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TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S M A RC H 2020

ON THE COVER

MACAULAY CULKIN PHOTOGRAPHED BY ROBBIE FIMMANO FOR ESQUIRE. ROBE BY DOLCE & GABBANA. STYLING BY GUS ROMERO. PROP STYLING BY ARIANA NAKATA FOR WALTER SCHUPFER. GROOMING BY HILDA LEVIERGE. PRODUCTION BY ZACH CRAWFORD. ABOVE: JACKET, VEST, SHIRT, AND TROUSERS BY GUCCI; RINGS, CULKIN’S OWN.

F E AT U R E S

55 FAME IN THE TIME OF TWO AMERICAS

by Jack Holmes Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, and Glenn Jacobs on political celebrity at a moment when a fault line may define our nation’s democracy.

68 THE PLACE TO BE

by Kate Storey For four decades, Page Six has ruled the world of gossip, but in an era when celebrities control the narrative and power is a dirty word, can it survive?

86 THE ANXIETY OF MODERN STARDOM

by Justin Kirkland Rickey Thompson grew up and blew up online, but what happens when he wants to move on?

by Ryan D’Agostino Macaulay Culkin is not like you.

74 GREAT BRITONS

by Murray Clark One of these marquee Brits could (maybe?) be the future James Bond.

92 THE DAY THE ROCKET CAME TO BOCA CHICA

90 THE STORY OF HUEY LEWIS

58 SNOWFLAKE

hear amplified music. Now the beloved pop star is on a search for answers.

IS NOT A TRAGEDY by Dave Holmes Without warning, Huey Lewis lost the ability to

by Rachel Monroe When Elon Musk announced plans to build a SpaceX launchpad in Texas, a nearby community had no idea it would be dismantled.

100 DIRECTORS’ CUT

by John von Sothen Designer Silvia Venturini Fendi and filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) have made this spring’s most inspired clothing collab. 104 BOLD, BASICALLY

Combining luxurious staples with a dash of unexpected color is the season’s key style move.

TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S M A RC H 2020

Rule No.

RICKEY THOMPSON PHOTOGRAPHED BY MAGNUS UNNAR FOR ESQUIRE

“DO I WANT TO BE THIRTY YEARS OLD AND STILL, LIKE, YOU KNOW, MAKING VIDEOS IN MY ROOM OR WHATEVER?”

854

IF YOU EMAIL YOUR BOSS WITH A VACATION REQUEST AND THE BOSS’S RESPONSE IS “SURE,” CANCEL THE TRIP.

THE ANXIETY OF MODERN S TA R D O M

If it ain’t broke, don’t ﬁx it. That’s the mentality Dior Homme brought to its newly imagined cologne, leaning into a modern iteration with more of the woody and gutsy elements. A few spritzes and you’re diving into a deep, sophisticated feeling—without losing the sort of freshness you need in an everyday fragrance. Need an endorsement? Just ask Robert Pattinson: “You don’t really notice you’re wearing a fragrance at all.” For more from him on his personal style, turn to page 38. —Garrett Munce

DIOR HOMME EAU DE TOILETTE ($95 FOR 3.4 OZ BOTTLE); DIOR.COM

COURTESY DIOR

PAG E NO.

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TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S M A RC H 2020 THE SHORT STORIES

26 EDITOR’S LETTER 9

JOHN KRASINSKI ISN’T TRYING TO BE YOUR RED STATE HERO

by Matt Miller The actor-director on A Quiet Place Part II—and an Office reunion? 32 STAY GOLD, PONYBOY

by Jonathan Evans Are you a Gold Chain Guy? 34 A SNEAKER FOR THE FEARLESS

by Daniel Dumas Giuseppe Zanotti and Swae Lee’s bold collab. 36 DIVE IN

by Nick Sullivan Bell & Ross’s aquatic riff on its square timepieces. 38 ROBERT PATTINSON WEARS HIS UNIFORM HOME

by Garrett Munce The face of Dior Homme is stealing his style from his latest roles. 40 FRENCH DRESSING

by Nick Sullivan A cadre of small shops in Paris are ushering in a new era of personal style. 42 HIGH, NOT TIGHT

by Ben Boskovich Embracing a baggier pant. 46 THE ENDURING CULT OF DESUS & MERO

G R E A T B R I T O N S ( P. 7 4 )

ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID BURTON FOR ESQUIRE SHIRT ($925) AND TROUSERS ($725) BY VERSACE; SANTOS-DUMONT WATCH ($11,800) BY CARTIER.

by Ben Boskovich A Q+A with the masters of pop-culture commentary. 50 BAKING BAD

by Jeff Gordinier How Ryan Morgan became one of America’s best bread wizards. 116 FAME-ISH

Three sorta famous people.

JACK ESSIG

MICHAEL SEBASTIAN

SV P, P u b l i s h i n g D i re c to r & C h i e f Reve n u e O f f i c e r

EDITOR IN CHIEF

CAMERON CONNORS Executive Director, Head of Brand Strategy and Marketing

NICK SULLIVAN Creative Director

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BEN BOSKOVICH Deputy Editor ROCKWELL HARWOOD Design Director

CHRIS PEEL Executive Director, Hearst Men’s Group

JOHN KENNEY Managing Editor

CARYN KESLER Executive Director of Luxury Goods JOHN WATTIKER Executive Director of Fashion & Retail

KELLY STOUT Articles Director

DOUG ZIMMERMAN Senior Grooming Director

KEVIN SINTUMUANG Culture and Lifestyle Director JONATHAN EVANS Style Director

JUSTIN HARRIS Midwest Sales Director

RANDI PECK Executive Director of Talent

AUTUMN JENKS Midwest Sales Director

JEFF GORDINIER Food and Drinks Editor

SANDY ADAMSKI Executive Director KIMBERLY BUONASSISI Account Director

ERIC SULLIVAN Senior Editor

JOHN V. CIPOLLA Integrated Account Director, Spirits & Travel

KATE STOREY Senior Staff Writer

JOE PENNACCHIO Eastern Group Advertising Director, Hearst Autos

AMY GRACE LOYD Literary Editor MATT MILLER Culture Editor

MARISA STUTZ Detroit Group Advertising Director, Hearst Autos

JACK HOLMES Politics Editor

ANNE RETHMEYER Western Group Advertising Director, Hearst Autos LISA L ACASSE Digital Sales Director, Hearst Autos

ADRIENNE WESTENFELD, BRADY LANGMANN Assistant Editors SARAH RENSE Associate Lifestyle Editor

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MADISON VAIN Associate Editor, Social Media

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E S QU I R E 03_2020

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MARKETING SOLUTIONS

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PROMOTION

BARTENDER MASTER CLASS

This September, Tequila Herradura and Esquire teamed up to present the Bartender Master Class 2019. More than thirty-two of the most inventive bartenders were selected to travel to Mexico to experience ďŹ rst-hand the craftmanship and heritage of Tequila Herradura. Guests enjoyed VIP tastings, excursions, and a visit to Casa Herradura, the last true tequila-producing Hacienda on the planet, in AmatitĂĄn, Mexico. Three top-scoring bartenders also made an exclusive trip to NYC this fall to be featured in a video for Esquire.com.

Tequila, 40% ABV, Imported by BrownForman, Louisville, KY. Please Drink Responsibly.

“Fame, fame, fatal fame It can play hideous tricks on the brain. But still I’d rather be famous Than righteous or holy Any day Any day Any day.” —The Smiths, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”

—Michael Sebastian AARON RICHTER

T H I S WAY I N A L E T T E R F ROM T H E E DI TOR

RECENTLY, WHILE HUNGOVER, I CAUGHT UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS. MY

young children were down for a nap, befuddled by why helping them put together a Hello Kitty puzzle had nearly made Dad’s eyeballs explode. I was nestled up beside my wife on the couch; she was watching an Easter episode of Keeping Up with . . . in which Kris Jenner, the matriarch of reality TV, hosts a Sunday-afternoon party for the family’s mostly famous friends. Somewhere around the egg hunt, it dawned on me: A decade ago, many halfway-respectable people—including a few in the pages of this magazine— dismissed the Kardashians as famous for no reason, as the harbingers of the end of Western civilization. In its 2008 recap of KUWTK’s first season, The Washington Post called the show a “monstrosity” packed with “brain-numbing” moments in the lives of a “despicable” family. Now? The Kardashians appear on the covers of Vogue and Forbes, are feted at very fancy galas, and host Easter brunch with luminaries. They have the ear of the president. The Washington Post urges us to “check out” Kim Kardashian’s “walk-in fridge and fro-yo machine,” as if her kitchen were the setting for peace talks with Iran. So who changed, the Kardashians or everyone else? One thing’s for sure: The Kardashians proved to have the savviest business minds of any clan since the Rockefellers. And while their business pursuits— and family—have grown in the past dozen years, they’ve remained true to their hyper-driven selves. No, it was we, the American public, who changed, because—without even knowing it—we embraced the flimsier angels of our nature. We dropped all pretense and fell in love with social media, which is just another way of saying we fell in love with ourselves. Today, we don’t just accept fame as the ultimate pursuit; we celebrate it. Bright flashes of entertainment, schadenfreude and FOMO, joy and cruelty—these are all hallmarks of the era. It’s like icing— delicious, yes, but only in small doses. Without the cake, it’s nothing but a tube of processed sugar. Welcome to what I call the Frosting Era. And welcome to Esquire’s Fame Issue, which doubles as the debut of our latest redesign. Of course, no one wants to read about a redesign; they just want to see it, so please enjoy and turn the page! (But only once you’ve finished reading this one.) Among the changes you’ll notice is a renaming, and rethinking, of the section at the beginning of the magazine (what we call the “front of book”). It’s now called The Short Stories, a nod to Esquire’s literary DNA as well as a place for our short(er) articles. Here, you’ll find stories on culture, style, and politics. Elsewhere in the issue, you’ll find stories that explore the beating heart of the Frosting Era: fame and its many tentacles, good, bad, and ugly. From Ryan D’Agostino’s tender portrait of Macaulay Culkin—who, at ten, became the most famous person in America and then mostly vanished—to Rachel Monroe’s dispatch from the small Texas community that Elon Musk is buying out to make way for his SpaceX rockets. The question looming over all of this is: Has the Frosting Era crested or are we just getting started? President Trump—himself a former reality-TV star, albeit a far less successful one than the Kardashians—possesses the nuclear codes and an itchy trigger finger, and he might yet unwittingly set us on course for a more sobering future. Here’s to hoping the hangover isn’t awful.

PROMOTION

EXCLU SI VE LY AT

THE

culture & style

John Krasinski Isn’t Trying to Be Your Red-State Hero The actor-director on A Quiet Place Part II, the military, and an Office reunion? by MATT MILLER

DOUG INGLISH/TRUNK ARCHIVE

ON MARCH 9, 2018, JOHN KRASINSKI AND HIS WIFE ,

coming out.” Blunt told him to focus on one thing. And he said he’d be happy if some people clapped at the end of the screening. Krasinski had never done anything like this. But A Quiet Place wasn’t just a genre departure for the man still best known as The Office’s Jim Halpert. It was a high-concept horror movie in which blind monsters with superhearing will kill anything that makes a noise. Krasinski and Blunt portray a married couple trying to keep their family alive. The film plays out in agonizing, stifling near-silence. In the theater that evening, any tiny sound—a body shifting in a seat,

Emily Blunt, were in the back of a car in Austin heading to the world premiere of A Quiet Place, at SXSW. Krasinski was terrified, and Blunt could tell. He had been working on the final sound mix of the movie (which he cowrote, directed, and starred in alongside his wife) until 5:30 that morning. He left the studio and flew directly to Texas. “Emily was holding my hand, and she was like, ‘You should eat something,’ ” Krasinski remembers. “And I said, ‘What do you mean? We just had lunch.’ And she goes, ‘John, you didn’t eat lunch.’ I totally didn’t realize how the nerves were

C U LT U R E & S T Y L E

Rule No. 855 YOU DON’T HAVE TO WATCH THE SHOW EVERYONE IN YOUR OFFICE IS TALKING ABOUT. Krasinski’s commitment to his family should be evident to anyone who’s watched A Quiet Place, which is very much about what someone will do for their child. Though the movie debuted to almost universal acclaim (95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), some people didn’t read it that way. This included The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who considered its depiction of a silent white family with guns protecting their home from invaders to be “conspicuously regressive.” Krasinski maintains he didn’t write it with a political slant. “I never saw it that way or ever thought of it until it was presented to me in that way,” Krasinski tells me. “It wasn’t about being, you know, silent and political. If anything, it was about going into the dark and taking a chance when all hope looked lost—you fight for what’s most important to you. Again, my whole metaphor was solely about parenthood.” And Krasinski says that he wanted to elaborate on this idea in the sequel. “If the first movie is about the promise that you make to your kids that I’ll keep you safe no matter what—that’s inevitably a false promise,” he says. “The second one is about growing up and moving on and dealing with loss,” he says. “For me, this whole movie is about who you trust and the power of relying on other people in dark times.” Krasinski majored in playwriting at Brown University, but that’s not what inevitably kick-started his career. That was, of course, The Office—the beloved NBC sitcom about midlevel grunts at a drab paper company. Still, he ultimately hoped to make movies. Krasinski used his first check from The Office to obtain the rights to David Foster Wallace’s short-story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. He wanted to make it into a movie, but he had no one to direct it.

“DO YOU RESPECT AND HONOR EVERY FACET OF EVERY SINGLE PRESIDENT? OF COURSE NOT.” Years later, he was talking about the project with his Office costar Rainn Wilson, who suggested that Krasinski should just direct the film himself. “I thought, Wow, I don’t know. I can’t direct,” Krasinski remembers. “And he was like, ‘Why not? Just do it.’ So I did.” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) was a strong directorial debut that gave him the confidence to helm a few later-season Office episodes. In fact, the TV series was such a monumental experience that he says he’d 100 percent do a reunion. “The Office was absolutely everything to me. I mean, it is my beginning and my end. I’m pretty sure at the end of my career I’ll still be known as Jim. It was the first creative family I’ve ever

Rule No. 856 BUT YOU PROBABLY SHOULD. had,” he says. “In many ways, they will always be the most important people in that most important experience in my career. So yeah, if they did a reunion, I would absolutely love to do it.” Over the past few years, though, Krasinski’s onscreen persona has deviated from Jim Halpert’s. He starred in the military drama 13 Hours and Amazon’s CIA series Jack Ryan and directed a film that some consider an allegory of conservative ideals, so a narrative started to develop around him. In August 2018, BuzzFeed posted an article titled “John Krasinski Wants to Play Red-State Heroes Without Getting Political,” and in November 2019, an old video of him saying, “The CIA is something that we should all not only cherish but be saying thank you for every single day” was heavily criticized. “That narrative is certainly not the narrative I intended to put out there. When people look for something that they want to see, I can’t stop them from a subjective belief in something,” says Krasinski, who cohosted a fundraiser for Elizabeth Warren’s senatorial campaign in 2012. From his perspective, his decision to star in 13 Hours— about the attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi—was not a political one. “I have 11 aunts and uncles and cousins who have been in the military or still are in the military. So it was a big thing on my list to get to

do a military movie or show or something,” he says, noting that the film was about the individuals and the events of that night. Not politics. “As far as Jack Ryan and the CIA, I always say it’s about the people. I’ll always respect people who put their lives on the line for people like me, who they’ve never met.” And as for his CIA comment last year, Krasinski says he meant for it to refer to the men and women of the CIA, not the agency as a whole. “If you start breaking down every single CIA event, do I respect and honor all those? Of course not. Do you respect and honor every facet of every single president? Of course not.” Once A Quiet Place Part II comes out, he plans to go right into production of the third season of Jack Ryan. After that, he’s open to exploring more stories in the Quiet Place universe, and of expanding that world, but he’s also up for something new. I ask him if he’s heard the rumors that he’ll be playing Mister Fantastic whenever Marvel gets around to tackling Fantastic Four again. “I was just about to walk into the worst pun ever: That’s a fantastic role,” he tells me. “Marvel wrote the playbook on secrecy. I am not committed to the role or anything. But if and when they do it, I would love to talk to them about it.”

R E A L A P P R E C I AT I O N I S N ’ T S P O K E N , I T ’ S P O U R E D.

I don’t want to completely blow your mind [extended bong rip], but have you ever really considered the nature of the self? Are we born with immutable characteristics that deﬁne us throughout our days on this planet, or do we reinvent ourselves constantly— sometimes so totally that the “you” you are now isn’t the same you as, say, last year? What I’m really trying to ask here is: Am I the kind of guy who can wear a gold chain? Sure, I’m physically capable of draping one around my neck. But that’s not the challenge. A necklace is a necklace, but I’d never been able to get past the idea that a string of precious-metal links is more than that. It’s a statement. Of wealth. Or conﬁdence. A desire to let the world know you’ve made it. Whatever it was, I had imbued this inanimate object with enormous spiritual

STAY GOLD, PONYBOY Wearing a gold chain: SIMPLE ACCESSORIZING or radical act of personal reinvention?

by JONATHAN EVANS

power that required a personality— a person—capable of matching it. And then, not too long ago, I started to suspect that perhaps I had been thinking way too hard about what it means to wear a piece of jewelry. Sitting in the Esquire ofﬁces one morning, I noticed a colleague wearing a thin gold chain over his black T-shirt. The vibe wasn’t mystically powerful; it was just cool. It looked good. And it occurred to me that maybe the only way to be the kind of guy who wears a gold chain is to wear a gold chain. So I tried it. I felt too visible. Too loud. I was utterly convinced of my own ostentation. And then I walked outside—and no one gave me a second look. Some people at the ofﬁce glanced at this clearly life-altering accessory, and then said nothing and moved on with their day. I didn’t feel like a Gold Chain Guy, and yet here I was, a guy wearing a gold chain. Maybe they’re one and the same, or maybe the latter begets the former. There’s no way to know until you try. Fasten the clasp on a thin one with a pendant (your call whether you’re channeling Steve McQueen or Tony Soprano) and see how it sits. Or go for it with a thick Cuban link and see if you feel famous. Are you a gold chain guy? Am I? Yes, if we choose to be. Or maybe we’re just born that way and free will is an illusion. Here, take the bong.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SANTOS DE CARTIER CHAIN ($7,450) BY CARTIER; CURB CHAIN ($1,650) BY TOM WOOD; PADLOCK CHARM CHAIN ($430) BY AMBUSH; 18K SMALL BOX CHAIN ($3,050) BY DAVID YURMAN.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY WESTBROOK

P R O P S T Y L I N G : M A R G A R E T M A C M I L L A N / H E L LO A R T I S T S

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S P ROT EC T YA N EC K

Rule No. A MAN WITH ONE PIERCED EAR IS RARELY AN AMAZON PRIME MEMBER.

857

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Giuseppe Zanotti and Swae Lee’s NEW COLLAB IS BIG, BOLD, and utterly unique by DANIEL DUMAS

powerful in an era when you can buy printed-ondemand T-shirts declaring your fandom of trucks, Texas, and Grey’s Anatomy from a Facebook ad. But when you’re talking about intricately hand-painted Italian sneakers, created by a collaboration between a fashion mogul and a hip-hop superstar . . . well, that’s something else entirely. The shoes are part of the new capsule collection from Swae Lee, 50 percent of the hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd, and Giuseppe Zanotti, the founder of the eponymous fashion label with a pen-

chant for bold leather jackets and flashy sneakers. The shoes just hit stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, and there’s a lot to see. “What drew me to Swae Lee is his fearlessness,” says Zanotti, who gave the musician full artistic license with the limited-edition line. That’s why Lee’s favorite color, pink, keeps showing up, whether in handpainted floral designs or as the canvas for a pair of boots. To be clear: These are not for the faint of heart. But neither are those shirts listing your hobbies and home state. After all, who cares if it’s one of a kind if it’s not actually cool, too?

P H OTO G R A P H B Y J E F F R E Y W E ST B R O O K

C O Y O A C Á N B L U E W A L L PA P E R / M U R A L S W A L L PA P E R . C O M ( B A C K G R O U N D )

A Sneaker for the Fearless “ONE OF A KIND” IS A TERM THAT MIGHT SEEM LESS

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S S OL E G LOW

“BUSINESS WAS A WAY FOR MEN TO TALK ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS.”

CONTEXT-FREE QUOTE FROM A BOOK WE LOVE

—ANNA WIENER, UNCANNY VALLEY (OUT NOW)

SNEAKERS ($995) BY GIUSEPPE FOR SWAE LEE.

I T H A S A LWAY S B A F F L E D M E T H AT T H E WAT C H I N D U S T R Y I S N â&#x20AC;&#x2122; T M O R E

into square watches. Certainly a handful of brands have created a unicorn or two, but these are rare departures from the overwhelmingly circular norm. Bell & Ross is a refreshing exception. Founded in 1992 (basically last week in industry terms), it gained early acceptance among watch fans for its no-nonsense, military-inspired tool models informed by the high-visibility readouts of airplane instrument panels. But its reputation was made in 2005 with the launch of the iconic BR 01 Instrument, a seriously

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S LOB S T E R S W E R E H A R M E D

Bell & Ross goes back to the Bronze Age with the BR 03-92 DIVER, a bol d

RULE NO. 858 NO BIBS.

chunky and eye-catching square timepiece that has largely defined the brand ever since. One of the newest variations on that look is the BR 03-92 Diver in bronze, a material that was used for centuries in ships because of its great resistance to corrosion. It also looks like gold (at a fraction of the price). Very unlike gold, however, bronze develops a darkening patina over time that varies in response to its environment. So each of the 250 watches in this limited run, made exclusively for the U. S. market, will cultivate its own utterly unique look. BR 03-92 DIVER ($3,990) BY BELL & ROSS.

n e w r i f f o n t h e b ra n d’s s i g n a t u re s q u a re t i m e p i e c e s

by NICK SULLIVAN

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY WESTBROOK PROP STYLING: MARGARET MACMILLAN/HELLO ARTISTS

by GARRETT MUNCE

The FACE OF DIOR HOMME is stealing his style from his latest roles

Robert Pattinson Wears His Uniform Home

SUIT, TURTLENECK, AND BOOTS BY DIOR MEN.

RO B E RT PAT T I N S O N C O U L D B E U N L I KA B L E .

There was all that brooding in the vampire movies. And then the Trump tweets—remember when our thenfuture president tweeted his sympathy for Pattinson after his breakup with Kristen Stewart, at whom Trump hurled insults? Pattinson could have taken the vampire fame and run with it or thanked the president-tobe. Instead, he put his head down and got to work. It was 2017’s Good Time—made by the same directing duo behind Uncut Gems—that gave audiences one of their first glimpses of the fully realized, post-Twilight Pattinson, or what you might call Weird Pattinson. Last fall, Weird Pattinson reached full bloom with The Lighthouse, a movie about two men going crazy in which he masturbates onscreen. Pattinson, 33, has also become a low-key fashion hero—and it started with Good Time. “The director saw

a construction worker walking down the street outside his office, got him to come in, and we stood beside each other to make sure we were the same build. We bought everything he was wearing, and that was my costume,” he tells me, adding: “I kept a lot of stuff.” His secret is adopting a uniform. “My style is always sort of utilitarian,” he says, explaining that he goes through stretches in which he’ll wear the same thing every day. For him, it’s been Dr. Martens and black baseball caps and corduroy jumpsuits (discovered in Copenhagen, too warm for L. A.). “If something fits right, it can genuinely change my life,” he says. Next year, Pattinson—who’s the current face of Dior’s new men’s cologne—will bring his weird vibes to the role of Bruce Wayne in The Batman, which also marks his return to big-budget films. The question is whether he’ll pinch some of the Caped Crusader’s wardrobe.

Rule No. 859 AS SMALL ACTS OF CHARITY GO, YOU CAN’T BEAT DONATING BLOOD.

DANIELLE LEVITT/AUGUST

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S K E E P G OT HAM WE I R D

WHAT TO WEAR AND HOW TO WEAR IT

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

When you want to look your best anytime, anywhere, Esquire’s witty sartorial guide shows you how. It covers everything from wardrobe basics, to investment pieces, to creating your own personal look, all accompanied with inspiring photographs of style icons. With these fashion fundamentals, you’ll be set for life.

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Clockwise from left: Looks from Husbands, Husbands, Holiday Boileau, Husbands, and Beige Habilleur.

L A E T I T I A H OT T E ( H U S B A N D S X 3 )

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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S A F T E R T H I S, MOUS TAC H E

style bible. Holiday Boileau, he explains, is a cocktail of American vintage and French culture. “We love to make ‘bourgeois’ clothes that feel worn in, mistreated, sexy,” he says. The only store not in the 16th, yet frequently mentioned alongside the Boileau boys, is Husbands. In the center of the city, Husbands is a rare gem. It started out featuring bespoke clothing and has recently expanded into readyto-wear that focuses on classics worn with a modern attitude. There’s a nod to Savile Row in the cuts and cloths, but it’s hardly stuffy. Imagine Bryan Ferry, not Prince Charles. Founder Nicolas Gabard, 40-something, is his own poster child for Husbands. His go-to look is a fitted gun-check hacking jacket of robust British tweed worn over a denim shirt washed to within an inch of its life. He calls Husbands “the opposite of the obvious in fashion—accepting a smaller but much more passionate audience.” Rifling through the racks at Husbands reminds me of les minets, a French version of British mod style that emerged in Paris in the mid-’60s. While the Brit version was thoroughly working class, the minets were essentially bourgeois, many hailing from the wellheeled western suburbs, and blew their francs on imported American and British style or homegrown brands like Renoma, founded in the 16th in 1963, whose pinched sartorial silhouette was championed by pop stars like Jacques Dutronc and Serge Gainsbourg. In some ways, these small Parisian brands are a throwback to that localized way of thinking about—and shopping for—clothes, to the kind of plugged-in neighborhood stores style hounds would once run to, precisely because others didn’t. “We all share the same vision,” says Gabard. “Restoring the luster and beauty of good clothes, re-creating the one-stop shop at a time where everyone else is launching a one-product brand.”

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S A F T E R T H I S, MOUS TAC H E

G E T T Y I M A G E S ( D U T R O N C ) . @ T H O U S A N DYA R D S T Y L E ( B O R S A R E L LO ) .

accounts—to spread their gospel of cool. There’s Le Vif, a showroom and shop selling American-made vintage clothing (think jeans, T-shirts, military jackets). Nearby is Holiday Boileau, a store with a collection of easy, vintage-inspired clothes whose founder, with journalist Marc Beaugé, reintroduced Holiday, a travel magazine from mid-century America that remains an inspiration for designers.

Clockwise from top: The 2019–20 Autumn/Winter edition of Holiday magazine; interior of Beige Habilleur in Paris; issue no. 3 of L’Étiquette magazine; Jacques Dutronc rocking les minets style in 1966 Paris; Le Vif founder Gauthier Borsarello; the Doek Court Shoe from Beige Habilleur.

Borsarello says Holiday Boileau’s customers are looking beyond workwear and extreme tailoring. “Now they simply want to feel current rather than dressed up as someone else, but to have quality clothing—whether that means a sneaker or a T-shirt or a pair of Levi’s.” In this age of digital ubiquity, and as men’s style is now contemplating the post-street-

wear landscape, being smaller and a little out of the way fosters an air of mystery that is compelling for anyone looking for something unique, well-made, and cool. Fortunately, all of these brands have a growing presence online through sites like Moda Operandi and Mr Porter, so you don’t have to fork out for a plane ticket to Paris to get hold of them. But if you do, it’s worth the trip west.

high,not tight

P H OTO G R A P H B Y M E N E L I K P U RY E A R

G R O O M I N G : L U I S PAY N E . W I L L H E AT H / N B C ( S T Y L E S ) . G E T T Y I M A G E S ( D A N , G R A N T, C O N N E R Y ) .

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S L E T ’ E M B R E AT H E

It’s the most elegant way to embrace a BAGGIER PANT by BEN BOSKOVICH

CONTEXT-FREE QUOTE FROM A BOOK WE LOVE

TROUSERS ($790) BY MICHAEL KORS COLLECTION; T-SHIRT ($88) BY LEVI’S VINTAGE CLOTHING; SHOES BY O’KEEFFE.

—BRANDON TAYLOR, REAL LIFE (OUT FEBRUARY 18)

mid-December when I finally embraced it. Staring into a full-length mirror, examining the suit I’d just put on, I put my hands in my pockets—and I couldn’t see the outline of my knuckles. The gravestone would read HERE LIE HIS SLIM PANTS, 2011–2019, but the death warrant was written a while ago. It took this moment to have the epiphany, but the truth is that I’d been thinking about moving on to more generously cut trousers for the better part of two years. This was the first time I’d felt good in a pair, but I was standing well on the latter side of their comeback. Fuller silhouettes have been creeping their way back into the zeitgeist over the past half decade. Now, visible kneecaps and the outline of your six-and-a-half-inch iPhone 11 Pro Max are being rapidly traded for clean, straight lines, roomy interiors, and the ability to bend down and pick up your child without literally bursting at the seams. My aforementioned suit pants weren’t exactly on the cutting edge of the movement, but getting over the hump only put me into a better position to indulge in an aspirational next step: going high-waisted. If finding a little breathing room for your calves was an uphill battle, then pulling your jawns up to your belly button might feel like scaling a rock wall with your hands tied behind your back. Worry not; with the right weapon— like these at left from Michael Kors—you’ll be comfortably equipped with a look that will make both your grandfather and your cool Parisian friend point their cigarette at you in approval. When the pants go up, your silhouette streamlines, ridding your mind of that little whisper of JNCO that sets in when you first read the word baggy (or, perhaps, wide leg). Once you’re working with the right trousers, finish off your look by keeping the rest simple. The best way to ease into this type of styling is with a well-fitting, tucked-in T-shirt and a jacket that’s long enough to balance the whole thing out. This isn’t an arena where you want to go wild with pattern mixing, but if the trousers are solid and the tee is minimal, a jacket with some texture can add the just-right amount of attitude. It’s an advanced move, for sure, but one that spans the decades. Cary Grant did it in the ’40s and Harry Styles did it in his recent Saturday Night Live hosting gig. Hell, even Connery’s Bond hiked ’em up in Dr. No. Yes, it will feel odd at first. Yes, strangers will do a double take. But anyone who wore skinny jeans before 2005 knows that feeling. And they’ll feel it again in the late 2030s, when we’re talking about that comeback, too.

“A COOL WIND COMES OUT OF THE WEST, DRAWS A HAND ACROSS THE GRASS AND MAKES IT WHISPER.”

IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN

n risi g stars Study these celebrity looks from high-waisted history to inspire your next move

Way back in November ’19, HARRY STYLES followed suit

while hosting SNL draped in an exact look from the Gucci Spring 2020 runway.

SEAN CONNERY wears ’em high

in 1962’s Dr. No, proving this tactic is well deployed when going monochromatic.

DAPPER DAN is no stranger to extreme ﬁts. The legend went way wide and way high in a look that’s tailor-made for his energy: big.

The move still plays if you’re not tucked in, as CARY GRANT displays with his sweater-overtrousers look.

ESQUIRE STUDIO X CLARKS

For 70 years, Clarks Original Desert Boots have been a cherished part of our wardrobe that only gets better with age, looks good with everything, and never goes out of style.

FOREVER ORIGINAL

By the mid-’50s, “the world’s most travelled shoe” was part of the new rugged but casual style Esquire championed.

Why Your Favorite Boots Are Also Your Most Indispensable

ou can’t mistake the classic silhouette of the original Clarks Desert Boots: the durable crepe-soled boot with butter-soft sand suede cut just above the ankle. It’s an enduring icon of modern design, a remarkable combination of form and function.

alternatives to the heavy, painful—and hot—British government issue army boots. He returned with a plan for a remarkably simple and elegant chukka boot, with no idea of the global success they would soon enjoy.

When Nathan Clark, great-grandson of C & J Clark founder James Clark, served in Burma and India during WWII, his family asked him to keep an eye out for new shoe designs. Nathan encountered boots in Burma that had been made-to-order at the bazaar in Cairo for 8th Army soldiers during the North African campaign. They were designed for the desert terrain as functional and comfortable

How could he? Nathan couldn’t even convince his family to produce them in Great Britain. But Esquire fashion editor Oscar Schoeffler immediately recognized their appeal when he spotted them at the 1949 shoe fair in Chicago. An Esquire feature that followed shortly afterward bestowed upon Clarks Desert Boots their bona ﬁdes, and they took off in America and Canada. Sneakers were decades away from being accepted as casual wear, but desert boots, advertised as “the world’s most travelled shoe,” had an irresistible dressed-up/dressed-down vibe that appealed to the teenagers and hipsters fast becoming the new tastemakers. By the end of the ﬁfties, a decade that brought us rock ’n’ roll, white tees, and blue jeans, Esquire was publishing Jack Kerouac, and his beatnik fans were rocking desert boots, which had become an integral part of any cool kid’s wardrobe. As the youth culture exploded in the sixties, Desert Boots proved to be more than a passing fad. In Jamaica, the boots—known as “Rebel Shoes”—had a massive impact on the Rude Boy culture and music scene. Finally available in Britain, they were quickly adopted as standard Mod attire in Swinging Sixties London; “Les Clarks” took France by storm, and were soon the rage in Italy and Japan, too.

The radical simplicity of Desert Boots struck a deep cultural nerve around the globe and became a rite of passage. Your first pair, so lovingly worn-in, won’t be your last.

Desert Boots weren’t just for kids, either—they were for anyone, from any culture around the globe. And they’ve never been uncool. Truth is, they don’t belong to a speciﬁc era. They look as sharp today—and well-suited to this moment—as they always have. We take comfort in their endurance, and are amazed by the brilliant collaborations and limited editions that push the genius of the basic design. Now and forever, they are an elemental part part of our wardrobe that only improves with time. —Alex Belth

The Enduring Cult of Desus & Mero The Bronx-bred duo continue to prove theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve mastered the art of poking holes in pop culture by BEN BOSKOVICH

TO CALL THE RISE OF COMEDIANS DESUS NICE AND THE

ROBBY KLEIN/GETTY IMAGES

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S # KNOW L E D G E DA RT S

Kid Mero meteoric would be an understatement. In just six years, the duo have taken a cult following on Twitter and turned it into a budding empire of cultural commentary, which led to a show on Viceland and now on Showtime, plus a book, GodLevel Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons from the Bronx (on sale April 14). When it all started, their reach may have been confined to those in the five boroughs of New York City with a specific sense of humor. But a lot has changed since Daniel Baker (Desus, left)

and Joel Martinez (Mero, right) first put their Twitter fingers to use. The medium that helped make them has devolved into an underregulated hotbed of hate. And all the while, the Bodega Boys have been continually rewarded for their nuanced takes on everything from what counts as chopped cheese to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg. Who better to talk about what it means to earn fame now than two guys so relentlessly authentic that they were able to find success at the bottom of the barrel of society, aka on the Internet?

M: Yo, it was nuts. I fully expected to walk out

This issue is about what fame means in 2020. We thought you guys would be the perfect people to talk to about it, given your own ascent, which we don’t have to get into, because, you know, you’re famous. DESUS: We thank you for that, because every interview is like 20 minutes of “How’d you meet?” Maybe that’s part of fame, you coming to interviews like: You already know that; don’t you dare ask that. ESQ: That’s the thing about social media, too. We just know everything all the time. D: Because remember, back in the day, you never knew what a rapper was doing. You didn’t know what Ghostface Killah had for breakfast. You didn’t even know if they had emotions. ESQ: What did you guys think about Twitter back in the day, when you were first starting to do cultural commentary, before you had a big audience? MERO: I was writing a blog, just like sitting around with friends and shit, and we would be smokin’, and then I would just pop out like a random non sequitur, and my homegirl’s like, “Twitter is made for your wild ADD-ass brain.” D: When I first started, in like ’08, I was working at nightclubs. So when I was tweeting, it was basically a journal. You’d say some fucked-up stuff, because you never thought there would be this culture of “Yo, let’s see what the fuck you said on September 13, 2009.” I think people on Twitter now, they don’t have that freedom we had. ESQ: You don’t really see it as a source of fame anymore. The people who’ve made the most of Twitter to achieve things. . . M: . . . already achieved it! ESQ: What counts as being famous? Where is the bar now? D: There’s a Jerry Seinfeld quote—he says that being famous means you meet a person and they know everything about you but you know nothing about them, and you have to repeat this hundreds of times a day. But it kind of means something different in New York. New Yorkers make eye contact with you real quick, they might do a head nod, and they just keep on moving. ESQ: Mero, I just saw a video of you in the Dominican Republic. People were chanting, “Mero!”

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S # KNOW L E D G E DA RT S

ESQ:

there and people to be like, “Who the fuck is this guy, and why is he having all this unfettered access to this shit?” And I just hear one dude be like, “Ay, Mero!” but in Spanish: “Mero, Mero!” I was like, “Y’all get Showtime out here?” ESQ: That’s one of those smell-the-roses moments. M: Hell yeah, bruh. I was like, “See, Mom, it’s legit; it’s international.” ESQ: Parents will always appreciate something different from what you will. D: My mother, when she got to this country, one of her main jobs was she worked in a New York Public Library. One day, my good friend Lisa Lucas, who is in charge of the National Book Foundation, was like, “We want to interview you at a library.” Packed house. Everyone was like, “We’re so proud of you— you were raised as a baby in the library,” and everyone afterward was showing me pictures of my mother, like, “Yo, send this to your mother!” And I showed that to my mother,

call you by your real names anymore? D: I was just at Shake Shack and I used my real name, and everyone was super fucking confused. Everyone at Shake Shack is like, “Who’s this famous person?” And there’s this one guy on staff, he does the nod, and I’m like, “You know who I am. So put extra ShackSauce on there, man—hook that up for me.” ESQ: What do you guys do now to make a point of keeping your feet on the ground? M: Bro, like, I am anchored to the ground. I have four kids; my wife does not call me Mero. My kids are like, “Yeah, you’re on TV—that’s cool, but that just means you can buy us more video games.” I am still going to basketball practice; I’m still at ShopRite. I don’t even have the space to get bigheaded. D: I’m still in the Bronx. Every night, I have to go buy beer and go buy blunt wraps. I always talk to people in the ’hood, just asking them about their day. And these people are like, “Yo, I can’t pay my rent this month” or whatever, and it just reinforces the fact that, like, we even

“MY KIDS ARE LIKE, ‘YEAH, YOU’RE ON TV—THAT’S COOL, BUT THAT JUST MEANS YOU CAN BUY US MORE VIDEO GAMES.’ ” and she literally teared up, like, “Wow, you’re really out there; you’re really famous.” And I was like, “I was just hanging with AOC and Don Cheadle—this is what impresses you?” ESQ: People remind you to smell the roses because it’s so hard to remind yourself. D: I think because our lives had really just such low bottoms, everything here feels like the highest point. If you’re not able to become comfortable in this, it’s going to kill you. Being famous means not only do you have to be comfortable with yourself but also comfortable with the way the world views you and you not being able to change that view. ESQ: A new level of fame is when people don’t know you by your real names. Does anyone

made it out of the Bronx was super lucky. The whole thing goes back to fame. We have to handle it well, because they’re watching and they hope we make it. I want to keep continuing to help you out and help the Bronx. ESQ: Last question: Who’s the most famous person in the world? M: Right now, this second? I feel like it’s Donald Trump, unfortunately. He’s always in the news; people all over the world are talking about this jerk-off. D: I gotta go with Jesus. Jesus is the most famous person in the world. And it’s not even in a good way. Even if you’re an atheist, you stub your toe, you’re like, “Ah, fuck, Jesus fucking Christ.” It’s just great branding.

Desus and Mero and their guest, Elizabeth Warren, on the set of the duo’s Showtime series.

D A N A S TA R B A R D / S H O W T I M E

TIME INSTRUMENTS FOR URBAN EXPLORERS

revolution of the past two decades, I think about people like Ryan Morgan. Morgan, 44, spent the early portion of his wage-earning years working as a mechanic. You can tell. Stocky, solid, salt-and-pepper-haired, and the furthest thing from a hipster, Morgan talks with a kind of no-bullshit midwestern gruffness that’s common in the city where he lives, which is Cincinnati. He happens to bake some of the best bread and pastries I’ve ever tasted, but you won’t catch him being precious about it. Ask and he’ll tell you that the whole thing was an accident. Back in 2011, Morgan and some relatives took over a family-owned Ohio bakery primarily so that his father, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis,

B A K I N G

The unlikely story of how RYAN MORGAN became one of America’s best bread wizards by JEFF GORDINIER

B A D A A R O N C O N W AY

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S P I S S OF F, K E TO

WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE AMERICAN FOOD

Award your breakfast with cream cheese made with only the freshest milk and cream.

ÂŠ2020 Kraft Foods

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S P I S S OF F, K E TO

52 could get restful time at home in his final years. For Morgan, becoming one of the country’s artisanal bread wizards did not seem like a realistic or compelling objective. “When I got here, I was just a mechanic and I didn’t really know anything,” he says. “But I always enjoyed eating.” He did not enjoy eating the bread at the family bakery, however. “Maybe the worst fucking bread I’d ever seen in my life,” he recalls. “Even I knew it was garbage.” But then something started to happen—the same sort of thing that had happened to so many Americans who, thanks to guidebooks and TV shows and spellbinding tales of celebrity chefs, transformed their lives in the early 2000s by becoming obsessed with baking and pickling and fermenting and beer brewing and heirloom gardening and dry aging and whole-hog smoking and all the rest. Morgan began with what he knew how to do, fixing machines in the bakery that seemed on the verge of falling apart. Pretty soon he wondered what would happen if the shop—which he had renamed Sixteen Bricks—focused on making excellent bread instead of phoning it in with mediocre bread. That led him to wonder what factors went into excellent bread, which led him through a series of obsessive wormholes (the nuances of fermentation, the use of ancient grains like einkorn, the possibility of milling his own flours) and ultimately to where he is now, thinking about bread all the time. “It’s when my life was ruined,” he says with a snort. “I was like, oh my God, this is the most interesting shit ever.” When he took the reins, the bakery had only 12 customers, “and I think six of them split as soon as I changed the bread,” Morgan says. Now Sixteen Bricks has 51 employees and about 200 clients around the country. (By the way, this growth reflects a culinary renaissance that’s under way in Cincinnati. The usual “hot food city” stories should start appearing any minute. . . .) If you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant inside a Nordstrom, well, Sixteen Bricks provided the sourdough. Morgan is talking about opening a bakery in Sonoma, California, with Mike Zakowski, who has been one of his flour/water/salt mentors over the past decade. (The other two are Craig Ponsford and Jeff Yankellow. Morgan met Yankellow when, in a moment of mild panic after taking over the ramshackle bakery, he Googled the phrase “artisan bakery consultants.” Yankellow actually called him back.) Morgan’s bread is bread that you really want to eat (especially toasted with a lot of butter and jam), even though— in true midwestern spirit—it doesn’t call too much attention to itself. He’s a master of balance. He’s not churning out soft, insipid rolls, but he’s also not giving his bread a crust as hard as concrete or a crumb as squishy as pudding. Still, Morgan is deep into a range of experiments. “Look, I’m making a bread right now with lemon-verbena hydrosol in it,” he says. He’s tinkering with a ciabatta laced with chocolate and candied orange peel, too. When I visited Sixteen Bricks in November with David Zilber, the fermentation guru from Copenhagen’s Noma, Morgan’s pastry chef, Rebecca Watkins, offered us pain aux raisins laced with turmeric cream that had just come out of the oven. If you tell Morgan that he’s got the mind of a mechanic and the soul of an artist, he’s likely to scoff, at first. “It’s way more blue-collar than that,” he says. But he eventually relents. “Having some kind of artistic outlet might actually be the coolest part of this job,” he says. “I struggled and I still struggle now. There are still sleepless nights. But I make a lot of cool stuff, man. I get to explore and imagine.” And we get to eat better bread.

WHAT THE HELL

IS HEALTHY?

Which foods are good for your body, and which are the opposite? If you’re like us, you find it impossible to keep track, because the diets and data keep changing with each passing decade—or week. (If you lived through the margarine haze of the 1970s, you remember a time when butter was as feared as the Zodiac Killer, whereas now there are true believers who stir globs of it into their coffee.) With that in mind, we offer an updated cheat sheet of often-vilified foods. —J. G. SUGAR: Will kill you SALT: Probably won’t kill you MILK: Might kill you BUTTER: Probably won’t kill you WINE: Might extend your life COFFEE: Might extend your life BREAD (PROCESSED): Might kill you BREAD (ARTISANAL): Might extend your life TEQUILA: “I’m gonna live forever!”

the indefensible position I Like Hooters Outﬁtted in shellacked wood-panel tables, big screens, and at least one arcade version of Cabela’s Big Game Hunter, Hooters is not, as The Ofﬁce’s Michael Scott famously put it, all about “the boobs and the hot wings.” No, the place where my father took me for what I’ve come to consider my redneck bar mitzvah is a temple to the idea of going all in. Order ten wings (classic, all drums, 3 Mile Island sauce, double ranch) with a side of fried pickles, and stake out a corner table. Watch older patrons make the pilgrimage, ordering pitchers of Bud Heavy for a little bit of attention from a woman in orange shorts and high-sheen pantyhose, and tell me you don’t enjoy it. It’s harmlessly tacky—heterosexual camp. And while those who enjoy it may claim to do so ironically, Hooters only works because it requires some authenticity. The grease, the kitsch, the ability to kill virtual buffalo for $1.50: It calls me. —Justin Kirkland

Fame in the Time of Two Americas ILHAN OMAR, ADAM SCHIFF, and GLENN JACOBS dish on political celebrity at a moment when our nation’s democracy is not just marked by a fault line—we’re deﬁned by it. by J A C K H O L M E S

F A M E A

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I have not transformed. I’m still the kind of person that goes home after the day is finished, that hangs out with the people I normally would if I didn’t have this particular life. My friends, my associations, my interests—none of those things have really shifted. We joke about how a lot of people know my name and think they actually know who I am.

IO:

I’ve always been very different than what people would imagine me to be. I came to the United States at a young age as a black Muslim refugee. There were a lot of stereotypes and expectations that people had and that were not aligned with who I was. You know, constituents are surprised that when we’re in our home districts, we don’t walk around with the kind of support that we have in D. C. People are often shocked that I am at the grocery store, or I’m dropping my kids off at school, because they expect my life to mimic the image they have of the life I’m leading. The more your notoriety grows, the more that people think of you as something bigger than you actually are. When they meet you, people will actually express what they thought before and how you’re different. The size of my voice doesn’t really match the very tiny person I am, so the first thing somebody will say is “Oh my God, you’re so small.” IO:

P R E C E D I N G PA G E : S H A R P N E R / S H U T T E R S TO C K . E R I N S C H A F F / T H E N E W Y O R K T I M E S / R E D U X .

It’s fascinating, and a little high schoolish. For us, we like to laugh at it. But there are a lot of people who take it seriously, who’ve tried to get their own little cliques. It’s just weird, because we’re adults who were each voted into office by hundreds of thousands of people. The idea that you would, in a serious and deliberative way, think about what your clique’s name should be? And that it’ll automatically give you a space to inspire? It says a lot about this need to try to duplicate anything that is noticed. We don’t have the influence we have because we’re called the Squad. We don’t raise the amount of political campaign funds we do because we’re called the Squad. And people know our name not just because we’re the Squad. Some of the public and the media pundits have decided that we must have somehow deliberately put this together. No. We are a group of female legislators who happen to have an agenda that is for the people, and it’s about boldly pushing for that. And it’s nothing more than that. To think that copying the model you think the Squad has will make you resonate is quite pathetic. See, I have strong feelings about those. . . . If they were a group of millennials, I would be like, “That’s cute.” IO:

D AV I D W I L L I A M S / R E D U X ( S C H I F F ) . C O U R T E S Y C E N T E R S T R E E T (J A C O B S ) . C H R I S R YA N / C O R B I S / G E T T Y I M A G E S ( W R E S T L I N G ) .

AS: People recognize me now much more than they used to. I was getting off the train and a person came up to me and said, “I just want to shake your hand. You’re my hero.” Then another person, who had heard the first, came up and got in my face and said, “You’re not my hero.” Sometimes I feel like a human focus group. Overwhelmingly, the feedback I get is positive—from friends and colleagues and so many people around the country. I received an email from one of Gregory Peck’s sons in which he said, “My dad would be so proud of the work you’re doing.” Watching Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird was what made me want to be a lawyer. So hearing that from his son meant an awful lot to me. But the negative feedback, when I do get it, is vehemently negative. I was in a parade in my district last weekend and there were people yelling out, “You’re a traitor. You’re ruining our country. You’re ruining our parade.” There are a lot of conspiracy theories about me. I recently saw a photo of me sitting on a couch next to Jeffrey Epstein. It was such a good forgery that when I looked at it, I was

In the wrestling world, people don’t look to criticize you about every possible thing, and to pick you apart, and to drag your family into it. Of course, that’s not the case in politics.

GJ:

Treat people like they matter. That’s the view I took in WWE. My wife put it in perspective for me one day over lunch. I’d just gotten off the road, and I was tired, and people kept coming up and wanting pictures, and I was starting to get frustrated, like, “Why can’t these people just leave me alone?” Crystal, my wife, said, “What you have to understand is that because you’re on TV, meeting you is a pretty exciting thing for a lot of people.” I realized that it’s not about me—it’s about them. And I

could put on a smile and be nice for two minutes and give those folks a good experience. Politics is the same way.

It’s important in a different way now, because people pay taxes to support the government and they literally are stakeholders, right? The fans are important, because again, they’re paying the bills. But if they don’t like you, they can go someplace else.

The first time I won the world championship. GJ:

GJ: So far, it’s just the fact that I’ve

gotten to meet so many great people. We have a literacy program. I go to schools often and read to the kids.

taken aback. Then I realized where we were sitting. It was my cousin’s couch, on Thanksgiving [in 2018]. They had Photoshopped my father out and Epstein in. It was done so well that anyone looking at it would not have known the difference. When the president calls you a traitor and says you’ve committed treason, most people tune that out. But there are some people who are not well, and when they hear that, it’s a call to arms.

AS: At times, I’ve had to make changes

for security reasons. Apart from that, we try to lead as ordinary a life as we can. I remember walking with my daughter in New York City, and I was getting stopped a lot. It surprised me, because I was wearing blue jeans and a green canvas jacket and sunglasses. I looked nothing like I do on TV. After getting stopped several times, my daughter started to get annoyed, because there’s only one center of attention in the family, and it’s her. The last straw was when somebody asked her to hold their beer while we took a photograph. She was like, “Am I now the beer holder?” I said, “Alexa, I’m just surprised anybody recognizes me.” And she said, without missing a beat, “Well, you know, Dad, it’s the pencil neck.”

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Macaulay Culkin is not like you p h s b y Ro b b i e F

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he HE IS TAKING OFF HIS PANTS WHILE STANDING UP, TRYING NOT TO FALL OVER.

He’s got his ankle kind of balanced on the opposite knee, and he sometimes loses his balance for a second, the way you and I do when we take off our pants while standing up. He has to hop on one foot. Sometimes he lets out a little whoop when he teeters on one foot, the way you and I might, especially if six people were watching us take off our pants and we lost our balance. So there he is in his underwear. Macaulay Culkin. I don’t know, they were like baggy briefs, I guess. Tan. He goes by Mack. “Hi, I’m Mack,” he had said four minutes earlier, before I saw him in his underwear. I’m not sure if I should look away, maybe. But it’s a photo shoot, so he has to keep changing, and he doesn’t appear to care that there are six people he doesn’t know watching him in his underwear. He’s making small talk with the stylist. (“Where’d you grow up?” “Manhattan. Yeah, I’m a city kid.” “Oh, yeah? Manhattan?” “Yep.”) He sounds . . . normal? He quickly re-pants, slips a T-shirt over his broad, taut, slightly elongated, pinkish, not-hairy, almost-forty-year-old torso. He slides on a pair of sunglasses with big rims tinted the color of a ripe peach. He looks good. Healthy. Is that a surprise? “Goin’ to get a little fresh air,” Mack says, smirking at his use of a cliché. The smirk is a Macaulay Culkin thing: One end of his full mouth curls up to one side in a way that makes him look like he knows something you don’t. His publicist, a gentle woman who has been his publicist since he was ten years old, two people who connected with each other and haven’t let go, gently hands him his pack of Parliaments and beat-up green drugstore lighter. His fingernails are painted red, and the paint is scuffed. She is expressionless as she hands him the cigarettes, or maybe she chooses not to express how much it worries her every time he puts a cigarette between his lips. Now he stands in the driveway of a former industrial building where the photo shoot is happening. The smoke break? He checks his phone, to see if his brother wrote back—his brother Kieran just got a Golden Globe nomination, and Mack texted him congratulations. A guy driving a truck rolls down his window and asks for a cigarette, but Mack holds up his pack and crumples it to show the guy it’s empty. Then he calls the restaurant, his regular place, to tell them he’s coming in tomorrow night. A smoke break. Back inside the former industrial building, he changes outfits again. The photographer and stylist have him getting into a bright red shirt and a dark black suit and shoes the color of custard. His blond hair is cut high and tight, showing off his ears, which are as you remember them. “Yeah, this is waaayy better than being home wearing my pajamas,” he says loudly as he buttons the shirt, smirking over at his publicist. “Oh, yeah. Why would I want to be home in my bed right now? With my cats? And my lady? That would be terrrrible.”

In truth, he hasn’t done a photo shoot like this in fifteen years. Which is not to say he hasn’t been a celebrity. Macaulay Culkin has been so famous for so many years that it is pretty much the only life he knows or can remember. But he was gone for so long. Or seemed gone. A kind of nether-celebrity. What about the stories about Michael Jackson? The drugs—that photograph, when he looked so skinny? Why did he stop making movies? Is he weird? He’s weird, right? Before the shot, when no one else is around, he says to me, quietly, “This is not really my cup of tea. These are all lovely people, but the poking, the prodding—honestly, it’s part of why I don’t do this anymore. Any of it.” And yet here he is, and on the set, when it’s time to pose, he is golden. He awaits instruction, a pillar amid swirling photographer’s assistants and helpers and a groomer and production people. He occasionally warbles along with the radio, but otherwise he says little, stands where he is asked, politely obliges when a different angle of the neck is requested. He positions and repositions his body; says, “Okay” and “Sure” and “Like this?” He is working. His eyelids are heavy, same as when he was a kid. When he raises his eyebrows, his eyes pop open and he looks amused. When his lids are low, he looks either bored or hyperfocused—you can’t always tell with Mack, and that’s part of what made him a joy to watch in the dozen movies he did before age fourteen, and especially in Home Alone, the movie that ultimately left him very much alone in the world. The photographer asks him to lean against the wooden wall, and he does. Then he rests his head against the wall, which makes him look contemplative, but really he’s just posing, because these are the conventions of celebrity: the pose, the hair spray, the fashion credits, the staring into the camera. It’s what celebrities do to promote their next movie, their new song, their comeback. The thing is, Macaulay Culkin isn’t promoting anything at all. What’s more, he would apparently rather be home with his cats. So what on earth is he doing here? “MAAAAACK!”

This is the beaming abuelo who co-owns Carlitos Gardel, an Argentine restaurant on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles where Mack has been eating a couple times a month for fifteen years whenever he’s in town. The man embraces Mack like he’s family come home for Sunday supper. His wife—she makes the desserts—comes over for a kiss. Mack orders a bottle of red wine, the one he likes. Waiters and attendants and family members assure his comfort. A basket of warm bread appears; he gets right into it, dunking a big crust into the Carlitos chimichurri sauce, taking a sip of wine—to Mack, this is all comfortable and easy, these people and this food. The warm relief of the familiar. Mouth half full, he’s talking about how he’s changing his middle name. It started as a gag on the website he runs, BunnyEars.com, on which readers

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could vote for what Mack should change his middle name to. He even went on The Tonight Show, and Jimmy Fallon cast his vote. The choices were: Macaulay Culkin (which would make his legal name Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin); Kieran (suggested by his brother Kieran); TheMcRibIsBack (the McRib being back); Publicity Stunt; and Shark Week (which Mack has never watched). The winner, with almost sixty-one thousand votes, was Macaulay Culkin. Mack smiles his I’m-amusing-myself smile the whole time he goes on about it: “I still haven’t officially done it. There’s a lot of hoops you gotta jump through. I have a high-powered, high-priced attorney all over it, and he goes, ‘It’s not as easy as you’d think.’ But yeah, no, it’s happening. This gag is like a year old. I gotta do this.” I ask if Kieran ever texted back about the Golden Globe nomination. They’re pretty close—Mack flew out to New York to meet Kieran’s new baby last year. Kieran is crushing it on Succession. “I think he did,” Mack says, thumbing his iPhone screen. “I told him, ‘Fuck Winkler, you got this.’ ” (Henry Winkler was nominated for his role on the series Barry.) “And Kieran said, ‘Actually, we’re both gonna get fucked by that hot priest this year. Which sounds more fun than it’ll actually be. But thanks.’ ” (That would be Andrew Scott, from Fleabag. Neither was right: Stellan Skarsgård won.) The middle-name contest? Mack does stuff like that. Stuff that seems super weird but to him is just fun and amusing. Like the time he joined a cover band that rewrote Velvet Underground songs so that they were all about pizza, and ended up touring with them for a year in 2014. Started as a gag. The Pizza Underground, they were called. What he doesn’t do is act in movies much anymore, but the movies he did do—in particular that one movie—have allowed him the kind of life where he can do these gags, can even go on The Tonight Show or Joe Rogan anytime he

up until the last year or two, I haven’t really put myself out there at all. So I can understand that. It’s also like, Okay, everybody, stop acting so freaking shocked that I’m relatively well-adjusted. Look: I’m a pretty peerless person. If I was an accountant, I could look left and right, and there’s other accountants sitting next to me in the office. It’s not like that. It’s one of those things where, like, the cliché that we’re all snowflakes? That we’re all unique? Well, you know what?” Mack leans in real close, drops his voice, looks me dead in the eye, and says, with a smile I haven’t seen since the last time I watched Home Alone and Kevin McCallister smiled directly into the camera, “I actually am a snowflake.” THE MACAULAY CULKIN ORIGIN STORY USUALLY STARTS WITH THE BAD DAD.

Why even name him here? Bullying failed actor shoves his offspring into the business using shame and threats—that was it. There were seven kids and two parents crammed into a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He enrolled Mack in classical ballet and signed him up for the Ensemble Studio Theatre, a respected company. With Mack, of course, the dad thought he had hit it big. At eight, Mack was cast in a movie, Rocket Gibraltar, with Burt Lancaster and a bunch of prefame New York theater actors, including Bill Pullman, Patricia Clarkson, and Kevin Spacey, who was, like Mack, appearing in his first big movie. (Me: “I thought Kevin Spacey was really funny in that movie.” Mack, loud and sarcastically: “He’s hilarious now!”) We’re talking about this at Carlitos, where dinner rolls along the way he is used to: a plate of grilled blood sausage, a Mack favorite; plump green gnocchi, the leftovers of which he will take home to the woman he calls “my lady.” A year after Rocket Gibraltar, Mack got a role in the John Hughes comedy Uncle Buck. In one scene, a woman arrives at the front door and he peers through the mail slot. “That scene where I’m looking through the mail slot? Hughes saw that and he got the idea: Kid defends house! And he wrote Home Alone for me,” Mack says.

HE STEALS SPOONS. HE IS GODFATHER TO PARIS AND HE GOT HER IN ON IT, TOO. HE TELLS TO TAKE SOMETHING AND DON’T FORGET TO STICK

wants, but without the pressure of promoting something all the time. Because the promotion? The promotion just about killed him. “Doing junkets and things—that stuff always drove me crazy,” he says. Last year, he was brilliant as a half-drunk tour-boat operator in Thailand in a wonderful film called Changeland that his buddy Seth Green made and that Mack had to do zero press for. It was the first movie Green directed, and he wrote it, too, a heartrending buddy dramedy about friends reconnecting on a trip. But Changeland was, like, his fourth movie in twenty years. Don’t some actors make movies and just not do all the crap that goes along with it? Couldn’t he do that? He nods. “No, it’s true. It’s just—I enjoy acting. I enjoy being on set,” he says. “I don’t enjoy a lot of the other things that come around it. What’s a good analogy. The Shawshank Redemption. The way he gets out of prison is to crawl through a tube of shit, you know? It feels like to get to that kind of freedom, I’d have to crawl through a tube of shit. And you know what? I’ve built a really nice prison for myself. It’s soft. It’s sweet. It smells nice. You know? It’s plush.” He drinks some wine. “People assume that I’m crazy, or a kook, or damaged. Weird. Cracked. And

From there, he became the hardest-working human in show business—and it wasn’t so bad at first. “I was enjoying it at that point,” he says, washing down a garlicky shrimp with some wine. “I was a bit of an attention whore. ‘Hey, I’m a kid, look at me!’ But I was not tugging on my mother’s or father’s sleeve saying, ‘Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a thespian.’ I enjoyed it because I was good at it and I knew it. I was at least sharp enough to understand good attention.” No Culkin would truly understand the humongousness of Home Alone for some time. Mack’s youngest sibling, his brother Rory, was born a year before the movie came out. “It wasn’t until my classmates in the first grade were telling me about my own brother that I realized, Oh, everyone knows him. Wait, is he everyone’s brother? I don’t get it,” Rory says. “And I guess in a sense, he was.” Still, the father started leveraging it immediately, making the decisions as Mack became a money-making machine. Some turned out well: My Girl, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, The Good Son (a messed-up movie worth rewatching). But there was also Only the Lonely (not John Candy’s best), a TV cartoon series that ran for one season, Getting Even with Dad (a forgettable Ted Danson vehicle), The Pagemaster (a partly animated flop), and Richie Rich, in which you can actually read on Mack’s bloodless face, normally so malleable and expressive, how much he doesn’t want to be doing this. “It started feeling like a chore. I started vocalizing that and not being heard:

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I was saying, ‘I wanna go to school—I haven’t done a full year of school since first grade,’ ” he says. The truth was, everyone knew Macaulay Culkin, but Macaulay Culkin felt like he didn’t know anyone. Mack’s parents were never legally married, so when they split up in his midteens, it wasn’t a divorce. A custody fight over the children dragged on for two years. Also at stake was Mack’s trust fund—his earnings were reported to be $15 million to $20 million. “We didn’t want to go with my father,” Mack says. “It’s always misconstrued, that I ‘emancipated’ myself from my parents. I legally took my parents’ names off of my trust fund and found an executor, someone who would look over my finances, just in case anyone wanted to stick their fucking pinkie in the pie. But the next thing you know, the story was that I divorced my parents. I just thought I was doing it cleanly—taking my father’s name off, taking my mom’s name off, so my opinion is unbiased. And when I did that, the whole thing kinda ended a lot faster.” Through all of this, he eats—the gnocchi, the shrimp, and the blood sausage have been decimated. Mack dabs his lips, stands, as if getting up from his own kitchen table, and walks slowly out the front door. On the sidewalk: a glass two-top, with a chunky glass ashtray on it, and two chairs. Fresh air. He sits, lights up. “Look, I mean, it sucks,” he says, puffing at the traffic on Melrose. Then he turns, elbows on the table, both hands up by his head. “But: It coulda been worse, you know? I wasn’t working in a coal mine. I wasn’t a child soldier. My father was not sexually abusing me. Certain fucked-up things happened, but fucked-up things happen to kids all the time and they don’t come out the other end. I’ve got something to show for it, man. I mean, look at me: I got money, I got fame, I got a beautiful girlfriend and a beautiful house and beautiful animals. It took me a long time to get to that place, and I had to have that conversation with myself and go, like, Honestly, Mack? It’s not so bad. I want for nothing and need for even less. I’m good, man.”

Richter had it for ten years but that Mack calls Macho. He’s pushing forty—he’s thirty-nine until August—and he’s feeling it in his back, among other places. (“I got an ulcer or two I gotta deal with,” he says. “I don’t poop like I used to. My body’s like, Oh, is this what the beginnings of dying feel like?”) He and Brenda are trying to have a baby. “We practice a lot,” he says, again with the smirk—he knows he’s using another cliché, and he thinks that’s funny. “We’re figuring it out, making the timing work. Because nothing turns you on more than when your lady comes into the room and says, ‘Honey, I’m ovulating.’ ” Sometimes, late at night, he plays video games—“when I’m stressed, or just for fun. I’m regressing in my video-game playing. Now I’m literally back to playing WrestleMania 2000. Gimme another week and I’ll be playing Pong on an Atari 2600.” And he watches YouTube. He loves The Venture Bros., the animated series on Adult Swim, and Nathan for You, the satire of an Apprenticetype reality show that’s the ball and the biscuit. Mack has certain phrases he says. Like “the ball and the biscuit.” Lizzo is the ball and the biscuit. The movie Saved!—a satire about a Christian high school, and “the first time I really did a gig where I was surrounded by people my own age, if you think about it”—was the ball and the biscuit. Mack also spends about three days a week on Bunny Ears, which he started in late 2017. It now employs five full-time staffers as well as twenty-five regular freelancers. They create daily content, plus a weekly podcast, merchandise, and a video channel. He presides over editorial meetings, green-lighting ideas. He crafts headlines for stories. It’s fun and amusing. He cracks himself up. His writers crack him up. He writes about professional wrestling, one of his favorite pastimes. He looks at the finances, which don’t always add up— he is funding the thing, after all. He has described Bunny Ears as a cross between Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-agey wellness company, and The Onion, the humor website. It makes fun of self-help, and it also makes fun of the Internet itself, with headlines overtly designed to get traffic from people’s search terms. If you Google “macaulay

JACKSON, MICHAEL’S DAUGHTER, HER, “DON’T FORGET TO BE SILLY, DON’T FORGET AWAY FROM THIS WHOLE EXPERIENCE, SOMETHING UP YOUR SLEEVE.” He stamps out his cigarette, smiles, and says, “He’s a shitty guy, don’t get me wrong.” Then he half stands, and motions with his thumb to go back inside. Back to the warm and familiar womb of Carlitos. LAST NIGHT AFTER THE PHOTO SHOOT, AT 3:00 A.M., MACK ORDERED EGGS

and bacon on Postmates, plus banana pancakes for his girlfriend, Brenda Song, for when she woke up and he was still sleeping. “I feed my lady,” he says. She feeds him, too. When he did wake up, around 10:30, he ate a big hunk of garlic rosemary bread she had made. “As fresh as fuck” it was. Brenda has acted steadily for twenty-five years in everything from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody to Scandal to Dollface, the recent Hulu comedy in which she stars. Last year, she starred in the movie Secret Obsession, which was streamed by 40 million viewers, making it one of the top ten most-watched Netflix originals. She also costarred in Changeland, which is how they got together. (“I didn’t see that one coming,” says Green, who cast them.) They have two cats—Apples and Dude—and a fish named Cinnamon. (“I tend to name all the animals as if I was a five-year-old,” Mack says.) They have a Shiba Inu, Panda. And they have a bird, a blue-headed pionus, a relatively quiet species of parrot, that was named Nacho when Andy

culkin net worth,” as many people apparently do, one of the top results is a Bunny Ears story titled “Why Macaulay Culkin Isn’t Concerned About His Net Worth.” (It’s about a butterfly net.) Other Bunny Ears headlines: “Deep Breathing Exercises for When Your Home Is Getting Robbed Right Now,” “Macaulay Culkin Ranks His Favorite Macaulay Culkin Movies,” and “Romantic Mixtape Songs That Say ‘I Wanna Do Butt Stuff.’ ” Mack has recorded about a hundred episodes of his podcast. (“I wanted to start a podcast, I guess? I don’t know, everyone’s doing it, but it’s not even that— if anything, that makes me not want to do it. Yeah, but why the hell not? Let me talk. I’m good at talking.”) It’s an extraordinary trove of Macaulay Culkin. For a while in season 1, there was a recurring joke that when he introduced himself at the top of each episode, he never said his real name but instead made fun of the way people always screw it up (“Hi, everyone, this is Makalay McClucklin”. . . “Hey, it’s Mulcahy Cluckster”. . . “I’m McClargy Conklin”). Nor did he ever mention his most famous movie, instead citing The Pagemaster as his claim to fame (“I’m former Pagemaster Makalaka Cuckler”). Or he might be introduced as “the kid from Home Alone 3,” which he was not in. So there’s that, the podcast. Otherwise, Mack waters the plants in the backyard and feeds all the animals. He paints. He writes ideas in notebooks piled high.

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ive

“I’VE HAD A LOT OF FUN WITHOUT BEING HAPPY. AND I’VE BEEN HAPPY WITHOUT NECESSARILY HAVING FUN. YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL. JUST DON’T CONFUSE THE TWO. BECAUSE IT’S EASY TO!”

Home is where Mack is these days. “Yeah, I’m a homebody,” he says. It’s where these two former child stars, one still working as much as she can, the other not so sure, just want to be. With each other, doing whatever. “People don’t realize how incredibly kind and loyal and sweet and smart he is,” Brenda says. “Truly what makes Mack so special is that he is so unapologetically Mack. He knows who he is, and he’s 100 percent okay with that. And that to me is an incredibly sexy quality. He’s worked really hard to be the person he is.” She keeps a notebook by her bedside, an old Moleskine that he has drawn in and customized. She writes his one-liners in it, stuff he says in the middle of the night that cracks her up. Brenda works steadily. She travels. She hustles. But here’s the thing: They bought this house, and that’s significant. For Mack? Yes. A home. He’s been a “tramp,” to use his word. A “vagabond.” Mack worried that when they started dating, Brenda might have thought he was still in that world—touring with a weird band, hopping into cars with strangers, playing handball in his apartment late at night. He is not that person anymore, of course. At night, he holds Brenda in their bed, in the fluffy comforters and matching pillows she picked out, their fluffy cats lolling around, legs hanging off the bed, purring. Mack holds Brenda, and he says, “I’m here. I’m right here.” AT CARLITOS, THE FLESH OF THE BRANZINO IS PICKED APART, WHITE FLECKS

amid shards of bones, the eyes staring up at Mack. Across the table, torn ribeye in a slick of oil and butter. Wineglasses with oily lip marks around the rims. The lights are low now, the street dark outside. There’s a guy playing the accordion two feet from us. We were talking about Saved!, the religion movie, and I ask Mack when the last time he went to church was. “Last time I went to church was my sister’s funeral,” he says. Bobs his head a little, swallows. “So it was about eleven years ago.” I look down at the table. Mack’s sister Dakota, the second of the seven Culkin kids, a year older than Mack, was hit by a car in Los Angeles and died the next day, on December 10, 2008. “She passed away eleven years ago tomorrow.” He bobs his head a little more. “Tonight”—eleven years ago tonight—“was the last time I talked to her, and she passed away overnight, kinda thing.” He stops talking, just for a second, then: “She had a roommate at the time. She said, ‘We just watched Party Monster, and we wanted to compliment you.’ She said, ‘I want you to stay focused and enthused.’ I was like, ‘Thanks. You too. Go to sleep.’ And then she went out to go get some Gatorade and cigarettes, and she got hit by a car.” His eyebrows lift, but his eyes are slits of contemplation. “I mean, look, I had that last conversation with her, and she told me to stay focused and enthused.” Mack sits back, looks around the restaurant. Takes a slug of wine. When he talks again, his tone is Hey, you know, what are ya gonna do?

“Her favorite drink was Budweiser,” he says, the smile returning. “So I’m gonna drink some Budweisers tomorrow. And listen, I’m not gonna get into it. But it’s my day, when I mourn my sister. So yeah.” Some silence hangs. The accordion player stares with a quiet intensity at his instrument as the music fills the air with some kind of mood, like the sadness of carnivals. “Yeah.” WHEN HE FIRST STARTED DATING BRENDA, THE FEELING THAT IT WAS TOO

good to be true almost overwhelmed him, almost overwhelmed their very relationship. He was, he says, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “And it’s always gonna drop,” he says. “Something bad’s gonna happen. Someone’s gonna die!” John Hughes was special to Mack. Even fatherly, though he doesn’t like to use that word. When Mack was filming Richie Rich in Chicago, Hughes stopped by the set and said hello. Mack was physically tired, missed home, and felt uninspired by the movie he was in. (He didn’t make another movie for nine years.) A couple days later, Hughes called him to ask: Are you all right? It hit Mack even then, as a child: It was the first time anyone had ever asked him that. In a professional capacity—whether he was all right. It was the last time he and Hughes ever spoke. A month before Hughes died, in 2009, Michael Jackson died after being given an overdose of medication. If Hughes sometimes played the father Mack’s father couldn’t be, Jackson was often the schoolmate he never had. Jackson got in touch with Mack after Home Alone, and suddenly they were hanging out. His parents neither encouraged nor discouraged the friendship. The way Mack sees it, Michael had a similar childhood, which is to say that he didn’t really have one, because his father was forcing fame upon him. So, at twenty-two years older than Mack, living in a place called Neverland, he felt the same age, in a way. Mack and Jackson used to prank-call people. Jackson used to do these voices, real nerdy—“Hello, I’d like to buy a refrigerator. How big are your refrigerators?” And Mack would laugh and laugh. The last time Mack saw him was in the men’s room at the Santa Barbara County Superior Courthouse in 2005. Mack was twenty-four. Michael was fortysix. Mack was testifying in Jackson’s defense in People v. Michael Jackson, in which the singer was charged with intoxicating and molesting a thirteen-yearold boy who had cancer. He was eventually acquitted. There was a short recess during Mack’s testimony. Mack took a leak, and Michael came in. Jackson said, “We better not talk. I don’t want to influence your testimony.” They laughed a little at this. Michael Jackson, who had been more famous perhaps even than Macaulay Culkin when he was eight, ten, eleven years old, looked whipped. Exhausted. Drained. They hugged. I ask Mack if he is bothered that people assume—because he was one of many boys who spent time at Jackson’s home, some of whom accused him of heinous acts of sexual abuse—Jackson must have abused him, too. “Look,” he says. “I’m gonna begin with the line—it’s not a line, it’s the truth: He never did anything to me. I never saw him do anything. And especially at this flash point in time, I’d have no reason to hold anything back. The guy has passed on. If anything—I’m not gonna say it would (continued on page 112)

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JACKET, SHIRT, AND TROUSERS BY DOLCE & GABBANA; SHOES, SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.

T H E P L A C E For more than four decades, Page Six has ruled the world of gossip about the famous and powerful. In an era when celebrities control the narrative and â&#x20AC;&#x153;powerâ&#x20AC;? is a dirty word, can it survive?

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hen I moved to New York from Florida in 2007 for a job as an associate editor at the New York Post, I’d never heard of Page Six. It quickly became my cheat sheet for how to be a real New Yorker. Page Six had its own language and cast of characters that made it feel like the most exclusive and exciting version of the city. Every morning, I’d grab the paper, turn right to Page Six, and be transported to a world where finance “honchos” I’d never heard of were suddenly intriguing, celebrities I did care about were “canoodling” with one another, and those who mattered were “spotted” at Elaine’s, Le Cirque, or Nello, restaurants I knew only by name and that in my mind were constantly filled with famous people swapping air kisses and dirt. At the paper, the small Page Six team seemed elusive. They kept to themselves, stationed in the back corner of the newsroom, buried behind stacks of newsprint and books. Although the dress code for tabloid reporters consists mostly of jeans and crumpled dress shirts, I’d see Johnson, always in his crisp suits and perfect flaxen coif, walking silently, regally around the office. His deputy, Paula Froelich, sometimes napped on a couch in the photo editor’s office, near my desk. “Dude, I was exhausted,” Froelich says. “I used to get in at 9:30, 10:00 in the morning. I would leave around 8:00 or 8:30 and then immediately go out, sometimes not getting back home until 3:00, and then six hours later do it again.” Tara Palmeri, who was at Page Six from 2010 to 2012, says, “You stay up all night because everyone says that everything goes down after hours, right? Everyone says that the end of the night is when you see people acting up, and that’s when the real drama happens.” They were filling two pages a day with a dozen or more “items,” the small news stories that constitute Page Six. The column had grown from a single page because luxury advertisers like Saks Fifth Avenue wanted to be placed across from it—and it usually appeared on page 12 or further back.

P R E C E D I N G PA G E S : C O U R T E S Y N E W Y O R K P O S T. B I L LY FA R R E L L / B FA . C O M ( S M I T H ) . PAT R I C K M Ɯ M U L L A N / G E T T Y I M A G E S (J O H N S O N ) .

How did something built upon a flimsy foundation of celebrity sightings and overheard chitchat become an indestructible mainstay of news and entertainment? So strong it can keep winning a game in which backstabbing, horse-trading, secrets, lies, manipulation, and the occasional fistfight are pretty much part of the rules? How does Page Six still thrive? How does Page Six still exist?

One publicist says of Page Six, “It’s like doing a deal with the Mafia.”

onald Trump and his wife, Melania, were stationed at the top of the grand staircase in the Four Seasons Grill Room, a longtime gathering place for Manhattan’s power brokers in business and the media. The event had just started, and Trump, then host of The Apprentice, still had his long black coat on over his navy suit. Melania was draped in an airy eggplant-hued cocktail dress. The party was for veteran Page Six editor Richard Johnson, who had just moved to Los Angeles to work for Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily, and New York’s elite were there to toast him. Katie Couric, Martha Stewart, and Jay McInerney mingled with Page Six reporters as well as publicists like Ken Sunshine, conversation dinning over the funky seventies mixes. Page Six, the gossip column in the New York Post, is an institution built on tipsters, anonymous sources, and old-fashioned reporting. Appearing in it means you aren’t just a success in your line of business; you are a true boldfaced name. You matter. Items about movie stars appear alongside stories about socialites and power players—as long as you make for good copy, the playing field is level. The fear Page Six strikes in its subjects has made it an indispensable tool for Manhattan’s rich and powerful. For Page Six, Trump had long been the trifecta: boldfaced name, tipster, and anonymous source. Reporters could call his personal assistant, Norma Foerderer, and within minutes he would call back personally. When contributor Jared Paul Stern called him about a story he was working on concerning Trump’s January 2000 breakup with Melania, he told Stern on the record, “It’s bullshit. It’s not correct.” But the item was peppered with supporting quotes from “one friend” of Trump’s and a “source close to Trump.” Stern says those quotes all came from Trump himself—a practice other former gossip columnists have confirmed Trump employed. Trump, disguised as a friend, said about himself, “He doesn’t

care. It’s not like he’s married. . . . [Melania] is a great girl, but Donald has to be free for a while. He didn’t want to get hooked. He decided to cool it.” (A White House official says, “That NY Post story you are referring to is false,” but wouldn’t comment on Trump supplying the anonymous quotes.) Trump and Johnson were close—the editor attended two of Trump’s weddings and served as a judge for the Miss Universe pageant when Trump owned the franchise. But the column was about to change. The dapper Johnson, who had been there for a quarter of a century, was being replaced by Emily Smith, a fivefoot blond Brit. She had become Johnson’s deputy a year earlier after a stint as the U. S. correspondent for The Sun. At Johnson’s send-off, in November 2010, Smith, in a simple black sheath dress, made her way around the room as guests congratulated her. When she got to the top of the grand staircase, she was introduced to the Trumps. “Oh, you’re taking over for Richard Johnson,” Trump said. “Big shoes to fill.” “I know—and I’m from England, too, so I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” Smith said. Trump responded, “At least you’re good-looking.” That interaction, that party, that collection of boldfaced names gathered to honor a newspaperman who traded in gossip seem like a gauzy dream. A moment before the collapse of the media business in which Page Six operated. Institutions crumbled. Social-media companies took shape, giving rise to a new breed of celebrity and, worse, influencer, who saw little value in gossip columns. Eventually, the schmoozy, seemingly harmless gossip at the top of the stairs became the president of the United States—impeached, embattled, spoiling for a fight. But somehow, Page Six—a column in a newspaper that is printed on paper—has managed to grow. Yes, it has a website and a Twitter feed, and there was even a TV show. But mostly, it’s still something you flip to rather than something you click on. #MeToo may have caused it to check its conscience. TMZ may have made it work harder. Social media may have given celebrities more power to control the news, taking some of the wind out of Page Six’s guess-what-we-just-saw urgency. And yet to the people who run the world, or certain parts of it, Page Six still matters.

When Murdoch and then Post editor James Brady launched Page Six on January 3, 1977, it was indeed the sixth page of the paper and the first gossip column to operate as a section—not attached to a single columnist, like those written by legendary gossips Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. The mandate was to cover “the corridors of power.” Competitors came and went, but the 1990s and early 2000s brought a gossip gold rush. One former Page Six staffer says of those days, “When you were at Page Six, the club owners would meet you at the door and hand you an eight ball—it was insane.” In addition to Page Six, there was Rush & Molloy (a husband-and-wife duo of former Page Six staffers), which launched at the Daily News in 1995. New York magazine had Intelligencer. Esquire (until 1997) and The New York Times had gossip columns. But in a 1994 New York ranking, Page Six topped everyone: “Page Six rests easy at the top of the gossip pile; in terms of performance, prestige and influence, it’s New York’s consensus No. 1 column. And the bitchiest.” Page Six itself—the actual newspaper column—looks almost exactly as it always has. There’s still a story that stretches across the top of the page: “the lede.” There’s still a two-column-wide item at the bottom right: “the double.” The fonts are the same. Every name is bolded, except those of the dead. There are recurring features like Sightings, which are quick hits revealing where celebrities have been spotted around town; We Hear, events that celebrities are expected to attend; and blind items, pieces of gossip with no name attached, often for legal reasons. (In December, a blind item disclosed that an unnamed A-list actor had been sending dick pics to couples in hopes of interesting them in a threesome.) Reporting methods are mostly the same, too. Page Six has an extensive network of tipsters, sources, verifiers, and helpers. “We rely on our sources more than reporters from other areas of the paper. Often it’s the source that gives rise to the story rather than the event itself,” says Johnson. In a media environment that prioritizes gaming algorithms to bloat website visits, Page Six reporters still do things the old-fashioned way, spending most nights at events, parties, and dinners cultivating sources, and days working the phones to verify tips. About 24 million people per month read PageSix.com, while 170,000 people read the Post in print and about 200,000 read the Post daily on the app.

EMILY SMITH (FAR LEFT, WITH REPORTER VICKY WARD) REPLACED RICHARD JOHNSON (ABOVE, WITH DONALD AND MELANIA TRUMP AND KATIE COURIC) AS PAGE SIX EDITOR IN 2010.

Henry Schleiff, group president at the media company Discovery, reads his Post on the treadmill while he watches CNN. “I savor Page Six as my dessert,” he says, marveling at the quality of reporting in the column. “One could argue they’re Woodward and Bernstein on speed.” For publicists, getting a client in bold can change their trajectory—shine a light on an up-and-comer or help shape the narrative about a celebrity. In the pre-Internet days, each morning, editors at glossy magazines would get a photocopied packet of the day’s gossip, culled by editorial assistants from the New York tabloids and trades and delivered to their desks—fodder that could turn into a bigger story. Today, a Page Six exclusive is often rewritten by dozens of other sites—you’ll find Page Six citations everywhere from Cosmopolitan to The Source to The New Yorker. “I recently had a conversation with the editor at a magazine, and he was telling me they wait for us to do the story first because they’re scared to do it or they won’t do it,” Page Six executive editor Ian Mohr says. “Then they jump on it as a feature. I see that all the time.” Page Six reporters have shown an uncanny ability to identify interesting characters, then cover them obsessively until they become first “Page Six famous” and then actual celebrities. New York socialites Paris Hilton and Tinsley Mortimer were Page Six staples—every table dance and club altercation was covered—before they became reality-TV stars. Other times it’s serendipitous. Page Six covered Timothée Chalamet in 2013, when he was a teenager dating Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon at Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School who’d had a bit part on Homeland. And yet getting a call from Page Six will send a chill down a publicist’s spine. “It’s usually a no-number—so it’s a private number—and I panic,” says publicist Kelly

Brady, who represents clients including Mortimer and Patti Stanger. “I’m always like, Fuck, it’s Page Six. My heart jumps out of my skin, always. I’m like, Oh my God, what did my client do?” hen something salacious happens in the city, odds are someone from the Page Six ecosystem saw it or heard about it—and is itching to be the one to get the satisfying thrill of sharing it. “Okay, you can out me as a gossip! I’m a Page Six helper,” says R. Couri Hay, an owner of a public-relations firm who has been working with the column since its inception. He says he was the one who gave Page Six one of its most famous blind items ever, about Woody Allen dating Soon-Yi Previn in the early 1990s, after hearing it from Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan. (Former Page Six editor Joanna Molloy has told a different story.) “The reality is, I love to gossip. I was born to gossip! I hear a lot. I have information every single day. Call me an adrenaline seeker—I guess some people feel like this when they skydive.” Hay goes to two or three parties a night, five or six nights a week, and calls his Page Six contacts almost daily. Before he even brushes his teeth, Hay grabs his Post to see if one of his items made the cut. “Just today, I woke up and found a couple,” he says. The ultimate rush comes when he gets “the wood”—tabloid-speak for the front page of the paper, where Hay’s items have landed a few times (according to him). Hay isn’t paid for his tips—Page Six doesn’t pay sources. However, his gossip prowess is useful in his PR business. “Over the years, I’ve been a partner with different nightclubs,” he says. “I remember Kim Kardashian wouldn’t get out of the car—I guess I can tell this story now; it’s ten, fifteen years

n a dreary afternoon this past December, Smith has just come from the Post’s daily 2:30 pitch meeting. The editor in chief, Stephen Lynch, listens as an editor from each section presents the day’s list-lines—summaries of stories their reporters are chasing. On this particular afternoon, Page Six is working on a tasty lede about NFL Network correspondent Jane Slater finding out an ex had been cheating thanks to his Fitbit showing a bump in his heart rate at 4:00 A.M. The race-car-red walls of the newsroom, on the tenth floor of the News Corp. building in midtown Manhattan, enclose stark white clusters of desks. CNN, CBS, and Fox News play soundlessly on TVs lining the perimeter. Smith usually sits at a small desk among her reporters, but she leads me to a conference room on the corner of the floor. She rarely sits for interviews. “Oh, it’s deeply uncomfortable! Because the star is Page Six; it’s not me,” she says, shaking her head. In her early days at Page Six, it wasn’t unusual for Smith to go from an all-night event she was covering straight to the office at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M. “I went to everything and I stayed out all night and just made a point to meet everyone. That was before I became a mother,” says Smith, who has a four-year-old. “It really hasn’t changed. I still go out quite a lot. It’s getting in earlier and not staying out and thinking, Oh, let’s go on to a nightclub and Let’s go to a karaoke bar, or Let’s go back to someone’s house.” The room we’re sitting in used to be Johnson’s office. “I had to clear the whole thing out, and there were old faxes from Donald Trump in there,” Smith says. Trump would famously fax angry letters to anyone he feuded with—Jerry Seinfeld, Rosie O’Donnell—and simultaneously fax over a copy to Page Six. “I kept some of them, but I wish I’d kept all of them.” The afternoon I visited the Post offices, Murdoch made his way through the newsroom alone with his head down, transfixed by his phone. He wore a navy suit with a crisp open-collared white dress shirt and bright-blue sneakers that appeared to be the trendy brand Allbirds. Smith raised a finger his way and said, “Hey, the boss!” Page Six may not be thought of as a sober journalistic enterprise, but its reporters have broken significant stories over the past forty-three years, and Smith sprinkles the conversation with bomb-

ABOVE: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET’S FIRST TIME AS A BOLDFACED NAME WAS AS A TEEN WHEN HE DATED LOURDES LEON. LEFT: BRITNEY SPEARS WEARS A PAGE SIXSIXSIX SHIRT IN 2003.

shells she and her team have unearthed. Page Six was the first to report Joe Biden’s son Hunter having a romantic relationship with his brother Beau’s widow. It was there when Trump staffers Hope Hicks and Corey Lewandowski got into a public screaming match, an early sign of chaos within the administration. In the early 2000s, the Internet became an increasingly threatening source of competition. In 2004, a blogger named Perez Hilton launched a site called PageSixSixSix.com—a name he had to change after the Post sued him. Gawker .com started in 2002 with its own snarky style of gossip—poking fun, sometimes viciously, at the media establishment, including Page Six. The differentiator? Reporting. Page Six had more experience at it. “Gawker was pretty much nothing compared to Page Six. Page Six broke news every day and night and worked their butts off, while Gawker was busy doing their hair or something,” says former Gawker editor Choire Sicha, who now runs the New York Times Styles desk. “Page Six knew the answer to gossip blind items that we didn’t even know enough to ask. There was some sort of enemyship and friendship relationship between Gawker and Page Six over the years, but Page Six was always the big dog. Sometimes the big, bad dog. Of course, Page Six was at times as corrupt as any media outfit could possibly be. It did very reprehensibly bad things over the years. But it also had an honor and a panache that I’ll always admire.” In 2006, there was an explosive allegation of corruption against Page Six. Stern was accused of extortion involving billionaire supermarket magnate Ron Burkle— demanding money to keep negative information about him out of the column.

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E L D E R O R D O N E Z / I N F P H OTO. C O M ( C H A L A M E T A N D L E O N ) . D S T E I N B E R G / B E I / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( S P E A R S ) .

later—unless you gave her a paper bag with $5,000 in it. The reason I did that is I knew it would end up in Page Six or one of the other gossip columns.” (A rep for Kim Kardashian West says, “Kim actually doesn’t remember this at all.”) An often unspoken tactic of gossip reporters is the trade: The column will mention a publicist’s client—a restaurant, for example—in exchange for other, more valuable gossip. “It’s like doing a deal with the Mafia. They’ll lend you a dollar if you pay them back four,” says publicist Kelly Cutrone. “I made a rule with myself about gossip, that I didn’t place gossip that I didn’t know to be true or that could ruin somebody’s life and family.” In addition to the tipsters, another class of valuable source is the unbiased verifier. “My role has been of a verifier,” says ubiquitous society photographer Patrick McMullan, who says he never calls in tips himself but has been a reliable ally because he’s so often at parties and events with the boldfaced. “Like somebody would say, ‘You were in the room. Was Charlize Theron there?’ I would say, ‘Yes, she was.’ I guess maybe because I didn’t have a horse in the race, I was a very good person to get the truth from.” The host of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen, reads Page Six on the Post app, which can assuage his ego when he’s the one being written about. “The great thing [about the app] is when they put something up about me that I don’t like, I know that it’s going to scroll down as the day goes on,” says Cohen. When the item appears in print, somehow the sting can be worse. “One time, Kim Cattrall told me that I should get a respectable job, that I should work at Roybers. Like, R-O-Y-B-E-R-S,” says Palmeri. “She meant Reuters.” There was the time Joss Sackler texted reporter Oli Coleman nothing but a middlefinger emoji after the column’s coverage of her New York Fashion Week show. Another Page Six reporter says, “Puff Daddy’s publicist called me in tears because she heard I was doing a spread about how he was afraid of clowns and supposedly suffered from this thing called coulrophobia. I was like, I can’t not do this. I don’t care if it ruins the relationship.” (“We remember this to be one of the more laughable calls we received daily from Page Six, who were obsessed with Diddy,” says a member of the artist’s former press team.)

(Smith was eventually proved right—the Trumps split, and Don Jr. is dating former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle.) At the mention of this, Smith seems to sit up a little taller. “I welcome the feedback,” she says. “You get people who don’t like stories, and they’ll go at you. But that’s part of the fun. That’s part of the game. If we are dishing it out in a gossip column, you have to expect to get it back.” here have been tipsters, there have been sources, there have been mutually beneficial relationships. And then there was Harvey Weinstein. For more than two decades, two New York power brokers—Page Six and Weinstein himself—used each other masterfully. One would occasionally take the other down, but year in and year out, Page Six sucked information from Weinstein and Weinstein sucked positive coverage from Page Six. And when the subject of this coverage was movie premieres or after-parties or even the occasional instance of bad behavior, there was no harm done. But what happens when one of your best sources turns out to be an alleged rapist and the catalyst for the entire #MeToo movement? Weinstein has been more extensively covered in Page Six than just about anyone else—more than eleven thousand times, according to his lawyers. They tried to use this as an excuse to have his trial moved last year, describing the coverage as “biased and sensational.” But a closer look shows that Weinstein’s ag-

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MANY PAGE SIX ITEMS TOOK PLACE AT ELAINE’S, A FAVORITE OF ACTORS LIKE ALEC BALDWIN AND WRITERS A. E. HOTCHNER AND GAY TALESE. BEFORE SHE WAS A REALITY STAR, PARIS HILTON WAS A PAGE SIX REGULAR.

“One could argue they’re Woodward and Bernstein on speed,” says one top TV exec.

A N T H O N Y B E H A R / S I PA P R E S S / A P ( B A L D W I N ) . J A M E S D E VA N E Y / W I R E I M A G E / G E T T Y I M A G E S ( H I LTO N ) . K E V I N L A R K I N / A P / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( TA L E S E A N D H OTC H N E R ) .

“We know how to destroy people,” Stern reportedly told Burkle. “It’s what we do. We do it without creating liability. That’s our specialty.” (After a federal investigation, no charges were brought.) When Johnson ran Page Six, he had the benefit of the last word in his many feuds over the years with the likes of Mickey Rourke (he challenged the actor to a fight), Alec Baldwin (who was dubbed the Bloviator), and Paul Newman ( Johnson accused him of lying about his height). Today, Page Six subjects can say their piece on Twitter as soon as the paper hits the newsstand. Social media is one of the starkest differences between Johnson’s era and Smith’s. Celebrities can use social media to try to beat gossip columns at their own game, negating scoops by announcing their engagements, divorces, and pregnancies on their Instagram pages—on their terms. There are gossip Instagram accounts like the wildly popular Shade Room, private gossip Facebook groups, secret invite-only gossip newsletters, and fan Twitter accounts that follow the every move of stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—all new competition for Page Six. On March 14, 2018, Smith broke the news that Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Vanessa, were splitting up, and the fiery, short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci tweeted that Smith was “a person with no morals or journalistic standards. Living off of others people’s pain. Beware! She will stop at nothing to hurt innocents. Especially your children.”

gressive attempts to shape Page Six coverage go back many years. In 2000, Froelich was covering a book party at the trendy downtown hotel the Tribeca Grand, hosted by Weinstein. When Rebecca Traister, a reporter for the elite, brainy Manhattan newspaper The New York Observer, asked Weinstein a question he didn’t like, he called her a cunt, and her colleague Andrew Goldman stepped in. Weinstein grabbed Goldman, put him into a headlock, and dragged him out onto the sidewalk, screaming, “You know what? I’m the fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” “I go in the next day and I’m like, ‘I’m gonna write [about] it,’ ” Froelich says. “Richard didn’t want to run it. And then I said, ‘If you don’t run it, I quit.’ ” Weinstein’s publicists told Froelich that the other reporters at the event had agreed not to write about the incident, she recalls. Goldman says Froelich called him that afternoon saying she was concerned about how Weinstein’s publicists were spinning the incident, so Goldman decided to file a police report. The item that ran in Page Six, which Froelich says was “heavily edited,” begins, “A couple of pushy reporters for the New York Observer pushed Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein to the breaking point, causing an ugly scene at what should have been a joyous celebration for former MTV veejay Karen Duffy.” Today, Johnson says Weinstein’s reps denied the attack—and quickly points to the New York Times coverage of the night, which, like the Page Six item, cast Goldman and Traister as the aggressors and Weinstein as the innocent victim trying to be civil. When read back the beginning of the Page Six story, Johnson pauses for a beat. “Oh,” he says. “Well, that was probably Harvey’s work. It sounds to me like the reporters were the victims here, not the perpetrators.” When asked if he has any regrets about how Page Six covered Weinstein, Johnson says, “Looking back, I wish I’d attacked him as a pervert from the very beginning, but, you know, I didn’t realize it. He was the leading independent filmmaker in New York for many years.” Weinstein controlled who got access to his parties, premieres, and stars. “He was another person who just implicitly understood how if you give, you get,” says George Rush, who was at Page Six in the late eighties and early nineties. “While studio publicists would keep a gossip columnist as far away as possible (continued on page 114)

British indie filmmaking got thirty-year-old CALLUM TURNER (left) hooked on acting. “A Room for Romeo Brass really affected me,” he says of the gritty 2000 coming-of-age flick. After a breakthrough role in the latest Fantastic Beasts installment, Turner’s next gig is the right-person-wrongtime romance The Last Letter from Your Lover, opposite Shailene Woodley. Jacket ($2,350) and trousers ($1,200) by Bottega Veneta; T-shirt ($900) by Brioni; shoes ($995) by Santoni.

G R E AT PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID BURTON STYLING BY NICK SULLIVAN PROFILES BY MURRAY CLARK 74 M A RC H 2020

Need an actor who can master any accent? Call up JOSH O’CONNOR (below). He spoke with aristocratic menace in The Riot Club, delivered a rural Yorkshire growl in God’s Own Country, and nailed the posh diction of Prince Charles on The Crown. “Accents for me are one of the first steps of building a character,” says O’Connor. “It’s such a big part of our identity.” Jacket ($1,750) by Brioni.

They can act . . . British. They can play often better than Yanks.

BRITONS

LO C AT I O N : B A R I TA L I A , F R I T H S T R E E T, S O H O

of them could (deﬁnitely? maybe?) be the Bond. Get next wave of marquee men the pond.

75 M A RC H 2020

Jacket ($3,750) and shirt ($550), Celine by Hedi Slimane.

EARL CAVE (left)—yes, offspring of Nick—is a nineteen-year-old bundle of

“I was a very introverted person who wanted nothing to do with the stage,”

nervous energy who impressed on the dark comedy The End of the F***ing

MALACHI KIRBY (below) admits. Lucky for us, shyness hasn’t deterred a

World and in this year’s True History of the Kelly Gang. As for the latter proj-

career that’s clocked up projects ranging from British soaps to Small Axe, a

ect’s tale of poverty and crime, the son of the great Bad Seed is sunnily real-

Steve McQueen–directed six-part BBC anthology about London’s West Indian

istic: “The whole idea of a gang is fun until you’re faced with mortal doom.”

community. “It’s probably the most important job I’ve ever done,” says Kirby.

Suit ($1,395) by Boss; tank ($40, pack of three) by Calvin Klein Underwear. 77 M A RC H 2020

Shirt ($695) by Valentino; Tank Solo watch ($2,550) by Cartier.

LO C AT I O N : H U N T S M A N O F S AV I L E R O W. S P E C I A L T H A N K S TO C A M P B E L L C A R E Y.

Jacket ($2,590), shirt ($485), and trousers ($850) by Givenchy; shoes ($795) by Jimmy Choo.

His role in Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of Little Women came on the

VIVEIK KALRA (above left) is intent on telling stories of the underrep-

back of two TV projects that made JAMES NORTON (left) big back home:

resented. His portrayal of a teen growing up working class and Pakistani

the grim Yorkshire police drama Happy Valley and the Kremlin crime se-

in 1980s London in Blinded by the Light earned a standing ovation at

ries McMafia. But he was still starstruck on the film set. “Someone brought

Sundance. Still, he’s in awe of epics like his next film, Voyagers. “Bigger-

Meryl Streep and I cups of tea with our names on it—I took a photo of it

budget stuff is an art form, because you have to imagine the surreal. That’s

when she wasn’t looking.”

an amazing thing to be able to do.”

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Jacket ($4,095, part of suit) and shirt ($625) by Giorgio Armani; Santos-Dumont watch ($11,800) by Cartier.

JOE COLE (above) was once told that “it’s never crowded on the extra

“I’m a massive Shakespeare nerd,” confesses NIKESH PATEL (right). “As a

mile.” The thirty-one-year-old took that advice, eschewed university for the

kid, I didn’t have much confidence, but university let me pick up the acting

National Youth Theatre, and eventually found his way onto Peaky Blinders,

bug with a production of Othello.” A love of the Bard didn’t quite prep him

sharing scenes with heavyweights like Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy. This

for auditioning on stilts in front of Kenneth Branagh for Artemis Fowl. “The

year, he’ll finally step into a leading role, on the TV series Gangs of London.

whole audition I just thought, Don’t fall over, which was actually a bit freeing.”

80 M A RC H 2020

Coat ($3,970) and shirt ($1,060) by Prada.

Coat, shirt, and trousers by Alexander McQueen; shoes ($795) by Jimmy Choo.

Suit ($4,995) and shirt ($595) by Brunello Cucinelli; boots ($1,610) by Edward Green.

“I’m the king, so at least it ended well for me,” twenty-year-old ISAAC

By his own admission, JACK LOWDEN (above) has two left feet. “My

HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT (left) says of his time as Bran the Broken on Game

younger brother is a ballet dancer, but I was encouraged to narrate shows to

of Thrones. How is he adjusting to post–GoT life? “In five years, I think the

keep me away from actually dancing,” he says. “And that led me to acting.”

loss will really start to hurt.” For now, the king looks skyward, as Hemp-

Which, fortunately, the soft-spoken Scot was much better at, scoring buzz-

stead Wright tackles a role in Voyagers, a sci-fi thriller he describes as “Lord

worthy roles opposite Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan in 2018’s Mary

of the Flies in space.”

Queen of Scots and alongside Tom Hardy in the upcoming Fonzo.

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DAMSON IDRIS (right) does serious seriously well. Proof? See him as a

on a full stomach) didn’t shock ARCHIE MADEKWE (below), but the acid-

kidnapped intern in the “Smithereens” episode of Black Mirror. But he’s

pagan horror flick’s big laughs did. “I wasn’t aware we were making this

perhaps best known for his turn as Franklin Saint, a South Central L. A. drug

black comedy until I went to the cinema and audiences were cracking up.”

dealer, on FX’s Snowfall. “Americans were shocked I wasn’t actually Amer-

Next up: playing a young man born with special abilities on Apple TV+’s See.

ican,” Idris says. “But don’t worry, I’m still London through and through.”

Jacket ($5,995) and shirt ($695) by Ralph Lauren.

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F O R S TO R E I N F O R M AT I O N S E E PA G E 1 1 5 . P R O D U C T I O N : D A N N Y N E E D H A M AT R O S C O P R O D U C T I O N S . G R O O M I N G : C I O N A J O H N S O N K I N G A N D J U L I A C A R TA AT A A R T LO N D O N . A S S I S TA N T S T Y L I S T S : J E S S I E C U L L E Y, LY D I A M A R I E O ’ B R I E N .

His character’s gruesome death in Midsommar (don’t Google “blood eagle”

Jacket ($3,600), shirt ($660), and trousers ($1,190) by Louis Vuitton Menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s; boots by Ermenegildo Zegna XXX.

R IC KEY T HOMPS ON GR EW U P ONL INE . THEN HE BLEW UP ONLINE. BUT NOW THAT THE 24 -Y EAR- OLD IS INTERNET FAMOUSTM , HOW CAN HE LEVEL UP?

T H E A N X I E T Y O F M O D E R N S TA R D O M

BY JUSTIN KIRKLAND PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAGNUS UNNAR

8 6 M A RC H 2020

RICKEY THOMPSON AND I ARE IN THE WOMEN’S SECTION OF THE VAN NUYS

Goodwill, playing a game we call “Is This ’90s Fashion?”—and I am losing. I fish out a sweater from the thrift-store racks, hold it up, and ask the socialmedia star: Is this ’90s fashion? The difficulty of this game is humbling, which makes no sense because Thompson was alive for only three years, ten months, and twenty-three days of the 1990s and I lived through the whole damn decade. But, he says, “recently, I fell in love with the ’90s/2000s era,” so I guess he’s the expert. When I show him a block-colored Dope polo shirt, he says, “That could work. It’s getting there,” but his eyebrows say otherwise. His nose is slightly crinkled. His upper lip is snarled. He has given me nothing but positive feedback, yet he is also a terrible liar. I have failed in the eyes of Rickey Thompson—social-media personality, style aficionado, and toddler of the ’90s—whether he will admit it or not. We came here because this is the thrift shop he frequents most, but ironically, we spend a decent chunk of time scrolling through the Internet’s vintageclothing offerings on his phone. He claims ’90s vintage is easier to find on a site called Depop, where “creatives” buy and sell clothes. That’s where he got the sweater he’s wearing, which he has accessorized with a black Prada bucket hat and twelve sterling-silver ear piercings. With five million Instagram followers, more than a million YouTube subscribers, and tens of millions of video views, Thompson is an Internet phenom. Dyed in the wool of the World Wide Web, he is best known for his comedy videos and eccentric style. In the fall of 2018, he went mega-viral for a highly quotable video that his followers know as his “you can’t defeat a bad bitch” monologue. It’s a Rickey classic: filmed on his phone, featuring low production values and the same comic note hit multiple times with growing intensity, until the viewer can’t help but feel in on the joke. His posts buck all storytelling conventions. Instead of having the expected beginning, middle, and end, Thompson’s videos are a collection of climaxes. The set is almost always his sparsely decorated L. A. apartment, with pop princesses of the late ’90s covering his bedroom walls. He may shantay toward the camera or sashay away, but all of his energy combusts in this limited space. He ends the video without warning. There is no coda or goodbye; he exits the stage. We are not done with him; he is done with us. Just as I’m starting to feel he is, in fact, done with me and my fruitless search for something that doesn’t make me look like an old, he pipes up: “I think the thing I get most nervous about is my age. I get very nervous. I’m twenty-three right now”—he turned twenty-four in February—“but I talk like I’m twentyseven. What if someone thinks I’m too old or something? That’s my biggest fear. How long will this hotness last?” Nothing’s older than the fear of getting old, but if Hollywood is an ageist industry, social media is even more brutal. Time just moves more quickly there: The ’90s are vintage, Dynasty has been rebooted, and kids are coming to snatch your social-media authority. (Of TikTok, for example, Thompson says, “I haven’t really got on it because I’m like, Oh my gosh, the young kids are on there. But, you know, TikTok is cute, though.”) Legacy careers are nearly impossible to attain. Veterans like Tyler Oakley (a whopping thirty years old) and Jenna Marbles (thirty-three) are regarded as hall of famers, elder statesmen who pioneered the industry for those who would come afterward. Thompson is part of the second or even third generation of logged-on icons straining to retain relevance in a world where going viral and being famous are not the same. Social-media fame may be the Next Big Thing, but in many ways, the career trajectories of social-media stars still have a traditionalism to them: Think of the Bo Burnhams or Casey Neistats of the world, who started online and moved into producing work for big-name brands and studios. It’s a pressure Thompson is aware of. “Do I want to be thirty years old and still, like, you know, making videos in my room or whatever?” Ouch.

Carolina, bedroom as a high schooler, in 2013, at a moment when becoming a star on Vine was a real possibility for a funny, good-looking kid with a knack for writing six-second bits for a generally friendly audience. At school, Thompson was bullied, and Vine and Instagram became outlets. I joke that if two gay men engaging in conversation like we are don’t share coming-out stories, it’s as if we didn’t speak at all, but Thompson’s coming out in North Carolina strikes me as relatively tame and plays a smaller role in his origin story than I’d expected. The short version: After his mother took him to a Miami pride parade when he was about seven years old, he remembers thinking, This could be me. His dad had a tough time in the beginning, but Thompson says, “When I grew up and he saw that I was so successful and that I was out there being me, my dad [became] like my best friend.” The real problem, according to Thompson, had much more to do with his race and his personality—people who didn’t think that a striking black man could also be a buoyant, pop-culture-obsessed diva were cruel to him. Being older than Thompson, I had assumed that he was bullied for being gay, conflating sexuality with personality. But in fact, the same qualities that landed him in a trash can in high school are what make him famous now. Bullies, at least the idea of them, have inspired some of his most beloved outburst videos on Vine. Before the platform was shut down, he had accrued 2.5 million followers. He moved to YouTube, where he started producing fashion videos, but “people weren’t enjoying them,” he recalls. “They were like, ‘I want funny Rickey back.’ ” Taking that penchant for the fabulously defensive and turning it into a character is complicated: It does put you into a box. Since moving to L. A., he’s achieved the goal of notoriety, but he admits that it doesn’t feel like he’s particularly made it yet. “I was talking to my manager one day, and she was like, ‘You’re a celebrity,’ and I was like, Whoa. It kind of scared me, because I—I still to this day think that I’m not a celebrity.” As I rummage the racks, two teenage girls appear from across the store, full of chaotic energy. They bombard him: “Can I take a picture with you? Damn, where’s my phone? I forgot your name.” Thompson responds in a fan-ready tone of voice I haven’t heard all day. While one of the girls preps her iPhone, she and Thompson compliment each other’s outfits. She says, “I want to put this on IG. This will be in my top nine this year.” He and the fan flash identical peace signs, then the teens disappear out into the sunlight of Victory Boulevard. “I see it now wherever I go,” Thompson says afterward. “There’s a phone like, you know . . . it’s Rickey. I do get very nervous. I don’t want to mess around and one day, I’m living my life, get caught doing whatever.” He means getting “canceled.” Laugh, but the Internet is fickle about viral sensations turned celebrities; for someone like Thompson, that could mean an entire career derailed. He’s managed to circumvent that fate by giving his millions of followers exactly what makes the Internet tick: seemingly unbridled tangents. But the

T WO T E E N AG E G I R L S A P P E A R . “CA N shots he fires never actually hit anyone in particular. His monologues do not explicitly name the villain—that is your job. (In a recent video, he says that in 2020, he will not know of “that bitch sadness.”) Such an approach scratches the itch of Internet ire without leaving any blood on Thompson’s hands. This formula has worked pretty well, too. He gains a million or so Instagram followers every four months. His manager updates him on his metrics, especially for every million-follower marker he crosses, but he insists that it doesn’t excite him anymore. He knows his progress isn’t something to scoff at, though. “I literally am just so obsessed with, like, all my success. . . . There are days when I’m, like, going to a movie with my mom, and then a bunch of people are like, ‘Rickey, can I get a picture?’ Sometimes I’m like, Oh my God, not right now, but I would never say, like, Ugh, I’m done with this life.” Thompson’s logged-off persona is much more subdued than that of the flamboyant figure most know him as on Instagram, even if aspects of it are

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G R O O M I N G : D A N I E L E P I E R S O N S F O R A R T D E PA R T M E N T U S I N G TATC H A

THOMPSON BEGAN HIS CAREER POSTING VINES FROM HIS RALEIGH, NORTH

I TA K E A P I C T U R E W I T H YO U ? D A M N , W H E R E ’ S M Y P H O N E ? I F O R G O T YO U R N A M E .” baffling to me. For example, he considers Twitter a place to, yes, relax. “You need a little vacation from the Internet, and you just have to find the right platform for that,” he explains. IN THE PAST YEAR, HE HAS BOOKED A FASHION SHOOT WITH TEEN VOGUE,

as well as partnerships with American Eagle, the luggage company Away, and Coach. One of his most recent stints was with Calvin Klein, which hired him for a spot in the #MyCalvins IRL lineup, a campaign featuring models in both highly posed shots and everyday moments. His demeanor is very different in these than in his video posts—for one thing, he’s silent in them. He comes across as more somber and masculine, bordering on vulnerable, and it didn’t come easy. “With modeling I was very discouraged. I was like, Oh my gosh, can I only be the funny guy? Is that all I’ll ever be?” He believes in manifestation, but he also believes in persistence, particularly when thinking beyond

modeling. “An Emmy and an Oscar will be mine,” he says matter-of-factly. Lately, Thompson has been trying to land an audition for Dynasty, and he’s starred in four seasons of the YouTube Premium series Foursome. After an hour, I have found only one Rickey-approved garment: a burgundy mock-turtleneck sweater with an embroidered snowman. Below it, the words STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT, PLEASE DON’T LET ME MELT TONIGHT are written in script. As we leave the Goodwill, Thompson mentions my boyfriend and wants to know how long we’ve been together. I tell him we just passed the four-year mark, and he gushes, “Oh, I love that! It can happen.” He claims he’s done with dating for now, explaining that by twenty-three, he had already sworn off all the apps. Instead, he’s going to focus on this machine he’s created. He has to plot that path to his Emmy. And his Oscar. This Vine-star-cumInstagram-star-cum-model-actor is convinced he’s running out of time.

Suddenly and without warning, HUEY LEWIS lost the ability to hear amplified music. Now, from his remote Montana ranch, the beloved pop star is on a search for answers. BY DAVE HOLMES PHOTOGRAPH BY SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

THE

STORY OF

HUEY LEWIS

YOU LIVED THROUGH THE

1980s, you will understand the strange and special thrill of receiving a concerned voice mail from Huey Lewis. “I’m going to see you tomorrow, but I need you to drive real slow,” Huey tells me, his indelible rasp turned fatherly. “There are a couple three days a year when the roads are really bad, man. And you’re in ’em.” It’s 5 degrees the next morning when I drive to his ranch, an hour outside Missoula, Montana, on narrow state highways as much ice as road. When I pull in—carefully, as instructed—there he is, a solitary figure standing in the snow, an icon in camouflage, surrounded by snowcapped mountains. This is a place where Huey can do what he likes while he waits to find out whether he’ll have another chance to do what he loves. We’re months away from the release of Weather, the first album of original Huey Lewis and the News music since 2001, and Huey doesn’t know if he’ll be able to perform again. Two years ago, he lost the ability to hear amplified music, to find pitch, to sing live. “When it’s really bad, I’m completely deaf almost,” he says. The title Weather was originally a nod to age and to the band’s breakthrough, Sports, but there’s a newer meaning than what we’re used to getting from Huey. It’s possible that with a lot of living still ahead, his last gig is behind him. “We’re getting a little weather now,” he tells me. “It’s not a perfectly clear day.” He shakes it off. “You wanna go on a sortie?” Huey sizes me up, grabs some cold-weather gear out of his mudroom, and then I’m bouncing around an expansive ranch near the Idaho border in an ATV wearing Huey Lewis’s snow pants. As we bob around the duck blinds, over the irrigation ditches, he points out a bald eagle in a tree, a herd of whitetail deer bounding past. He’s content here. This is entertainment for Huey now that he can’t hear television or music. It’s particularly cruel that music sounds like distortion to him, because the albums he made with the News were meticulous pop-rock, with the smoothest harmonies this side of the Beach Boys. It’s difficult to imagine from today’s perspective, but after the release of Sports in 1983, Huey was ubiquitous and wellliked. He had every subset of the 1980s American teenager on his side, like he was Ferris Bueller’s cool uncle. To know Huey Lewis and the News was to love them, whatever else you naturally enjoyed. You could, like me, not play sports and play the hell out of Sports. Huey represented a sensibly sexy mainstream masculinity: dimpled chin, haircut that rejected any recognizable trend, body just Soloflexed enough to pull off a red suit. The coolest guy at your dad’s work. He’s still crag-

G R O O M I N G : N I N A A LV I A R

gily handsome as he approaches his seventieth birthday, a hero in a Clint Eastwood western. In his upstairs office is a framed copy of the top two hundred albums from Billboard magazine’s June 30, 1984, issue, the week Sports finally hit number one, nine and a half months after its release. Behind Sports in the top ten: Thriller, Born in the U.S.A., the Footloose soundtrack. Purple Rain was released that week; Madonna would debut “Like a Virgin” at the first Video Music Awards weeks later. “This is the good stuff,” I sigh out loud. Summer 1984 was possibly the greatest summer in pop-music history, due to the genre gumbo of MTV and Top Forty radio. It was the height of the monoculture, and Huey sat on top of it, with weapons-grade likability and a sound that didn’t quite conform to the trends. Although he gets lumped in with the superstars of the eighties, the songs of Sports—“The Heart of Rock & Roll,” “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “If This Is It”—don’t sound dated. They don’t even sound like the sixties R&B that inspired them. They’re timeless. For the past three decades, Huey’s been relying on one good ear. His right one went out just before a gig in Boston in the mid-eighties, and a specialist in San Francisco told him to get used to it. “You only need one ear,” he says. “Brian Wilson had one ear.” Then came January 27, 2018. Huey was backstage at a News gig in Dallas, and all at once the opening act turned into distortion. “They’re playing, and it sounds like it’s warfare . . . like there’s an airplane taking off.” He went through with the gig, but even the sound in his in-ear monitors was a jumble. He couldn’t find pitch in his own music. “It was the worst night of my life.” An ear specialist put him on a steroid regimen for twenty-eight days. No change. He saw a rheumatologist, then an immunologist, then an otolaryngologist at Stanford. The best any of them could do was to diagnose it, and barely. “They tell me I have Ménière’s disease, but nobody knows what Ménière’s is. It’s a syndrome based on the symptoms.” They also don’t know what causes it or how to cure it. His doctors have put him on a low-salt diet, but he’s not sure it’s helping. The condition might go away as it came on. It also might not. Two years have passed since Huey has done a proper gig, and the musical energy is all pent up. In his kitchen, he pulls up music—the Rance Allen Group—then starts singing along: “Ain’t no need of crying when it’s raining,” Rance and Huey sing to me, “ ’cuz crying only adds to the rain.” Then the harmonica comes out, and he plays along, and there is so much pure joy radiating from him I’m almost sorry I’m going to die in his kitchen. We can have this moment because the track is compressed, hitting our ears with the force of an iPhone speaker. “Doing this with a proper band,” he says, “with bottom end and drums roaring away and all that? That’s going to be hard.” Huey wears hearing aids that play a series of five tones when he puts them in each morning—“It’s an F chord,” he tells me—and if he can hear all of them, that’s a level 6 hearing day. Today is his twenty-fifth level 6 hearing day in a row, a new record. If he racks up another week or two of 6’s, he’ll try to sing along to loud music. “What I got to do is get stabilized for a month, and if this works, then we’ll try a little rehearsal experiment. If that works, then we’ll try a full-blown rehearsal. If that works, then maybe book a gig. But I’m a ways away from that yet.” What if the music never returns? “I haven’t allowed myself to go there yet,” Huey says. “I keep thinking I could maybe sing again. I get down sometimes, but it’s better to remember that life is okay. I’ve had a great run.” He is as upbeat as a man can be when he’s beginning to speak about himself in the past tense. The temptation is to paint Huey as a tragic figure, out in the middle of nowhere, waiting to see if his music career can come back to him as quickly and mysteriously as it left him. But I don’t want to write a tragedy, not about Huey Lewis. A positive outlook is the one thing all the doctors have prescribed, and after all the plays I got out of Sports and Fore! and Picture This, I owe him mine. If you know Huey, then you love him, and what is love if not belief and support? When we check in several weeks later, the goalpost has moved again. “I had to cancel rehearsal,” he texts me. After nine weeks at a 6, three days before his first attempt to sing along to live music in two years, his hearing went to a 2. All at once. He doesn’t know why, and the doctors don’t either. The guy is curious and passionate about a million things, but the one mystery he can’t solve is the one that keeps him from singing. So now we wait to find out whether there will ever be another Huey Lewis and the News gig, and as we do, all we know for sure is that there ain’t no need of crying when it’s raining. In the meantime, Huey’s just being patient, trying his hardest to adjust to the quiet.

TRAGEDY

NOT A

9 1 M A RC H 2020

THE DAY THE ROCKET CAME TO BOCA CHICA by Rachel Monroe Photographs by Kevin Cooley

After Elon Musk announced plans to build a SpaceX launchpad at the southernmost end of Texas, nearby residents grew worried that their remote beach community would be disrupted. Little did they know that it would be dismantled.

“The schemes and dreams of developers to build on this beautiful and desolate area die hard, but die they always have.” —Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, 1992 “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it’s cool.” —Elon Musk, 2018 AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, WHEN TENSIONS WERE AT THEIR PEAK, THE

residents of Boca Chica Village received a message from SpaceX. The private space company was publicly unveiling its new spacecraft here, at the southeastern tip of Texas, and they were invited. The gesture came as a surprise. Earlier that month, homeowners in this tiny community of independent-minded retirees had received another letter from SpaceX, via FedEx. “Expansion of spaceflight activities,” it read, “will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption.” Given the company’s ambitions—massive and, as the residents had come to learn, always shifting—SpaceX wanted to buy their homes. As an incentive, it had offered three times the properties’ assessed values. As an incentive of a different kind, the letter had declared that the offer, which was final, would expire in two weeks. That deadline passed three days before the rocket unveiling. Of the residents who planned to attend, not one had accepted SpaceX’s offer. The afternoon of the event, Mary, sixty-one, a wiry, practical woman who was arguably the rocket’s biggest fan in Boca Chica, painted her fingernails a sparkling silver and put on star-shaped earrings. Cheryl Stevens, fifty-nine, a former legal secretary with expressive hands and frizzled, graying hair, almost turned down the invitation—she’d been battling SpaceX for years—until she heard her neighbors were going. She borrowed a friend’s elegant teal dress—then, after spotting a neighbor in shorts, changed into something more casual. About a dozen people gathered at the cozy, cluttered home of Terry and Bonnie Heaton, seventy and seventy-one, the community’s longest-tenured residents. Cars were already streaming in from the west, through the Border Patrol checkpoint, past the wildlife preserve and its nesting shorebirds. At dusk, two SpaceX employees wearing effortful smiles herded the Boca

Chicans into a van and drove them to the launch site. It was surreal to see Boca Chica so busy. A few years earlier, it had been a sleepy neighborhood of a few dozen houses on just two streets, the perfect counterpoint to the spring-break madness of South Padre Island, a few miles up the coast. Sometimes during the slow summer season, the Heatons were the only people around. In the winter, the main source of excitement was the weekly game night over at the Averys’ house. Then SpaceX chief Elon Musk took an interest in the area and began building his new rocket prototype here. Now the mile-and-a-half drive to the launch site was lined with SpaceX enthusiasts and Musk hangers-on. The 164-foot-tall spaceship, named Starship Mk1, loomed above the site, its stainless-steel hull gleaming in the floodlights. Mary asked if she could hug it. Her friend Gene Gore, a sunbaked surfboard builder from South Padre Island who was invited as a local SpaceX supporter, peeked inside the bulkhead and felt as though he’d entered the future. Gene and the other SpaceX fans mingled with company executives and local politicians as the Boca Chicans were ushered over to a private, cordoned-off area. Their minders didn’t let the residents out of their sight. Musk took the stage to detail his big plans: how Starship Mk1 was the first full-scale prototype of what would eventually be the biggest, cheapest spacecraft ever built, the rocket that would make humans a multiplanetary species. “This thing is going to take off, fly to sixty-five thousand feet, about twenty kilometers, and come back and land, in about one or two months,” he assured the crowd. He talked about moon bases, asteroid mining, and how fuel could be produced on Mars. It was an expansive, optimistic vision of the future, and, according to Musk, much of it was centered here, in Boca Chica. As Musk took questions from the audience, the Boca Chicans were hustled back into the van. They assumed they were heading home, but instead their minders said that a “special guest” wanted to meet with them. Musk, they presumed. They were escorted to a nearby building, where they grazed on platters of fudge and fancy chips and mingled uneasily. Another resident, Maria Pointer, received a text from a reporter she’d grown friendly with over the past several months: “Elon is talking about you guys!”

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;We are working with the residents of Boca Chica Village because we think over time itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going to be quite disruptive,â&#x20AC;? Musk was telling the crowd. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The actual danger is low to Boca Chica Village, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not tiny. So therefore, we want super-tiny risk. So probably over time itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s better to buy out the villagers.â&#x20AC;? An hour passed, then another. One by one, the Boca Chicans began giving up: Bonnie went home to take her medication; Ellie Garcia just got fed up and left. It was after 11:00 P.M. when Musk finally walked into the room. Here was the man theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d all been talking about for years, sometimes with excitement (Elon retweeted my picture of the rocket!), sometimes with bitterness (Elon thinks he can just have my house?). He wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t charismatic, but his power felt palpable in the room. Andy Goetsch, whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d moved to Boca Chica to be close to SpaceX, was giddy. But most of the other residents wanted to vent. Musk crossed his arms, assumed a stiff, wide stance, and listened as they unloaded their grievances and disputed their appraisals. Their houses werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just brick-and-mortar structuresâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;you had to take into account the wildlife, the proximity to the beach, how special Boca Chica was. He did a lot of nodding. Before the meeting ended, Cheryl took a selfie with Musk, then handed him a sort of peace offering: a Mars-themed issue of National Geographic from 1977, which sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d found in a libraryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s giveaway pile that morning. He seemed taken aback. He reacted that way, she reasoned, because he wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t used to being given things; usually Musk was the one doing the giving. The next day, Cheryl received a text from someone sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just metâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a SpaceX superfan whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d flown in from California to attend the event, only to find that he couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t secure a ticket. So in the morning, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d hiked over some sand dunes, passed the NO TRESPASSING signs heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d claim not to have seen, sidled up to the rocket, took a selfie, and posted it on Facebook. The company had seen his photo and considered it proof of trespass. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m in handcuffs, please call my mom,â&#x20AC;? the superfan wrote to Cheryl. SpaceX was pressing charges. WHEN I FIRST VISITED BOCA CHICA, IN OCTOBER, I WAS STARTLED TO SEE

the rocket sitting out in the open, by the side of a public highway. When Jeff Bezos decided he wanted to venture into space and founded Blue Origin to do so, he quietly bought up three hundred thousand acres of remote west Texas ranchland so he could experiment in seclusion. Richard Branson opted to base his private space company, Virgin Galactic, at Spaceport America, a facility owned and operated by the state of New Mexico. But Musk has always done things differently. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Head down, plow through the line. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very SpaceX,â&#x20AC;? the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s president, Gwynne Shotwell, has said. And in this case, the line ran right through Boca Chica. (Neither Musk nor SpaceX would comment for this story.) The area isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the most obvious place to build a home base for space ex-

ploration. Cell service is spotty. The nearest grocery store is a half-hour drive away. Freshwater is nonexistent; it must be trucked in each month. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything out here rusts, rots, and mildews,â&#x20AC;? a former resident told Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine in 1992. â&#x20AC;&#x153;And the dust off the flats can blow something awful!â&#x20AC;? That hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stopped developers from targeting the area over the years. Musk is only the latest outsider to arrive here with big ambitions. But nothing before has stuck, mostly due to the hurricanes. In 1867, a hospital and barracks built down the road from the site of the Battle of Palmito Ranch, arguably the Civil Warâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last land skirmishâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which the Confederates wonâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;were washed out to sea. Between the world wars, tourists frolicked at a seaside resortâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the author Sherwood Anderson caught several â&#x20AC;&#x153;gorgeous redfishâ&#x20AC;? there, according to his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s diaryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;until, in 1933, another hurricane, with a thirteen-foot storm surge and 124-mile-an-hour winds, wiped it away, too. A Moon Motor Car flipped over on the beach and in time became nearly buried in sand, where it remained for three decades, until Hurricane Beulah (twenty-foot surge, 136-mile-an-hour winds) uncovered it. In the sixties, a schemer named John Caputa began pitching Polish communities in the greater Chicago area on a beautiful retirement village in Boca Chica. He called it Kennedy Shores, in homage to the president, and he promised investors an improbable 12 percent return. Few bought into the dream, and Caputa completed only a fraction of the planned development. A few years later, he died, penniless, of a heart attack. In time, the community changed its name first to Kopernik Shores, in homage to Copernicus, then to Boca Chica Village. But most of the houses that now stand are Caputaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. The Heatons bought one of them in 2001. Fed up with Minnesota winters, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d decided to retire somewhere warm and quiet and affordable. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d planned to go to South Padre Island, but a barge accident destroyed a portion of the bridge, rendering it inaccessible. Someone suggested they check out Boca Chica, a dozen miles down the coast, and they never left. Many residents arrived here like the Heatons: accidentally, while trying to get someplace else. They felt as though theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d stumbled on a secret shared only with their neighbors, and with the day-trippers from nearby Brownsville. The community marks the eastern edge of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, a two-hundred-mile stretch of federally protected land along the southern border, intended to allow safe passage for animals such as the ocelot, whose U. S. population has dwindled to fewer than one hundred. For a certain kind of personâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one who prizes independence over convenience and who doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind living among more pelicans than humansâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; there was no better place on earth. Sitting in their living room, Bonnie told me how the seclusion suited her and

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Left: To observe SpaceX’s progress, Boca Chicans need only step outside. Right: After Mk1’s bulkhead shot into the sky during a pressure test in November, SpaceX began dismantling it, while speeding up production of its next prototype. Opposite: Rob and Sarah Avery recently became Texas residents so they could relocate here permanently. When the offer letter from SpaceX arrived, “we were floored,” Rob said.

her husband, and the fishing was world-class. In the winters, Bonnie cut her neighbors’ hair and Terry helped out with their home repairs. Most of their neighbors were part-timers, returning to their homes in Alaska or Michigan or Wisconsin during the hot months. I asked Bonnie if it got lonely during those quiet summers, and the question seemed to make her feel sorry for me. “It was wonderful,” she said. “It was wonderful.” But that was before SpaceX and its intrusions. “They don’t want us here because it’s costing them money to have us here. But we were here first,” she told me. “This is where we thought we were going to live until we died.” Cheryl, who lives a few doors down from the Heatons, decorated her house with seashells and left out dishes of water for migratory birds. She paid her mortgage by renting out her house on Airbnb. In the summer, sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach; once, she helped a nest of hatchlings find their way to the sea. Another time, in the eerie calm before a hurricane, she saw a jaguarundi—a rare wild cat that has since gone extinct in Texas. She befriended Wiley, the half-tame coyote who skulked through the village at dusk. Cheryl grew up in south Texas, the fourth generation of her family to play on Boca Chica Beach. As an adult, she lived in Austin until it got too crowded and expensive; then she moved to Portland and repeated the process. When her grandmother got sick, she returned to Texas and, in 2005, bought one of the Caputa houses; if anywhere was safe from the exhausting logic of gentrification, she figured Boca Chica was it. So when Musk started sniffing around, she told me, “those of us who lived here hoped [the project] would implode, or he’d run out of money.” Cheryl’s shell collection is rivaled by that of Rob Avery, sixty-six, a retired pipe fitter with graying copper hair, and his wife, Sarah, sixty-three, who used to work in insurance. On their daily walks along Boca Chica Beach, the couple has found oyster beds, rare shells, bison teeth, and even a remnant of a centuries-old shipwreck. They spend six months each year in Boca Chica and recently became Texas residents so they could relocate permanently. When the offer letter from SpaceX arrived at their other home, in Connecticut, “we were floored,” Rob told me. “It made you feel that if you didn’t accept this offer, eminent domain would be the next step,” Sarah said. Rob added, “We felt under duress. We were caught off guard.” He paused. “We’d had two deaths in the family,” he said. “It couldn’t have been a worse time.” Feeling that they had no choice, the Averys signed the paperwork and rushed down to Texas six weeks earlier than usual, prepared to pack up their house and say goodbye to Boca Chica. When they arrived, they saw the partially assembled Starship Mk1 rocket for the first time. Some of their neighbors refused to look at it. Others couldn’t look away.

ONE MORNING, BEFORE DAWN, I HEADED TOWARD THE LAUNCH SITE IN

search of the burgundy van that always seemed to be in its vicinity, as close as you could get to the rocket without SpaceX security shooing you away. The van belonged to Mary. She and her husband, Gale, seventy-eight, retired to Boca Chica twelve years ago. They loved the community, with its neighborly solicitude—one time, Mary helped Cheryl get TV reception by jerry-rigging an antenna out of scrap lumber and coat hangers. But unlike her NIMBY-minded neighbors, Mary was intrigued by the community’s transformation into a space corridor. Her interest spiked in November 2018, when SpaceX began assembling Starhopper, the squat prototype built to test the company’s methane-fueled Raptor engine, which, if all goes to plan, will one day propel the Starship fleet into space. “That’s when I fell in love with a rocket,” she sang, to the tune of T-Pain’s “I’m in Love with a Stripper.” Mary spent most days by the side of the road, observing the rocket and its surroundings as if it were her full-time job—never mind the heavy heat of the Texas summer or the dense swarms of mosquitoes that arrive after the rains. She doesn’t have an engineering background, but she has a keen observer’s eye, and she started posting pictures and videos of the project’s developments on Twitter, as @bocachicagal. She averaged twenty tweets a day, and she had a fondness for the star-eyed emoji. Space obsessives took notice. She’s now a go-to source for on-the-ground updates out of Boca Chica. As of press time, she’s amassed nearly seventeen thousand followers. Mary was joined that morning by two other rocket enthusiasts, Gene, the surfboard builder, and Andy, the Musk fan who moved here because SpaceX did, too. Andy is a retired IT technician; when he learned that the houses in Boca Chica were cheap, he bought one, rigged it to run on solar panels hooked up to a Tesla battery, and waited for the launches to begin. That was four years ago. We clambered up the beachfront dunes to get a better view of the rocket. The vibe was celebratory, even though today’s activities were relatively low-stakes: SpaceX was transporting Mk1’s ninety-foot cylindrical propellant tank over from the assembly site. The launch area, mostly unpaved and at least one-quarter puddle, had an ad hoc feel, like a haphazard construction site. A stone’s throw away sat Starhopper on its three fat legs. A white sign was posted on the chain-link fence: NOTICE: SEA TURTLE NESTING SEASON IN PROGRESS. There was something dizzyingly improbable about this futuristic hardware plopped down amid the seagrass, beside the indifferent storks wading carefully through the mudflats. “It’s not made out of some super-high-tech carbon composite,” Gene was enthusing about Mk1’s hull of stainless steel—a material vastly cheaper than carbon, with a higher melting point. “It’s not some super-secretive thing. It’s like—you can buy this crap at the hardware store.”

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“It’s just—it makes people stutter, like I’m doing now,” Andy said. “These guys come out in the middle of the desert with some plumbers and welders, and they just start building something. Started welding it together out here, in the open.” Mk1 was omnipresent, impossible to avoid unless you never looked southward. Still, Mary, Gene, and Andy—and the rocket’s other local fans—couldn’t get enough of it. Seven years after SpaceX began buying up their backyard, there was finally something to see. Since Musk founded SpaceX, in 2002, the company has relied on government-owned sites, Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, to launch its rockets. But doing so chafes against Musk’s desire to get things done his own way, at his own pace. In 2005, SpaceX was temporarily booted from its launchpad at Vandenberg at the request of Lockheed Martin, which had raised concerns that the newcomer’s rocket would explode and damage nearby infrastructure. Musk was outraged. “Somebody else builds a house next to you and tells you to get out of your house,” he said at the time. “Like, what the hell? . . . We’re going to fight that issue, because it is just fundamentally unfair.” Building its very own commercial orbital launch site—the world’s first—would free SpaceX from such hassles. In 2011, the company began scouting. The location would need to be close to the equator—better for the launch trajectory—with a low population and a welcoming local government. SpaceX quickly narrowed down its options to three: Florida, Puerto Rico, and Boca Chica. Musk, it turned out, had a knack for Texas politics. That year, he invited Cameron County officials to SpaceX headquarters, in Hawthorne, California. The following year, the company upped its force of Texas lobbyists from one to five, and Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, wrote in a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration, “Please know that I strongly support the efforts of SpaceX and the Brownsville community to bring this business to Texas. I ask you to favorably approve their application.” SpaceX formed a shell company, Dogleg Park LLC, named for the path its rockets would zag to avoid passing over populated areas, and later another called the Flats at Mars Crossing LLC, and began scooping up properties at the local sheriff’s sale. The land

was cheap, in part because it was difficult. Roads washed out all the time; in the spring, sand swirled in the fifty-mile-per-hour gusts. Even so, in 2013, at a hearing before the appropriations committee of the Texas state legislature, Musk laid out his vision for “the commercial version of Cape Canaveral.” He was there to support two bills intended to lure SpaceX to the state. One would reduce a private space company’s liability in the case of a nuisance complaint; the other, written by the congressman from Brownsville, would empower county officials to deny access to public beaches when “spaceflight activities” were on the calendar. In his speech, Musk was by turns encouraging and coy. “Texas is our leading candidate right now,” he told the room. But also, “any support Texas can offer will be helpful.” Perry signed both bills into law. SpaceX spoke loftily of up to twelve launches each year. Each month, one of the company’s rockets—a Falcon 9, its workhorse, or a Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in operation—would shoot into the sky, destined for the International Space Station, or perhaps beyond. According to Brownsville’s then mayor, Tony Martinez, Musk told him, “One day, you are going to read that a man left Brownsville and went to Mars.” Local officials were flattered by the attention, but they also saw an opportunity. Brownsville is the country’s poorest metropolitan area; in recent years, if it makes national news at all, the stories pertain to the crisis at the southern border. “Anything positive, people are hungry for it,” Juan Montoya, a local political blogger and lifelong Brownsville resident, told me. SpaceX was promising nothing short of an economic transformation, estimating it would create five hundred local jobs at an average salary of $55,000. The Brownsville Economic Development Council claimed the economic impact would be a “game changer for the region” in a PowerPoint presentation used to sell the community on the idea. Sure, the launches might occasionally shut down Boca Chica Beach, one of the state’s few remaining stretches of undeveloped coastline—a place Montoya described to me as “the poor people’s beach” for the role it serves for the residents of Brownsville—but the trade-offs would make the sacrifices worthwhile. The BEDC

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conservatively estimated that fifteen thousand people would come watch each launch. “Nobody really knows very much about Brownsville,” Martinez told me. “But if you talk about SpaceX and Brownsville, now you’ve got a marketing tool. You want to go watch the launch? Well, you gotta go to Brownsville.” Riding high on his promise of economic expansion, Musk didn’t encounter much resistance. The city, county, state, and University of Texas system put together an incentive package worth nearly $40 million. “Elon says—‘Man, you guys need a new airport.’ Even though he doesn’t fly commercial,” Martinez recalled. “And we’re building a new airport.” Finally, the deal was done. In 2014, Musk and then-governor Rick Perry posed together, their shovels stuck in a mound of sandy soil, at the groundbreaking. The company renamed streets—Joanna Street was now Rocket Road. THINGS GOT OFF TRACK ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. CREWS DRILLED IN SEARCH

of bedrock on which to build a launchpad but didn’t find any. Instead, they learned that when you dig a hole on the mudflats, murky water soon seeps in. If SpaceX needed solid ground in Boca Chica, it would have to create it. So the company trucked in 310,000 cubic yards of earth, then waited three years for the soil to settle. Musk had agreed to protect fifty acres of wetlands via land transfer to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the approval didn’t move forward at the pace SpaceX expected, the company convinced the feds to allow the land to go to the state of Texas instead. Musk had claimed the project would be an operational spaceport by 2016, but that year came and went, with not much to show other than an expensive pile of dirt. For years, the main sign to Boca Chicans of SpaceX’s presence was the company’s steady accumulation of houses and vacant lots—as of press time, it owns more than 150 properties in the area—as well as the procession of reporters who began knocking on their doors, seeking their take on living next to a spaceport, albeit one that didn’t yet exist. In the press, residents opposed to their new neighbor voiced their distaste. Terry and Bonnie Heaton appeared most often, perhaps because they were the only year-round residents. With a clear-spoken folksiness, the couple explained to one outlet after another— The Brownsville Herald, the Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, NPR—how SpaceX was intruding on the golden years of retirement they’d looked forward to for so long. Boca Chica homeowners were invited to meet with SpaceX in 2015. Musk wasn’t there, but his representatives made several reassurances: They’d provide ample advance warning for all launches; they wouldn’t close the beach on summer weekends. They wanted, the company told the Boca Chicans, to be a good neighbor. Meanwhile, SpaceX was struggling with more than just dirt. A Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated on a flight to the ISS in 2015, and another exploded the following year. Musk was also putting out fires of his own making: In 2018, NASA rebuked him for getting stoned with Joe Rogan. This came after his tweets drew the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which fined him $20 million and forced him off the board of his own electric-car company, Tesla. Then, in the midst of the drama, Musk made headlines when he called a heroic cave diver in Thailand a “pedo guy.” But SpaceX worked hard toward improvement, and it paid off. The company was launching more mostly reusable rockets, sending more successful missions to the ISS. Its Falcon spacecraft were proving reliable enough to earn the company billions of dollars in government contracts. And then Musk decided he needed a new space vehicle—one theoretically capable of interplanetary travel—to set in motion the next ambitious phase. At first, SpaceX referred to this next-generation spacecraft as the BFR—the Big Fucking Rocket; eventually, it was rechristened Starship. Last May, the company quietly filed paperwork with the FAA indicating that its plans for Boca Chica had changed. Instead of being a commercial launch site to send Falcon rockets into orbit, it was now home to SpaceX’s “experimental test program,” through which the company would design and build Starship. And because Starship was now central to SpaceX’s vision of its fu-

ture, Boca Chica was, too. The government required the company to up its liability insurance from $3 million to $100 million, largely because of the residents’ proximity, but otherwise approved the pivot. None of this was immediately apparent to the people of Boca Chica, however. All they knew was that since the fall of 2018, the area had been buzzing with activity. White pickups and heavy machinery clogged the boulevard; SpaceX workers scurried around “like a bunch of ants,” as Bonnie put it. The company had opted to build its rockets outside—constructing a building would take too long, Musk said, and floodlights illuminated the rocket-assembly area throughout the night. The generators never stopped humming, and employees banged on the prototypes around the clock. Maria and her husband, Ray, whose home is closest to the rocket-assembly site, could see the welders’ acetylene torches spark from their bedroom window long after midnight. The couple put a webcam on their roof, which transmitted a round-the-clock YouTube stream of SpaceX activity. Some of Cheryl’s Airbnb renters requested refunds; they had expected Boca Chica to be a quiet retreat, and instead it was a 24/7 construction site. (In October, when I rented Cheryl’s place, I could hear the rumblings of Starship’s construction from her backyard.) This past summer, as Mary documented the construction of Starhopper, activity continued to ramp up. In July, the prototype successfully completed a “hop”—that is, it lifted sixty feet in the air, moved laterally, and landed back down—then ignited a hundred-acre brush fire. The fire was frightening, but what frustrated Cheryl the most was how the county seemed to bend over backward to accommodate the company. A sheriff ’s deputy was stationed

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across from the launch site, keeping guard. At SpaceX’s request, Boca Chica Beach was closed at least half a dozen times between June, when the temperature in Brownsville was already hitting triple digits, and August, which marked that month’s second-hottest average on record in Texas. Every time the company was up to something big—which seemed to be every couple weeks—the only road to Boca Chica was blocked off, essentially trapping the residents in their homes. The beach road was shut down again the October day I stood on the dunes with Mary, Gene, and Andy, so Mk1 could be moved. We watched the Starship prototype slowly roll down the road and inside the gate, where it came to a stop. Up close, I could see dents in its silvery hull. They made the rocket seem friendlier somehow, almost relatable. For a long while, nothing happened. A small crowd had gathered and was growing restive; due to the roadblock, no one could leave until SpaceX was finished, and it was already an hour behind schedule. A red SUV with a HOOKED ON JESUS bumper sticker pulled up to the sheriff’s road barrier. It was Terry, back from his morning fishing expedition. He, too, was told he could not pass. “This is a load of crap,” he said, brandishing a printout from the county that said the road should’ve been reopened an hour and a half ago. He said he was diabetic and needed to go home to get his insulin. “My hand’s already shaking,” he said. His house was right there, just a mile away. He started to slowly roll forward. “You can’t,” the deputy said. “You’ll be arrested.” Terry’s face reddened, but he stopped and waited for the rocket business to finish.

BY MID-FALL, BOCA CHICA VILLAGE BEGAN TO FRACTURE. THE HOMEOWN-

ers who had accepted the buyout offered in September felt judged by the holdouts; the holdouts felt betrayed by the sellers. Everyone wanted to know how much money their neighbors ended up with. Mary was no longer speaking to Maria, whose coverage of SpaceX’s snafus—like when Starhopper’s nose cone blew off in a big gust of wind, and when it burst into flames after a static fire test—she found distasteful. She also claimed that Maria tried to use the @bocachicagal handle as her own. (Maria disputed the accusation.) Mary changed her Twitter bio to read, “My name is NOT Maria.” In October, SpaceX made some concessions to the holdouts, extending the offer deadline by a few weeks and arranging for more-thorough appraisals. The initial valuations had been based on drive-by assessments and hadn’t taken into account many of the improvements the homeowners had made. But the revised appraisals weren’t much better, and the company made it clear they wouldn’t extend the deadline again. Once it expired, the three-times offer would be off the table. The Heatons hosted a meeting with a prominent eminent-domain lawyer in their living room. The good news, the lawyer told the assembled residents, was that they were sympathetic; any jury was likely to feel for them, and perhaps rule in their favor. The bad news was that getting to that point meant engaging in an ugly, expensive, protracted legal battle that they may well lose. Take the money, he advised, unless you’re really in this for the long fight. It was hard for residents to believe they’d be formidable opponents. Perhaps the biggest threat to ever face SpaceX’s concern in south Texas was Donald Trump’s “big beautiful” border wall, with a proposed pathway that would have bisected the launch site. But members of Congress had successfully lobbied to adjust the wall’s path to protect five places: a state park, a butterfly sanctuary, a wildlife refuge, a historic church, and SpaceX’s Boca Chica operation. (A lawyer from the Institute for Justice, a legal-aid nonprofit that specializes in eminent-domain cases, is in touch with several Boca Chica homeowners.) In mid-November, as Mary and her camera watched from down the road, Mk1’s bulkhead suddenly shot up into the sky; the rest of the rocket disappeared behind a billowing plume of nitrogen. The boom was so loud that Gene heard it on South Padre Island, eight miles away. The rocket the Boca Chicans had watched from infancy had just blown up during a pressurization test; it wouldn’t be traveling to space after all. SpaceX spun the incident as not “a serious setback,” since crews were already working on an updated version, the Mk3. After the accident, activity at the construction site got even more frantic, as if the company was trying to make up for lost time. The Pointers covered their windows with hurricane shutters to block out the noise and light from the round-the-clock construction, but Ray still wasn’t sleeping well. Eventually they decided to make a deal with SpaceX, although Maria didn’t feel happy about it. “This tiny little spit of land is so important,” she said. “And that I got to live, breathe, and experience it? In the last house on Texas [Highway] 4 before you get to the ocean, in a beach villa with gorgeous views, and a frickin’ rocket shipyard on both sides? You can’t pay a person enough for that.” Even Cheryl, with her keen sense of justice, was considering selling to SpaceX. Being in a constant state of outrage exhausted her, and she worried about her Airbnb income drying up. Then, one morning in November, the Heatons were gone. Word around town was that they had sold to SpaceX. (After our initial conversation, the Heatons didn’t reply to further interview requests.) The news stunned Cheryl. Not only had the Heatons been vehement opponents of SpaceX, “they’re really the foundation of everything here,” Cheryl said. “Not just mowing everybody’s lawn, but when things break. . . . They had everyone’s keys. And they’re like, ‘We’re out of here.’ You can’t blame them, but I wish they would’ve communicated with us.” Now who would you call if your pipe sprung a leak? By then, the Averys had decided to rescind their acceptance of the buyout. The offer had been framed to seem generous, but the appraisal had valued their sunny three-bedroom, two-bathroom home, (continued on page 115)

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SILVIA VENTURINI FENDI is a designer. (At Fendi. Heard of it?) And LUCA GUADAGNINO is a ﬁlm director. (Call Me by Your Name. Seen it?) And together they’ve made this spring’s most inspired clothing collab.

directors’ cut

WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD, SILVIA VENTURINI FENDI (CREATIVE DIRECTOR AT, UM, FENDI)

watched a lot of movies, but she didn’t go to the cinema. The cinema came to her. “Every anniversary, every Christmas, every family gathering, we’d screen a movie at home, and I remember my cousins and I waiting impatiently for the man to arrive with the projector. They’d put up a white sheet against the wall and we’d watch Visconti’s The Leopard or Gone with the Wind or The Sound of Music. The boys, of course, wanted to see more action films, but I loved it. There were the dresses and the suits, and over and over again I’d sit and stare.” It was during these nights that Silvia grasped the power of filmmaking, its dark magic and liquid mystery, and, of course, its potential as a platform for fashion. Her grandparents Edoardo

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BY JOHN VON SOTHEN PHOTOGRAPH BY LORENZO BRINGHELI

Jacket ($1,690), shirt ($1,290), trousers ($990), loafers ($890), hat ($650), and socks ($190) by Fendi Men’s.

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FAST-FORWARD FORTY-PLUS YEARS AND

Silvia now is a titanic force in fashion, driving her namesake men’s-wear brand since 2000. For the men’s Spring/Summer 2020 collection, she’s joined up with her own auteur, Italian director Luca Guadagnino, whose 2017 romantic coming-of-age drama, Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, broke gay and straight hearts alike and was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture. Luca and Silvia’s relationship is a close one. In 2005, the company hired him to shoot a short promotional film titled First Sun, and Silvia liked it so much, she bagged the idea of a fashion-show catwalk and ran Luca’s film instead. That work led to other projects, including two of Luca’s feature-lengths, which Silvia helped produce: 2010’s I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as an expat housewife trapped in the stifling, moneyed upper middle class of contemporary Milan, and Suspiria, a 2018 remake of the 1977 Dario Argento–helmed horror classic, starring Dakota Johnson. And just like Fendis before her, Silvia provided costumes and even her mother’s jewelry, which Luca insisted be from a certain era. “You see?” she says. “He’s got this maniac Visconti thing in him. Everything needs to be exact.” Amazingly, many of Luca’s initial sketches for this collaboration were done on the set of Suspiria while passing the time between lighting changes. “When I shoot, I’m not happy,” he says. “But when I am designing or talking about designing, it’s fantastic.” For the hyperactive, multitalented filmmaker, executing multiple projects while shooting a movie isn’t a distraction. It’s a release. In addition to this Fendi venture, he was prepping a series for HBO while designing houses on Lake Como and Aesop boutiques in Rome and London. Luca’s idea for the collection stemmed from a farmhouse he recently purchased in the north of Italy. “And when he showed me these photos of this beautiful place, we decided to explore the notion of gardening, nature, and farming,” says Silvia. “But for Luca, the setup was important. We had to tell the story first.” “I wanted to capture a man wandering in the nature that he has forged,” Luca explains. “This isn’t a person out there in the wilderness living off scraps. It’s about a person and about the garden he’s cultivated. What is the art of gardening? What does it mean to walk and bend nature to your will?

M E N E L I K P U R Y E A R ( T H I S PA G E A N D O P P O S I T E ) . G R O O M I N G : L U I S PAY N E . F O R S TO R E I N F O R M AT I O N S E E PA G E 1 1 5 .

and Adele did, too. They’d founded Fendi back in 1925 and, thanks to the shrewd hire of an up-and-coming designer named Karl Lagerfeld in 1965, transformed it from a nuts-and-bolts fur-and-leather-goods company into a major Roman maison. Soon the Fendis were providing costumes for some of cinema’s most iconic films while forging friendships with the likes of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. Directors like these, Silvia learned, were just designers in another medium. They too had taste and vision and an attention to detail that only the finest tailor could appreciate. “My mother told me when they helped with Visconti’s Conversation Piece”—a 1974 film starring Burt Lancaster—“there was a bedroom scene, and Visconti insisted there be linens stocked inside the closet even if the doors of the closet were closed the entire shot. Why? Because the actor had to know this, Visconti told her. If not, it would affect him differently.”

Directors, Silvia learned, were

THE FENDI-GUADAGNINO DUO MAKE FOR

an odd couple. Luca is an easy six feet tall, and when you first see him next to the petite Silvia and her shock of white hair, you almost vibe a czarina and her Rasputinesque counsel. But when you sit with them drinking espressos as I did at Fendi headquarters, high up in the hills overlooking Rome, they remind you more of those older couples at the end of When Harry Met Sally . . ., finishing each other’s sentences because they know each other so well. “What I like about Luca,” Silvia says with a smile, “is the great balance he has between his aesthetics and vision. Plus, he delivers things. I’m very fast, but I get bored very easily. Luca, when he has an idea, he can wait years, slowly crafting a story around his vision.” “Well, it’s like a screenplay, actually,” Luca says. “If I’m designing something for somebody, whether it be a house or a store or a collection like this, I have to know what the client really wants, who they are, and what is their way of living. And then you have to translate that into spaces or clothes. Maybe it’s intuitive, but I don’t know how else to do it.” In a way, the screenplay for this collab hearkens back to Call Me by Your Name, a patient film set during a beastly Italian summer, with bike rides through lush orchards and calls to the dinner table echoing inside airy villas, delivering a sensuality and audaciousness that’s become rarer and rarer

just designers in another medium. They too had an attention to det ail

This was the tension I wanted to capture.” “And, I might add,” Silvia says, “he is not just a farmer but a gentleman farmer.” When you look at the line, you see more than enough beiges and greens and browns to go around. Each is combined with material you’d expect to find in a farmhouse or a greenhouse—denim, cotton, leather—but also silk, suede, and cashmere, with the noble elements put to use in clothing you might wear to dig in the dirt, or string a line of beans, or net a butterfly. Yet not all is rustic, bucolic, and compost heap. There are clothes you need when you’re in town: light suits, croco-printed loafers, silk shirts with African-inspired patterns (designed by Luca), not to mention the wood-handled umbrella, because any gentleman farmer of standing isn’t paying social visits dressed in gardening boots.

Shirt, trousers, sneakers ($790), belt ($420), and necklace ($690) by Fendi Men’s. STY L I N G B Y A L F O N S O F E R N Á N D E Z N AVA S

t hat only the finest tailor could appreciate. in film nowadays, considering that most of what we see today is either an eight-episode Netflix series or a Marvel franchise. “I don’t agree,” counters Luca, “and I know my take probably goes against all the analysis, but I do believe that cinema is always surprising. Take Joker, for example. It’s a movie that exists in the space of a character piece, the storytelling of the filmmaker, and by the performance of his actor. There is no car chase. There are no explosions. There are no digital effects. Nothing. And yet it made one billion dollars. I remember when I was a kid and already people were saying, ‘Cinema is dead. Cinema is dead.’ And yet here we are here, still talking about it and making it and enjoying it. It’s like fashion, actually. Things come full circle.” So, while we tend to assume that big data mapping each of our tastes has won, Italian designers and filmmakers are still holding it down, huddling over bottles of Chianti late at night in Roman trattorias, talking jewelry and cigarettes and marble staircases and visions of how to mold them into something that stirs the soul.

Bold, Basically

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This page: Jacket ($279) and trousers ($89) by Ben Sherman; sweater ($295) by L.B.M. 1911. Opposite: Jacket ($1,270) and trousers ($265) by Officine Générale; sweatshirt ($300) by Boglioli; sneakers ($80) by Adidas Originals.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLIE HOLLOWAY STYLING BY NICK SULLIVAN

One secret to making a statement this spring? Don’t overthink it. Luxurious staples with a dash of unexpected color are the strong yet simple style move to pull out until the end of summer.

10 6 M A RC H 2020

This page: Jacket ($2,410) and trousers ($840) by Prada. Opposite: Jacket ($550) by Holiday Boileau; T-shirt ($150) by Massimo Alba; trousers ($790) by Michael Kors Collection.

This page: Coat ($615), shirt ($475), T-shirt ($105), and trousers ($305) by Aspesi; sneakers ($75) by Sperry; Aquaracer watch ($1,600) by TAG Heuer; hat ($20) by Gap. Opposite: Jacket ($1,250), sweater ($450), and trousers ($350) by Canali; boots by Sebago; sunglasses ($360) by Persol; Luminor 8 Days Power Reserve watch ($7,400) by Panerai; vintage bag, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

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Sweater ($650) and trousers ($790) by Michael Kors Collection.

F O R S TO R E I N F O R M AT I O N S E E PA G E 1 1 5 . G R O O M I N G : J A N I C E K I N J O U S I N G K E V I N M U R P H Y AT T H E W A L L G R O U P.

Jacket ($13,100) and trousers ($1,325) by Hermès; T-shirt ($140) by Officine Générale; sneakers ($80) by Vans.

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SNOWFLAKE (continued from page 66)

be stylish or anything like that, but right now is a good time to speak up. And if I had something to speak up about, I would totally do it. But no, I never saw anything; he never did anything. “Here’s a good Michael Jackson story that doesn’t involve Michael Jackson at all: I ran into James Franco on a plane. I’d bumped into him two or three times over the years. I give him a little nod as we’re putting our bags overhead. Hey, how you doing? Good, how ya doing? And it was right after the Leaving Neverland documentary came out, and he goes, ‘So, that documentary!’ And that was all he said. I was like, ‘Uh-huh.’ Silence. So then he goes, ‘So what do you think?’ And I turned to him and I go, ‘Do you wanna talk about your dead friend?’ And he sheepishly went, ‘No, I don’t.’ So I said, ‘Cool, man, it was nice to see you.’ ” Mack is godfather to Michael’s daughter, Paris, and they remain close. The next thing he tells me is that he has passed along to her his quirky habit of stealing spoons—from restaurants, from cafés, from airplanes. “It’s harmless,” he says. “It’s a harmless thing. It’s not like you’re ruining something, like stealing a chess piece, where the board would be incomplete.” He and Paris give each other spoons. They have matching spoon tattoos on their inner forearms— Mack’s only tattoo, one of many for Paris. When she was starting to put herself out into the world in a public way, he gave her some godfatherly advice, vis-à-vis the spoons: “Don’t forget to be silly, don’t forget to take something away from this whole experience, and don’t forget to stick something up your sleeve.” MACAULAY CULKIN HAS DECIDED TO STAY JUST

famous enough that he has options. He can make a movie once in a while if he wants to, and he can have a podcast. “It’s nice to see Mack out there doing stuff, and not getting caught by paparazzi looking hungover one particular day,” says his friend Har Mar Superstar, a performer who toured alongside the Pizza Underground. “We all have rough moments, but he was under a microscope. People love to see a child star fail for some reason. But now people know he’s alive and has opinions and has a good heart and isn’t some dark character that people want to create.” Brenda hopes that Mack will get back into his profession for real. “I truly believe that he is the actor he is now because of all the things he had to go through,” she says. “He has gone through so much tragedy; he’s had so many ups, so many downs; he’s seen the ugly side of this industry; he’s also seen the amazing side of this industry. So he can pinpoint exactly what he doesn’t want and what he doesn’t like about it. But yeah, I hope, I hope, I hope.” Toward the end of Changeland, there’s an extended

scene of Mack’s character in a boxing match. He has almost no lines, and yet he makes your heart break for this guy, this American lost in Thailand, losing a tourist-trap fight. Green, the director, says, “It was Mack going through that choreography dozens of times. Full speed, taking hits, throwing hits—there was no real way to fake it. He wouldn’t take a photo double. He’s like, Nah, man. You gotta see my face; otherwise, it’s not gonna work.” He auditioned for Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, the Quentin Tarantino movie from last year. The audition did not go well. Actually: “It was a disaster. I wouldn’t have hired me. I’m terrible at auditioning anyway, and this was my first audition in like eight years.” Mack published a book when he was twentyfive, and in it he writes pretty clearly about why he soured on acting in the first place. The book is a trip. On the cover it says it’s “A Novel,” but those words are crossed out and the word “Not” is written. It’s called Junior. He told me it’s basically about him. The first chapter is about a monkey boy in the circus, which is essentially Mack being a child star. I ask him about a line in the book that points out the difference between having fun and being happy. “Believe me, I would know,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of fun without being happy. And I’ve been happy without necessarily having fun. But also: You can have it all. Just don’t confuse the two. Because it’s easy to! A lot of times, when you’re having fun you’re rolling on MDMA or something.” He laughs a little at this. “It doesn’t mean you’re happy. It just means you’re altered.” He laughs a little harder at this. “One of my favorite jokes: I’ve been accused of having a drug problem, but nothing could be further from the truth. Drugs are the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” He cracks up at this. But, really, how bad did it get with drugs? “Um? Listen,” he says, “I played with some fire, I guess is the best way to put it. At the same time, I’ve never been to rehab or anything like that. I’ve never had to clean out that way. There were certain times when I had to catch myself, once or twice. You’re having too good a time, Mack. I mean, I’ve had friends who ask me, ‘How do I get clean?’ And I go, I’m the last person you should ask, because I’m gonna give you the worst advice, which is: Just stop. Just stop! And that’s not the way it works. But I never went so far down that road where I needed outside help. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t had drugs in my life at some point or another. I had some illuminating experiences—but also it’s fuckin’ stupid, too, you know? So besides the occasional muscle relaxer, no, I don’t do drugs recreationally. I still kinda drink like a fish. I drink and I smoke. But I don’t touch the things. I do love them. They’re like old friends. But sometimes you outgrow your friends.” And here he pauses for a moment. That’s all he’s got to say about that. His thoughts return to his

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home, which is filled with all kinds of things he never had much of. Cats. Space. A yard. Food in the fridge. Routine. Comfort. “You know what I’m going to do after this? I’m gonna take care of my back—I’m gonna take a hot bath. I have a video queued up: the history of Castlevania, the Nintendo game. It’s fifty-five minutes long, and that’s the perfect bathtime amount of time. I’m gonna stretch my back out, kiss my animals, and go to sleep with my lady. I’m a man of really simple pleasures.” THE LAST SETUP OF THE SHOOT WAS ON THE ROOF

of the former industrial building. The fire marshal came in and gave us all a speech about being careful up there, and Mack stood listening, dutifully, looking studious almost, arms folded. He thanked Inspector Matthews politely. He stood on the roof. This was work for Mack, don’t forget. And the fucking clothing guy kept primping and poking and puffing him. Hell of a guy, very sweet guy, but Jay-zus! Mack hasn’t moved a muscle, and the guy’s right back in there, flicking his lapels, straightening his cuffs. Sweet guy, but. Driving Mack nuts. After they get the shot, Mack climbs back down the stairs to the main floor. At this point he is wearing another ridiculous costume: an expensive tank top, black suit pants, and white shoes reminiscent of those worn by the Lollipop Guild. (They’re cool, it must be said.) His publicist is walking next to him— they are a team, striding through the former industrial building. The shoot is done. “Okay?” she asks. “Yes!” Mack says. “Okay. I’ve decided I’m gonna do the photo shoot!” So I have to ask him: Why? I mean, it’s great to see him working, even to see him doing the professional-celebrity thing. But it’s so unweird that, after all this time, it’s kind of weird. It’s not like he has a movie coming out anytime soon. And he ain’t exactly hitting the media circuit for Bunny Ears. Mack isn’t really doing anything more than he’s been doing for a while now: keeping the animals alive and keeping his lady fed and, God willing, bringing a child into the world. So why bother? He doesn’t hesitate. “No matter how much I act like a curmudgeonly old man, it’s still fun to get back in the saddle once in a while and play around. The stars aligned, and actually I thought it could be super fun. It’s cool. It’s classy. Nobody had to twist my arm, put it that way. It was a good time, the pictures look great, it made my lady happy. . . . It’s fun. But no, I’m not promoting anything. I’m not even promoting myself. It’s just another little adventure.” Later that night, when he got home from the shoot, he showed Brenda a couple of the photos from the day that he’d saved on his phone. She loved them.

THE PLACE TO BE (continued from page 73)

from the star at a premiere, Harvey would corral the star and pull her to the gossip columnist and say, ‘George is a good guy; we trust him. Take care of her. Be nice, George.’ And so everybody would win. You’d have your exclusive interview with Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt. These people were coming up—they were babies.” Weinstein would oscillate from charming and complimentary to threatening and bullying and back to get his way. But Rush and other former gossip columnists say they never heard stories of Weinstein being sexually abusive—allegations first reported in 2017 by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in The New York Times and by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker. Froelich, however, says she’d heard rumors about Weinstein and Rose McGowan, who later publicly accused Weinstein of raping her. “There were often rumors about Rose because Rose would talk about it sometimes,” Froelich says. “If people aren’t gonna go on the record, you can’t do it. You know, it’s not like I had somebody leaking me the inside papers from Miramax or from the Weinstein Company that show all the documentation of it.” Miramax bought the rights to Froelich’s book at auction while she was still at the Post, though she says that never affected her reporting on Weinstein. She says, “He would tell people, ‘I bought that book!’ And I was like, ‘Whatever, dude, I don’t give a shit.’ ” In 2015, the Post reported on Ambra Battilana Gutierrez’s harassment accusations against Weinstein in front-page stories accompanied by images of the model in lingerie—and they ran online on PageSix.com. Stories by news reporters sometimes run under the Page Six banner on the website, but in those cases it’s Page Six that gets the credit when they’re cited by other publications. One story quoted an anonymous source calling the case extortion. The source accused the model of taking Broadway tickets and asking for a film role after the molestation claim. Battilana Gutierrez did take the tickets—attending the play at the encouragement of the police and wearing a wire, she said on Farrow’s Catch and Kill podcast. It was after that play, outside Weinstein’s hotel room, with several cops stationed around the hotel, that she recorded Weinstein admitting he’d groped her. Weinstein has since been accused by more than eighty women of sexual harassment and assault, up to and including rape. (Weinstein has denied all allegations of “nonconsensual sex.”) In 2017, Battilana Gutierrez spoke to a Post reporter about how painful the 2015 tabloid coverage had been for her. “A friend texted me a photo of the [Post] cover and asked me what was happening,” she said. “I didn’t have the power

to defend myself. . . . It really broke my heart.” In that story, the Post concedes that when it came to the 2015 coverage of Battilana Gutierrez, “Weinstein called the Post with his account” of her asking for a film role—but the sources quoted in that piece were unnamed, and it wasn’t made clear that Weinstein was one of them. Though Smith has one of four bylines on the Broadway-tickets story, she says the coverage wasn’t led by Page Six but rather by the news team at the Post, and that she didn’t edit the stories or control the tone in which they were written. Weinstein continued to turn to Page Six after the horrifying allegations were revealed in 2017. He did a series of interviews with Smith in which he talked about being “profoundly devastated” about his wife leaving him, saying he “bears responsibility” for his behavior, while at the same time criticizing The New York Times for “reckless reporting.” This past December, Coleman wrote a snarky item about Weinstein’s seemingly selective use of a walker, implying it may have been used to garner sympathy before his January trial for predatory sexual assault and rape. And once again, Weinstein went to the Post—this time for a bizarre interview that ran on PageSix.com. Sitting in a private hospital suite, he refused to talk about the allegations against him but “whined” that he should be remembered more for things like hiring female directors than for the “sickening accusations.” Though the short-lived Page Six TV series reported in October 2017 that Weinstein was calling Smith from rehab nearly nightly, Smith says she’s no longer in contact with him. IT’S DIFFICULT TO READ PAGE SIX WITHOUT thinking about how men like Weinstein used it as a tool for so many years—how it contributed to his fame at the expense of the reputations of women like Battilana Gutierrez. The ways in which Page Six skirts the norms of traditional journalism—blind items, trades, frequent anonymous sources—cultivate its mystery and allure. But they also make it difficult to discern clear motives and create a fog behind which nefarious players can operate. The editors of Page Six help decide who is famous and who is infamous. We, the readers, will never know who planted that salacious item about a starlet canoodling; we just have to believe that the person writing it knows— and cares about—the motivation. On the surface, Page Six has started to evolve: Gone are the cruel nicknames like “portly pepperpot,” “aging pop tart,” and “celebutard.” “I try not to be mean anymore,” Smith says. “I wouldn’t call Monica Lewinsky a portly pepperpot anymore. And she’s told me many times how she really didn’t like that.” Page Six is becoming more global as well, to appeal to its digital audience. (The downside: Reading it, particularly online, feels less like

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sneaking into an exclusive party and more like reading any number of gossip sites.) Still, in spite of its history—or, more likely, because of it—Page Six has persevered. “When I think of a Park Avenue building, from the guy answering the door in the package room to the guy in the penthouse—they’re all avid Page Six readers,” says Mohr. Elaine’s, a late-night restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was a favorite of all kinds of fascinating New York characters until it closed in 2011 after forty-eight years in business. Writers including Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion hung out there. So did movie stars like Judy Garland, Jack Nicholson, and, famously, Woody Allen, all of which made it a backdrop to countless Page Six items. When Johnson ran the column, he’d often finish his evenings by stopping into Elaine’s and sitting at the large center table where owner Elaine Kaufman—herself a fascinating New York character—held court, to see if she’d seen anything interesting that night. Brian McDonald, who worked at Elaine’s from 1986 to 1999 as a bartender and manager, was a reliable Page Six tipster. Like the time around thirty years ago when Chinatown producer and Hollywood roustabout Robert Evans strolled into the dim, storied dining room around midnight. “He says the words that put a chill through the heart of every regular customer: ‘I just had dinner at Le Cirque. I’m here for coffee and dessert,’ ” McDonald says, pausing for dramatic effect. “Elaine said, ‘If you had dinner at Le Cirque, you should have stuck around and had dessert there, too,’ and walked away. So he sat at a table—he was there with two stunning women, blond-haired women—and he ordered dinner for everybody, and it sat there, uneaten, just to make Elaine happy.” McDonald smiles. “I called that item in.” The Evans tidbit is, in a way, the perfect Page Six item. Evans was a big name, a mysterious creature whom most people had no access to, never saw. Elaine’s was an institution, the kind of place most people might visit in hopes of catching a glimpse of someone like Robert Evans but never do. The item captured Kaufman’s gruff charm and Evans’s showbiz ego. What actually happened? Not much. The exchange was utterly meaningless. And that delicious meaninglessness is one big reason so many people have loved the column so much for so long. It’s about these titillating and amusing and sometimes shocking things happening around us all the time, late at night or at exclusive lunch spots or in the lobbies of luxury co-ops—things we would have witnessed if we’d happened to be there. Alas, we weren’t. But Page Six was. So for a few minutes as we ride the subway or drink our coffee or wait for the doctor, we get to escape our little lives that no one ever writes about. We get to be there, too.

THE DAY THE ROCKET CAME TO BOCA CHICA (continued from page 99)

with broad views of the bay, at only $47,000. As they looked at real estate nearby, they were dismayed. For $141,000—SpaceX’s offer—“we couldn’t even find a fixer-upper,” Rob said. The prospect of leaving behind the home they’d spent fifteen years improving to instead spend their retirement somewhere cramped, hemmed in by other houses, and far from the beach was disheartening. They hadn’t yet signed over their deed nor accepted SpaceX’s money. Rob and Sarah told me that if Musk wanted to sue them for breach of contract, so be it. Even if things devolved into a lengthy court battle, at least they would have a few more years in Boca Chica. In the days after the Mk1 explosion, dead sea turtles began washing up on the beach. On their morning walks, the Averys saw two dozen of them. Sixty-three corpses were found in all, according to a local turtle-protection group. The deaths were determined to be related to illegal fishing, but the incident threw into sharp relief the fragile world in which SpaceX was expanding its empire. THE MORE I READ ABOUT SPACEX, THE MORE I

realized how radical its vision of the future actually was—not so much its hypothetical journeys to Mars but rather its near-term ambitions. The company is seeking approval to launch forty thousand satellites as part of its Starlink program, a Google- and Fidelity-funded endeavor to bring high-speed Internet to rural areas and expedite international financial transactions. Starlink would allow SpaceX to capture a portion of the trillion-dollar global telecommunications industry. If all goes according to plan, there will be five times as many SpaceX-launched satellites in the sky as visible stars. Starship—and therefore Boca Chica—is key to making this a reality. A Falcon 9 rocket can hold several dozen satellites, a Starship several hundred. Musk has said that he’d like to see as many as three launches a day from Boca Chica. “I did the calculation—that’s more than nine million pounds of fuel a year,” said Dave Mosher, a reporter for Business Insider who covers SpaceX. “I don’t think you can get the fuel there fast enough.” Even correcting for Musk’s characteristic overstatements, it seems likely that Boca Chica will soon be less a poor people’s beach or a community of fixed-income retirees than a busy industrial corridor. Indeed, the beginnings of a liquefied-natural-gas export facility at the Port of Brownsville are already visible on the horizon. And so when I returned to Boca Chica in late December, I imagined I’d find a depressed, depleted place. Instead, after a tumultuous year, the community seemed infused with a fresh spirit. Resi-

dents seemed to have come to terms with SpaceX’s presence, for better or worse. The rocket might be intrusive, but it was their neighbor, and unlike them, it was here to stay. For some, that was an incentive to hash out an agreement with the company. “I jumped ship before it sank,” Cheryl told me. We were sitting in her living room, among the thrift-shop décor she’d carefully amassed over her fifteen years here. “I’m going to find a cheap home somewhere else, probably in a different state, since I’m disgusted with Texas. And I’m going to try to re-create my life.” SpaceX had granted her until March to move out, and she was determined to make the most of her final winter by the beach. Others were resolved to fight. As of press time, a dozen homeowners still refused to sell. Some thought they might get a better offer from SpaceX if they waited—a risky gamble, since the company said the three-times offer was off the table. Others just wanted more time. The holdouts also included the rocket’s biggest fans in Boca Chica. By now, Mary was a micro-influencer to the rabid community of SpaceX fans worldwide. Andy told me, “People go to Florida and pay a thousand dollars to watch a rocket launch there. I can say I turned down $200,000 to watch a rocket launch.” I got the sense that after spending so much time watching Starship get built, neither one wanted to leave it behind. One moody, misty afternoon, Rob and Sarah Avery took me on a drive along Boca Chica Beach. We cruised down to the mouth of the Rio Grande. Two men with fishing poles waded into the surf; Mexico was just a coin toss away. I tried to picture the fuel-production facilities, the fleet of reusable rockets, the tens of thousands of SpaceX satellites spangling the night sky. As with so many of Musk’s visions, it seemed at once difficult to take seriously and dangerous to dismiss. At the launch site, expansion continued apace. Earlier that month, SpaceX had announced that it was winding down activity at its other rocket facility, in Cocoa, Florida. Components were salvaged and sent on a chartered ship to Texas, where the company installed an enormous white tent to shield its work from the very thing that had rebuffed so many outsiders before them: the weather. The towering, matte-black wedge-shaped windbreak they’d erected wasn’t doing the trick. “Our main issue here in Boca,” Musk tweeted, “is that it can get very windy.” Back at Boca Chica Village, Mary was by the side of the road again, keeping an eye on things. This week, she was photographing the crews as they assembled the skeleton of an enormous building. It seemed as though the next version of Starship, now called SN1, would be built inside, out of the sight of its critics and fans. Even so, Mary would keep taking pictures as long as she could, even if she was only documenting her own exclusion.

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JERZY GWIAZDOWSKI: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS PUNNER Jerzy Gwiazdowski is an actor, just not a famous

one. He’s appeared in Across the Universe, Nurse Jackie, Ray Donovan, Girls, and more, but if you know him, it’s probably not for that. “I get recognized for acting stuff, but I’m not in the same stratosphere as I am in the boutique world of punning,” Gwiazdowski says. “The puns have definitely eclipsed that.” At this writing, Gwiazdowski is the winningest competitor in Brooklyn’s monthly “Punderdome.” “There will be someone who will compete for the first time and they’ll say, like, ‘You’re my inspiration,’ ” he says. “Or sometimes I’ll be getting a beer and some twenty-three-year-old dude will work up the courage to say, ‘I really want to follow in your punning footsteps.’ ” Gwiazdowski has won the annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships competition in Austin eight times since he started competing in 2012. Gwiazdowski competes with punny pseudonyms, so when he’s recognized, fans will call out, “Hey, are you Lingo Star?” [Insert pause for groans.] —KATE STOREY

T H I S WAY OU T L I V E F OR EV E R

RANDALL POSTER: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS MUSIC SUPERVISOR You’d be hard-pressed to find a longer

IMDb page floating through the Hollywood Hills than that of music supervisor Randall Poster. “The best work I do is invisible,” he explains, “where it’s so inherently part of the film’s fabric that you don’t step away from the narrative—that you just feel like you’re embedded in it.” His work is, yes, literally invisible; he’s responsible for helming soundtracks for some of the most lauded names in Tinseltown. Since serving as music supervisor on Larry Clark’s seminal, shocking 1995 film Kids, he’s worked on 150-plus movies and TV series. The sound of indie stalwarts like Boyhood, Boys Don’t Cry, and Velvet Goldmine? That was him. Glossy, big-budget affairs like The Aviator, Skyfall, The Wolf of Wall Street? Him too. A Martin Scorsese acolyte, he has also worked with Wes Anderson on every film in the director’s canon. Poster earned one of his two Grammy Awards for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel, and in 2019 alone he led music departments for The Irishman, Ad Astra, Waves, and Joker. Poster, of course, speaks about his career in humble terms; while he’ll allow that within the film community he and the music-supervision company he heads, Search Party, are “known, and hopefully respected,” a following is hardly what he craves. “Something that Wes and I always talk about is making the effort to create stories and movies that the lonely soul who’s sitting in a movie theater is inspired by, and feels less alone by—something that makes them feel connected to the larger world, because that person was us.” —MADISON VAIN

Fame-ish

ALEX MULLEN: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS “MEMORY CHAMPION” The World Memory Championships

are like the Olympics, if they were held in a business conference center. There are no snowy ski hills or giant camera crews; the “athletes” study numbers, playing cards, lists of words, or abstract images before the clock runs out and they have to write them down from memory. Alex Mullen, a twenty-seven-yearold doctor from Mississippi, was once their star, but he is adamant that this was not a glamorous type of fame. (“I hesitate to even associate the words glamour and memory competition together. Most people would roll their eyes, me included.”) Mullen is the world’s They’re bona fide stars, top-ranked memory athlete, the first person to membut in obscure fields. orize the order of a deck of cards in less than twenty seconds, as well as the first to memorize more than three They deserve a moment thousand decimal digits in an hour. At the height of his in the spotlight, too. memory-sports career, Mullen’s fans—lesser-known, lower-ranking memory athletes than he—would bashfully approach him for photos, but now he sees himself on something of a career downswing. “I think there’s been maybe two times that I can count where someone has actually recognized me, just, like, on the street,” he says. Although he hasn’t competed in two years, he does set aside a bit of time each day to respond to fan messages on Facebook, which come from panicked students cramming for exams and the odd dancer trying to memorize a ballroom routine. —LAUREN KRANC

WE’VE BUILT A NAME ON BOURBON AND A LEGACY ON RYE.