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D E C E M B E R 2 0 17 No. 6 8 8

F E AT U R E S

A TAP ON THE BACK B y B ET H A N Y M C L E A N

Showbiz icon Jennifer Lopez and ex–Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez face all the challenges of any power couple, and then some. Their secret is the vulnerability they’re willing to share. Photographs by Mario Testino.

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MADE IN THE U.S.D.A. B y M I C H A E L L EW I S

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BIG LITTLE TRUTH

Spotlight on Hong Chau, starring with Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. By Krista Smith. Photograph by Erik Madigan Heck.

JOE, MOURNING B y DAV I D KA M P

After losing his son to cancer, Joe Biden decided not to seek the White House in 2016. As his book about that heartbreaking time is published, the former vice president charts the challenges, both personal and political, that he has been facing. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

ON THE COVER Clockwise from above: Vanessa Kirby (page 59); John Grisham (page 156); Kurdish soldier Ako Abdulrahman (page 128).

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Jennifer Lopez wears a gown by Ralph Lauren Collection; jewelry by Harry Winston. Alex Rodriguez wears clothing by Tom Ford; bow tie by Budd Shirtmakers; watch by Rolex; studs and cuff links from Beladora. Hair products by Oribe. Makeup products by Dior. Nail enamel by Chanel. Grooming products by Dior Homme. Hair by Oribe. Hair color by Anthony Palermo (Lopez). Makeup and grooming by Stéphane Marais. Manicure by Tom Bachik. Set design by Peter Klein. Produced on location by GE Projects. Styled by Jessica Diehl. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Mario Testino in Malibu. For details, go to VF.com/credits.

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KI RBY PHOTO GR A PH ED BY COL I E NA RE NT ME E STE R ; D RE SS BY O SC A R DE L A RE NTA ; J E WE L RY BY T IFFANY & CO . A BD ULR A HM A N PHOTOGR A PHE D BY C EN GI Z YA R . I L L USTR ATI O N BY R IS KO . F O R D ETA I L S, GO TO VF.CO M/C REDI TS

Inspecting meat, protecting rural communities, fighting wildfires and hunger: the Department of Agriculture’s programs are essential—and in jeopardy. But few Americans realize how much they owe the U.S.D.A. The White House either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. Photographs by Tom Fowlks.

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PERFORMANCE ARTIST B y M A R K ROZ Z O

The Toulouse-Lautrec of contemporary New York, James McMullan has captured the city’s cultural pulse with his inimitable posters for the Lincoln Center Theater. After three decades, the artist still treats his daunting mandate as if he were just starting out. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

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IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTIE

Spotlight on Ordeal by Innocence, starring Bill Nighy, a BBC/Amazon adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Christmas whodunit. By Tamasin Day-Lewis. Photograph by James Fisher.

AKO’S RIDE

B y J E F F R EY E . ST E R N

When ISIS invaded Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, last year, Kurdish soldier Ako Abdulrahman got behind the wheel of his pride and joy—a used bulletproof BMW—and drove straight into local legend. Photographs by Cengiz Yar.

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TO THE MANNERS BORN B y JA M E S R E G I NATO

For sisters-about-town Lady Violet, Lady Alice, and Lady Eliza Manners, London means being tabloid targets and Instagram regulars. Yet at their family home of Belvoir Castle, rebellion and tradition go hand in hand. Photographs by Jonathan Becker. Clockwise from above: James McMullan’s poster for 1987’s Anything Goes (page 120); Donald Trump as the anti–Hugh Hefner (page 82); the U.S. Department of Agriculture (page 104).

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VA N I T I E S

CROWNED KIRBY

My Stuff: Hugh Jackman. My Place: David Linley, the second Earl of Snowdon. Cocktail attire to be the life of the party. Beauty: this season’s stylish scents.

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PH OTO I L L USTR ATI O N BY DA R ROW ( TR UMP ) . PHOTO GRA P H © L A NCE CHE UN G/P L A NE T P I X/ ZUM A WI RE ( DE PA RTM EN T O F AGR I CULTU RE ) . PO STE R CO U RTE SY OF LI N CO L N CE NT ER THE AT E R

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FA N FA I R & FA I R G R O U N D

31 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF THE CULTURE

The return of Search Party, TBS’s bewitching noir sitcom. According to Keegan-Michael Key. Hot Type. Hot Tracks: pop prodigy Khalid; plus vocal powerhouse Alice Smith.

AROUND THE WORLD, ONE PARTY AT A TIME

Britain’s brightest actors and directors show support for the British Film Institute’s National Archive at the Luminous gala. In Beverly Hills, V.F.’s fourth annual New Establishment Summit kicked off with a starry soirée. COLUMNS

THE HEFNER DELUSION B y JA M E S WO L C OT T

Some argue that the late Hugh Hefner helped put another hedonistic mogul in the White House. But while the Playboy founder lived for pleasure, Trump’s turn-on is pain. Photo illustration by Darrow.

Clockwise from above: Jeff Goldblum (page 80); Hot Type (page 72); Ladies Eliza, Alice, and Violet Manners (page 134).

THE TWO MRS. TRUDEAUS By MICHAEL CALLAHAN

Scandalously divorced from one Canadian prime minister, now proud mother of another, Margaret Trudeau looks back at the tragic spiral that led to her battle against bipolar disorder. Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

OF MUSIC AND MADNESS

Spotlight on Mark Rylance and Claire van Kampen as their London hit, Farinelli and the King, arrives on Broadway. By Cullen Murphy. Photograph by Simon Upton. ET CETERA

EDITOR’S LETTER The Good, the Bad, and the Truly, Meaningfully Dangerous

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CONTRIBUTORS THE COASTER CORRESPONDENCE IN THE DETAILS Jeff Goldblum PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE John Grisham PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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MA N N ER S SI STE R S PHOTOGR A PH ED BY J O N ATH A N BE CKE R. EL I ZA ’ S DR E SS BY F E ND I; E A RR I NG S BY MARK DAVI S. ALI C E’S DRE SS BY VA L E NTI N O . VI O L ET ’S DR E SS BY DI O R. GO L DB L UM PH OTO GR A PHE D BY RA N DA L L S L AVI N; C L OTHI NG BY SAI NT L AURE NT; GL A S SE S BY TO M F OR D; WATCH BY J U NGH A NS . PHOTOG RA P H BY T I M HO UT ( BO O KS ) . F OR DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

EDITOR’S LETTER

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE TRULY, MEANINGFULLY DANGEROUS *

here are two distinct approaches to the opportunities and pitfalls provided by modern-day fame. There is one in which the person believes that by being famous he or she lives in a glass house— a fully transparent one—and that every word and deed will be subject to public inspection and mockery. This is the majority, and they tend to keep their noses clean. Members of the second group go about their days in the belief that they live in a fame bubble—a protective place where any kind of abhorrent behavior is permissible. This group is blessedly in the minority, but it’s the one that takes up most of the tabloid headlines and causes abundant collateral damage. Two charter members of this fame-bubble sub-species are our current president and the former head of the Weinstein Company. I’ve been threatened by both men. The Trump attacks have been retailed on this page over the past many decades. The Harvey Weinstein altercation took place years ago at a restaurant in Los Angeles called Atlantic, which was owned by Madonna’s brother Christopher. Following dinner with friends, I passed Weinstein’s table. He was surrounded by young starlets. He called over to me. He was in a rage over some perceived slight and said that he was going to come at me with Talk magazine, which he was about to launch. We got into an argument, and in front of the table he said, “You know something, let’s settle this outside.” Now, I’ve seen enough B Westerns to know that this is a prelude to a fight. I’d had a bit to drink and so I was perhaps not as cautious as I should have been. Harvey, after all, is a big fellow. Also, I’ve never slugged anyone in my life. We stumbled toward the door. The moment we stepped out into the night air, Weinstein didn’t fight, but rather turned on one of his famous charm offensives, saying how much he admired Vanity Fair and hoped that Talk would be half as good. He tried to pat me on the shoulder, but I took a step back, turned, and walked over to my car. It was only on the way home that I realized that the challenge had all been a show intended to impress that table full of attractive young women. As the world now knows, Weinstein’s M.O. when it came to attractive young women was not to have them step outside—but to have them step inside. I got off lucky that night. The legions of actresses and models who got caught up in his web of promises and bullying intimidation did not. Like our president, Weinstein

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equates the ability to cause fear with power, and uses it to overwhelm the young, the helpless, or the ambitious. Thanks to the admirable courage of Ashley Judd and other victims, three dogged reporters at The New York Times, and one at The New Yorker, a lot of women now feel safe to tell their own stories about Weinstein. What started as a trickle has turned into a flood, a national discussion about sexual harassment, and perhaps a societal shift. Quite apart from the obvious damage done to the women, these two monsters have further coarsened the culture—with words like “pussy” and “masturbation” cropping up in the pages of family newspapers.

he toxicity of our current president is the contagious sort. Spend any time in his presence and your reputation begins to curdle. It’s the Trump curse. And it’s as lethal to a person’s mojo as dating Madonna was in the old days. Think about the able people around Trump, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, chief of staff John Kelly, and Gary Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser. Prior to the election, these men wouldn’t have touched a man like Trump with a barge pole. But because of either patriotism or résumé buffing, they tied themselves to this man and they now realize they made a mistake. With so many prevaricators in the current administration, about the only one who tells the truth about the boss is Tillerson. Thanks to him, we have “fucking moron” in the pages of those family newspapers. The commander in chief’s erratic early-morning Twitter feed is a symptom of a mind that even his Republican handlers and enablers have begun to realize is dangerously, epically unhinged. There will come a time when the subject of one of his angry tweets falls victim to some overzealous fan of the president’s. Tweets, as silly as they are, and as silly as they sound, have consequences, both for individuals and for nation-states. Most thinking people were appalled by his approach to the families of fallen soldiers and at the way Trump responded via Twitter to the devastation of Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. His description of the territory when he met with members of the House of Representatives and then later with Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy was one for the books—perhaps of the psychological medical variety. “This is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean—and it’s a D EC EMB ER

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ANNI E LE I B OVI TZ

*BUT IN REVERSE ORDER

EDITOR’S LETTER big ocean, a very big ocean… [It’s] out in the ocean. You can’t just drive your trucks there.” If it seemed as if the president’s seminar on Puerto Rico was designed to be understood by an idiot, it’s probably because this is the way it was explained to him.

to helping the less privileged fight their way out of poverty. What comes across in Lewis’s account is their absolute decency. If the president’s buffoonery has distracted you from the true, devastating—and lasting—damage he is doing to our country, Lewis’s article is a must-read. Perhaps the most celebrated journalist currently working, he goes straight to the heart of the matter: America is now run by people whose only watchword is greed. They may want to rethink that approach, if only out of grim self-interest. The penthouse is not a comfortable place to live—even in tacky old Trump Tower—if the floors below are on fire.

s we await deliverance from this serial series of horrors, whether by ballot or through some other constitutional event, there’s the current reality to contend with. The president has no coherent philosophy to speak of. The West Wing is as much a seat-of-the-pants operation as Trump’s ramshackle real-estate operation was. Incompetence and destruction are the names of the game, whether it’s treaties with our allies or preening bluster directed at our foes, at the achieveI. Newhouse, Jr., the Chairman Emeritus of Condé Nast, died ments of his predecessor, or at government institutions themselves. in October in New York, the city he was born in and the one Federal agencies, such as the Department of Education, the Envithat gave foundation to the empire he built. With his passing, a little ronmental Protection Agency, and the State Department, are places more than a month short of his 90th birthday, so goes the last of where Trump’s agenda—or, rather, that of his corporate and right-wing the great visionaries of the magazine business. Indeed, in a career patrons—is succeeding spectacularly. By appointing people who are that spanned more than six decades, Si placed the Newhouse famutterly unqualified to run these agencies, or are openly hostile to their ily name firmly in the pantheon of American publishing, alongside those of Luce, Sulzberger, Graham, and Hearst. aims, he is effectively dismantling the parts of the U.S. government The Condé Nast company was once a distant, white-glove comthat are the benevolent legacies of the Progressive Era and the New petitor to Henry Luce’s muscular dominion of Time, Life, Fortune, Deal: public education, job training, environmental protection, access Sports Illustrated, and People. But with the revival of Vanity Fair, in to health care, and much more. The far right’s decades-long impossible dream of killing off such achievements has finally come to fruition. 1983, and the purchase of The New Yorker, in 1985, Si transformed In “The 5th Risk,” in the September issue of Vanity Fair, the incomCondé Nast into a powerhouse of style and substance. He inherited parable Michael Lewis exposed the president’s takeover of the Departa carriage-trade company encompassing Vogue, Glamour, House & ment of Energy. Apparently, the commander in chief thought the deGarden, and Mademoiselle, and built from there, launching or adding partment was all about oil when he appointed former Texas governor not only Vanity Fair and The New Yorker but also Self, GQ, Wired, Rick Perry to run it. Perry, who had called for the abolition of the Details, W, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, and Bon Appétit, among department during his failed 2012 presidential bid, will go down in hisother titles. In 1980 he built out the book side of the family business tory as one of the most comically—or perhaps tragically—inept governby purchasing Random House, including Alfred A. Knopf. mental appointees in U.S. history. At least he had the honesty to admit Decade in and decade out, his publications helped report and set that he had no idea what the department actually did when he called the style for much of the civilized world. And as much as Si appreciated their outsize influence, he wasn’t one to shimmer around the for its abolition—or would have called for its abolition had he only smart drawing rooms where his magazines wound up. It just wasn’t been able to remember its name on national television. What the department did, he soon learned, had little to do with oil and everything his thing. What he really loved were the magazines themselves. As to do with guarding and maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpile. objects. And as businesses. He loved them the way his younger In his new article, “Made in the U.S.D.A.,” on page 104, Lewis brother, Donald, loves the family newspapers. Although modest looks at the Department of Agriculture—another federal agency in aspect, Si ran his fiefdom the way I imagine Louis B. Mayer ran whose name belies its true function. No, it does not Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in its heyday—minus the starlet THE CHAIRMAN primarily pay farmers to grow or not grow crops. The groping and inappropriate advances. If Si wanted cerSi Newhouse and tain writers or photographers (or editors, for that matvast majority of its budget—in 2016, $110 billion of its Graydon Carter $164 billion—goes to feed impoverished Americans: at the 2000 Vanity Fair ter), he went after them. And more often than not, he got them. Once, in a negotiation I was involved in with mostly schoolchildren, pregnant women, veterans, and Oscar party. a photographer, it came down retirees. Lewis focuses on four to a $250,000 difference beof the government’s former tween what the photographer’s employees, many of whom agent wanted and what we were have been displaced by absurdly boneheaded Trump apwilling to pay. “Oh, give it,” he paratchiks. (In the U.S.D.A., told me, finally. “I don’t want these include a country-club to nickel-and-dime them.” attendant and the owner of a scented-candle company.) e was an early riser, getWhat most of the former cating to work before sunreer public servants have in rise—and before the day’s traffic common is that, although could clog the streets. He ate they grew up in strained cirlunch at noon. I don’t mean cumstances, their families surnoon-ish—I mean 12 sharp. He vived and flourished because ate simply and quickly. Bernie of various forms of federal Leser, a veteran hand from the aid. To show their gratitude, British and Australian wing of they have devoted their lives the empire, told me that, in the

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J O NATHA N B E CKE R

EDITOR’S LETTER days when Si smoked, he often puffed between bites. He generally left the office around 3:30. He exercised, read for an hour or two, and then, with his wife, Victoria, went out to a film or an opera, or had an early dinner and then turned in. He was religious about his fitness routine. I was once having a drink with Warren Beatty at the bar of the Bel-Air hotel, in Los Angeles. When Si came in with Victoria and Donald and Donald’s wife, Sue, Warren went over to their table and said that he and Si had been doing circuit training in the same gym in New York a few weeks back, and that he could never have kept up with Si’s exertions. It was one of the many times I saw Si beam. His work uniform was simple but comfortable: navy polo shirt, cotton chinos, brown Car Shoe loafers, and an old New Yorker sweatshirt. Because he was fit, he looked good in this kit. If he had to, Si could brush up. Back in the days when the Newhouses still owned Random House, he and Donald, Donald’s son Steve, Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, and Random House C.E.O. Alberto Vitale would assemble in the first booth along the wall of the Grill Room of the Four Seasons for a working lunch. The restaurant was one of the last holdouts of the jacketrequired rule for men, and Si went along with this. I once saw a blue suit with a powder-blue shirt and dark-blue knit tie on a hanger in his office. When duty called, he was ready—like a smaller, older Superman.

ong before I came to know Si properly, I had asked to see him in order to get some advice about a twice-a-week newspaper I wanted to start in New York. He invited me to come by at seven A.M. I got there a half-hour early and waited out on the sidewalk. At 6:55, I made my way to his office. It was large and spare, done up in blond wood and lush, white, wall-to-wall carpeting. On the walls were original panels of the old “Krazy Kat” cartoon strip. His assistant brought us tall, thin glasses filled with iced milk coffee. Si and I talked for about 15 minutes. The upshot was that he thought there was a dip in the economy around the corner, and he advised me not to start the paper. As I stood up and began to put on my overcoat, the tail of it hit my glass of coffee. And in what I can only describe as the closest thing to real-life slow motion I have ever experienced, I watched in horror as the contents of the glass tumbled out onto the beautiful white carpeting. I apologized profusely and frantically tried to mop things up with my handkerchief. Si put his hand on my shoulder and said words for which I will be forever grateful: “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a laugh. “I do it all the time.” I didn’t start that paper. But I did take over The New York Observer. It was then a sleepy, provincial weekly with a charmingly antiquated broadsheet design, and it was printed on pink paper, like the Financial Times. I went in with a plan that mapped out a series of changes over a 3-month, a 6-month, and a 12-month period. At the half-year mark, I was pleased enough with our progress to begin sending the paper out every week to friends in the U.S. and Europe—many of them editors. The only reason I mention all of this is that, a few months later, Si took one of his regular tours of Condé Nast’s European properties. And damned if he didn’t find a copy of the Observer in everybody’s in-basket. Si left the Continent thinking that everyone in his circle over there was getting the paper—overlooking the fact that the copies were going out unsolicited, and for free, and that they were in people’s inbaskets and therefore not read yet. When he returned to New York he asked me over to his apartment for a drink and offered me a job.

hat was the thing about Si. He was a gambler—especially when it came to backing the things or people he cherished or saw promise in. He scooped up The New Yorker and hung in there for decades, despite its losses, until it found its new footing—and, in this

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century, its profitability. Following his relaunch of Vanity Fair, he saw losses mount to close to $100 million before he was in the clear and the magazine began turning a profit. Si spent what needed to be spent. But he kept a close eye on what was coming in. Magazines like Vanity Fair are expensive propositions, and they survive and thrive on the advertising pages their publishers sell. Every month, Si would spread out the new issues of all his magazines on his desk and count the advertising pages by hand with one of those nubby rubber fingers that bank tellers once used to count bills. He juggled publishers constantly, but he was stalwart with his editors. I was a pretty wobbly steward of Vanity Fair during my early years at the magazine. But if he had doubts about my abilities during those days—and he had ample reason to worry—he never showed it. He instinctively knew that there is no guidebook to being an editor; success comes only from confidence and a vision that forms over time. Most important, for an editor to thrive, he or she has to be blessed with a comforting and nurturing proprietor. In this respect, Si had no equal. Most years, during Si and Victoria’s stay in Los Angeles for the Vanity Fair Oscar party, David Geffen would host a dinner in their honor. The other guests generally included Donald and Sue Newhouse, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Sue Mengers, Fran Lebowitz, and me and my wife, Anna. One year, Geffen was showing Si around the Beverly Hills house he had bought from the Jack Warner estate. They paused in front of a rectangular Jackson Pollock that hung vertically in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Si looked at it for a good while and asked where he had gotten it. Geffen turned to him and said, “I bought it from you, Si!” Si looked at it again and then realized that, when he owned it, he had hung the painting horizontally.

had lunch with him every couple of weeks. Like others before me, I learned to prep for the meetings, because he rarely wanted to talk about business. He was much more interested in art and film, and gossip from Washington, Europe, and the West Coast. To have lunch with Si was to be peppered with a lot of questions. When there was a problem to be addressed, he used his own, occasionally awkward Socratic method to find a way toward a solution. He took his time when speaking. If you asked him a question, he would formulate his answer slowly, waiting for the right thought and the right words to form in his mind. Newcomers to a conversation with Si would rush into the void as he fermented his replies. Veterans knew to wait. The result was that all of his responses and opinions were measured and well considered. I don’t recall him, in the hundreds of lunches and dinners we shared, ever saying anything rash or ill-informed. When the Condé Nast offices were at 350 Madison (between Paul Stuart and Brooks Brothers) we generally had lunch at Brian McNally’s restaurant 44, in the lobby of the Royalton hotel, about three blocks from the office. One day, as we were leaving the restaurant, it started to rain in buckets. I had my best suit on and a new pair of shoes and was resigned to the fact that we would get drenched. As in a movie, a cab pulled up, discharged its passengers, and lit the on-duty sign. Si and I made a run for it. Just going from the door to the cab, we got soaked. I told the driver that we were only going a few blocks, but that I would give him $15. He said fine. I suddenly realized I didn’t have any money. Lunch had been on the restaurant’s Condé Nast account. I quietly asked Si if he had any money and he whispered no. So here we were, me and one of the wealthiest men in the country, and not a penny in change between us. When we pulled up in front of the office, I told the driver that, if he waited there, I would rush in and get him the $15 plus a $5 tip. He thought for a few seconds, then turned around to us and said, “Fine. But the little guy has to stay in the car!” —GRAYDON CARTER D EC EMB ER

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

vanityfair.com Director MICHAEL HOGAN Editor MATTHEW LYNCH Deputy Editor KATEY RICH Digital Managing Editor KELLY BUTLER Senior Photography Editor CHIARA MARINAI Audience Development Director KIA MAKARECHI Executive Video Producer ERIC LEFFLER Social Media Director JEFFREY TOUSEY Projects Editor ALYSSA KARAS Line Editor KATIE COMMISSO Executive Awards Editor ANNA LISA RAYA Hollywood Editor HILLARY BUSIS Staff Photographer JUSTIN BISHOP Hollywood Correspondents REBECCA KEEGAN, NICOLE SPERLING Film Critic RICHARD LAWSON Senior Staff Writers JOSH DUBOFF, JULIE MILLER, JOANNA ROBINSON Staff Writers LAURA BRADLEY, KENZIE BRYANT, YOHANA DESTA, ERIKA HARWOOD, HILARY WEAVER Associate Line Editor RACHEL FREEMAN Supervising Video Producer TRACI OSHIRO Video Production Manager ALYSSA MARINO Hive Video Producer LAUREN BETESH Social Media Video Editor ELLA RUFFEL Lead Producer JARONDAKIE PATRICK Associate Producer ERIN VANDERHOOF Editorial Assistant SARAH SHOEN Photography Associates LAUREN JONES, JORDAN AMCHIN Senior Social Media Manager DANIEL TAROY Social Media Managers CHRISTINE DAVITT, RHIAN SASSEEN Development: Director of Engineering MATTHEW HUDSON Production Director ZAC FRANK Engineering Manager CHARLES TRUELSON Senior Manager, Analytics KRISTINNE GUMBAYAN Production Manager AMINATA DIA Software Engineer GEGE PINCIN Front-End Engineer RAFAEL FREANER

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

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

Contributing Photographers

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

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JOE BIDEN This fall, former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., pictured with Annie Leibovitz (left) and his wife, Jill, will be conducting a 19-city tour across America, holding public discussions with local leaders about our nation’s pressing questions. In an adaptation from his new memoir, Promise Me, Dad, on page 119, Biden shares intimate moments from his family’s last Thanksgiving with his son Beau, who died of brain cancer six months later. “I hope my own story will strike a chord with other Americans who have walked the same path I have,” Biden said.

DAVID KAMP For “Joe, Mourning,” on page 112, V.F. Contributing Editor David Kamp sat down with Joe Biden, who discussed his new book, Promise Me, Dad. In it, the 47th vice president not only talks about the demands of the West Wing and the question of his candidacy for the presidency but also tells the difficult story of the illness and death of his son Beau. “What stood out was Biden’s optimism,” says Kamp. “What could have been a tremendously heavy story has hope and life lessons and even some levity.”

In “Ako’s Ride,” on page 128, Jeffrey E. Stern investigates the resourceful young Kurdish fighter who—using his bulletproof BMW as a shield—saved scores of Iraqi civilians. “Especially if you cover war, you hear all the time that anyone can become a killer if you put a gun in their hand,” he says. “But this story took that and flipped it. Maybe if you give someone a shield instead of a gun, anyone can become a humanitarian.”

TAMASIN DAY-LEWIS V.F. contributor Tamasin Day-Lewis interviewed Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean character actor Bill Nighy, who appears in the forthcoming Amazon mini-series Ordeal by Innocence, based on the Agatha Christie novel. “Bill is always a complete joy,” says Day-Lewis, whose article “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christie,” on page 126, explores what makes the English-country-house thriller both a perfect and a peculiar film to release for the holidays. “He has a kind of magic.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 54

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B I DEN PHOTOGR A PHE D BY KATHRY N M A C LE O D. PHOTOG RA P HS BY RO B E RT FA I R ER (DAY- L E WI S ) , N A S I M FE KRAT (STERN), GASPE R TRI NGALE (KAMP)

JEFFREY E. STERN

CONTRIBUTORS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 52

MARK ROZZO

NORMAN JEAN ROY Born and raised in Montreal, V.F. Contributing Photographer Norman Jean Roy has long held a special fondness for Margaret Trudeau, the former wife of the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s most charismatic prime minister. For “The Two Mrs. Trudeaus,” on page 84, Roy shot the mother of Canada’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, at the Fairmont Royal York, in Toronto. “As the First Lady during my childhood, she was a big part of our cultural identity,” Roy says. “She was complicated and joyful. I absolutely loved her.”

JAMES WOLCOTT In “The Hefner Delusion,” on page 82, Contributing Editor James Wolcott denies that Playboy’s March 1990 cover boy, Donald Trump, is Hugh Hefner’s legacy. A quarter-century and a seat in the Oval Office later, Trump still embodies the look of Hef, favoring gilded interiors and surrounding himself with pageant contestants. “Affinities between the two glazed oglers are indisputable,” Wolcott says. “But we should exonerate Hefner from the calumny of being Trump’s warm-up act.”

MICHAEL CALLAHAN “I have always been fascinated by people who re-invent themselves,” says V.F. Contributing Editor Michael Callahan of Margaret Trudeau, the former Studio 54 regular turned mental-health advocate. For “The Two Mrs. Trudeaus,” on page 84, Callahan met with the grandmother of eight to explore her tumultuous past—marked by flirtations with rock stars and psychedelics. “I think we need more public figures like Margaret Trudeau,” says Callahan, whose novel The Night She Won Miss America came out in April.

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PH OTO GRA P HS BY S A M ER I CKS O N ( RO Z ZO ) , CO URT E SY O F NO RM A N J E A N ROY ( ROY ) , BY ZO EY SL E SS -KI TAI N DO UGHERT Y (C ALL AHAN). I LLUSTRATI O N BY TI M SHE AFFE R

In “Performance Artist,” on page 120, V.F. Contributing Editor Mark Rozzo examines the lengthy career of illustrator James McMullan, who has created classic images for magazines, children’s books, and, perhaps most famously, posters for Lincoln Center Theater. “There’s something borderline criminal about the fact that Jim’s name is not known to all,” says Rozzo. “The city of New York is McMullan’s art gallery, and the show’s been going for 30-some years.”

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A l l I s VA N I T I E S . . . N o t h i n g I s F a i r

DECEMBER

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My Stuff: The Earl of Snowdon’s Hugh Jackman Cotswolds p. 62

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Cocktail glamour p. 65

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Kirby wears a dress by Louis Vuitton; earrings by Bulgari; hair products by Wella Professionals; makeup by Chanel; nail enamel by Essie.

@vf.com Visit the set of VANESSA KIRBY’S Vanities shoot at VF.COM.

VANESSA KIRBY

AGE: 29. PROVENANCE: London, England. HOUSE SEATS: “I was taken to the theater quite a lot as a kid, and I remember seeing Vanessa Redgrave in The Cherry Orchard and thinking, I want to do that, get in someone else’s shoes and explore the world in that way.” RISKY BUSINESS: Bucking tradition, she chose to make her professional debut instead of attending drama school. “I had to gamble. I could’ve done three plays in six months and never worked again.” But the work hasn’t stopped. “I am very lucky.” THE SPARE HEIR: Next month, Kirby returns to Netflix as Princess Margaret in the award-winning series The Crown. “We really delve into the darkness of an identity pulled in two different directions, and how that affects somebody with as much life force as she had.” NEW MISSION: Next year, she trades palace scandal for international espionage with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 6. “I met him at the studio; we had a chat; he shook my hand and said, ‘Welcome to the family.’ I hadn’t even seen a script.” DREAM PART: “There are so many incredible stage roles for women. I really want to play Hedda Gabler—it’s a bit cliché but a rite of passage.” GOLDEN AGE: “I feel there is a real turn to female directors and writers, and their stories. I want to be part of that change.” — KRISTA SMITH

DEC E M B E R

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P H OTO G R A P H

COLIENA RENTMEESTER

VAN IT Y

FAIR

VANITIES

HOME

Favorite coffee shop? Laughing Man Coffee, 184 Duane Street, N.Y.C. Favorite piece of furniture? My bed. Do you wear shoes inside your home? Yes. Favorite drink? Coffee or a Negroni. Favorite piece you collected while traveling? A backgammon set I bought in Paris. Favorite family heirloom? My mum made me a book of all her recipes. I use it often. Favorite season? Summer. What’s on your reading list? Hello, Sunshine, by Laura Dave; The Thunder and the Sunshine, by Gary Hart. Best host gift to give/receive? Give: homemade bread. Receive: guests that don’t stay too long. Do you have pets? Dali and Allegra. Can’t leave the house without? Watch, wallet, phone. (Inevitably I will forget one of these.)

My Stuff HUGH JACKMAN

A P P R E C I AT I O N S

Favorite film director? Completely impossible to pick. Your all-time Hollywood crush? Deborra-lee Furness. Favorite movie character? Indiana Jones. Favorite childhood character? Superman. Childhood crush? Olivia Newton-John. Favorite show to binge-watch? House of Cards. Favorite exercise? A game of squash. Your guilty pleasure? Endless hours of watching sport. Most embarrassing moment? Peeing my pants onstage in Beauty and the Beast. Hidden talent? I’m pretty good with a yo-yo. If you could choose a superpower, what would it be? Teleporting. Greatest indulgence? Food. Favorite cuisine? Japanese.

TECH

Favorite apps? Waze, ESPN, and NFL. Last person you texted? I’m not much for texting. Favorite podcast? This American Life. Favorite Web sites? Ted Talks, The New York Times, AFL Live, NFL. Thoughts on social media? Like alcohol—if you don’t abuse it, it can be awesome. On your music playlist? Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons, Bruno Mars. On your workout playlist? AC/DC, Eminem, Midnight Oil. Album you could listen to on repeat? Dear Evan Hansen original soundtrack. Favorite person to follow on Twitter? Ricky Gervais. Favorite news source? The BBC, Channel 4. Which app do you use the most? iTunes. Wake; walk dogs; meditate; eat; work out; repeat.

MORNING R O U T INE

CL O T HING

est known as the X-Men’s Wolverine, Hugh Jackman has become an acclaimed international star, on Broadway as well as on-screen. In addition, the Australian actor is the founder of Laughing Man Coffee and the Laughing Man Foundation. Ahead of his latest movie, The Greatest Showman, premiering on December 25, Jackman shares his favorite things …

Most recent purchase? James Perse shorts. Silk or terry-cloth robe? No robe. Favorite pajamas? Haven’t worn ’em since I was seven. The piece you love but never wear? My hat from the outback. Favorite fashion trend of all time? Walkman! Go-to bag for the day? My Montblanc backpack. Sneakers or dress shoes? Sneakers. Biggest fashion faux pas? 1996-ish three-quarter-length pants that my mates still make fun of to this day. Favorite watch? Montblanc TimeWalker. Favorite piece of jewelry? My wedding ring. Favorite designers? Tom Ford, Louis Vuitton, Burberry. Go-to outfit? Jeans and a T-shirt. Favorite store? Tokyu Hands, Tokyo.

G R O O MIN G

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Your “passed down from Mom” routine? Laugh every day. Favorite face mask? SK-II. Your “can’t live without” product? Sunscreen. Favorite brand of sunscreen? Kiehl’s. Favorite bath products? I take showers. Must-have face treatment? Sunscreen. Greatest indulgence? Sunscreen; a deep-tissue massage. On your top shelf? A lot of out-of-date vitamins. Best tip? Wear sunscreen. Biggest grooming faux pas? Not wearing sunscreen.

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IN S P IR AT ION S

What inspires you? People with courage. Spirit animal? Snow leopard. Living or deceased, whom would you most want to have a drink with? Socrates. Words to live by? “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” Baz Luhrmann said that to me. A word you love or hate? Love the word “bombastic.” Hate the word “should.” What would you do for a career in your next life? Today-show host. Favorite vacation spot? Byron Bay. What do you steal from your hotel room? As if…! Do you collect anything? Memories.

VANITIES

he Earl of Snowdon, known professionally as David Linley, has traveled the world following his passion for the arts. When not in London or at his French home, the Christie’s U.K. chairman, and founder of his eponymous, bespoke furniture company, spends his time in the English Cotswolds, in Daylesford.

My Place THE EARL OF SNOWDON

1 4

3 2

5 6

KEY PHRASE TO KNOW:

“

Where’s the nearest pub?

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Rabbit Inn (4): a Michelin-starred pub with Cotswold-stone floors, Windsor chairs, crackling log fires, and walls hung with Hugo Guinness line drawings. FAVORITE RESTAURANT: Daylesford Farmshop—world-famous farm-to-table establishment. FAVORITE LOCAL FOOD: The famous Daylesford Cheddar. WHAT TO DRINK: Château Leoube rosé (3). FAVORITE MUSEUM: The British Motor Museum, in Gaydon, showcases the history of British inventiveness and manufacturing excellence on four wheels. THE LOOK: Tod’s and Loro Piana (6) are perfect for reading Sunday papers in front of the fire. Weekenders favor jeans, Belstaff jackets (2), and blackened Rolexes made by George Bamford. BEST SHOES TO WEAR: An R. M. Williams jodhpur boot (5) or a pair of Brasher boots. CAN’T BE MISSED: Chopping firewood. HIDDEN GEM: The Rollright Stones (7), the less known—and consequently much more chic—Stonehenge. LOCAL FAVORITE: Little Rollright church—it’s a 13th-century building. Anything that’s been around that long has an aura. WHAT TO PACK: Plenty of layers, a Loro Piana gilet, and something warm and waterproof. LUGGAGE BRAND: Marc Newson’s Louis Vuitton rolling luggage is superb. SECRET HIDEAWAY: East Banqueting House (1), in Chipping Campden. The Landmark Trust rents out hidden architectural gems all over the kingdom, such as this tiny Jacobean curiosity. WHAT TO LEAVE AT HOME: Never bring an umbrella to the country—wear a tweed cap. D EC EMB ER

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PH OTO GRA P HS BY DAV ID M. B EN E TT /GE TT Y I M AGE S ( T HE E A RL OF SN OWDO N ) , TI M GA I NE Y /A L A MY (RO LLRI GHT STO NE S), PAUL GR UNDY ( E A ST BA N Q UET I NG HO USE ) , M A RTI N M OR RE L L ( WI L D RA B B IT I N N) ; F O R DE TA I LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C REDI TS

BEST PLACE TO STAY: The Wild

VANITIES

Kick off the holiday party season with a splash of pizzazz

Market COCKTAIL CIRCUIT

Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, 1957.

Oscar de la Renta geometric gown, $8,990. (Oscar de la Renta boutiques)

The Row clutch, $2,450. (212-755-2017)

Giuseppe Zanotti Aleesha heel, $895. (giuseppezanotti.com)

Iman and Elizabeth Taylor, 2002.

Boucheron brooch, price upon request. (boucheron.com)

Fernando Jorge ring, $28,350. (barneys.com)

Gianvito Rossi Kimono pump, $795. (fwrd.com)

Gucci tulle tunic gown, $13,500. (Selected Gucci stores)

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Louis Vuitton cuff, price upon request. (louisvuitton.com)

Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello sweater, price upon request. (Saint Laurent, N.Y.C.)

Gucci sandal, $1,790. (gucci.com)

Jimmy Choo Annie heel, $995. (jimmychoo.com) Dior dress, $12,500. (Dior boutiques)

Hermès Chaîne d’Ancre Punk earrings, $3,400. (Hermès stores)

Roger Vivier evening box, $1,695. (rogervivier.com)

Chanel Code Coco watch, $5,000. (Chanel Fine Jewelry boutiques)

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Van Cleef & Arpels Plumes d’Icare ring, price upon request. (vancleefarpels .com) David Yurman Stax bracelet, price upon request. (davidyurman.com)

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MILESTONE Following a unique collection of scented, statement jewelry designed by Elie Top in October, By Kilian is launching a range of opulent, quote-adorned clutches this month. In celebration of the brand’s 10-year anniversary, every clutch will house one of the perfumer’s signature scents. Hidden treasures. ($315 for clutch, and from $550 for jewelry; bykilian.com)

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AS H TO N

The Surrealists In partnership with the Man Ray Trust, François Nars tapped Fabien Baron to help Nars Cosmetics create a colorful interpretation of the celebrated photographer’s black-and-white world. Nars re-envisioned the work of the 20th-century artist, a love of his since he was 19, by channeling components of Ray’s best-known imagery into a limited-edition makeup collection. Glass tears and lips are some of the defining elements of the collaboration, which includes blush, eye shadow, highlighter, lip gloss, and lipstick—surrealism made real. ($24–$55; narscosmetics.com) —NORA

MALONEY

Beauty Flash Tuberose is taking over for fall … Hermès Twilly d’Hermès E.D.P. ($130 for 2.9 oz.; nordstrom.com)

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Ralph Lauren Woman. ($110 for 3.4 oz.; ralphlauren.com)

Altaia Tuberose in Blue. ($210 for 3.4 oz.; aedes.com)

Aerin Tuberose Le Soir. ($305 for 3.4 oz.; aerin.com)

Atelier Cologne Café Tuberosa. ($150 for 3.4 oz.; ateliercologne.com)

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ZENITH Succeeding Malin + Goetz’s bestselling candle, its new eau de parfum, Cannabis, arrives this month, inspired by founders Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz’s memories of roaming Amsterdam in their youth. The city’s spirited attitude is captured in notes of bergamot, spicy black pepper, and soft magnolia, heightened by warm, woody base notes. The resulting scent is an herbaceous bouquet, evoking past heydays. ($165 for 3.4 oz.; malin andgoetz.com) — SUNHEE GRINNELL

COST UME S BY M ATT HE W SI M ON E LL I ; HA I R P RO DU CTS BY KÉ R A STA S E PA RI S, L E O NO R GRE Y L , O RI BE , AND R & CO .; MAKE UP BY GI O RGI O ARMANI BEAUT Y AND NARS; GRO O MI NG PRO DUC TS BY CH A NE L A N D S UNDAY R I LE Y; HA IR BY T E RR I WA L KE R ( SH AW KAT ) A ND DE RE K Y UEN ( HAGNER); MAK E UP BY MO LLY GREE NWALD (HAGNER) AND EL AI NE O FFERS (SHAWKAT); GRO O MI NG BY TA SH A B ROWN ( HA L L ) A N D J E S SI CA ORTI Z ( E A RLY, R EY NO L DS ) ; PRO DUCE D O N LO C ATI O N BY GAI L SALMO ; FO R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C REDI TS

3 1 DAY S i n t h e L I F E o f t h e C U LT U R E

DECEMBER 2017

Ê ACCORDING TO: KEEGAN-MICHAEL KE Y AND MUCH MORE ...

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John Early, Meredith Hagner, Alia Shawkat, John Reynolds, and Brandon Micheal Hall star on Search Party, TBS’s millennial mystery, which this month returns for its second season. For more on the entrancing dark comedy, turn to page 70.

SLEUTH OR DARE

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Key—a Penn State University grad—is a football fanatic. He says the first thing he checks on his phone when he wakes up in the morning is the ESPN app, the PennLive app (“I gotta check and see how my Nittany Lions are doing”), or the Detroit Lions app. He’ll also browse the news: CNN, PBS NewsHour, Slate, and, yes, Fox News (“I like to try to be fair and balanced when I can, if I can stomach it”).

Key and his girlfriend used to go to Black Tap burgers in SoHo frequently, though he notes that, once it started making “crazy shakes that have entire cookies on the side of them,” the place started “becoming a gimmick.” Their new go-to? Tiny’s and the Bar Upstairs, in Tribeca. “If you go there, you gotta go for brunch and get the egg sandwich. It’s on these two beautiful pieces of artisanal bread. It’s the best.”

BOOKS

HOBBIES

A voracious reader, Key enjoys a range of titles. Recently he read Hamlet in Purgatory, by Stephen Greenblatt (partly as research for the production of Hamlet he starred in alongside Oscar Isaac), and he mixes in some fiction (Paul Beatty’s The Sellout) and self-help (Win or Learn, by professional fighter Conor McGregor’s trainer).

Key is a self-described fitness obsessive. “I’m very, very, very interested in martial arts,” he says. “I don’t know if people would be surprised by this or not, but I’m kind of into nutrition and weight lifting. I know I’m kind of a slender man, but the human physique fascinates me, and learning about metabolism.” B EYO N C É S O N G

ACCORDING TO:

Keegan-Michael Key The Key & Peele comedian— who co-stars in Meteor Shower, a new play by Steve Martin, which opens on Broadway this month—recommends some people, places, and things

SEARCH AND ENJOY

A bewitching comedy-thriller, and 2016 standout, returns for its second season By R I C H A R D L AW S O N

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By J O S H D U B O F F

earch Party could easily have been just another comedy about feckless, self-involved millennials—Girls revisited. But, instead, the first season of TBS’s witty and beguiling series took us down a dark, twisting rabbit hole, delving into the mystery of a missing woman while also, yeah, making fun of twentysomething vanity and, y’know, brunch. (Still brunch! After all these years. Carrie Bradshaw should be so proud of the world she’s built.) Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat, both sweet

and gloomy, plays an aimless New Yorker who finds purpose in her life trying to track down a college acquaintance who has disappeared. She drags her monstrously, hilariously self-involved friends—the terrific Meredith Hagner and alt-queer-comedy “It boy” John Early—into her mad spiral, along with boyfriends past and present, played with boho appeal by Brandon Micheal Hall and John Reynolds. The pointed, hyper-observant jokes keep coming, even as the show heads toward a startlingly grim place.

The second season, premiering this month, has a big season-finale cliff-hanger to build off of, which is a tricky task. But this clever series—from creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, The Big Sick)—should pull it off with refreshingly youthful alacrity. Search Party is an invigorating and oddly prophetic satire of young people tragically unaware that they’re tilting toward the abyss. We should all pay attention as we, well, pretty much do the same.

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M OV I E S

Two Robert De Niro films top Key’s list of all-time favorites: Heat (“If that movie’s on, I’m watching it, no matter what”) and Midnight Run. He is also a major fan of the first John Wick film. “There’s something very simple and contemplative about John Wick—what is interesting is that it looks like it was based on an Akira Kurosawa movie.”

“Love on Top,” off Beyoncé’s 4, is Key’s favorite—the one where she “just keeps modulating and modulating and modulating”— and his rationale makes sense, given his comedy background. “There’s almost a comedic game in that song because you think to yourself, Well, it is Beyoncé, so maybe she can actually keep going. She might be able to sing higher than frequencies we know because she’s not a mere mortal. So there’s something titillating about [it].”

Hawk Songmaker finds herself at the center of this startling story of speculative fiction in which pregnancy has been placed under the jurisdiction of the state. With a drop of The Handmaid’s Tale and a drop of The Children of Men, Er drich cooks up a reproductiverights thriller all her own. A flood of spare prose courses through Megan Hunter’s debut novel, The End We Start From (Grove). The big ideas keep flowing through The River of Consciousness (Knopf), by the late Oliver Sacks. Beverly Gray bangs on the glass of nostalgia with Seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Algonquin). And Jed Perl hangs an intricate mobile of art, biography, and criticism in Calder (Knopf). — S LOA N E C R O S L E Y

Hot Type

Coney Island, 2015, from LA NY: Aerial Photographs of Los Angeles and New York (Thames & Hudson), by Jeffrey Milstein.

Letters Perfect To call Patrick Leigh Fermor just a travel writer is like calling Fred Astaire just a tap dancer; the description says nothing about the talent. His best-known book, A Time of Gifts, an account of his trip by foot through Europe from 1933 to 1934, published in 1977, glitters with acuity and wit. No wonder his letters are such gems to read, and in Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters (New York Review Books), editor Adam Sisman does justice to a man who, right up until he died, at 96 in 2011, spun literature from his own adventurous life. — J I M K E L LY 72

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Alex Hammond and Mike Tinney’s The Secret Life of the Pencil (Laurence King) is the No. 1 book about the No. 2. Alan Bennett elicits literary laughs in Keeping On Keeping On (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Alec Baldwin and V.F. contributing editor Kurt Andersen pay taunting tribute to Trump with You Can’t Spell America Without Me (Penguin Press). Charles Bukowski brews a Storm for the Living and the Dead (Ecco). Latin-American legend Eduardo Galeano is a Hunter of Stories (Nation Books). Will Friedwald croons for The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums (Pantheon). Henry Louis Gates Jr. revisits 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (Pantheon). Lawrence O’Donnell catches politicians Playing with Fire (Penguin Press). Joshua Greene uncovers The Essential Marilyn Monroe (ACC Editions). Franklin D. Roosevelt (Viking) wheels and deals in Robert Dallek’s biography. A monarch gets meddlesome in Deborah Cadbury’s Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking (PublicAffairs). Reza Aslan delves into divinity in God (Random House). David Hallberg is en pointe with A Body of Work (Touchstone). Nicholas Hytner pulls back the curtain in Balancing Acts (Knopf). Gregory Maguire squeezes the Nutcracker in Hiddensee (Morrow). Jefferson Morley eyes an agency spy in The Ghost (St. Martin’s). Activism is far from static in Bill McKibben’s Radio Free Vermont (Blue Rider). Photographer Jack Pierson (Damiani) pictures 1980s America. John Banville paints a portrait of Mrs. Osmond (Knopf). Madness ensues in Matthew Weiner’s Heather, the Totality (Little, Brown). Juli Berwald inspects invertebrates in Spineless (Riverhead). There’s always room for Joan Silber’s Improvement (Counterpoint). — S . C .

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hey are building their homes by headlight so that, come morning, the government can’t tear them down. So begins the first story in Daniel Alarcón’s polished and poetic The King Is Always Above the People (Riverhead). While we are never told who “they” are in this modern fable of immigration and determination, the story sets the tone for the subsequent nine narratives in Alarcón’s first collection in more than a decade. Here are the stories of a gang member’s childhood, a South America in turmoil, a city consumed with politics, and the hardships that haunt the modern world. Home is a slightly different sort of precarious in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (Harper): Cedar

‘ was told I wasn’t good enough, but I just chose not to listen,” says Khalid, the 19-year-old singer/songwriter who’s captivated a huge audience with unique, dreamy R&B-flavored pop songs (“Saved,” “Location”) from his top-10 debut album, American Teen. Khalid (last name Robinson) adds, “The only thing that can hold you back is yourself.” Here, he talks with Lisa Robinson (no relation) about songs, singing, and success. LISA ROBINSON: You recently

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toured Europe with Lorde, who told me that she knew better than any record executive what people her age would respond to. Do you agree?

KHALID: I agree; I know what people of my generation connect with because I’m part of that generation. A lot of people think teenagers haven’t gone through anything in their lives—they’re not even 20 years old yet. But a twentysomething can go through the same type of experience or heartbreak that a 50-year-old can go through, so why does age matter? L.R.: You have a song titled “Young, Dumb and Broke.” You won’t always be young, but I assume you weren’t dumb and are no longer broke. What have you learned since you wrote that song that you might write about for your next album? K.: I’ve learned that success is happiness. Positivity, confidence,

and persistence are key in life, so never give up on yourself. I just want to keep telling stories that relate to me—especially when it involves love, which I talk a lot about in my songs. L.R.: Did you really consider becoming a music teacher? K.: I did, and if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I would definitely be teaching. I would never have been able to find my voice if I didn’t have music education. My mom is a singer, and growing up, I always sang with her; but it wasn’t until my senior year in high school, when I wrote “Saved” and saw the positive reaction from my community, that I realized this was what I wanted to do with my life. L.R.: Your mother was in the military, you moved around a lot as a kid, and you’ve said that you always felt like an outsider. Do you still feel that way? K.: I will never forget what that felt like. I still get nervous [when I perform]; I’m experiencing a lot of things for the first time. L.R.: You’re very young, you’re getting a lot of attention— what keeps you grounded? K.: Luckily I’ve been able to bring my best friends on tour, and having them around helps me stay true to myself. They knew me before all this happened, and now they’re going through everything I’m going through with me. L.R.: One of your lyrics refers to someone passing out in an Uber; have you ever passed out in an Uber? K.: I have not passed out in an Uber, but I’ve definitely been tired enough to fall asleep.

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ALICE’S WONDER Any level of freedom you can maintain around your artistic life is best,” says Grammy-nominated singer Alice Smith, who adds, “it’s more conducive to creativity.” In 2006, following a bidding war, Smith signed to Epic Records; then she lived through numerous label-executive changes, and eventually went out on her own. Legal problems held up her recordings for several years, but she couldn’t be stopped; from an early age it was obvious her voice was special. This past August, she stunned the audience at the Apollo in the Hamptons benefit (where other performers included Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams, and Gary Clark Jr.) with her electrifying vocals and a commanding stage presence that bordered on possessed. Smith’s repertoire ranges from pop to R&B to jazz. Her fans and collaborators have included Prince, Aloe Blacc, and Tyler the Creator, and her persona is enhanced by her distinctive style: “I think my shows are elevated by a thought-out wardrobe,” she says. “It helps to create an environment where something out of the ordinary can happen.” As for releasing her albums independently, Smith says, “It doesn’t make the music business any easier. Maybe it comes down to picking your poison.” —L.R.

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DECEMBER 2017

LIGHT BRIGADE A constellation of Britain’s brightest actors, writers, and directors came out to support the British Film Institute at this year’s BFI Luminous, held at London’s Guildhall. The gala raised more than half a million dollars for the B.F.I.’s “Back the Future” campaign, dedicated to developing tomorrow’s screen stars. “The archive builds the house,” noted guest speaker Tilda Swinton, referring to the B.F.I.’s National Archive of film and television. “Our filmmakers—past, present, and future—light it up.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 78

Tilda Swinton with, left to right, silhouette artist Charles Burns and Wes Anderson.

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Jeremy Irons and Jonathan Ross

Julian Fellowes and Emma Kitchener-Fellowes

Tom Hiddleston

Terry Gilliam Callum Turner and Jemima Khan

LIGHT BRIGADE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 76

Percy Gibson and Joan Collins

Patrick Stewart

Stephen Fry, Michelle Dockery, and Hugh Laurie

Jane Buffett

Julia Boorstin, Michael Lynton, and Casey Wasserman

PALM COURT On the eve of the fourth annual Vanity Fair Summit, Casey Wasserman hosted an opening cocktail reception at his home in Beverly Hills.

Juliet de Baubigny

Aja Naomi King James Norton

Leslie Moonves Jeffrey Katzenberg

Dee Dee Myers

PHOTOGRAPHS: TOP, BY MARCUS DAWES; BOTTOM, BY JUSTIN BISHOP (BUFFETT, KATZENBERG, KING, MYERS), HANNAH THOMSON (ALL OTHERS)

Steven Spielberg, John Kerry, and J. J. Abrams

Puzzle This:

JUST IN TI for the M E H O L I D AY S

5 Classic Covers (Some Assembly Required) Launched in 1913, Vanity Fair would go on to become the sophisticated, witty magazine that celebrated the culture of “the smart set.” Its Jazz Age issues bore dazzling covers from the most influential illustrators of the day, including William Bolin, A. H. Fish, John Held Jr., and Frank X. Leyendecker. Now five of those classic covers have been re-created as elegant puzzles, evoking a charmed era—gone, but not forgotten.

AVA I L A B L E at

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N E W Y O R K P U Z Z L E C O M PA N Y. C O M / C O L L E C T I O N S / VA N I T Y - F A I R

IN THE DETAILS

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

JEFF GOLDBLUM

veryone has seen Jeff Goldblum in a movie. The Oscar- and Emmy-nominated actor has done it all: alien, dinosaur, and superhero blockbusters; urban comedies (both light- and dark-hearted); dramas; thrillers— the works. He’s not designated as a comedian first and foremost, but Goldblum is a connoisseur of absurdity and often brings a perverse, languid humor to his roles. His funniness was apparent from the earliest days of his film career: in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), for instance, Goldblum plays a vapid Los Angeles actor at a party, informing someone—presumably his agent or manager—on the phone, “I forgot my mantra.” The cameo lasted all of two seconds, but the line has become one of the most oft quoted from the classic film. Now 65, Goldblum remains relentlessly busy. In Thor: Ragnarok, out this month, he plays the immortal, game-obsessed Grandmaster; he’s also reprising his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm in next year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Factor in his regular jazz gig in L.A. and two kids under the age of three, and Goldblum would seem to be leading a sleepless existence. But he says he’s sleeping just fine these days, thank you very much. Below, he talks about vice-free living, an unlikely early job (it involved jails), and how he repaid Woody Allen for that early-fame favor.

AS A kid, he knew that he wanted to be an actor but kept the aspiration secret. “I was embarrassed, I think—[even though] both of my parents had toyed with the idea of being actors. In fact, my mother supposedly tapdanced on stairs that her dad made; they said SHIRLEY JANE on the front of them.” HE HAS taken weekly tap-dance lessons himself, in the guesthouse on his Los Angeles property. HE’S GETTING his star on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame next year. Who he would most want as a star neighbor: Charlie 80

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Chaplin, Frank Capra, or Marlon Brando. Who he doesn’t want to be near: “Oh, anyone would be fine. I’m just grateful to be on the sidewalk. But, wait—doesn’t Donald Trump have a star? Hmm.” HE ONCE sold pencils to prisons. “When I came to California in ’74, I said, ‘I should get a job and get some more money,’ or something like that.” He found employment selling surplus office supplies to correctional facilities. “After a week of that stuff, I got an illness that landed me in the hospital. That was the last time I dared to do something that wasn’t in the creative arts.” P H OTO G R A P HS

RANDALL SL AVIN

EVERY WEDNESDAY in Los Feliz, when he isn’t shooting, he plays piano in his jazz ensemble, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra—named after a bridge-playing, fitness-fanatic friend of his mother’s in Pittsburgh, Goldblum’s hometown. “Mrs. Snitzer lived to be over 100 and even came out to one of our gigs. She just waltzed in one night at 90 and surprised us.” HIS FAVORITE jazz musician: Thelonious Monk. His jazz anthem: “Eldorado,” by Erroll Garner. UNLIKE MANY of his jazz-player heroes, he claims to have few vices. He goes to bed early and rarely touches wine or even coffee. His drink of choice? He’s a selfdescribed Smoothie King. “I like to use things up. Today I made one with bananas, plums, peaches, kale, apples, coconut water. And strawberries—stems and all. What? Aren’t the stems good for you? Maybe next time I’ll cut them off.” HE OFTEN makes a guttural-yet-luxurious purring noise when he’s thinking. HE DENIES having any catchphrases. That said, he uses the word “bugaboo” frequently in conversation, including chats in which he denies having any catchphrases. “I try to stay clear of trendy phraseology. It’s a bugaboo of mine.” THE WORD “veggies” offends him. “I don’t like how baby talk has found its way into the mainstream. That word is even on menus in reputable establishments. Veggies—what the hell?” (Shudders.) “I’m like, Please: it’s vegetables.” NOR CAN he abide railed terraces above heights, and snakes—quite a liability for a longtime resident of the craggy Hollywood Hills. That said, he never likes to kill anything: “I even put spiders outside.” HE DOES not become attached to places or possessions. “I think I like to aspire to nothingness.” Is he a nihilist? “No, I’m not a sourpuss.” HE PLAYS a dog in Wes Anderson’s upcoming stop-motion film, Isle of Dogs. He named his own dog, a standard poodle, after Woody Allen. “I love telling people that Woody Allen sleeps in our bed with us.” UNLIKE HIS character in Annie Hall, he remembers his own mantra: “Accept, enjoy, enthuse”—which he says to himself during daily meditations, along with “I am grateful.” —LESLEY M. M. BLUME D EC EMB ER

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A PA N O P LY O F E C C E N T R I C B I O G R A P H I C A L DATA R E : H O L LYWO O D’ S D R O L L C H A M E L E O N

JAMES WOLCOTT

s the presidency of Donald Trump the price America paid for Hugh Hefner’s sins? Did Playboy magazine’s gospel of monogrammed hedonism ultimately produce the tufted warlock in the White House, much as Charles Manson rattlesnaked out of the hippie ethos of free love? “The current president of the United States may be Hefner’s most sterling achievement,” wrote Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker in September, shortly after the founder of Playboy magazine and its once fluffy bunny empire evacuated his waxen envelope of flesh at the age of 91. “Hefner may have … promoted the kind of persona that helped carry Donald Trump to the White House,” the historian Gyorgy Toth speculated on the website “The Conversation.” “[Some] male voters may have felt ‘oppressed’ by political correctness as much as Hefner’s followers felt trampled by the imperative to marry.” PLAYBOY OF THE Even partial responsibility for Trump’s WEST WING election is a heavy rap to lay on Hef’s President Trump’s mottled reputation, but affinities belouche past has not translated into a tween the two glazed oglers are indisliberal agenda. putable, as was their mutual-admiration society. Along with lording about like harem masters (Hefner with the pneumatic Playmates and centerfolds at his Los Angeles mansion, Trump with the tiara-pursuing contestants in the cheesy beauty pageants he produced), both moguls promoted their brands as aspirational models, running their companies as patriarchal fiefdoms, extensions of their biorhythms and fidgets. (The Hefner described in Tom Wolfe’s 60s-era profile “King of the Status Dropouts,” poking at the headboard dials of his round bed, In the wake of Hugh Hefner’s death, some have trying to get the damned thing to revolve, is blamed the Playboy founder’s gospel of an innocuous precursor to Trump orchestrating chaos from his Twitter app.) In 1990, hedonism for enabling the presidency of Donald Playboy featured Trump on the cover, an Trump, another would-be harem master. But editorial honor that Trump still cherishes but that Hefner’s son and editorial heir, Cooper, the comparison is deeply unfair to Hef

THE HEFNER DELUSION

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WOLCOTT rues as “a personal embarrassment” and a pigeon stain on the brand (my metaphor, not his). Trump was also an occasional visitor at the Playboy Mansion, and, in a bi-coastal salute, “a complete run of Playboy, bound in luxe leather,” resides in the lounge of Manhattan’s Trump Soho, according to The Nation’s architecture critic, Michael Sorkin. “If Donald Trump has a maestro in matters of taste,” observed Sorkin, “it’s surely his fellow teetotaler and sex fan Hugh Hefner, the pajama-clad, Pepsi-swilling progenitor of the lifestyle that so intoxicated boys of The Donald’s generation.” Trump picked up his cues for public indoctrination from Pajama Man. “Trump’s politics are, like Hefner’s ‘Playboy Philosophy,’ an impossible combination of liberalism, hedonism, bloviation, and misogyny.” What makes this combo platter menacing to civic health is when you add Fascism to the menu. Sorkin posits a third bro looming in the background of these two stylish schlockmeisters: the glowering specter of Adolf Hitler. It is no secret that Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, not exactly lullaby reading, and all three men were arch-merchandisers. “Hitler, Hefner, and Trump—the real rat pack— share a logo fetish (the swastika, the bunny, and the big T are among the most ubiquitous signifiers of their times) and a powerful fascination with building and design. Hefner in the Playboy Mansion, Hitler in the Berghof, and The Donald in his Trump Tower triplex are obsessed with self-corroboration by decorative context and the dramatic possibilities involved in the public marketing of a ‘private’ lifestyle.” Published in 2016, when Trump’s election still appeared to be a black-swan event, Sorkin’s unholy trinity of Hitler-Hefner-Trump seemed a mite overwrought, even for The Nation, but hyperbole is the horse we all ride now, and some of the obituaries for Hefner cast him as a serious contender for History’s Most Heinous. “On hearing that the pimp and pornographer Hugh Hefner had died this morning, I wished I believed in hell,” railed Julie Bindel in The Independent, a hot take if there ever was one. “To claim that Hefner was a sexual liberationist or free speech idol is like suggesting that Roman Polanski has contributed to child protection.” Unable to express-package Hefner’s soul to hell, detractors deplored the final resting-place of his sordid remains. Reports that in 1992 Hefner had purchased the crypt next to Marilyn Monroe’s grave only confirmed a legacy of sexual predation. Monroe was on the cover of Playboy’s debut issue and helped make DEC E M B E R

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the magazine’s fortune, but the photograph was purchased for a pittance without Monroe’s knowledge or consent—she didn’t make a dime from the booming newsstand sales. So here Hefner was, fumed another contributor to The Independent, “the ultimate misogynist [allowed] in effect to shack up with a woman under the soil,” a necrophiliac image worthy of FX’s American Horror Story. Even in death, ruled The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, Hefner “continues to be a creep”: “The ancient toad … rests beside the ill-used beauty who was smart, kind, well-read, didn’t have an orgasm until the end of her life, and described herself as a ‘sexless sex goddess.’ ”

come not to praise Hefner, nor to bury him next to Marilyn Monroe, nor to dig him up and bury him somewhere else, a pet cemetery perhaps, but to exonerate him from the calumny of being Trump’s warmup act and the unwitting architect of our ongoing misfortune. Their dissimilarities are as telling as their similarities. Of the two, Trump is a much cruder construction. Hefner never sexualized his daughter, Christie, a former Playboy Enterprises chairman, as Trump has done with Ivanka since she was nubile. Hefner’s son Cooper is by all evidence a serious, thoughtful, un-braggadocious young man; Donald Trump Jr. and Eric exude eau de entitlement and pose beside the beautiful animals they’ve unconscionably murdered. Hefner was a huge jazz fan and a financial supporter of film preservation, cultural interests unshared by Trump, who has no cultural interests. Politically, Hefner and Trump are hardly fellow crooners, Hefner’s epicurean bill of rights in the Playboy Philosophy being something he evangelized for as a democratic ideal—everybody into the hot tub! When Hefner expressed glee that Trump had defeated Ted Cruz, that oozer of false pieties, for the 2016 G.O.P. nomination, it was because he believed it delivered a roundhouse rebuke to “their Christian crusade to eliminate all sexual activity that doesn’t lead to procreation” and signaled “a sexual revolution in the Republican Party.” In this, Hefner was sorely mistaken. But so were nearly all of us who entertained the notion that Trump’s metropolitan lifestyle, his lubricious track record, and Ivanka’s moderating influence would incline Trump to a laissez-faire attitude toward abortion, birth control, transgender rights, and other issues that hadn’t preoccupied him in the past. Instead, we got a spiteful Baby Huey on Cruz control. Whatever sins, dramas, and depravities may have been roiling behind the mansion

doors, Hefner was consistent in his convictions and advocacy. Detractors claim that the Playboy Philosophy and the magazine’s liberal editorial agenda were an elaborate doily to justify Miss November pertly bending over in ski boots, this patina of “redeeming social value” lending respectability to a prurient enterprise. But the range of Playboy’s libertarian positions—pro-druglegalization, pro-civil-rights, pro-freespeech, etc.—belie simple expediency. The Playboy Foundation, which gave grants to organizations involved in progressive causes and research (including prisoners’ rights), was begun in 1965, when Playboy magazine was firmly established on the newsstand and the cultural landscape and didn’t need to put on lofty airs for social respectability. On abortion, Playboy was in the vanguard. “Playboy was the first major national consumer magazine to advocate for legal abortion on demand,” Sierra Tishgart wrote in the Cut. “From 1965 to Roe v. Wade in 1973, Playboy covered abortion in almost every single issue, and advocated for the legalization of abortion on demand with no restrictions.” By no warped stretch of the imagination could Hugh Hefner be called a feminist, but considering what we’ve learned about a number of prominent pro-feminist men in recent years (saying the right rah-rah things in public, turning werewolf at dark), it hardly signifies. In their influential prime, Hefner and Playboy supported causes that promoted the freedom of personal choice that was part of the feminist project. It was an ally, and one of the reasons the political left finds itself on the perpetual defensive is that it has come to reject allies that don’t meet its ideological-purity standards. The sexual revolution and liberal social changes that Playboy championed in the 60s and 70s largely succeeded, and liberals have forgotten what it’s like to play a winning hand. With every Republican administration, especially the current travesty, it’s one long defensive crouch to protect what we’ve achieved, and with more and more ground lost. Donald Trump isn’t the fulfillment of Hefner’s pleasure principle but its betrayal, a counterrevolutionary not by design but because he doesn’t care a damn about anything except causing his opponents pain. Venus has been muscled aside by angry Mars. Where the rabbit ears in the Playboy logo double as a peace sign, Trump’s red Make America Great Again cap serves as a warbonnet. Who knows, he may even be buried in it, though not next to Marilyn Monroe; that spot’s taken. www.vanityfair.com

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LETTER FROM MONTREAL

After Margaret Sinclair, 22, married Pierre Trudeau, the decades-older prime minister of Canada, in 1971, she spiraled into madness. Today, with her son Justin in power, she recalls the affairs and the tragic reckoning that followed as she advocates for others battling bipolar disorder

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MICHAEL CALLAHAN

yan O’Neal, in those days, was still one of Hollywood’s favorite bad boys, a rake with sandy hair and a Pepsodent smile. He had already dispatched the hearts of Ursula Andress, Bianca Jagger, two wives, and a host of others. And as he pulled up to the entrance of the Beverly Hills Hotel on that day in 1979, driving a beige Rolls and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he was soon to do the same to Margaret Trudeau, the wispy, glamorous wife of the prime minister of Canada. Maggie—as her friends knew her—would later

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note that theirs was “one of the shortestlived, most exciting and absurd” affairs of her life; the 38-year-old O’Neal was “shallow” and represented “everything that was wrong about the way I lived.” And, boy, how Margaret Trudeau had lived. By the late 1970s she was an international sensation, the Holly Golightly of the Mounties, the wayward wife who had left Canada’s dashing, intellectual prime minister, Pierre, and their three young sons (the eldest, Justin, became prime minister in

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MOTHER COURAGE Margaret Trudeau, photographed in the Prime Minister’s Suite at the Fairmont Royal York, in Toronto.

LETTER FROM MONTREAL 2015) to pursue a life of glitz and unbridled hedonism that was splashed on the pages of every international tabloid. She had met O’Neal at Studio 54, where she was a regular (“He was sort of like Cary Grant and Peter Lawford—lanky and tall and elegant, just perfect lines everywhere,” she says today), and where she once memorably sat on a patron’s birthday cake. A photo of her kicking up her heels on the 54 dance floor—the same night in 1979 that her then husband lost re-election—was zapped all over the world, confirmative evidence of her status as the gold standard in reckless bohemian chic. As most of O’Neal’s conquests did, Margaret enjoyed frisky fun with him, tumbling for his mix of boy-next-door charm and a touch of menace. (O’Neal declined to comment for this article.) Until the day she taped an episode of The Mike Douglas Show and then went to his house to see him, only to be told he couldn’t let her in because his son was at home. Piqued and undaunted, she hiked up her tight leather skirt and scaled the high wall surrounding O’Neal’s mansion, teetering on black suede pumps as her driver looked on, suitably agog. O’Neal had been appalled, amused, and impressed, but not enough to hang around for more: things quickly flamed out. So Margaret Trudeau did the only thing she could think of, which was to stop for Japanese takeout, then have the driver pull over on Sunset Boulevard so she could toss the entire meal at a billboard for The Main Event, O’Neal’s new movie. I remind her of this story one night as we sit in the back of a car, on the outskirts of Toronto. It’s not a funny memory. “Oh, the

others, many just as shocking and scandalous and embarrassing. She’d rather not, of course, but she knows she has to. Because she has to be authentic, she has to tell the truth, she has to get people to listen, to understand that what happened to her is happening every day to other people whose foibles never make it into the Daily Mail. You can call it a crusade, or, if you’re a cynic, you can call it Margaret Trudeau giving a narrative to her past bad behavior under the guise of being a mental-health advocate. She doesn’t particularly care. She knows that she hasn’t always done the right thing but that she’s doing the right thing now. “I’ve had the biggest shame of all,” she says. “I’ve been locked away in a psych ward. I lost my mind. I’ve been humiliated like nobody’s been humiliated, everybody talking about it and laughing about it and joking about it. Just because of that, and that alone, means I’m the one to talk about it. Because they can’t throw anything more at me.” Nature Girl

argaret Trudeau sits on the lanai of her 1920s penthouse, near downtown Montreal, sipping tea. The sun-splashed apartment seems like the lair of a madcap aunt: a warren of cozy rooms with old country wood furniture and scattered stacks of books and photo albums. On the living-room wall is a framed to-do list dated May 22, 1980, written by John Lennon six months before he was murdered outside the Dakota. Among the mundane tasks (“H.B.O. guy,” “Marmalade”), he also listed: “Margaret Trudeau book.” He had appar-

BY THE LATE 70S SHE WAS AN INTERNATIONAL SENSATION, THE

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madness … ,” she says, trailing off, looking out the window. She’s come to terms with all of this, with her torrid past and its resulting infamy, and with her serenity about it all, which seems genuine and hard-won. But despite her fortitude, she cannot completely vanquish regret, having lived a big, wild, public life. “You look back and you wonder, How could I have? And yet you know you were trapped in the reality of mental illness.” Margaret doesn’t tell the O’Neal story in the speeches she now makes. But she tells 86

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ently intended to read Beyond Reason, the first of Margaret’s several tell-all memoirs. She’s lived that kind of life. Margaret Trudeau, at 69, seems remarkably calm—all the time. She speaks with the lilting, comforting cadence of a bedtime-story teller. She has a head of wavy chestnut hair and wears bright-orange sandals, her toenails painted to match. Her sparkling eyes are sea blue, full of life and mirth and sadness. She can be effortlessly charming and yet pleasantly evasive, like a child who pretends not to hear

when you insist it’s time for bed. Her brand of freedom looks forward, not back. You get the sense that she has done the work, much of it brutal, and come out the other side. But she also knows she will never again be completely who she was, who she might have been. And who was Maggie Trudeau? An adventurous young woman, who, at the age of 22, married a politician of 51 and found herself wildly unprepared for the fishbowl that came with being the wife of a national leader; a wild child who traded that restrictive existence for a glittering jet-set life that almost killed her, and for affairs with some of the most powerful and notorious playboys of the 1970s: O’Neal, Jack Nicholson, Ron Wood, Ted Kennedy, Perrier-water heir Bruce Nevins, and countless others, including a notorious cocaine dealer. And yet she never completely lost her wide-eyed wonder. Diane von Furstenberg, who socialized with Margaret in those heady days, recalls her as “beautiful, fun, vulnerable.” Indeed, von Furstenberg says that when she first met Margaret’s son—Canada’s new prime minister—“I had to hug him, this compassionate, powerful head of state. Because he reminded me so much of his mother.” No one knew just how vulnerable Margaret had been. Because for much of her life she’d hidden a terrible secret, even from herself: that she was suffering from bipolar disorder, undiagnosed and untreated. She would spiral into depression only to zoom up into mania. The outside world saw the dervish—the poster girl for the 70s’ louche free-for-all as she sipped champagne at the Savoy, roared through shopping sprees at Chloe, Ungaro, and Charles Jourdan, and sought love and sex from powerful men. “Self-loathing is the biggest hurdle you have to get over,” she says on the lanai, taking a sip of tea. “When I was living it up, no one could have told me I was as mad as a hatter. Clearly, I was beyond reason—I wasn’t thinking with a rational mind. That is the essence of mental illness: not being able to access the reasoned, judgment part of your brain.” A Free Spirit

argaret Sinclair was one of five daughters born to a Cabinet member and his wife. She was, in her own words, “a highly sexualized teenager” who drove a 1966 Beetle, smoked pot, took mescaline, and was obsessed with Keats. At 19—over the 1967 Christmas break—she went on a family trip to Tahiti and began dating Yves Lewis, 21, a French waterskiing champion who’d studied at the Sorbonne and whose grandfather was one of the founders of D EC EMB ER

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LETTER FROM MONTREAL

Club Med. One afternoon, on a raft by herself, she was joined by an older man, “clearly an athlete,” who had been slalom skiing nearby; their banter soon turned into a lively discussion. After they went snorkeling together, something struck her about Pierre Trudeau, even if he was 29 years her senior. His eyes, she now recalls, “were a very, very twinkly blue. He was very charming. He was an adventurer; he was a tease; he was so, so intelligent. And he had fabulous legs.” In 1969, while she was staying at her grandmother’s house on the British Columbia coast, her mother telephoned to relay that Pierre Trudeau, now the prime minister of Canada, had called to ask if he could invite young Margaret to dinner. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the scion of a wealthy Montreal family and had his own colorful past: at 28, in 1948, he logged more than 1,700 miles on his Harley, roaring through Europe before setting out on a world tour, during which he had been falsely arrested as an Israeli spy, hitched across Indochina in a military convoy, and been detained (for crossing the new and tense India-Pakistan border). By the 60s he had discovered politics, and his lithe good looks and easy way with crowds made him a J.F.K. of the provinces. As his political profile continued to rise, he dated beguiling women, Barbra Streisand among them. “I think Pierre thought of himself as the old Prince of Wales who liked the showgirls,” Margaret says. “He just loved to date actresses and singers and ballerinas, just for the weekend or a glass of champagne. But Barbra was substance. She really was. We had an arrangement: when I wasn’t going DEC E M B E R

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serenaded the First Lady of Venezuela with a self-composed tune during a state dinner. (What no one knew was that she had eaten some hallucinogenic peyote beforehand.) The Trouble with Margaret had actually started long before. Almost from the start, the unconventional Trudeau marriage had been jinxed. Plunging into depression in 1973 following the birth of her second son, Alexandre (called Sacha), Margaret fled Canada for Paris and Crete, hoping to reconnect with her more footloose side. She returned just in time to attend a celebrity tennis tournament in New York, where she quickly fell under the spell of Senator Edward Kennedy, cementing what would become a pattern of risky affairs with famous and emotionally unavailable men. The Trudeaus had a third son, Michel, born in 1975. Indeed, at that phase in Margaret’s life, motherhood was the only aspect that seemed firmly in her control. Her three sons grew up adoring their freewheeling mom, even in her dark days. “When I became a dad, 10 years ago, I remember asking my mom what the secret was to being a great parent,” Justin Trudeau recounts today. “ ‘Love,’ she said. ‘Before and above all else, be filled with love for your children, no matter what the circumstances.’ But long before she ever told me that, she showed me that, all through my life.” Even as Margaret found stability in raising a family, the social and political pressures

IN THE LIMELIGHT Trudeau, from left: with Steve Rubell at Studio 54, 1979; with husband Pierre Trudeau, 1972; in Montreal, circa 1979.

out with him, he could go out with other girls. But I didn’t mean Barbra Streisand.” Margaret and Pierre continued to date secretly, and then, in March 1971, they eloped to a small church in North Vancouver, where the 22-year-old bride carried a bouquet of white daisies and wore a gown she had made herself. But this young Margaret Trudeau, like Grace Kelly had before her, found herself unprepared for ceremonial duties and blindsided by intrusive press stories about everything from her pregnancies to her wardrobe. The media frenzy reached its peak when she attended a reception at the White House in 1977 and was practically burned in effigy for wearing a knee-length cocktail dress—and, worse, for having a run in her stocking. The next day, she dreaded the reciprocal reception the Trudeaus were obliged to host for Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. “But the feminists had been outraged for the way I had been treated,” she says. “The phone rang all day long. Elizabeth Taylor called saying, ‘I’m wearing short!,’ and Mrs. Carter saying, ‘I’m wearing short!’ So we all wore short, and we all laughed.” “Margaret incidents” became a staple of the papers, such as when, impromptu, she

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Unconventional Re-invention

he night of her sixth wedding anniversary, Margaret went to Toronto to see the Stones at a rare club date, at the El Mocambo. Dressed in a jumpsuit and a Pierre Cardin scarf, she left her table to sit at Mick Jagger’s feet as he sang and strutted. She stared at him worshipfully throughout the performance. The Daily Mirror would blare: PREMIER’S WIFE IN STONES SCANDAL. Being Margaret, she returned for the Stones’ concert the following night, and

reports surfaced that she’d hosted a party for the band in her hotel suite. (A few months later, Mick Jagger told the Evening Standard, “She is a very sick girl in search of something. She found it—but not with me. I wouldn’t go near her with a barge pole.”) She retreated home, then turned up in New York, where she hunkered down in the apartment of her friend Yasmin Aga Khan, the socialite daughter of Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth. As the Canadian and European press spit-roasted her regularly, she was, to the New York disco crowd, simply the newest “It girl”—fun, fresh, and fickle. “It had a Roman Holiday quality to it,” recalls nightlife photographer Patrick McMullan. “I think that added a kind of glamour. It wasn’t like she was doing anything bad—she was just out having a

good time. It was the late 1970s, a crazy time. It wasn’t as outlandish as it might sound. I mean, Lillian Carter was at Studio 54.” “She had never really experienced New York, never mind the most bohemian, fastest crowd in New York,” adds Vanity Fair contributing editor Bob Colacello, who first met Margaret when she emerged nude from a hot tub in a Tokyo hotel room and offered him and Andy Warhol a joint. Margaret later became a regular at Warhol’s fabled salons. Margaret had been intent on re-inventing herself. First, she tried her hand at photography, spending time with Richard Avedon in his studio, going to galleries with Warhol, even shooting a portrait for People magazine. She tried acting, landing the female lead opposite Patrick McGoohan in the film Kings and Desperate Men, a hostage drama. Then she went on a two-year lost weekend, stopping only to see her sons, then turning around to run back to the dance floor at 54, where Steve Rubell made sure she always breezed in. “I would get this call at 11 or 12 or even 1,” she recalls, “and it would be ‘Meggggie! We’re havin’ a big pah-ty tonight and all the stahs will be there and you have to come. I’m sending the cah!’ It was the most marvelous time.” In the fall of 1978 there were jaunts to Paris with Sabrina Guinness and dinners at Maxim’s with Pierre Cardin. (Guinness’s recollections of those heady times, she confesses, are a tad fuzzy, though she adds, “I do remember Margaret being a lot of fun.”) And naturally, there were the men. She met Jack Nicholson in London, where he was filming The Shining. Nicholson was publicly dating Anjelica Huston (who had also dated Ryan O’Neal—it’s Hollywood), PH OTO GRA P HS : L E FT A N D R I GHT, BY O SCA R A B O L A F IA ; C EN TE R , BY KE V IN DOW L I NG/ CA ME R A PR E S S/RE DUX

triggered downward spirals. She carried a fantasy of running away with Ted Kennedy, something which she knew would never happen, and shouldn’t happen, but which she couldn’t let go of. In hindsight, she now says, “I was just one of his flirts, and it wasn’t serious. But it was cataclysmic to my marriage.” She briefly checked into a hospital, but it didn’t help. Nothing did. In March 1977, she decided on a trial separation—a period she would later call “two years of mayhem.” Which started when Margaret Trudeau met the Rolling Stones.

JET-SETTER Trudeau, from left: in the South of France, 1978; on the French Riviera filming The Guardian Angel with Jean-Luc Fritz (second from left), 1978; with Andy Warhol at New York’s Le Club, circa 1979.

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but that didn’t keep TruFar right, with son Justin Trudeau deau and Nicholson (he in Montreal after his called her “Canada’s election victory, 2015. Margaret”) from romping Below, Prime around. “To me, he’s the Minister Trudeau, in Italy, 2017. example of what a free human being is,” Margaret says of Nicholson. “He didn’t tell any lies; he didn’t make any promises; he didn’t pretend. He simply was free. He wasn’t going to commit to anyone—he never did.” In the summer of 1979, she would make one of the biggest mistakes of her life: she granted an interview to Playgirl magazine. The result: a largely incoherent Margaret recounted that she’d had an abortion at 17; that she’d once spent eight hours sitting in a tree, high on mescaline; and that she was now in love with singer Lou Rawls, Alicia. Prozac helped—until she went off it. whom she had just met on The Mike Doug- She was busted for pot. She miscarried. Kemlas Show. “He just wants to take good care per went bankrupt. She ended up back in a of me. Oh, and I am so much in love with mental hospital for more than two months. that idea… Don’t you think we could have It was in the fall of 1998 that Margaret a beautiful chocolate-colored daughter to- Trudeau began her race to the bottom. On gether?” (Rawls’s publicist quickly issued a a fine October day, her son Michel came to statement saying that the two had not even say good-bye; he and some friends were gospoken since the taping.) ing on a ski trip. He told her he loved her, The most damning part of the piece? The got in his car, and drove off. A few weeks transcription of Margaret’s side of a phone later, the police knocked on Margaret’s door call from Pierre in the middle of the inter- at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal and told her view, during which she described for him the the devastating news: there had been an acpedal pushers she wore in the photo on the cident. An avalanche on the glacier. Michel cover of the New York Post that showed her Trudeau had been swept away into the icy dancing at Studio 54 the night he lost his bid lake below. His body was never recovered. for re-election. Ouch. “I mean, it was her son,” recalls her close The media fallout was immediate and vi- friend Ann White. “I just can’t imagine any-

SHE WENT ON A TWO-YEAR LOST WEEKEND, SEEING HER SONS, THEN …

BACK TO THE DANCE FLOOR AT 54. cious. Humiliated, she fled back to Canada and her children, where she went into relative seclusion, hoping to ride out the storm. It turned out that a worse storm was coming.

or the next two decades Margaret Trudeau went into social eclipse. She married again, this time to a German real-estate entrepreneur named Fried Kemper. She had two more children, Kyle and

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thing worse. She just went to bed and pulled the duvet over her head. She was just paralyzed. And it destroyed Pierre. He wanted to die. Everyone wanted to die.” Pierre did die less than two years later. At that point a despairing Margaret teetered on the brink. “I just went into madness,” she says. “It’s very, very frightening to be in that place.” There were two more hospital stays, and a straitjacket, and even a patient who once pointed to her and remarked to another,

“You see that lady over there, the one in the corner, crying? She thinks she’s Margaret Trudeau.” She didn’t want to live anymore. “Watching her, my superhero kind of mom, kind of crumble was really scary,” says her daughter, Alicia Kemper, now 28 and quite close to her mother. “I had to keep my distance [at the time].” “I think when you’ve lost a child, nothing’s that sad. And you get a gift that comes out of that terrible sorrow,” Margaret says. For her, it was finally getting help—and getting the right diagnosis and treatment. She also found a raison d’être: to make sure others understood the struggles that come with depression and bipolar disorder. “Many wallow in the grief,” she attests. “It defines them for the rest of their lives.” She claims she didn’t smile or laugh for five years. Then, in 2003, her son Sacha took the family on a trip to Cuba. They stayed at a beautiful resort, walked on the beach, danced to Lil Wayne. Margaret left the gathering by herself, and as she walked back into her hut she began laughing. And laughing. “And I came home,” she says, “and it was over.” On Her Own Terms

he 16th Annual Activist Awards Dinner was recently held in the headquarters of the Oakville District Labour Council, a nondescript brick building just outside of Toronto. Margaret had agreed to be the keynote speaker, and there was suitable buzz among the 430 who had come to hear her. One sometimes forgets what Margaret has meant to Canada, what she still means. These kinds of speeches are now how she makes her living, telling wry, selfdeprecating anecdotes—along with offering www.vanityfair.com

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nd she manages, through it all, to remain that barefoot Aquarian. “There [is] no pretense, nothing fancy,” says Brian Bowman, a neighbor. “She has a big heart. Huge.” It’s not easy to re-invent yourself as a serious person with a serious message after spending the best years of your life making the worst possible decisions, played out for the world to see and ridicule. And yet that is precisely what Margaret Trudeau, the unlikely Barbara Bush of the north, has managed to pull off, armed with perspective and grit and humor and the unyielding belief that, somehow, tomorrow has the potential to be better than today. One night, as I am leaving her Montreal apartment, she stands by the door and then steps toward me and envelops me in a giant bear hug, the kind seasoned grandmothers know how to deliver. As we separate she takes my face in her hands and looks at me with those merrily mischievous blue eyes. “I am not defined,” she says, “by the men I slept with.”

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OF MUSIC AND MADNESS

mad Spanish monarch who can be soothed only by the arias of a celebrated Italian castrato: that’s the improbable plot—based on the actual lives of Philip V, who reigned 300 years ago, and the opera singer Farinelli—at the center of a 2015 London hit soon coming to Broadway. Farinelli and the King opens in December with its sumptuous original set and most of its original cast. The Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance (who plays the king) and his wife and longtime collaborator, the composer Claire van Kampen (who wrote the play and conceived the musical arrangements), recently reflected on the emotional dynamics behind the story. “What happens,” van Kampen asked, “when two damaged people, who have been made kings of their own kingdoms, Mark Rylance come together?” Each personality is split: the king who rules and Claire van and the king who suffers; the peerless performer and the mutiKampen, in London’s Sam lated man. Seven arias pierce the performance, sung onstage Wanamaker by the countertenor Iestyn Davies. Is Farinelli and the King a Playhouse, at the musical? Not in any conventional sense, but music defines its Globe Theatre— character. A central question of the play, Rylance noted, has where Farinelli and the King to do with “the idea of music and harmonics bringing a disorfirst came to life. dered psyche to health.” As directed by John Dove, the show embraces a wide emoVan Kampen wears a dress by Stella tional register: stretches of comedy, moments of shattering sadMcCartney; shoes ness. It opens with the king in bed, holding a fishing rod over a by Aquazzura; bowl in which a live goldfish swims. The contents soon splash jewelry by Tiffany & Co.; hair products across the stage. Recalling the scene, Rylance and van Kamby Bumble and pen hastily spoke as one: “No goldfish were harmed in the Bumble; makeup by — CULLEN MURPHY making of this production.” L’Oréal Paris. PH OTO GRA PH

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prescriptions for addressing individuals’ and society’s mental-health challenges. That evening, Margaret took the stage to rousing applause and the click-click-click of cell-phone cameras. And off she went, in a torrent. People in Canada love to hear her speak because of their fondness for the Trudeau family, their fascination with the new prime minister, as well as their abiding respect for Margaret. She delighted the audience with tales about seeing Pierre that first time in Tahiti “in his creepy little bathing suit,” how she “took to marijuana like a duck to water,” how her mother did not want her to see a psychiatrist: “She said, ‘Oh, Margaret, psychiatrists only blame the mother.’ ” The crowd roared. For an hour she discussed the science of manic depression while unfurling a PG version of her own biography. (“In one of my episodes [I] ran off with the Rolling Stones,” she said. “I could have just as easily run off with one of the guys from the 7-Eleven.”) Afterward, there was a book signing, and a line of (almost all) women snaked down and out and around. Some had waited more than an hour for an autograph, a selfie, a chance to tell Margaret Trudeau that they admire her and, most of all, that they love her. “We don’t talk about policy as much as we talk about people,” Justin Trudeau says of his frequent chats with his mother. “Everywhere she goes, as she shares her story with Canadians, they share with her their hopes and fears, successes and pains.”

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PILLOW TALK Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez are “living the dream,” he says. Lopez wears pajamas by Brooks Brothers; bra by Kiki de Montparnasse. Rodriguez wears a watch by Patek Philippe.

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A Tap Back on the

Despite the surreal fame—and baggage—carried by Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez, their relationship makes perfect sense. Both started from modest backgrounds, hit the big time fast, and had to battle their own demons to survive. Visiting with the new couple, BETHANY MCLEAN learns about everything from their nerve-racking first date to the “reveals” that forged their bond DEC EMBE R

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t was just one of those things where you feel compelled to do something you wouldn’t normally do,” says Jennifer Lopez, explaining how she and retired Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez, who made their red-carpet debut as a couple last spring at the Met Gala, came to be a modern Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio—that is, if Monroe and DiMaggio had been happy, highly functional fortysomethings who had apparently done battle with their demons and emerged the victors. It was last winter as she was having lunch in Beverly Hills that she saw Rodriguez walk by. “I almost yelled out ‘Alex,’ but I am the shyest person when it comes to things like that,” she says. When she went outside, he was still there, facing away from her. “I could literally just have walked away,” she says. “But I walk over and tap him on the shoulder and say ‘Hey.’ “I had just come from a promo for my show, Shades of Blue [in which she plays N.Y.P.D. detective Harlee Santos], so I’m dressed like my character, like a boy—Timberlands, jeans, curly short hair. He looks

appy, naturally, has turned out differently from what she imagined. Just hours after Rodriguez met her in Beverly Hills, he called her, and they agreed to have dinner a few nights later. She told him that she remembered meeting him on a baseball diamond, 12 years earlier. Her then husband, Marc Anthony, had thrown out the first pitch of a New York Mets game, but the cameras captured Lopez and Rodriguez shaking hands and locking eyes. “You don’t have to say you remember if you don’t,” she told him. “Shea Stadium, during a subway series,” he responded. Just then, Rodriguez walks out of the house to join us on the patio. “I was telling her about the tap,” she says to him. “But there were two taps,” he says. She turns to me. “There was another very significant tap on the shoulder,” she says. Before we get to that tap, we talk about their first date, when they met for dinner at the Hotel Bel Air. “He was sitting there in his white shirt, very confident and manly, but

then he was just so talkative!” she says. “I think he thought I was going to be this loud person, but I’m not. I just listen. So he’s talking, talking about his plans, about how he had just retired from baseball, about how he saw himself getting married again, all these things you wouldn’t normally talk about on a first date. I don’t know if he thought it was a date. I thought it was a date. Then I knew he was nervous because he asked me if I wanted a drink. I said, ‘No, I don’t drink,’ and he asked if I minded if he had one. He was nervous, and it was really cute.” “I didn’t know if it was a date,” Rodriguez says. “Maybe we were seeing each other at night because of her work schedule. I went in uneasy, not knowing her situation.” He continues: “It would be incredibly productive for me to sit with one of the smartest, greatest women in the world, especially for a guy like me who is coming through tough times, rehabbing himself, re-establishing himself to folks out there. I thought it would be a win-win no matter what.” Then: “She told me around the third or fourth inning that she was single,” he says. “I had to get up and go re-adjust my thoughts. I went to the bathroom and got enough courage to send her a text.” “So I’m sitting there and he’s walking back, and I get a text,” Lopez continues. “It says … ” She looks significantly at Rodriguez. “You can tell her!” he says. “ ‘You look sexy AF,’ ” she tells me. They both laugh. “And then it took a turn,” Lopez says. “The fire alarm went off, and we had to evacuate.” I laugh, thinking she’s being metaphorical. “No, really,” she says. “The fire alarm went off!”

ut about that other tap. This one was metaphorical. In August 2016, when Rodriguez announced his retirement from baseball, with his mother and his daughters Natasha and Ella in the stands, four runs short of 700 home runs, he said, “Baseball has a funny way of tapping you on the shoulder when you least expect it and telling you that it’s the

Of their first date Lopez recalls, “I don’t know if he thought it was a date. I thought it was a date.... He was nervous, and it was really cute.” 94

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at me. I say, ‘It’s Jennifer.’ He says, ‘You look so beautiful.’ ” She and I are sitting on a stone patio at Lopez’s new house in Bel Air, overlooking an infinity pool and a lush green lawn with a double-size swing, which she points out is perfect for her nine-year-old twins, Emme and Max. The house is light-filled, sprawling, and warm, with wood-beamed ceilings, stone walls, plush low-slung sofas, big pillows, bowls filled with cut roses, and artwork by collagist Peter Tunney. “GRATTITUDβ,” one piece spells out. It’s a portmanteau of “gratitude” and “attitude” that could define Lopez. Wearing a cropped turtleneck sweater, skinny jeans, high Christian Louboutin boots, and impressive diamond earrings, she is as startlingly beautiful at 48 as she was at 28—if not more so. “We walked into this house, and I said, ‘This is where I want my kids to grow up,’ ” she says. “You have to imagine your life, and what you want to be in it, and I imagined we would be very happy here no matter what.”

A GIRLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BEST FRIEND Lopez and Rodriguez in Malibu. Lopez wears a robe by Ralph Lauren Home; jewelry by Harry Winston. Rodriguez wears a shirt by Tom Ford; bow tie by Budd Shirtmakers; suspenders by Brooks Brothers.

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IN STEP “Alex doesn’t let anything beat him,” says Lopez. “He just comes back stronger.” Rodriguez wears a coat by Hermès; sweater by Berluti; pants by Tom Ford; boots by Edward Green; sunglasses by Barton Perreira. Lopez wears a coat by Fendi; sweater by Vince; pants by Tom Ford; boots by Alaïa; earrings by Jennifer Fisher; necklace by David Yurman.

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WEIGHTY MATTERS The two put so much pressure on themselves “to do something great,” she says.

HEDTK Adele emerges from tk pool. Adele wears a robe by Burberry; earrings from Stephen Russell; bracelets from Beladora

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Lopez wears clothing by Valentino; shoes by Walter De Silva; earrings by Jennifer Fisher; rings by David Yurman. Rodriguez wears a sweater by Hermès; pants by Anderson & Sheppard; boots by Berluti; watch by Patek Philippe; sunglasses by Barton Perreira.

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Rodriguez’s friend Warren Buffett, the eminent investor, told him, “Always be a gentleman. Be the best guy you can be.”

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CAUGHT HER FANCY The couple met 12 years ago at Shea Stadium but didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t date till last winter. Lopez wears a gown by Zuhair Murad Couture; jewelry by Cartier High Jewelry. Rodriguez wears clothing by Tom Ford; bow tie by Budd Shirtmakers; watch by Patek Philippe; studs and cuff links from Beladora.

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end.” It’s a year later, and now, he says, “I’m thinking about one door closing and another opening, and if that first door doesn’t close, well, there isn’t that second tap.” Rodriguez’s story about the tap is a poignant reminder that this isn’t just another love story. It’s the story of two people with rich and at times tumultuous pasts, which are part of the reason they have a present as a couple. “We are very much twins,” he says. “We’re both Leos; we’re both from New York; we’re both Latino and about 20 other things.” “I understand him in a way that I don’t think anyone else could, and he understands me in a way that no one else could ever,” she says. “In his 20s, he came into big success with the biggest baseball contract [at the time]. I had a No. 1 movie and a No. 1 album and made history. We both had ups and downs and challenges in our 30s, and by our 40s we’d both been through so much. And more importantly than anything, we had both done a lot of work on ourselves.” Lopez, whose parents came from Puerto Rico, grew up in the Bronx, where she shared a bedroom with her two sisters. She famously left home at 18 to make it as a dancer, and burst on the scene in 1991 as one of the Fly Girls on Fox’s In Living Color, the hit comedy series. She quickly parlayed her luminous beauty, talent, and sheer workaholism into a series of starring roles, including Marisa in Maid in Manhattan, which grossed more than $150 million worldwide. Being a movie star wasn’t enough for Lopez. She also released a string of hit albums and became a fashion icon. In 2003, she signed a lucrative endorsement deal with Louis Vuitton. “Now it’s odd if you’re a celebrity and you don’t serve as the spokesperson for a brand,” says Benny Medina, her longtime manager, whom Lopez credits with seeing the potential of celebrities as brands long before it was commonplace. “But back then there were plenty of snarky comments.” In 2013, Lopez was granted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the following year she became the first female artist to receive a Billboard Icon Award; her net worth has been estimated at more than $300 million.

“There are people who put their feet in other people’s footsteps,” says Elaine GoldsmithThomas, who was once Lopez’s agent and is now a partner in her production company. “Jennifer had no footsteps in front of her, so much of the terrain had to be forged.”

here was a cost, Lopez learned. “When you have that type of success at a young age you have to navigate it, almost survive it,” she says. “I was the first Latin actress to ever make $1 million from a role, and you feel, Oh God, I have to do something great all the time.” There were the inevitable flops (most prominently Gigli, her movie with then boyfriend Ben Affleck) and three failed marriages, the last of which was with Marc Anthony, the father of her twins. And so her story isn’t just about astounding achievement but also about personal growth and resilience. “I was eviscerated,” she recalls about the press on Gigli. “I lost my sense of self, questioned if I belonged in this business, thought maybe I did suck at everything. And my relationship [with Affleck] self-destructed in front of the entire world. It was a two-year thing for me until I picked myself up again.” She has also conquered what was once her biggest fear: being alone. Last August, she broke up with dancer Casper Smart in an effort to learn how. “She’s a seeker,” says her close friend Leah Remini, the actress and anti-Scientology activist. “She’s always trying to improve herself, her relationships, be a better friend, a better daughter, a better mother, a better person. She’s not closed-minded.” If self-doubt and self-reflection aren’t what you’d expect from a diva, it’s striking how little diva there is to Lopez these days. Goldsmith-Thomas, who, in 2004, was diagnosed with Stage Three breast cancer, recalls that Lopez would show up for her chemo appointments. “She made me very popular on the chemo ward!,” Goldsmith says. “She’d bring clothing for everyone from her Sweetface line and she’d rub my bald head and talk about dreams. It was really important to

talk about the future because she wanted me to know there was one. That girl saved my life.” Rodriguez tells me that Lopez is happiest at home, in pj’s, eating chocolate-chip cookies with friends. She and Rodriguez like to talk in terms of “reveals”: the unexpected moments that tell you who someone else is. An early one for him, he says, was discovering that Lopez was “the role model for health and wellness. She rarely drinks. She tries to get at least eight hours of sleep.” He adds, “That helps explain why she’s so beautiful.” She’s also been willing to take risks to stay relevant, no easy task in a world where female stars are widely believed to have an expiration date. In 2010, she agreed to become a judge on American Idol, which some people derided as a comedown. But it worked. “Viewers who knew only an attention-grabbing siren met a hardworking, self-made, empathetic single mother,” observed Forbes. “No one from my team wanted me to do American Idol except Benny,” Lopez says. “But I felt I had something to offer, and in the back of my mind, I thought, Maybe people will get to know me a little bit better.” She adds, “With reality TV, you can’t hide who you are. You just can’t. It’s going to come through.” Rookie Season

s Lopez was becoming J.Lo, so Alex Rodriguez was becoming A-Rod. He was just 18 and the youngest player in the league when he made his debut with the Mariners, in July 1994. He turned in a series of impressive stats that galvanized the baseball world—like becoming the youngest player to hit 500 home runs. For the 2001 season, he was offered a record-breaking 10-year $252 million contract by the Texas Rangers. In 2004, Rodriguez was traded to the New York Yankees, and in 2007 he negotiated another 10-year deal. Like Lopez, Rodriguez is not a child of privilege. He too was born in New York City. When Alex was eight, his parents, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, moved the family to Miami, where his mother became a secretary in an immigra-

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tion office and waited tables at night. When he was 10, his dad moved out of the house. As with Lopez, success made him feel not comfort and security but a near-desperate drive to succeed even more. (And you can see how questions such as CAN ALEX RODRIGUEZ PROVE HE’S WORTH $252 MILLION? would foster that attitude in a young athlete.) “My No. 1 goal was to give R.O.I. [return on investment] to owners who believed in me,” he recalls. In 2008, his marriage to Cynthia Scurtis, with whom he had daughters Natasha and Ella, broke up, due to his relationship with Madonna, and his dates with stars from Kate Hudson to Cameron Diaz became tabloid fodder. Plus, there were the injuries: two major hip surgeries, two knee surgeries. “We’re both like this,” Lopez says. “We put so much pressure on ourselves to be great, to be the best all the time. We understood that about each other. When we came together it was ‘Oh my God, I was the same way.’ ”

odriguez’s career was ultimately sidelined by the steroid scandal, which rocked Major League Baseball in the mid-2000s. Rodriguez had earlier admitted using performance-enhancing drugs during his time with the Rangers, but adamantly denied he’d continued the practice while with the Yankees. After a protracted fight with both the Yankees and the M.L.B., Rodriguez was suspended for an entire season—one of the largest penalties in baseball history—in early 2014. “I was hoping the suspension would be shorter,” he says today. “I remember when Tony Clark, the head of our union, called me and said, ‘It’s a full season—it’s 162 [games],’ it was a knife to my ribs.” Rodriguez says he didn’t leave his house for seven days. “I thought I’d played my last game. I grew a beard—as much as I can grow it—and didn’t want to see anyone, including my kids.” I ask him what he learned during that year. “Do you have enough time?” he asks. As he talks, Lopez nestles into him. “I started brushing myself off, thinking, How do I come back into the world?” he says. The year off, he realized, could give him the chance to heal not just his body but also his mind. “I felt I could work on myself, understand why I kept making mistakes… In a weird way, 2014 will be the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced a paradigm shift.” He continues: “I remember thinking one night … Don’t know if I told you this, babe [he says to Lopez] … In the middle of this craziness, I remember it’s three A.M., four A.M., and like many nights, I couldn’t DEC E M B E R

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sleep. I’m not a crier, but I’m bawling… My pillows are now soaking wet, and it’s the middle of the night, and I’m thinking I’m the only fucking asshole that gets pocket aces and figures out a way to lose the hand. I was so angry at myself, so pissed off, that it was hard to breathe.” “How did you get through?” I ask. “Help,” he says. “The work I did, that was one of the most painful and most rewarding experiences of my life, and it continues to this day. I tell myself, ‘I’m rounding first base and going to second base. It’s a process.’ ” He says he decided to do like Rocky Balboa, to try to make the team “as a brokendown 40-year-old that didn’t have a lot of allies.” And he succeeded, finishing the season with 33 home runs. “I did that at 40 and 100 percent clean, and no one can take that away from me,” he says. “It told me everything about who I was.” When he retired, he agreed to stay on as an adviser to Yankee owner Hal Steinbrenner and as a mentor to younger players. “From where I came from, that honor is like hitting 800,” he says. This, to Lopez, was a reveal. “The most impressive thing to me was how he did pick himself up and take that opportunity to make himself a better person,” she says. “The hardest times prove who you are. That’s what I love and admire the most about Alex. He doesn’t let anything beat him. He just comes back stronger.” Each believes that if they had been single when they met, 12 years ago, the relationship wouldn’t have worked. “We had to grow and discover ourselves first,” she says. But it also works for another reason. As GoldsmithThomas says, “They weren’t afraid to dream, and they are still dreaming, both of them.”

he next night, Lopez is performing her smash show All I Have in Las Vegas. Onstage, she moves seamlessly from the best kind of sexy—with a sense of humor—to a festive Latin-inspired segment, to an utterly moving testimonial to her children, in which she sings Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.” She’s an incandescent performer, partly because, as Remini says, “there is nothing Jennifer does that she does half-assed. When she is in a project, she is in it, devouring it.” “A-Rod’s in the house,” someone from the audience yells. She laughs. Yes, A-Rod is in the house. Although he’s seen the show many times, he’s still watching every detail. He nudges me, pointing out a middle-aged woman in a pink pantsuit dancing ecstatically

to “Jenny from the Block.” Then he points out a gay couple in the front row practically swooning after one gets to touch Lopez’s feet. During a segment that’s all New York, with Lopez in a sequined baseball jersey, he nudges me again. “If you look closely, you’ll see what number she’s wearing on her jersey,” he says. It’s 13, his Yankee number. Earlier that day, she and Rodriguez were in Los Angeles at the premiere event for this season’s Shark Tank, in which Rodriguez will be the first Latino shark. At a panel where the sharks discussed the show, the @vf.com investor and Dallas Watch: A LIGHTNING ROUND with J.Lo Mavericks owner and A-Rod at VF.COM. Mark Cuban says, “A lot of us were pleasantly surprised that when Alex came in, he knew his stuff cold.” During the red-carpet interviews, Lopez, who is impossibly glamorous in a floorlength tweed coat and aviator sunglasses, hangs at the back of the crowd. “Does it feel weird to be in the background?” I ask. “Noooo,” she says. “I like it. Because I’m out there enough. Some people, it wouldn’t work—they can’t stand not being the one in the spotlight. But not us.” Back in Business

heir story is also a merger of business empires. Lopez, who back in 2002—way before everyone else was becoming an entrepreneur— launched her fragrance Glow by J.Lo, now has a big portfolio of business interests, which range from her production company to sprawling property holdings. Rodriguez seems to slot right into her world. From a young age, he sought out mentors who could help him build a business that would one day replace his baseball income. During his suspension year, he took investing classes at Columbia and marketing classes at the University of Miami. Today, A-Rod Corp is an investment firm focused on a broad array of industries, including real estate, sports and wellness, media, and entertainment. “I don’t have your traditional formal education,” he says. “Mine comes through reading and passion and grit and collecting a lot of information from my mentors. I’ve never been afraid to say, ‘I don’t know. Can you explain that to me?’ ” That’s echoed by hedge-fund billionaire Marc Lasry, who has invested with Rodriguez for the last decade. “What’s interesting about Alex is that he’s T E X T C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E

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LUCKY IN LOVE She wears his Yankee number, 13, during her Las Vegas shows. All clothing by Tom Ford. Lopez wears earrings from Beladora; ring by Van Cleef & Arpels; High Jewelry bracelet by Bulgari. Rodriguez wears a bow tie by Budd Shirtmakers; suspenders by Brooks Brothers; watch by Rolex; studs and cuff links from Beladora. Throughout: hair products by Oribe; makeup by Dior; nail enamel by Chanel; grooming products by Dior Homme.

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The U.S.D.A. headquarters, in Washington, D.C.

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li Zaidi was five years old when his parents moved him from Pakistan to the United States, in 1993. Later he’d marvel at American parents who agonized over the trauma that some trivial relocation—say, from Manhattan to Greenwich, Connecticut—might inflict upon their children. His parents might as well have put him in a rocket and shot him to the moon and no one made any fuss at all about it. His father wanted to study educational administration (“He loved the idea of helping to run the places people came to learn”), and the one place he knew someone willing to teach him worked at Edinboro University, in northwest Pennsylvania. And so the Zaidis left Karachi, a city of more than eight million Muslims, for a rural town of 7,000 Christians. “We went from solidly upper-middle-class to trying to reach into the middle class,” recalls Ali. The people in Edinboro didn’t have a lot of money, but Ali sensed that his family Harvard was a bit of a stretch, and they encouraged him to apply to Penn State or the had less of it than most. “The other kids University of Pennsylvania, recalls Ali. He thought they were trying to lower his expecIn the end he applied to Harvard, pay a dollar-fifty for school lunch and tations. and only to Harvard, because, as he put it, you applied to one place, why would you pay 50 cents—you know something “after you waste money to apply to other places?” admitted Ali to its class of 2008 is going on, but you don’t really know andHarvard gave him financial aid. Around the what.” There was no particular reason he needed to figure out what was going on. But, in the most incredible way, he had. Even as a kid he was interested in politics. That helped. He got that from his parents. “They spent a lot of time talking about society. Good and bad. Justice. About what we owe people,” said Ali. In rural Pennsylvania most people were Republicans. Ali became a Republican, too. “I believe in personal responsibility,” he said. “It’s exciting when people come together because of their faith to do something for their community. To care 106

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about something more than themselves.” In high school he volunteered for America’s Promise Alliance, Colin Powell’s foundation to help underprivileged children; he knocked on doors for the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. He ran track and excelled in the 400-meter dash. He was bright and ambitious and good at school. On a family trip to Boston he got his first, brief glimpse of Harvard and, without giving much thought to how he would pay for it, decided that was where he’d like to go to college. Faculty members at his high school thought

same time, the C.E.O. of America’s Promise passed through rural Pennsylvania and asked to meet with volunteers. Ali went to the meeting, and one thing led to another: before he knew it Alma Powell, the group’s board chairman, asked him to join the America’s Promise board. At the time he thought this was preposterous. The America’s Promise board was filled with the biggest names in Republican politics and the C.E.O.’s of huge corporations. “I thought it was crazy,” recalls Ali. “They’d fly me to D.C. and put me up in a hotel.” D EC EMB ER

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he Iraq War happened. Guantánamo Bay happened. Hostility toward his fellow Muslims found a greater welcome in his party than elsewhere. Yet Ali remained a Republican. Six or seven months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast he traveled there, with America’s Promise, to help. In New Orleans he saw poverty he’d never imagined. “They had to rebuild these schools, and the kids were effusive,” he said. “The thing that got me was that they weren’t happy because they had just got their school back. They were effusive because suddenly they had a school that worked in the first place.” If you had asked Ali, before he went to New Orleans, what he thought of people who didn’t help themselves, he would have said, “My parents had to start all over again. What’s the big deal? Just suck it up.” The sight of little kids postKatrina jolted him. “It kind of blew my mind: if you are in kindergarten you should at least get a fair shot. It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.” Now he sensed that poverty came in many flavors. He’d been lucky to have his particular parents and his particular community. He was reminded of the first time he’d run on a track with spikes. “You just fly on the track.” The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren’t. “There’s a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.”

He returned to college and rejoined the Harvard Republican Club. The surface of his life remained unchanged. But a new crackling sound in his head made the political program playing there more difficult to hear. One day he attended a debate between his two most famous professors: Michael Sandel, the philosopher, and Greg Mankiw, the economist who had served as chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Someone got up and asked, ‘If you are a storeowner after Katrina, should you hike up the price of flashlights?’ Greg Mankiw said yes, without hesitation.” Ali remembers thinking: Greg Mankiw is a good guy. But that answer is absolutely wrong. We don’t just have markets. We have values. “I started to think, Ah, man, I’m probably not a Republican.” A year or so later he listened to a speech by the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. One line from it stuck in Ali’s head: “Poverty is not a family value.” He worked as a field organizer in Obama’s campaign. “The biggest disappointment was that it was a little bit of a cliché: Harvard liberal,” said Ali. “Whereas my politics before were not a cliché.” Two years later he graduated from Harvard, and Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. Ali knew he had at least a shot at a very junior position in the new administration. “I had for whatever reason in my mind decided that I should go to the place where it wasn’t sexy but the sausage came together.” That place, he further decided, was the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. His first job in the new administration was to take the budget numbers produced by the senior people and turn them into a narra-

U.S.D.A. Organizational Chart

tive: a document ordinary people could read. One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the U.S.D.A.—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals people eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program; a bank with $220 billion in assets; plus a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its D.C. headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee-colony collapse. A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural America—including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. “I’m sitting there looking at this,” said Ali. “The U.S.D.A. had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town’s water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten.”

o prepare for the transition after the 2016 election the U.S.D.A.’s staff had created elaborate briefings for the incoming Trump administration. Their written material alone came to 2,300 pages, in 13 volumes. A lot of people who work in the DepartP R E –T RU M P A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

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ment of Agriculture grew up on or around farms. They like to think of the Department of Agriculture as a nice, down-to-earth bureaucracy. They consider themselves more bipartisan, and less ideological, than people at the other federal agencies. “Our plan was to be as hospitable as possible,” said one of the transition planners. “We made sure the office space was gorgeous.” To make the Trump people feel at home the U.S.D.A. people had set aside the nicest rooms on the top floor of the nicest building, with the nicest view of the National Mall. They had fished out of storage the most beautiful photographs from the U.S.D.A.’s impressive collection and hung them on the walls. They had brought in computers and office supplies, and organized a bunch of new workstations. When they heard that Joel Leftwich, the guy Trump wanted to lead his U.S.D.A. transition team, had been a

LILLIAN SALERNO Former U.S.D.A. deputy undersecretary for rural development.

lobbyist for PepsiCo, they brought in a minifridge stocked with Pepsis. That was just the way they were at the U.S.D.A. They didn’t think: How the fuck can people paid to push sugary drinks on American kids be let anywhere near the federal department with the most influence on what American kids eat? Instead they thought: I hear he’s a nice guy! No one showed up that first day after the election, or the next. This was strange: the day after he was elected, Obama had sent his people into the U.S.D.A., as had Bush. At the end of the second day the folks at the Department of Agriculture called the White House to ask what was going on. “The White House said they’d be here Monday,” recalled one. On Monday morning they worked themselves up all over again into a welcoming spirit. Again, no one showed. Not that entire week. On November 22, Leftwich made a cameo appearance for about an hour.

“We had thought, Rural America is who got Trump elected, so he’ll have to make us a priority,” said the transition planner, “but then nothing happened.” (The U.S.D.A. did not respond to questions from Vanity Fair.) More than a month after the election, the Trump transition team finally appeared. But it wasn’t a team: it was just one guy, named Brian Klippenstein. He came from his job running an organization called Protect the Harvest. Protect the Harvest was founded by a Trump supporter, an Indiana oilman and rancher named Forrest Lucas. Its stated purpose was “to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own animals.” In practice it mainly demonized organizations, like the Humane Society, that sought to prevent people who owned animals from doing terrible things to them. They worried, apparently, that if people were forced to be kind to animals they might one day cease to

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the work.” The career staffer running the transition politely declined to give Klippenstein the names, but he said he bore no ill will toward him for asking. Klip— as he became known affectionately—had reassured everyone by saying, to anyone who would listen, that just as soon as this transition was over he was going straight back to his small livestock farm in Missouri. Bless his heart! Everything on the farm was still normal! (And just you never mind why Uncle Joe likes to be alone with his favorite sheep.) It was obvious to everyone inside the U.S.D.A. that Klip was in an impossible position; no one person could get his mind around all the things the department did. Just a couple of weeks DR. CATHIE WOTEKI before the inauguration, Former U.S.D.A. chief scientist and undersecretary Klip was joined by three for research, education, and economics. other Trump people. The four-person team eat them. “This is a weird group,” says Ra- made a show of sitting down with some of the chael Bale, who writes often about animal roughly 100,000-person U.S.D.A. staff to hear what they had to say. These briefings lived up welfare for National Geographic. to their name: the entire introduction to the ne of the U.S.D.A.’s many U.S.D.A.’s vast scientific-research unit lasted duties was to police con- an hour. “At most of the federal agencies, flicts between people and there were no real briefings,” says a former animals. It brought legal senior White House official who watched the action against people who process closely. “They were basically for show. abused animals, and so The Trump transition sent in these teams in maybe it wasn’t the ideal place to insert a man the end just to say they were doing it.” who was preternaturally unconcerned with he Department of Agritheir welfare. The department maintained its culture normally closes for composure—no nasty leaks to the press, no business on Inauguration resignations in protest—even as Klippenstein Day. It’s the only federal focused, bizarrely, on a single issue. Not animal abuse but climate change. “He came in agency with an office building on the National Mall, and wanted to know all about the office on climate change,” says a former U.S.D.A. em- which, once upon a time, had been the site ployee. “That’s what he wanted to focus on. of an experimental farm. The building is now He wanted the names of the people doing used as a staging post during the inaugural by

the National Guard and Secret Service. Just before the inauguration a Trump representative called the U.S.D.A. and said he wanted the building to remain open, as he was sending 30-something new people in. Why the sudden rush? Why force the government to turn on the lights and staff the cafeteria and go to the rest of the trouble to animate a federal building on a day no one was working? Even getting people into the building would be difficult, with snipers on the roof and the Metro station closed. A member of the Obama transition team wondered how the newcomers could have been vetted so quickly by the Office of Presidential Personnel. Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees. Its reporter Jenny Hopkinson obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into U.S.D.A. jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scentedcandle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.” What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump. Nine months after they’d arrived a man I’d been told was the best informed of all the department’s career employees about the haphazard transition couldn’t tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. And what fingerprints they left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants, for instance, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. “Too close to the Obama administration is what people are saying,” noted one U.S.D.A. career staffer. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase “climate change.” They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department’s Web site. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the U.S.D.A. to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, “they told C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 9

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wanted anyone to see where she lived.” Chau has been working steadily as an actress since graduation. Coincidentally, it was while playing a supporting role on Big Little Lies with three other Payne muses—Laura Dern (Citizen Ruth), Reese Witherspoon (Election), and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants)—that she landed the part of Ngoc Lan Tran, an immigrant who has been, literally, downsized to five inches, in Downsizing. Chau said she was drawn to the role, in part, because the film gives a voice to a segment of society that is often overlooked. “My parents speak with strong accents, and there is something that happens where they become invisible, people assume that they are not smart, or that they don’t have opinions or a sense of humor,” she said. “The genius of Alexander and [co-writer] Jim Taylor’s writing is that they write very deceptively simple dialogue and it just packs such a wallop.” So does Hong — KRISTA SMITH Chau’s performance.

ST YL E D BY J . E R R ICO; HAI R BY DAVI D VON C A NN ON ; MA K E UP BY SA M A D D IN GTON ; MA N IC UR E BY A DA Y E UN G ; S E T DE S I GN BY AN D R E A HU E LS E ; F OR DE TAI LS , G O TO V F. COM/ C R E DI TS

l e x a n d e r Pa y n e ’ s m u c h anticipated Downsizing—a science-fiction satire that explores the choices people make to cope with overpopulation, threats to the environment, and the struggles of the middle class—stars Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, and Hong Chau, an actress whose career started with a plan to work safely and inconspicuously behind the camera. Chau studied film at Boston University, hoping the “technical skills” she’d learn would please her parents, who are from Vietnam. But after appearing in a few student films, she responded to encouragement from peers and dived into improv classes, which helped her overcome a fear of public speaking and a shyness that dates back to her hardscrabble upbringing. “I’ve always identified with Molly Ringwald’s character from Pretty in Pink,” she told me, “where she lived on the wrong side of the tracks and never

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Hong Chau, photographed in New York City. Chau wears a dress by Oscar de la Renta; earrings by Salvatore Ferragamo; hair products by R & Co.; makeup by Clé de Peau Beauté; nail enamel by Chanel.

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In a cruel twist, Joe Biden’s planned 2016 presidential campaign was upended by the death of its foremost booster, his 46-year-old son, Beau, from brain cancer. Will the former vice president make a run in 2020? With the publication of his book Promise Me, Dad, recalling that tragic period, Biden opens up to DAVID KAMP about the emotional—and political—challenges he is facing DEC EMBE R

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oe Biden, the former vice president, was four minutes and forty seconds into discussing his new book, Promise Me, Dad, when he got snagged on a memory. We were sitting in the den of his vacation home, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It was a hot day in late summer, and while his wife, Jill, and his sister, Valerie, milled around nearby in casual workout gear, Biden was smartly attired in a checked dress shirt, charcoal trousers, and black tassel loafers worn without socks—as if primed for an afternoon of shirtsleeve campaigning. In his genially raconteur-ish Uncle Joe way, he recalled how eye-opening it was, 25 years ago, to read Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, a chronicle of the 1988 presidential election that is considered a modern classic of political nonfiction. Biden was one of six candidates whose campaigns granted Cramer nearly unfettered access. When the book came out, in 1992, Biden told me, he spent four hours discussing it with another of the ’88 race’s also-rans, Senator Bob Dole: “I said to him, ‘You know, I looked at it, and there’s things in there I don’t like, but I can’t say they’re not true.’ ” Writing Promise Me, Dad, to be published by Flatiron Books on November 14, forced another of these reckonings—only, this time, Biden found, he had to be his own Cramer, confronting truths about his life that he had heretofore blocked out. “I realized,” he said, “how I engaged in the willing suspension of disbelief. How, until I had to write it down, I could not let myself think about the really bad parts about Beau—illness.” Beau. Illness. This is where the snag happened. Biden’s eyes suddenly flashed and reddened, as if he was seeing something in his mind that he didn’t like seeing, and he bowed his head for a moment. The reason I know the precise timing of this is that I instinctively did the same and, in so doing, caught sight of my recorder on the coffee table, its L.C.D. readout blinking 4:40. Joseph Robinette Biden III, the firstborn of Joe Biden’s four children, known as Beau, died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015, at the age of 46. More than two years later, and less than five minutes into an interview, his father’s grief was still quick to surface.

But not for long. Biden paused briefly, swallowed, looked up, and calmly resumed talking. Finishing his thought, he described how his second-born son, Hunter, helped disabuse him of the magical thinking that was fogging his writing process. At some point, Biden said, he had mentioned to Hunter some words that Beau had spoken to him two weeks before he passed away. “And Hunter said, ‘Dad— Beau couldn’t speak for two months before he died! He had a tracheotomy!,’ ” Biden said. “I knew that. But I had put it out of my mind. I could not let myself think about my boy in pain.” In Promise Me, Dad, Biden faces Beau’s trials head-on: the early uncertainty over what was ailing his son; the brutal diagnosis of the tumor as a glioblastoma (“the Monster,” as Biden’s own White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, called it); the hopeful period when Beau was responding well to treatment; the racking, lastditch experimental procedures that Beau stoically endured after his symptoms took a turn for the worse; and, ultimately, the death of a man who was not only beloved within his close-knit family but also a political comer, a popular, charismatic figure in his native Delaware. From 2007 to 2015, Beau served as the state’s attorney general. He was also an officer in the Delaware Army National Guard and spent a year on active duty in Iraq. Before he got sick, Beau had planned to run for governor of Delaware in 2016. Given his impressive résumé and widespread appeal—Beau, his father writes, “had all the best of me, but with the bugs and flaws engineered out”—he might have gone farther still.

urprisingly, given its central subject matter, Promise Me, Dad is a brisk, often uplifting read, a consequence of its author’s congenital jollity and irrepressible candor. The book is fashioned essentially from three narrative strands braided together: about Beau’s illness, Biden’s ongoing deliberations over whether to pursue the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2016, and the serious responsibilities, mostly in the foreign-policy arena, that he was juggling in his capacity as vice president. The action takes place over a span of two years, from the summer of 2013, when an M.R.I. scan first revealed the presence of a lesion on Beau’s brain, to the aftermath of Beau’s death, in 2015, when Joe finally decided against running for president. It’s a glimpse into a chunk of the past that is recent but feels impossibly distant, when the daily business of the federal government’s executive branch was conducted with sobriety and comity, the sitting vice president was sufficiently well versed in international affairs to advise Iraq’s new Shia prime minister on how to build a coalition with the country’s Sunni and Kurdish factions, and the biggest criticism that Biden could muster of the man then in the Oval Office was that he was “deliberate to a fault”—too reluctant to act on his gut. True to his informal persona, Biden usually refers to Barack Obama in the book not as “the president” but as “Barack,” and portrays their relationship as an initially uncertain alliance that developed into a genuinely warm and deep friendship. One of the few people outside the family privy to the severity of Beau’s condition, Obama served as Biden’s confidant and grief counselor, and even made an offer (never taken up) to assist the family out of his own pocket if the going got tough for them financially during Beau’s ordeal. Biden has never been a wealthy man; he is that rare creature in Washington who earned his living from a government salary the whole time he served, for 36 years as a senator and 8 years as vice president.

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I asked Biden why he chose to write this particular book, a relatively slender volume (250-odd pages) about a relatively narrow band of time, rather than collect his thoughts and produce, down the road, a memoir of his years in office. He replied that a big part of his motivation was to pay tribute to Beau—the book takes its title from Beau’s insistence, as he came to realize that he might not make it, that his father pledge “that no matter what happens, you’ll be all right”—and to help others who have suffered unimaginable loss understand that “one of the ways to get through tragedy is to find purpose.” But he also said, firmly, “I’ve got too much more to do to write an autobiography. For real. I don’t consider my attempt to contribute to the public square finished.” The Sheriff

ad Beau Biden never fallen ill, Joe Biden would have run for president. “No question,” he told me. “I had planned on running, and I wasn’t running against Hillary or Bernie or anybody else. Honest to God, I thought that I was the best suited for the moment to be president.” Is this uncouth, to bring up what-might-have-been political scenarios in the same breath as his son’s death? Not in the eyes of Biden, because the foremost booster of his 2016 candidacy was none other than Beau. At the time of his second swearing-in as vice president, in January 2013, Biden was all but certain of his plans. But that year Beau started to experience dizziness and auditory hallucinations while out on his runs, and then, on a vacation, he suffered a stroke-like episode that landed him in a Chicago hospital. That’s when doctors first spotted a tumor. There was hope initially that it might be benign, or that perhaps Beau had lymphoma, which is often curable. But a few days later, by which time Beau had been transferred to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, the family was informed that Beau’s tumor was a glioblastoma, Stage IV. The median life span after such a diagnosis, they learned, is 12 to 14 months. This news upended any certainty that Biden had held about the future. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2014, as his own resolve was wavering, Biden broached the subject of 2016 with Beau and Hunter, articulating his feeling that, given what the family was going through, it probably wasn’t the best idea for him to run. He was surprised by the vehemence with which his sons rejected that notion, Beau’s in particular. “At one point he said it was my obligation to run, my duty,” Biden writes in Promise Me, Dad. “Duty was a word Beau Biden did not use lightly.” Beau’s sense of duty was forged early, under tragic circumstances. On December 18, 1972, six weeks after Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident while they were out Christmas shopping. Beau and Hunter, not quite four and three years of age at the time, were also in the car, and sustained injuries that kept them hospitalized for weeks. Biden was sworn in from their hospital room. At Beau’s funeral mass, held at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, in Wilmington, in June 2015, Hunter recalled that his earliest memory of his older brother is in that hospital room, clasping his hand, looking him in the eye, and saying the words “I love you” over and over again. Whether it was the loss of his mother that imbued him with this trait or an inherent part of his character, Beau bore a sense of responsibility beyond his years. His childhood nick-

name was the Sheriff. “Beau was that child who always took charge of everything,” I was told by Jill Biden, who entered the boys’ life in 1975 and married Joe in 1977. (The boys embraced her immediately and grew up calling her “Mom”; they were joined in 1981 by a sister, Ashley.) Jill, now a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, remembers the young Beau as preternaturally poised and principled—a boy who, before he even turned 10, offered to fix a flat tire for one of her friends, and took umbrage at the inappropriate tone with which a gas-station attendant addressed his stepmother as “Honey.” “I always knew that Beau would follow in his dad’s footsteps,” Jill said. “He loved politics; he loved the campaigns, the picnics and coffees and parades.” Follow he did. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he went to the same law school as his father, at Syracuse University, and then eased into public life, working as a federal prosecutor and in private practice before pursuing office in 2006. By that time, he had been married for four years to the former Hallie Olivere and was the father of a girl and a boy. In January 2015, Beau completed his second term as Delaware’s attorney general. With his own political ambitions on hold, he became deeply involved in planning his father’s potential presidential run. In February, he, Hunter, Joe, and the senior Biden’s chief of staff and chief political strategist—respectively, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon—gathered in the library of the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president, to discuss a 22-page memo that Donilon had prepared. The upshot of the memo was that the 2016 election was Biden’s to lose. He was the right man to connect with middle-class voters about their frustrations and their aspirations, the argument went, plus he was endearingly real in a manner that seemed to fit the mood of the electorate. As Biden notes in the book, “My reputation as a ‘gaffe machine’ was no longer looking like a weakness.”

onilon had a plan completely laid out, with speeches in strategic states and a formal announcement in April. But Biden couldn’t commit to moving so fast. In that very meeting at the residence, Beau seemed weaker and more quiet than usual—a consequence, perhaps, of his increasingly evident aphasia, which sometimes rendered him unable to summon the words he wanted to say. (Through his friend Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut and navy captain, Biden arranged for Beau to work with a speech therapist who had treated Kelly’s wife, the former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, after she survived being shot in the head.) What’s more, Beau was soon to return to M. D. Anderson for another round of brain scans. I asked Biden if, by that point, the act of considering a presidential run was mainly an exercise in keeping Beau optimistic or something he was genuinely invested in. “Quite frankly, more of the former than the latter,” he said. “Because Beau, it’d be a play on words to say it would have killed him, but it would have bothered Beau a great deal if I’d not run because of him.” Other factors weighed on Biden’s decision. Shortly before the Donilon meeting, Hillary Clinton had paid her own visit to the Naval Observatory, to deliver the news in person that she was going to run for president. She asked Biden if he would also be doing so. He told her he was undecided, but that if he did he would not run a negative

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THE NEXT CHAPTER campaign against her. Biden writes that Biden and his wife, Jill. she promised the same. “Although some They ask themselves, of our supporters can get out of hand at says Jill, “What would times,” he quotes her as saying, “it would Beau want us to do?” not be me.” In the same period, Obama, too, had been trying to suss out Biden’s intentions, at their weekly one-on-one lunches at the White House. The president, in Biden’s telling, dropped heavy hints that, for the good of party unity, the vice president should stand down; Clinton’s political organization was formidable, and it was her turn. Obama further cited the excitement with which he personally was anticipating life after holding high office, and asked Biden, “Joe, have you focused on that? How do you want to spend the rest of your life?” All of these considerations fell by the wayside when Beau, after a final rally in late May, died on the Saturday following Memorial Day. Biden acknowledges this event in the book by reprinting his succinct, heartbroken diary entry from that evening:

May 30. 7:51 p.m. It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.

A week later, at the memorial service at St. Anthony’s, in Wilmington, President Obama, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, and General Raymond Odierno of the U.S. Army delivered eulogies. For the homily, Joe Biden enlisted a family friend, Father Leo O’Donovan, the former president of Georgetown University. O’Donovan’s words were arresting in their stricken bluntness. Beau, he said, was “gone, gone, gone. It was—is—like the night of Good Friday. The one we hoped in, counted on, thought our future, has been taken from us.” “I very clearly intended the parallelism between Jesus and Beau,” O’Donovan told me recently. “I didn’t want to overstate it, but people had such great hopes for him. What is that like? It’s like losing someone like Jesus.” And yet, O’Donovan said, reflecting back on that June weekend, “I lived for a year on the grace of those days—the undeniable presence of God in the midst of that sorrow.” What struck him most about the vice president, he said, was his fortitude. A day before the funeral, at Beau’s wake, Biden stood by his son’s coffin for nearly eight hours, greeting the ongoing stream of visitors who had come to pay their respects. “He changed his role entirely and became the comforter rather than the bereaved,” O’Donovan said. This is a role for which Biden has found himself uniquely suited. Having experienced unthinkable tragedy at the beginning of his public life, he was marked early as a survivor, a man to whom others can express their grief because they know he has lived it. In Promise Me, Dad, he describes how he explains to people in mourning that their sadness will last a long time, and that the smallest sensory cue—a song, a scent— may bring forth, in sudden and painful fashion, a vivid memory of the departed. And yet, he tells them, the time will come when the memory “will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes.” Biden found himself playing a new variation on his consoler role this past July, when he learned that Senator John McCain had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma, the same kind of tumor that killed Beau (and also, in 2009, Biden and McCain’s Senate colleague Ted Kennedy). Though they belong to opposing parties, and, indeed, faced off on opposing tickets in the 2008 presidential election, the two men have long been close friends, dating back to the 1970s, when McCain, not yet a senator, served as a navy liaison to the Senate. McCain told me that Biden had quickly gotten in touch after the diagnosis went

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iden spent the summer of 2015 in a peculiar state of simultaneously grieving and mulling a late entry into the presidential race. This emotional high-wire act reached its climax on September 10 of that year, when he appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and laid bare his ambivalence, telling Colbert, “I don’t think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president, and, two, they can look at the folks out there and say, ‘I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion to do this.’ And I’d be lying if I said that I knew that I was there.” FAMILY MEN Colbert, going out on a limb, all but Biden, his grandson pleaded with Biden to toss his hat into the Hunter, his son Beau, and Jill, at the ring. “I know that’s an emotional decision Naval Observatory you have to make,” he said, to the studio residence, in audience’s applause. “But it’s going to be Washington, D.C., emotional for a lot of people if you don’t October 2011.

run. Sir, I just want to say that I think that your experience and your example of suffering and service is something that would be sorely missed in the race… I think we’d all be very happy if you did run.”

art of what animated the draft-Biden movement was the joylessness of the 2016 crop. Whereas Biden is known for his wide smile and personal warmth, few of the candidates exuded optimism about America or seemed to enjoy relating to actual human beings. Donald Trump liked speaking before hangars-ful of supporters, but he painted a dystopian picture in which the U.S. economy was a “disaster” and foreign powers were always “laughing at us.” Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio spoke in only slightly less apocalyptic tones. As for Hillary Clinton, Biden writes that he felt a “twinge of sadness” for her as she departed the Naval Observatory the day of her visit. “The sage political analysts would say she was probably on her way to a historic victory—the first woman to win the White House,” he writes. “But she did not evince much joy at the prospect of running. I may have misread her entirely that morning, but she seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making.” I asked Biden to elaborate on this passage. “Everyone thinks it was just raw ambition on her part,” he said. “I think she was sort of a prisoner of history. First woman who had a better-than-even chance of getting the nomination. First woman, relative to the Republican field, who had a better-than-even chance of being president. But there’s a lot of baggage, fair and unfair, and there was no illusion on her part—this wasn’t going to be a Marquess of Queensberry fight. And so I never got the sense that there was any joy in her campaign. Maybe it’s me, but I find joy in doing this.” To be fair to Clinton, Biden noted that Barack Obama is not the most natural press-the-flesh schmoozer, either. “Barack would rather speak to a million people than speak to 30,” he said. “But I think I can do both. I really, really enjoy what I do.” All that said, a few weeks after his Late Show appearance, in October, standing in the White House Rose Garden flanked by his wife and President Obama, Biden announced that he would not be running. “I realized that I just wasn’t ready,” he told me. For one thing, he was not so naïve as to believe that he would be treated with kid gloves just because he had recently buried his son. “It was clear that there was a lot of negative research being done on me, coming from my own party,” he said, citing reports that the pro-Clinton political operative David Brock was gathering oppo materials on him. “The other thing,” Biden said, shifting to the grieving process, “is that the second year is harder than the first. That’s a fact. Anybody I know who’s gone through serious tragedy, the first year, there are so many people around you, propping you up. But after a year, your family, your close friends—I mean, it’s normal, they’ve got to get back to their lives. But then the reality of it sets in, in a profound way.” The shocking outcome of the 2016 election has led to some recriminatory moments over the last several months. In March, at the launch of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a new foreign-policy and national-security incubator affiliated with Beau’s alma mater but based in C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 6 D EC EMB ER

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public, downloading all that he had learned from Beau’s experience about the best doctors and the most cutting-edge treatments—“a lot of good information and recommendations,” said McCain. “And also, we had some wonderful conversations. When you have dear friends like that, it’s always very important, but the fact that he had just been through what he had just been through was particularly meaningful.” It is not true, as has been reported, that Biden also called McCain to lobby him to vote against the “skinny repeal” health-care bill that the Republican leadership was rushing to the floor that month—the one that was defeated after McCain dramatically cast the deciding “No” vote in the wee hours of July 28. But, McCain said, Biden did call him after the fact, “and he told me he thought it was a pretty laudable act, the thumbs-down.” McCain added, “If we’re going to really solve the health-care issue, it’s got to be done on a bipartisan basis, with hearings and amendments and votes and bringing it to the floor.” Two days after our conversation, McCain declared publicly that he would not support the Graham-Cassidy proposal, the latest G.O.P. effort to repeal Obamacare.

BEAU IDEAL By J O E B I D E N

he Biden tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving on Nantucket started in 1975. By 2014, the year after Beau’s brain-cancer diagnosis, the gathering had grown to include our three children—Beau, Hunter, and Ashley—their spouses, and our five grandchildren.

eau kept to himself our first day in Nantucket. His Secret Service detail had become really good at walling him away. He was easily fatigued and increasingly shy about interacting with people. He was losing feeling in his right hand, and it wasn’t strong enough for a good firm handshake, and he had been wrestling with a condition called aphasia. Radiation and chemotherapy had done some damage to the part of his brain that controlled the ability to name things. He had been going from his home in Wilmington to Philadelphia most days for an hour of physical therapy and occupational therapy and then an hour of speech therapy, all above and beyond his regular chemo treatments. It was slow going, but he never showed frustration. Nobody in the family, or among his friends, or among his staff at the attorney general’s office, saw him angry or down. It just took a little patience, and a few extra words when he couldn’t recall “mayor”: “You know, that guy who runs the city.” Or “dinner roll”: “Pass the, you know, the brown thing you put the butter on.” We got up Thanksgiving morning and did our annual Turkey Trot—a 10-mile run (for anybody who felt up to it) to the other side of the island. I rode the route on a bike with some of the Adapted from Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, by Joe Biden, to be published this month by Flatiron Books; © 2017 by the author.

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grandchildren. We spent part of the day tossing a football around the beach. I showed young Hunter, Beau’s son, the bluffs where his father and his uncle used to jump off and catch passes when they were about his age. Beau and Hallie and their kids made sure to get some nice pictures of the four of them together on the beach. And for our annual family photo we went over to the little saltbox house above the dunes at ’Sconset Beach that we called “Forever Wild,” after a carved wooden sign on its porch bearing that inscription. Jill and I first saw the house in 1975, when it was for sale. The asking price then had been too rich for a senator’s salary. This year, the lot was ringed with yellow police tape. The house was gone, a victim of rising ocean tides that had been washing away three or four feet of the ’Sconset Bluff every year for the past 20. Bad storm years might take out 10 times that in certain places. “Forever Wild” had finally run out of safe ground, and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic. The only thing left behind was a piece of the foundation.

e went back to town the day after Thanksgiving, making sure to be at the right spot around dusk, to watch the annual lighting of the Nantucket Christmas tree. Beau had proposed to Hallie at the tree lighting in 2001, and they were married at St. Mary’s church, in the

heart of downtown Nantucket, the next year. Hallie always suspected it was Beau’s way of locking them into Biden Family Thanksgivings for all time. And it worked. They were celebrating their 12th anniversary at the end of the week, and Hallie had never missed a Thanksgiving. Even the year Beau was stationed in Iraq, she insisted we all keep the tradition and go to Nantucket. While we did our family stroll, I found myself mulling an issue that was beginning to weigh on me. I was getting a lot of questions, from a lot of different quarters, about running for president in 2016. Even President Obama had surprised me by asking directly about my plans at one of our regular lunches a few weeks earlier. At some point on the streets of Nantucket that day, I brought up the question of 2016 with my two sons. I had a feeling that they didn’t want me to make the run, and I said as much. Beau just looked at me. “We’ve got to talk, Dad,” he said. So when we got back to the house that evening the three of us sat down in the kitchen and we talked. I knew there were plenty of good reasons not to run, and uncertainty about Beau’s health was at the top. And I really suspected that my sons, whose judgment I had come to value and rely on, did not want me to put the family through the ordeal of a presidential campaign just now. “Dad, you’ve got it all wrong,” Beau said. “You’ve got to run. I want you to run.” Hunter agreed: “We want you to run.” The three of us talked for an hour. They wanted to know what I would do to get ready and when the right time to announce would be. Hunt kept telling me that of all the potential candidates I

was the best prepared and best able to lead the country. But it was the conviction and intensity in Beau’s voice that caught me off guard. At one point he said it was my obligation to run, my duty. “Duty” was a word Beau Biden did not use lightly.

hen we boarded Air Force Two for the trip home that Sunday, everybody seemed happy. The five days had been a success in all ways. It was a family tradition to make our Christmas lists over Thanksgiving, and Jill had the completed lists stowed away for safekeeping. She and I arrived back at the Naval Observatory that afternoon and went up the sweeping central staircase to the second floor to settle into the casual living quarters we used when it was just the two of us. I sat down on our couch, in the one place in the house that felt as though it truly belonged to us, to relax and reflect. But there was an image I could not get out of my head. I kept seeing the little “Forever Wild” house, undermined by the powerful indifference of nature and the inevitability of time, no longer able to hold its ground; I could almost hear the sharp crack as its moorings failed, could envision the tide washing in and out, pulling at it relentlessly and remorselessly until it was adrift on the water, then swallowed up by the sea. No Thanksgiving would ever be quite the same. I pulled out my diary and started to write. I did have one big item for my own Christmas list that year, but I was keeping it to myself: NavObs, November 30, 2014, 7:30 p.m. Just home from Nantucket. I pray we have another year together in 2015. Beau. Beau. Beau. Beau.

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For more than three decades, James McMullan has provided the a seemingly limitless stream of instantly identifiable watercolors that unlock pulse of one of New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest cultural

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QUICK ON THE DRAW James McMullan’s first theater poster, for Comedians, in 1976. Opposite, the artist, photographed in New York’s Central Park.

NCE ARTIST visual curtain-raisers for Lincoln Center Theater—its posters, each production’s magic. MARK ROZZO explores the way McMullan takes the institutions, capturing the spirit of a city and of an age

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n 1979, the illustrator James McMullan was invited to mount a one-man show at the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. At that point, McMullan had been at it since the mid-1950s, and a retrospective was in order. His winsome, instantly identifiable watercolors, occupying their own territory between dreamy and brooding, along with his dashing signature—the eight letters of his last name rendered in stylish flicks of a sable brush—had been omnipresent in the pages of Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, GQ, New West, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and New York, where he was a contributing editor; on the covers of books (Borges and Durrell) and record albums (Poco); in corporate brochures and advertisements for everything from anti-psychotic drugs to Caprolan, a kind of nylon; and, lately, on theater posters, including a particularly eye-popping one for the 1976 Broadway production of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians, directed by Mike Nichols. Here, McMullan depicted the actor Jonathan Pryce doubling over in a paroxysm of laughter, his character no doubt cracking up at one of his own jokes. The image had as much bang as an exploding firecracker. It was an invitation to fun and hilarity, laced with devilry: the stand-up comic’s desperation and neediness are laid out for all to see in brushstrokes that are as exquisite as they are unforgiving. For the retrospective’s poster, McMullan now put his scalpellike skills to work on himself. The self-portrait he came up with revealed similar layers—the light lights and the dark darks. It shows the bespectacled, 45-year-old illustrator in profile, done in a wet wash of happy mauves and aquamarines: a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged milquetoast. He is surrounded by some of the

hard-nut subjects he tackled for magazines: teamsters, denizens of ratty Brooklyn discos. McMullan’s brush extends into a white void, where it sketches out a gangster character, a noir-ish guy in a fedora who happens to be pointing the business end of a revolver right at McMullan’s face. McMullan survived the encounter. As many New Yorkers know, he has gone on to create a seemingly limitless stream of posters for Lincoln Center Theater, beginning in 1986 with John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. He’s averaged about three a year since then, the most recent—No. 87—being for Dominique Morriseau’s Pipeline. The McMullan–Lincoln Center partnership is remarkable not only for its longevity, consistency, and amicableness but also for its visual imprint on both the contemporary theater and New York City. It might not be that much of a stretch to say that McMullan, who is hardly a household name, is to modern-day New York what Toulouse-Lautrec was to 19th-century Paris: the poster artist who sums up the spirit of his age. Guare has said as much over the years, and when I asked him about the McMullan/Toulouse-Lautrec connection not long ago, he emphasized the point: “I would repeat that! Those posters are a visual manifestation of what’s entertaining us now.” In person, McMullan, who turned 83 in June, is as unassuming as Toulouse-Lautrec was outré: mild-mannered and given to gray flannels, wingtips, and wire-rims. I brought up the 1979 retrospective poster—the nearest thing to a definitive McMullan self-depiction—with him at the recently inaugurated James McMullan gallery, in the lobby of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, at Lincoln Center. The gallery displays the original watercolors of an array of memorable posters—among them, Anything Goes, Arcadia, Six Degrees of Separation, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I—and a new mural by the artist depicting a crowd of theatergoers (including William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln) stampeding across Lincoln Center plaza ahead of curtain time. Is the self-portrait a metaphor for the treacherous act of picture-making, the drama of creation, the clear and present danger involved with every dip of the brush? McMullan deflected this overheated line of inquiry with a few sensible strokes. “Oh, I was just flaunting my effeteness,” he said. “By painting these tough guys, I found a way of overcoming them.” On the surface McMullan, with his self-effacing, wry wit, is Mr. Mellow. The man who is arguably the greatest illustrator of contemporary drama—and perhaps the greatest living poster artist—turns out to be decidedly no-drama. But creating poster after poster, year after year, with multi-layered input from directors, playwrights, and programmers, can really be nothing but perilous. With each new poster for each new Lincoln Center play or musical, McMullan’s daunting mandate is to create a work of art that unlocks the soul of another work of art, all while looking great on

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I MAGES : TO P L EF T, F RO M T HE S CHO O L O F VI S UA L A RTS A RCHI VE S /GL A S E R A RCHI VE S/ VI SUA L A RTS F O UN DAT IO N ; B OTTO M, BY DA NA SH AW /P RE SS N E WS GRO UP

A LIFE IN PICTURES Clockwise from top left: a self-portrait for a McMullan retrospective at the School of Visual Arts, 1979; McMullan in his N.Y.C. loft, 1958; at his Sag Harbor home studio, 2014.

a bus shelter and ensuring that butts, as the theater parlance goes, land in seats. (And doing it all months in advance of opening night.) McMullan is a full-time metaphor seeker, forever in hot pursuit of the perfect, single, framable image that sums up an entire, complex production. (“I’m like Houdini,” he said of his artistic predicament. “I’m in the straitjacket.”) So far, he’s performed this neat trick with a stunningly high rate of success upon a roster of playwrights that, along with Guare, includes August Wilson, Edward Albee, Clifford Odets, Tom Stoppard, Wendy Wasserstein, David Hare, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Cole Porter, Sarah Ruhl, and William Shakespeare. In the depths below the Lincoln Center theaters, hallways extend in every direction, lined with dressing rooms and rows of McMullan posters—the 41-by-81-inch “three-sheets” you find on Metro-North platforms and subway walls. It’s a virDEC E M B E R

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Poster Boy

tual underground McMullan museum. The actress and singer Kelli O’Hara has spent countless hours down there, having starred in three productions that McMullan has done posters for: The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific, and The King and I. “You dream of being on those posters!” she said. “The emotion that’s conjured up staring at those day after day: it can bring me to tears; they’re so much a part of my life.” They have also become a huge part of the life of one of America’s greatest cultural institutions. After 30-plus years, McMullan and Lincoln Center are synonymous. As Lincoln Center Theater artistic director André Bishop put it, “The body of work he’s created for the Lincoln Center Theater has been indelible. If we didn’t even put our name on it, people would know it was Lincoln Center Theater.” Bartlett Sher, the director of South Pacific, The King and I, and the forthcoming My Fair Lady, concurred: “When you think of Lincoln Center, your image of it is one of his posters.” (McMullan has done posters for seven Sher productions.) McMullan refuses to take any of it for granted, or to blow his own horn, or to slow down. “I’m on probation,” he said of his remarkable streak. “It’s my 30th year of probation!” 124

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hat probationary feeling may have something to do with McMullan’s peripatetic boyhood. He was born in Qingdao, China, in 1934 and grew up in Yantai (formerly Chefoo). His grandparents were AngloIrish missionaries who started a lace-manufacturing business in China in the late 19th century. During the Second World War, McMullan and his mother shipped out due to the Japanese occupation, ending up in British Columbia with relatives in the provincial outback and, later, on Salt Spring Island, across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver. Then it was on to Darjeeling and a spell at boarding school, then back to China (Shanghai this time), and then back to British Columbia. He lived in 10 houses in 11 years. One day in September of 1945, a month after the end of the war, while the 11-year-old McMullan was at school in Darjeeling, a soldier he didn’t know invited him to a local café for an ice-cream sundae. The two had a pleasant chat, and as the boy was finishing his treat the soldier announced that McMullan’s father, Lieutenant Colonel James Cornwall McMullan, British Army, had died in a military-plane crash. (McMullan’s youth is stunningly chronicled in his illustrated 2014 memoir, Leaving China.) Guare calls McMullan’s childhood “the key to him,” the reason he is so “quiet and to the point and terribly intuitive.” (Shades of that childhood filter into his Lincoln Center work: the puckish commentary on colonialism in the South Pacific poster, an out-of-place student’s alienation in Pipeline.) McMullan describes his boyhood self as a “sissy kid” and a “show-off.” He was a natural bully tarD EC EMB ER

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PO ST ER S COURTE SY O F LI N CO LN C E NTE R T HE AT ER ( CA ROUS E L , SI X D E G RE E S OF S EPA RATI ON, S OU TH PACI F IC )

GRAPHIC CONTENT Top, from left: McMullan’s work for South Pacific (2008); the cover of the June 7, 1976, New York magazine; Carousel (1994); Six Degrees of Separation (1990); The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1999. Left, Walter Bernard, Milton Glaser, and McMullan at New York magazine, early 1970s.

get. The relative loneliness of his upbringing, and his outsiderness, prompted him to take refuge in art: drawing a credible Bambi at age seven, progressing through superheroes, and, eventually, taking up a tutorship in Canada with a painter named Plato Ustinov, the Russian-aristocrat uncle of the actor Peter Ustinov. McMullan affectionately remembers him as “a bit of a hack.” Art school in Seattle and the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, followed. In the 1950s, McMullan mostly did book jackets for E. P. Dutton. DEC E M B E R

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“I would get $110 a cover,” he says, “and rent was $35 a month for a cold-water flat on Sullivan Street.” One initial inspiration was Norman Rockwell, but fine artists such as Ben Shahn and Max Beckmann made a decisive impact: “We went wild making many neo-GermanExpressionist illustrations,” McMullan once recalled of that time; many of them were for girlie magazines. In 1966 he joined the legendary Push Pin Studios design firm, founded in 1954 by Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel; a mock travel poster he did at Push Pin, “Head Out to Oz,” has all the trippy psychedelic touches you might imagine. Even so, McMullan’s style was conspicuously naturalistic and painterly compared with those of his Push Pin brethren. McMullan began selling illustrations to New York shortly after the magazine was launched, in 1968; by 1974 he was a contributing editor. (He left Push Pin in 1969.) During the 70s, McMullan became a go-to journalist-illustrator, his unmistakable watercolors and drawings accompanying everything from a Nabokov novella in Esquire to an excerpt from Joan Didion’s The White Album in New West. The subjects were frequently gritty: Times Square hustlers, pool sharks, “paranoia.” The big one was a 1976 story in New York about an emerging dance culture in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, written by the swaggering British writer Nik Cohn. “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” was an instant sensation. McMullan’s snapshot-like watercolors could only have C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 4 www.vanityfair.com

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IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTIE

t’s an English-country-house suspense thriller in the time-honored tradition,” Bill Nighy says of Ordeal by Innocence, a three-part television adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel, following last year’s The Witness for the Prosecution and 2015’s And Then There Were None. It will appear this Christmas on the BBC in the U.K. and early next year on Amazon in the U.S. The story is set at Christmastime, in 1954, and Nighy stars as Leo Argyll, a gentleman and an amateur Egyptologist. Nighy was first attracted to the project by, he explains, the “brilliant script, the director, the cast, and the period, and I’m keen on the genre generally.” He continues: “A large part of its appeal was

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the period—how much our relationships and social structures have changed, and the nostalgia and curiosity we all feel for what happened 60 or 70 years ago.” Co-starring is Anna Chancellor as Rachel Argyll, a perfect wife to Leo and mother to five adopted children, who is brutally murdered. “It’s a rather cruel Christie for Christmas,” says writer Sarah Phelps. “A nice murder, twisted deviance, and savagery—it makes you realize you quite like your own family!” “It’s about what kills her, not who,” Phelps says, adding that “women had become weaponized postwar—they were what we’d been fighting for, the perfect hearth, home, family … but Rachel kept a dark secret.” Execu-

tive producer James Prichard, Christie’s greatgrandson, echoes Phelps: “Everything’s perfect on top, but underneath the water everything is chaos. What I love is that it is really subversive, an incredibly screwed-up family at Christmas.” Nighy concurs: “All families have their ups and downs, but this one, bloomin’ hell!” Director Sandra Goldbacher was looking for “an All About Eve tone, darkly glittering old-style glamour and snappy one-liners.” As for the viewers, Nighy says, “I have a vision of every family around their TV arguing about who’s done it, because the audience will confidently suspect all the characters at some time during the show.” A perfect Christmas feast, then, and there are six more in the pipeline. —TA M ASIN DAY- LE WIS

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COSTUME S D E S IG N E D BY TR I SHA BIG G AR ; MA KE U P D E SIG N E D BY C L A IR E H AR R IS

The cast of Ordeal by Innocence: Luke Treadaway, Alice Eve, Anthony Boyle, Anna Chancellor, Bill Nighy, Ed Westwick, Matthew Goode, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ella Purnell, Morven Christie, and Crystal Clarke, photographed at the Ardgowan Estate, in Inverkip, Scotland.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY

JAMES FISHER

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IDE

When Ako Abdulrahman bought a used bulletproof BMW in 2014, it was the Kurdish soldier’s way of standing out from the crowd, not to mention protecting himself. Two years later—when ISIS invaded Kirkuk and began slaughtering civilians—Abdulrahman and his car made all the difference. JEFFREY E. STERN reports

FIRE WHEN READY Ako Abdulrahman in his bulletproof BMW E32 750i Security Vehicle, in northern Iraq.

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T he oil-rich city of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, was quiet the evening before the surprise attack by ISIS last October. On the city’s outskirts, a young Kurdish peshmerga soldier named Ako Abdulrahman parked his bulletproof BMW outside his house. The front line was far—more than 100 miles away, in Mosul, where the American-backed coalition had just launched the biggest operation yet against the Islamic State. But, in Kirkuk, there were few signs of ISIS. Soldiers traveled to fight elsewhere. The provincial governor had left to go on holiday. It was the weekend. But before dawn on Friday, October 21, 2016, more than a hundred ISIS fighters passed through a gap in Kirkuk’s defenses and began moving, unnoticed, toward the city center. Ako Abdulrahman didn’t know it yet, but the eyes of an entire city would soon be on him and his car. Bayerische Motoren Werke introduced its High Security line of luxury automobiles nearly 40 years ago with the philosophy that the best way to protect your cargo was to call no attention to it. A BMW assembly line in Dingolfing, Germany, was re-engineered with the special machinery needed to form ballistic-grade paneling and high-melting-point, ultra-strong metals into the shape of the company’s standard models. The cars were designed to look like any other BMW. In the days when the Baader-Meinhof gang was terrorizing wealthy capitalists, it was the perfect conveyance for an executive seeking safety and discretion. When Ako Abdulrahman, then 30, bought a used BMW E32 750i Security Vehicle, his intention was the opposite of the one BMW had envisioned. Nothing Ako does is safe or discreet. If he offers you one of his French cigarettes, he lunges forward with it. He drinks a cappuccino in three gulps. He listens to Kurdish rap music and likes it loud. His presence is one of urgent motion. Even his beard is shaped into an angular prominence that suggests direction. When Ako bought the BMW, the first thing he did was put a forest-pattern camouflage decal right on the hood—camouflage that he hoped would make the car stand out rather than blend in. He wanted it looking martial. Ako had been raised on stories of slaughter. He was born in 1984, and among his first memories was hearing how Saddam Hussein had gassed a village of Ako’s own people, the Kurds, killing 5,000 civilians. Even as a child he had a hair-trigger sensitivity to examples of powerful

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people punishing the powerless. He felt Kurds had been victimized by Sunni Arabs, by Shia militias, by the Iraqi Army. He hated al-Qaeda. When elements of al-Qaeda morphed into ISIS, he hated ISIS. For Ako, revenge was a cause, a calling. He was drawn to conflict, and to weapons, and in the part of the world where he lives there is almost always a fight to be had. At age 15 he joined the peshmerga, “the ones who face death.” He was wild on the front line, walking down roads without cover and slicing bomb wires without a bomb suit or even a flak jacket. At 17 he got his tattoos: three faint dots around one eye (a common Iraqi design) and a scrawl on his arm that says, “Life is torture.” Soon after the American military came to northern Iraq, in the course of the 2003 invasion and occupation, Ako trained with them. By his own account he killed a man for the first time in 2007, and by now he has killed a hundred men, maybe more. Once, he says, he beheaded four al-Qaeda terrorists. In general, the killing has gotten easier. Beheadings, he admits, would never be easy. It was a dangerous life, and after he was wounded in an ambush while driving home one day, Ako decided he needed a bulletproof car. He was at peace with the idea of dying in battle, but he didn’t want to die en route to one. A friend of Ako’s owned an armored 1989 BMW that he had bought in Baghdad and brought to Kirkuk; the friend said it had belonged to Israeli intelligence. Ako assumed it was really American intelligence. BMW, citing a commitment to “maximum discretion and anonymity,” will not say who its clients in Baghdad may have been. The friend offered to sell the car, for $10,000. Ako started saving in earnest, taking construction jobs when he and his peshmerga brothers weren’t on duty. In 2014, he took possession. It had a V12 engine, an aramid-fiber synthetic layer, and polycarbonate glass windows that didn’t go down very far but would stop bullets. Checkpoint

t midnight, ISIS fighters leached into Kirkuk and moved toward the center of the city, then split up and headed for separate targets. One group took control of a bridge and cut off a neighborhood that many security personnel lived in. Another took up positions surrounding a police station: the idea seemed to be that, when the attack began, police and security forces would rush to their station, and ISIS fighters would pick them off as they arrived. A third group surrounded the governor’s headquarters. A fourth targeted a government office building that stood next to a jail where ISIS fighters have often been held. This fourth group soon split up. One team occupied the Jihad Hotel, which provided a nearly 360-degree vantage point over the city center. Another approached an old synagogue on the citadel, across a river from the tower. The third scaled the office tower’s wall and entered the compound. Using a police radio, ISIS announced that it now controlled the building. Sixty miles to the east of Kirkuk, the governor’s phone beeped with a message. Najmaldin Karim, a physician by training, had been a light sleeper ever since his nights on call as a neurosurgery resident at George Washington University Hospital, in Washington, D.C. In 1981, after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, Reagan and his entourage were taken to that hospital. Karim was a surgeon who assisted the team that saved the life of Press Secretary Jim Brady. The information in the phone message was sparse: gunshots had been heard around the city. Karim considered, then rejected, the notion that it might be a celebration. There was no political party having an anniversary. None of the favorite soccer teams were playing. In a security convoy, Karim raced back to the city. Ako, at his home on the outskirts of Kirkuk, got his own call an hour after the governor did. It was Abbas, a friend and fellow peshD EC EMB ER

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BACK AND FORTH TO THE HOSPITAL throughout the morning.

merga fighter. Ako felt a surge of excitement, then doubt: Kirkuk was secure, wasn’t it? The fighting was supposed to be in Mosul. Still, he wasn’t going to let a chance go by. He took two assault rifles—a Kalashnikov and a G3—and a machine gun out to the BMW. The rifles would sit next to him and the machine gun would stay in the trunk—it was his PKM, like the one Rambo uses, too big to shoot from inside the car anyway. Ako had five magazines on a belt around his waist and an additional 3,000 rounds in backpacks. He lit a Gitanes cigarette and pulled out onto the road. Ako drove angrily. He had recently watched an ISIS propaganda video, which showed peshmerga soldiers being pulled into a city street in jumpsuits, bound and blindfolded. Civilians were made to shoot each of the prisoners in the head, then to keep shooting even after the bodies were curled on the ground, orange commas jumping with each shot. Ako put on a CD with his Kurdish rap and cranked up the volume. It was still dark, and the inside of the car was thick with smoke, because the air-conditioning was broken and the security glass would go down only a few centimeters. His first stop was to pick up Abbas on the way downtown. By now, ISIS fighters ROAD WARRIOR Ako and his had pushed deep into Kirkuk, so when

Ako and Abbas arrived, the city seemed deserted. The sun was just coming up. The roads were empty. Ako saw police cars outside a small police station, and he stopped there to ask what was going on. The station was empty. It looked as if the policemen had abandoned the post in a hurry. Then Ako and Abbas heard gunfire—small, tightly packed bursts, which Ako knew to be weapons set to automatic. The gunfire sounded as if it was coming from the other side of a riverbed. They got back in the car, and Ako turned down the music so he could track the gunshots. The sound led them to what appeared to be a checkpoint on a bridge, where armed men stood alongside police patrol cars. Something obviously was not right: the men at the checkpoint were not wearing police uniforms. In the dim morning light, from several hundred yards out and closing, Ako began to make out what looked like foreign clothing—the baggy, Afghan-style shirts that Ako associated with terrorists. And unlike most policemen in Kirkuk, these men all had beards. Then he understood: they were ISIS fighters who had stolen the patrol cars and were trying to divide one part of the city from another. Ako knew they had already seen the BMW. He decided to breach the checkpoint. He flashed his lights three times, as though communicating with the fighters. Then he hit the gas pedal. The ISIS fight-

BMW outside his house, in Tuz Khurmatu, Iraq.

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LOCAL HERO Above, Ako outside a house he helped move a displaced family to, in Tuz Khurmatu. Below, Ako and a ranking commander survey a peshmerga frontline position southeast of Kirkuk, Iraq.

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ers didn’t seem to know what to make of the luxury sedan hurtling toward them. They didn’t even raise their weapons as Ako flew past. With the checkpoint behind them, Ako slowed and again listened for gunfire. He and Abbas inched along through an old industrial neighborhood. He had the palpable sense of being within ISIS-held territory. He thought he caught little glimpses of it: a flash of motion on a rooftop was an ISIS sniper shifting in his hiding place. Then he saw bodies. Ten people on the side of the road, maybe more, lying next to a few stalled cars. Some were dead; some were wounded. Next to them, a young woman in black stood upright. Locking eyes, she screamed at him as he drove past—screamed about her children, and about the family members dead and wounded at her feet, and about the people in the cars around her. Ako felt something begin to stir. His preoccupation with fighting ISIS was displaced, for a moment, by an impulse to save those people on the street. He made a U-turn. Second Wind

hat Ako did next caught the attention of local Kurdish news channels and TV stations, and eventually even a few international outlets. After seeing these reports, I traveled to Kirkuk this summer to find Ako, and to hear the full details of his story. The first person he came upon was a taxi driver. Middle-aged, balding, and chubby, he had been hit in the neck through the driver’s-side window. Ako pulled the BMW up to the man and positioned it so the car’s armor would serve as a shield from oncoming fire. Abbas jumped out, using his open door for protection on his flank. He pulled the man from the taxi and into the BMW, sitting him upright. Ako turned in his seat and reached for the man’s neck. He worried his fingers through the blood, checking for a pulse. There was nothing. The man was dead. Ako did not want to leave the taxi driver behind. For ISIS, bodies were opportunities for propaganda—mutilated, celebrated, filmed. He pulled out and accelerated, racing north through the ISIS-controlled neighborhood until he reached Kirkuk’s biggest public emergency hospital. After dropping off the body, Ako and Abbas returned to the same neighborhood for more of the dead and wounded. Each time, they repeated the maneuver, forming the car’s body and the open door into a bulletproof V around the victim. For those hit in extremities, Ako tied tourniquets. For the others, all he could do was haul them into the car and drive as fast as possible. Ako and Abbas went back and forth to the hospital throughout the morning—two times, six times, eight times. From that one spot near the woman in black, he took in 15 people; 10 were dead by the time he pulled into the hospital. Soon Ako’s deliveries were generating special requests—people at the hospital recognized the man who kept coming back with more dead and wounded, and began asking if he could check on this friend, that relative. Everyone had a stake: by now, there was fighting all over Kirkuk. After eight trips, Ako and Abbas needed a break. They bought apples and sat in the car to eat and smoke. But people wouldn’t leave them alone: throughout the city, victims needed help. Ako told the people coming to his window that he was too tired. They

could take the car if they wanted. No one took him up on the offer. They wanted the car, but they wanted the driver with it. In early afternoon, Abbas picked up a call from a friend trapped in the southern part of Kirkuk: a construction worker who had slept in the house he was working on the night before, and who woke to find himself in the middle of the siege. The man was pinned down. This meant that rescuing him was also a chance to fight. Ako got a second wind. Driving south back toward the outskirts of the city, he and Abbas honed in on the shooter’s position by tracking the sound of gunfire and found him well positioned in an upper window at the corner of a block. Ako saw a nearby house he liked with a high roof and good lines of sight. He stopped the car, got out, and charged through the front door without knocking, Abbas right on his heels. He yelled in Arabic at the Arab family, “Don’t be afraid!,” and found stairs up to the family’s roof. From there he could see the shooter’s position but had a bad angle. He leapt to the next house, moving closer to the shooter, but still had no shot. He lowered himself off the roof and dropped to the ground, then ran to press himself up against a wall near the shooter, but still didn’t have a good angle. He reached for a cigarette, remembered he’d left them in the car, and got an idea. He and Abbas got back in the BMW. Ako swung around the block and then accelerated straight toward the shooter’s position, stopping only when he was almost directly underneath the window. Abbas cracked the passenger door open and held his Kalashnikov rifle in the narrow V between the door and the windshield, firing single shots with a slow rhythm. The return fire dented the paneling and left impressions on the windshield but didn’t penetrate. As Abbas kept the shooter occupied, Ako focused on the muzzle flashes coming from the window. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, switched his fire selector to full automatic, opened the door, jumped out, and squeezed. Before the shooter could shift his attention away from the passenger side, Ako had fired 30 rounds of electric-red tracer bullets at the window. The house went silent.

irkuk was now in chaos. ISIS was killing people everywhere. The attackers had detonated three suicide bombs at a power station near the oil fields and had killed 15 workers there. In the heart of the city, they had slipped into houses and high buildings surrounding the most strategic sites. Anyone who hadn’t been awakened by gunfire and explosions woke to ISIS on mosque loudspeakers, announcing that Kirkuk was now part of the Islamic State. Reinforcements coming to help with a counterattack were running into their own troubles. A peshmerga unit west of the city was under fire. A counterterrorism unit coming from the east drove into an ISIS ambush. The U.S.-run ISIS strike center in Baghdad was hamstrung. It was coordinating air assets all over Iraq—manned and unmanned, land- and carrier-based—and could both conduct surveillance and mount an attack. But it had been monitoring a 24-hour feed of Mosul—there’d been no reason to pay much attention to Kirkuk. In any case, once ISIS had infiltrated the city, C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 8

HIS BULLET-RIDDLED CAR could be seen entering and exiting the frame on TV.

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SISTERS ACT Ladies Eliza, Alice, and Violet Manners in the Elizabeth Saloon of Belvoir Castle, their family home, in Leicestershire, England. ST YLE D BY FI ON A S CA R RY; F OR D E TA IL S, G O TO VF. CO M/C RE D ITS

Eliza wears shoes by Manolo Blahnik. Alice wears a dress by Erdem. Violet wears a dress by Fendi; shoes by Jimmy Choo. All jewelry by Delfina Delettrez.

If Britain’s aristocracy has an answer to the Kardashians, it’s the Manners for the tabloids—as have the domestic arrangements of their parents, the 11th both with new partners. Yet behind the Mannerses’ disregard for certain pro 134

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sisters: Lady Violet, Lady Alice, and Lady Eliza, whose antics have been grist Duke and Duchess of Rutland, who continue to share the family seat, Belvoir Castle, prieties, as JAMES REGINATO learns, is a deep commitment to their heritage DEC EMBE R

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n 1066, their progenitor Robert de Tosni sailed across the English Channel from France with William the Conqueror and helped slaughter thousands of Anglo-Saxon troops at the Battle of Hastings, thus beginning the Norman Conquest of England. Today, the three Manners sisters are continuing the family tradition of storming the ramparts, but this time they are taking on the London social scene. In their rarefied world, the lively and alluring daughters of David and Emma Manners, Their Graces the 11th Duke and Duchess of Rutland—Lady Violet, 24; Lady Alice, 22; and Lady Eliza, 20— just might be the equivalent of the Kardashians. There is little the busy sisters don’t share with the world on their Instagram accounts (@mannersviolet, @mannersalice, and @elizamanners). Amid an abundance of cleavage, bikinis, and louche pouts there are shots of them participating in, among other activities: shooting, riding, skiing, yachting, car racing, scuba diving, skydiving, dancing, and safaris. And, inevitably, partying. THE BAD MANNERS SISTERS OF BRITISH HIGH SOCIETY: DUKE OF RUTLAND’S LEGGY, LOUD AND FRIGHTFULLY NAUGHTY DAUGHTERS WHO MAKE DOWNTON’S CRAWLEY SISTERS LOOK LIKE ANGELS was the headline of a Daily Mail piece. DUKE OF RUTLAND’S DAUGHTERS INFURIATE NEIGHBOURS WITH WILD “ALL-NIGHT” PARTIES, proclaimed The Telegraph. Their family seat is Belvoir Castle—a palatial, multi-towered-andturreted 356-room behemoth on a 16,000-acre estate in Leicestershire stocked with pictures by van Dyck, Holbein, Poussin, and Reynolds. But the ruckus that landed them in the tabloids emanated from a five-bedroom town house owned by the family in the Fulham district of London. “The Pussy Palace,” as it has been called, had become party central for the sisters and their circle of young aristocrats and offspring of the elite, which includes Lady Kitty Spencer (daughter of Earl Spencer); Lady Melissa Percy (daughter of the Duke of Northumberland); Lady Isabella Innes-Ker (daughter of the Duke of Roxburghe); Freddie and A TURRET Sophia Hesketh (their father is the third Baron AFFAIR Hesketh); Tara, Isaac, and Otis Ferry (sons of Belvoir Castle, Bryan Ferry); and Gus Cameron (nephew of the comprising 356 rooms, has been former prime minister David Cameron). the family seat for “I don’t know what they do [inside], it’s like the Earls and they have elephants in the house,” complained Dukes of Rutland Jackie Elliot—a resident of the heretofore transince 1509. D E CEMBE R

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THE D UCHE SS OF RU TL AN D â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S D RE S S BY CHR I ST IA N D I OR; TOP BY L AN V IN ; SHOE S BY NI CHO L A S K IR K WOOD ; E A RR I N GS BY D E L FI NA D E LE TTR E Z . PH OTOG R AP HS BY DA F YD D J ON E S ( 2 ) , J ON ATHA N B E CKE R ( ALL OT HER S). ART WOR K BY N OR MA N HE P PLE / B E LVOI R C A ST LE / BR I DG E MA N IMAG E S ( 4 ). F OR D E TA I LS , G O TO VF.COM/ CR ED ITS

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LEAVE IT TO BELVOIR (1) A Belvoir guest bedroom. (2) A masked Eliza at her circus-themed 18thbirthday party with brother Lord Hugo (in clown costume), 2015. (3) Servants’ bells. (4) A Norman Hepple portrait of a four-yearold David Manners, now the 11th Duke of Rutland, with his father, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, 1963. (5) The castle’s grounds, designed by Capability Brown. (6) The Duchess of Rutland in the upstairs gallery.

“It’s a very modern arrangement—yet very French 18th-century at the same time,” says Nicky Haslam of the duke and duchess. DEC EMBE R

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quil block—to the Telegraph. “Loud music, people coming and going very late … shouting, cars arriving, cars going.” Her notes to Lady Violet drew mixed results: apologies, “on occasions,” which “never prevented callous repetition,” said Elliot. Things blew up in the press when Vi posted online a photo of a letter Elliot had sent to the Duke, followed by cheeky commentary between Violet and her friends.

ive years ago, the girls’ parents—David, 58, and Emma, 54—generated headlines of their own. “ ‘The Duke of Rutland and I are separating … but we’ll live together in our castle and have new partners’: Duchess’s remarkable response to her husband’s infidelity” was the lead in a September 2012 Daily Mail piece written by the duchess herself, in which she revealed she had busted the duke with two girlfriends over a 10-year stretch, which left her “wretched, angry and bitter.” But she got over it—and began “a relationship of my own with a man who works on the estate.” The gentleman in question, it was later discovered, is Phil Burtt, 63, who had arrived at Belvoir in 2008 to manage the game shoot and went on to become the estate manager. The upstairs-downstairs romance prompted predictable comparisons to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Today, domestic tranquillity reigns at Belvoir, 120 miles from London. It helps to live under a twoand-a-half-acre roof: there is no need for anybody to move out. The duchess occupies the Nursery Wing, while the duke resides in Shepherd’s Tower, where he can entertain with his girlfriend, Andréa Dubeux Webb, an elegant fiftyPUT UP something Brazilian national who occupies YOUR DUKE a property on the estate, as does Burtt. (1) David Manners, Designer Nicky Haslam sizes up the situthe 11th Duke ation: “It’s a very modern arrangement—yet of Rutland. (2) The servants’ bell for very French 18th-century at the same time.” the King’s Dressing Following their 1992 wedding, at Belvoir, Room. (3) The the then Marquess and Marchioness of entrance to the duke’s Granby settled into a Victorian manor quarters. (4) Old English hounds house on the edge of the estate and started in their James Wyatt– having children—Violet, born in 1993, foldesigned kennels. lowed by Alice, in 1995, and Eliza, in 1997. (5) A 1908 Renault acquired by the ninth Then two boys—Charles, in 1999, and earl. (6) The State Hugo, in 2003. On January 1, 1999, the Dining Room. young family’s cozy world was transformed, upon the death at age 79 of David’s father, Charles, the 10th duke. (Barbara Cartland once described him as “absolutely stunning—the most attractive man I have seen in all my life” and “exactly the sort of man who appears as the hero in all my books.”) David and Emma became the 11th Duke and Duchess of Rutland, and tradition called for them to move into the castle. The new duchess quickly rolled up her sleeves and took the reins of the estate. “I had to get ahold of this monster and make it work,” she explains. “It’s a great big machine.” She quickly laid off about half of the 350-person staff and began to make a brand out of Belvoir, with herself as its very successful

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bviously, it’s not going to be a normal childhood,” says Lady Violet as we sit down for a chat with her sisters. “When we moved in here, it was pretty terrifying. For anyone it would have been scary, but to an eight-year-old it was quite daunting.” It took seven minutes’ fast-walking to get from her bedroom to the front door, which involved passing through vast chambers decorated with enough menacing swords, muskets, and cannons to wage any battle. But soon enough the girls discovered there were advantages to living in a castle. Like being able to scare the tourists. “We had

“We know how to have fun and party— but we know how to get up the next morning and go to work,” says Violet.

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some real laughs—so much fun being realTRIPLE PLAYERS ly naughty,” says Violet as she recalls some Opposite, Alice, of their youthful high jinks, such as hiding Violet, and Eliza in the Pre-Guardroom. under the enormous four-poster bed in Bottom, Violet, the room Queen Victoria slept in. When Eliza, and Alice at a group of tourists passed by with a guide, Eliza’s 18ththe sisters would suddenly shoot their birthday party. hands out from underneath the bed, makOpposite, Alice wears ing some tourists jump in fright—and earna sweater by ing the girls “a bollocking,” as Violet puts Alexander McQueen. Violet wears a sweater it, from the guides once the tourists had left by Christian Dior. the room. Another favorite pastime was to Eliza wears a dress, boots, and belt shoot paper darts down from the upper by Hermès. Throughout: gallery of the chapel. hair products “It certainly made it interesting for by Oribe; makeup by Bobbi Brown. them,” says Eliza, referring to the unsuspecting visitors. Their fun and games weren’t incompatible with entrepreneurship. There were many opportunities at the castle to supplement their allowances, they discovered, from inviting young visitors to take a ride in their miniature electric cars (for 50 pence) to “flogging,” according to Alice, their old toys on the lawn. Eliza helped man the little gift shop, selling postcards and souvenirs (“I said, ‘Right—how many hours do I have to work to buy an iPod?’ ”), while Violet ran an ice-cream shop (“My math wasn’t brilliant,” she confesses. “I wound up overcharging”). Arithmetic aside—and contrary to expectations one has after reading their press clippings—the sisters possess a strong work ethic, which goes hand in glove, as it were, with their social life. “It’s the upstairs-downstairs thing,” observes Eliza. “Mum always instilled in us that you can have as much fun as you like upstairs. But when we’re downstairs we have to work—to understand that this estate is a business and we have to immerse ourselves in it.” “We love nothing better than having a party,” comments Alice. “Put us on a mountaintop or in a ballroom, we’ll have a good time. But partying is not the be-all of our lives. We realize the value of work, not just money-wise but mentally. It keeps you sane.” “It is part of our upbringing that we know how to have fun and party—but we know how to get up the next morning at nine o’clock and go to work,” says Violet. “I’ve never missed a day of work. Life is about getting the balance right.” All three girls attended the posh, $39,000-per-year, all-girls Queen Margaret’s boarding school, in York. Eliza is now entering her second year at Newcastle University, where she is studying business management and pursuing her interests in acting and singing. (Her elder sisters skipped university.) Violet, who has been employed at My Beautiful City, a creative agency in Soho, just started her own marketing and brand-strategy consultancy. Alice, who attended the Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design, is a model, stylist, and personal shopper at Selfridges and writes a fashion column in The Sunday Telegraph. A recent feature about her in The Telegraph, headlined WHY LADY ALICE MANNERS IS FASHION’S NEW NAME TO WATCH, called her “supremely stylish.” Though they have all left the nest, they come back to Belvoir most weekends. During the daytime, it’s all about shooting and riding. The Belvoir Hunt, founded around 1730, is among the U.K.’s toniest fox hunts; the Duke of Rutland’s pack of purebred Old English hounds—one of the last in England—is housed in the octagonal-roofed Belvoir Hunt kennels, designed by James Wyatt and built in 1804. But, at night, watch out when they get things going in “Dadaballs,” D EC EMB ER

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face. Now a regular on lecture circuits, she recently published her third book on the estate—Capability Brown & Belvoir, about the great landscape architect’s work on-site—and has launched myriad product lines, from furniture and fabrics to shotguns (the over-and-under 12-bore “Rutland” is stamped with the duchess’s logo). In the process, she has re-invigorated the property. “At so many of these stately homes, they carry on in the same grim old way,” says Lord Harry Dalmeny, chairman of Sotheby’s U.K. and Ireland. “Bold as brass, Emma has made it look like it might actually be fun to live in a house like this. And her daughters are so unlike those posh, bloodless girls who complain and don’t want to do anything. They’re the dictionary definition of ‘work hard, play hard.’ They’re fireballs.”

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The Manners Sisters the “nightclub” the duchess installed in a subterranean space when she and the duke moved in, equipped with a smoke machine, an elaborate lighting system, and turntables manned by rotating members of their gang. (Otis Ferry, whom Alice is dating, spins frequently.) “It’s like Annabel’s in the country,” explains Violet. “It turns into crazy, major fun: carnage.” “It’s 18 to 80, local characters to members of the royal family—all digging in,” says communications adviser and family friend Joe Phelan. “Bonkers!” Party giving is a skill that Manners girls begin training for early on. Family tradition dictates that a major ball be held upon their 18th birthday. “Each of us micro-managed ours,” says Eliza. Themes are required. For Eliza, it was the circus. (The duke and duchess were tophatted ringmasters.) Violet chose “Gods and Goddesses,” while Alice picked “Arabian Nights,” for which her brothers, Charles, Marquess of Granby, and Lord Hugo, arrived on camels. Nine-year-old Hugo wrote and performed a rap for the birthday girl: “Alice, Alice, Alice, she lives in a palace, palace, palace.” (Austin Powers was the theme Charles picked for his 18th, in July. The duke came as Dr. Evil, and a Jaguar XK8 was decorated in the Union flag.)

he girls opened up on the subject of their parents’ separation and new domestic arrangements. “It was tough initially, but, now, we couldn’t be in a better place,” says Violet. “We go up to Dad’s tower and

James McMullan

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 2 5 helped convince the producer Robert Stigwood that this was a movie waiting to be made: Saturday Night Fever. “The disco story,” Cohn later wrote, “might never have seen daylight without” McMullan’s handiwork. With the Lincoln Center Theater relationship, which began under founding executive producer Bernard Gersten and director Gregory Mosher, McMullan fully ascended

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hang out with him, and every weekend we all meet in the middle and have lunch or dinner together.” “Everyone is much happier now,” says Alice. “If anything, the new setup has made them closer. Mum and Dad are best friends.” “I hate it when people say something isn’t ‘normal.’ What’s normal?” says Violet. “This works for us. It’s unbelievably amicable. It’s an arrangement that many other people have; it’s just that we live in a castle and it’s on a slightly more public scale.” (As proof of the cordiality, Burtt is now a trustee of the estate. A father of four daughters, he owned an estate nearby until his divorce. One of England’s top grouse shots, Burtt is a premier sportsman. Webb, an art consultant, was brought up in Brazil and is a niece of Roberto Burle Marx, the Brazilian landscape architect.) “They are a great team. My dad understands and respects that Mum has this incredible business mind,” says Eliza. “Not always in life do things work out the way you want them to,” says Emma. “Everyone has a lot of healing to do when a marriage breaks down. This works in a very practical way. David and I share five wonderful children, we’re great friends—and I’ve got a job to do here. I just think, Get on with it. We may live in a historic building, but that’s no reason to be bound by outmoded traditions.”

bit later, I climb the stairs of the Shepherd’s Tower for a visit with His Grace. He sits at an imposing mahogany table, a portrait by Van Dyck of Lady Katherine Manners, a daughter of the sixth Earl of Rutland, hanging behind him. He seems the picture of

to the status of illustrator’s illustrator, draftsman’s draftsman, watercolorist’s watercolorist. Gersten proudly called him “an artistic collaborator in our theater”—not just a picture-maker for hire. Bishop, who took over from Gersten in January 1992, calls McMullan “a true artist,” whose work transcends advertising—and illustration—in its virtuosity, complexity, and expressiveness: the emotional shadings, the layers of meaning, the mischievous wit, the dark undertow. McMullan’s posters are, fittingly, every bit as challenging, and as entertaining, as Lincoln Center’s remarkable plays. They also transcend their moment: they are not dated, kitsch, or camp. There’s no retro mania for vintage McMullans as there is for B-movie posters or schlock paperbacks from the Mad Men era. McMullan’s illustrations—from any decade—look fresh. And seen whizzing past from a subway window, a McMullan poster, as Guare put it, can “burrow itself into your unconscious for years and years.”

an old-school duke: portly, cigar-chomping, and unabashedly non-P.C. Just a few days after the U.K.’s Brexit vote, his conservatism is literally flying high: on the flagpole above the castle, he has had the colors of the U.S. Confederacy hoisted, in place of the usual ducal flag. “After voting for secession from the E.U., I thought it was an appropriate flag to fly,” he says. “I bought it last year when I heard the South Carolina state legislature had voted to ban it. I thought, How very pathetic and very P.C. It is historical.” Leaving the European Community has “certainly given [the E.U.] a very large enema,” he adds gleefully. Though the duke doesn’t come across as the bookish sort, he has spent the last decade at work on Resolution, a biography of the fourth Duke of Rutland and his brother, co-written with Emma Ellis and published last spring by Head of Zeus books. “I bash on [with writing], and [my wife] Emma gets on with the estate,” he says. “She has a strong work ethic, as do my children, I’m glad to say.” Unexpectedly, the duke seems in many ways the most laid-back member of the household. “I’ve lived here all my life,” he notes. “At a certain point in your life you find yourself taking over. You just have to get on with it.” That requires long-term thinking, this 11thgeneration duke adds: “When I plant a tree, I think, What trees will look nice in 300 years? I take a 300-year view. During my lifetime the family will be 1,000 years old. We will be here another 1,000 years.” One can only wonder, what will the parties be like in 3017?

Studio City

or 45 years McMullan did much of his work out of a studio at his house in Sag Harbor, New York, a 1950s prefab perched on Upper Sag Harbor Cove that he bought in 1970. Two years ago, he relocated back to Manhattan, where his new studio occupies a generic one-bedroom apartment five floors up in a brick tenement on a tree-lined Upper West Side block. The sounds of recess at the public elementary school across the street filter through the windows. Like the man himself, the studio is neat and uncluttered. The walls are covered with various McMullans—originals, posters, prints, a piece about him from The New York Times, mounted and framed by his daughter, Leigh McMullan Abramson, a lawyer turned writer who has contributed to The Atlantic and other publications. McMullan has been married to his wife (and Leigh’s mother), the writer Kate McMullan, since 1979. Together, they have authored an ongoing series of children’s books with titles such as D EC EMB ER

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I Stink (about a garbage truck) and I’m Mighty (about a tugboat). The books are modern classics and have become the basis of a new Amazon video series, The Stinky & Dirty Show. His workstation, with its tilted drafting table, displays an envy-inducing degree of orderliness: Kolinsky sable brushes stand in tall containers, and the white-enamel butcher’s trays he uses as palettes are lined up according to color groups, arrayed with discrete blobs of watercolor paint. (McMullan has a special affection for the cobalt blue made by the Schmincke company.) For a guy who spends his waking hours channeling the Sturm und Drang of Lincoln Center’s dramatic productions, the place is—true to form—conspicuously drama-free. This is where McMullan works from 9:30 until 5:30 every weekday, with a martini at the finish line. When he gets the call from Lincoln Center, he first reads the play or watches an earlier adaptation on video. He can start the visual brainstorming with a ballpoint pen on a legal pad or on old Filofax sheets. The ensuing process can be byzantine and arduous, best characterized by a line he used in 1998’s The Theater Posters of James McMullan, one of two illuminating books he wrote documenting the creation of his Lincoln Center posters: “Take two Prozac and call me in the morning.” (McMullan’s writings on illustration add up to arguably the most probing and entertaining investigation into the genre ever attempted.) In McMullan’s case, the proverbial drawing board is frequently returned to as he sifts through sketches and ideas and layers of feedback from Lincoln Center. There’s a give-andtake, often lively. “He can get hot under the collar,” Bishop said. “He’ll defend the things he strongly believes in.” But just as easily McMullan will shift gears, like an actor toggling through different approaches to a character, until he strikes gold, ending up, as Sher put it, “somewhere mind-blowingly great you never could have imagined.” (A Stanford University business professor, McMullan said, uses the artist’s process as a way of teaching the concept of flexibility.) When the approach has been decided on, McMullan typically employs a method he perfected during his years in journalism: taking photographs to get what he calls “information.” Models or, if available, actors pose. McMullan is an artist obsessed with the body, and all of his theater posters contain figures, often full-length ones. “In terms of the posters of the 20th century,” he said, “there are more feet in my posters than anyone else’s.” A typical McMullan image is all about movement and intense physicality: the heavily seated figure in his two classic posters for Six Degrees of Separation, the backside of the comely, broadhatted passenger on the deck of a ship in the Anything Goes poster, all Art Deco curves. He is a master of the telling gesture, the writhing DEC E M B E R

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DESK JOB An illustration by James McMullan for Audubon magazine’s September/October 1996 issue.

contortion, the fleeting expression: the illustrator’s classic tools. When he’s ready to get down to business, he breaks into a special stash of watercolor paper, none of it made after the year 1955. The vintage stuff, McMullan says, has the right balance of absorption and resistance. His precious stockpile is now down to 80 sheets. (“It’s a race to the finish—whoever goes first, me or the paper.”) He tends to work small, sometimes four by eight inches. The fine lines you see on a McMullan poster are done with brushes—no pencils or pens. Much of what he does is “wet on wet,” that is, fields of watercolor meeting, or “fusing,” before they dry. This leads to a sustained series of accidents that bring energy to the image and excitement to the artist. “My work involves so much risk,” McMullan says. Sometimes the accidents aren’t so happy and the work ends up in the trash bin. Occasionally McMullan will execute an elaborate watercolor background, as with the poster for Albee’s A Delicate Balance. He’ll let it dry, admire it, and then attack it with an overlay in gouache (usually the figures), another technique that gamely courts disaster. If all goes well, the finished art is on its way to Lincoln Center, ready to be blown up into a three-sheet, with McMullan’s handpainted, always striking lettering—remember South Pacific?—done on an affixed sheet of clear plastic. You think of theater posters as having to pummel weary subway riders with screaming graphics, hard edges, riotous color. Yet McMullan’s watercolors and gouaches, for all their relative softness, cut through the urban noise. They’re the stage whispers that turn all heads. (Like anything posted in subway stations, McMullan’s posters are vulnerable to graffiti, a lopsided kind of collaboration that gallery and museum artists rarely

endure.) Even so, there have been strikeouts along the way, such as the poster McMullan attempted in 1988 for a Mike Nichols production of Waiting for Godot. Nichols dinged the poster, apparently having made up his mind that he didn’t want a McMullan for the show, no matter how great and no matter how much Lincoln Center wanted one. It’s an experience that still sticks in the artist’s craw. “He accused me of not reading the play,” McMullan said. “Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a reader, and I do that part of the job.” The illustration showed an empty suit of clothes in the act of walking, the trousers going one way, the coat the other, a concept plucked from the first act of the play. (Small vindication: the poster was later printed and, according to McMullan, various people involved in the production bought and framed it.) But those disappointments are rare, not unlike McMullan originals. The artist tends to hang on to them or give them to archives (such as the expansive James McMullan Collection at New York’s School of Visual Arts) or gift them to a lucky actor, director, or playwright. Prints and posters can be had at the Triton Gallery, in New York City; they’re a steal, often under $1,000 a pop. (The odd piece shows up on eBay from time to time.) Perhaps the modest prices reflect the fate of the lowly illustrator, even one as off-the-charts as McMullan, in an art market gone mad. As the caricaturist and satirist Edward Sorel, an admirer of McMullan’s, put it, “We live in a world with Jeff Koons—and the Motherwells and Franz Klines and Andy Warhols—and other extremely notalent idiots that the world takes seriously as artists, while we, who take ourselves seriously as artists, are ignored as simply being ‘commercial.’ ” With trademark sarcasm, Sorel characterizes himself and McMullan—and, by www.vanityfair.com

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James McMullan extension, their illustrator ilk—as “the only sane people in an insane world.” Lincoln Center of Attention

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he worst poster I’ve ever done.” Back at Lincoln Center, McMullan paused before one of his works, inspecting it closely. It’s for a show from about 10 years ago, and one of the figures is a veteran Broadway and Lincoln Center actress. “She still hates me for this,” he said with a smile, adjusting his wire-rims. The depiction, after all, isn’t ex-

Joe Biden

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 1 8 Washington, Biden criticized Hillary Clinton’s campaign as the first he could recall “where my party did not talk about what it always stood for, and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.” Clinton took issue with this comment in her recent memoir, What Happened, writing, “I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.” Still, Biden insists that his support for Clinton was genuine, noting that he made 83 appearances on behalf of her campaign. And even if he had challenged her, there’s no telling—in an election year that defied polling forecasts and the societal norms of advanced civilizations—what might have happened. He might well have been whomped by Hillary. Then again, he might have turned out to be the old white man whom much of America was evidently looking for, the suspension bridge between the Trump base and the Bernie base. The point is, he didn’t run.

“I Mean, Jeez!”

hich brings us to 2020. Is it too late? Is Biden too old? He will turn 75 on November 20, and will turn 78 shortly after the next presidential election, which would make him, were he to be the candidate and victor, the oldest first-term president ever—older than Ronald Reagan when he left office after two terms. But Biden, when I met with him, appeared conspicuously, emphatically healthy— tan, slim, vigorous. It’s not that he didn’t look

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actly flattering. But it looks exactly like her. You can’t help but wonder if McMullan’s is a dying art. In the age of social media and logos and InDesign, how could it not be? “This art is going to look prehistoric in not too many years,” McMullan said. But he didn’t seem perturbed. For now, there’s another memoir to get done and a children’s book about a pickup truck to illustrate. And there’s Lincoln Center poster No. 88 to turn in. This one is for next spring’s production of My Fair Lady, directed by Sher. McMullan suddenly seemed eager to return to his studio and continue work on the new poster. He stood at the corner of West 65th

and Broadway, ready to head uptown. A streetmounted Pipeline poster was visible behind him—an odd, alfresco tableau of the artist and his art, one that, after 31 years, McMullan is accustomed to. It was again time to get back to the drawing board, to try out more ideas, to crank out more sketches, hoping something might stick and the streak might stay alive: yet another classic McMullan. He didn’t seem to care how long it might take or how impossible the task might seem. “I love working,” McMullan said, turning to leave. “So what if I have to go back and do the whole thing over again? What else am I going to do with my life, you know?”

74, but, rather, that he is one of those fit older people who have redefined what 74 can look like. It probably helps that he is a teetotaler, a choice he made as a young man, having been disturbed by the effect that alcohol had on members of his family. As Lorne Michaels once said admiringly of the stamina and 24-7 work ethic of a protégé, the writer-comic John Mulaney, “He doesn’t drink—which means that he also has his evenings.” Asked for his current state of mind about 2020, Biden ruled nothing out. “I haven’t decided to run,” he said, “but I’ve decided I’m not going to decide not to run. We’ll see what happens.” He is behaving very much like a probable candidate, having formed a political-action committee, American Possibilities, in June, and writing opinion pieces in recent months for The Atlantic and The New York Times about Donald Trump’s illiberal conduct and the need to reclaim traditional American values. When one is with Biden, his words about current affairs are less measured. If he gets riled up, the midcentury Irish-Catholic locutions of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he spent the first 10 years of his life before moving to Delaware, come to the fore. “We are so well positioned to own the 21st century—Jesus, God!—if we just get out of our own way,” he said. “The rest of the world is not a patch on our jeans. I mean, jeez, we have problems, but holy mackerel!” Trump, he went on, is not only “selfreferential and uninformed” but also a threat to the very foundations of America. “This sounds corny,” he said, “but everything the founders did was to erect institutions that made it more difficult to abuse power. That’s why they have three different branches of government. And what really worries me about this administration is the frontal attack on those institutions that, if they were lost, makes the abuse of power so much more available.”

policy hand who has forged relationships with leaders the world over. He represents an old-fashioned ideal of bipartisan cooperation that many Americans crave, maintaining amicable, ongoing relationships not only with John McCain but also, he says, with Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, and Rob Portman. And for someone who has worked in Washington for virtually the entirety of his adult life, he is resolutely unbought: not a “swamp creature” but a wageearning public servant. It was only as Biden was walking me to my car that I learned that the house in Rehoboth Beach is a new acquisition, purchased this year with funds from his book advance. He had pledged to Jill years ago that they would someday get a beach house, he explained. Above the front door is a sign that reads, A PROMISE KEPT. But the list of prospective Democratic challengers to Biden is long. From the Senate alone, there are such contenders as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Al Franken, and Chris Murphy, to say nothing of the various governors, congresspeople, and privatesector wild cards like Oprah Winfrey and Disney’s Robert A. Iger, who have positioned themselves as potential candidates. And grief has no timetable. The process of getting over Beau’s death, Biden said, “has lasted longer for me than the first time,” alluding to the 1972 accident. He finds himself still concerned about his ability to regulate his emotions and is acutely sensitive to any perception that he is milking Beau’s death for sympathy and political advantage. In May, he attended a financial conference in Las Vegas that was organized by, of all people, Anthony Scaramucci, prior to his ill-fated cameo as White House communications director. At a private banquet that took place after the conference, Biden lost his temper when he construed a remark of another attendee, the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, to be a comment on his penchant for talking about Beau. Having held the floor for a period, Biden cut himself short, saying

here are plenty of reasons to believe that Biden would be a viable candidate. He is inherently likable and uncommonly joyful for a politician. He is an experienced foreign-

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words to the effect of “I’ve said enough.” This prompted Ackman to respond, “You’ve never held back before!” Biden was not amused. “I said, ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’m going to knock you on your ass!’ In front of a crowd,” he told me, with a mix of sheepishness and pride. Through a spokesman, Ackman stated that he has enormous respect for Biden and would never make light of anyone’s death, and that his comment was, in fact, an attempt to lighten the mood at the table after an intense group conversation about President Trump, not Beau—a version of events supported by others who were present. But Biden makes no bones about having been angry. “The governor on my anger,” he

J-Rod!

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 0 1 a sponge,” Lasry says. “He really wants to learn.” Another mentor of sorts is Mary Callahan Erdoes, the C.E.O. of J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, who met Rodriguez around the time that Lasry did. “You might be expecting something different,” she says. “But from the first day, he had his notebook out. He’s incredibly curious and serious. There’s no nonsense and no pomp and circumstance.” That’s true to this day, Erdoes says, whether he’s attending a JPMorgan-hosted conference on Brexit or a meeting with a hedge-fund manager. “He sits in the front of the room with his notebook out and his hand up, asking questions,” she says. Rodriguez’s innate curiosity—about business, about other people, about fresh concepts—makes him stand out in a world where many people lack that trait. “The real reason people do deals with Alex is that they like him and he’s smart,” says Lasry.

rominent on Rodriguez’s list of mentors is eminent investor Warren Buffett, whom Rodriguez met when Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway underwrote disability insurance for his contract with the Rangers. Rodriguez sent Buffett a thank-you note and asked if he could come visit, thinking he’d get a quick “No.” But Buffett said yes, and Rodriguez has counted him as a friend ever since. Buffett tells me that Rodriguez “has what I DEC E M B E R

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said, was that, in the moment, he thought Ackman was alluding to Beau. Moving Forward

iden is also aware that, as a candidate, every aspect of his life would fall under close scrutiny. “It’s hard,” he said. “You don’t run by yourself. Your family is totally implicated. They become news; they become fodder.” For the extended Biden clan, this is a thorny proposition; in the time since Beau died, his widow, Hallie, and his brother, Hunter, have become a couple, and Hunter and his wife, Kathleen, have divorced. (Hunter Biden declined a request to be interviewed for this story.) For her part, Jill Biden told me that, these days, she and her husband are focused on

call a ‘money mind,’ meaning he instinctively knows many things about dealing with money that other people never learn and to some extent can’t be taught.” Buffett adds, “A-Rod would have done very well in business if he had never seen a baseball.” What’s the best advice Buffett has ever given him? “On the business side, it was always non-recourse debt,” Rodriguez says. “Don’t personally guarantee it. And cash is like oxygen: you need it, but you don’t need too much of it. You’d rather have your money in great businesses.” Rodriguez recalls that one day long ago Buffett gave him a different kind of advice. “He said, ‘I have two things for you,’ ” Rodriguez says. “I asked, ‘Do you mind if I take out a notebook?’ Warren said, ‘Go ahead, but you won’t need it. Number one: Be the best baseball player you can be. Number two: Always be a gentleman. Be the best guy you can be.’ … That was simple, but it was so genius.” The couple is taking his advice to heart. Days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Lopez gave $1 million to help its victims there, and she and Rodriguez asked their contacts in Hollywood and in the business world to raise $26 million. In mid-October, Lopez, together with Rodriguez and her ex-husband Marc Anthony, organized a benefit concert and telethon that brought in an additional $9 million in pledges for Puerto Rico’s relief efforts.

he day after I saw Lopez’s show in Las Vegas, we meet at one of Rodriguez’s latest investments, which he discovered when he was looking for a place to work out in Las Vegas—members of Lopez’s crew had raved about it. Called TruFusion, it offers more than 65 styles of instruction and 35 to 40 daily classes in yoga, Pilates, kettlebell exercises, and battle-rope workouts in heated rooms. Last June, Rodriguez purchased a major stake in the company, and now owns the development rights for all of Florida. President and C.O.O. Jonathan Fornaci says the classes

moving forward. Part of doing so, she said, is considering the question “What would Beau want us to do?” “He wouldn’t want us to grieve forever, although you do,” she said. “So, moving forward, what would Beau want Joe to do? You can probably answer that question.” I countered by noting that they have a nice new beach house and seem to be relishing their taste of private life; she had just mentioned how thrilled she is to be driving her own car again. I asked Jill if, in her capacity as Joe Biden’s wife, she is ever inclined to say to her husband, “Take care of yourself. Enjoy life. Maybe dial it back.” She fixed me with a knowing look. “Do you understand,” she said, “what ‘Enjoy life’ means for Joe?”

can be so hard that he sees some professional athletes take breaks during them, but “Alex kills it. And immediately afterward he’s drilling down, asking questions that any privateequity analyst would be asking.” I’m warned that the “Down N Dirty Bootcamp” will be hard and sweaty, and it is precisely as advertised. At one point, confused by the welter of instructions—Left! Right! Kettlebell! Weight! Sandbag!—I look over at Lopez and roll my eyes in desperation. “I get confused, too,” she says. “Just watch everyone else.” During some particularly brutal leg lifts, I give up. She does not. In fact, she starts singing. At the end, we’re all sitting on our mats, drenched in sweat and exhausted. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” is playing. Living the Dream

t’s clear as day that neither of them is hitting Pause. After Vegas, she’s off to New York, where her children are in school, and he’s off to Atlanta, where he’s filming a pilot for a CNBC reality show that will help retired athletes who are struggling financially. Rodriguez says he keeps himself grounded with some key words: “Gratitude and appreciation. When someone offers me a job, I thank the Lord that I have work, and I beg for more work.” And he adds, “We’re really good at reminding each other.” They begin to tell me a story, one in which Lopez is in the bath, and Rodriguez is sitting by the fire in a robe. Looking at my face, he starts laughing. “You’re like, ‘Where are you going with this story, and is it going to get R-rated?’ ” But it’s not R-rated, not at all. He says he got hot from the fire and went to sit on the patio outside their room, with a book and his feet up, in the crisp air. Lopez breaks in. “I came out and said, ‘What are you doing out here?’ He said, ‘Living the dream.’ ” It’s clear from the story that he said it in a way that was free of irony. “I thought, Wow, this person is different,” Lopez says. “Because a lot of people I’ve met in my life, they don’t appreciate what they’re doing and how amazwww.vanityfair.com

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J-Rod! ing it is … not the greatness of the house, but the moment of sitting there with someone you love, with a family, with healthy kids.” All over the house are pictures of their four children as one family; when I ask Rodriguez which of his businesses he’s most passionate about, he responds, without missing a beat, “My daughters.”

Ako’s Ride

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 3 3 tactical air support was no longer an option. From the air it was almost impossible to distinguish ISIS positions from civilian ones. Ako’s cell phone rang again. It was a friend calling from downtown. “Ako, where are you?” “I’m at home, sleeping,” he said, weakly trying for humor. “Kirkuk is under attack! This would be a really good day to use your car!” “Doesn’t anyone else have an armored car?” “We’re on the bridge, near the old directorate of police. I’ll give you anything. Just come here and help these people!” Ako swung the BMW around. He passed the ancient citadel and then crossed a bridge over the river. This placed him on a stretch of roadway that had just become a major front in the battle for the city. He stopped the car, Abbas took out another apple, and Ako lit another cigarette. They took stock of the situation. ISIS fighters had holed up in the Jihad Hotel, a quarter of a mile away. They held a commanding, elevated vantage point, and from this one location were able to paralyze that central neighborhood. Security forces had begun to make their way into Kirkuk and had some military vehicles at their disposal, but they weren’t doing much with them yet. Far more important, in terms of resistance, were Kirkuk’s ordinary citizens. The city was filled with volunteers and a few off-duty military men willing to fight. Many of these volunteers wanted to storm the hotel. But if they tried to advance on the building, they would be moving down a quarter-mile of roadway unprotected, and with no idea where in the

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s we drive from TruFusion to a little restaurant in a Vegas strip mall called Greens and Proteins, they say that early in their relationship they’d text each other using the hashtag #bloodinbloodout, after the Mexican gangster film that is in some ways about the unbreakable ties of family. At the restaurant, a few people turn and stare, but mostly we’re ignored, probably because no one can quite believe it’s them. He’s in workout clothes; she’s wearing a cropped pink sweatshirt, no makeup, and has

her hair pulled back in a bun. When we sit down, Rodriguez asks what surprised me the most about spending time with them. I answer that I was surprised, even shocked, by their genuine interest in other people. But when I walked behind them as they left TruFusion, their hands were touching and they were talking intently. It was normal and natural and easy. And that’s an even better answer: I’m most surprised to see that, out of two often surreal lives, they are managing to make one wonderfully real life.

hotel—or in other buildings along the way— ISIS fighters might be lurking. Ako had another idea: using a technique he’d employed before, he would drive slowly down the road in his BMW, drawing fire and revealing the enemy. That would at least give the volunteers some useful intelligence. He pulled away and inched toward the hotel. A round struck the car on the passenger side, and Abbas yelled, “Motherfuckers won’t even let me eat!” Ako said, “I swear to God, if it wasn’t an armored car your brain would be mixed with that apple.” They bickered as Ako drew closer to the hotel. The next rounds came quick and close, a concentrated hailstorm that skittered across the windshield. One shot hit the car in a place Ako hadn’t expected—in the driver’s-side door. That meant ISIS had a position not just in front, in the hotel, but to his left, near a bus depot. Ako yanked the car hard right, pulling away from the crossfire, circling the block, and eventually returning to the place he’d set out from, where the volunteers were about to advance. Ako made sure they knew about the bus depot, and tried to persuade two of the volunteers to ride with him back to the hotel so they’d be protected at least part of the way. The two men seemed drunk on adrenaline. “What is ISIS?,” one of them yelled, insisting he’d go on foot with his friend. “I’m not afraid of ISIS!” A moment later his head snapped and the other man’s neck opened up. A sniper had dispatched them both with a single round.

rilla unit from the P.K.K. had come from the mountains nearby to help. Counterterror units finally got into the city, and security forces retook the strategic locations. As volunteers made it inside the Jihad Hotel, they found wounded people who had been suffering for hours. One man they picked up just outside the hotel, with a hole in his chest, was hauled into Ako’s car. Ako spoke to the man, trying to keep him alive as he raced to the hospital. He died in the backseat. By five P.M. the sun had slipped below the horizon, and Kirkuk was bathed in a grayblue light. It never becomes totally dark in this city, because the flare stacks in the oil fields burn continuously. The fighting lasted three full days, but it was clear after the first day that ISIS would be defeated.

The Tide Turns

ut as the hours passed, the volunteers began to make progress. They took heavy casualties, but they drew closer to the hotel. Ako used the same maneuver he’d used earlier in the day, pulling up in front of the fallen and using the car’s armor as a shield. The supply of wounded seemed endless. Word began to spread about the man in the BMW. His bullet-riddled car could be seen entering and exiting the frame on TV channels as news crews beamed footage of the fighting itself. By late afternoon, the tide had turned against ISIS. An all-female Communist guer-

ko lost count of the people he saved and the bodies he retrieved, but toward the end of the day, he says, a man approached him and said, “I’ve been counting for you. You’ve made 140 trips.” Ako asked if he was joking; that couldn’t be right. Later local news reports about the man in the BMW put the number of lives saved at 70. Ako didn’t know about that either. All he knew was that, when he had time to count, he found 123 bullet marks all over the BMW’s body. He says he also knew that, throughout the day, Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, and Christians had all been in his car. Among the people he had saved were those who belonged to groups he had hated, fought against, and shot at. The siege provided a brief moment of collaboration in Kirkuk. Ako has now dropped out of contact (as has Abbas, who was not available for comment on this story) in the face of another threat, this time in the form of the Iraqi military and Shia militias. After Kurds in Kirkuk voted overwhelmingly in a September referendum to secede from Iraq, the government in Baghdad removed Dr. Karim, who had supported the referendum vote, and then deployed Iraqi troops to Kirkuk to take over oil fields and a military base, and to block roads to other major Kurdish cities. One can imagine another call from a friend: “Ako. This would be a really good time to use your car!” D EC EMB ER

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Department of Agriculture

us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it,” said Rachael Bale. “We asked for the files, and they sent us 1,700 completely blacked-out pages.” By the time I set out to get the briefings the Trump people had not, it was late summer. Of the 14 senior jobs at the U.S.D.A. that required Senate confirmation, only one had been filled: former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue was named secretary of agriculture, in April. If Trump’s interest in a subject is to be judged by the speed with which he appointed his Cabinet secretaries, the Department of Agriculture is screwed: Perdue was dead last. C ON T I N U E D F ROM PAGE 10 9

here’s a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the U.S.D.A. do it? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess if the U.S.D.A. does it. (In this case, it does.) Even people who have worked at U.S.D.A. for years wind up having to chug. So it’s no use pretending that I can actually explain to you everything the place does. I was looking to get a sense of the big risks that increase when a limb of the federal government is neglected or misunderstood or badly managed. I’d had a bunch of conversations with people who had run the department under past administrations: former secretaries and deputy secretaries of agriculture. They reached a bipartisan consensus: the best way to get a quick grip on the details of the department is to march through the seven little boxes of its organization chart. (See page 107.) For example, if you want to know the likelihood that the geese loitering near the La Guardia Airport runway will cause your plane to crash-land in the Hudson River and become the subject of a major motion picture, you go to see the undersecretary or deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, which oversees the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles the bewildering set of conflicts in America between people and animals. (The people tend to get their way.) If you want an up-to-date snapshot of which farmers are most dependent on federal aid, you go see the peoDEC E M B E R

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ple who manage the little box marked “Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services.” These undersecretaries and deputy secretaries occupy public offices, but they are not really public figures: no one outside the department knows their names or faces. And their little boxes are not equally exposed to the whims and idiocies of any given presidential administration. The question of the day, at least it seems to me, is: Where in these little boxes is the greatest damage likely to be done, through neglect or mismanagement or malice?

ake the little box labeled “Natural Resources and Environment.” It’s not as abstract as it sounds. Employing around 40,000 people, it contains the U.S. Forest Service. Its 193 million acres of forests and grasslands are important to the future of the climate. Its most recent undersecretary, Robert Bonnie, was described to me by one of his superiors as “maybe the single best undersecretary we’ve ever had.” Bonnie himself is a seriously interesting person—and filled with concerns about what the Trump administration might do to his former department. But when I asked him to name his No. 1 concern, he said, “Wildfires.” But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing. Even as the Trump administration forbids its employees to use the phrase “climate change,” there’s no sign that this will contribute in any special way to America’s growing wildfire problem, caused over the last two decades not only by climate change but also by not enough clearing of dead brush and by people building homes too close to combustible landscapes. The career people at the U.S. Forest Service, because they have direct lines into Congress, don’t need the White House behind them in the way many other departments do. Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the U.S.D.A. does. It’s the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most. Ali Zaidi had been the first to point this out to me: that the seven little boxes inside the Department of Agriculture are not equally vulnerable. And he would know. He’d spent two years as a grunt in the Office of Management and Budget, before moving into ever more important White House jobs. He’d been one of those young people with the gift for getting old people to forget how young he was, and found himself thrust into jobs normally reserved for much older people. In 2014, at the age of 27, he was put in charge of a team of experts overseeing the Department of Agriculture’s entire budget—along with the budgets of NASA, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and a couple of others. He’d been forced to get his mind fully around the federal department that had underpinned his childhood: it wasn’t easy. “Of all the budgets, it’s the weirdest,” he said. It was weird, first, because the U.S.D.A. did so many dif-

ferent things. It was weird because so many Americans had no idea how much their lives depended upon it. And it was weird because of the sheer sums of money sloshing around the place, dispensed by government employees no one had ever heard of. If you took a follow-the-money approach to what might go wrong inside the U.S.D.A., you ended up inside the box run by Kevin Concannon. Hunger Games

found Concannon at home in the woods of Maine. On the phone he’d told me that he’d spent most of his career running health and nutrition services for several different states. Back in 2008 he’d retired to this place, purchased long ago, with his wife. The woods were near the sea, and so they had bought a small boat. “I was sort of unhappy being retired,” he said. “We had the boat. But after two weeks in the boat we said, ‘O.K., what are we going to do now?’ I don’t understand people who say they can’t wait to retire. It’s like living your life in jail or something.” Not long after he’d had that thought he got a call from the newly appointed secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack. “I hired him for several reasons,” said Vilsack. “But the first is: heart.” Concannon was pushing 70, but he came out of retirement to take charge of the box inside the U.S.D.A. labeled “Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services.” He’d run the place right up until the Trump people finally arrived, in January of this year. In his job at U.S.D.A., Concannon had overseen for eight years the nation’s school-lunch program; the food-stamp program, which ensured that pregnant women, new mothers, and young children received proper nutrition; and a dozen or so smaller programs designed to alleviate hunger. Together these accounted for approximately 70 percent of the U.S.D.A.’s budget—he’d spent the better part of a trillion dollars feeding people with taxpayer money while somehow remaining virtually anonymous. “We used to say if we stopped the tourists outside the building and told them what we were doing inside, most of them would have no idea that we were doing it,” he said. He’d helped to prepare for the Trump transition, but, of course, that transition never happened. He hadn’t had a single encounter with anyone associated with it. Nor had the Trump people bothered to speak with anyone who reported to him. And so it seemed fair to say, as Concannon had said to me on the phone, that “they don’t seem to be focused on nutrition.” The Trump people were a bit like those tourists outside the Whitten Building. Only now they were inside it. Concannon’s house is hidden from the road by trees and so comes as a surprise. So does he: I had expected to meet an old guy with at least some need to convey his own importance. I expected him to retain at least a trace of the stuffy bureaucrat. Instead I find www.vanityfair.com

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Department of Agriculture myself being led through his retirement house by a leprechaun who has disguised himself by shaving off his beard. “Media has not been a big part of my life,” he says, laughing, as he leads me to a table and chairs out back. “This is new!” Exposed to the early-autumn chill we play New England’s favorite outdoor social game: seeing who will be the first to break and beg to go back inside. “The food-stamps program,” he says, instantly, when I ask him for his biggest concern. The Trump budget had proposed cutting food stamps by more than 25 percent over the next 10 years and more or less abandoning the notion that the country should provide some minimum level of nutrition to its citizens. The Trump budget was just an opening bid and unlikely to become policy, at least not right away, because Congress could always fight it. But it signaled an intention and, perhaps, a shift in public attitudes. “Why is it that people channel so many of their hang-ups about people who are poor or unsuccessful into the food-stamps program?” asks Concannon as we settle into our chairs, then answers his own question. “No one really knows when you go to the doctor and the government is paying. But people see you with this card or coupon and react. People would say to me, ‘I saw someone buying butter with food stamps.’ And I would say, ‘Well, yes.’ ”

nyone who takes over his old job, he explains, needs to be especially vigilant about fraud, even though there is probably less of it in the program than ever. Actual fraud in the food-stamp program in 2015 was about 5 percent of the $70 billion paid out. People still succeed in understating their income and get benefits they would otherwise not. People occasionally “traffic,” the term of art for exchanging food stamps at less than face value, for cash or ineligible goods. (The storeowner then puts through a bunch of phony purchases, and pockets the difference between what the government pays him and what he has paid to the food-stamper.) And fraud is far more likely in some parts of the country than in others. “The Dakotas—they’re all Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts who live there,” Concannon says. “But just look at Miami. Or Columbus, Ohio.” But replacing food stamps with a card that has a PIN number has made fraud, and theft, much less common. The U.S.D.A. hires specialists to search foodpurchase data for suspicious patterns. When they find what appears to be a problem, they send in one of the 100 U.S.D.A. food-stamp undercover investigators, to gather evidence. I stop writing and look up. “The Department of Agriculture has private eyes?” “They’re more like Columbos,” he says. But that’s not his point, he says. His point is

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that, while actual fraud is relatively rare, “instances of fraud attract huge media attention and can have big effects—like Surfer Dude.” Surfer Dude was a guy in San Diego who claimed on Fox News that the food-stamp program gave him the cushion he needed to surf all day. The network ate it up. And that was the problem: the wildly distorting media coverage of any cheating creates political resistance to the entire enterprise. No one in the Trump administration was likely to ever come right out and say: We want to let kids and old people go hungry. But, obviously, they might run the program so ineptly that it lost political support. And then kids and old people would go hungry. What I needed to keep in mind, said Concannon, was just how much was at stake for the people who needed the program. “I used to tell the people that worked for me: You may not ever meet a single person it benefits. You might never see the infants who are fed, or that family that lost a job. To the extent you can keep in mind that they are out there, it will motivate you to do your job better.”

t now occurs to me that this question of motivation sits somewhere near the middle of the problem I am investigating. Why does someone go to work inside this little box—or any little box—inside the federal government? There’s always an answer to this question. And it’s obviously important. Why a person does what he does has a big effect on how he does it. And yet Kevin Concannon, whose little box had spent nearly a trillion dollars, had never really been asked it. He has an answer to the question, as it turns out. He’d grown up in Portland, Maine, in a working-class family with seven children. His older brother had suffered from schizophrenia. His parents, immigrants from Ireland, had been crippled by the sense that they were responsible for their child’s illness. “There was a very strong belief in those days in nurture versus nature,” he says. Then one day—like a bolt from the blue—a pair of social workers from the Veterans Administration visited their home. They put his brother on a new medication, which eased his symptoms. “They helped my parents to understand that the fact that he had this illness had nothing whatever to do with how they raised him,” says Concannon. “It was luck of the draw.” The effect of these government angels on his family’s life was astonishing. By the time Concannon left for college, in 1959, he wondered what it might be like to do that kind of work. In college he read The Other America, Michael Harrington’s account of the lives of the American poor, and listened to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, with its bracing call to public service. By the time he graduated he knew what he wanted to be. Fourteen years later he was running Maine’s mental-health services. He proved effective enough at the job that, after an election pushed him out of it, other

states recruited him. In 1987 he took a job running the mental-health and developmentaldisabilities programs for Oregon. Four months into his new gig Oregon’s governor, Neil Goldschmidt, grabbed him in the hallway. “He said, ‘C’mon to the pressroom. They’re naming the new director of human services.’ I said, ‘Who is it?’ And he says, ‘It’s you!’ ” As the head of Oregon’s nutrition programs he learned that the country’s willingness to feed people who are hungry does not mean that hungry people are always fed. The federal government makes the benefits available, but then leaves it to states to administer them. “Where you live in this country makes a huge difference if you are poor,” says Concannon. “And it’s not just the weather. You have states with these 60- or 70-page documents people have to fill out to get benefits. Poor people are easy to wear down.” Georgia was usually a problem. Texas too. “If they ran any of their football teams the way they ran their food program, they’d fire the coach,” said Concannon. A Wyoming legislator, proud of how badly he had gummed up the state’s nutrition programs, told him, “We pride ourselves on doing the minimum required by the federal government.” An Arizona congressman proposed that the card used by people receiving food-stamp benefits be made prison orange, conferring not just nutrition but shame. In 2016, after several counties in North Carolina suffered severe flooding, the state tried to distribute federal disaster-relief food-benefit cards on the day of the presidential election, to give poor people a choice between eating and voting. In Kansas, Concannon had explained to an executive who oversaw the state’s food-stamp program how he had made it easier for people in Oregon who were going hungry to access their program. “He said, ‘Jeez, if we did that we’d have more people coming in the door.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but isn’t that the idea?’ ”

oncannon viewed his job in Oregon simply: to make benefits more easily available to people who qualified for them. Minimize the red tape. Promote the programs. Change the culture that dispensed them from one of suspicion to one of sympathy. From Oregon, at the behest of yet another governor, he returned home to Maine, to run all of the publichealth and nutrition programs. There he displayed yet again his unusual gift for finding and slaking need. For instance, he noticed that a lot of people without health insurance in the state were failing to fill their prescriptions, because they couldn’t afford the drugs. In northern Maine, people were crossing the border into Canada, where they could buy the same drugs from the same companies at a fraction of the cost. He thought the situation both outrageous and economically inefficient: help people prevent a stroke and you could avoid the far greater expense of caring for them after D EC EMB ER

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they had one. He created a program, Maine Rx, that extended the cheaper Medicaid prices of drugs to people who were well above the poverty line. Within three months, 100,000 people had signed up. (The drug companies challenged the program, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, which mandated some changes. It is now called Maine Rx Plus.) In 2003, at the request of Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, he left Maine for Iowa. In his six years there, he raised the number of Iowans receiving food stamps by 68 percent. There was more. But it was getting late. “Are you cold?” I ask, hopefully. “No,” he says, “but if you are … ” We move back inside, to his kitchen table. He locates a plate of freshly baked banana bread and puts it in front of me. I try not to stare at it. Dry banana bread I find inedible. Moist, sticky banana bread I find hard to resist. His banana bread glistens. There are people who would seek to dismiss his entire enterprise with a single line: Why should my hard-earned dollars go to feed anyone else? They’d see Kevin Concannon as the King of Handouts. A promoter of sloth and indolence. But the facts of the program he ran for eight years are innocent: its average benefit is just a dollar and 40 cents a meal. Eighty-seven percent of that money goes to households with children, the disabled, and elderly. “The idea that we are going to put these people to work is nonsense.” Able-bodied adults on food stamps are required to work, or attend job training, for at least 20 hours a week. The nation’s private food banks dispense about $8 billion worth of food each year, while $70 billion worth is provided through food stamps: charity alone will not feed everyone who needs feeding. The problem with the program is not that people are cheating it. The problem with the program is that people who should be on it are not. Kevin Concannon had done a lot to fix it: He’d raised the participation rate of the poor people who qualified for it from 72 percent to 85 percent. And he’d reduced fraud rates to all-time lows. But the myths about the food-stamp program—that food stamps can be used in casinos, or to buy alcohol and tobacco, for instance—persisted.

reach for a slice of banana bread. “Anything else you worried about?” I ask. “School nutrition,” he says, without missing a beat. One week after being sworn in, Sonny Perdue staged a public event at a school in Leesburg, Virginia. The Obama administration had pushed successfully to raise the nutritional requirements of school meals fed to 30 million American schoolchildren, for the first time in 20 years. To receive federal subsidies for the meals they serve, schools are now required to behave more like responsible parents than indifferent ones: more whole grains,

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THOUGHT FOR FOOD The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s sprawling headquarters, photographed from the Washington Monument.

more fruits and vegetables, less sodium, no artificially sweetened whole milk, etc. Concannon expanded the breakfast programs for kids who did not get fed at home—and that meal, too, became more nutritious. “You can’t just serve them pancakes and hot dogs,” he says. Big companies that provided the schools with meals fought back: it was more profitable for them to serve pancakes and hot dogs than fruits and vegetables. But by the end of 2016, America’s children were eating better than they had been in 2008. “Ninety-eight percent of the schools were meeting the new standards,” says Concannon, “and to those that weren’t, that had some problem, we’d say, ‘We’ll work with you!’ ” At the school in Leesburg, Perdue announced that the U.S.D.A. would no longer require schools to meet the whole-grain standard, or the new sodium standard, or ban fat in artificially sweetened milk. Those changes sound trivial, but the stakes are huge. This is a matter not just of what kind of milk America’s schoolchildren drink but also of the process by which we as a society decide which milk they will drink: will it be driven by the dairy industry and the snack-food industry, or by nutritionists? Concannon was deeply disappointed in Perdue’s speech. He saw it as pure politics, not motivated by any concern for children’s welfare. “Look, you can have confidence in the career people,” he said. “Because most of them have migrated to where they are out of desire. They believe in what they are doing.” About the new political people who might replace him he wasn’t so sure. The problem was motive: why would they come to work at the U.S.D.A.? A person who worked inside Concannon’s little box, as long as they catered

to the food industry, could make a lot more money outside of it. Munching on a second slice of banana bread, I look around Concannon’s house. His career was over. He’d spent the better part of 50 years using public money to alleviate suffering. He’d controlled nearly a trillion dollars in government spending. Yet his home is modest. He drives a 10-year-old Volvo. He had gone from state to state, and each time he had been honored for his public service. The plaques were stacked up in his garage. He didn’t own enough wall space for them all. What’s striking about Kevin Concannon is what he decided, for whatever reason, he didn’t need. He could have named his price with the drug- and food-company lobbies, and yet he’d never taken a job in the private sector. He claims never to have felt the slightest interest in that kind of work. “I’ve done all right,” he says when I ask him, more or less, why he’s not rich. “I’ve always had enough. I’ve never felt the need to go over to the other side and make three times the amount of money. If you like what you do, you just keep doing it.” On my way out the door he stops me. “You didn’t ask me what else I was worried about. But if you asked me,” he said, “I’d say Science.” Political Science

he thing you eventually noticed about Cathie Woteki was her detachment. She was slow to talk about the more emotionally charged moments of her career, and even when she did, she didn’t talk for long. It wasn’t until our fourth conversation, for instance, that she bothered to mention she had become an agricultural scientist only after her professors told her that there was no place for www.vanityfair.com

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Department of Agriculture women in basic science. She’d graduated in 1969 from Mary Washington College, the women’s affiliate of the University of Virginia, which at the time didn’t accept women as undergraduates. From there she followed her future husband to Virginia Tech, where she entered the graduate program in biochemistry. Her fellow graduate students in science were all men. It took her a while to sense how the professors treated her differently from the way they did everyone else. “I finally figured it out when all the guys were given assistantships and I wasn’t.” She went to the head of the department and asked what she needed to do to get an assistantship, too. “He said I would not be given one because women were a poor investment. I’d probably only have children and drop out.” Looking back she found it odd that they had let her into the school only to stifle her ambition. But it was the late 1960s, and people were making new, if halfhearted, attempts to address sex discrimination. “If you talk to women scientists of my age, almost all of them have a story similar to mine,” she says. Virginia Tech, like most every college in the United States with “Tech” or “A&M” after its name, was established in 1872 by the same Congress that created the Department of Agriculture. In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That’s why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab. Endless statistics illustrate the astonishing effects that lab has had—it has changed the way we live. In 1872 the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people. It’s not just people and plants that have become more productive. In 1950 the average cow yielded 5,300 pounds of milk. Last year the average cow yielded 23,000 pounds of milk. A Wisconsin Holstein recently yielded nearly 75,000 pounds of milk in a year, which amounts to roughly 24 gallons a day. Her name is Gigi. You can thank her later.

hanges in agricultural science trigger changes in the structure of the society: where people live, what they do, what they value, the metaphors that naturally pop into their minds. Those changes have been driven by research funded by the Department of Agriculture, done inside the land-grant colleges created alongside it. Virginia Tech, like the University of Wisconsin, was one of the original ones. “Because Virginia Tech was a land-grant university, there was a department called ‘Human Nutrition,’ which I had never heard of as a field of study,” says Woteki. She

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ended up studying the subject because that was what she was encouraged to study. She had no particular connection to farming or agriculture: her father had been an air-force fighter pilot; she’d grown up on military bases. “The first time I ever touched a cow,” she said, “was when I artificially inseminated one at Virginia Tech.” But she grew interested in the intersection between food and health. Her dissertation investigated a mysterious outbreak of illness in Texas, where, in the late 1960s, MexicanAmerican kids were turning up sick and no one could figure out why. She figured out why: milk. “It wasn’t a pathogen,” she said. “It was the lactose in the milk.” MexicanAmericans, as a group, turned out to be especially intolerant of it, though no one knew that until that moment. The symptoms usually started by age 11 or 12. She became a professor of human nutrition at an interesting moment: in the early 1970s, Congress was taking a new interest in malnutrition in children. “There was a lot of stunting and wasting in children,” she recalls. After a talk given by a congressional staffer studying the effects of legislation on human nutrition, she walked up and introduced herself—and he hired her on the spot. One thing led to another and soon she was leading a group inside the Department of Agriculture that took survey data and analyzed patterns in food consumption, to explore the relationships between the American diet and American disease. From there she moved naturally enough to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she led a team seeking answers to basic questions about the overall health of the population. For instance, blood lead levels in children fell by a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s. This welcome development, they figured out, was due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline. In early 1993 a pediatrician in Seattle alerted the Washington State Department of Health that he was seeing in children symptoms of E. coli such as cramps and bloody diarrhea. In four western states hundreds of people became seriously ill. Four children died. The disease was tracked to Jack in the Box. The chain had been cooking its hamburgers at temperatures too low to kill the bacteria. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for the safety of all meat. The F.D.A. handles all other food. An American killed by his spinach can justifiably blame the F.D.A., but an American killed by his steak is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. Cheese pizzas are the F.D.A.’s problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the U.S.D.A. After the Jack in the Box outbreak, the U.S.D.A. created a new little box on the organizational chart called “Food Safety.” Woteki became its first undersecretary and served in the post for four years.

fter that she thought she was done with government. “Then 9/11 happened,” she said. “I had an emotional response: What can I do? It made me realize there were very few people who had ever had the experiences I had had.” She was able to explain the various threats to the food supply as few could, for example. She understood how genetic engineering might be used as a weapon of mass destruction. She knew that a microbe could bring down a civilization. She returned to government. For the last six years of the Obama administration she’d been the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist. The same qualities that had led her to minimize the importance of her feelings had made her an excellent supervisor of science. Though she didn’t seem to care one way or another how she was addressed, no one thought of her as “Cathie.” She was always “Dr. Woteki.” “She was great at her job,” said Tom Vilsack. “She was very adamant about keeping politics out of science. If I called and said, ‘How about we delay the announcement of that grant for a week or so,’ it was ‘Hands off my science!’ ” We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame. But if anyone ever paid attention they would note that Woteki’s department, among other achievements, had suppressed the potentially catastrophic 2015 outbreak of bird flu. They’d created, very quickly, a fast new test for the disease that enabled them to cull the sick chickens from the healthy ones. Because of their work the poultry industry was forced to kill only tens of millions of birds, instead of hundreds of millions. In the early 1990s, the U.S.D.A. had also dealt with the outbreak of ring-spot virus in papaya trees, when the papaya industry in Hawaii faced ruin and extinction. Inside the little box marked “Science,” the U.S.D.A. helped genetically engineer a papaya tree that was resistant to ring-spot virus. The worst I could get anyone to say about Cathie Woteki was that she had an unusual sense of humor, at least by the careful standards of the Department of Agriculture. The jokes of scientists sometimes feel like experiments gone wrong, and she was very much a scientist. Her car license plate read, DR WO. No one at the U.S.D.A. called her that, or could imagine doing so. At Secretary Vilsack’s small office Christmas dinner for top U.S.D.A. officials, her scientist husband came wearing an elf hat. “No one knew why,” says a U.S.D.A. staffer. “That she had looked at her husband dressed as an elf and said, ‘Yep, that’ll work.’ She never explained it. It was actually kind of endearing.”

he first time we spoke wasn’t long after Trump had nominated her replacement. His name was Sam Clovis. He had a doctorate in public administration from the University of Alabama but no experience in D EC EMB ER

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science. He’d come to prominence in 2010 as a Rush Limbaugh–style right-wing talk-radio host in Sioux City, Iowa. As Iowa chairman of Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign, he’d ripped Trump loudly and righteously for having “no foundation in Christ.” Then he’d quit Perry’s campaign to become cochairman of the Trump campaign, declining to address rumors he’d done it for the money. (“I’m not going to talk about how much money I’m getting paid,” he told the Des Moines Register. “It’s just not going to happen.”) His appointment as the U.S.D.A.’s chief scientist felt like a practical joke to those who had worked there: this was the place that, back in the early 1940s, had taken Alexander Fleming’s findings and effectively invented penicillin. It had triggered the antibiotics revolution. It had coped with endless blights and outbreaks. The consequences of the science it funded—or did not fund—was mind-boggling. The person Clovis was replacing had taught at universities, worked in the White House, and, along the way, been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. “They are going to politicize the science,” said Woteki. “My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.” In recent years, much of the department’s research has dealt with the effects of climate change. The head of science directs nearly $3 billion in grants each year. Woteki directed the science that leads to nutritional standards for schoolchildren. She set research priorities. Hers had been food security; domestic and global nutrition; safety of the food supply; and figuring out how best to convert plants into fuel. “All of that has to be done in the face of a changing climate,” said Woteki. “It’s all climate change.” It might sound silly that the U.S.D.A. funds a project that seeks to improve the ability of sheep to graze at high altitudes—until you realize that this may one day be the only place sheep will be able to graze. “We’re going to become even more reliant on the efficiencies that come from the investment in science,” she said. One-quarter of the arable land in the world is already degraded, either by overfarming or overgrazing. “Changing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will force changes in the way crops are grown and livestock are raised,” she said. “The changing climate brings new risks of food-borne disease. Even the pathogens are influenced by temperature and humidity.” If the Trump administration were to pollute the scientific inquiry at the U.S.D.A. with politics, scientific inquiry would effectively cease. “These high-level discussions really worry me,” she says. Research grants will go not to the most promising ideas but to the closest allies. “There is already good science that isn’t being funded,” she said. “That will get worse.” Junk science will be used to muddy issues like childhood nutrition. Maybe sodium isn’t as bad for kids as people say! There’s no DEC E M B E R

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such thing as too much sugar! The science will suddenly be “unclear.” There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories, with two sides to them.

ince she had run two of the little boxes on the org chart, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and ask Woteki what most worried her about Food Safety. “Regulatory reform in food safety without science,” she said. That was too general. I pressed her for some real, specific concern. “They could increase the line speeds,” she said without missing a beat. The U.S.D.A. has big, fat, quite readable rule books to prevent meat from killing people. One rule concerns the speed of the poultry-slaughter lines: 140 birds a minute. In theory, some poor U.S.D.A. inspector is meant to physically examine each and every bird for defects. But obviously no human being can inspect 140 birds a minute. No industry can kill nine billion birds each year without wanting to find faster ways to do it. Just this fall, the National Chicken Council petitioned the U.S.D.A. to allow for line speeds of 175 or faster. “It’ll make it even harder for inspectors to do their jobs,” says Woteki. What she fears isn’t so much the bad intentions of the people who fill the jobs she once did. She fears their seeming commitment to scientific ignorance. No big chicken company wants to poison a bunch of children with salmonella. But if you speed up the slaughter lines, you need to make the new speed safe. Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.

li Zaidi drew a distinction between the little boxes inside the Department of Agriculture that enforced regulation (such as Food Safety) and those that spent money (such as Science). “One is the stick and the other is the carrot,” he said. “You pay for things often that you can’t or won’t regulate.” Where the government had the power to regulate, it had less need to pay for things. It couldn’t compel university professors to do agricultural research, and so it paid them to do it. It had the power to compel, say, egg producers to adhere to rules that kept eggs from making people sick, and so didn’t need to pay them to do it. “In the extreme case the federal government could just buy eggs for everyone and test all of these eggs,” said Zaidi. “That’s obviously a dumb thing to do from an economic point of view, but it shows you how regulation takes the place of expenditure. ” The regulation side of things is, as a rule, less vulnerable to the short-term idiocy of a new administration than the money side of things. The big show Trump has made of removing regulations by executive order has

done far less than he suggests, as there is a formal rule-changing process: you must solicit outside opinion, wait a certain amount of time for those opinions to arrive, and then deal with the inevitable legal challenges to your rule change. To increase the number of chickens a poultry company murders each minute might take years, even if it is the smart thing to do. But to change who gets money to do agricultural research, or whether they get it at all, is a cinch. For that reason, Ali thought the little box marked “Science” was of far greater concern than the box marked “Food Safety.” There were two other important little boxes inside the U.S.D.A. One was marked “Farm,” and the other was “Rural Development.” Ali Zaidi had watched many billions flow through the first and a few billion flow through the second. He thought it highly unlikely the Trump administration’s budget cuts would have much effect on the farm dollars. A lot of that money VANITY FAIR Statement Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685 showing the Ownership, Management and Circulation of VANITY FAIR, published monthly (12 issues) for October 1, 2017. Publication No. 697-930. Annual subscription price $24.00. 1. Location of known office of Publication is One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. 2. Location of the Headquarters or General Business Offices of the Publisher is One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. 3. The names and addresses of the Publisher, Editor and Managing Editor are: Publisher, Chris Mitchell, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Editor, Graydon Carter, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Managing Editor, Chris Garrett, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. 4. The owner is: Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., published through its Condé Nast division, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Stockholder: Directly or indirectly through intermediate corporations to the ultimate corporate parent, Advance Publications, Inc., 950 Fingerboard Road, Staten Island, NY 10305. 5. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities are: None. 6. Extent and nature of circulation Average No. Copies Single Issue each issue during nearest to preceding 12 months filing date a. Total No. Copies 1,529,517 b. Paid Circulation (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid 863,420 Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (2) Mailed In-County Paid 0 Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (3) Paid Distribution Outside the 153,540 Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS® (4) Paid Distribution by Other 0 Classes of Mail Through the USPS c. Total Paid Distribution 1,016,960 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (1) Free or Nominal Rate 164,481 Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541 (2) Free or Nominal Rate 0 In-County Copies included on PS Form 3541 (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies 0 Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS (4) Free or Nominal Rate 11,999 Distribution Outside the Mail e. Total Free or Nominal Rate 176,480 Distribution f. Total Distribution 1,193,440 g. Copies not Distributed 336,076 h. Total 1,529,517 i. Percent Paid 85.21% j. Paid Electronic Copies 60,196 k. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) 1,077,156 + Paid Electronic Copies l. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) 1,253,636 + Paid Electronic Copies m. Percent Paid (Both Print & 85.92% Electronic Copies)

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0 1,016,587 165,814 0 0 14,992 180,806 1,197,393 317,184 1,514,577 84.90% 55,314 1,071,901 1,252,707 85.57%

7. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. (Signed) David Geithner, Vice President and Treasurer www.vanityfair.com

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Department of Agriculture went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. “The money follows the political power of the constituencies,” said Ali, “instead of the evidence of need in America. If you really boil down the difference between the farm side of the budget and the rural-development side of the budget, the farm subsidies can wind up in the pockets of large corporations. It’s the rural-development money that tends to stay in these communities.” Without that money, he thought, rural America would be a very different place from what it is. “Without the U.S.D.A. money it’s possible we’d look like sub-Saharan Africa, or rural China,” said Ali. Small-town America is dispersed and disorganized and poor. The people in those communities don’t have the money to hire Washington lobbyists. A way of life depends on federal subsidies. “It’s preserving an emotional infrastructure,” said Ali. “We have decided this is the type of community we want to preserve. But the entire time I was in the White House, we grappled with the question: Where do we find the political capital for rural development? Because it can’t just come from the people rural development helps.” Rural Delivery

y the time she left the little box marked “Rural Development,” Lillian Salerno had spent the better part of five years inside it. The box’s function was simple: to channel lowinterest-rate loans, along with a few grants, mainly to towns with fewer than 50,000 people in them. Her department ran the $220 billion bank that serviced the poorest of the poor in rural America: in the Deep South, and in the tribal lands, and in the communities, called colonias, along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Some of the communities in the South, the only checks going in are government checks,” she said. And yet, amazingly, they nearly always repaid their loans. Half her job had been vetting the demands from rural America for help. The other half had been one long unglamorous road trip. “It wasn’t like I could just fly to New York City. I’d be going to, like, Minco, Oklahoma. Everywhere I went was two flights minimum plus a two- or three-hour drive.” On the other end of the trip lay some small town in dire need of a health center, or housing, or a small business. “You go through these small towns and you see these ridiculously nice fire stations. That’s us,” she said. It was always more expensive for these towns to get electricity and Internet access and health care. “But for the federal government rural Alaska wouldn’t have any drink-

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ing water.” The need was incredible; her work felt urgent. “We’d give $40,000 for a health clinic and the whole time you’re like, Shit, this makes a difference.” As the U.S.D.A.’s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News–watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. “He’s telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own,” said Vilsack. “The U.S.D.A. person goes to introduce herself, and he says, ‘So who are you?’ She says, ‘I’m the U.S.D.A. person.’ He asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ She says, ‘Well, sir, we supplied the money you are announcing.’ He was white as a sheet.” Salerno saw this sort of thing all the time. “We’d have this check,” said Salerno. “We’d blow it up and try to have a picture taken with it. It said, UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, in great big letters. That was something that Vilsack wanted—to be right out in front so people knew the federal government had helped them. In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say, ‘Can you not mention that the government gave this?’ ” Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, it remained oddly invisible. “It’s just a misunderstanding of the system,” said Salerno. “We don’t teach people what government actually does.”

he herself hadn’t learned until very late. She’d grown up in a family with no money, and nine children, and Republican sympathies, in a small farming town in Texas called Little Elm. Her graduating high-school class had 18 people in it. She was both student-council president and head cheerleader. (“The reason I’m not very good at math is you had to choose: cheerleading or math. And I chose cheerleading.”) Few of her school’s graduates ever went to college, but she was admitted to the University of Texas, on a Pell Grant. She paid for what the grant didn’t by waiting tables. She was waiting tables in Little Elm in the late 1980s when friends started getting sick, and dying, from AIDS. She went to Dallas to visit them. There, at a Dallas hospital, she saw that men condemned to death were going without care: the nurses were frightened to interact with them. They had a particular fear of being infected by the needles that delivered medication to the patients. “At that time everyone died,” said Salerno. “And they are told, ‘The nurses aren’t coming.’ I said, That’s about as fucked as anything I ever saw.” She had a raw sense of injustice, and a desire to see life be made fair. “Small town,

big family, no resources: you look at the world in a certain way.” She also had a rollup-your-sleeves-and-fix-it attitude. After seeing the needless suffering she came up with an idea: the retractable needle. It worked like a ballpoint pen. A friend of hers, an engineer, designed it. She applied to the local community bank for a loan and got it. It wasn’t until much later that she discovered that the loan had ultimately come from the Small Business Administration, and that the federal government had simply used the local bank as a delivery system. She didn’t know enough to know that no bank was going to lend money to a first-time entrepreneur on the strength of a new invention—in part because banks didn’t value willpower. “All good inventions come from something personal,” she said. “People create things because it’s personal.” Salerno and her partner built and ran the new company in Little Elm and called it Retractable Technologies. They received their first patent in the early 1990s and F.D.A. approval in 1997. The first year in business they sold one million syringes, the next year three million. By the third year her company employed 140 people in Little Elm. She repaid the bank her government loan—and she still didn’t realize it was a government loan. For the first time in her life she had money. She also now had a view of the inner workings of the health-care industry. The company that had made the old syringes, Becton, Dickinson & Co., controlled more than 80 percent of the market and felt threatened. It wasn’t long before it started to require hospital systems to buy its clumsy new version of a safe syringe, by bundling it with other products. Salerno assumed Becton, Dickinson was counting on her inability to pay for the lawsuits required to fight them. But she did and wound up with a settlement of $100 million in 2004. Even then, Becton found ways to keep her new product from gaining full access to the market. Her company survived but didn’t become what it might have. It now employs 130 people, instead of the 200 at its peak. Salerno concluded that increased corporate power was one of the forces that had reduced the opportunity available in rural America. The rapacity of companies with monopolistic power, and their ability to have their way with the government, got her thinking about the big American systems. “The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make,” she said. “I know what things cost because I made them.”

er outrage led her to support Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007, but she soon switched to Obama. (“I switched because I got so angry at how they were beating him up.”) After Obama won, Salerno was a natural candidate for a job she had no idea existed: helping people in rural America to help themselves. “Someone said, D EC EMB ER

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‘Why don’t you become an administrator in rural America, at the Department of Agriculture?’ I said, ‘There’s an administrator in rural America?’ ” She’d come to her job inside the little box marked “Rural Development” without any particular ambition to be there. The sums of money at her disposal were incredible: the little box gave out or guaranteed $30 billion in loans and grants a year. But people who should have known about it hadn’t the first clue what it was up to. “I had this conversation with elected and state officials almost everywhere in the South,” said Salerno. “Them: We hate the government and you suck. Me: My mission alone put $1 billion into your economy this year, so are you sure about that? Me thinking: We are the only reason your shitty state is standing.” She was a small-business person first and had no affection for the inefficiencies she found inside the federal government. “You have this big federal workforce that hasn’t been invested in forever,” she said. “They can’t be outward-facing. They don’t have any of the tools you need in a modern workplace.” She couldn’t attract young people to work there. Once, she tried to estimate how many of the U.S.D.A.’s roughly 100,000 employees had been taught how to create a spreadsheet. Fewer than 50 people, she decided. “I was always very aware how we spent money. When I would use words like ‘fiduciary duties’ or say, ‘Those are not our dollars,’ they would say, ‘Are you sure you aren’t a Republican?’ But I was really sensitive to the fact that this wasn’t our money. This was taxpayer money. This was money that had come from some guy working for 15 bucks an hour.” The big messy federal government was still the only tool for dealing with what she saw as a growing crisis: the deconstruction of rural America. “It’s hard to quantify what it means not to have your entire town’s businesses shuttered up because Walmart moved there,” she said. There was a hole in the American capital markets: they simply didn’t reach small towns. And there were lots of stats that suggested that our society benefited from having small towns—and that small-town life made some important, perhaps undervalued, contributions to the whole. Fifteen percent of the country lives in towns of fewer than 10,000

people, for instance, but a far greater proportion of the armed services come from rural areas than from urban ones.

ut the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked “Rural Development.” That’s not what has happened. The Trump administration wanted to show early that it was serious about foreign trade. This desire expressed itself in the Department of Agriculture by a splitting of the little box marked “Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services” into two little boxes—one for Farm programs and another for Foreign Agricultural Affairs, or trade. Oddly, at that very moment, Trump was removing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and costing American farmers an estimated $4.4 billion a year in foreign sales, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. As there’s a rule against having more than seven little boxes on the U.S.D.A.’s org chart, they had to eliminate one of the little boxes. The little box they got rid of was Rural Development. “I worked in the little box in the government most responsible for helping the people who elected Trump,” said Salerno. “And they literally took my little box off the organization chart.” This troubled Lillian Salerno, and not just because she’d spent five years of her life inside that little box. It troubled her because it made her wonder about the motives of the people who had taken over the Department of Agriculture. She’d worked inside the little box for a reason. And if you wanted to understand what was at stake inside these little boxes, you could not neglect the motives of the people who ran them. “You want to know what worries me most?” she says after I ask her the question I’d come to ask her. “I am absolutely convinced about one thing: there are conversations going on right now in New York and Washington between people in the Trump administration and Wall Street bankers about how to get their hands on the bank portfolio. Folks in banking: I’m sure they are

nice people—they just can’t help themselves.” She’s worried that an only partially adequate tool for helping people who were raised in the country’s unlucky places will be turned into a source of profits for the biggest financial firms. She thinks that was why they eliminated her little box and moved the $220 billion bank into the office of the secretary: so they could do new things with the money without people noticing. “At the end of the day, what do I think they are going to do?” she said. “Take all the money and give it to their banker friends. Do things like privatize water—so people in rural Florida will be paying $75 a month for it instead of $20.”

illian Salerno had observed the Trump administration for a long moment. Virtually all the people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their 20s. They exhibited no knowledge of, or interest in, the problems of rural Americans. She decided there was only one thing to do: move back to Texas and run for office. She had no illusions about herself as a political candidate. She was still a small-town girl from Little Elm, Texas. “I’m still basically a waitress,” she said. “I still feel like this. If I get to be a congressman, I’ll still feel like that.” Ali Zaidi had asked a question: Where would the political capital come from to help people in rural America? Well, it would come from her. Zaidi marveled at how hard it was for Americans to see the source of their society’s strength. People who came to the United States from other countries had this one advantage: they didn’t take it for granted. “The immigrant journey has a time compression to it,” he said. “Within a generation you’re able to see how the rungs of the ladder of opportunity are laid out in front of you, and you can see the hands that pull you up. You see people pull you up and you say, O.K., I’ve got to do the same thing for other people. “I came up that ladder of opportunity, but even I didn’t know the names of the government programs that made up the ladder itself. Growing up, what was obvious to me was the kindness of community members. But government was less visible. You need to work really hard to appreciate it.” And who wants to do that?

VANITY FAIR IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2017 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VANITY FAIR DECEMBER 2017, VOLUME 59, NO. 12. VANITY FAIR (ISSN 0733-8899) is published monthly (except for January, a combined issue in June/July, a Hollywood issue in February, and a Holiday issue in November) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman Emeritus; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Officer; James M. Norton, Chief Business Officer and President of Revenue. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to VANITY FAIR, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0617. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to VANITY FAIR, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0617, call 800-365-0635, or e-mail subscriptions@vf.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If during your subscription term or up to one year after the magazine becomes undeliverable, you are ever dissatisfied with your subscription, let us know. You will receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of order. Send all editorial, business, and production correspondence electronically to vfmail@vf.com. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For reuse permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.vf.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0617 or call 800-365-0635. VANITY FAIR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY VANITY FAIR IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.

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PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

John

GRISHAM

The best-selling novelist—who has a new legal thriller, The Rooster Bar— discusses his golf handicap, Trump, and quitting the Boy Scouts to pursue football and cheerleaders

hat is your current state of mind? Reasonably carefree. What is your favorite journey? To the beach. What is your greatest fear? Having a stroke. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience; the inability to savor the moment. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Narcissism. What is your greatest extravagance? I collect first editions of 20th-century American authors. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Enthusiasm. On what occasion do you lie? Twice, every time: my weight and my golf handicap. What do you dislike most about your appearance? Thinning hair. Which living person do you most despise? That fraud in the White House. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “I think … ”; “I do think … ”; “I feel … ”; “You know … ” What is your greatest regret? In the Boy Scouts, I was six months away from achieving the rank of Eagle when I quit to play football and chase cheerleaders; caught neither the ball nor the girls. What or who is the greatest love of your life? Renee. When and where were you happiest? Right now. Which talent would you most like to have? To write as clearly as John Steinbeck. If 156

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you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Thicker hair. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? Pass. It’s about politics. What do you consider your greatest achievement? Debuting at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for 25 consecutive years. What is your most treasured possession? Two: a signed first edition of The Sound and the Fury and a first edition of The Great Gatsby. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Serving time in prison as an innocent man. Where would you like to live? I’m not moving. What is your favorite occupation? Writing novels. What is the quality you most like in a man? Humor and humility. What is the quality you most like in a woman? Patience. What do you most value in your friends? Bluntness. Who are your favorite writers? Steinbeck, John le Carré, Ian McEwan, John Irving, James Lee Burke, Pat Conroy, Michael Lewis. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Atticus Finch. What is it that you most dislike? That fraud in the White House. How would you like to die? Sleeping. If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? I shall not return. What is your motto? “Drink the wines from the top shelf.” BY

RISKO

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