MAN AT HI S B E ST WINTER ’19
STeADFAST, HONeST, AND T R U E
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN THE VOICE AMERICA NEEDS RIGHT NOW By Michael Hainey
this Way In CONSIDER THE BASKETBALL Let’s say that tomorrow NBA head Adam Silver decommissions the Spalding basketball and replaces it with its glowed-up counterpart from Versace. You remember Like Mike? Where Lil Bow Wow turns into an all-timer after getting ahold of Michael Jordan’s sneakers? It’d be like that. This blinged-out, baroque ball would cure Markelle Fultz of the yips, make DeMarcus Cousins a big ol’ teddy bear, and keep LeBron playing until he’s 97. Just think about it. In the meantime, think about copping a pair of sneakers from Ronnie Fieg’s collaboration with New Balance. They won’t have you shooting like a Splash Brother, but you’ll at least be stylish enough to walk the pregame runway alongside Steph and Klay. —Brady Langmann
Editor’s Letter The Big Bite Movies that mattered in 2018; one woman finds out if fraternities are too toxic to save; a cocktail for those who need a break from cocktails; Errol Morris sits down with his most controversial subject yet.
The Code Why the best kicks don’t need a gimmick; a man’s guide to aging well; talking with the founder of minimal French cool; revisiting a campus staple; forgetting everything you ever learned about matching.
The Best New Restaurants in America, 2018 By Jef Gordinier All year, we crushed hard on everything from fancy tasting menus to Filipino rice bowls. So where should you eat when you’re in town? We’re sending you there. You’ll probably see us at the next table.
It’s Time to Start Talking By Lars Kenseth Right now, around every dinner table in America, there’s a conversation happening. And it’s a discussion that’s long overdue. Heritage Series watch ($795) by Movado; movado.com. Arrows sneakers ($150) by New Balance; kith.com. photograph (bottom): Allie Holloway
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CONTENTS
A B R I E F M O N T H LY E X PA N S I O N O N A TO P I C E X P LO R E D I N T H E I S S U E ( S E E PAG E 7 2 )
F E AT U R E S
The neutrality of this information is disputed. And rightfully so. By Drew Dernavich
New Jersey is the area of the United
States located of exits 1 to 18 of the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s nicknamed “the Garden State” because
NEW YORK THINGS THAT ARE ACTUALLY IN NEW JERSEY
72
Songs of Himself
82
Dubious Achievements 2018
88
A Man in Full Bloom
92
The Rapture Will Be Televised
–The Statue
malls in one area, so you can buy your stripper outit and gym gear at the same place. New Jersey was one of the original 13 colonies and was a key battleground in the Revolutionary War, The crash of the Hindenburg was the only time someone during which George Washington in New Jersey witnessed famously surprised British mercean accident without cursing. naries by commuting to New Jersey. he attack is depicted on the back of New Jersey’s state quarter, which can be seen being dropped into any one of the video-
By Michael Hainey With his new Netflix special—a film of his intense, powerful one-man show on Broadway—Bruce Springsteen reveals that his bravest journey has been into his own soul.
The most questionable feats from another banner year for imbecility.
By Michael Hainey Kim Jones is arguably the most inluential designer today. Now that he’s taken over Dior, what can we expect?
By Barry Jenkins How do you top Moonlight? With the irst Englishlanguage ilm adaptation of a James Baldwin novel. Jenkins retraces his journey to Beale Street.
96
Break Out
104
“Looking for Elvis”
112
Dark Matter
By Emily Poenisch Follow actor Joe Alwyn’s lead and try out styles that were practically made for playing hooky.
By Garrett M. Graf Fifteen years ago this month, we found Saddam Hussein. Those who pulled it of tell the harrowing story of his capture.
If you’re looking to deepen your style this winter, black is the biggest noncolor of the season.
ON THE COVER BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY
• “Snow Tires Tearin’ Up the Road to My Heart” • “Santa Claus Didn’t Bring Me Flood Insurance” • “Can’t Find My Gift Receipt for Chris Christie”
10 Wint e r 2 01 9_ Esq u ire
• “Gift-Wrappin’ My Regrets in the Newark Obits” • “Paycheck Stretched to Eight Nights (Hanukkah at the Neptune City Dollar Tree)”
ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI FOR ESQUIRE
Saint Laurent coat, All Saints T-shirt, and jewelry, Springsteen’s own. Production by Nathalie Akiya at Kranky Produktions. Casting by Emily Poenisch. Styling by Nick Sullivan. Set design by Heather Wolensky. Grooming by Chris McMillan at Starworks Artists. Location: Jujamcyn’s Walter Kerr Theatre.
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said. Meanwhile, according to Common Sense Media, other people’s kids now spend between six and nine hours a day looking at screens, many of them manufactured by Apple. Jobs never got an award
THE THERIGHT RIGHTSIDE SIDEOF OFHISTORY, HISTORY, WRONG WRONGSIDE SIDEOF OFHUMOR HUMORAWARD AWARD
like a Woke Jeremiah, keelhauling just about anyone who dares disagree with his progressive opinions. “The GOP are now completely invested in Trump’s economy of LIES,” he recently tweeted. “They say they’re gonna give you HEALTHCARE while working to destroy it. They make up lies about refugees while KIDNAPPING INNOCENT CHILDREN! Vote Democrat. Help save the future. DON’T FOLLOW THE RED HAT TO HELL!” If you can’t beat Trump, tweet like him.
THECORPORATE CORPORATEPLUNDER PLUNDER THE AND PILLAGE AWARD AND PILLAGE AWARD
BE FIRST ind my iPhone, my iPad, my iWhatever bombarded by yet another cycle of incomprehensible developments, making the last news cycle look comprehensible by comparison, I have begun to wonder if it’s not that we need to speed up our minds but rather slow down our clocks. Forget about GMT, EST, CST, or PST. We’re all now on DWTFT—Digital WTF Time— in which a month goes by in a day and this past November alone felt like one hell of a decade. Why can’t our Washington overlords simply manufacture more hours, just like the Fed prints more money, so we can somehow pro-
p hot ogra p h (t o p) : Marc Hom
illustration: Bo b Man koff
Jeff Koons, the Howdy Doody doppelsomething that hadn’t been done since Manet shocked the French bourgeoisie in 1863 with Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Koons ofered to “donate” an outdoor sculpture to the city of Paris to commemorate the victims of recent terrorist attacks, but there was an asterisk: Someone was going to have to cough up 3.5 million euros to pay Koons for the cost of manufacturing his vision, and he wanted it to be placed within view of the Eiffel Tower. So far, the French response has been “C’est impossible!”
THE IF ONLY THE GOSSIP WERE TRUE AWARD year (that’s all, y’all?), “This next year will,” Stankey said, “feel like childbirth.” That Stankey is also such a talented motivational speaker made this award a real no-brainer.
THE REAL WINNERS NEVER LOSE AWARD Serena Williams made twenty-year-old Naomi Osaka’s first Grand Slam victory at the U. S. Open all
that its viewership has plummeted this season. Even if the end isn’t in sight, why not savor the fantasy a moment? Inspired by the clever aperçu that her whole brood could build an empire of money and fame off a sex video starring her own daughter, Kris Jenner willed a Caligulan shitshow of excess and indulgence into existence. KUWTK has made countless contributions to the cultural landscape: The show reimagined what it means to be unaware
. . . self-actualization!
THEPANDORA’S PANDORA’SBOX BOX THE LEGACY PRIZE LEGACY PRIZE
ment Awards begins with the Dubious Person of the Year Award, the Homo maximus ridiculous of Silicon Valley’s dick-swinging billionaires: Elon Musk. Congratulations, Elon! Here’s a man who could definitely use a few more hours in the day for himself—and Tesla’s assembly line. If anyone can reinvent time, it’s this guy. As well for this year’s list, in the hope that readers will see that there’s no fruit too low for us to pick, we’re ofering an additional seven awards, which
THE THANKS BUT NO THANKS AWARD
THE WE WILL ALWAYS SURRENDER AWARD Last fall, astronaut Scott Kelly thought he was just tweeting something inspirational for the Trump oppressed: “One of the greatest leaders of modern times, Sir Winston Churchill, said, ‘in victory, magnanimity.’ I guess those days are over.” It backfired, and Kelly found himself facing down a digital mob who accused him of supporting a racist who committed atrocities.
tic groupthink.
“Uh, can you follow up on that? I’ve followed up on so many follow-ups that I’m all follow-upped out.”
Congratulations to you all! —Jay FIELDEN
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THE YEAR IN FILM 2018
MOVIE S THAT MAT TERED Clear your schedules: his is a BINGE-WORTHY time in cinema. By Dwight Garner In Terry Southern’s cult novel The Magic Christian (1959), a movie-theater owner has an idea to increase attendance. He cuts prices and widens seats so two people can (barely) sit in them at once. His advertising slogan: “Half the Price, and a Chance for Vice.” This year, moviegoers didn’t get love seats, but for a welcome moment we got something arguably better: MoviePass, a subscription service that let us see all the ilms we wanted for a $10 monthly fee. Many of us binged. Reader, I was among them. It felt not just good but also necessary to check out for a few hours—to ind refuge in the congenial public dark, in a year when America appeared to have lost some of its moorings and meanings. MoviePass seemed too good to be true, and indeed it was. It lost money and added restrictions. “The large print giveth,” as Tom Waits said, “and the small print taketh away.” But it was an excellent year to be a committed ilmgoer. Good movies of all varieties were there when we needed them. Let us count a few of the genres. co n t in u ed ▶
A Cultural Guide to Just Enough of Everything
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THE NICE-CORE EXPERIENCE
Anderson’s Isle of Dogs found him in a mellow, percolating
underscored something Alfred Hitchcock said: “Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.”
BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX In a non-fussy way, Joaquin Phoenix had the best year of any American actor. His three major performances— as the disabled cartoonist John Callahan in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot; as a cowpoke assassin in The Sisters Brothers; and as a traumatized veteran who tracks down missing girls in You Were Never Really Here—were indelible. If the Oscars, like the Nobel prizes, went to bodies of work rather than single performances, Phoenix would be a shoo-in for Best Actor this year. P. S. Go find a book of the real John Callahan’s cartoons.
Black Panther, the first Marvel offering with a predominantly black ensemble, was a high-budget franchise superhero film that brought skill, heart, politics, Kendrick Lamar songs, and Shakespeare-worthy supporting players to the table. It made you want to get your hands on some vibranium. I saw it in the Magic Johnson theater in Harlem and I thought the roof was going to levitate. Crazy Rich Asians, based on Kevin Kwan’s novel, was a genuinely funny rom-com and the first major studio film with an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club 25 years earlier. It gave important roles to parents, a rarity, and the dialogue had the buttery crunch of popcorn. The movies this year began to look like America. More, please.
The MOVIES this YEAR began TO LOOK LIKE AMERICA. More, PLEASE.
INTENTIONAL
Goh Peik Lin in Crazy Rich Asians: Awkwafina carries the movie and makes for the most memorable BFF in recent rom-com history.
SEMI-INTENTIONAL
HORROR HONORS
THE RESISTANCE
Laura Harrier and John David Washington in “BlacKkKlansman.” 20 Wint e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the well-made documentary about the life and philosophy of Fred Rogers, host of the long-running children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, provided some much-needed catharsis. Remember decency? There was a reason this became the highest-grossing biographical documentary ever. Paddington 2 (officially released in late 2017), a live-action animated comedy featuring an anthropomorphized bear, was a movie people needed, too. It is currently Rotten Tomatoes’ best-rated film of all time, with 100 percent approval.
FUNNIEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ’18
Hereditary, starring Toni Collette as an artist in the grip of demonic forces, planted images in my mind that are going to stay there until I take leave of this life. A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s cogent postapocalyptic movie, reminded us that silence is a core virtue. And Annihilation, the sci-fi horror film from director Alex Garland, an omnidirectional talent, was a high-minded mind-bender pinned to the earth by extended closeups of the flying buttresses that are Natalie Portman’s stupendous cheekbones, upon which one wants to shave ice.
Dick Cheney in Vice: Christian Bale nails the VP’s famous side-mouth. His dialogue almost seems to emanate from an undisclosed location.
UNINTENTIONAL
Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War: Spoiler alert: He kills half the population. Motivation: He just wants to be alone. Thanos = most emo villain in the universe.
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The buddy movie of the year, and one that didn’t get the attention it deserved, was the comedy-drama Blindspotting. Set in Oakland, it’s a raw heartbreaker of a film about a parolee (Daveed Diggs) with three days left on his sentence and the charismatic, hotheaded
ROMA WON’T WIN BEST PICTURE
a
Eskpertise BIG, BAD, AND NATIONWIDE Tom Cruise made saving humanity look easy again in Mission: Impossible— Fallout; we’ll never look at the Met Gala the same way after Ocean’s 8; and Holly Hunter’s character kicked a lot of ass in The Incredibles 2 while her elastic posterior inspired a slate of body-positive memes on Twitter. Also playing at the not-entirely-hellish octoplex: Deadpool 2, Creed II, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and Fifty Shades Freed. The Fifty Shades movies are so entrancingly filmed that they remind me of Kenneth Tynan’s observation that “exciting locations are great saviors of drivel.”
lubrication around here?” the army commander asks. Three other notables: Eighth Grade, which has a slow and painful verisimilitude; Private Life, worth it for Kathryn Hahn’s earthy performance alone; and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, a wild, freefloating, almost Robert Altmanesque satire about trying to get rich in a white man’s world while keeping heart and soul intact.
Winter Tip #1: Make like a duck and fly away from it.
PROBABLY. BUT ALFONSO CUARÓN’S PROUSTIAN EPIC DEFINITELY SHOULD. There are lashier movies out there: Green Book, Vice, A Star Is Born. They’re all very good. But when it comes to grade-A cineast material, the kind of must-watch movie that will reside next to classics by Bergman and Fellini and Kurosawa on a ilm-school syllabus in the decades to come, it’s all about Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. The upstairs-downstairs drama focuses on Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a live-in maid/nanny, and the wife, grandmother, and four kids in an upper-middle-class Mexico City family she cares for after the children’s father abandons them. Emotional moments are delivered without the trickery of melodrama, a score, or even color. All of it is presented in neorealist, 65mm black and white, with a meditative soundtrack of environmental sounds (which becomes a character in its own right) and a quiet, naturally powerful performance by Aparicio, in her debut role. You’ll exit the theater, or turn of your TV if you’re streaming it on Netlix, in a state of cinematic bliss, unsure of what you’ve just seen. There’s no uplifting song during the credits. Instead, you’re left with your lingering thoughts. You’ll remember the perfect frames, the slowly panning shots playing out in your memory in the hours and days ahead. Watching Roma is like experiencing time itself. —Kevin Sintumuang
illustration: Ben Schwartz
that I would see again were Game Night, with Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, and A Simple Favor, with slinky and knowing performances from Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick. See Game Night just to hear Jesse Plemons, as a sad-sack and potentially dangerous cop, intone this line: “Don’t you ever exclude me again.” See A Simple Favor just to drink in Lively’s way with a martini.
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D O C U M E N TA R I E S
THE TRUE BELIEVER Errol Morris has interviewed murderers, torturers, and Holocaust deniers. his time, he sat down with STEVE BANNON—his most controversial subject yet. By Ron Rosenbaum
Errol Morris and I are trying to igure out the hidden meaning of Steve Bannon’s stubble. Errol tells me that through ive days of shooting face-to-face interviews with Bannon for his new ilm, American Dharma, the erstwhile consigliere to Donald Trump and ledgling leader of the new, vaguely menacing, perhaps neo-Nazi white-nationalist movement would show up on the set with his stubble always exactly the same hobo length, suggesting it was not negligence but a way of deliberately sending a message: Don’t be fooled by the vagrant-like appearance. He really thinks of himself as a grizzled cinematic lyboy, the kind who breaks the rules to win the war the brass is losing. In addition, Bannon wears three or four sweaty shirts at a time—an equally fascinating sartorial signal— which, combined with the whiskey-bum stubble length and the greasy, graying hair swept back in the aging prep-school swirl, creates, for those who have the fortune or misfortune to recognize it, a craftily confected image. In other words, only someone imbued, as Bannon was, with the full attitudinal arsenal of white privilege would show up for his close-up with a major ilmmaker looking like a back-alley lout, gin blossoms and all, letting his inner Brett Kavanaugh freak lag ly. The ensemble basically says, “This stubble is a privilege that you have to earn or inherit, and you probably never will.” 24 Wint e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
DOCU-DRAMA
Morris’s ilm “American Dharma” has sparked a ierce debate.
Various critics have said, in efect, “Don’t give a dangerous demagogue like Bannon a platform.” Errol calls this the “ostrich mentality” and asks how it worked out in Europe in the ’30s and ’40s. At this writing, the ilm has yet to ind a distributor. Have the ostriches won? Errol can be a very crafty, not to say sneaky, guy in that he sets up his prey in a subtle and revealing way for his painstaking one-on-one interviews. (Disclosure: I’ve covered his work and we’ve become friends.) Onscreen he’s mostly nonconfrontational on the surface yet manages to elicit unexpected revelations. In Bannon’s case, he learned that one of his subject’s favorite movies is Twelve O’Clock High, the 1949 World War II ilm in which a crew of demoralized airmen are revved up for the ight by a tough new squadron commander played by a square-jawed Gregory Peck. So Errol built a (somewhat scaled-down) period-perfect Quonset hut to serve as the setting for his encounters with Bannon. It was a tactic designed to loosen Bannon’s tongue by placing him in a replica of his favored self-image setting. And loosen it, it did. Here’s a sample from the transcript one of Errol’s assistants in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio,
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Josh Kearney, supplied me with from a dramatic high point of the ilm, when Bannon breaks out into an incantation of his faux-populist mantra: “People have been getting fucked. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face. We have a consolidation of power. We have a consolidation of wealth. You have to tell the establishment, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ You just have to.” “Fuck you,” in essence, to anyone who stands in the way of the ignorant mob illing up the pro-Trump hate rallies you see on Fox. It’s not a particularly sophisticated political platform. But there in the unheated mock-lyboy hangar, it’s a strenuous attempt to portray himself as a bark-on populist icon in the new right-wing deinition of populism sweeping what were once Western democracies. Errol, who usually doesn’t step in if his interview subjects make fools of themselves with their various pretensions and revealing obsessions, makes a rare intervention here in this “fuck you” fest. “I call [Trump] the Fuck You President,” Errol says. “You want health care? Fuck you. You want clean drinking water? Fuck you.” Bannon’s “populism,” as Errol notes, exists to serve the rich. American Dharma is the third installment of what I like to think of as Errol’s “Eichmann Trilogy,” a
career-long examination of the nature of evil and its enablers.
Eskpertise
Fog of War (2003), in which Errol gets Robert Strange McNamara to reveal himself by sub-
S. McNamara, referring to the great strategist whose technologWinter Tip #2: Make like a bear and sleep through it.
the military bequeathed us the Vietnam war, with its 58,000 dead American soldiers and some million or more dead Asian civilian victims, and who then kept silent for years after he knew the war was lost and futile and so many continued to die. This was followed by The Unknown Known (2013), about the Iraq war, with its bogus rationales and its millions dead and displaced. How, Errol asks, do we evaluate these upper-
A Hearst Special Event Michelle Obama on the Art of the Swerve
• • • Becoming, Michelle Obama’s new memoir, has all of the life-well-lived wisdom you’d expect. But her life really kick-started when at age 27 she stopped pushing papers as a corporate attorney and took up a post in Chicago’s city government—a move she spoke about with Oprah Winfrey during a recent visit to the Hearst Tower in New York. “I narrowed myself to being this thing I thought I should be. It took losses in my life that made me think, Have you ever stopped to think about who you wanted to be? And I realized I had not. I was on the 47th floor of an office building, going over cases and writing memos. One day [my mother was] driving me from the airport after I was doing document production in Washington, D. C., and I was like, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t sit in a room and look at documents.’ . . . And then I met this guy Barack Obama.”
slaughter in the annals of evil? And now Steve Bannon, who blithely whips up anti-immigrant feeling using the rhetoric of the alt-right movement he helped found. What fresh hell. So should we avoid trying to ind out? A week or so after seeing American Dharma, I watched Paul Greengrass’s 22 July, about the mass murder committed on an island of the coast of Norway by Anders Breivik, who used rhetoric very similar to Bannon’s about keeping Europe white. Seventy-seven dead and hundreds wounded. So far the American alt-right movement in the era of Trump has only a handful of murders (that we know of ) to its credit. I’m not saying Bannon has that sinister potential, but there are eerie parallels between his language about the loss of white supremacy and the Norwegian mass killer’s, and Bannon is now working closely with farfar-right parties in Europe to destroy democracies in the name of white supremacy. The ostrich mentality is not going to help combat it, which is why a ilm like American Dharma is a valuable warning. p hot ogra p hs: Allie Holloway (ra d io) ; Miller Mobley (book)
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the Big Bite
DESIGN
THE ANTI -
STARCHITECTS Johnston Marklee gives a quiet power to HOUSTON’S new Menil Drawing Institute In 1980, when Renzo Piano agreed to build an art museum in Houston, his client Dominique de Menil ofered a friendly salute: “Welcome to hell!” With her late husband, John, the French-born, oilindustry-rich activist and style icon had amassed a staggering art collection. By Menil’s own admission, she was a hard-to-please stickler and she didn’t mince words. “Hit the tits!” she would say, making clear where the center of a work should be displayed. The Menil Collection was unveiled in 1987 as the keystone of a 30-acre campus that included Mark Rothko’s famous chapel and, later, Piano’s Cy Twombly Gallery, transforming the city into a mecca for arthopping pilgrims. Now comes the next installment: the recently opened 30,000-square-foot Menil Drawing Institute, housing 2,000 works on paper by the likes of Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg. It’s the irst new building on the campus in 20 years, and it represents a new level of exposure for Johnston Marklee, the upstart, award-winning Los Angeles– and Boston-based irm headed by work and life partners Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, who created this $40 million centerpiece of the Menil’s David Chipperield–led master plan. “Not at all hellish!” Johnston says when asked about client relations with the modern-day Menil. As for
LOW-KEY COOL
Johnston Marklee’s Vault House, inished in 2013, has become a SoCal landmark.
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LIGHT TOUCH
The design of the Drawing Institute reduces sunlight by a factor of 2,000 but still allows art to be viewed in natural light.
the Drawing Institute, the efect is far from infernal. There’s a well-ordered, arcadian aura about the place, with its stark white origami-like planes, sun-dappled courtyard, luminous oak loors and cedar siding, and gossamer-thin steel construction, which together evoke world-class institution, modernist house, and cloister all at once. The spiritual feeling is no accident. “The Menil family were very religious people,” Johnston says. “They were expansive in their belief and committed to social justice; it was about opening up to others instead of setting boundaries.” Johnston and Lee are boundary breakers themselves. They are routinely described as pioneers of the movement away from starchitecture and toward buildings that are low-key, hushed, and even, most daringly, boring: no asymptotes, no blobs. “Their design preserves and respects the scale, green ambience, and tranquility of the neighborhood,” observes Menil Collection director Rebecca Rabinow. “Our work reveals itself over time,” Johnston says. “It doesn’t hit you over the head.” —Mark Rozzo
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the Big Bite
BOOKS
AMONG THE BROS
Fraternities have been knocked for bad behavior from time immemorial—certainly since Animal House—but they’ve recently reached a crossroads. Research shows that members are three times as likely to engage in sexually aggressive acts as nonmembers. Hazing deaths continue to mount despite promises to reform the dangerous rituals. And let’s not forget the Kavanaugh hearing. Investigative journalist Alexandra Robbins spent more than two years interviewing hundreds of fraternity men, who insisted on anonymity and clandestine of-campus meetings. What emerged from Robbins’s reporting is Fraternity, a fair, clear-eyed portrait of what works—and what needs to change—when it comes to modern Greek life. —Adrienne Westenfeld Can fraternities still help young men, even as they pose potential risks? Most guys, even fraternity guys, don’t want to deine their masculinity by how much they drink or how jacked they are. They want to be diferent and they want to be allies with women, but colleges don’t walk them through how to do that. There are a lot of fraternities encouraging guys to just be themselves. What was it like embedding yourself in frats with the brothers you proiled? 28 Wint e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
Eskpertise
Winter Tip #3: Make like a drunk bear and sleep through it at the bar.
THE FIVE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR By Matt Miller
1. Lush, Snail Mail
2.
3. Invasion of Be the Cowboy, Privacy, Cardi B Mitski
4. Room 25, Noname
5. Daytona, Pusha-T
illustration: Ben Schwartz
Are frats too toxic to save? Alexandra Robbins infiltrated the secretive GREEK SYSTEM to find out.
It was eye-opening. The best moments of fraternity life are really the quiet ones among guys. The feeling on the ground is that they’re under siege. The Kavanaugh hearing didn’t help. What’s the alternative to hazing? Is there a way to stop it? The fraternity membership is somehow worth more if they have to work for it, and some chapters don’t know how to do that without forcing guys to drink. I think the irst step would be replacing hazing with something else that’s diicult, like actual get-your-handsdirty community service. Are guys really going to do community service instead of drink? Even if they rehab their practices, can frats rehab their image? I think if fraternities rebrand themselves as groups that welcome guys to be themselves and promote friendships, communication skills, and safe spaces, that could be valuable. You know, it took one ad for Nike to rebrand itself. I think it would take longer for fraternities, but it can certainly be done.
DON’T HIDE. GO SEEK.
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the Big Bite
DRINKING
ALL HAIL THE HIGHBALL It’s the COCKTAIL for those who need a break from cocktails You know things are serious when two grown men are talking about the size of bubbles. The subject of carbonation is where my conversation has veered with Masahiro Urushido, head bartender at Katana Kitten, a JapaneseAmerican bar in New York that, like other ine watering holes (including Paciic Cocktail Haven in San Francisco and Houston’s Tongue-Cut Sparrow), is bringing the artful craft of the Japanese-style highball stateside. W hat’s in a highball? Whisky and soda. Cue spit take. Are we saying the whisky soda, a drink that is barely a drink, is making a comeback? Yes, but the highball is diferent. How? “Care and love,” Urushido says. “It’s all about how you make it.” Hence, bubbles. At a growing number of bars, highballs come from a machine newly developed by Suntory and Hoshizaki that dispenses perfectly carbonated water and
Don’t you drink your shiso G+T’s highball-style?
Bourbon: A celebritybacked whiskey (Bob Dylan) that’s surprisingly elegant ($130). Roku Gin: The delicate balance of this Japanese gin from Suntory might make it your favorite ($28). Thrasher’s Green Spiced Rum: Made with botanicals, this rum produces some delightfully complex daiquiris ($27).
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photo graph : Kevin Swee ney (bottles)
ENJOY RESPONSIBLY. ©2018. DEWAR’S BLENDED SCOTCH WHISKY 40% ALC. BY VOL. IMPORTED BY JOHN DEWAR & SONS COMPANY, CORAL GABLES, FL.
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Because Style Is Always Personal
COLOR COATED An old CAMPUS CLASSIC gets a hit of in-your-face color It’s tough to improve on the dule coat. Guys have prized it for its sturdy build, roomy it, and undeniably cool closures (they’re called “toggles”) since it became part of the British Royal Navy uniform in the 1890s. (It reached a second peak on college campuses just after the midcentury mark, making it part of this winter’s collegiate-style craze.) Until recently, however, the dule has been available almost exclusively in navy. Which is handsome, sure, but also . . . predictable. That’s why we suggest you spin the color wheel this season. Find a dule in bright red, hunter green, canary yellow, or the deep orange shown here. Celebrate the fact that you can still enjoy all the coat’s original perks, but now in punched-up shades weaponized to ight winter’s grayest days. — J o n R o t h
Coat ($3,400) and sweater ($1,300) by Bottega Veneta; trousers ($415) by Officine Générale.
p hot ogra p h : Allie Holloway
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QUAD GOALS This winter, the NEW GENERATION of COLLEGIATE STYLE is the smartest way to STAND OUT If you’re a man who went to college anytime in the past few decades, odds are you didn’t dress like this. Most guys today move from the dorm to the lecture hall in a mix of basketball shorts, shower slides, and bookstore hoodies. So when we say the clothes at right channel “collegiate style,” we’re not talking about any school you could visit right now. It’s a way to reference an idea of college life, the kind of clothes and images we know from ilms like Carnal Knowledge and Animal House. Like movies, fashion is more about impressions than reality. For whatever reason, tastemakers are returning to those collegiate references now, and they’re not holding back: reprinting logos in varsity lettering; piling on argyles, wide-wale cords, and tweeds; and topping it all of with dule coats and letterman jackets. Separately, these pieces don’t belong to any
it’s that nostalgia can be a dangerous drug. Instead, the clothes have a smart, contemporary edge. Calvin Klein’s deployment of the Berkeley logo puts a postmodern filter on a storied university. Versace’s take on a school scarf transforms the brand from fashion house to campy alma mater. Labels like AMI, Tommy Hiliger, and McQueen
Jacket ($3,295) by Brunello Cucinelli; sweater ($698) by Michael Kors; tote bag ($1,400) by CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC; scarf ($550) by Versace; hat ($300) by Exemplaire.
particular “look.” Worn together, they give the impression you just left the quad. The good news is that designers today are too smart to re-create some
MASTER THE ACCENT The runway has offered up plenty of head-totoe collegiate looks, but it’s better to start small. A tote or a scarf with some varsity lettering will channel the same vibe. 3 6 Wint e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
From left, runway looks from AMI Alexandre Mattiussi, Tommy Hilfiger, and Alexander McQueen.
photo graph (to p) : Allie Holloway
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the Code
each give the look their own spin (by turns Parisian cool, streetwear savvy, and geek goth), so we end up with revisions instead of retreads. That’s exactly how you should wear this stuff, too—guided by your personal style. Mix in some denim for a workwear feel. Layer a hoodie underneath to keep it casual. Hell, try it with those Adidas slides you’ve always loved. Personality is key here. It’s what separates a grown man pulling of a varsity jacket from a narc. — J . R . Jacket ($2,900) by Gucci; sweatshirt ($370) by JW Anderson; trousers ($395) by Polo Ralph Lauren; glasses and Clarks shoes, model’s own.
M A K E A P L AY When you’re ready to go all in, choose a statement piece like this old-school jacket, then ground it with the quieter, simpler stuff you’ve probably already got in your closet.
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photo graph: Allie Holloway
the Code: Sole Searching
THESE SNEAKERS ARE LIT GUCCI reminds us that the best KICKS don’t need a GIMMICK First it was normcore. Then it was dad sneakers. Lately, it’s been tough to stay current without partaking in the style world’s obsession with all things ironic. It raises the question: When did cool stop being cool? That’s where Gucci comes in, with an unimpeachable throwback to the ’70s. Its latest sneakers are Stan Smith meets Salvation Army, featuring a classic shape that isn’t challenging, or avant-garde, or conceptual. It’s easy to love. Consider these the sequel to the fur-lined loafer Gucci made ubiquitous a few years back (though they’re a lot easier to pull of). Don’t worry about getting them dirty, either; they come fresh out of the box prescufed. That high-low tension—a designer sneaker that’s slightly cruddy—is the real source of their charm. You could say the brand is making a statement about the fraught relationship between luxury and authenticity. Or you could just admit no one wants their sneakers too white anyway. — Adrienne Westenfeld
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HANG TIME
Sneakers ($870) by Gucci.
WHY TAKE A HIGH-END SNEAKER AND ROUGH IT UP LIKE ANY OLD TENNIS SHOE? BECAUSE IT’S THE LAST THING ANYONE WOULD EXPECT.
photo graph: Jeffrey Westbrook
the Code: Tailoring
CLASH IS IN SESSION Forget EVERYTHING you ever learned about MATCHING Guys going through the grind of work parties and family gatherings this season have a limited arsenal of style moves to pull from. No wonder so many of us settle for the cop-out that is the ugly holiday sweater: Dabbing Santa, Betty White, and a talking Charlie Brown doll were all immortalized in knitwear this year. But let us tell you: There is a way to show some personality without looking like a walking meme. The answer is mixed tailoring—that is, separate tailored pieces that you have ingeniously paired together. Don’t worry if the jacket doesn’t match the pants. That’s the point. If your blazer is checked, opt for stripes on your bottom
half. Do the same thing with the scale of your patterns. If one is bold, pick a tighter design to ground it. And nail the color combo with this old trick: Find a secondary shade from one piece (say, a smaller element in a plaid pattern) and make it the primary shade in the other. Instead of a carefully coordinated ensemble, it should feel like a happy accident. Do it right and you’ll have a simple, alloccasion look that’s got more personality than a suit but not so much personality that it looks like you found it next to the novelty toilet paper at Spencer’s.
T H I N K B E YO N D THE SUIT Mixing up tailored pieces is easier than it sounds. Remember to play with the scale of the patterns and stick to just a few colors.
—Brady Langmann
Jacket ($2,100) by Canali; vest ($840) by Missoni; shirt ($875) by Brunello Cucinelli; trousers ($950) and loafers ($960) by Bottega Veneta.
SHOP TALK
MILLENNIAL PINK • • • Back in the boomtime nineties, British shirtmaker Thomas Pink was a favorite with young strivers who didn’t care for their bosses’ staid shirts. Then the brand lost its way. Or it had, until new creative director John Ray, a veteran of Gucci and Dunhill, reimagined the line for young men today. His efforts recently debuted at Pink stores p hot ogra p h (t o p) : Allie Holloway
across the U. S. (and, of course, online). The shirts have been washed to give them the patina of a much-worn favorite, which means they look as good with a pair of jeans as they do with a wonky four-inhand. Tailored pieces and overcoats have a similar vintage vibe. “The whole thing is softer and lighter,” Ray says. “Everything has had the stuffing knocked out of it.” —N. S. Winter 2019_Esquire 45
the Code: Complications
SEIKO’S TOP SHELF The watchmaker’s BEST-KEPT SECRET is about to hit the States in a BIG WAY
When most people hear Seiko, they think quartz. And for good reason: Seiko created the irst widely available quartz-driven watch in 1969, a cost-saving, accuracyenhancing innovation that changed the industry. But few people know that almost a decade before that, the Japanese company explored the other end of the market with Grand Seiko, a line of luxury mechanical timepiec-
es that challenged Swiss watchmaking supremacy. It was little known here in America until 2010, when the brand allowed a trickle of watches to hit the U. S. Demand quickly surged. The Spring Drive Snowlake shown here (named for the granular texture of its dial) is typical of the restrained luxury of Grand Seiko. It’s technically innovative, too—powered by a mechanical movement but regulated by a quartz timing module. It’s one of the most sought-after Grand Seikos, and it’s available for the first time in the U. S. through Watches of Switzerland, which has just opened its irst American store, on Greene Street in New York’s SoHo. The UK-based retailer is a major player in watch sales. (Its Regent Street, London, location turns over $77 million a year.) The store’s arrival stateside means we’ve got not one but two foreign imports to celebrate. —Nick Sullivan
Snowflake watch ($6,000) by Grand Seiko; jacket ($1,595) by Emporio Armani; shirt ($275) by the Armoury; tsavorite ring ($2,960), diamond ring ($10,120), and emerald ring ($4,880) by Selim Mouzannar. p hot ogra p h : Jeffrey We stbrook
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the Code: My Take
THE CHANGE AGENT More than 30 years after defining minimal FRENCH COOL with A.P.C., JEAN TOUITOU is taking a new tack— and reading the tea leaves of a culture in conflict By Michael Hainey What’s brought on this change in your aesthetic to something richer and more “designed”?
You can, after a while, become a slave to your own minimalism. After your 71st perfect trench coat, it’s natural to do one that says, “I deserve the right to mess with you.” I had had enough of being part of vulgar minimalism, which is what has taken over contemporary fashion. It seems like a contradiction in terms.
AMPING IT UP Touitou, above, helped popularize a spare, French style that’s spread across the globe. But in his latest collections, the designer is diving into pattern and embellishment.
Images from A.P.C.’s Fall 2018 lookbook, and a knit cap from a collaboration with Carhartt. 48
compromis and compromission. Compromission is a compromise where you lose your morals. I try to make compromis but not compromission. I had lunch with Kim and Kanye yesterday, and I have a picture. Compromission would be to put this picture on social media and get so many likes. But I want my friends to remain my friends, not to use them as a commercial weapon. We are entering a very hard time where image has taken over sense. For many people, Instagram is their reality, and real life is just a locker room to get ready for Instagram. I’m shocked when I see on Instagram a basketball player going to work, which is training for basketball—but they dress themselves Like “celebrity culture”? and they are groomed as models on the runway Yeah, those two words every day of their life. should not . . . they’re an And they get paid for it. oxymoron. My principle has been to remain free But that is the reality and not go too much with now, isn’t it? the wind, but I have to Everything is permeated go a little bit. The wind with this nonsense. It’s is my commercial team. only about who is the They say, “Jean, we need coolest and who has the a boring suit.” And crowds. If you don’t I say, “Okay, I’ll do it.” publicize yourself, you’re You have to be realistic. a dead person. If you’re not a brand, you’re How do you maintain nothing. You have to ind integrity in ways to still be yourself, those situations? but slightly louder. In French, there are two words for Do you ever feel like it’s “compromise”— too much to handle?
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S H I R T S
the Code: Grooming
A MAN’S GUIDE TO AGING WELL Men may look better with age, but there’s a ine line between aged and . . . elderly. (Maybe less a ine line than a bunch of deep, gnarly wrinkles.) And while we can’t stop time, modern technology has made it a whole lot easier to slow it down. Skin care will be your best defense here: Get a irm handle on the creams and serums you need and you’ll look like the optimal version of you at any age.
FIVE STEPS TO SAVING FACE A good antiaging regimen is not about using a lot of stuff; it’s about using the right stuff, smartly, to keep your skin healthy on its own.
Start thinking of your skin as a sports car: It’ll take you a lot further if you put in a little MAINTENANCE along the way. By Garrett Munce
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Eye Cream If you look tired, your eyes are usually to blame. Using an eye cream minimizes dark circles and bags in that thin-skinned zone. Even better, it will keep that third cocktail you had last night under wraps.
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Kiehl’s Eye Fuel The cafeine in this formula is like a cup of cofee for your face, leaving you looking bright-eyed in no time.
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Retinol Also known as vitamin A, retinol can soften fine lines and wrinkles, brighten dark spots, and even fade acne scars by prompting cell turnover. (It can also make skin more sensitive to light, so apply it at night.) The Ordinary Granactive Retinoid 2% in Squalane Gentle but efective, this retinol is mixed with squalane, a natural oil with crazy moisturizing properties.
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1 Vitamin C Serum Antioxidants are a crucial antiaging ingredient, and vitamin C is their king. Regular use can brighten skin tone, reduce dark spots, and lessen the appearance of fine lines. SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic Serum The combination of vitamins C and E here is like a one-two punch in the face of aging.
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Moisturizer with SPF Fact: Hydrated skin looks younger. A moisturizer not only keeps your skin more youthful-looking; it also serves as your first line of defense against the harsh outside world. One with sunscreen will also protect against ultraviolet rays. Paula’s Choice Resist Skin Restoring Moisturizer with SPF 50 This moisturizer contains a high dose of SPF but still won’t leave a film on your face.
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Exfoliator A good exfoliant removes dead skin cells from your face, making you look brighter and cleaner. (Think of how much better your wood floors look after you Swifer.) Chemical exfoliants work better and can be gentler than scrubs, so use a product containing alpha hydroxy acid (AHA) or beta hydroxy acid (BHA) once or twice a week. Biologique Recherche Lotion P50 This one’s been around for decades and is still considered a holy-grail product by skin-care nuts. The tingle lets you know it’s working. photo graph: Jeffrey Westbrook
A FR AG R A N C E F O R ME N
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MASTER OF MATERIALS
Is this what they mean by caviar dreams?
THE BeST NeW
ReSTAUR AN TS IN AMERICA, 2018
Including: twenty restaurants, the best chef, a pop-up, and lots of caviar
BY
J E F F GORDINIER
P HOTOG RAP H BY
JAKE STANGEL
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T H E B E S T N E W R E S TA U R A N T S 2 0 1 8
Time to make some reservations.
Caviar on a bone-marrow custard. Carnitas on a deftly textured tortilla. A Balinese chicken thigh with a crackly roof of skin. We loved them all this year—we crushed hard on fancy tasting menus and Filipino rice bowls, swooned over ceviches and tlacoyos. Where should you eat? We’re sending you here, to the Best New Restaurants in America. You’ll probably see us at the next table, because we can’t stop going back. 60
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Angler, San Francisco
Esquire essayist Nora Ephron once said that it’s important for a person to eat her or his last meal strategically, before the actual onset of death, at a time when it can still be most relished. Should you want to follow her advice, book a table at Angler, in San Francisco, where through the front windows you’ll get
a romantic view of the light show on the Bay Bridge. As soon as you sit down, ask a waiter to bring you a dozen oysters as well as the Parker House rolls, which are served with butter and a bowl of caviar. Proceed to a whole purple sea urchin, the antelope tartare (trust us), the fried rabbit, its meat piping hot and almost pufy beneath a molten red crust. Surround that with a flotilla of sides: mushrooms, artichoke hearts, a single baked and sliver-sliced potato afloat on a tarn of chivey, creamy sauce. Finish with a bowl of fresh fruit—figs and plums and berries and a honey-smeared persimmon—and sorbets that taste more like melon and coconut than the fruits themselves. With his twisted fixation on finding the Best Ingredient Right Now, huntingcapped gastro-savant Joshua Skenes presides over an elegantly laid-back space that feels like a woodsmoke-scented hunting lodge as conceived by Bryan Ferry. It’s an Avalon of pleasure and ease. Go while you’re still alive. 132 The Embarcadero
P hotog ra ph s by J ake S ta n gel
C L O C K W I S E F R O M R I G H T: PA R K E R H O U S E R O L L S W I T H B U T T E R A N D A N G L E R P R I VAT E B AT C H C AV I A R ; T H E D I N I N G R O O M ; B O N N E T M O U T H .
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T H E B E S T N E W R E S TA U R A N T S 2 0 1 8
Atomix, New York City When you dine at Atomix, you are given beautiful printed cards that accompany each course, elucidating every preparation: a deep-fried Scottish langoustine with creamed uni; golden osetra caviar atop an unlikely scoop of fresh cheese and braised baby artichoke; a bowl of nurungji, a creamy Korean pudding made with “the golden crust that is formed at the bottom of the pot after making rice.” In this way, chef Junghyun Park, known as JP, is showing you the details behind his sleight of hand—telling you that the Wagyu strip loin is “lightly marinated with fermented fruit juice for 36 hours”— and yet you still can’t figure out how the damn magic trick works. My dinner at Atomix left me reeling, and I came away with the sense that Park, who owns and runs the restaurant with his wife, Ellia, is on the brink of joining Eric Ripert, Dominique Crenn, and Daniel Humm as one of the top-echelon talents in America. His interpretation of Korean culinary tradition is both reverent and radical, and his fresh approach to the tasting menu made me fall back in love with a format that I had come to loathe. As JP writes on one of the cards, “My goal at the end of the day is to have made your lives a bit brighter and a bit happier through the experience that we have created at Atomix.” And he does. 104 East Thirtieth Street
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must’ve been chemically engineered to turn my palate into their willing puppet. All of the food I was served at Nancy’s Hustle was like that: My discipline evaporated like mist in the Texas heat. Leeks vinaigrette, a cheeseburger worthy of a drag race in a James Dean flick—no wonder there’s a line out the door by 6:00. I don’t know how to categorize the cooking at this place other than to say that Nancy’s Hustle, where executive chef Jason Vaughan and pastry chef Julia Doran and cocktail master Kristine Nguyen seem to operate in deft sync, is like a roadside diner in which a bunch of Michelin-starred talents are secretly hiding out, thanks to the witness-protection program. 2704 Polk Street
C A K E S W I T H S M O K E D T R O U T R O E AT N A N C Y ’ S H U S T L E ( A B O V E ) ; T H E B A R AT M I N N E A P O L I S ’ S H A I H A I .
Misi, Brooklyn Is Missy Robbins clairvoyant? How else would she know—with such exactitude—just what we want to eat right now? With Misi, her sequel to the pulsatingly popular Lilia, she and business partner Sean Feeney have edited the menu down to a haiku of hunger. You start with a series of vital vegetable dishes (slowroasted tomatoes kissed with hot honey, soft grilled artichokes splashed with a minty salsa verde) and then the pastas. Linguine and fettuccine, pappardelle and strangozzi, corzetti and occhi: In Missy Robbins’s kitchen, these very words become a kind of cheese-and-pepperdusted incantation. You finish up with gelato. She has spent countless hours fine-tuning that gelato, hunting for the right milk, the right mint, the right olive oil. Knowing that, you’ll want to savor it patiently, but you won’t be able to. 329 Kent Avenue
Nancy’s Hustle, Houston When the Nancy cakes arrived, I told myself that I wasn’t going to finish them. But reader, I couldn’t stop. Hot, flufy flapjacks of corn paired with trout roe and wild honey and an obscene smear of cultured butter—salty and creamy and sweet—God in heaven, these cakes 62
Celeste, Somerville, Massachusetts “Eh, excuse me—is this that Peruvian restaurant or are you guys just throwing a party in here?” At Celeste, hospitality and home enter-
taining merge into an instant and intimate bash. There are flames dancing of the frying pans. Co-owner Maria Rondeau is smiling and ushering some sort of purple cocktail to your table. South American psychedelia is choogling out of the speakers (music so good you’ll want to jot down the names of the songs), and chef JuanMa Calderón—a noted indie-film director back home in Peru—is cranking out ceviches and causas that radiate flavor and soul. Is this really New England or did we pass through some kind of magic Andean portal? Either way, dinner at Celeste is the most fun you’ll have anywhere within twenty miles of Boston. 21 Bow Street
6 The DeBruce, Livingston Manor, New York Remember this name: Aksel Theilkuhl. A former lieutenant of Laurent Tourondel, Thielkuhl is a chef with family roots in the Dominican Republic who is pulling of something consistently remarkable at a chic next-generation inn in the Catskills that’s usually full of leaf peepers and babymooners. He’s cooking food that’s so delicious—
PROMOTION
GROO MIN G TO O LS
HAIR CARE
U LTA . C O M / B R A N D / E S Q U I R E - G R O O M I N G
BEARD CARE
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T H E B E S T N E W R E S TA U R A N T S 2 0 1 8 rooted in the bounty of what can be farmed and foraged from the surrounding landscape—that when I first tasted it, I stood up, walked over to the kitchen, and started peppering the poor man with questions. The guy can roast you a chicken with Robuchon-worthy mashed potatoes on a winter’s night, and he can lay out a tasting menu that’ll make you wonder, through course after course, whether Noma has established a secret outpost on the banks of the Willowemoc. The cooking comforts and mesmerizes; so does the view: Everything happens in a quiet, wide-windowed dining room that overlooks the curves of a mountain range. 982 Debruce Road
7 C H E F - O W N E R A L E J A N D R O PA R E D E S P R E P P I N G T H E P O R K AT C A R N I TA S L O N J A .
Bavel, Los Angeles
BeVERAGE DIReCTOR OF ThE YeAR
MARCO The food at the humming Bavel is the food of the Middle East as interpreted by the minds of two imaginative people, owners and chefs Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis. If you can’t identify precisely where in the Middle East halvah is made with foie gras, and hummus is crowned with spicy duck ’nduja, that’s by design. The married duo behind Bestia have liberated these dishes from the borders of tradition, creating a delicious twenty-firstcentury hybrid of the personal and the historical. They make bread so alive it seems to breathe. They make mushrooms so tasty—spiked on a skewer and licked by flames—that they’re better than meat. They fry up quail with enough expertise that you might mistake Menashe for a Mississippian. Regardless of where you’re from, eating at Bavel tastes like coming home. 500 Mateo Street
8 El Jardín, San Diego You say you love Mexican food, but have you ever tried a tlacoyo? You want one. It’s a creamy street snack that tastes like a cross between a tamale and a custard, and El Jardín is one of the few places in the United States where I’ve seen it. 64
ZaPPIA OF
MARTINA
IN
MINNEAPOLIS
A lanky, excitable gent with one of the coolest names in the business, Zappia loored me with his percolating creativity when I visited Minnesota. If cocktail making has become a bit too enamored with itself in recent years (hey, sometimes you just want a drink, not a dissertation), Zappia may be the antidote. His bibulous experiments recall the curveballs associated with Dave Arnold at the much-missed Booker and Dax and Kevin Denton at the much-missed wd-50, but he never loses sight of the fact that drinking is ultimately supposed to be, um, fun.
On a lively patio about twenty miles from the Mexican border, chef Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins is serving up an uncompromisingly authentic alternative to the rice-and-beans combo plates that have put San Diegans into a food coma for decades. Zepeda-Wilkins relies on a backyard garden to bring an immediacy of freshness to everything she cooks. Her aquachile, with raw wild shrimp basking in the cut hull of a coconut, practically shimmers with heat and sweetness. She even redeems taquitos, stuffing them with braised short ribs and turning a stoner fallback into a master class on the timeless relationship between the tender and the crisp. 2885 Perry Road
9 Hai Hai, Minneapolis True story: As I stood outside Hai Hai in early spring, a truck sped by on University Avenue and sprayed me from head to toe with dirty snow and gutter water. It’s a testament to the sunny energy of Hai Hai that I didn’t care. By then I’d been filled up with chef Christina Nguyen’s water fern cakes; her fried wontons, all melty inside with cream cheese and chicken livers; her showstopping Balinese chicken thigh under a roof
of crispy skin and on a bed of coconut-creamed jasmine rice. Banana blossoms, sugarcane, sticky rice, and green papaya—Nguyen’s menu reads like a street-smitten ode to Southeast Asia, a pop song that can brighten up even the murkiest of days in L’Étoile du Nord. 2121 University Avenue NE
Carnitas Lonja, San Antonio Here’s what Alejandro Paredes does: He makes carnitas, the pork all crackly and creamy from its own slow-melted fat. He makes tortillas, too—with the right chewy texture from the griddle and a pronounced flavor of corn—and he makes salsas that pretty much hum with life. Here’s what you do: You park your car and step inside and order a couple tacos filled with that carnitas (and maybe a quesadilla laced with his house-made chorizo), and you sit outside at a picnic table and eat your food and send up prayers to whichever deities govern the realm of tacos and appetite, because in this instance you are fortunate beyond measure. Mexican food in the United States doesn’t get any more delicious and honest than this. 1107 Roosevelt Avenue illustration: Kelsey Dake
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T H E B E S T N E W R E S TA U R A N T S 2 0 1 8
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Lady of the House, Detroit Kate Williams is running the show here, so look sharp. With restaurants around the country experiencing painful spasms of self-analysis in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning that obliterated the careers of accused chefs like Mario Batali and John Besh, Lady of the House could be viewed as a prototype for a new path forward. Williams, who has Irish-American family roots in the Corktown neighborhood where she cooks, pays close attention to the well-being (and diversity) of her employees—so much so that, like a proud mama, she hangs their childhood photos in a hallway by the kitchen. Naturally she
fosters a relaxed, homespun vibe in the dining room, delivering food that comes across as down-to-earth even though tremendous care has gone into it. The magnificently delicious “carrot steak” may carry an echo of a dish associated with Relæ, the pioneering New Nordic spot in Copenhagen, but the rum cake? Williams got that recipe directly from her mother. 1426 Bagley Street
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PASTRY CHEF OF THE YEAR Genevieve Gergis (Bavel, Los Angeles) The dessert I still dream about is a multitextured bonbon sufused—bracingly, boldly— with the flavor of black licorice. It is Gergis’s obsession that led to its difficult birth. All of her desserts are lovely, but that bonbon is special— think of it as a noir treat from the city that gave us Raymond Chandler.
Bar Crenn, San Francisco
Caviar caps an eggshell full of bone-marrow custard. Oysters hover suspended in a briny floral gelée beneath a spray of rose petals. A Paris-Brest from pastry virtuoso Juan Contreras becomes a palegreen study in the love afair between sugar and salt. The prices are punishingly high, yes. Bar Crenn, chef Dominique Crenn’s boudoirlike
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CHEF OF THE YEAR Missy Robbins (Misi, Brooklyn) These are crazy times. We need to get back to basics. Missy Robbins knows this in her bones. Misi makes the very most of minimalism. “Keep it simple” is its credo, and in her hands, serving you a perfect bowl of noodles with butter and cheese becomes a spiritual act amid the lunacy of the news cycle.
Rising Star of the Year Christina Nguyen (Hai Hai, Minneapolis) After I ate at Hai Hai, I figured Nguyen must have a tony résumé. I was wrong. She got her start running an arepa truck. The deep understanding of flavor that she displays is the result of life experience and raw talent. In an age when too many young chefs are phoning it in with beet salads, Nguyen cooks with a fresh vantage point on what it means to feed the people.
illustrations: Joe McKendry
T H E B E S T N E W R E S TA U R A N T S 2 0 1 8 wine-centric annex to her twoMichelin-starred Atelier Crenn, can be viewed only as an absurd splurge. But if you’re going to gouge yourself into bankruptcy, you might as well do it right. 3131 Fillmore Street
13 Petra and the Beast, Dallas
In a 1930s gas station that looks like dusty scenery from The Grapes of Wrath, in a room decorated with anime and skulls, to a soundtrack of Rage Against the Machine, chef Misti Norris is conjuring funk. A motto at the restaurant is “farm, forage, fermentation, and fire,” but it is definitely funk that those other four f’s result in—dishes (served in the sort of paper boats that I associate with chilicheese fries) that seem to writhe with flavor. Consider her fried chicken hearts wrapped in a pale-green garlic crepe, or her pigtails with sour purple cabbage. Her background is Cajun, but that doesn’t really help you locate her inspiration. As far as I can tell, her cooking appears to be Narnian. 601 North Haskell Avenue
14 The Love, Philadelphia By now, the phrase “farm to table” may make you sigh, but Aimee Olexy reminds us that the concept is simply about coming back to the life force of fresh ingredients. The crudités at the Love have such a Marvel Comics splash of color that I almost checked to see whether the plate had tiny stage lights; the Caesar salad, in which chef Charles Parker dresses ribs of romaine and fronds of dandelion in a vinaigrette that makes a briny-sweet coupling of anchovies and figs, is so freshly bouncy with firmness that I wondered whether Olexy and business partner Stephen Starr had planted a farm a few steps away in Rittenhouse Square. Don’t sleep on the fried chicken, embroidered with tawny gnarls of crust. Two bites and I knew why they call it the Lovebird. 130 South Eighteenth Street
15 Voyager, Ferndale, Michigan A squat box in a neighborhood north of downtown Detroit is probably not where you’d expect to find seafood as glorious as the oferings
at, say, Kødbyens Fiskebar in Denmark or Elkano in Spain. But order the Dungeness crab with fermented mayo, and the tuna on toast, and a dozen or so oysters, and you might trick yourself into catching a whif of an ocean breeze in the midwestern air. The high-quality cooking makes sense when you consider the pedigree of chefs Jennifer Jackson and Justin Tootla, who’ve logged hours on the good ships Prune and Le Bernardin. I could eat here twice a week, you’ll think. Pull up a beach chair and start shucking. 600 Vester Street
16 Tie: Che Fico, San Francisco & Don Angie, New York City
Del Mar, Washington, D. C.
A guy stands next to your table and heats up a spoon with a blowtorch. He then slides the hot metal into a tub of sobrasada, a spicy scarlet-hued sausage that has been shipped in from Majorca, and he instructs you to spread the red stuf on crisp, wispy loaves of pan de cristal that have been shipped in from Barcelona—with a drizzle of chestnut honey to top it of. This is how your meal begins at Del Mar, Fabio and Maria Trabocchi’s love letter to
T H E S C E N E A T V O YA G E R ( L E F T ) ; C H E F I C O ’ S M A R G H E R I T A P I Z Z A .
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Spain. He’s the chef—and, yes, Italian—but Maria’s roots in Madrid help ensure Iberian integrity, from the croquetas to the paella. It’s no mean feat to succeed with Spanish food in the city where José Andrés holds court, but at the grand, sweeping Del Mar, Team Trabocchi proves that our nation’s capital is big enough for more than one escalivada. 791 Wharf Street SW
Che Fico is big and booming, with Blur and Devo serenading you as you scarf down chef David Nayfeld’s trufled gnocchi and ricotta-stufed squash blossoms and (yes) pineapple pizza. Don Angie is tight-quartered and intimate, with a haute-Jersey aesthetic that would make Frank Sinatra feel at home even if Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli’s chrysanthemum salad and pepperoni fried rice might’ve thrown Ol’ Blue Eyes for a loop. Both places confirm a great American truth on both coasts: When you ache for a fun night out, you can never go wrong with Italian. 838 Divisadero; 103 Greenwich Avenue
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T H E PA E L L A D E P E S C A D O Y M A R I S C O S AT D E L M A R I N WA S H I N G T O N , D. C .
Pop-Up of the Year: Edward Lee’s Mr. Lee’s at Succotash in Washington, D. C.
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19 Karenderya, Nyack, New York
Longway Tavern, New Orleans
In spite of his Korean-American background, chef Edward Lee isn’t famous for cooking Asian food. In fact, what he and his crew plate up at Succotash bears the biscuits-and-bourbon imprint of the many years Lee spent in Kentucky. Stroll past the throngs waiting for a table, though, and you’ll ind a separate room, outitted with Chinese lanterns, in which Lee is quietly, modestly giving you a glimpse of the sort of food that he remembers from his childhood and still often makes at home for his daughter: pork belly that you swaddle in lettuce leaves and speckle with ssamjang and (oddly, brilliantly) crispy fried chickpeas; tender, chewy dumplings stufed with sweet potato or duck conit. Lee, a restless and peripatetic fellow who authored this year’s Buttermilk Graffiti, plans to keep Mr. Lee’s up and running for the rest of the year, maybe longer. If you go, do me a favor and urge him to make this pop-up a permanent installation. 70
“It’s just cool there,” the novelist (and New Orleans resident) Jami Attenberg told me when I emailed her about Longway Tavern. She’s right, and what’s surprising about that is that this refuge of refreshment murmurs discreetly in the midst of the tourist-clotted French Quarter. Longway, as led by chef John Sinclair and bar guru Liam Deegan, is the pub you wish you could park in for a few years. Sip a perfect Sazerac while you marvel at snacks that conjure the Big Easy without the usual creole tropes. The chicken sandwich is lusciously smeared with chicken livers; the peas—yes, peas!—bathe in cauliflower cream under a crust of breadcrumbs and country ham. 719 Toulouse Street
In the future, we pray, thousands of small towns in America will have Filipino restaurants as excellent as this one, with adobo pork belly braised to crispy meltiness atop garlic rice, and shrimp aswim in a coconut broth that tastes like French cream, and a cassava-jackfruit cake that comes across like a brilliant cobbler in which the crust and the filling have magically merged, and a smart beer list that highlights the best of Hudson Valley breweries. For now, Karenderya serves as exciting evidence that the #filipinofoodmovement is making inroads in suburbia, thanks to co-owners Cheryl Baun (the cake is her mother’s recipe) and chef Paolo Garcia Mendoza, a veteran of Tabla in Manhattan. Theirs is a warm, family-friendly enclave, and if you visit, you’re going to wind up wishing it were a block away from your house. 248 Main Street illustration: Kelsey Dake
FOR MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS , INTO
THE HEART OF AMERICA. BUT WITH HIS
SPECIAL— A SHOW
ON
FILM
OF
B R OA D WAY—
HIS
INTENSE,
MICHAEL
HAINEY
NEW NETFLIX
POWERFUL
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
T H AT H I S B R AV E ST J O U R N E Y H A S B E E N BY
H E ’ S T R AV E L E D D E E P
PHOTOGRAPHS
INTO
BY
ONE-MAN REVEALS
HIS OWN SOUL.
ALEXI
LUBOMIRSKI
Growin’ Up H&M T-shirt and jewelry, Springsteen’s own.
Tougher Than the Rest Bruce Springsteen backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, September 2018. Vintage Golden Bear biker jacket, H&M T-shirt, jeans, boots, and jewelry, Springsteen’s own.
that there is another way, that he can create an identity apart from “the lifeless, sucking black hole” that is his childhood. “All you needed to do,” Springsteen says when he unpacks the lesson Elvis taught him, “was to risk being your true self.”
he first time I meet Bruce Springsteen is backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, where he is in the homestretch of performing his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway. It is a few weeks before I am supposed to sit with him for an interview, but his publicist has asked me to come by before this performance so he can, I deduce, check me out. I arrive at 7:00 and am directed to a small couch near the backstage bathroom. Finally, ive minutes before curtain, I see, coming down the stairs that lead to his dressing room, a pair of black work boots and black-legged jeans. Springsteen ducks his head beneath a low arch and walks toward me, extending his hand and saying, “I’m Bruce.” We shake hands, and then there is silence. He looks at me and I look at him, not sure what to say. At ive-foot-ten, he’s taller than you think he’ll be; somehow, he remains the runty-scrawny kid in the leather jacket, possibly dwarfed in our minds due to the years he spent leaning against Clarence Clemons. That evening, Springsteen is weeks from notching his sixty-ninth birthday. And as we stand there, I ind it impossible not to think that the journey he has undertaken in this decade of his life has been nothing short of miraculous. He entered his sixties struggling to survive a crippling depression, and now here he is approaching his seventies in triumph—mostly thanks to the success of this powerful, intimate show, which is not a concert but an epic dramatic monologue, punctuated with his songs. After a year of sold-out shows, he will close it out on December 15, the same night it will debut on Netlix as a ilm. He at last breaks the awkward silence by giving a small nod and saying to me—but more to himself, just as we all kind of say it to ourselves as we head out the door each day—“Well, I guess I better go to work.” And with that he ambles toward stage right.
“Yeah...,” Springsteen says when I sit down with him a couple weeks later and tell him it seems the essential question of his show is “Are we bound by what courses through our veins?” He looks of to his left into his dressing-room mirror, the surface of which is checkerboarded with photographs, much as a mirror in a teenage boy’s bedroom might be. Among the many images: John Lennon in his NEW YORK CITY T-shirt. A young Paul McCartney. Patti Smith. Johnny Cash. They are, as Springsteen tells me later, “the ancestors.” It’s into this mirror and toward these talismans that Springsteen often gazes when he is answering my questions. He’s a deep listener and acts with intent. He has a calm nature and possesses a low, soft voice. He has a tendency to be self-deprecating, preemptively labeling certain thoughts “corny.” He smiles easily and likes to sip ginger ale. Sometimes before telling you something personal, he lets out a short, nervous laugh. Above all, he speaks with the unveiledness of a man who has spent more than three decades undergoing analysis—and credits it with saving his life. His cramped dressing room looks more like the “oice” the superintendent of your prewar apartment building carves out for himself in the basement, next to the boiler. Much of it feels scavenged. There’s a brown leather couch and a beat-up cofee table. Nailed up above the couch is a faded, forty-eight-star American lag and a ragged strand of white Christmas-tree lights. Now Springsteen sits on the couch before me, dressed in black jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt that reveals a faint scar at the base of his neck—the scar that remains from a few years ago, when surgeons cut him open to repair deterioration on some cervical discs in his neck that had been causing numbness on the left side of his body. On his right ring inger is a gold ring in the shape of a horseshoe. Finally, he speaks. “DNA is a big part of what the show is about: turning yourself into a free agent. Or, as much as you can, into an adult, for lack of a better word. It’s a coming-of-age story, and I want to show how this— one’s coming of age—has to be earned. It’s not given to anyone. It takes a certain single-minded purpose. It takes self-awareness, a desire to go there. And a willingness to confront all the very fearsome and dangerous elements of your life—your past, your history—that you need to confront to become as much of a free agent as you can. This is what the show is about.... It’s me reciting my ‘Song of Myself.’”
“DNA.” This is, curiously, the irst word that Springsteen says when he takes the stage. An unlikely, unromantic, unpoetic choice for a man who has always been more about the sensory than science. Yet in many ways, DNA is Springsteen’s unrelenting antagonist, the costar that he battles against. This is the central tension of Springsteen on Broadway: the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can—if we have the courage and desire— will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be conined by my DNA, or will I deine who I am? A few minutes later, in the show, he talks about the moment that opened his eyes to what was possible if one believed in the power of self-creation. It’s a Sunday night in 1956, and an almost seven-yearold Springsteen is sitting in front of the TV with his mother, Adele, in the living room of the tiny four-room house in Freehold, New Jersey, that he shares with his parents and sister. This is the night he sees Elvis Presley. In that moment, when he receives that vision, he realizes W inter 2019_Esquire 75
But as you learn after spending time with him, there is what is on the surface and then there is what is below. Because the show is also about other tensions: solitude versus love (the ability to give it as well as receive it); the psychological versus the spiritual; the death force versus the life force; and, most of all, the father versus the son. Yes, it is about his struggle to ind his true self, his identity. But most of all, it is about his father—and Springsteen’s search to ind peace with the man who created him but, in many ways, almost destroyed him. Here’s Springsteen describing in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, how he saw himself as a young boy, and how his father perceived him: Weirdo sissy-boy. Outcast. Alienated. Alienating. Shy. Soft-hearted dreamer. A forever-doubting mind. The playground loneliness . . . “[I had] a gentleness, a timidity, shyness, and a dreamy insecurity. These were all the things I wore on the outside and the relection of these qualities in his boy repelled [my father]. It made him angry.” He tells me his father made him ashamed that he was not hard like him but more like his mother. “My mother was kind and compassionate and very considerate of others’ feelings. She trod through the world with purpose, but softly, lightly. All those were the things that aligned with my own spirit. That was who I was. They came naturally to me. My father looked at all those things as weaknesses. He was very dismissive of primarily who I was. And that sends you of on a lifelong quest to sort through that.” Doug Springsteen was a stout man Springsteen remembers as “two hundred and thirty pounds of nickels in Sears slacks” and, at one point, as having the “face of Satan.” He worked a range of blue-collar jobs, from loor boy in a rug mill to bus driver, yet his primary occupation was not outside the house but inside; he dominated the family home, ruling his small kingdom with silence and menace. His throne was a chair at the kitchen table. Night after night, he’d sit in the darkness, drinking and brooding. “It was,” Springsteen writes, “the silent, dormant volcano of the old man’s nightly kitchen vigil, the stillness covering a red misting rage. All of this sat on top of a sea of fear and depression so vast I hadn’t begun to contemplate it.” When I ask Springsteen about his childhood, he tells me, “There was the house—and then there was what was happening in the kitchen. And when you went into the kitchen, the force of what was going on there was intimidating. But you had to deal with it. So the kitchen became freighted with meaning and danger.It was a dark, quiet place. The air was thick. So thick. Like swimming through dark molasses. You had to make your way through and make your way out—without disturbing, or creating too much attention toward yourself.” I tell him I ind it interesting that he smashed that silence with rock ’n’ roll. A joyful noise. “When I was a child, and into my teens,” he says, “I felt like a very, very empty vessel. And it wasn’t until I began to ill it up with music that I began to feel my own personal power and my impact on my friends and the small world that I was in. I began to get some sense of myself. But it came out of a place of real emptiness.” He pauses. “I made music for that kitchen. Go to Nebraska and listen to it. But I also made music for my mother’s part of the house, which was quite joyful and bright.” He locks his eyes on me. “You have to put together a person from all the stuf that you’ve been handed.” It was his father’s distance and silence that Springsteen rebelled against, yet his father’s identity is what he embraced. Because when Springsteen decided to adopt a rock ’n’ roll identity, what did he do? He stole his father’s work clothes and his persona—if Doug Springsteen wouldn’t love his true son, maybe at least he’d love a relection of his son as himself. One of the rawest stretches of the show comes when he sings “My Father’s House,” from his sixth album, Nebraska. After, he speaks of still, forever, being a boy who yearns for his father’s love: “Those whose love we wanted but didn’t get, we emulate them. It is our only way to get it. So when it came time, I chose my father’s voice because there was something sacred in it to me.” He pauses. “All we know 76 Wint e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
about manhood is what we have learned from our fathers. And my father was my hero, and my greatest foe.” Like too many of us, however, by choosing to mirror the identity of someone whose absent love he longed for, Springsteen ended up not knowing who he was. He spent much of his life afraid to love or be anything more than an observer. It’s not surprising that he eventually spun out.
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pringsteen’s first breakdown came upon him at age thirtytwo, around the time he released Nebraska. It is 1982, and he and his buddy Matt Delia are driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles in a 1969 Ford XL. On a latesummer night, in remote Texas, they come across a small town where a fair is happening. A band plays. Men and women hold each other and dance lazily, happily, beneath the stars. Children run and laugh. From the distance of the car, Springsteen gazes at all the living and happiness. And then: Something in him cracks open. As he writes, in this moment his lifetime as “an observer . . . away from the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me.” All these years later, he still doesn’t exactly know why he fell into
Clockwise from top right: Springsteen with his bandmates from Steel Mill, one of his early groups; jamming at age twenty; his mother and father in a New Jersey diner, and on their wedding day; a close-up of one of his guitars.
an abyss that night. “All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me of from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.” That breakdown sent him into analysis. It—and the work he did on himself—transformed his life. He became the man he yearned to be but hadn’t known how to become. Springsteen’s desire to share his demons, and to argue for the need he believes all of us have to confront our own—this is one of the show’s great powers. We ignore our demons, he says, at our peril. The show is, as he calls it, “a magic trick.” But in other ways, as I tell Springsteen, it is a revival show—not just him energizing the audience through the power of his life-airming, raucous songs; it is also a self-revival show. This is the work of a man revealing his laws so that he can inspire us to redeem ourselves.
Nearly a decade after that night in Texas, Springsteen is at his home in Los Angeles. He’s living with Patti Scialfa, and they are days away from welcoming their irst child, Evan. It is early morning, and there is a knock on the door: his father. Springsteen invites him in, and he and his father sit at the table. It is here, in his home, that his father tells him, “You’ve been very good to us.” Springsteen has no words. He can only nod. Then his father says, “And I wasn’t very good to you.” “It was,” Springsteen says in the show, “the greatest moment in my life, with my dad. And it was all that I needed. . . . Here in the last days before I was to become a father, my own father was visiting me, to warn me of the mistakes that he had made, and to warn me not to make them with my own children. To release them from the chain of our sins, my father’s and mine, that they may be free to make their own choices and to live their own lives.” Late in his father’s life, Springsteen received an answer that gave him even deeper insight. He learned that all those nights Doug Springsteen sat alone, brooding, silent, in the dark of that kitchen, he was a man lost. A man who would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The diagnosis gave Springsteen context to his boyhood. But it also gave him a new fear. As Springsteen confesses to me, “I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself. I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come of a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.” Twenty years ago this past spring, his father died at age seventy-three in hospice, cradled in Adele’s arms. On the day of the funeral, after the priest inished his prayers at the graveside of the family plot in Freehold, Springsteen sent away the mourners and remained behind with only a few close friends and relatives. Then he took a shovel and moved every last bit of dirt onto his father’s grave. That’s quite biblical, what you did, I say to him. Burying your father’s body with your own hands. “I wanted that connection,” he says. “It meant a lot to me.” I ask him: Will you be buried there, too? In the family plot in St. Rose of Lima Cemetery? He looks of toward the mirror, pauses. And then comes the short laugh. “That’s a big question,” he says. “And I’ve asked myself that question on a variety of occasions. Will I end up there? I don’t know. I think I’ll just be . . . I think I’ll just spread myself around a little bit. Maybe a little in the ocean. [Laughs] A little in town. Here and there.” Is there anything your father never said to you that you wish he had said? Were there any words unspoken? “Well,” Springsteen says, “he never said, ‘I love you.’ ” Never? “Nope. He never got around to it.” Not even when he lay dying? “Nope.” Does that hurt you? Springsteen pauses again and looks back toward his mirror. Then: W inter 2019_Esquire 77
Prove It All Night All Saints T-shirt, jeans, boots, and jewelry, Springsteen’s own.
“No. Because (a) I know he did. And (b) it just wasn’t in his repertoire. So he showed me he did, on many occasions. And so that was ine. My father was so nonverbal that . . . he cried whenever he left. When you’d say, ‘I gotta go now, Dad’— boom!—tears. Later in his life, the last ten years, he was very visibly emotional.” I tell him that there is a line in the show where he says of his father, “If I had a wish, oh, man, it’d be that he could be here to see this”—and then I ask, Is there something you’d want to hear from him? Springsteen goes silent. Then: “Honestly, I would have liked him to see who I was. That was what I was always running up against. He couldn’t see who I was. I mean, that’s what your children want from you—you are the audience. I igured that out really early in my kids’ lives. That’s the natural role of things. So somewhere inside of me, I still wanted my dad to be my audience. I wanted him to be mine. I wish for further and deeper understanding of who we both were.” Springsteen tells me he has found purpose through his children. He is the father of two sons and a daughter: Evan, twentyeight, works for SiriusXM; Sam, twentyfour, is a ireighter in New Jersey; and Jessica, twenty-six, is an equestrian. He says he promised himself long ago that he would not lose his children the way his father lost him. Much of his struggle to become a good father had to do with the hurt and anger he had to work through. He was ighting what he calls “the worst of my destructive behavior.” His father sent him a message that a woman, a family, weakens a man. As he says, for years the idea of a home illed him “with distrust and a bucketload of grief.” He credits Scialfa, his wife of twenty-seven years, with inspiring him to be a better man, with saving him. (“By her intelligence and love she showed me that our family was a sign of strength, that we were formidable and could take on and enjoy much of the world.”) It’s no wonder that he brings her out in the center of the show and duets with her on “Tougher Than the Rest” as well as “Brilliant Disguise.” You read his book and you see the wisdom and sensitivity she brought to their relationship. It’s Scialfa who, when the kids are small, goes to Bruce, the lifelong nocturnal creature, and says, “You’re going to miss it.” What? he asks. “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most.” Cut to: Bruce, remaking himself as the earlymorning-breakfast dad. “Should the whole music thing go south, I will be Winter 2019_Esquire 79
able to hold a job between the hours of 5:00 and 11:00 A.M. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is an act of great intimacy, and I received my rewards: the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster.” And there it is: Bruce, no longer the son of scarcity but rather the father of abundance, reclaiming the kitchen for his family; transforming it from a fortress of darkness and silence into a land of brightness, filled with the sounds of life. Sitting here with me now, talking about his brood, he radiates joy. A father, proud of his children, grateful. I ask him, considering the current environment, what kinds of conversations he and his family are having around the kitchen table; what it means to be a man in society right now. “My kids . . . we’re lucky. They’re solid citizens.” But what would you say if you had to give advice to someone raising sons today? “Be present. Be there. If I have any advice to give, that is it. I mean you have to be fully present in mind, spirit, and body. And you don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] I mean, you get a lotta credit just for showing up. Just by being present, you guide them. My children are transitioning into adulthood. But I’ve found my presence still carries a great deal of weight—on that rare occasion now when someone actually still asks me a question. [Laughs]” I ask him to deine the qualities that make up a good man today. “I do have two good men. And I would say their qualities are, they’re sensitive. They’re respectful of others. They are not locked into a 1950s sensibility of manhood, which I had to contend with. Consequently, their attitudes toward women and the world are free of those archetypes, and that frees them to be who they are and have deeper and more meaningful relationships. They know themselves pretty well, which is something I can’t say for myself when I was that age. They know—and can show—love. And they know how to receive love. They know what to do with their problems. I think they have a sense of process as to how to work on themselves, which is something that I certainly didn’t have at twenty-ive. These are the things that I’m proud of my boys for. They are quite diferent from my generation.” And what about your daughter, who is navigating a world that has had a rebirth of misogyny—do you and Patti talk to her about this? “She’s learned quite a bit, even through the few serious relationships that she’s had. And what do I notice? It seems to me like women today learn a lot quicker. She came with a set of tools that—and I have to credit most of this to Patti, because Patti was just very in tune with all the kids all the time—allowed her to make her way through the world in a very aware way. Consequently, there’s a lot of bullshit she doesn’t put up with. My daughter—she’s really tough. She’s in a tough sport. She’s physically very brave, very strong, and mentally very, very tough. That came through Patti. Patti was very independent. So she has a roaring independence that has served her very well.” A “roaring independence.” I like that. “Yeah.” [Chuckles] There’s a lot of noise right now about what a man is. 80 W i nt e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
“My kids aren’t confused by that.” If you had to say, “Here are the qualities you should seek to instill in your young man,” what would you say? “The funny thing is. . . if you’re present from when they’re young and if you comport yourself even reasonably well, they pick up a lot of healthy habits. And that discussion happens implicitly. By your behavior at home and how you treat your partner and what they see. I by no means have been perfect. But if you give a reasonable presentation of yourself, a lot of that occurs implicitly.” Why, I ask, do so many men, whether they’re sixty-five or twenty-ive, refuse to take responsibility for their actions? Springsteen sighs. “I would go back to DNA. If you grow up in a household where people are refusing to take responsibility for their lives, chances are you’re gonna refuse. You’re gonna see yourself as a professional victim. And once that’s locked into you, it takes a lotta self-awareness, a lotta work to come out from under it. I’m shocked at the number of people that I know who fall into this category. And it has nothing to do with whether you’re successful or not. It’s just your baggage. So that’s important to communicate to your children: They have to take responsibility for who they are, their actions, what they do. They’ve got to own their lives.” Is there, I ask, a code that you live by? “I’ve never tried to articulate it, to be honest. The qualities that my mother has are ones that I’ve tried to foster in myself. So what do I say? Kindness, a certain kind of gentleness that’s girded by strength. Thoughtfulness, which is very diicult for a narcissist like myself to deliver on a daily basis. I’ve had to get around my own self-involvement, which is one of the natural characteristics of the artist. If I had to say something, I’d say, ‘I’m steadfast, honest, and true.’ ”
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teadfast, honest, and true. If this is his motto, it also represents the qualities his fans project onto him. These are the values Springsteen seems to embody that create such a bond with his audience. Because of this, they believe he knows them. And gives voice to their heartaches, as well as to the better selves they aspire to be. But he has also sought, especially in the second half of his career, to write songs that speak to social and class issues. He’s always revered folkies like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and around the time he released his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad, he began to strive to create songs that found the intersection between “The River” and “This Land Is Your Land.” A place where, as he says, “the political and personal came together to spill clear water into the muddy river of history.” I say to Springsteen, In your book, you write this about America: “Dread—the sense that things might not work out, that the moral high ground had been swept out from underneath us, that the dream we had of ourselves had somehow been tainted and the future would forever be uninsured—was in the air.” I tell him: What’s strange is that this is not you describing the mood of this country in 2018; this is you writing about the country in 1978, forty years earlier, at the time you wrote Darkness on the Edge of Town. Yet those words feel
Land of Hope and Dreams Springsteen greeting fans outside the Walter Kerr Theatre. Vintage Golden Bear biker jacket, All Saints T-shirt, jeans, boots, and jewelry, Springsteen’s own.
like they are about this country right now. Do you think America is worse or better? “I don’t think it’s better.” You mean it’s worse? I ask. “Well, I guess forty years-plus would make it worse. And I do feel that people feel under siege, and sometimes for reasons that I don’t agree with and that are unfortunate. Like I say, whether it’s the changing face of the nation or . . . I think those people legitimately feel under siege. Their way of life is somehow threatened—is existentially threatened. And maybe that explains Trump and maybe it doesn’t, but . . . that’s always been a part of the American story. It continues to be a part of it today. At the time when I wrote those songs, I suppose it was a lot of what I was seeing around me.” There comes a moment in the show, before he sings “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which was inspired by John Ford’s ilm adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when he gives a beautiful relection on how sacred he feels democracy is. He speaks of how “these are times when we’ve also seen folks marching, and in the highest oices of our land, who want to speak to our darkest angels, who want to call up the ugliest and most divisive ghosts of America’s past. And they want to destroy the idea of an America for all. That’s their intention.”
So I ask him: Who are the “they”? “Well,” he says, “I would be talking about our president. Probably number one. [He] has no interest in uniting the country, really, and actually has an interest in doing the opposite and dividing us, which he does on an almost daily basis. So that’s simply a crime against humanity, as far as I’m concerned. It’s an awful, awful message to send out into the world if you’re in that job and in that position. It’s just an ugly, awful message. You are intentionally trying to disenfranchise a large portion of Americans. I mean, you are simply . . . that’s unforgivable. And then there’s just the rise of—whether it’s the alt-right or the folks who were marching in Charlottesville with their tiki torches and all of that coming to the fore again, you know? Which our president was more than happy to play into and to play to. So these are folks who are invested in denying the idea of a united America and an America for all. It’s a critical moment. This has come so far to the surface, and it’s so toxic. And it appears to have a grip . . . and to be so powerful . . . in a lot of people’s lives at the moment. It’s a scary moment for any conscientious American, I think.” And if you could, I say to him, make one request of citizens in this country right now, what would it be? A long silence follows. Springsteen turns back to the mirror and, at the same time, draws both of his booted feet up to the edge of the couch. He resembles a man squatting beside a campire, watching lames. “I think that a lot of what’s going on has been a large group of people frightened by the changing face of the nation. There seems to be an awful lot of fear. The founding fathers were pretty good at confronting their fears and the fears of the country. And it’s the old cliché where geniuses built the system so an idiot could run it. We are completely testing that theory at this very moment. I do believe we’ll survive Trump. But I don’t know if I see a unifying igure on the horizon. That worries me. Because the partisanship and the country being split down the middle is something that’s gravely dangerous. To go back to your question, what would my wish be? [Sighs] It’s corny stuf, but: Let people view themselves as Americans irst, that the basic founding principles of the country could be adhered to, whether it’s equality or social justice. Let people give each other a chance.” In the show, Springsteen plays many moments for laughs. He’s a natural actor, with a gift for landing a line or milking a moment. He’s also good at building the intensity of a story—or, if he has to, delating it, as he does at one point when he shifts gears for an intense stretch and jokes, “I’m going to release you from suicide watch right now.” But as I prepare for our inal meeting, I ind myself thinking he may be hiding in plain sight. I think about his description of his second breakdown, which descended upon him a few years after he turned sixty. It was a darkness that lasted on and of for three years; it was, he writes, “an attack of what was called an ‘agitated depression.’ During this period, I was so profoundly uncomfortable in my own skin that I just wanted OUT. It feels dangerous and (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 1 8) Winter 2019_Esquire 81
DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS 2018 Starring
ELON MUSK OUR DUBIOUS PERSON OF THE YEAR Yay, Elon! He earned it! What an impressive résumé of accomplishments:
Shooting a car into outer space for no discernible reason. Marketing a flamethrower for no discernible reason. Announcing via Twitter that he was building “a cyborg dragon.”
(That one sort of makes sense.) Announcing via Twitter that he was planning to take Tesla
private for $420 a share. (Get it?) Composing said tweet on acid, according to Azealia Banks. Being fined $20 million by the SEC for said tweet. Referring to the hero diver who helped rescue twelve boys from
a flooded Thai cave as “pedo guy.” Describing his own mind as “a never-ending explosion”
while high as a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Ruining Grimes .
Turn the page for Elon’s gracious and super-coherent acceptance speech! I L L U ST R AT I O N BY L Æ M E U R
Winter 2019_Esquire 83
Speech! Speech! Speech!
“ I ’m
getting a little tired of being
awarded things, honestly. Working on a sentient AI that can stand in for me to accept statuettes and plaques moving forward. Still perfecting the hair plugs for it. Need it to look sexy; otherwise it’s just creepy. ¶ So this is a magazine award? We’re still using paper and printing presses? Such a waste. I have a better use for ink. We can use it to communicate with giant squids. Just imagine how many submarines we’ll save. You people aren’t thinking big enough. While we’re at it, don’t you think I’d be a better Aquaman than Jason Momoa? The water-breathing exercises I’ve been doing in the morning make me feel amazing. And pretty soon you’ll be able to just dump information into my tank from a metal bucket and my brain will absorb it instantly. It’s still in
beta, and you have to learn to hold your breath for like three hours, but by 2020 that’s how we’ll all vote. Is that what this award is for? ¶ You can totally honor me. I don’t mind it. And yeah, I know I’ve been doing a lot to make humanity better and save the earth and replace the sun with a more cost-eicient renewable heat ball and all that, but hey, we need to all pull together to make my life easier. I’m working really hard for you guys and I’m not sleeping well. Like why am I waking up hungover with my pants at my ankles in the Tesla factory? It’s inappropriate. And where’s my girlfriend? Is she a hologram? This is no way to live. ¶ How long is my acceptance speech supposed to be? I don’t recognize your arbitrary rules. ¶ Thank you.”
TRUMP TO JOIN PUTIN, DUTERTE, AND ERDOGAN FOR “ORIGINAL STRONGMEN OF COMEDY” TOUR
During a September address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump’s claim that his administration had accomplished more in two years than “almost any administration” in American history drew laughter. UNFORTUNATELY, THE FIREARM CAME PREASSEMBLED
A six-year-old boy found a loaded handgun in a sofa at an Ikea store in Fishers, Indiana. The boy accidentally fired a shot, but no one was hurt.
–As told to Scott Dikkers
Meanwhile, back at the White House and several other places that, believe it or not, have nothing to do with Trump . . . IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE THAT BEER GOGGLES ARE A THING
an extremely drunk man they found trying to have sex with a car’s tailpipe.
As a publicity stunt during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club featured pole-dancing robots.
“No president has ever consulted more widely or talked with more people from more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.” —Brett Kavanaugh, being introduced as nominee HE ALSO WANTS TO DEPORT MARIO
TURNS OUT IT WAS ONLY THE BILL OF RIGHTS
Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for a flight from Minneapolis with toilet paper stuck to his shoe.
At a press conference with Norway’s prime minister, President Trump boasted of selling the country “F-52” planes—a model that only exists in the Call of Duty videogame series. THE CAR WOULDN’T DO GLOVE COMPARTMENT
Police in Newton, Kansas, arrested
BUT TRY STUFFING A G-STRING WITH BITCOIN
PRESIDENT HAILED FOR MINORITY APPOINTMENT
THE SCIENTIFIC TERM IS BOOF
In a Fox News interview, seated next to his wife, Brett Kavanaugh volunteered (unprompted) that he was a virgin in high school “and many years thereafter.”
Research published in the journal Nature Astronomy confirmed that the atmosphere of Uranus is composed of hydrogen sulfide, a compound that creates the smell of human farts.
APPARENTLY THERE’S A LOT OF MONEY IN EVIL
GET THE SCHINDLER’S TWIST—IT’S TO DIE FOR
Google removed the famous “Don’t Be Evil” clause from its code of conduct.
A new bakery in Amsterdam was named Anne & Frank, after Anne Frank.
I L L U ST R AT I O N S BY L Æ M E U R ( M U S K ) A N D S E R G E S E I D L I T Z ( A L L OT H E R S )
DeVos’s $40 million family yacht, setting it adrift on Lake Erie and causing $10,000 in damages.
ADMINISTRATION HOPES TO BOND JUST AS STRONGLY WITH IRAN
A U. woman cited the D-Day invasion as an example of America’s “very
SO SAY STUDIES CONDUCTED BY THE KLEENEX RESEARCH INSTITUTE
British psychologists said that masturbating at work is an efficient way to relieve stress.
DONE BETTER YOUR MOVE, “MAN OF STEEL”
In the inaugural issue of Batman: Damned, Bruce Wayne’s penis was drawn for the first time.
In just six hours, a Girl Scout in San Diego sold more than three marijuana dispensary.
HE’S NOT REALLY THE WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA, EITHER
The Nobel Committee revealed that a letter nominating President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize had been forged. “I LIKE PEOPLE WHO WEREN’T CRUCIFIED”
A former member of President Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council boasted that he could win reelection even against “a combined ticket of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.” ON SECOND THOUGHT, WE DON’T WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND
In an interview with GQ, Paul McCartney recalled masturbating with John Lennon and other boyhood pals. “We were all just in these chairs, and the lights were out, and somebody started masturbating, so we all did,” McCartney said. “We were just, ‘Brigitte Bardot! Whoo!’ And then everyone would thrash a bit more.” BARTENDER: “HANG ON, I KNOW THIS ONE”
A horse walked into a bar in Chantilly, France, after escaping
PREVIOUSLY ON BREAKING SAD! . . .
Trump-shaped Ecstasy pills were seized by Indiana police in June. GERMANS PERFECTLY HAPPY TO BE KNOWN FOR HITLER AGAIN
A study found that upward of one hundred Germans die every year from risky masturbation practices.
IT JUST DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU SEE THE GLASS AS 1% FULL OR 99% EMPTY
In a CNN poll assessing support for possible Democratic presidential candidates, Michael Avenatti got 1 percent—the worst showing of anyone with declared interest and any name recognition.
Amazon introduced a new service in which you give the company access to your car and it will leave packages locked inside instead of on your step.
After being told she couldn’t bring an emotional-support hamster on board her Spirit Airlines flight, a Florida college student flushed the hamster, named Pebbles, down an airport toilet, then threatened to sue. HOWEVER, UNFLUSHABLE THIRTEEN-POUND BIRD DOING WELL
As seen in a viral video, a twentyone-year-old woman claimed that drinking her dog’s urine had cleared up her acne.
Kurri Kurri, a small town in Australia, hosted a mullet festival with 150 participants.
YOUR TESLA CAN EVEN SIGN FOR THE PACKAGE IF IT DOESN’T KILL THE DELIVERY GUY FIRST
STILL, IT BEATS FLYING SPIRIT AIRLINES
WELL, THAT OR SHE GREW OUT OF IT
BUSINESS CONVENTION IN THE FRONT, PARTY IN THE BACK
At Newark Liberty International Airport, United Airlines told a woman she couldn’t board with her emotional-support peacock, even if she paid for its seat.
PADDINGTON 3 TAKES AN ADULT TURN
A bear in California entered a man’s hot tub and began drinking a margarita. ALLOW US TO “MANSPLAIN” WHY THIS IS FUNNY
Merriam-Webster added the term “dumpster fire” to the dictionary. SPOOKIER STILL, SHE KEPT SAYING, “GOOD ONE, JEFF”
Amazon struggled this spring to find out why, under certain circumstances, its Alexa personal assistant started spontaneously laughing. FIRST THEY CAME FOR MY BASEBALL CARDS . . .
Two parents in upstate New York successfully sued to evict their thirty-year-old son. “BRING IT ON,” SAY FEMALE SEXBOTS WITH TRASHCOMPACTOR VAGINAS
The sex-doll company Realbotix announced it had begun manufacturing male sex robots with unstoppable bionic penises. PUBLIC-EDUCATION SYSTEM ADMIRES DOCK’S ABILITY TO WITHSTAND ASSAULT
A prankster unmoored Betsy
“WE LIKED BERRIES, WE STILL LIKE BERRIES. BUT WE DID NOT EAT BERRIES TO THE POINT OF BLACKING OUT, AND WE NEVER FLEW INTO WINDOWS”
Due to the early fermenting of berries in Gilbert, Minnesota, “drunk” birds began flying into windows and cars with abnormal frequency.
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THE CONDIMENT SINGULARITY APPROACHES
Heinz debuted Mayochup—a mix of ketchup and mayonnaise.
SO PREOCCUPIED WITH WHETHER THEY COULD THAT THEY DIDN’T STOP TO THINK IF THEY SHOULD
A giant bare-chested statue of Jef Goldblum reclining, replicating a famous scene from Jurassic Park, was placed on view in London over the summer. #YODO
A sixty-three-year-old Romanian man whose wife had him declared dead in 2016, twenty-four years after he moved to Turkey and cut of all communication with her, returned to Romania but failed to persuade a local court to overturn his death certificate.
OKAY, BUT HOW ABOUT A SEXY AL JOLSON COSTUME?
The NBC morning show Megyn Kelly Today was canceled and its star released from her network contract after Kelly questioned why anyone would think wearing blackface for Halloween is racist. DON’T BRING A CHAIN SAW TO A LAWN-MOWER FIGHT
Small Hands, Big Love? A forensic analysis of presidential PDA technique
A Tennessee man lost a leg when his son ran him over with a lawn mower, after he’d attacked his son with a chain saw. ALAS, BELIEVING LIFE IS FAIR WON’T MAKE YOU ANY BETTER-LOOKING
A study published in the journal Psychological Reports found that good-looking people are more likely to believe that life is fair. EACH TIME YOU LITTER, SHE SHEDS 1/1,024th OF A TEAR
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Three-toed Sloth
As always, Trump bends the rules in his favor. In his version, rock smashes scissors and flattens paper.
The result of hard-fought negotiations: “She’ll let him hold one finger.” “He wants five.” “Okay, three, but it’s gonna cost you.” “Done.”
According to a DNA test released by Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator is 0.01 percent to 0.0002 percent WE KNEW THOSE CAMATTRACTIVE
A dozen camels were disquali-
injections in their lips. JAPANESE ORGY WAS BETTER ENGINEERED, MORE EFFICIENT
only 375 participants showed
ICE ICE Baby
Trump L’oeil
After visiting children separated from immigrant parents at the border, it was the First Lady who appeared detained.
A technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion from a distance that hands are being held.
to top a 500-person orgy
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Contributors: David Hirshey, Nell Scovell, Michael Solomon, Nat Towsen, and Lawrence Wood
A R T B Y K Y L E H I LT O N
S TO R Y BY B R U C E H A N DY
A Man in Full Bloom KIM JONES
is arguably the most influential designer today, the man who merges the runway and the street. Now that he’s taken over DIOR, what can we expect? BY MICHAEL HAINEY P hotogr ap h b y Mi l an Vukmirovi c
Jones, photographed in Paris in June, before he presented his first men’s-wear collection for Dior.
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The Rue de Marignan is one of those thin, short streets in Paris that epitomize discretion. Tucked behind the Champs-Elysées, it’s the kind of place where le Carré would have placed a safe house. No wonder Dior—always subtle, always understated—keeps its men’s headquarters here. And yet, on this warm June afternoon . . . “Kim!” “Kanye!” Two people in sunglasses emerge from Dior, intent on navigating the gap between the door they’ve exited through and the car that awaits them. Photographers yell and click. Horns honk. Passersby gaze but pretend not to stare. They are French, after all. So much for discreet. But then again, this celebrity pilgrimage, this paparazzi catwalk, is one big reason Kim Jones has been brought on as Dior’s new men’s-wear designer. Because this is where fashion is right now, and Jones—a humble, unpretentious bloke from London—is likely the true genius-godhead of our current Fashion Moment, the man who more than a decade ago didn’t just foresee that the street and the runway were going to fuse—he led the melding. Maybe that’s why his (continued on page 122)
For the show, Jones commissioned the artist KAWS to create a 33-foot floral sculpture with a classic Dior suit.
KIM JONES reminds us how rebellious the P hoto g rap h s b y Al l i e Holloway / Styling by M atthew Mard e n
90
suit can be. “It’s elevated but effortless,” he says. All cloth i n g b y Dior Men
RAPTURE
J A M E S B A L D W I N AT H O M E I N F R A N C E , 1 9 7 0 .
Will
ph otograp h : Guy L e Q uerrec / M a gnum P hot os
The
Be
TELEVISED
H O W D O YO U
TOP MOONLIGHT?
WITH THE FIRST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE
F I L M A D A P TAT I O N O F A J A M E S B A L D W I N N O V E L . AN
OSCAR-WINNING D I R EC TO R R E T R A C E S H I S N E A R LY T W O - D EC A D E- LO N G J O U R N E Y TO BEALE STREET. BY B A R R Y J E N K I N S P. 93
B A R RY J E N K I N S W I T H ST E P H A N J A M E S A N D K I K I L AY N E O N T H E S E T O F I F B E A L E ST R E E T C O U L D TA L K .
IN
the sophomore year of my under-
grad education, I discovered James Baldwin. I discovered James Baldwin in the wake of a breakup. I discovered James Baldwin when my no-longer girlfriend looked at me squarely and said, “You need to read James Baldwin.” I was punching above my weight. She was further along, a senior. Her parents were (proudly) from the nation of people responsible for the irst—the only—successful slave revolt in the history of the world. It was a turbulent relationship, as far as I can remember, her repeatedly allowing me my painful emotional growth, me repeatedly taking that space as a means to neglect and evade the growth she believed me capable of. It’s a wonder she bothered with me at all. In her wake, I read James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room (1956), Baldwin’s torrid portrait of an American in Paris struggling to reconcile his love afair with an Italian bartender who is decidedly not the woman he’s been promised to wed; The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin’s book-length essay on “the Negro Problem,” both an inward letter to his nephew and a call to arms for America at large: These were my introductions to Baldwin. I don’t remember fully what I made of them. Instead, looking back, there are feelings, remembrances of moods, the dizzying tulle of discovery that Baldwin so singularly wove through much of his work; words as imagery, emotions as tools wielded to stupefying efect. Taken together, they are a frightening read, a fury and reckoning with the American legacy, with the shame of taboo and desire; the head and the heart as vessel and ballast, loins and gray matter as sibling determinants in the pleasures and sorrows of life. To that point in my life I had scarcely seen two men hold hands, to say nothing of seeking wholeness and pleasure in matters of the lesh as forthrightly presented in Giovanni. It had never occurred to me to read the writing of a queer author. It had never occurred to me that there were gay, black authors raised on the Gospel who wrote in French and in the voices and souls of both black and white folks. In light of this new occurrence, the world opened up. In the act of reading Giovanni and David’s tale, in loving them, in caring for them, I felt the barrier between my experience and theirs— and in my young mind, between myself and gay men—recede. We were all men, all fragile and broken in some way, in need of love and grace and the salve of a mother or father 94 Wi nt e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
or estranged lover. We were all Baldwin’s children. The fact of this lineage and the generosity of our father conirmed that we, his readers, were worthy of love. My introduction to Jimmy coincided with my earliest explorations of ilm. I knew almost as little about myself as I knew about cinema. Still, from the very moment I inished those books, I dreamed of translating Baldwin’s prose into imagery. These dreams were vivid and persistent, terrifying, like a fog chasing me, choking me, both within and beyond my abilities. I remember thoughts of an animated excerpt from The Fire Next Time—the sequence in which Baldwin travels to Chicago and has a tête-à-tête with Elijah Muhammad over dinner in a South Side home—in the style of Waltz with Bashir. Giovanni’s Room was to be a lean exploration of shame and desire in the style of Cassavetes’s Faces. A decade later, I found myself at the end of something I couldn’t articulate and the beginning of something I feared. I was lonely, terribly lonely. In 2007, I’d made a ilm for a budget of $15,000 with ive friends and two actors, and that ilm had sold and screened at festivals around the world. I’d signed with a Hollywood agency and had a deal at Focus Features. I was, somehow, doing it, making myself into a real ilmmaker, and then . . . I looked up ive years later and realized I’d done nothing. Filmmakers are, if nothing else, kind to one another. Rarely have I met one who wishes another ill. There’s a question we ask each other at festivals and workshops and mixers: “So...what are you working on?” Asked without thinking, asked with kindness and the hope that the answer will be everything but understanding that it will just as likely be nothing. But I wasn’t working. I hadn’t worked for quite some time. I’d become that ilmmaker at ilm festivals that other ilmmakers looked upon with pity. I had worked, of course. On other people’s things, on branded things, and con-
begin, having survived my apprenticeship (but had I survived it?), a great work. I might really become a great writer. But in order to do this I would have to sit down at the typewriter again, alone—I would have to accept my despair: and I could not do it. —James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer,” Esquire, 1961
“So . . .what are you working on?”
That question drove me to Europe, to Brussels and Lyon and Berlin. It drove me—over six weeks, three Airbnb rentals, and a combination of cofee and shade-tree manhattans (whatever whiskey was available, a dash of Grand Marnier, orange peel if available, rocks served then excised)—to write one script that would ultimately win Tarell Alvin McCraney and me an Academy Award and, on the same sojourn, another that would serve as the foundation for an adaptation of Baldwin’s Harlem romance, If Beale Street Could Talk, in which a young woman races against the clock to prove her iancé’s innocence while carrying their irst child to term. It’s assumed that Beale Street exists as a ilm as a result of the success of Moonlight, that seeing that ilm and its miracle awards-season run gave the Baldwin estate the conidence to trust me. On the contrary, after adapting the book in the summer of 2013, I wrote a letter, printed the screenplay, and put together a package representing the work I had completed to date. Rather than sending a ilm with cover art stating “Future Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture,” I scoured Amazon and eBay for secondhand sellers who had DVD copies of my irst (and little-seen) ilm, Medicine for Melancholy. Baldwin had only previously been adapted once on ilm, and not in English. When my query was met with warmth and open ears, I was shocked, but prepared: I had the script in hand and a clear vision of how I would go about making it. In Beale Street, I ind a Baldwin that doesn’t
WE DON’T EXPECT TO TREAT THE
L I V E S AND S O U L S OF BLACK FO L K S I N T H E
A ESTHETI C O F THE ECSTATIC. ceptual things, and commercial things. But I had not worked, a feeling that reminds me of words Baldwin wrote in this very magazine at the age of thirty-six, close to the age I am now: And beneath all this, which simpliied nothing, was that sense, that suspicion—which is the glory and torment of every writer—that what was happening to me might be turned to good account, that I was trembling on the edge of great revelations, was being prepared for a very long journey, and might now
appear as readily in his other works. This is, to be sure, an angry work of iction, illed to bursting with the energy of the turbulent era in which it was composed, the author surrounded by death; farm boys and ghetto children marshaled of to Vietnam at the will of a drunken government, the heads of state and civil movements felled by snipers at close and long range. Under the wiki for “protest
itself near the top of the list. And yet so rarely has a protest novel contained within it as soaring a love as that between Tish and Fonny. To put it simply, the romance at the center of this novel is pure to the point of saccharine. It’s no wonder that, amongst the more scholarly of his readers, the book is held in lesser esteem. And yet even this is a testament to the magic trick Baldwin pulls here, and a key reason for the tone of our adaptation. We don’t expect to treat the lives and souls of black folks in the aesthetic of the ecstatic. It’s assumed that the struggle to live, to simply breathe and exist, weighs so heavily on black folks that our very beings need be shrouded in the pathos of pain and sufering. It is this need, this desire to render blackness in hues of dread and sorrow, that leads some to reject rapturous renderings of black life as inauthentic. This misconception would be trivial if it didn’t trivialize an unquestionable fact about black life, for who else has wrested as much beauty from abject pain? Who else has manifested such joy despite outsized sufering? Somewhere, an Earth, Wind & Fire song is playing in a living room where portraits of Maya Angelou and a blue-eyed Jesus share a wall. The Rapture will be televised. And I’ll be damned if it won’t involve a cookout and somebody’s auntie leading an Electric Slide. I chose Beale Street because I felt the novel, more than any of his other works, represented the perfect blend of Baldwin’s dual obsessions with romance and social critique, as sensual a depiction of love as it is a biting observation of systemic injustice. BLACK WOMEN THROWN OFF NAPA WINE TRAIN FOR LOUD LAUGHTER. A recent news headline, tiresome in its inevitability. I think of these women and this ridiculous “wine train” and I think of Baldwin scoing at the news and
Brian Tyree Henry and Stephan James on location in Harlem; James and KiKi Layne in Beale Street; Jenkins with D. P. James Laxton on the set of Medicine for Melancholy.
walking to the nearest window in some lat on some street in Harlem that exists as it always was and forever will be, one of those nowhere and everywhere New York places that I’m certain his ninety-four-year-old self would have secured to live out the balance of his magnificent life. From the window, I imagine him hearing from the road below: “You believe this shit?!” And I hear Baldwin calling out with that devilish laugh he wielded like a sword: “How could you not?” (It was no surprise to learn that the women on the train were not drunk.) Fonny: chews on the rib, and watches me: and, in complete silence, without moving a muscle, we are laughing with each other. We are laughing for many reasons. We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. —James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974
The film we’ve made of Baldwin’s
novel is a faithful one. It preserves his impressionistic approach to time as a thing beholden to memory, and love as a thing that one need not explain or justify. It is an earnest attempt to extend to viewers the seismic swell of emotion
Baldwin’s writing has always given to me—a feature, not a bug. Like its source material, the ilm rhymes the bitter anger of social injustice with the visceral expression of the ecstatic. In a moment not drawn from the book but, I hope, itting well within the aesthetic contract the novel creates, our main characters walk down the center of a Little Italy street basking in good news. Without prompting, the two lovers throw their heads back and yell to the sky. I have this memory of standing on set watching passersby, people in the neighborhood, look on in confusion. I was reminded of my grandmother: born and raised in the Jim Crow South; lost an eye to diabetes as a very young woman; sent multiple sons both to prison and to the grave. Yet to this day, her laugh is the most joyful sound I’ve heard in all my life. You simply cannot rob black folks of the spirit of the ecstatic. James Baldwin passed in ’87 at the age of sixty-three. I wonder at times what he would make of things, a world and a country at so many crossroads, seemingly three quarters of the way to hell. Sixty-three years is young for anyone, but certainly for a titan on the order of Baldwin. And yet, James Baldwin is eternal. In the body of work he left us, I struggle to ind the lack.
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P HOTO GRAP HS BY
WINTER BLUES GOT YOU READY FOR A CHA NGE
O F PAC E ?
Follow actor Joe Alwyn’s lead — try out a MIX of GRAPHIC SWEATERS, ROOMY TOPCOATS, and OFF-DUTY SUITS that were practically made for PLAY ING HOOKY.
STY L I N G BY
M AT T H EW
M AR DE N
Winter 2019_Esquire
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In 2017, B R I T I S H actor shot four ilms across three continents in less than twelve months, and the resulting projects, all of which hit theaters in the latter half of this year, reveal his impressive range in a series of small but critical roles. First came Operation Finale, about the hunt for Nazi oicer Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley), with Alwyn as Eichmann’s son. Then there was Boy Erased, a ilm about gay-conversion therapy, in which Alwyn, alongside a cast including Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, played a closeted predator. The Favourite soon followed, a riotous period piece with Alwyn, as a besotted courtier, revealing a knack for physical comedy opposite Emma Stone. And this month, the twenty-seven-year-old appears in a very diferent kind of period ilm, Mary Queen of Scots (December 7). Directed by Josie Rourke, it tells the true story of two young queens who are cousins and rivals for the English crown, with a fierce and brilliant Saoirse Ronan in the role of Mary and Margot Robbie as a powerful yet vulnerable Elizabeth I. Alwyn plays Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s right hand. “He isn’t driven by politics and ambition and power in the same way as the other male characters,” says Alwyn. “The others try to circle the women and use them for their own advantage. That’s not to say that my character is incapable of doing that, but he has higher priorities or higher feelings—his love and loyalty to Elizabeth.” Alwyn’s big break came in a shot-out-of-a-cannon moment when Ang Lee cast him, at age twenty-four and fresh out of school, as the lead in the highly anticipated wartime drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The ilm stumbled at the box oice, but Alwyn remains grateful: “It’s still the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.” Landing a starring role so soon could have turned his head, but the young actor stayed focused on his work and regrouped by taking a number of smaller parts. “Since that ilm, I’ve tried to make a conscious efort to ind projects where, if there were supporting roles where I could learn and be surrounded by a great cast of actors and ilmmakers and crew, then that was what I wanted to do.” That approach led Alwyn not only to create a diverse résumé but also to work with a diverse group of directors. He’s currently shooting Harriet, about abolitionist Harriet Tubman, directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou). Throughout, Alwyn has retained an apprentice-like humility. “I still ind it a strange readjustment when you go back to set,” he says. “To do your work in a way where you don’t feel anxious and completely consumed by anxiety, it takes experience and practice.” His levelheadedness has also helped him navigate the incessant curiosity about his relationship with superstar Taylor Swift. Asked whether anyone gave him guidance, Alwyn says he kept his own counsel. “I didn’t seek out advice on that. Because I know what I feel about it. I think there’s a very clear line as to what somebody should share, or feel like they have to share, and what they don’t want to and shouldn’t have to.” —Emily Poenisch
J O E A LW Y N
Overleaf, left: Jacket ($1,950), shirt ($690), and trousers ($790) by Bottega Veneta; belt ($575) by Louis Vuitton. Overleaf, right: Jacket ($4,350) by Loewe; sweater ($970) by JW Anderson. Coat ($930) by AMI Alexandre Mattiussi; turtleneck ($980) by Prada; trousers ($348) by Boss; sneakers ($180) by New Balance x StĂźssy.
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A perfectly tailored suit will take you
ANYWHERE.
This page: Vest and trousers (part of three-piece suit, $2,675) and shirt ($395) by Dolce & Gabbana; Coupole Classic Power Reserve watch ($1,650) by Rado. Opposite: Sweater ($2,740) by Louis Vuitton; trousers ($780) and boots ($1,095) by Givenchy. W inter 2019_Esquire
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For store information see page 123. Casting by Emily Poenisch. Grooming by Scott McMahan for Art Department.
This page: Coat ($3,495) by Dolce & Gabbana; jacket ($2,695), trousers, and shoes ($1,095) by Giorgio Armani; T-shirt ($160) by Worstok; socks ($20) by J. M. Dickens London. Opposite: Coat ($3,900), trousers ($890), and boots ($1,490) by CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC; Calvin Klein Underwear T-shirt, Alwyn’s own.
Nothing ties it all together
LIKE A TOPCOAT.
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10 4 W i nt e r 2 01 9_E sq u ire
CH ASING TH E CARD DECK Spring 2003 Major General Ray Odierno, commander, Fourth Infantry Division: [Iraqis] feared Saddam. They feared he would come back. To them, he was all-powerful, almost like this mystical figure. The fact that he’d gotten away made him even more mystical. The longer that he was free, the more mystical it got. Ambassador Paul Bremer, administrator, Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq: He was a presence—or an absence, more accurately—in everything we were doing. Andy Card, White House chief of staf: We were always frustrated not to have captured Saddam. Odierno: We were chasing the card deck. We realized that was not going to help us capture him—he had a whole other network that supported his moving around, based on ties from his childhood, family, other relationships he had. Very few of the ties were within the Iraqi government. The leaders of our special-operations forces came to see me. We made an agreement to work closely on capturing Saddam. Major Brian Reed, operations officer, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division: There was a sense in the brigade, and with the special task force that we were working with, that Saddam was going to come back to where he was from, given his lineage, his tribal linkages, familial linkages. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, commander, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division: Our orders were to occupy Tikrit. This was Saddam’s hometown, 97 percent Sunni. Reed: It wasn’t a place that welcomed us with open arms. Colonel James Hickey, commander, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: Historically, Tikrit is an interesting piece of ground: It’s on the east-west route along the Tigris, one of the great rivers of the world. We were just one of the armies that had passed through—along with the Persians, the British, the Turks, the Romans. It’s the crossroads of history. It’s the Iraqis who stay. Captain Bradley Boyd, commander, Charlie Company, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: We assumed Saddam and his supporters weren’t hanging out in town. But we thought they were passing through town on a regular basis. I thought we’d 10 6 W i nt e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
The Invasion Clockwise from center: The Pentagon’s Ace of Spades; battle tanks roll into Iraq; the toppling of a Saddam statue in the heart of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, just days after U. S. forces arrived in the capital; President Bush’s premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished” on May 1; Saddam’s gold-plated firearms; Paul Bremer, the highest-ranking U. S. oicial in Iraq at the time.
catch him by accident on the side of the road. Staf Sergeant Eric Maddox, interrogator, U. S. Army: If you look at how we got [the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, how we got bin Laden, it was cell phones. You ain’t inding those guys without cell phones. There was not a single cell phone used to track any part of this hunt. We had to use HUMINT [human intelligence] from prisoners exclusively. The Special Forces team and I started to pursue individuals who we learned about from prisoners. And that gave us new prisoners, and through their interrogations, they started to talk about a certain family—the al-Muslits—and their former role as a bodyguard family for Saddam. Russell: The biggest breakthrough came in June, when two businessmen came to a complaint center we’d set up for Iraqis. We got some chairs, some Pepsis, put them in a cool place in the building, and for the next
two and a half hours, they sketched out on butcher paper Saddam’s security apparatus: half a dozen families, cronies who had been with him since the 1950s, people related by blood or marriage. It was like sketching out Tony Soprano’s family. Major Michael Rauhut, operations officer, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: We were given what turned out to be a treasure trove of context. Joseph Fred Filmore, translator, Fourth Infantry Division: We grabbed so many of his inner-circle guards. Lieutenant Colonel Russell had a big map with the families and the tribes. Every time we came from a raid, we discovered this tribe married a girl from this one, this one was close to this tribe. It was painstaking. Hickey: There were a handful of guys we were really looking for. One was named Hadooshi, and one was named Mohammed Ibrahim al-Muslit.
EVERYTH ING IS G OLD June 2003 As the spring progressed, intelligence led the task force and the Fourth Infantry Division to zero in on the Hadooshi farm, ten miles outside of Tikrit. On June 18, they raided it. Staf Sergeant Sean Shofner, scout platoon, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division: We went in to scout the Hadooshi farm. We were gathering intelligence; there were quite a lot of buildings and compounds across the whole farm. We could see they were antsy. We went up to the gate, breached it. We caught them of guard. This one woman, she was just mean. Every time we walked Winter 2019_Esquire 1 07
through the garden, she went nuts. We noticed the garden was freshly dug. We started moving the dirt around, and we pulled up a big square riveted container. Reed: We recovered $8 million [in U. S. currency] out of a hole. Filmore: In the stable, we saw, like, four huge boxes buried. We saw some jewelry, also buried. Shofner: We came across birth certiicates, marriage licenses. We knew it was signiicant. Filmore: The soldiers’ jaws dropped, like, three miles down to the loor. So much jewelry. Then they opened the money in front of me, and I couldn’t believe it: $10,000 bundles of hundred-dollar bills in Chase Manhattan Bank wrappers. I can still see it. Hickey: We pulled in [Saddam’s wife] Sajida Talfah’s jewelry collection, literally like half a dozen garbage bags full of gems. Odierno: Everything is gold—gold jewelry, you have earrings, rings, little knives, every-
The Raid Clockwise from top right: Task Force 121 translator Samir pulling Saddam out of the spider hole; a specialoperations unit flying north of Baghdad; the Butcher of Baghdad’s incorrectly dated mug shot; Fourth Infantry Division soldiers at the prop-styled spider hole; a view down the hole.
thing you think that would be in a treasure chest, a gold-plated AK-47. Rauhut: You don’t just ind $8 million. If we had any doubts before that time on whether or not we were acting on good information, that was a conirmation.
A CHIN LIKE JOHN TRAVOLTA’S Fall 2003 Through the summer and fall, the political situation in Iraq deteriorated rapidly and a new threat to American soldiers began to appear: roadside IEDs, improvised explosive devices that in the years to come would kill and wound thousands of Americans. The intensity of combat rose signiicantly. In October, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz visited the
Fourth Infantry Division in Tikrit as part of a tour of Iraq. Meant as a sign of hope, the tour only underscored the challenge ahead: The next morning, Wolfowitz’s hotel in Baghdad was hit by a rocket attack, killing an American soldier and wounding at least ifteen others. Russell: The enemy was clearly forming. Boyd: We called it the “Traveling Roadshow.” The insurgency was in this transition from fedayeen ighters—Saddam loyalists— to the growing AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq]. They didn’t have the numbers to do a full press on the town, but guys would come in, start ighting, and the temperature would go up for a week or two until we got them or they moved on to another city. Hickey: We had to do something strategic to bring the violence down. We couldn’t win tactically. So I said, “Let’s dust of everything we know about Saddam Hussein.” We kill or
capture Saddam, that’s going to take the wind out of their sails. I couldn’t care less whether we killed or captured. Boyd: By December we knew that Saddam was exploiting some seam to stay elusive. Shofner: It was like looking for Elvis. Maddox: When we as a team decided to focus on Mohammed Ibrahim—and that’s where all our focus was—it was easy, because we didn’t give any stupid leads the time of day. The last few weeks before Saddam’s capture, it was one raid after the next to get to Mohammed Ibrahim. Hickey: On December 9, a pleasant day, I was leaving the headquarters. I was rolling out the front gates, and a little boy was walking down the access road to our front gate. He’s screaming at us. He must have been nine years old, if that. Specialist Esteban Bocanegra, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: We pulled over. When Joseph and the colonel talked to this kid, we thought the kid was throwing rocks. Filmore: The kid said there was a meeting of the fedayeen. I said, “Where?” He said, “Outside of town.” Russell: It wasn’t “I know where some guys were.” It was “I know where some guys are.” He’s pointing us to this western desert farm. Hickey: They ended up doing a raid and picked up a bunch of characters in two buildings in the desert west of Tikrit and pulled in a bunch of paraphernalia from the fedayeen. Russell: We were able to determine a few locations in Tikrit, Samarra, and Baghdad where Mohammed Ibrahim might be. To prevent the whack-a-mole, we hit them all simultaneously. Hickey: They scooped up a bunch of guys, handed them over to the interrogators. Maddox: At the time, my tour was up. I was manifested to leave the country the morning of December 13 and had returned to Baghdad. The night of December 12, after the Baghdad team conducted the raid and brought back the prisoners from one of the houses, I started interrogating the prisoner they said owned the house and quickly realized that he was the deputy of the bodyguard, Mohammed Ibrahim. He eventually said, “I know where Ibrahim is. And by the way, he was at the house last night.” I went to the other prisoners and took off their hoods, and one of them was the bodyguard—it was Mohammed Ibrahim. I knew exactly what he was supposed to look like. Ibrahim was supposed to have a chin like John Travolta’s. When I took the hood of him, it was like, bam. I even said, “You’re Mohammed Ibrahim. I’ve been waiting to meet you.” He looked at me and said, “I’ve been waiting to meet you too.” Hickey: [Maddox] recognized him because we had captured all these photographs. We shared it all with our special-operations guy.
It probably sounds unbelievable, the combination of me talking to this young boy and this guy heading out on home leave and seeing a guy’s face he recognizes from photographs captured a few months prior—it comes together. Maddox: My pitch to him was “Saddam made you get involved. He’s the reason forty of your [family members] are in jail. You take us to Saddam, and I will let all forty go.” We went back and forth. He indicated he may know, but he didn’t want to do it. My time ran out, my light was leaving the country, and I told Mohammed Ibrahim, “You are a terrorist, right? They will not let you out. They don’t think you can take us to Saddam. When I leave, your ship is gone. When you change your mind, you’re going to have to make them come talk to you. Bang on the walls of your cell. Go crazy.” Our light was leaving Baghdad at 8:00 in the morning. At 7:00 A.M., on the way to the airport, the head interrogator said, “They’re really worried. They think your prisoner is trying to kill himself. He’s banging on the walls of his cell and they can’t get him to stop.” I jumped out, went to the prison. I pulled Ibrahim into a cell and said, “Where is he?” He said, “I’m going to help you.” I said, “You’re not going to help us. You’re going to take us.”
JACKPOT December 1 3, 2003 Within hours of Ibrahim’s agreement to cooperate, Task Force 121 and the Fourth Infantry Division were ready for the inal raid of the operation. Even ifteen years later, the U. S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) considers the Special Forces’ role classiied and prohibited any operators from participating in interviews
for this story. SOCOM says it will evaluate the operation for possible declassiication in 2028. Hickey: The ield phone rang. It was John with the special-ops unit. [John is a pseudonym for a Task Force 121 team commander whose identity is still classiied.] He said, “We got Ibrahim in Baghdad last night.” I said, “No shit?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “John, you know what we’re doing tonight? We’re going after Saddam.” Rauhut: Steve tells me, “They’re coming up north with an informant. Saddam is either in Tikrit or across the river, so we’ve got to be ready.” That’s when it got real. Special Agent James Davis, deputy onscene commander, FBI Iraq Task Force: Early in the day, [Davis’s boss, FBI Special Agent Ed Worthington] called and said, “I can’t tell you anything. But round up a ingerprint expert, stat.” It was pretty clear to me what he was saying. Reed: Colonel Hickey called me and said, “We caught the source who we were looking for, and he’s being brought up to Tikrit. I want you to link up with the task-force guys.” Samir, translator, Task Force 121: They brought Ibrahim to us. Around 1:00 P.M., he showed us on a map where Saddam was supposed to be. Reed: The questioning took place in a living room. Ibrahim was obviously frightened, having been caught, but the conversation proceeded easily. He was very willing to help. Hickey: Just before 5:00 P.M., John said he thought Saddam was somewhere down in Ad-Dawr. I said, “That’s it.” Ad-Dawr had gotten very violent in October. It’s on the east side of the river, halfway between Tikrit and Samarra. We pulled out some aerial photographs. John said, “Ibrahim said something about ‘down by the river, by the junkyard.’ ” I knew exactly where that was: in the northwest part of town, next to the Qais family property. We’d had
Winter 2019_Esquire 1 09
some shoot-outs there a few months prior. Russell: Brian Reed, John, Colonel Hickey, and an operational planner hammered out the mechanics of the raid. Reed: On a piece of butcher paper, we drew a sketch of how we were going to do this thing. Then we transmitted those orders over the radio. Russell: We’d narrowed the location down to a couple farms. All of these locations were to be simultaneously hit. Hickey: We did it all with verbal orders, which is pretty rare. Russell: Between the team going in on the raid, the overwatch, the security cordon, the armored vehicles, and the helicopters, roughly a thousand soldiers were involved. Samir: We decided to take Ibrahim there in a civilian van. Me, him, and a team of Delta 121 forces drove through Tikrit and out to Ad-Dawr. At the start of the main road that led to the farm, a quarter mile away, Ibrahim
kitchen next to where date palms and an orange grove came together, right on the edge of a fallow sunlower ield. It was completely blacked out to the naked eye, but we had our night-vision equipment. Russell: Operators coming in on the Little Birds [helicopters] encountered two men, Qais Namaq and his brother, leeing through the orchard. I believe they hid Saddam, stashed their AKs, and took of, trying to divert the forces away from the location. Hickey: John said to Des, “Looks like a dry hole.” Samir: When we got to the farm, we captured two guys guarding Saddam. We couldn’t get any information from them, so we decided to come back with Mohammed Ibrahim. Russell: They got Ibrahim out of the back of a Hummer. He was nervous; he didn’t want to be seen there. Maddox: Ibrahim started yelling at the farm-
said, “If you keep going, they’re going to know somebody’s here.” Hickey: At precisely 1930 hours, we rolled out. We were completely blacked out. The artillerymen were in the shadows. You could see their silhouettes as they sealed up the road behind us. Sergeant Major Larry Wilson, Twentysecond Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division: From Ibrahim, they got three targets: two primary targets, Wolverine One and Wolverine Two, and an alternate target, an old farmhouse. Once [the team raided] Wolverine One, dry hole—dry hole means no one’s there—Wolverine Two hit dry hole, and they were thinking, Wow, man. We missed him. Hickey: It was just negative contact, negative contact. I’m thinking, Damn. Wilson: Then they hit the farmhouse. Hickey: John and [Captain Desmond] Bailey went down to the river line. Des set up a cordon. John and his guys cleared out the palm groves. There was a little lean-to with a
house owner, Qais Namaq, “Show him where Saddam is!” Qais said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Russell: They were pressuring him. “Where’s he at?” [Ibrahim] motioned with his foot toward a foot mat. “He’s here.” Now everyone was concerned. How deep was the hole? How many people were down there? They brushed away the dirt and uncovered the top to something. John radioed to Colonel Hickey and [Delta Force squadron commander] Bill Coultrup, “We may have something.” It was 8:25 P.M. They pulled open the top and hit it with the weapon’s lights. Samir: When we opened the hole, he started yelling, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” I was yelling at him—because I was the only translator—to come out. Finally, he put one hand up, then the other. I grabbed both hands and got help to pull him out. Hickey: It was Saddam. Samir: I knew from his voice that it was him. I was raised in Iraq. We saw Saddam on television almost every day. I couldn’t recognize
110 W i nt e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
his face because he looked so diferent—he had a lot of hair on his face—but the voice, it was him. Russell: The guy inside said, “I am Saddam Hussein, I am the president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate.” One of the soldiers said, “President Bush sends regards.” Wilson: The hole [where Saddam was hiding] reminded me of a ighting position. It was about two M-16’s long. You could sit two people inside. There was a ventilation fan and a luorescent light. He could’ve stayed there for a long time. Samir: To end up to be the one who grabbed him irst—I didn’t think too much about it. I wanted to get that son of a bitch out because he put me, my parents, and my country through hell. Filmore: Samir started slapping him. The Special Forces took Saddam away and said, “You are not allowed to touch him. We need him alive.” Hickey: Over the radio, John said, “Jackpot.” Bill Coultrup, his squadron commander, was right next to me. We hugged one another. Bocanegra: We heard “Jackpot—Ace of Spades.” We were like, “No shit!” It was surreal. This was Saddam—where was his personal guard? No shots were ired. It was the opposite of what we’d expected. Wilson: We heard “Jackpot.” It was said eight octaves higher than usual. Normally the Delta guys didn’t get excited, but this was a big deal. Samir: We put him in a helicopter and lew him back to the Special Forces compound. Bocanegra: We were pulling up as that helicopter was coming in blacked out, and you could see shadows and silhouettes. It was like, “Shit, there he goes.” They just took of. Reed: We then did what’s called a tactical site exploitation. Bocanegra: The sergeant major came back [to my vehicle] carrying a footlocker and told me to open it. It is $750,000 of American money in hundred-dollar bills. Hickey: We were efectively done at 2030. It was a very early night. Reed: It was textbook. Odierno: This guy brutalized an entire population for at least two decades, and he ended up where he should have been—being pulled out of a hole in the middle of nowhere.
SADDAM LIES DOWN December 14, 2003 Hickey: Suice it to say, nobody in Baghdad ever expected us to do this. They were caught unawares. There was a lot of scrambling going on. Odierno: Nobody (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 2 0)
tions used to justify the war were shaky at best. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. While the invasion itself was fast and successful, governing and rebuilding Iraq has been a near-impossible task for the U. S., which finds itself still struggling fifteen years later. And few of the Bush administration’s pre-war arguments have been proved true by history. —Eric Sullivan
August 26,
September 28,
2002
2002
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” —DICK CHENEY, vicepresident of the United States, from an address to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars
November 14,
December
2002
sesses biological rebuilding the and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the order is given.” —GEORGE W. BUSH, president of the United States, from his weekly radio address
use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” —DONALD RUMSFELD,
secretary of defense, from an interview with Infinity CBS Radio
February 10,
2003 April 2,
2003 “Let’s not lose sight of the cause of this current problem in this current conflict. It is Saddam Hussein. . . . The sooner he is removed and this regime is put into “Iraq has in the past provided training in the trash can of history, document forgery and bomb-making to Al Qaeda. It also the better off the provided training in poisons and gases to two Al Qaeda Iraqi people will be.” associates; one of these associates characterized the —COLIN POWELL, relationship he forged with Iraqi oicials as successful.” secretary of state, from —G EO RG E T E N E T, an interview on director of the Central Intelligence Agency, from a stateTurkish television ment to the Senate Committee on Intelligence
clear than anything we could have foreseen prior to September 11th. And history will judge harshly any leader or nation that saw this dark cloud and sat by in complacency or indecision.” —CONDOLEEZZA RICE, national security advisor, from an article published in U. S. Foreign Policy Agenda
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118 W i nt e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
(co n t in u ed f r o m p age 81 )
.. mise and foreboding were all that awaited.” It is the writing of a man desperate to escape profound pain. So when I see him, I ask: Have you ever attempted to take your life? “No, no, no.” But have you ever contemplated suicide? “I once felt bad enough to say, ‘I don’t know if I can live like this.’ It was like . . .” He pauses for a moment. Then: “I once got into some sort of box where I couldn’t igure my way out and where the feelings were so overwhelmingly uncomfortable.” Was that during your irst breakdown? “No. This was the ‘agitated depression’ I talk about in the book, where feelings became so overwhelmingly uncomfortable that I simply couldn’t ind a twelve-by-twelve piece of the loor to stand on, where I could feel a sense of peace on.” As he tells me this, he brings his hands up to either side of his face, framing it like blinders on a horse, as though trying to conjure that small square of safe space. Trying to see it. Then he says, all the while still holding his blinder hands to the sides of his head: “I had no inner peace whatsoever. And I said, ‘Gee, I really don’t know. I don’t know how long I could . . .’ It was a manic state, and it was just so profoundly emotionally and spiritually and physically uncomfortable that the only thing I’ve ever said was ‘Gee, I don’t know, man . . .’ It gave me a little insight into . . .” Springsteen’s voice trails of and he slowly lets his hands fall into his lap. For a moment, neither one of us says anything. Then I break the silence and ask: Did you think you should be hospitalized? “No one was saying that I should be . . .” Springsteen gives me a wry smile. “I had a couple very good doctors. But, unfortunately, it was August. That’s when they all take of.” Springsteen lets out one of his short, raspy laughs. “All I remember was feeling really badly and calling for help. I might have gotten close to that and for brief, brief periods of time. It lasted for—I don’t know. Looking back on it now, I can’t say. Was it a couple weeks? Was it a month? Was it longer? But it was a very bad spell, and it just came. . . . Once again—DNA. And it came out of the roots
that I came out of, particularly on my father’s side, where I had to cop to the fact that I also had things inside me that could lead me to pretty bad places.” And when you see someone like Anthony Bourdain, can you understand how that happens? “Well, I had a very, very close friend who committed suicide. He was like an older son to me. I mentored him. And he got very, very ill. So, ultimately, it always remains a mystery—those last moments. I always say, Well, somebody was in a bad place, and they just got caught out in the rain. Another night, another way, someone else there . . . it might not have happened.” He pauses. “They were ill, and they got caught out in the rain. . . . I don’t know anyone who’s ever explained satisfactorily the moments that lead up to someone taking that action. So can I understand how that happens? Yes. I think I felt just enough despair myself to—pain gets too great, confusion gets too great, and that’s your out. But I don’t have any great insight into it, and in truth, I’ve never met someone who has.” Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self? “You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I ind myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!” I tell him I want to pause for a moment, because some people might say, “What are you talking about? You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?” “Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.” I ask if he has spent his life trying to love that boy his father denied.
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“Those were big moments that I had through my analysis. I saw myself as a child and experienced my own innocence and realized, Oh my God, I was so fragile. I was so easily broken and dismissed. My father taught me to hate that person. So it took me quite a while to come back around and make my peace with who I was. That was a lot of what I was doing through my playing—trying to come to a place where I could just stand myself. [Laughs] It was just developing a self that allowed me to live with myself in a way that a lot of the self-loathing didn’t allow. That’s just a part of my DNA. I do a lot better with it now, but it’s an ongoing struggle. “I was well into my forties before I figured this out. I don’t know how to describe [that breakthrough] except you think you’re seeing all of yourself, and then it’s like a finger pokes at this boundary in front of you and suddenly a little brick drops out, and you look through [the wall], and you go, Oh my God—there’s this entire other world in there that I’ve never seen. And a lot of it, you’ve sort of been living in—I don’t know how to describe it—a cruel universe, and it’s just a little ray of light that allows you to see more of your experience and existence. [Pauses] I mean, what are you doing in analysis? You’re trying to take all this misunderstanding and loathing, and you’re trying to turn it into love—which is the wonderful thing that happens when you’re trying to make music out of the rough, hard, bad things. You’re trying to turn it into love. So along with that effort came the realization, through a lot of studying and analysis, of how rough I’d been on myself and had continued to be until a very late stage in life.” I tell him I’m thinking about his lines in “The Promised Land”—“Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode . . . take a knife and cut this pain from my heart. . .”—and how for years I thought the song was about the heartbreak of losing a woman. “It’s about existential weakness and trying to the best of your ability to transcend it.” And the line “the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted”? “Everybody carries those things with them. It’s a line that always penetrates. It still penetrates for me when I sing it each night.” I tell him: You’re making me see that “The Ties That Bind” is not a love story but about the DNA family ties you can’t escape. “The bonds of your personal family,” he says, “but also the ties you can’t break among your community and your fellow citizens. You can’t forsake those things. It’ll rot your core at the end of the day. If you want to see someone who’s—look at Trump. He has forsaken a lot of these things, and it’s affected him. He’s deeply damaged at his core.” Because he forsook the ties, the bonds? “Absolutely. That’s why he’s dangerous. 120 W i nt e r 2 01 9_ E sq u ire
Anyone in that position who doesn’t deeply feel those ties that bind is a dangerous man, and it’s very pitiful.”
“LOOKING FOR ELVIS” (c ont i nu e d from p a ge 1 1 0)
And then
can live with the sadness / all the madness in my soul.”
it does.” Sadness, love, madness, soul. I tell him: Those are your four elements. “The last verse of my greatest song. And that’s where it ought to end every night.” Springsteen pauses. “Twenty-four when I wrote it. Wow. It’s a . . . holds up pretty well. But I . . . that was what I was aiming for in those days—that’s what I was shooting for.” I tell Springsteen that before I leave, I have one last question. In the book, he talks about how, when he was nineteen, he and his buddies loaded up a truck with all their worldly possessions and kissed Freehold goodbye. Yet a few years later, we learn that Springsteen, while dating a woman with a young daughter, has given the girl the rocking horse he loved as a boy. “Ah,” Springsteen says, a look of happiness rising up in his eyes, “my rocking horse.” Right, I say. But here’s the image I can’t square—you are a nineteen-year-old badass, ditching your hometown with your buddies. Lying on the back of a flatbed truck with a guitar and a duffel bag. And you’re telling me you have your rocking horse with you? Springsteen looks at me like I’m crazy. “Well, it was the only thing I had left from my childhood.” He goes on to tell me that years after giving the girl the rocking horse, he tracked down her mother and asked her to return it. The woman, however, had given it away. He pauses. I ask him if he has carried anything else with him from his childhood, and he tells me how when he was growing up, there was a merrygo-round on the Asbury Park boardwalk that he rode as a kid. “It had an arm and on the end of it, there was a gold ring. If you caught it, you got a free ride. I used to go nuts because I could never reach these rings. I rode it a thousand times. But then one night before I was about to put my first record out— I can remember the night . . . I got on the merry-go-round and bing! I grabbed the gold one.” Where is it now? I ask. “I keep it in my writing room, at home. And the rest is history.”
Davis: No one thought we’d capture him alive. Card: Paul Bremer called Condi [Rice]— she was the irst to know. George Tenet called me. It was a nighttime call, late, probably 10:00 or 11:00 P.M. I was dubious at irst. We were all excited, but we needed to make sure it was right. The president was cautious. He wanted to make sure we were 100 percent, that Saddam was identiied. He said, “I don’t want anyone pounding their chest before we’re sure.” I remember the skepticism. “Do we really know it’s right? Are people too excited about this?” Rauhut: Colonel Hickey had a conversation with [the commander of U. S. forces in Iraq] Lieutenant General [Ricardo] Sanchez. Jim said, “What’s next?” You know, the same thing we all were wondering: How do we leverage this? It became very clear, very quickly, that strategically, we didn’t plan for the capture of Saddam. Dr. Mark Green, flight surgeon, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment: Saddam made a circuitous route back [to the Special Forces compound]. I’d already come back from the mission and had cleaned up my gear, so I thought, I’d better go over there and get a glimpse of this guy. I was standing outside his cell, and tons of people, all of these dignitaries, were coming and going. They were getting their picture taken with him. Davis: We did a fingerprint, a DNA swab, and a photograph. Physically, he was in bad shape. Green: Around midnight, I was still standing outside Hussein’s cell. [Special Forces Commander William] McRaven came out and said, “I want a physician with this guy overnight. Mark, will you stay with him?” I said, “Hell, yeah.” I grabbed an issue of Stars and Stripes. I thought I would read while Saddam was sleeping. But he couldn’t sleep. He motioned for me to take his blood pressure. When you’re taking somebody’s blood pressure, you’re in their face and they’re in yours. He said to me through an interpreter, “I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, but politics had too great a hold of
my heart.” This image of the Butcher of Baghdad taking the Hippocratic Oath—“Do no harm”—started a conversation that lasted ive and a half hours. He was charming, a bit aloof. Obviously, I did not want to foul any of the ongoing investigations, so I didn’t ask questions about WMDs. My questions evolved from his political career—Why did you invade Kuwait? Why did you start the Iran–Iraq war?—to getting very personal. In the middle of our conversation, he asked which direction Mecca was; he turned and prayed, but he never kneeled. It was now morning. The commander walked back in and asked what was going on. I said, “We’re just chatting.” He said, “We’ve got to get this on tape,” and I’m like, “Cool.” They get a camera. This little red dot comes on. Saddam lies down, pulls the covers over his head, doesn’t say another word. End of interview. At a press conference on December 14, Bremer announced to the world the successful outcome of what the military had dubbed Operation Red Dawn, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.” He added, “Now is the time for all Iraqis, Arabs, and Kurds, Sunnis, Shia, Christians, and Turkmen to build a prosperous, democratic Iraq at peace with itself and with its neighbors.” Bremer: There was an important political message to deliver. People in the audience were in tears, were shouting. It was quite a scene. Before I went out, a British spokesperson, Dan Senor’s British counterpart, introduced me to the idea of “We got him.” He was an Arabic speaker and knew that phrase worked in Arabic too.
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Reed: I did not know what we’d named the operation until I was getting ready to watch the announcement. I asked my planner, “What did we name this thing?” This was before we had conventional naming systems, so we were basically naming stuf whatever we wanted to name it. He said, “Red Dawn.” I asked if it was named after the movie. He said, “Nah, I’ve never seen it, sir.” “Why would you name it Red Dawn?” “Because I’ve been watching the sunrise over the Tigris every morning, and it’s this really cool red dawn.”
NOT OUR BEST MOMENT 2003–present Reed: At the time, I thought the war was over. I felt like we were starting to see the end of things. Lieutenant Jason Lojka, second platoon leader, First Battalion, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: The feeling was “We got him. Now we can go home.” After the euphoria of the capture wore of, I realized that was a very naive approach. We were not going home earlier than projected. Card: It was closure to Saddam’s role, but it wasn’t closure to the challenges in Iraq. Green: Saddam was probably thinking, I’m going to ride out the rest of my life in a nice American jail. Bremer: One of the military plans had been to remove Saddam to a ship in the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, in the Persian Gulf. I said, “Absolutely not. He belongs to the Iraqis.” It was very important that we allow the Iraqi people to put him on trial.
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Spot On: Winter Odierno: When I left in April 2004, I felt like we were heading in the right direction. But it’s like everything else with Iraq—we totally misunderstood what was going on. The sectarian war started to break out below the surface, and that regenerated the insurgency. Our failure to understand that, I think, was our biggest mistake. On June 30, 2004, Saddam Hussein and eleven senior Iraqi Baathist leaders were handed over to Iraqi authorities as part of the transfer of control from the U.S. to the country’s interim government. In November 2006, an Iraqi court found Saddam guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was executed on New Year’s Eve. Video of his Shia captors celebrating around him as he awaited execution sparked fresh controversy in Iraq. Odierno: His death, the way it was done, was not our best moment. The celebrations on the Shia side just refueled the Sunni–Shia conlict. The saddest thing for me was in 2010, when I was getting ready to leave Iraq for the last time. Violence was way down; we’d just had a very successful national election. I thought maybe
A MAN IN FULL BLOOM (co nti nued from page 89)
crowning achievement (and in the eyes of some snobs, his most unforgivable sin) came during his previous stint, at Louis Vuitton, where he engineered a collaboration between the French fashion house and the streetwear juggernaut Supreme. Kanye has bum-rushed my appointment time, and an hour later, when I am inally ushered upstairs, Jones is a bit embarrassed. “I’m sorry about the delay,” he says. “I couldn’t say no to Kanye. He and Virgil used to sleep on my couch back when they were wanting to learn about fashion. I hope you understand.” As I stand with Jones the day before his debut show, it’s clear that he has already yanked Dior in a bold new direction. Up to now, it had always been an unsurprising cou122 W i nt e r 2 01 9_E sq u ire
By Seth Fleishman
we were coming very close to the end of this. But again, we miscalculated on understanding the dynamics. It went back to sectarian ways. ISIS grew out of the fact that the Sunnis had nowhere to turn. Rauhut: Fifteen years later, what have we learned as a nation? This threat is not going away. The world will always have tyrants. We cannot aford to invade every country that’s got a tyrant, overthrow him, hunt the guy down, and come up with another plan. I’m still hopeful for Iraq, but it’s looking pretty messy.
This past February, two months after its declaration of victory over ISIS, the Iraqi government announced that the U.S. would draw down some of its remaining troops. Approximately 5,200 American troops remain. On August 19, a spokesperson for the U.S. forces in Iraq said, “We’ll keep troops there as long as we think they’re needed.” The next day, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Taylor Galvin, thirty-four, of Spokane, Washington, was killed in a helicopter crash near Sinjar, the 4,555th U.S. military casualty of the Iraq war. Galvin was on his ninth deployment.
ture house, known in men’s wear for pretty much one thing: razor-edged black suits, best worn by young actors on red carpets. With Jones, the black has been banished, as has the skintight it. Everywhere I look in the atelier, there are suits in soft pastels and softer silhouettes. “I want Dior to look elegant, fresh,” Jones tells me as he pulls me over to a poster board bearing reference shots of the models who will walk in the show the next day, each wearing one of the forty-nine looks. “And I want the collection to be light and easy. Because the way men dress right now is interesting to me.” And what exactly does interesting mean? “Men today want to feel good, in clothes that inspire conidence. At diferent times you feel like diferent things—why not mix it up?” He pauses for a moment and adjusts some of the photographs on the board before us. “Just today I’ve changed four times because I get hot, then I get cold. I want to make things that make men’s lives easier.” Maybe the coolest thing Jones is doing is reminding us how rebellious and beautiful the suit can be, especially in his hands. In this era of streetwear-athleisure dominance he helped create, the thirty-nine-year-old designer shows us that tailoring can be daring too. Not a moody, blend-into-the-black suit but one that embraces color, one that is cut for comfort.
“It’s time for a completely different approach,” Jones says. “Guys want to dress up right now, but they want it to feel easy. Dior has that legacy of couture, and I thought the tailoring was essential. But it’s relaxed. This is elevated but efortless.” If anyone can deconstruct the Dior suit, it’s Jones, who has never been one to stand on ceremony. As a London teenager, he fell in love with fashion by way of music and magazines, making T-shirts for his friends to wear when they went out. “In college, we would swap things and then I started making and selling them,” he says. “It all happened so fast.” He went to Central Saint Martins college (a sort of Juilliard of the fashion world), where he caught the attention of John Galliano. He launched his own label and ran it for ive years. Next, he took the top job at Dunhill in 2008, then he took over Vuitton, and now . . . Even though it is less than a day before his collection debuts, Jones is calm. “I focus on the work,” he says, as we look at a tray of accessories. “And trust my instinct.” At this point, an assistant interrupts. “We need you for a itting.” Jones apologizes for cutting the time short. “So much to do. But it will all get done.” The next day, he unveils his irst collection for Dior, and the reviews are near unanimous. He’s done it, all right. And he’s only just getting started.
CREDITS STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. The Code, p. 35: Bottega Veneta coat and sweater, 800-845-6790. Officine Générale trousers, mrporter.com. P. 36: Brunello Cucinelli jacket, brunellocucinelli.com. Michael Kors sweater, michaelkors.com. CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC tote bag, calvinklein.com. Versace scarf, versace.com. Exemplaire hat, exemplaire.com. P. 42: Gucci jacket, gucci.com. JW Anderson sweatshirt, ssense.com. Polo Ralph Lauren trousers, ralphlauren.com. P. 44: Gucci sneakers, gucci.com. P. 45: Canali jacket, canali.com. Missoni vest, missoni.com. Brunello Cucinelli shirt, brunellocucinelli.com. Bottega Veneta trousers and loafers, 800-845-6790. P. 47: Grand Seiko watch, grand-seiko.com. Emporio Armani jacket, armani.com. The Armoury shirt, thearmoury .com. Selim Mouzannar tsavorite ring and diamond ring, selimmouzannar.com. Selim Mouzannar emerald ring, newyork.doverstreetmarket.com. A Man in Full Bloom, pp. 90–91: Dior Men clothing, 800-929-DIOR. Break Out, p. 96: Bottega Veneta jacket, shirt, and trousers, 800-845-6790. Louis Vuitton belt, louis vuitton.com. P. 97: Loewe jacket, loewe.com. JW Anderson sweater, ssense.com. P. 99: AMI Alexandre Mattiussi coat, amiparis.com. Prada turtleneck, prada.com. Boss trousers, hugoboss.com. New Balance x Stüssy sneakers, newbalance.com. P. 100: Louis Vuitton sweater, louisvuitton.com. Givenchy trousers and boots, 212-650-0180. P. 101: Dolce & Gabbana vest, trousers, and shirt, dolcegabbana .it. Rado watch, store.us.rado.com. P. 102: Dolce & Gabbana coat, dolcegabbana.it. Giorgio Armani jacket, trousers, and shoes, armani.com. Worstok T-shirt, fourtwofouronfairfax.com. J. M. Dickens London socks, britishapparel.com. P. 103: CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC coat, trousers, and boots, calvinklein.com. Dark Matter, p. 112: Ermenegildo Zegna Couture boots, zegna.com. P. 113: Hermès belt, hermes .com. P. 114: Louis Vuitton suitcase, louisvuitton .com. P. 115: Breitling watch, breitling.com. P. 116: Valentino x Moncler jacket, valentino.com. P. 117: Prada hat, prada.com. Photographs & Illustrations This Way In, p. 7: Hand and watch: Studio D/Kevin Sweeney; p. 10: Springsteen: Walter McBride/ WireImage. Editor’s Letter, p. 17: Carrey: Leon Bennett/FilmMagic; Kelly: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/ AFP/Getty Images; Williams: DON EMMERT/AFP/ Getty Images; Jobs: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Kardashian: Phillip Faraone/WireImage; Stankey: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images; Koons: Axelle/ Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic. The Big Bite, p. 20: Black Panther: Chadwick Boseman, 2018. ©Marvel/©Walt
Disney Studios Motion Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection; Mr. Rogers: Fotos International/courtesy Getty Images; BlacKkKlansman: Laura Harrier, John David Washington, 2018. David Lee/©Focus Features/courtesy Everett Collection; A Quiet Place: Courtesy Paramount Pictures; Crazy Rich Asians: Courtesy Warner Bros.; Vice: Courtesy Moxie Pictures; Avengers: Infinity War: Collection Christophel/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 22: A Simple Favor: Courtesy Lionsgate Publicity; Eighth Grade: Alamy Stock Photo; Creed II: Everett Collection; The Death of Stalin: Courtesy IFC; Roma: Courtesy Netflix; p. 24: American Dharma stills: Nafis Azad; p. 26: Vault House, Oxnard, California: Eric Staudenmaier; Menil Drawing Institute: Courtesy Menil Drawing Institute/ Richard Barnes; p. 28: Fraternity image, leis, cups, cans, sunglasses: Getty Images; Snail Mail: Courtesy Matador Records; Mitski: Courtesy Dead Oceans; Cardi B: Courtesy Atlantic Records; Noname: Courtesy PR; Pusha-T: Courtesy Genesis; p. 30: Cocktail: Noah Fecks. The Code, pp. 35–42: Grooming by Losi/Honey Artists; tailoring by Joseph Ting; p. 44: Prop styling by JoJo Li/Hello Artists; p. 45: Grooming by Losi/Honey Artists; tailoring by Joseph Ting; p. 47: Prop styling by JoJo Li/Hello Artists; p. 48: Touitou: Geof Pugh; p. 52: Prop styling by JoJo Li/Hello Artists; p. 54: Sunbathing: Paul Almasy/ Corbis/VCG via Getty Images; Pharrell: Mark Sagliocco/WireImage; Leto: David Wolf-Patrick/ Redferns; Cruise: Alamy; Wong: Laura Cavanaugh/ FilmMagic. The Best New Restaurants in America, 2018, p. 62: Cakes and salmon roe: Jenn Duncan; Hai Hai: Matt Lien; p. 64: Paredes: Brian Caron; p. 66: Restaurant exterior: Marvin Shaouni; p. 68: Voyager: Zara Creative; pizza: Krescent Carasso; p. 70: Paella: Scott Suchman/Washingtonian. Songs of Himself, p. 76: Wedding photo: Springsteen’s personal collection; guitar: Alexi Lubomirski; parents dining: Springsteen’s personal collection; p. 77: Springsteen and friends: Billy Smith Collection; Springsteen: Springsteen’s personal collection. Dubious Achievements 2018, p. 84: Trump: YouTube; Kavanaugh, from left: Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images, Matt McClain-Pool/ Getty Images, Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images; p. 85: Horse and peacock: Getty Images; Avenatti: Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Superman: Henry Cavill as Superman, 2016./©Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection; pills: Police Osnabrück/Germany; McCartney: WENN/Alamy; p. 86: Goldblum statue, Trump and Melania: Associated Press; Mayochup: Courtesy Heinz; lawn mower: Getty Images; Warren: Mark Wilson/Getty Images; hands, clockwise from top left: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images, Associated Press, MANDEL NGAN/ AFP/Getty Images. A Man in Full Bloom, p. 89: Adrien Dirand/courtesy Dior; pp. 90–91: Grooming by Losi/Honey Artists; tailoring by Joseph Ting. The Rapture Will Be Televised, p. 93: Tatum Mangus/ courtesy Annapurna Pictures; p. 95: Clockwise from top left: Courtesy Barry Jenkins, Tatum Mangus/ courtesy Annapurna Pictures, courtesy David Bornfriend. “Looking for Elvis,” p. 104: Saddam, 1983: François Lochon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; p. 105: Mural: James Hill/Contact Press Images; p. 107:
Bremer: João Silva/The New York Times/Redux; ace of spades: Mark Stewart/Camera Press/Redux; Saddam, 1980: Associated Press; tank: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy; statue: Gilles Bassignac/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; Bush: Stephen Jafe/AFP/Getty Images; rifles: Clif Owen/Associated Press; p. 108: Spider hole: Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images; Saddam on ground: DOD/Planet Pix via ZUMA Wire; helicopter: Courtesy Mark Green, M.D.; Saddam mug shot: FBI; Task Force 1-22 Infantry: Courtesy Steve Russell; p. 111: Cheney: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press/REX/Shutterstock; Bush: George Bridges/Charlotte Observer/MCT/Sipa USA; Rumsfeld: Dennis Cook/Associated Press; Rice: Charlie Archambault/Polaris Images; Tenet: Charles Ommanney/Contact Press Images; Powell: Ray Stubblebine/Reuters. (ISSN 0194-9535) is published monthly (except combined issues in December/ January and June/July/August and when future combined issues are published that count as two issues as indicated on the issue’s cover), 9 times a year, by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019 USA. Steven R. Swartz, President and Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice-Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David Carey, Chairman; Troy Young, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice-President, Finance. © 2018 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Esquire, Man at His Best, Dubious Achievement Awards, The Sound and the Fury, and are registered trademarks of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at N.Y., N.Y., and additional entry post offices. Canada Post International Publications mail product (Canadian distribution) sales agreement no. 40012499. Editorial and Advertising Offices: 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019-3797. Send returns (Canada) to Bleuchip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, Ontario N6C 6B2. Subscription prices: United States and possessions, $7.97 a year; Canada and all other countries, $19.97 a year. Subscription services: Esquire will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order, undertake fulfillment of that order so as to provide the first copy for delivery by the Postal Service or alternate carrier within four to six weeks. From time to time, we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings via postal mail, please send your current mailing label or an exact copy to Mail Preference Service, P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. You can also visit preferences.hearst mags.com to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing ofers by e-mail. For customer service, changes of address, and subscription orders, log on to service.mag.com or write to Customer Service Department, Esquire, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Esquire is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or art. None will be returned unless accompanied by return postage and envelope. Canada BN NBR 10231 0943 RT. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Esquire, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Printed in the USA. Winter 2019_Esquire 1 23
This Way Out
IT’S TIME TO START TALKING Ready, set, stop. By Lars Kenseth
Right now, around every dinner table in America, there’s a conversation happening. It may not be easy—it may even be hard—but it’s a discussion that is long overdue. We can’t fear it. We can’t put it of anymore. The time has come to put all our cards on the table and just have it out. It’s time to start talking. I want to begin by saying I never saw this coming. After decades of staunch opposition and years more of crippling inaction, all seemed hopeless. But now, inally, we’re making inroads. People actually seem open to having this much-needed dialogue. So let’s not beat around the bush any longer. Let’s confront these issues head-on and make some real progress for once! Let’s not be coy—this evil that has taken 124 W i nt e r 2 01 9_E sq u ire
root has a name. And the only way to strip it of its power is to name it. Just stand up, point your inger, and call out that evil for all to hear! Obviously, we all know its name, so I’ll skip that part. Believe it or not, there are some people who think they can stall the conversation by sounding sympathetic without actually saying anything of substance. How dare they! Do they seriously think that they can ignore the clarion call of history? Do they earnestly believe that people won’t be able to discern who was on the right side of the issues and who just hung out on the sidelines playing on their phone? Well, I say, dammit! Why does Words with Friends keep telling me I have a game with Apple Bill? Who is Apple Bill??? At the end of the day, this is how I see it—
and I’m not the only one who feels this way— because, if you want to get technical, we are all part of this. And when I say this, I want to be clear: All you have to do is look at the numbers. You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. That’s just math. And when you add it all up, the message is clear. And that message is so resounding, I don’t even have to spell it out for you. The writing is on the wall, the die has been cast, the cake has been baked, and the future will not be televised. And if it is televised, you won’t be able to DVR it. It’s for the historians to DVR. And when they do, our grandchildren will be glad that we did the hard work. That we started talking and restarted talking so much that we could give them a world where no one wanted to talk anymore.
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