How TRUMP Made Chickens of the GOP M A N AT HI S B E ST

SEPTEMBER ’18
By Ryan Lizza

The TOM WOLFE,

ESQUIRE, and
Varoom! Varoom!
ToM The B I R T H
OF AN AMERICAN
HaRDY
By Eric Sullivan
Original

INSIDE the
Matt
Lauer --NBC
Meltdown
HappY
20th,
By David Usborne
VIAGRA!
THE STRANGE Story
of How a, Um,
Hard Sell Became a PILL
The Suit WORTH BILLIONS
By David Kushner
Will
NEVER
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Look—YOU
CAN EVEN SWIM
IN ONE!

H2Uh-Oh: The Coming WATER Crisis

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57 The Code
The sweater that punches up any outit; rock-
able jewelry; a face mask that’ll have you
looking better; how Ansel Elgort got his style.

Full Disclosure
78 By Ryan Lizza
With the GOP acting like a personality
cult, is there anything President Trump could
do to lose party support?

Unconventional Wisdom
81 By Dwight Garner
Ten artists, writers, and other creative inspira-
tions you might not know . . . but need to.

84 Cherry
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p hot ogra p hs : Jeffrey Westbrook S eptember 2018_Esquire 29

 this Way In

A B R I E F M O N T H LY E X PA N S I O N O N
A TO P I C E X P LO R E D I N T H E I S S U E
The neutrality of this information is disputed. And rightfully so. By Drew Dernavich
CONTENTS F E AT U R E S

2018 Mavericks of Style

Leather is a durable and lexible material made from the only 93 Eight men (and one woman) who prove there’s
part of an animal that you can’t ind at a Golden Corral bufet: a lot to be said for dressing dangerously.
the hide. Cowhide is the most
The Peacock Patriarchy
common material used, since 104 By David Usborne
cows are the animal with the Matt Lauer’s axing from NBC has raised unset-
most naturally occurring zip- tling questions about the network’s leadership.

pers and buckles. Leather has

The Wild One
long been a popular choice for 110 By Eric Sullivan
making clothing, accounting On a tour of his hometown, the enigmatic Tom
Hardy revealed his personal side to the author.
for almost 50 percent of all
Village People costumes worldwide. Wearing a leather coat Lighting the Bonfire
supposedly projects the same image of youthful rebellion as 118 By Tom Wolfe
an Italian sectional sofa. Although new leather can be stif, it Excerpts from one of the greatest magazine
writers who ever lived.
can be broken in gradually by acting as a
cowboy in erectile- Face Mask
dysfunction ads. THE MOST ICONIC
122 The latest pieces from these designer labels are so
LEATHER ITEMS IN fresh you won’t have to rely on your good looks.
In addition to FILM HISTORY
clothing, leather Drip . . . Drip . . . Drip
is frequently used 132 By Alec Wilkinson
Tom Cruise’s Experts are worried that we’re running out of
in making books Top Gun usable water. How do we keep it lowing?
Corinthian leather is a
and journals, like leather jacket
product of the Greek city- the one used by 138 All Rise
state of Corinth, which By David Kushner
occupied the interior of the
the writer who
Laurence The story of how the duo behind Viagra popped
Chrysler LeBaron just asked you if the top on a $3-billion-a-year industry.
from 1974 to 1988. Fishburne’s
you wanted room Matrix
Henry Goes to Hollywood
for milk. trench coat 142 By Kevin Sintumuang
Leather is produced in a tannery, Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding is possibly
where the hide is scraped with a the luckiest actor in the history of Tinseltown.
Clint
hide-leshing knife and bathed in toxic
Eastwood’s
chromium salts in a process called face ON THE COVER
a “daily skin-care regimen” by most TO M H A R DY
PHOTOGRAPHED BY GREG WILLIAMS FOR ESQUIRE
men. People who disapprove of leather How TRUMP Made Chickens of the GOP M A N AT HI S B E ST
SEPTEMBER ’18
M A N AT HI S B E ST
SEPTEMBER ’18
By Ryan Lizza

may consider Naugahyde, which is the University of Phoenix The TOM WOLFE,
ESQUIRE, and
of clothing materials. ToM Varoom! Varoom!
the B I R T H
ToM
Y
HaRDY
OF AN AMERICAN
Original D
By Eric Sullivan

H aR
INSIDE the
Matt
Lauer--NBC
Meltdown
HappY
20th,
By David Usborne
VIAGRA!
THE STRANGE Story
of How a, Um,
Hard Sell Became a PILL
The Suit WORTH BILLIONS The May
hem an
Will
By David Kushner
dM Y
ST E RY L
NEVER BE
Surrender od RE
Look—YOU ywo
CAN EVEN SWIM Holl
IN ONE! uine lli va n

Gen
ic Su
By Er
of a

H2Uh-Oh: The Coming WATER Crisis

By Alec Wilkinson

Left: Suit and shirt by Gucci; vintage tie, stylist’s own.

Right: Coat and trousers by Giorgio Armani; T-shirt by
Armani Exchange. Production by Rosie Smith Oliver.
Styling by Nicole Schneider. Grooming by Jennifer Hearty.

30 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire
 this Way In

Suit by Hugo; shirt, shoes, and socks by Boss.

MAVERICKS OF STYLE
JOHN MULANEY
H A S T H E S H A R P E ST
W I T I N C O M E DY

PaGE 93

3 2 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire photo graph : C aitlin C ro nenberg

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The Bronze Age of Television


THE FANTASTIC
MR. WOLFE
Au revoir to the last great gentleman assassin
The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe’s inal
book, was about language. Apes can com-
municate, Darwin noticed; so can dolphins.
Does that make them like us? According to
Wolfe, the answer wasn’t just no but, as he
might put it, noooooooo!!!!! Humans and apes
may both have opposable thumbs, but what
makes us unique is our invention of language.
Wolfe himself was unique as a writer for how he
handled that very thing, giving his prose sound
efects, explosive charge, elastic energy, and the
illusion of improvisation.
No one else sounded quite like him or had
the cojones to poke a walking stick into the sa-
cred cultural beehives he did. In The Painted
Word, he declared that art had “disappeared up
its own fundamental aperture.” When Mailer
insulted his choice of wardrobe, Wolfe, who
considered him a gork, replied: “The lead dog
is the one they always try to bite in the ass.”
Writing about the high-church rituals of The
New Yorker, in 1965, he said it all in the title:
“Tiny Mummies! the True Story of the Ruler
of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.”
Belonging to a group—or starting one—
wasn’t his thing. He was, as his last name im-
plied, a lone species. For a time, though, perhaps
a longer one than anywhere else, Wolfe, who
was eighty-eight when he died this past spring,
considered himself an Esquire writer. Where
else could such a born iconoclast ind a lasting
home but among like-minded literary outsiders
who spent their creative capital not just on the
page but on their wardrobes. He described the
magazine as a “carnival of contrariness,” which
wasn’t a diss but a self-relexive compliment.
In 1973, the year Wolfe wrote that, the
3 6 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire
this Way In
country was in a familiar state of feverish con-
vulsion—Watergate, the oil crisis, the Roe v.
Wade decision, Vietnam, race riots. It was a
creed, as he wrote, that had gotten the mag-
azine through “the depression of the 1930s,
the war of the 1940s, through the Silent Gen-
eration, the Beat Generation, the Flower Gen-
eration, the Revolution Generation, the Pro-
bation Generation, the Salvation Generation,
and the current Urethritic Ooze Generation,
through tank tops, bell bottoms, race wars, gap-
ing beavers, and recessions.” Somewhere in
there, we have lately surmised here at Esquire,
were planted the seeds of the iPhone Genera-
tion, the MAGA Generation, the Gender Neu-
tral Generation, the Woke Generation, Black
Lives Matter, Digital Disruption, Bernie Bros,
#MeToo, #TimesUp, tattoo sleeves, athleisure,
fur-lined loafers, and hot-desking. An attitude
of bracing intelligence that aims to amuse still
seems a sure way to help our readers keep put-
ting one foot in front of the other.
The last time I saw Tom was the irst time
we had lunch. I’d had a spotty correspondence
with him over the years, but now that I was at
Esquire, he couldn’t resist. We met at Café Bou-
lud, a white-tablecloth box of black enamel and
mirror that had a Bonfire of the Vanities vibe,
social X-rays at the surrounding tables and all.
Drinking an iced tea, asking me what I thought
“conit” was in reference to the menu, he was
a courtly and warm companion, zinging ideas
about in a voice that was just above a whisper.
In his white suit, he wore a pocket square dot-
ted with the mustachioed face of Esky, Esquire’s
mascot. I had sent it to him for Christmas. “I was
hoping you’d notice that,” he said, pulling out a
folded-up sketch he’d done as a thank-you note.
“It’s not quite there, but I’ll send it to you when
it is.” The food arrived, but we talked more than
we ate. We even hit upon an idea before I helped
get him a cab some three hours later. Emails
here and there followed, and then the sad news.
“I consider myself especially lucky to have
been his close friend for more than a half cen-
tury,” Gay Talese, who met Wolfe when they
were city reporters for competing New York
“The results show your masculinity to be benign, but let’s keep an eye on it.”
Wolfe, circa 1970, at the Leo Castelli
Gallery—a rare photograph of him
not sporting one of his bespoke white suits.
newspapers in the early 1960s, told me a few
days after he died. “It is never easy to be friends
with writers, but not so with Tom.” In the lit-
tle time I spent with him, I could see the irony
was true: He could skewer anyone, but he was
essentially a southern gent.
In honor of Wolfe, we have put together a
small but essential selection of pieces in this is-
sue that stretches almost the entire three de-
cades he pumped essays, reportage, and iction
into our pages. The three that appear here trace a
primary branch of New Journalism’s trajectory.
“There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy
Kolored (Thphhh-hhh!) Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby. . . .,”written in 1963, might
have been his irst for Esquire, but it already
shows what Wolfe could do when he irst be-
gan to break free from the stultifying norms
of mid-twentieth-century magazine writing.
The novel as the be-all and end-all of liter-
ary accomplishment was waning; real life had
somehow become too big and chaotic for ic-
tion to grapple with. Steeped in the tricks of the
iction trade but trained as a newspaper jour-
nalist, Wolfe, who never seemed to forget that
all humans are just gloriied talking apes, stum-
bled upon a new tool. The result—fact-based
pieces crafted into yarns of riveting drama—
changed the future of journalism and places him
in the pecking order where he deserves to be. At
the top!! Full stop!!! —Jay F I E L D E N
photo graph : A lexei Hay
 TV
BE ST.
CAREER .
EVER .
he creator of THE SIMPSONS
and FUTURAMA extends
his cartoon multiverse into the
realm of hard-drinking
princesses and neurotic elves
By Dan Hyman
illustration: Matt G ro e n i n g
Matt Groening will forever be known as the guy
behind The Simpsons, now the longest-running
prime-time scripted series in television history. Hey, a
guy could do worse. But the 64-year-old former cartoon-
ist has never been one to rest on his Emmys: Groening
remains intimately involved with every episode of his
best-known show (639 at this writing) and has spent
the past several years developing a new animated se-
ries called Disenchantment (debuting this month on
Netlix), set in the mythical kingdom of Dreamland.
Amid a typically busy day shuttling between the
L.A. studios where his shows are made, Groening spoke
with Esquire about the origins of Disenchantment, his
love of Bollywood, and the secret to The Simpsons’
Montgomery Burns–like longevity. c ont i nu e d ▶
S eptember 2018_Esquire 39
 the Big Bite

c on ti nu ed ▶ Dan Hyman: What inspires someone with the culture has become
three decades of success to say, “I’m going to start from crasser but also more po-
He’s Matt
square one”? litically correct. Are the
Groening.
Matt Groening: I just love creating new worlds. I’ve been shifting boundaries of
Who the Hell
fascinated since I was a kid by fantasy maps and old Dell humor in 2018 something
Are You?
crime paperbacks that had maps on the back covers. you considered?
There was a very spooky poster from 1930 that hung in MG: You never know. You Hometown:
the den of my parents’ house called “The Land of Make work for a couple years on Portland, Oregon
Believe,” by an artist named Jaro Hess. It scared the something and you don’t Early work:
hell out of me, but I loved it. I actually tracked it down know what it’s going to be The alternative comic strip
and hung it in my kitchen to scare my children. But it’s or how it’s going to be per- Life in Hell, which
always been an inspiration to me. I mean, The Simpsons ceived. That’s the hardest ran from 1980 to 2012
is its own parallel universe, and certainly Futurama is thing about animation, Inspirations:
the same thing. And now Disenchantment is a third one. by the way: getting the Charles Schulz, Walt Disney
DH: How long did it take for this particular universe to tone right. Especially in a
Emmys:
take shape in your head? Eskpertise world that is completely
36 nominations, 11 wins
MG: I started a notebook full of ideas for the show in made-up. The challenge
2012...or maybe a little earlier. Every time I thought of becomes whether you Side hustle:
a diferent kind of fantasy trope, I’d write it down and can get people to climb Played cowbell for
see if there was a way of sticking it in the show. I have lists on board and make them the Rock Bottom
of every kind of small mythical forest creature: gnomes, forget for a moment or Remainders (bandmates
included Stephen
fairies, imps, goblins, gremlins, trolls, plus a bunch that two that they’re watching
King and Amy Tan)
I can’t remember right now. It’s all there in the note- a cartoon and get caught
book. But it’s hard. If you want to tell jokes about elves up in the feelings. World events predicted by
and dragons and so on and so forth, pretty soon you re- Paradoxically, as I get The Simpsons:
alize, Oh, every single dragon joke has already been made. older, I am less interested Donald Trump’s presidency,
DH: But you always intended to create another ani- in fantasy and more inter- self-driving
trucks, Disney’s pending
mated series? ested in reality. And by re-
First rule of fashion: acquisition of Fox
MG: Oh, yeah. I think about ideas for diferent TV shows ality, I mean real emotions.
If you want it,
all the time. What holds me back is knowing how hard it The trappings of the show
you can’t afford it.
is to actually pull them of, and whether I really want to I’m amused by, but what really gets me going is the stuf
commit myself to something that keeps on going. You with heart.
know, my comic strip Life in Hell lasted 33 years. The DH: Obviously being on a platform like Netflix, as
Simpsons is 29 years and running. Futurama didn’t last opposed to network TV, gives you more freedom.
as long. [It ran for seven nonconsecutive seasons.] So I MG: I still think about boundaries, because there are
have to really want to do it for me to plow forward. some. Actually, one of the nice things about conventional
DH: I hear you drew inspiration from some rather television is that the boundaries are clear on what you
obscure sources for Disenchantment. can show and what you can say. With Netlix, they’re
MG: I don’t think they’re obscure, but other people very encouraging for us to do whatever we want to do.
could consider them obscure. So in a given show there Still, we found early on that there’s a certain kind of dirty
might be homages to Buster Keaton and to an Indian joke that within this show just didn’t feel right. But who’s
ilmmaker named S.S. Rajamouli, who has made some to know what people will be bothered by?
of my favorite ilms of the last decade. I particularly rec- DH: As of this past April, The Simpsons became the
ommend a movie called Magadheera. I’m getting very longest-running prime-time scripted show in television
obscure now. But this stuf just makes me so happy. HERE BE LULZ history. How much longer do you see it going?
DH: When it irst aired, The Simpsons was viewed as Disenchantment’s Bean, MG: The work itself is very real. There’s very little strut-
wildly subversive and even controversial. Since then, Luci, and Elfo. ting around the studio saying, “Look how long we’ve
been on the air!” It’s mostly just doing the job, and it’s
really fun. And if I could point out something about
The Simpsons that the general fans might not know: It
has turned into a forum for diferent kinds of animated
humor. There’s not a single kind of joke. We do jokes
that are about animation, we do parodies, we do topi-
cal humor, we do family-sitcom jokes, we do all kinds of
diferent approaches to humor. And as a result, it’s not
the same as what it used to be. But to me, it’s also not
repetitious, because we’re always exploring new things.
illustration: Ben Schwartz

Banksy did the storyboards for a couch gag.

DH: Given that you don’t do many interviews, I get the
sense you would rather people know your work than the
man behind it.
MG: Oh, yeah. This is the best kind of fame. If I looked
like Bart Simpson, it’d all be over for me.

40 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
 PROMOTION

BY INVITATION ONLY
ESQUIRE & PATRÓN TEQUILA TOAST THE
BEST BARS IN AMERICA 2018
Esquire Food & Drinks Editor Jef Gordinier and Culture & Lifestyle
Director Kevin Sintumuang co-hosted an exclusive event celebrating our
ever-growing list of the best bars in America.
The event was held at George Washington Bar in New York City, one of the
2018 honorees, and guests enjoyed custom Patrón cocktails made special
for the evening by head bartender Ben Rojo.
 the Big Bite

SPORTS

A (LEGAL ) NFL BET TOR ’S GUIDE

he federal prohibition on sports betting has been axed, and
you’re now free to . . . continue what you were doing all along. Herewith, we handicap
some NFL bets you’ll see this fall. By Brady Langmann
WHO WILL WIN THE SUPER BOWL? OVER/UNDER
Everyone’s favorite
pseudoscientist, Tom 87.5 National-anthem-related Trump tweets leading up
to midterm elections
Brady, isn’t retiring
without another ring. 60 Inane group laughter in minutes per Fox broadcast
The TB12 Method
Pittsburgh Philadelphia Los Angeles
Patriots Steelers Eagles sequel won’t sell itself! 25 Times Roger Goodell utters the statement “There is no
Rams
6–1 8–1 10–1 12–1 greater priority than protecting the integrity of our sport”

WHO WILL HEADLINE THE We can write 5 Times Jerry Jones makes an empty threat
to sue the NFL
off “This Is America”
playing anywhere near 16 NFL owners who are named as defendants in
an NFL stadium. cheerleaders’ harassment suits
Parlay Taylor Swift
with an Ed 10 Heckling children Cam Newton attempts to fist-fight
Sheeran cameo.
.5 Games won by the Cleveland Browns

Taylor Childish 3 Average minutes Odell Beckham Jr. spends per

Swift Rihanna Drake Gambino Baker Mayfield has a touchdown celebration
2–1 25–1 50–1 100–1
YouTube-able arrest video
and once grabbed his 15 Games in which Aaron Rodgers will have to single-handedly
WHO WILL BE JOHNNY MANZIEL’S crotch while screaming LeBron his team to mediocrity
BRO APPARENT? “Fuck you!” at an
opponent’s sideline. 7 Sponsors that go the way of Papa John’s and part with

Yes, Cam Newton really

confronted schoolkids at
Panthers minicamp. You
can safely bet the over YES OR NO?
Baker Josh Josh Sam on all of these (except on
Mayfield Rosen Allen Darnold Browns wins, of course).
4–1 8–1 30–1 45–1 Fox finally dumps the discount
from its broadcasts.

There’s nothing quite like Roger Goodell institutes a Fortnite ban in NFL
locker rooms.
quarterback privilege.
Big Ben got a mulligan
Ndamukong Suh is the first player suspended under
for his sexual-assault the new helmet-targeting rule.
allegations—our money’s
on that not lasting long. Rob Gronkowski executes another late MMA-style
cheap shot yet remains a fan favorite.
Now that he can gamble, your suburban-dad-
We wouldn’t be turned-wannabe-Soprano buddy suddenly starts
Ben Jameis Ezekiel Richie dropping the word vig into casual conversation.
Roethlisberger Winston Elliott Incognito surprised if the NFL
6–1 9–1 15–1 20–1 continued to follow the As the MAGA faithful shame kneeling players and
way of the presidency. the #ImWithHers shame the NFL for shaming
WHICH TEAM’S FANS WILL HAVE If anything seems kneeling players, party lines temporarily cease to
THE MOST ARRESTS AT A SINGLE inconceivable to you— exist as both sides call for an NFL boycott.
bet that it’ll happen.
A playoff game is decided by a
poorly worded catch rule. But hey,
that’s football!
Philly built a drinking mall
smack in the middle of The upcoming Child’s Play reboot casts Jon Gruden
its three major sports as Chucky’s humanoid father.
Philadelphia Buffalo Cincinnati Seattle stadiums. Don’t count out
Eagles Bills Bengals Seahawks an Eagles fan who’s ten The NFL catches a referee point-shaving, the gam-
3–1 10–1 18–1 40–1 Yuenglings deep. bling ban is reinstated, and none of this matters.

42 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _E sq u ire Contributor: Walker S. Schneider


How to pick the perfect golf umbrella for the city By Joe Keohane
1. First, make sure you need a
golf umbrella. Does it rain fre-
quently in your city? If not, are you
highly sensitive to the sun? Do you
need everyone in the city to know
that you play golf? If the answer to
any of these questions is yes, you
need a golf umbrella.
2. What color would you like your
golf umbrella to be? They come in
an array of colors—from the tradi-
tional black and navy to more color-
ful options such as green and white.
Since you’ll be taking up an entire
sidewalk while using yours in the city,
make sure the color suits your style
and sensibility.
3. What features would you like?
We’d recommend a push-button
44 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
the Big Bite
LAFFS
HACK MY LIFE
auto-open golf umbrella, for ease of
use, and a light, durable shaft. While
a leather handle is nice, a rubber one
will work just as well and last even
longer. Finally, look for a wind-tested
golf umbrella with a double-layer
canopy. That will stand up to those
unpredictable city gusts and inevi-
table pedestrian collisions.
4. Next, ask yourself what kind of
fucking asshole you are. Because it
goes without saying that you have
a malfunctioning supramarginal
gyrus—the part of the cerebral cor-
tex responsible for basic human
empathy and self-awareness. But
just how malfunctioning?
5. For instance, are you the kind of
asshole who merely prioritizes his
own comfort over the comfort of
everyone else?
6. Or are you the kind of asshole
who gets off on pointless gestures
that force others to react to you?
7. Or maybe you’re simply the
kind of asshole who just wants to
harm people?
8. The answers to these ques-
tions will determine the size of your
golf umbrella.
9. Just kidding! No, they won’t.
You’re going to get the biggest
golf umbrella there is, aren’t you?
Of course you are. Five feet wide
at least. Bigger if you can get it.
Otherwise, some part of you might
get wet! And what’s the point of a golf
umbrella if even a single drop of rain
comes in contact with a single part of
your body, or a stitch of your cloth-
ing, or a hair on your precious hand?
Here’s the answer, pal: There is no
point. You may as well walk into the
sea and fuckin’ die.
10. So get the golf umbrella. Go big.
Get the one with all the spokes jutting
out at eye level and a big, sharp pike
on top. This is America, bub, and in
America we say fuck everyone else.
Fuck ’em all. What matters is that big
boy stays dry. Big boy stays dry! Big
boy stays dry!
illustration: T imothy K re ider
 the Big Bite

FOOD

WOKE E ATS
In SAN FRANCISCO, a new kind
of restaurant business is
injecting CULTURAL DIVERSITY
into the land of tech luxocrats
By Jef Gordinier
How much do I love jerk chicken? True story: A
few months ago, while my wife was in the hospi-
tal enduring hours of labor as she prepared to give
birth to our twin boys, my mind kept taking a U-turn
back to the little Jamaican restaurant that I had spied
around the corner. As we waited and listened to our
hospital playlist, I became hungrier and hungrier day-
dreaming about the lavors of Jamaica. Finally, Lauren
uttered the magic words—“go for it”—and I dashed
over to Caribbean Thyme for a platter of jerk chicken
with plantains and rice and an extra spoonful of oxtail
gravy. After all, there were babies on the way.
I mention this story because I had the same reac-
tion earlier this year when I was in San Francisco. I
heard that there was a new restaurant, Kaya, special-
izing in the food and drink of Jamaica. I was psyched.
I was also surprised, because Kaya turned out to have
a pretty tony address. Launched by chef Nigel Jones, it
opened at 1420 Market Street, across the street from
the corporate headquarters of both Uber and Twitter.
Now, there’s no reason organic jerk chicken and
oxtail stew shouldn’t be available within walk-
ing distance of Bay Area technology titans. (If the

46 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire illustration: e Boy

© 2018 Tyson Foods, Inc.
 the Big Bite

coders ever leave their cocoons, Kaya is a ine place to

unwind.) It’s just that this type of restaurant is having a
very hard time getting a foothold in San Francisco these
days. Rents have become nauseatingly high. Tech-
fueled gentrification has dramatically reduced the
city’s African-American population. “People are feel-
ing displaced and under siege,” Jones told me when I
dropped in. Michelin-starred tasting menus may be
flourishing, but chefs like Jones, who’s got another
casual Jamaican spot, Kingston 11, over the bridge
in Oakland, tend to come up against insurmountable
challenges when they need to raise capital.
Yet Kaya represents a business model that’s based
as much on multicultural potential as it is on proits.
Jones’s partner in the enterprise is Daniel Patterson,
DISHING
a socially conscious avatar of California gastronomy DISRUPTION
with an ever-shifting network of restaurants around Above: Chef Nigel Jones.
the Bay Area; chefs including James Syhabout, Katy Right: Jerk chicken and
Millard, and Carlos Salgado have passed through the black-pepper crab. Below:
kitchen at Patterson’s Coi, a North Beach gem that he scene at Kaya.
boasts three Michelin stars. Patterson, who turns 50
this year, is moving in an intriguing direction. He is
putting his money where his mouth is when it comes
to supporting female and minority chefs by teaming
up with them to build restaurants whose path to suc- have.” What if chefs like Jean-
cess, without his intervention, would potentially be as Georges Vongerichten and ADVENTURES
steep and twisty as Lombard Street. Eskpertise Thomas Keller started using in S nack ing

A few months back, Patterson knew he had to close their clout and cash not to WANT ICE
one of his restaurants, Alta, at 1420 Market Street, expand their own empires, per
but he still had a lease. “Instead of giving up the lease, se, but to give young voices a CREAM WITH
he approached me and said, ‘Hey, I love your food,’ ” platform of their own? THOSE FRIES?
Jones remembers. “ ‘Why don’t we think about a col- For decades, of course,
laboration?’ Daniel is the establishment, so to speak, young cooks have endured
but he has reached out to say, ‘How can I open the merciless hours by the stove
door for other people?’ ” Patterson has since gone on while their star-chef employ-
to do the same thing for two other businesses: Dyafa, ers have tiptoed off to tape
a Middle Eastern restaurant in Oakland whose chef is Second rule of fashion: TV shows. W hat Patter-
Reem Assil; and Besharam, inside a San Francisco art If you can’t son is doing is different; it’s It’s not often that a bar snack
space called the Minnesota Street Project, where chef afford it, fake it. more akin to Brian Eno twid- delivers shock and nostalgia
at the same time, but the
Heena Patel serves Indian fare. dling knobs behind the scenes
pièce de résistance at Ludlow
Is it foolishly idealistic to imagine that a few to help guide Talking Heads Liquors in Chicago does just
modest restaurants could make an impact on the to greatness. Jones, Assil, that. Courtesy of chef Nick
cultural vibrancy of a major metropolis? Maybe not. and Patel have creative con- Jirasek (who operates under
“My hope is that if it’s successful, other people will trol over the cooking, decor, the moniker Old Habits), it’s
say, ‘Oh, this is a good business model,’ ” Patterson and music at Kaya, Dyafa, and a frosty scoop of vanilla
told me. “If a lot of people did this, it would change Besharam, but they can count ice cream accompanied by a
our country. I think it’s important not to underes- on someone like Aaron Paul, heap of hot french fries and
timate the efect that one person in one place can the beverage guru at Patter- a generous pour of gravy that
son’s Alta Group, for insights tastes like your grandma’s
pot roast. Sweet, salty, meaty,
on wine, beer, and cocktails.
and weird. Let’s make that
It remains to be seen whether a double. —J. G.
these modest woke restaurants
will make a dent in thwarting
San Francisco’s mutation into a generic play-
ground for venture-capital luxocrats, but hey,
it’s worth a try.
“We’ve been able to create one of those melting-pot
spaces in Oakland,” Jones says. “You see everybody—
illustration: Ben Schwartz

black, white, straight, gay. And I love that. And I really

want that to happen here.” Kaya is named after a Bob
Marley album, and Jones ofers up a quote from that
greatest of Jamaican bards: “None but ourselves can
free our minds.”

48 September 2018_Esquire photo graphs : Jake Stangel

LOOKS GREAT. TASTES BETTER.
Great taste. Only 96 calories.

MILLER LITE. HOLD TRUE.

 the Big Bite
BOOKS
HIDDEN HAND
A distressingly timely new
book about the
GODFATHER of fake news
By Ron Rosenbaum
Have you heard of William Cooper? I used to
think I knew all the big players in conspiracy-
theory culture. After all, I was there the summer
after the JFK assassination when Warren Commis-
sion “critic” Mark Lane gave a primitive PowerPoint
presentation “proving” that someone had Photo-
shopped a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald holding his
rile so that the shadow pointed in . . . the wrong direc-
tion. Which proved . . . I don’t know, but it became an
iconic data point in JFK conspiracy-theory lore.
And it was in this very magazine (September
’77) that I was able to bring national attention to
the overwrought gothic rituals of the Yale secret
society called Skull and Bones. And to its net-
work of powerful graduates, who all too many gull-
ible souls had come to believe were the secret rulers
of the world—along with the Illuminati and the
Bilderbergers, of course. I later assembled a team
of Yale videographers to clandestinely tape the dra-
matic climax of the Bonesmen’s weird “throat
slitting” initiation.
5 0 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire
I’ve followed truthers (9/11 was a “false lag” op)
and birthers (Obama was Kenyan-born). I’ve choked
down my disgust at “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy pro-
moted by Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich, who pos-
ited (on the basis of zero evidence) that Hillary Clinton
was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a
D. C. pizza parlor (which had no basement).
But Milton William Cooper—you might think of
him as Alex Jones before Alex Jones—no. Cooper had
not been on my radar, and I’m grateful to Mark Jacob-
son for Pale Horse Rider, his in-depth portrait of an
inluential conspiracy-theory crank and the beliefs he
insidiously spread to the vulnerable-minded.
Two things need to be said here. Yes, there have
been conspiracies in history. Ask Julius Caesar. Ask
Abraham Lincoln. Allegations of conspiracy shouldn’t
be dismissed out of hand without investigating.
The second thing worth noting is that there are
scores of brilliant investigators (often called “report-
ers”) who are superb at uncovering such genuine con-
spiracies. They deserve respect, not disdain, from the
fantasists who love to look down their noses from an
imagined position of insider knowledge. This is even
more important right now, when the nation is in the
midst of a frenzied debate about what is fact and
what is fake.
In Jacobson’s telling, Cooper made his bones with
a spectacular claim. He had found a secret docu-
ment in a cabinet somewhere that detailed a turn-
ing point in the entire history of the planet: a 1954
summit conference between then-president Dwight
D. Eisenhower and “the Aliens,” as Cooper nonspe-
photo illustratio n : Max-O-Matic
C r e a t i n g n ew h e i g h t s
The new Montblanc 1858 Geosphere.
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montblanc.com/1858

cifically called them, in which a treaty was signed
between the commander in chief and the outer-
space powers that would allow them to rule the earth
under the cover of Ike.
And then there was Cooper’s claim that he had
solved the Kennedy assassination after viewing a
secret tape that showed that the Secret Service man
driving the death limo in Dallas turned around and
killed JFK by iring a super-special gas-powered gun
in plain view of the people assembled on Dealey Plaza.
(But you knew that.)
Cooper was also a black-helicopter man who pro-
vided some of the ideology for the right-wing militia
movement that produced the Oklahoma City bomber
Timothy McVeigh. People die because of lies like
his. (Cooper himself died in a gunight with local law
enforcement in 2001.)
Maybe it’s unstoppable, but I’d argue that the only
way to ight falsehood is with truth. And Jacobson, a
felicitous writer with a talent for deadpan accounts of
the ridiculous, does us a service by bringing us as close
as possible to a igure like Cooper, author of a 1991
book called Behold a Pale Horse, which manages to
fuse UFOs, Skull and Bones, militia madness, and bib-
lical apocalypticism (the title is taken from the Book of
Revelation), thereby attracting a large and durable fol-
lowing of the credulous and the impressionable. Sadly,
according to Jacobson, that following has included a
number of well-known rappers, such as the late Tupac
Shakur and members of the Wu-Tang Clan.
One comes away from Jacobson’s book thinking he
was absolutely right to take these people seriously,
even if one inds their ideas impossible to take seri-
ously. They represent a large and growing segment of
the voting population, after all. But what makes them
tick? Over years of dealing with their smug know-it-all
smiles, their condescension toward the pitiful uniniti-
ated—or “sheeple,” as Cooper would say—I’ve devel-
oped a Theory of Conspiracy Theory, which involves
two paradoxes.
First, there is the Arrogance/Ignorance dialectic.
The more ignorant conspiracy-theory proponents are
of history—and one thing you can be sure of is that
they have a deeply impoverished knowledge of his-
tory, of the wild, unpredictable, chance-driven course
of events, the frequent irretrievability of certainty
from the mists of the past one gets from reading, say,
ive versions of the Battle of Hastings—the more they
are likely to vaunt their mastery of the secret springs,
the alleged puppet masters behind it all that make a
simpliied plot for simple minds.
The other paradox might be called Insecurity/Nar-
cissism. Many of these theorists are deeply frightened
by the world, by their utter lack of comprehension of
historical forces, and in response they put on an air
of superiority as a kind of shield from allowing oth-
ers to see the panic inside. If their idiocies didn’t dis-
rupt the politics of the nation or the notion that there
is any such thing as reality, or that it’s worth searching
for rather than just making up, we might be tempted
to feel sorry for them.
52 Sept e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire
the Big Bite
BOOKS
WORTH THE
Crackpot
Nation STRUGGLE
WHY YOU NEED TO READ THE 21ST
CENTURY’S LONGEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY
First the stats: six books, 3,600 pages, a million or
so words, all revolving around the insights and in-
securities of a forty-something writer with an asshole
54.3% father, a screwed-up love life, and a fascination with
of Americans believe 9/11 Adolf Hitler. Not quite a memoir, not exactly a novel,
was an inside job. My Struggle made its author, Karl Ove Knausgaard,
tabloid-level famous in his native Norway when the
irst volume was published in 2009. Since then, the
49.6% legend of the hypersensitive Scandinavian has gone
think Lee Harvey Oswald international: His unsmiling visage can be found star-
was a patsy. ing out intensely from bookstore shelves around the
world, beckoning new disciples to the cult of Karl Ove.
And now we come to Book Six. That’s the title of the
inal installment in this alternately dour and ecstatic
epic, the English translation of which comes out this
month. Conirmed Knausgaardians like me have been
42.1% drumming our ingers impatiently ever since the re-
think global warming lease of Book Five more than two years ago. We don’t
is a hoax. need glowing reviews to convince us that this is the
most audacious literary undertaking of our time. We
get it. We clicked the preorder button months ago.
So what about the rest of you? The distributor, Ran-
dom House, points out that Book Six, which is espe-
cially heavy on Hitler musings (Karl’s not a fan, in case
you were wondering), is particularly relevant given
27.8% “our current global climate of ascending dictator-
think Antonin Scalia ships.” Hey, fair enough. But the real reason to read
was whacked. Knausgaard is to marvel at how he transforms the mun-
dane—a trip to the supermarket, a phone call from
your brother, using the toilet at a friend’s house—into
the momentous. I’d ofer an excerpt to prove the point,
but he’s not that sort of author; you enjoy him by the
chapter rather than the verse. He dispenses with con-
24.2% temporary iction’s usual lourishes and sleight of hand,
think the moon landing opting instead for his own of-kilter kind of confession.
was staged. It’s written magic without the tricks. —Tom Bartlett
DON’T HIDE.
GO SEEK.

Play just got serious in the all-new Toyota Avalon.

Every road is a playground in the Avalon Hybrid Limited. With an impossible-to-miss
available Cognac Leather-trimmed interior and a 14-speaker JBL®* Audio system,
it sounds as good as it looks, no matter where the road takes you.
Let’s Go Places.

CARS
Urus By Kevin Sintumuang
Let’s talk sweatpants. To many, it has become
acceptable to wear the same sporty clothes to the
gym and the oice. Whether you’re riding high on the
“athleisure” pommel horse or not, it’s easy to under-
stand its lasting appeal. The clothes are comfortable,
yet they make you aspire for more—yes, you’re in line
to order a matcha latte, but you could totally be doing
burpees. Just feel how stretchy these pants are, dude.
In the automotive world, the equivalent of the ath-
leisure movement is the crossover, the SUV-esque car
that’s making sensible sedans a rarity. Loading up at
Costco may be your day-to-day reality when driving
one, but should the asphalt underneath suddenly turn
into rubble, you’ll get that 32-pack of toilet paper home
like it’s the antidote to the zombie apocalypse.
It’s one of consumerism’s most irresistible cocktails:
real-world practicality with a shot of lifestyle fantasy.
You could say that this kind of poseurdom is only
attractive to soccer parents who shop at big-box stores,
but that’s neither fair nor accurate. (What are you, a
coastal elitist?) The rich are not immune to this potent
market force. Swiss fashion house Bally sells a $1,500
tracksuit. The $750 Balenciaga sock sneaker is among
the most coveted shoes in high fashion. And now, for
$200,000, you can own an SUV from the maker of
some of earth’s most face-melting cars: Lamborghini.
The fast-and-fancy crossover isn’t new. With the
now-16-year-old Cayenne, Porsche proved that a
sports-car maker could build an SUV and not ding
the brand’s heritage. Still, a Lamborghini SUV?
Even if you’re clueless about cars, you know that’s
an oxymoron.
But oh, what’s that in the rearview? It’s your skepti-
cism being left behind thanks to 650 hp and 627 ft-lb
of torque. After I took a few laps in the V-8-powered
54 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire
the Big Bite
clear that the Lambo wasn’t some sort of rebadged
Audi Q7 crossover, with which it shares many of its
underpinnings. Despite the high ride height, the car re-
mains amazingly lat in corners courtesy of next-level
adaptive air suspension. In other words, it handles
like a genuine track star. Accelerate in launch control,
Eskpertise whomp on the brake pedal, and the biggest, most pow-
erful brakes ever found in a production car will make
any doubts about the Urus’s prowess vanish.
While 0 to 60 in 3.6 seconds is fast, it’s not the un-
hinged insanity one normally desires in a Lambo. Does
that even matter? The irst year’s production is sold
out, and for 68 percent of Urus owners, this will be
their irst Lamborghini. Comfort has its own gravita-
tional force that can be stronger than what your ego
wants to scrunch into—getting in and out of a Urus
doesn’t require a chiropractor’s note like a low-slung
Aventador does, but it still delivers thrills.
Maybe the future holds a more crazed Lambo SUV.
Third rule of For now, the downright Germanic Urus, as well as the
fashion: If you can’t upcoming ultraluxe SUVs from the likes of Rolls-Royce
fake it, own it. and Aston Martin, represents the wish of the super-
rich to be, well, basic like the rest of us.
This is not a diss. I’d totally wear track pants made
illustration: Ben Schwartz; photo illustration: C. J. Robinson
from nappa leather if I could aford them.
HOW ELSE CAN $200K MOVE YOU?
2 Alfa Romeo
16 Trek Madone 9.9s
($12,000 each): The finest
tour ($157,300): Travel to goes 0 to 60 in 3.6 carbon superbike money
nine destinations over seconds but for less than can buy. You still have to
23 days on a private jet. half the price. pedal, though.
 Hillshire farm® turkey
is slow roasted for hours.
And devoured in seconds.

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At Hillshire Farm , right after we carve our deliciously seasoned turkey, we double seal
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you’ve ever tasted. Visit HillshireFarm.com for more sandwich inspiration.
 the Code Because Style Is Always Personal

BRIGHTLY
KNIT
Whether you’re in a
style groove or a rut, a
FAIR ISLE SWEATER
can add NEW LIFE
to your LOOK
Those who know
me will tell you:
I am not a man who
breaks his stride when
it comes to style. Is
that boring? Maybe. I
prefer to see it as con-
sistent. Steady on. Pull
open my closet and
you’ll find a landscape
of deep browns, calm-
ing greens, charcoal

Sweater ($470) by Acne Studios; trousers ($780) by Gucci.

Phot ogra p hs : Bra d O g b o n n a ; lo c a t ion: Henr y Pu bl i c , Brookl y n S eptember 2018_Esquire 57

 the Code: Trending

grays, and dark blues. the 19th-century ver-

I pretty much locked
into my look some
years ago, and I will
not blow money on
trends. I invest in
timelessness.
Which might explain
why I am intrigued by
many of the knits
designers are turning
out this fall: They’re a
trend that happens to
be timeless.
I’m talking about
the Fair Isle sweater.
Brightly hued and
richly patterned in hor-
izontal bands, it’s got a
heritage that goes back
to the Scottish islands.
While no one is exactly
sure of the origin of
these sweaters, my
theory is as good as
anyone else’s: They’re
sion of tattoos, a way to
set yourself apart. If
Deadliest Catch were
being filmed in 1882
in the North Sea,
rather than seeing
some fully sleeved,
tattooed man pulling
in nets like you do now,
you’d see a guy in one
of these numbers.
Mind you, I haven’t
made the leap to wear-
ing one yet. But I’m
getting there. For the
21st century, the
Fair Isle sweater is the
thinking man’s graphic
T-shirt. Years ago,
I saw a photograph of
a post-Beatles Paul
McCartney rocking
a Fair Isle, and it has
always stayed in my
head; he’s wearing

WEAR IT OUT
A FAIR ISLE KNIT
SPEAKS FOR
ITSELF, BUT IT ALSO
PLAYS WELL
WITH OTHERS. TRY
IT UNDER A
CORDUROY SUIT OR
WITH A BLAZER
AND JEANS FOR SOME
EXTRA POLISH. ORIGIN STORY
FAIR GAME

something that is so • • • Fresh-off-the-

antique that it’s cool,
that boasts enough col-
ors and patterns in it
to defy categorization.
And that’s its appeal,
ultimately. Just when
you think you’ve got
your style all figured
out, something like
this comes along and
makes you reconsider
everything. —Michael
Hainey
Top: Suit ($468) by Banana
Republic; sweater ($810) by
Marni; T-shirt ($58) by
Double Eleven. Left: Jacket
($1,425) by Drake’s; sweater
($2,200) by Gucci; shirt ($92)
by Brooks Brothers; jeans
($250) by A. P. C.
runway Fair Isles have
upped the ante
with brilliant colors and
bolder patterns, but
the original knits, first
devised around 1850,
were more subdued,
rendered in red, blue,
white, and gold, with
finely figured patterns.
They originated on
the tiny island of—you
guessed it—Fair Isle,
then spread upward
through the Shet-
land Islands north of
Scotland, where locals
like Johnnie Jamieson
(above) took to wearing
the designs with an all-
over abandon you have
to admit is pretty
rock ’n’ roll. —Jon Roth

58 Se pt e m b e r 2 01 8 _E sq u ire

YOU INTO THE
STONES?
You may not be KEITH RICHARDS, but you
can still channel his style
6 0 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
the Code: Hardware
Rare is the man who
has eyed a piece of
jewelry and thought,
I can pull that off, easy.
A lot of guys believe any-
thing beyond a wedding
ring belongs only on rock
stars. Fitting, then, that
John Varvatos, designer
to music’s A-list, has just
launched his signature Instead, it’s got a rugged,
jewelry line. And no, you
don’t have to sell out the
Garden to wear it. Com-
earthy quality most men
will be naturally drawn to.
When it comes to styl-
posed of richly textured ing tips, Varvatos says to
stones like jasper, tur- take a cue from his run-
quoise, and lapis and pre- ways: “Our philosophy in
cious metals like bronze, clothes has always been
silver, and gold, the col- lightly layered. I feel the
lection is far from lashy. same way about jewelry.
Go slow and ind a few
things you really love.”
With more than one hun-
dred pieces to choose
from, that shouldn’t take
too long. —J. R.
Silver necklace ($898), silver cuff
bracelet ($598), jasper necklace
($498), turquoise bracelet
($398), lapis bracelet ($298),
brass bracelet ($298), and ring
($198) by John Varvatos; wood
bowl ($150) and KH Würtz
bowl ($70), available at RW Guild.
photo graph : Jeffrey Westbrook
 the Code: Complications
IT’S A STEEL
The world’s oldest SWISS watchmaker
regularly turns out tickers IN THE SIX FIGURES.
Now it’s made one for the rest of us.
• • • For anyone with more than
a passing interest in wrist-
watches, the name Vacheron
Constantin takes on a rever-
ential tone. The 263-year-old
champion of high watchmaking
ranks up there with the likes
of Patek Philippe and Breguet.
Being “up there” means that
many of the brand’s new
watches are hardly what you’d
Fiftysix self-winding watch ($11,900) by Vacheron Constantin. call entry-level. The star last
p hot ogra p h : Jeffrey Westbrook
year—it won the watch world’s
equivalent of an Oscar—was
the Les Cabinotiers Celestia
Astronomical Grand Complica-
tion, which mechanically
maps out your life in no fewer
than 23 separate complica-
tions. The price tag? In excess
of $1 million.
But take heart: Vacheron
Constantin is just as mindful
of the other end of its market.
S eptember 2018_Esquire 61
This month marks the
launch of the Fiftysix: an
elegant, no-nonsense design
that harks back loosely—
but not obsessively—to a
model from 1956. Available
in a number of iterations
with a gold or steel case, the
watch at its simplest features
a three-hand display, a date
window, and an automatic
movement. Typical of a new
sense of taste and realism
in watchmaking, it is moder-
ately priced (for this class of
timepiece, anyway—it costs
$11,900). The alluringly
monochromatic 40mm
steel version is an instant
classic, from a house with
a storied reputation for pro-
ducing just that. —Nick Sullivan
 the Code: A Different Cloth

LIKE A BOSS
A TECHNICAL fabric is the SHARPEST
way to show YOU MEAN BUSINESS

When Prada irst sent

black nylon down the
runway 25 years ago,
no one else at that level
had ever tried it. Back
then, nylon meant util-
ity, not luxury. Then it
became Prada’s hallmark.
Now the brand is revis-
iting the material, and it
MAKE SOME feels timelier than ever—
M OV E S
especially when you con-
WHETHER YOU’RE MEETING
IN THE CORNER OFFICE sider the way we work
OR THE COFFEE SHOP, now. Which is to say not
NYLON PIECES LIKE THESE necessarily in a suit, or
WORK IN ANY SETTING.
even in an oice, in an
age when a CEO can
lash a Casio watch
and interns save up for
designer sneakers. In that
mix, Prada pieces like
this vest and folio echo
the tone of the times—
a little sport, a little
street—with a much-
needed dose of restraint.
All that, and nylon’s
got the versatility you’d
expect from a technical
material. You’re going to
be multitasking no mat-
ter what; you might as
well dress for it. — J . R .

Jacket ($2,620), vest ($1,650),

shirt ($1,120), and portfolio
($1,130) by Prada; jeans ($165)
by Polo Ralph Lauren; loafers
($511) by Armando Cabral.

THE LOOKBOOK
LEGENDS OF THE FALL
• • • Bonobos has made its
name selling stylish, affordable
clothes that actually fit. This
fall, it drives home the “style”
part of that equation, producing
brilliant graphic knits, richly tex-
tured outerwear, and, of course,
perfectly cut trousers. The ele-
vated aesthetic is no accident.
Design head Dwight Fenton
has deployed brighter colors and
richer materials to “diversify
what is typically a more subdued
season.” We say the bolder,
the better. —Michael Stefanov

62 Se pt e m b e r 2 01 8 _ E sq u ire photo graph : Brad O gbo nna

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 the Code

Nailing it: I had my

nails painted up until
HOW I GOT MY STYLE
today. My dad needed A NS EL ELG ORT
a pedicure, so we went
24, Brooklyn
there together and I got
them done. There was
this woman there, she
had seen Baby Driver, talks about his first big purchase, his SHIFTING
and she said, “You might STYLE, and the pull of Polo’s new scent, RED RUSH
know my husband—his
name is Wayne Gretzky.
He’s coming to pick me

done Carrie, and that

was my first paycheck,
right out of high school.
Pony boy: The smell of
Red Rush is great. It’s
and then Wayne clean and fresh. I’ll
Gretzky came, and I wear it when I want to
couldn’t shake his hand let loose. Plus, Polo is
because my nails were so iconic. They didn’t say,
still drying. “Do you want to repre-
Shape-shifter: My style sent this smell?” It was
changes all the time. The “Do you want to repre-
second I start to feel like sent Polo?” And yeah, I’m
I have something that’s a down to represent Polo.
go-to, I throw it out the In living color: When I
window. Right now I’m was working [on The
really into color. Goldfinch], I wore these
Purchasing power: I was bespoke suits. I felt that
obsessed with deejay- character [Theodore
ing, and I didn’t want to Decker, who loses his
just be a computer DJ; I mother in a terrorist
wanted to use the hard- attack] was taking over
ware. So I went to Guitar my life. I needed to
Center and I bought two remind myself that I was
CDJ-2000s, a DJM-2000 this colorful kid and
not this dark, depressing
guy. So I would wear
this purple jacket from
Canada Goose and
Opening Ceremony.
It was nice to put on my
clothes at the end of
the day and know I could
go home and go to
sleep as myself. —As told
to Brady Langmann
 the Code: Sole Searching MASTER CLASS
ANALYZE THIS
• • • For all the inspiration we take from
red-carpet rigs, the best style is often right
in front of us—or at least a quick scroll
down the Instagram timeline. This fall,
Shoes ($135) by Shoes ($695), Saint Laurent Shoes ($135) by
we’re digging the sartorial savvy of Gerardo
Clarks Originals. by Anthony Vaccarello. Clarks Originals.
Cavaliere, lawyer and cofounder of Roman
tailors Sartoria Giuliva. (Find his photos on
the ’Gram: @sartoriagiuliva.) —N. S.

The contrast
between denim
and wool makes
tailoring feel
casual.

If you’re not
built like
a stick insect,
pleats are your
friend.

The secret
to looking
(and feeling)
comfortable in
a suit? A soft
structure.

THE SHOE
THAT Fine

ALWAYS
textures keep
formal clothes
from seeming
boring.

FITS
If there’s a wrong way to wear The flipped
jacket collar
a Wallabee, we haven’t found it yet is a study in
sprezzatura.

There aren’t many
shoes that work
as well on an Oxford
professor as they do on
the Wu-Tang Clan, but
Wallabees do just that.
Chalk it up to the suede
upper, the crepe sole,
the rugged stitching, or
the distinctive shape—
whatever the reason,
these moccasin-chukka
crossbreeds have quietly
earned their place as the
most versatile kicks
around. Clarks has been
turning out the originals
since 1967, but this sea-
son the fashion crowd
got in on the game, with
houses like Saint Laurent
and Tod’s making subtle
tweaks to a classic. An accent
Whether it’s imitation or color adds
homage, you can’t have personality.
too much of a good thing.
—Adrienne Westenfeld
Shoes ($695) by Tod’s; jeans
($250) by A.P.C.; socks ($165)
by the Elder Statesman.

66 Se pt e m b e r 2 01 8 _ E sq u ire ph otog raph : Bra d Ogbo nna

 # W A T C H B E Y O N D

BR V2-94 RACING BIRD · Bell & Ross Inc. +1.888.307.7887 · e-boutique: www.bellross.com
STACYADAMS.COM
 VERSACE ALEXANDER McQUEEN

BOSS JOHN VARVATOS

BELT IT OUT
• • • By nature I’m more of a backpack guy, but when I saw the new
Burberry belt bag for the first time in London, I did a double take.
The size is perfect, and the contrasting belt is really snazzy (though
you can get it in black too, if you prefer). Best of all, the leather
Bigger, bolder, brasher—THE
SUIT TO BUY this fall takes a HARD LINE
—Matthew Marden
The chalk stripe has casual). For a few dark the texture beneath
always appealed decades it was adopted the jacket with a thick
to larger-than-life by Wall Street fat knit in a bold, earthy
types. Wider than a cats, but this fall the tone. Play with pattern
pinstripe and woven in stripe is returning to by adding a funky
rich lannel, the pattern form: Designers from argyle sweater, or pile
was a favorite with Hugo Boss to Versace on the outerwear for a
JFK, Salvador Dalí, and are knocking the dust more layered approach.
Winston Churchill (who off the pattern and A suit this bold will
would wear a chalk- reminding us that it support any styling
stripe jumpsuit while was always meant to be trick you can throw at
inspecting the troops, a statement. it—just bring enough
thereby inventing the So go ahead and get attitude to carry it off.
concept of business loud with it. Turn up —A . W.

S eptember 2018_Esquire 69
 the Code: Grooming

Verso Intense
Facial Mask
Feeling worse for wear?
This quenching sheet
mask is packed with
dermatologist favorites like
retinol and ceramides to
help reduce wrinkles.
$75; bloomingdales.com

Tom Ford
Intensive Purifying
Mud Mask
The mood ring of mud
masks, this thick,
clay-based formula turns
light gray as it extracts
oil, dirt, and toxins straight
from your pores.
$60; tomford.com

D O YO U B E L I E V E I N TA K I N G
C A R E O F YO U R S E L F ?
WE DON’T ENDORSE ALL OF PATRICK
BATEMAN’S PROCLIVITIES, BUT
THE MAN WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME WHEN
IT CAME TO SKIN CARE.

If you’ve noticed to resemble Hannibal

a surge of creepy
masks on Instagram
lately, Halloween hasn’t
come early. You’re
looking at the well-
groomed man’s secret
weapon: the sheet mask.
Why are guys so eager
Lecter? Because once
the mask comes of, its
beneits remain, namely
a potent cocktail of can deliver visible
vitamins and hydrating results in about 15
agents that’ll bring the
SOLID
most ravaged mug back
to glowing health. If moisturizer’s cruise
control. Just what •••
you want after a late
night at the oice (or
the bar). — A . W.

Grown Alchemist
Hydra- Repair
Cream-Masque
This mask/moisturizer
hybrid (use a nickel-
sized amount daily, or
slather it on once
a week) is rich in oil-
balancing botanicals
and hydrating
hyaluronic acid.
$69; davidpirrotta.com

ph otog raph s :
 *Cigar & Spirits Magazine
February 2018 Issue

**June 2018 Issue

PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY NOLET’S® Silver 47.6% Alc./Vol. (95.2 Proof)
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CRAFTED WITH OVER 325 YEARS

O F N O L E T FA M I LY E X P E R I E N C E

D I S C OV E R M O R E AT N O L E T S G I N .C O M
 the Code: How to Wear It

’SUP, LAYER?
GO AHEAD, work in some WARMER clothes.
Just don’t do it ALL AT ONCE.
• • • No one loves fall more
than I do, especially from a
style perspective. The end
of summer means a welcome
return to sweaters, thick
wools, and flannels. (It also
means I no longer have
to look at gobs of sweaty
flesh every time I go outside.
That’s another story.)
But here’s the thing about
fall style—you can’t rush the
season. You know these guys,
the season-rushers: They’re
the nerds who did what Mommy
told them and wore their
heavy fall clothes on the first
day of school, even though the
temperature still hovered in
Shoulder Season the 80s. These guys are
Paul Weller knew better than to run for a grown-up now and still making
parka at the first sign of a chill. the same mistakes. The trees
don’t drop their leaves all in
one day. So why do so many
AMI Officine men pull on topcoats the min-
Alexandre Générale ute the temperature dips be-
Mattiussi low 50? If it hit 50 in March,
you’d change into shorts and a
T-shirt. What gives?
September and October
should be a slow build, a
chance to incrementally layer
up. In these early days of cooler
weather, think about the pieces
you can add and subtract.
. . . and wrong During those chilly mornings,
The right . . . way throw a vest over your sport
to layer.
coat. When it warms up in
the afternoon, lose the coat and
keep the vest. That way, you’ll
look cool—not sweaty. —M.H.

THE ARSENAL
• • • You don’t need a
ton of new clothes to
ease into the season.
It’s about making
better use of the
stuff you’ve already
got. Here, three
cool-weather essen- The ideal core warmer—wear it over a When it’s as wet as it is cold, make a Try subbing in an unlined tweed blazer for a
tials and how to blazer or under, or use it to top off your breathable, water-resistant windbreaker light coat. You’ll look a lot sharper and stay
make the most of them. favorite sweater. Vest ($795) by Herno. your top layer. Jacket ($148) by Nautica. just as warm. Jacket ($358) by Brooks Brothers.

72 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _E sq u ire
Sleep In The Clouds

tomorrowsleep.com
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h[i[WhY^WdZcWdk\WĂkh_d][nf[hj_i[Xoj^[mehbZÉib[WZ_d]
ib[[f[nf[hjiWjI[hjWI_ccedi8[ZZ_d]$

Convenient <h[[(#):Wo ),+:Wo Efj_edWbI[jkf

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 ESQ Full Disclosure
IQ

Vanishing POINT
With the GOP acting like a PERSONALITY CULT, is there any RED LINE President Trump
could cross—DNA evidence? war with Germany?—that would cost him party support? “Doubtful,” say
a dozen top REPUBLICANS stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball. By Ryan Lizza

ark Sanford, a Republican con-

gressman from South Carolina

M who lost his seat in June after

sparring with the president on
several issues, has been think-
ing a lot about Hitler. He is
quick to point out that he is not comparing
Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. “Let me be
clear about that, okay?” he told me days after
he was defeated in a GOP primary that was
deined by one overriding question: Which
candidate was more slavishly devoted to the
president? It wasn’t really a contest.
Sanford, a brooding lone wolf among
House Republicans, has survived a lot in
his political career. He was a member of the
House in the nineties and then a popular
two-term governor, though his last two years
in oice were marred by his notorious “hik-
ing the Appalachian trail” adultery scandal.
He divorced his wife and narrowly averted
impeachment by the South Carolina legisla-
ture. After it was all behind him, he ran for
Congress again in a 2013 special election
and found that voters in the overwhelmingly
Republican district had forgiven him. But
that was ive long years ago.
In the Trump era, most Republicans,
when approached by reporters on Capitol
Hill, have learned to scurry away or feign an
important call on their cell phones to avoid
the inevitable questions about the most re-
cent lunatic comment from the president. “If
we tried to respond to everything the pres-
ident said, we’d never get anything done,”
said Lynn Jenkins, a House Republican from
Kansas who told me she saves her public con-
demnations of Trump for only his most egre-
gious statements, like the time he made up
a story about a female TV anchor “bleeding
badly from a face-lift.” But Sanford, while
still voting about 70 percent of the time with
Trump on legislation, hasn’t been shy about
criticizing the president, taking him to task
for everything from his budget (“a lie”) to
the Stormy Daniels scandal (“deeply trou-
bling”). As he told me, “You’re on whatever
show and they ask you about the latest cra-
zy tweet and you answer honestly: ‘That’s
crazy!’” His frankness, he said, “became dei-
nitional in this race.” Indeed, his opponent’s
most devastating TV ad simply strung to-
gether short, contextless clips of Sanford’s
Trump criticisms: “I have to disagree with
the president on this. . . . If he would just shut
up. . . . The guy said something stupid.” The
president inished Sanford of with an elec-
tion-day tweet calling him “nothing but trou-
ble” and making snide reference to his afair.
In her victory speech, Katie Arrington,
his opponent, made the lesson of the race
clear. “We are the party of President Don-
ald J. Trump,” she declared. Sanford told me
that when he saw her comment, he thought,
“What kind of parallel universe do I live in?”
Which brings us back to Hitler. Like any
good conservative, Sanford has studied and
reveres Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serf-
dom, the philosopher-economist’s 1944 ac-

78 Se pt e m b e r 2 018 _ E sq u ire illustration: T imothy Kre ider

count of how dictators take over democracies.
Again, he’s not comparing Trump to Hitler.
But still, he’s worried about America’s polit-
ical dysfunction, Trump’s “strongman” ain-
ities, and where that combination could lead.
He also brings up the fall of Athenian democ-
racy. “In part this is not a new movie,” he con-
cluded. “This is a replaying of a script that’s
played throughout the ages, but with incred-
ibly ominous possibilities if we don’t recog-
nize the dangers of the themes that are now
at play within American society.”
rrington was right. The GOP
is the party of Trump. Over
A the summer, as he hit the ive-
hundred-day mark of his pres-
idency, his Gallup approval
rating among his own party’s
members—87 percent—was higher than
that of any postwar president except George
W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. Trump famously
said that he could shoot someone on Fifth
Avenue and he wouldn’t lose supporters. A
year and a half into his term, that statement
has become more plausible than ever.
As the country awaits whatever conclu-
sions Robert Mueller’s Russia investiga-
tion brings, the most important question
in politics may be whether there is any red
line Trump could cross and lose signiicant
party support. Four and a half decades ago,
Republicans stuck with Richard Nixon un-
til incontrovertible evidence of his crimes
emerged. Democrats never abandoned Bill
Clinton because they believed his misdeeds
weren’t impeachable. What is the red line
for a contemporary GOP increasingly built
around a personality cult? I put that ques-
tion to a dozen Republicans in the House
and Senate, a mix from across the ideolog-
ical spectrum and from every region of the
country. The conversations revealed a lot
about the Trump GOP, but the red line, with
respect to Trump’s behavior generally, or
his conduct speciic to the Mueller probe,
was vanishingly thin and diicult to detect.
And every time you think you see it—pee
tape, porn-star liaison, erratic diplomacy,
threats to ire Mueller—it keeps moving.
As Republican senator Jef Flake of Arizona
put it, “I don’t know that there is one.”
Flake never supported Trump and has
been the president’s most consistent critic
in Congress, though one who still votes for
much of his agenda. When Flake was decid-
ing whether to run for reelection this year,
one of his political consultants told him there
was only one path: “You’ve got to be okay
with Trump’s policies or be quiet about them,
and be okay with his behavior or be quiet
about it.” Flake decided to retire instead.
80 Se pt e m b e r 2 01 8 _E sq u ire
A FEW ANTI-TRUMP
REPUBLICANS, LIKE
STEVE SCHMIDT,
OPENLY SUPPORT A
DEMOCRATIC TAKEOVER
OF CONGRESS.
Jenkins, the congresswoman from Kan-
sas, relayed a conversation she recently had
with a factory owner back home, who told her
that while the guys on his shop loor “hate”
Trump—they are from the Bible Belt, af-
ter all, she noted—“they love what he’s do-
ing.” She then ofered the most honest expla-
nation I’ve heard for this phenomenon. “It’s
kind of like supporting your favorite team
and there’s a talented trash-talking person-
ality on the other team,” she said. “That player
is the worst human being on the face of the
earth, but if that same talented player is on
our team, well, you know, they’re our team,
so we give him a pass.”
indsey Graham, a Republican
senator from South Carolina,
L was known as one of Trump’s
most vociferous critics. I
caught Graham on his cell
phone while he was visiting
Iraq in July. During the 2016 campaign, he
called Trump “a kook,” adding, “I think he is
unit for oice.” Graham is now much more
diplomatic, ofering himself up as a kind of
translator between the #NeverTrump move-
ment and the party’s base. On the plus side
for him were the judges, the tax cuts, the ight
against ISIS, and the withdrawal from the
Iran nuclear agreement. On the other side
were Trump’s “uncertainty about our com-
mitment” to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria;
his trade policy; and his lack of seriousness
about Russian meddling in American elec-
tions. “This constant minimizing of Putin
and his agenda—very problematic.”
Those were his toughest words for Trump.
I was surprised how much he was soft-selling
his well-known disagreements with the man
on foreign policy, especially Trump’s retreat
from defending our democratic allies. I asked
him if the American president was still the
leader of the free world. He paused for ive
seconds before telling me, “America First is
one or two things. It’s an understanding that
we’re a unique country and it’s about burden
sharing,” he said. “You gotta remember, he
won. I think when the president talks of how
other countries are taking advantage of us,
we’re ighting their wars, we’re spending too
much for their defense, that resonates with
people.” He never did answer the question.
Earlier this year, Graham made the case
that if Trump ired Mueller, “it would be the
end of President Trump’s presidency.” I asked
if he still believed that about Mueller. He let
out a deep sigh. “He’s done such a number
on this guy, I don’t know,” he said, referring
to Trump’s attacks on Mueller’s credibility.
Leonard Lance, a congressman from New
Jersey, was one Republican, albeit a moder-
ate, who volunteered a red line: “Personal col-
lusion by Trump with the Russians during the
campaign.” But if Republicans keep the House
and the Senate this fall, Trump will have a po-
litical fortress protecting him in Washington.
That prospect has led a few anti-Trump Re-
publicans, like Steve Schmidt, who ran John
McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to
openly support a Democratic takeover of Con-
gress. In their minds, there is no red line for
the GOP. I came to the same conclusion after
my hours of interviews.
Conservative Trump critics fear becoming
the next Sanford and stay quiet—what Flake
and others call the “don’t poke the bear”
mind-set. Meanwhile, many of the mod-
erate anti-Trump Republicans are leaving
oice. Congressman Ryan Costello, a Repub-
lican from Pennsylvania who decided to quit
(redistricting gave him a bluer constituency),
said, “If I were running for reelection, ev-
ery single time that I saw on the TV screen
that the president was going to hold another
rally, I’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ Because he’s go-
ing to say ifty things that aren’t accurate.”
Sanford has started to think seriously
about what he should do now to contain the
forces he says Trump has unleashed. “I came
back to Congress worried primarily about
debt, deicit, and government spending,” he
told me. “This thing, though, given my own
personal experiences, has begun to crowd in-
to that space, to say this is a bigger and more
clear and present danger to the republic than
even the debt and the deicit that I thought
was the end of the world.”
I asked Sanford: If he really believed what
he said about Trump, shouldn’t he too support
a Democratic takeover of the House or Sen-
ate? He paused for a long time, perhaps won-
dering how Friedrich Hayek might answer.
“I don’t know,” he inally said. “I mean, ev-
erybody’s going to come up with their own
remedy as to what you do next. I wouldn’t
say that’s mine.”
But he wouldn’t rule it out.
“I’m not there at this point,” he said. “Let
me just take one day at a time.”

Subjects for F U R T H E R I N Q U I RY
TEN AR TI ST S , WRITERS , and other CRE ATIVE
INSPIR ATIONS you might not know . . . but need to By Dwight Garner
SIGRID NUNEZ
KINGSLEY AMIS
A. J. LIEBLING
here’s no way to make your
life longer, H. L. Mencken re-
T minded us, but you can make
it wider. Always have a book
going; keep in contact with
music and art and movies.
What follows is a list of writers and artists—
also, as a curveball, there’s a radio station—
some of them lesser known, whose work is
life-, and mind-, expanding, who repay long
study, who just might make you happier to
be alive. This is the start of an occasional
series—let’s call it Subjects for Further In-
quiry—about certain people whose work
gives the mind wings.
FREDERICK SEIDEL: To read Seidel’s
ESQ Unconventional Wisdom
IQ
WILLIAM EGGLESTON
LES BLANK
A L L I S O N J A N A E H A M I LT O N
poetry—the book to buy is Poems: 1959–
2009—is to take a pagan holiday. His
poems are balefully vivid. Seidel writes
about life’s dark matter (death, envy, lust,
greed) with a jaunty lightness of hand. He
approaches happier topics with a disturb-
ingly wrinkled sort of buttoned-down
charm. You read him for the wrong rea-
sons, which is the best reason to read any-
one. Like a rapper, Seidel declaims upon
his wealth. He writes about good hotels,
hand-built Ducati motorcycles, and the
bikini-waxing habits of his younger girl-
friends. A poem called “Widening Income
Equality” begins, “I live a life of appetite
and, yes, that’s right / I live a life of privi-
LOUISE GLÜCK
FREDERICK SEIDEL
S A L LY T I M M S
lege in New York, / Eating buttered toast in
bed with cunty ingers on a Sunday morn-
ing. / Say that again? / I have a rule— / I
never give to beggars in the street who
hold their hands out.” I have no idea about
Seidel’s actual philanthropic practices, but
as a writer he gives and then gives again.
LOUISE GLÜCK: So many poems are like
lowers, fainting in their own vases. Glück’s
poems, like the thorns on a succulent, draw
blood. Pick up her book Poems 1962–2012
and scan any of the work from her three
best collections, Meadowlands, The Wild
Iris, and especially Ararat, which appeared
in 1990. These deal with family, often with
sisters, and they seem to have been etched
S eptember 2018_Esquire 81
in blood rather than ink. Come for the net-
tling put-downs (“your back is my favorite
part of you, / the part furthest away from
your mouth”), stay for her supple and inter-
rogating mind. Her name rhymes with click,
not cluck. Up at the top of the mountain of
American verse, those are her footprints.
WWOZ: New Orleans is more pricklingly
alive than other American cities for many
reasons, including this one: It has an insis-
tent, often elegiac soundtrack, supplied by
the nonproit radio station WWOZ. When
you’re in New Orleans, WWOZ is omni-
present. You move from Uber to bookstore
to bar and hear it everywhere, pouring out
of cars, tying the scenes of the day together
as if they were links of andouille sausage.
The city pulses to its Louisiana-centric
rhythms: blues and zydeco, gospel and tra-
ditional jazz, R&B and moony pop. The
best thing about WWOZ is that you can
stream it live on your home speakers. Turn
it on when you’re cooking or cleaning or
if your weltanschauung is a bit wobbly, to
quote a line from the poet A. R. Ammons.
WWOZ delivers a lot of shadoobies, to
steal an undervalued word from Mick Jag-
ger in “Shattered.” Its sound will turn your
day around.
SIGRID NUNEZ: I came late to the work
of this witty and philosophical New York
City–born novelist. She published a book
this year called The Friend, about a woman
who inherits, after the suicide of a friend,
his harlequin Great Dane. This sounds like
a setup for a romantic comedy, but Nunez
employs it as a pretext to talk superbly
about everything: love and loss and writ-
ing and the #MeToo movement. The Friend
was so good it sent me back to her earlier
novels, including A Feather on the Breath
of God, about immigrants and ballet, and
Salvation City, about a near-apocalyptic
plague. What’s the best feeling you can
have after reading a good book? The real-
ization that, lo, this writer has a backlist I
can dive into.
A.J. LIEBLING: The four horsemen of Amer-
ican food writing are Calvin Trillin (The
Tummy Trilogy), Jim Harrison (The Raw
and the Cooked), John Thorne (Outlaw
Cook), and A. J. Liebling (Between Meals).
If you are a serious feeder and aren’t famil-
iar with these books, then you are slacking.
Liebling’s Between Meals is my sentimen-
tal favorite among them. It’s an account of
this New Yorker writer’s apprenticeship as
an eater in Paris in the 1920s. Liebling con-
tends that the rich are doomed to be dil-
ettantes at the table because they’re not
forced to experiment and eat around the
margins. Above all, he’s good company. He
82 Se pt e m b e r 2 01 8 _ E sq u ire
“You wouldn’t believe how far I had to go to find ice.”
quotes a friend who steers clear of society
women because “they kissed as if they were
sipping creme de menthe through a straw.”
KINGSLEY AMIS: The English novelist
Kingsley Amis wrote many books worth
knowing about, in many genres. The one
I return to most is Everyday Drinking, a
compendium of his writing about the art of
making and consuming wine and cocktails.
This book brims with arcane wisdom; one
of his hangover cures is to read the final
lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost, another
is to “go up for half an hour in an open aero-
plane, needless to say with a non-hungover
person at the controls.” If you are debating
going on a diet, read this book irst. Heed
Amis’s core advice: “The irst, indeed the
only, requirement of a diet is that it should
lose you weight without reducing your alco-
holic intake by the smallest degree.”
SALLY TIMMS: Timms is one of the cen-
tral members of the indispensable British-
American rock band the Mekons, which
started as an art collective and is still thrill-
ingly alive after more than forty years.
(Everyone has his or her favorite Mekons
album. Mine, somewhat unorthodoxly,
is So Good It Hurts, from 1988. Slip the
songs “Ghosts of American Astronauts”
and “Dora” into your current playlist.)
Timms’s solo albums, notably Cowboy Sally
and Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for
Lost Buckaroos, are more than worthwhile.
She bends Americana to her own strange,
steely English whims.
LES BLANK: Is it possible that Blank, a doc-
umentarian, was the most important ilm-
maker of the twentieth century? Some
days I think so. He was certainly the fresh-
est, funkiest, and most easygoing. He’s best
known for Burden of Dreams, an epic about
the tortured filming of Werner Herzog’s
Fitzcarraldo. But it’s his smaller movies
that sting your curiosity and bring a smile
to your face. One is about garlic, another
about the appeal of gap-toothed women.
In another, Herzog, after losing a bet, is
forced to eat his shoe. (Alice Waters of
Berkeley’s Chez Panisse bathed the shoe
for hours in garlic, herbs, and duck fat.)
See also: A Poem Is a Naked Person, about
the southern rocker Leon Russell. A favor-
ite moment: when Russell devours a plate
of chicken, rice, and beans onstage as if to
say, This is home.
ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON: This young
black American artist, born in Kentucky
and raised in Florida and western Ten-
nessee, is one to watch. Her photographs,
sculptures, and installations are in touch
with folklore and myth yet they seem irre-
ducibly modern. She often employs taxi-
dermy in her work, to sublime efect. See:
her 2015 photograph The Hours, from a
series called Sweet Milk in the Badlands.
Hamilton’s irst solo show is currently at
MASS MoCA and pulling more than its
own weight. This artist is turning over deep
soil. It’s hard not to look forward to what
she does next.
WILLIAM EGGLESTON: Born in Mem-
phis, raised in Mississippi, Eggleston is
the éminence grise of southern photogra-
phy. A house without one of his books in it
is barely a house. He’s credited with help-
ing legitimize color photography, but it’s
his darkly realistic eye for quotidian scenes
that swamps you over and over again. Let
us turn for guidance to Eudora Welty,
who wrote that a typical Eggleston photo-
graph might include “old tyres, Dr. Pep-
per machines, discarded air-conditioners,
vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-
Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles
and power wires, street barricades, one-
way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs,
parking meters and palm trees crowding
the same kerb.” He is sui generis.
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 CTI ON
F I
U IRE
ESQ

CHE R R Y
AN EXCLUSIVE BY NICO WALKER
NOVEL: A SEA EXCERPT FRO
R I N G , B R U TA L M THE SEASON’S MO
, A L L-T O O - ST TA L K E D -A B
BY THE AUTHO A M E R I CA N TA OUT
R’S OWN DE- LE INSPIRED
SOLDIER TO H EVOLUTION FR
EROIN ADDICT OM STUDENT
AND BANK ROBBER AND
Photographs by ROBIN BROADBENT

EMILY’S GONE to take a shower. The room’s half-dark and I’m get-
ting dressed, looking for a shirt with no blood on it, not having any
luck. The pants are fucked too—cigarette burns in the crotches. All
heroin chic, like I were famous already.
I go downstairs. Livinia pissed in the living room. There’s a lake of
piss. I say, “Livinia, goddamn,” yet low enough that she won’t hear me.
She’s a good dog; just we’ve been some fucks about house-training her.
I get the paper towels and a bottle of spray. There’s a pack of Pall
Malls on the kitchen counter. I shake one loose and light it on the
stove. I check the rigs in the cupboard. The rigs in the cupboard are
all blood-used and crooked, like instruments of torture. And there are
two lengths of nylon in the cupboard, and a box of Q-tips and a digital
scale, two spoons with old cottons in them. The needles on the rigs are
dull, but they’ll have to do. Emily has to be at school by ten, and it’ll be
a close-run thing. There won’t be time to buy new rigs till afterward.
It’s twenty to nine but I think we’ll make it. Black should be on time
today, and he’ll have something for us, so I’m not worried. I soak the
piss up with the paper towels. I wipe the spot down with disinfectant,
throw the used paper towels away.
Black pulls up in the driveway, and I let him in the side door. He
hands me a .45-caliber pistol wrapped in a blue rag; and I say, “Let me
hold another gram.”
He says okay. “This’ll make it seven twenty,” he says.
“No problem.”
I get the scale for him, and he sets to weighing out a gram. I say, “It
was three light yesterday.”
He knows. But he doesn’t say anything. That’s how they do it: They
short you, they know they shorted you, and then they act like you’re the
one who’s fucked up.
“Remember I called you about it?”
He remembers. But he’s got to make things stupid because he’s a
dope boy.
I say, “C’mon. Don’t be fucked-up. You said I owe you money for it
like it was right. And it isn’t like I’m not gonna have you together real
soon.”
He says okay.
I go to the stairs and call up to Emily. “Hey, sweetheart. Black’s here.
Come down and do some of this dope with me.”
She says she’ll be down in a second.
I split the heroin up and set out some clean spoons: one for me, one
85
for my best girl. I ill a glass with water and
draw some out with a rig. I press the water out
hard to break up any blood clots in the needle.
I draw some more water out and add the
water to the spoon. I hear Emily on the stairs,
and I stir the heroin up with the water and go
over to the stove. Emily says hi to Black. Black
says hi. I say to Emily, “That’s you over there
on the counter.”
She says, “Thank you, baby.”
I turn the burner on low and cook the shot
on the lame till the shot starts to hiss a little;
then I take it off. Emily’s rolled up a bit of
cotton for me. She knows I’m in a hurry. Her
hair is still wet. I take the cotton and drop it
into the spoon. The cotton turns dark and
swells. I draw the shot through the cotton and
lick the air out of the rig. What’s left in the
rig looks pretty dark.
She says, “Are you doing all yours right
now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you sure that’s wise, baby?”
“It’ll be alright. If I can’t get more real soon
then I don’t see as it’ll matter.”
It hurts a little extra when the needle’s dull
like this. It can make it hard to hit a vein. But
I hit a vein no problem, and this is a good
omen. It’s going to be a lucky day.
I shoot it.
The taste comes on first; then the rush
starts. And it’s all about right, the warmth
bleeding down through me. Till the taste
comes on stronger than usual, so strong
it’s sickening. And I igure it out: how I was
always dead, my ears ringing.
I’M ON the kitchen loor and my balls
are cold.
Emily’s over me: “Come on.”
I lift my head. I look at Emily. I look at
Black. Black is backed against the counter. I
want to laugh in his face, but I can’t.
Emily’s hands are cold. “Talk to me!”
My pants are undone and there are ice
cubes in my underwear.
“Did you put ice cubes in my underwear?”
“I thought you were going to die,” she says.
“The day’s still young.”
And I see she’s about to cry. I say, “I’m
sorry. I was only kidding. It was good of you
to do that. There’s no reason for you to be
embarrassed. You did a good job.”
“You fucking piece of shit!”
“Goddamn, lady. What do you want from
me?”
I get up of the loor and I go to the sink and
start digging the ice cubes out of my under-
wear. My cock can be seen; it’s cold, not
making a good show of it.
“If I’d have known this was gonna happen
I’d have cut my pubic hair.”
Black exits the kitchen.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Do yours, babe. We’re gonna
have to get you to school and it’s almost nine.”
I pick the ice trays up from off the floor.
86 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
There are three diferent kinds of ice trays:
green, blue, and white. I ill them all up in the
sink and put them back in the freezer.
BLACK IS in the living room. I draw a
picture for him: “This is Lancashire, this is
Hampshire, this is Coventry. I’ll park here, up
past the stop sign, up past where it’s one-way.
You pick me up and take me over to Lan-
cashire. Stop a couple buildings back from the
corner and let me out. Then drive to the park-
ing lot behind this storefront. Wait for me
“The rigs in the
cupboard are all blood-used
and crooked, like
instruments of torture.”
there. I’ll be in and out real quick and I’ll come
around through here. Then all you’ll have to do
is drive me up to where I parked and let me out
and that’ll be that. We’ll meet back here, split
the money up, yada yada yada. Sounds good?”
“Yeah. Sounds good.”
“So you’re up for it then?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright. Just give me a second and we’ll go.
Emily has to teach a class at ten.”
She’s in the kitchen, feeling better now.
I say, “I’m heading out. I’ll be back in a
minute.”
She says, “Be careful.”
I say I’ll be careful.
WE LIVE on a street of red and white
houses, where we don’t belong, Emily and
I. But we’re happy enough, though we’re
often sad because we feel like we’re losing
everything.
Sometimes she gets to carrying on real loud
and screaming at me about shit like I can help
it; and I have to say to her, “What the fuck is
wrong with you? Are you fucking crazy? Why
are you making all this noise like you’re being
murdered? Are you being murdered? Am I
murdering you? The neighbors will think I’m
murdering you. And they’ll call the fucking
police. And the police’ll come over here, and
they’ll see me, and they’ll say, ‘This guy looks
like the one’s been doing all these fucking rob-
beries.’ And then I’ll go to fucking prison, and
you’ll feel terrible.”
And sometimes she says she’s sorry. Or
sometimes she doesn’t say anything. Or
sometimes she punches me in the neck. And
I’ll say, “Ah, shit! Baby, why’d you punch me
in the neck?”
And she’ll run upstairs and lock her-
self in the bathroom and not come out for
hours while I’m downstairs crying my eyes
out over her. I love her so much it feels
like dying every time she does that. She’s a
beauty and I tell her so all the time. I think
she’d do anything for me.
I GET in the car and back out into the
street. I’m behind Black at the light. I don’t
especially like Black because he’s always on
some bullshit. Still, he’s alright as far as dope
boys go. All his brothers are in jail.
The arrow’s green and Black makes a left.
I follow him and pass him going up Cedar.
The morning is overcast, but it’s bright
nonetheless—a bright overcast morning! In
just-spring! And maybe it will stay this way
forever. It would be nice, but it’s a childish
thing to wish for.
I go past South Taylor, past the pharmacy,
past the abandoned KFC, past the Wendy’s,
past the high school, past the movies, past Lee
Road, another pharmacy, more houses, and
I’m twenty-ive years old and I don’t under-
stand what it is that people do. It’s as if all this
were built on nothing, and nothing were hold-
ing this together. And then I hear people talk,
and that just makes things worse.
I didn’t make the light at Meadowbrook. I
turn right at Coventry and follow it down to
Hampshire and turn left. Here the street signs
are painted to look like they’ve been tie-dyed.
I used to live here before they did that. Then
I couldn’t anymore. It was like finding out
you’d had some shit on your face the whole
time you’d been talking.
I go up Hampshire where it’s one-way and
the brick apartment buildings on either side.
Some of the apartments have balconies. And
the trees are nice. I don’t understand them
either but I like them. I think I’d like them
all. It’d have to be a pretty fucked-up tree in
order for me not to like it.
The lane is two-ways with houses on either
side after the stop. Some of the houses are
duplexes, some are single-family homes, and
they all look nice, and there are more trees,
and bigger ones. I turn around in the street
and park at the curb. Black pulls up and I get
into his car. He cuts over and turns left onto
Lancashire. He drives down and stops a little
ways back from the corner. There is nothing
more left to do now.
SOMEWHERE ALONG the way I got into
this, and it’s become a habit with me. One
thing leads to another, leads to another.
Things get better, they get worse. Then one
day you’re all the way thrown out, before you
ever knew it was that serious. And you might
be crazy, and you might have a gun, but even
then it’s usually no big deal.
I have the door open and the car chimes.
“I’ll be quick, so you might as well start now.
You know where you’re going, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Just make the irst left three times and you
can’t go wrong.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure you want to do this? Because
you don’t look like you do. It isn’t too late to
change your mind.”
“I’m good.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you in the parking lot in
about two minutes, give or take. Please be
there.”
 He says, “I got this.”
“Too easy, right?”
“Too easy.”
I’M ON the sidewalk. I’m an Indians hat
and a red scarf. I’m a blue hoodie and a white
button-down shirt, some jeans, white Adidas,
nothing out of the ordinary. The gun is in my
waist. I pull the scarf up before I go by the
ATMs, and the scarf covers the lower half
of my face. It’s a little late for it to do any
good; I’ve been at this awhile now, and it’s no
secret what my face looks like. And here’s a
guy walking out and I’m at the door going in
and I’m not worried. I’m through the door,
and I have the gun out so everybody can see:
“NO ALARMS. I’M A WANTED MAN.
THEY’LL KILL ME.”
I’M ONLY kidding around. And I think
everybody knows as much. But this is never-
theless a holdup, and I’ll need some money
before I’ll leave.
I walk to the counter, with the gun down
now so it’s pointed at the floor. There’s no
sense in making a big deal out of this. One
thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly
robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be
rude. About 80 percent of the time, so long as
you’re not rude, the women don’t mind when
you hold up the bank; probably it breaks up
the monotony for them. Of course there are
exceptions; about 20 percent have a bad out-
look. Like there was one lady, looked like
Janet Reno, wouldn’t come off a cent more
than $1,800; she’d have seen everybody dead
before she’d have come of another cent. She
actually thought the bank was right. But this
was a fanatic. Usually the tellers are pretty
cool: You give them a note or tell them you’re
there to do a robbery, and they go in the cash
drawers and lay the money on the counter,
and you take it and you leave and that’s all
there is to it. Really it’s very civilized. It’s like
a quiet joke you’ve shared with them. I say
joke because in my case I don’t imagine there
was ever one to believe I’d do anything seri-
ous if push came to shove, though I do make it
a point to try and at least look a little deranged
because I don’t want anyone getting in trou-
ble on account of me. I have a lot of sadness
in the face to make up for, so I have to make
faces like I’m crazy or else people will think
I’m a pussy. The risk you run is that some-
times people think you’re a crazy pussy. But
I have to do what I can; otherwise her man-
ager might say to her, “Why’d you give that
pussy the money? You’re ired!” And she goes
home and tells the kids there isn’t going to be
any Christmas.
It doesn’t matter. Here is a teller. I say to
her, “It’s nothing personal.”
And do you know we recognize each other!
There was another robbery, on the West Side,
Lakewood, maybe a month ago (the days run
together). I robbed the other teller, but she
was there too. It was funny how it happened.
88 Excerpted from Cherry, by Nico Walker, to be published on August 14 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
The other teller laid $1,400 on the counter
and said it was all she had. I remember the lie
in her voice and thinking, This poor woman
thinks I’m retarded. But then what did I care?
She was pretty and it wasn’t like I wanted
everything; I only ever wanted what was
enough for now.
So now I’m robbing this teller and we’ve
recognized each other and it isn’t a big deal.
I don’t think she’s against me. I think maybe
we’re the same age. She’s pale as I am. And
her hair is dark. Her eyes are blue with lecks
of gold in them, and I could be in love with
her if things had been different. And then
maybe we are somewhere.
I say, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Vanessa.”
“I’m sorry, Vanessa.”
“What’s your name?”
“You’re funny, Vanessa.”
She empties out the cash drawers quickly,
which is good as I’m not trying to hang out—
there’s a police station not a quarter mile
from here. I take the stacks of money of the
counter and shove them into my pockets. It
looked alright: It doesn’t matter, it isn’t ever
very much. It’s like smash-and-grab, like hit-
and-run: The important thing is to get away.
The important thing is to run fast.
I slam through the doors going out and
round the corner, go past the ATMs. But I
don’t run back up the street; I turn and run
behind the bank, past the dumpster, past the
place where I used to live upstairs, then down
the steps in back of the almost vegetarian
restaurant, to the chain-link fence. And the
parking lot is there, but I don’t see Black. And
I’m not at all surprised as this is typical fuck-
ing dope-boy behavior.
The important thing is don’t run.
My car is a block away and I think I can
make it. So this isn’t the end of the world. The
parking lot’s three sides where it’s walls and
the walls full of windows looking down on me.
I take my hat of and put the gun in my hat.
The gun’s heavy on account of it’s full of bul-
lets. It’s full of bullets because I can’t imag-
ine it being anything else. It’s really too heavy
The author, Nico Walker, a former
Iraq-war medic with two years left in an eleven-year prison
sentence for holding up a bank.
to go carrying in a hat, but this arrangement
will have to work as I have a ways to go and I
don’t want the gun trying to de-pants me in
the getaway.
I walk down more steps that go into the
parking lot, carrying my hat, with the gun in
my hat, with my hat in my left hand. There’s
no one else in the parking lot when I cross it.
The gun in my hat still isn’t well hidden. I take
my scarf of while I’m walking and I ball it up
some and place it on top of the gun in my hat
and it’s a little better. Still there’s the money
sticking out of my pockets; I’ll need to be care-
ful that none falls out. I go left when I get to
the sidewalk, and I’m walking up Hampshire.
They’ll be coming up Mayfield, and if they
catch me I’m fucked.
Sometimes I wonder if youth wasn’t wasted
on me. It’s not that I’m dumb to the beauty of
things. I take all the beautiful things to heart,
and they fuck my heart till I about die from it.
So it isn’t that. It’s just that something in me’s
always drawn me away, and it’s the singular
part of me, and I can’t explain it.
There’s nobody out here except me and
one other guy; he’s on the same sidewalk as I
am, coming toward me from the other end of
the block. We will meet eventually. I see he’s
dressed like an old-timer, and that’s good: If
he’s old then I doubt he gives a fuck about
what I’m up to. The important thing is don’t
act like you robbed a bank.
Act like you have places to go and people to
see.
Act like you love the police.
Act like you never did drugs.
Act like you love America so much it’s
retarded.
But don’t act like you robbed a bank.
And don’t run.
The important thing is don’t run.
The sirens coming up Mayield now, and the
grass is like a teenage girl. And the stoops!—
the stoops are fucking wondrous! There’s a
fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big
wet juicy bag of garbage—look at them go!
The big swinging-dick starling’s got all the
other starlings scared. He’ll be the one who
gets the choicest garbage!
This is the beauty of things fucking my heart.
I wish I could lie down in the grass and chill for
a while, but of course this is impossible; the gun
in my hat could be a little obvious, the money
sticking out of all my pockets too. And the
sirens telling everyone I’m a fucking scumbag.
I bet they hope I’ll try something so they can
drink my blood and tell their women about it.
I say good morning to the old-timer. He
says good morning. And if he suspects me of
wrongdoing, he is good enough not to men-
tion it. We go about our business.
I’m three-quarters there now.
So maybe I get away.
And here come the sirens.
Here come their fucking gangsters.
The sirens screaming now, now turning.
And I feel peaceful.
HUGO BOSS FASHIONS INC. Phone +1 800 484 6267
 2018 ic k s
e r y le
v
a S t
M of
SOMEWHERE along the way, guys
all started dressing alike. And they look
sharp, sure. But also. . . safe. Which is why
we’re here to lift up the rule breakers,
the renegades. The ones who can pull off
a salmon-colored suit or a bleached-blond
MOHAWK without batting an eye.
HERE’S to the EIGHT men
(and ONE woman) who
PROVE that there’s a lot to be
said for dressing dangerously.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAITLIN CRONENBERG STYLING BY M AT T H E W M A R D E N
93
 Coat and trousers by Yohji Yamamoto; sneakers by Yohji Yamamoto x Adidas.

Ste
McQ ve
uee
TH
E
E
n
D i re
cto
r, 4
8
XA
C
EY TING
E

Style isn’t just about what leries for more than two
you’re drawn to—it’s about decades now, from quiet, sear-
where you come from. That’s ing works like Shame to the
director Steve McQueen’s take. unlinchingly brutal 12 Years
“I’m a working-class Londoner,” a Slave (which won the Oscar
he says. “When you think for Best Picture). You might ex-
of London, you think of pect someone with McQueen’s
rockers, punks, skinheads. The success to resist change, but
three-quarter pants, the you’d be underestimating him.
close-cropped hair. It’s very Up next is something entirely
London, whatever I do.” new. Widows, which he adapted
It’s itting that McQueen prefers from a British television show
clothing by designer Yohji with Gone Girl author Gillian
Yamamoto, whose avant-garde Flynn, will see a stacked cast of
approach taps into that women conspiring to settle a
same rebel energy. debt from their dead husbands’
“There’s an ease with his crimes. It’s a diferent story
clothes, and a kind of movement for McQueen to tell and a
interpreted in the fabric or in chance to take his directorial
the cut. It’s very much matched style in new directions.
to me and my body,” says “I’m looking for truth in what-
McQueen, who walked the run- ever I do,” he says. “I don’t like
way for Yamamoto in 2008. the idea of putting a stencil on a
The director has unveiled narrative. I want the narrative
visionary films in theaters and to tell me how it wants to be seen.”
art installations in swanky gal- —A drie nne We ste nfe ld

94
 John Mulaney remembers the
exact moment he decided to up-
grade his stand-up uniform.
He was performing in Atlanta,
wearing the same lannel-and-
jeans outit as everyone in the au-
dience. “I thought, Oh! There’s
no reason I should be talking up
here,” he says. So while ilming his
irst Netlix special, New in Town,
he decided he’d try out some
tailoring. “It was funny to me to
be a twenty-eight-year-old in a
suit, yelling at everyone.”
Mulaney’s had an epic run ever
since, including national tours,
a Broadway run alongside Nick
Kroll in Oh, Hello, voice work
Right: Grooming by Sussy Campos using KEVIN.MURPHY & Milk Makeup. Left: Production by Danny Needham at Rosco Production. Grooming by Ciona Johnson-King at Aartlondon.
The comedian likes suits from
Paul Smith for their it, and
because they come in shades that
folks can spot from the cheap
seats. “They have a great variety
of popping-up-in-front-of-dark-
curtains-colored suits,” he says.
Not that a suit should be a
gimmick. If anything, Mulaney
thinks guys should wear them
more often.
“If you’ve got a blazer, a dress
shirt, dress shoes, and then you
put on jeans? Just wear a suit,” he
says. “People say, ‘I don’t want
to look too dressy,’ but unless it’s
a wedding that insists everyone
dress like Edward Sharpe

on the raunchy puberty comedy and the Magnetic Zeros, no one’s

Big Mouth, and two more acclaimed going to be upset.” —Jon Roth
stand-up specials. For his latest,
the Emmy-nominated Kid
Gorgeous, he sold out Radio City
Music Hall for all seven engage-
ments. You can’t attribute all that
success to good tailoring, but
something about his clothes tugs at
the tensions in his comedic style:
formal, then absurd. Wholesome,
then suddenly dark.

h n y
J o
n e
u l a n ,3
5
TI
N
dia
M Co
me
E ST S
WI

A RP NES
E SH USI
TH E B
TH

Jacket, sweater, and trousers by Paul Smith.

 The way he moves
across the concert
stage—strutting,
swaggering, shirtless—you could
peg Matty Healy, frontman of
Brit group The 1975, as rock ’n’
roll’s second coming. But Healy’s
got no interest in re-creating the
past. He may have rock-god cha-
risma, but he’s topped the charts
with a distinctly millennial savvy.
Take The 1975’s sound. It’s a
genre-hopping mash-up that
references everyone from Talking
Heads to One Direction. Tracks
vary wildly in sensibility because
the band aims to write songs for
the streaming generation rather
than monumental albums.
“We create in the way we con-
sume,” Healy says. And that
onstage persona? It’s more
impersonation than emulation.
He has said that no one can be an
unironic rock star today.
Healy favors cool-kid design-
ers like Raf Simons and Hedi
Slimane, but when asked about
personal style icons, he’s charac-
teristically unbound by era,
aesthetic, or gender. “There’s too
much to choose from,” he says.
“There’s people who I think
are chic as fuck, though. Michelle
Pfeifer in the nineties.
Seal in the ‘Crazy’ video. Jackie
Kennedy. Nick Cave.”
This fall, fans will get more
of Healy’s reference-rich inven-
tion with The 1975’s new
album, A Brief Inquiry into
Online Relationships, followed by
yet another album in the spring.
One thing Healy unironically
shares with the outsized rock
legends of yore? The conviction
that more is more. —J. R.

at t y
M LY
E A
H Mus
icia n, 29

THE
N
O DER
TM
P O S P S TA R
PO
Jacket, shirt, trousers, and sunglasses by Dior Men.

96
 Is there any role
Right: Hair by Lona Vigi using Oribe. Makeup by Adam Breuchaud for Dior Beauty. Nails by Erin Moffett using Chanel Le Vernis. Location: The Chateau Marmont. Left: Production by Danny Needham at Rosco Production. Grooming by Ciona Johnson-King at Aartlondon.
Dress, boots, and ring by Givenchy.
Sarah Paulson can’t
inhabit? She’s played
conjoined twins, a medium,
a witch, and a journalist—and
that’s just in the American
Horror Story universe.
The actress resists categoriza-
tion on the red carpet, too, where
she’s shaking up Hollywood’s
predictable fashion scene. At the
London premiere of Ocean’s 8,
she wore a pink Valentino gown
that was equal parts arty and
feminine, then went punk for the
New York premiere in an electric

PaS A R
lime-green Prada number. “I look
like a giant highlighter,” she later

ul A H
joked. We call it a bright spot.
If anyone knows Paulson
at her core, it’s Ryan Murphy,
with whom she’s collaborated TH
soAc
t re
nonstop since Nip/Tuck in 2004.
The partnership isn’t likely
RE
E

D-
n ss
,4
3
to end anytime soon. “He makes
CH
AM CA
EL RP
me feel seen,” Paulson says. “You EO ET
N
don’t leave somewhere where
you’re being celebrated and chal-
lenged. It’s like being in a mar-
riage that works.” That marriage
has garnered Paulson six
Emmy nominations, and a win
for American Crime Story.
Paulson’s back on the big
screen next fall as part of the stel-
lar cast of The Goldfinch. She will
also return to another Murphy
project—playing Nurse Ratched
in a Netlix series exploring the
origin story of everyone’s favor-
ite battle-ax. We bet you’ll
hardly recognize her. —A. W.
 Ludwig
GÖRANSSON
Composer, producer, 33

THE HIT MAKE R

Left: Grooming by Sussy Campos using KEVIN.MURPHY & Milk Makeup. Right: Production by Danny Needham at Rosco Production. Grooming by Ciona Johnson-King at Aartlondon.
Style comes in stages. First, you
score a few compliments. Later,
friends ask, “Where’d you get
that?” When you’ve really
made it, people start stealing
your damn clothes. Swedish
composer Ludwig Göransson hit
that last level at his bachelor
party, when he briely left a suede
Lanvin jacket—wallet inside—
behind at a table. It was gone
when he came back. “It was a
fashion thief,” Göransson says,
since someone later found his
valuables. “Whoever took it just
wanted the jacket.”
Also in demand from Görans-
son? His virtuosic musical
abilities. He started out day-
jobbing the scores of New Girl
and Community and has since
evolved into an indispensable
collaborator to the likes of
Childish Gambino, Ryan Coogler,
and Chance the Rapper. Not
necessarily what you’d expect
from an artist who hails from
the land of EDM. (You can
thank Donald Glover for the
introduction to rap.) Göransson
mashed modern hip-hop into
the Rocky theme for Creed, laid
down Black Panther’s thump-
ing afrobeats, and coproduced
Gambino’s next-level hit “This
Is America,” which is why you
could see him in anything from
a dashiki to a bomber jacket.
“When I go into the studio,
I’m trying to dress up to the
way I want my music to
sound,” he says. “It makes it
easier to connect and create.”
Jacket, shirt, trousers, and tie by Boss; Gucci ring and vintage signet ring, Göransson’s own.
—Brady Langmann
 B il l Y
H
NIG o r, 6
8
Act GE
H AN
K- C
UIC T
TIS
E Q
TH
A R

If you want Bill Nighy to look

his best, put him in a suit.
He’s got the build to carry them
of with ease. But in the course
of his ive-decade career, the
Golden Globe–winning actor
has learned a hard truth: The
costume department isn’t there
to make him look good.
Take the motion-capture suit
that transformed Nighy into
half-man, half-mollusk Davy
Jones in the Pirates of the
Caribbean series. “I had to wear
computer pajamas with white
bubbles all over them and a white
skullcap with a white bubble on
top,” Nighy says. “People pit-
ied me. They would avert their
eyes because I looked sad, and
I couldn’t have agreed more. I
knew how sad I looked.”
The actor’s other roles have run
the sartorial gamut, from his
Tony-nominated performance in
Skylight (charcoal suiting) to
his turn as a word-vomiting
rocker in Love Actually (snakeskin
pants). Ofstage, he opts for sim-
ple, navy-colored dress clothes.
“It occurred to me that I’ve spent
most of my life just slightly
overdressed,” he says. “Jarvis
Cocker had a good response when
asked why he always wore a suit.
He said, ‘Well, you never
know who you’re gonna bump
into.’” —B. L.

Suit by Thom Sweeney; shirt by Margaret Howell; tie by Drake’s; loafers by Church’s.

99
 Brian
T YREE
Henry
Actor, 36
THE SCENE-STEALER

The best piece of direction that

Brian Tyree Henry, a Yale School
of Drama alumnus, ever received
came from South Park’s Trey
Parker during a rehearsal of the
Broadway musical The Book of
Mormon. “I had some dialogue,”
Henry says, “and at the end of
it, Trey was like, ‘Cool. Now just
add a bunch of fucks in there.’ ”
Henry is best known for play-
ing Alfred, aka Paper Boi,
Donald Glover’s rap-star cousin
and meal ticket on FX’s Atlanta.
The show’s second season
(which earned Henry an Emmy
nom) smartly focused on Alfred’s
ambivalence about celebrity

Left: Grooming by Ruth Fernandez. Right: Grooming by Jodie Boland using Lab Series Skincare for Men.
and the toll of carrying his
entourage. This fall, he’ll appear
in both Steve McQueen’s Wid-
ows and Barry Jenkins’s If Beale
Street Could Talk.
There is a scene in the Atlanta
episode “Woods” in which
Alfred’s girlfriend tries to per-
suade him to buy a pair of velvet
slippers. Henry would need no
convincing. The actor is given
to bold prints, statement jewelry,
and velvet evening jackets.
“When I enter a room, I want
you to know I entered,” he says.
When asked about his acting
Suit and shirt by Boss; sneakers by Vans; jewelry, Henry’s own.
idols, his answer is just as decisive
(and unexpected). “Laurie Metcalf
is the—capital THE, underline
the—actor that I was like, ‘I want
to be her.’ ” —Ash Carter

10 0
 Few theatrical mo-
ments match the
conclusion of Henrik
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, when
housewife Nora Helmer slams
the door on her marriage and
her children. For decades, play-
wrights have taken unsuccessful
stabs at dreaming up what
happened next. Then came
Lucas Hnath, who took his au-
dacious sequel, A Doll’s House,
Part 2, all the way to Broadway,
and a landmark eight Tony nomi-
nations. A gutsy high-low
fusion, the new play finds Nora
knocking on that same door

A S ifteen years later, a successful

C h feminist novelist who’s come

LU a t to demand a divorce.
Hnath cites his Orlando child-

H n wr
igh
t, 38
IS T
hood as one of his greatest inlu-
ences. “I grew up seven minutes
Pla
y
S I ON from Disney World,” he says.

IL LU “That acclimated me to delight-

TH
E ing in artiice.” In his wardrobe,
that translates into slim-itting
silhouettes, “self-consciously
theatrical” designers like Alex-
ander McQueen, and bohemian
lourishes. All that, and he has
one of the most luxurious manes
on the Great White Way.
“I hate that it’s become a bit
of a trademark, but I do like it
long,” he says. Every artist needs
a signature. —A. W.

Jacket by Maison Margiela; shirt by Bottega Veneta; trousers by Coach 1941; belt by Gucci.
 An artist can ind their
inspiration anywhere.
Raúl de Nieves found his in a
pair of heels. “I thought it would
be funny to wear them to a punk
show. People called me Grandma,
but it also made me more
approachable, because it started
a conversation,” he says. He then

A Ú L started incorporating them into

R e s his artwork—covering the shoes

i e v with cheap plastic beads until

de N Artist,
34
they took on their own organic
shapes. “I’m morphing these

S FOR MER everyday objects into something

T H E T R A N more magical,” de Nieves says.
The artist grew up in
Michoacán, Mexico, a place he
describes as a “huge artisan com-
munity” where craft truly was
an everyday practice. He immi-
grated to San Diego at nine, and
as an adult skipped art school,
saving the money and teach-
ing himself. He developed a
wide-ranging practice rooted in
sculpture and performance art.
In 2017, his reputation spiked
with his inclusion in the Whitney
Biennial. There he created a
thirty-eight-foot stained-glass
installation lanked by elaborately
costumed igures and beaded
sculptures. Innovative as ever,
de Nieves crafted his “stained
glass” out of tape and colored
paper. The inished product was
packed with imagery by turns
sacred, celebratory, and surreal.
These days, de Nieves wears
more sneakers than party
pumps—you need sensible shoes
to travel. In September, he’s got
shows in L. A. and Paris, and he’s
making plans for even bigger
projects. “Working on that scale
pushed me not to have limits,”
he says of the Whitney show. “I
made that stained-glass window Grooming by Jodie Boland using Lab Series Skincare for Men.
by myself in a basement with no
natural sunlight. I believed that
it would work, and it did. And it
was beautiful.” —J. R.

Coat, vest, and shirt by Versace; jewelry, de Nieves’s own. Casting by Emily Poenisch.

102
BOSS 0969

Henry Cavill
#SharpenYourFocus

boss.com
 From his $20-million-a-year perch at Today, Matt Lauer
turned NBC into his personal playground.
THEN, SUDDENLY, HE WAS GONE.
10 4
 BIRDMEN
From left:
Mark Halperin,
Andy Lack, Tom
Brokaw, Matt
Lauer, Billy
Bush, and Noah
Oppenheim.

BY

David
Usborne

But Lauer’s axing has only raised unsettling questions about

the NETWORK’S LEADERSHIP,
its boys’-club culture, and how it covered the #MeToo moment.

t was a little before dawn
on the last Wednesday in
November, and the robin-
egg blue of the slowly
brightening sky heralded
a fine day—good news
for NBC as it prepared for
the evening’s Christmas-
tree-lighting special,
hosted again by then-
ifty-nine-year-old Today
anchor Matt Lauer, at
Rockefeller Center, the
network’s home. Yet as
the crews for that morning’s broadcast iled
sleepily into Studio 1A, where Today is shot,
rumors had begun circulating. Lauer hadn’t
been to hair and makeup. He wasn’t in his
dressing room. His car hadn’t shown. Where
in the world was he?
Only a select few were in the know. Savannah
Guthrie, who’d cohosted Today since 2012,
received a call while en route to the studio.
Hoda Kotb’s phone had rung earlier. She’d
be cohosting with Guthrie from the top of
the show that day instead of starting at her
usual ten o’clock hour.
The digital clocks around Studio 1A read
06:45—ifteen minutes until airtime—when
executive producer Don Nash, whose youth-
ful mien belied his almost three decades at the
network, gathered everyone around. (Weeks
later, in a post-Lauer purge, Nash would be
ousted and replaced by Libby Leist, report-
edly a favorite of Guthrie’s.) In shock him-
self, Nash simply read a statement that was
NBC insisted that current management had known nothing
sources at the network say they had been HEAR
to be released minutes later to the press in the
name of Andy Lack, chairman of NBC News.
NBC had received a complaint from a col-
league about “inappropriate sexual behavior
in the workplace by Matt Lauer,” it began,
going on to say that the network had “reason
to believe this may not have been an isolated
incident.” Then the bomb drop: “We’ve
106 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
decided to terminate his employment.”
Everyone behind Studio 1A’s glass win-
dows was aghast. A few wept. Were they
really cutting Lauer loose?
He had been the breakfast company of mil-
lions for two decades, a trusted public persona,
and the marquee draw for a franchise that
earned the network hundreds of millions per
year. He was the face of the Olympics and the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, “the hunk
next door” with a reported salary of $20 mil-
lion a year, an apartment on the Upper East
Side, and three properties on Long Island (a
$36.5 million compound in North Haven, a
house in Sag Harbor, and a forty-acre horse
farm in Water Mill)—not to mention access
to chartered helicopters to whisk him from his
various homes to 30 Rock and back. Last year,
he purchased the lease on a sixteen-thousand-
acre ranch in New Zealand. He attended all
the right social events and knew all the right
people. On top of that, he was widely seen
as an entirely professional coworker, always
ready with a kind word. And now he was out.
Barely thirty-six hours earlier, the colleague
in question (who remains anonymous) had
arrived at NBC headquarters to meet with
the network’s human-resources and legal
departments. She was accompanied by Ari
Wilkenfeld, a famously determined civil-
rights lawyer with Wilkenfeld, Herend-
een & Atkinson in Washington, D. C. Lauer
had drawn her into an improper sexual rela-
tionship, she alleged. The details were kept
quiet, though they were relayed by neces-
sity to the top brass who’d have to decide
Lauer’s fate, including Lack.
It had already been a rough year for the
network. The previous September, Lauer
had received near-universal criticism for his
interviews with Hillary Clinton and Donald
Trump. (The New York Times called them a
“farce.”) In early October 2016, a tape was
discovered in the archives of Access Hol-
lywood, part of the NBC family, that had
then-candidate Trump boasting about us-
ing his celebrity to take advantage of women.
Its existence was eventually reported not by
NBC but by The Washington Post. Then in
October 2017, MSNBC’s Mark Halperin, a
ixture on the Sunday talk shows, was ired
for sexual misconduct.
On Tuesday, November 28—his last day
on the job—Lauer had been on set as usual.
Among the topics discussed: the engage-
ment of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
and preparations for the tree lighting.
Later that day, HR and Legal confronted
him: Were the allegations true? Lauer ad-
mitted that he’d had sexual relations with
the complainant and nothing more. But that
was enough. It fell to Lack, up to that point
a close friend, to go to Lauer’s eleven-room
Lenox Hill apartment that same evening to tell
him not to come to work the next morning, or
ever again. He would be denied the $30 million
reportedly remaining on his contract.
NBC was constrained from divulging
any conidential elements of the irst com-
plainant’s story in public. That put the net-
work in a bind. How to justify its treatment of
Lauer to staf members without ofering evi-
dence? In the end, Lack reportedly would of-
fer one clarifying nugget as he briefed shocked
senior Today stafers in the hours after Lauer’s
iring: The liaison had begun at the Sochi
Winter Olympics in Russia in 2014.
“NBC has a duty to maintain coniden-
tiality,” Wilkenfeld said in an interview on
Today two weeks later, “and they have not done
a good job of doing that. They know exactly
what they’ve done, and they need to stop.”
Lauer retreated to his home in the
Hamptons while his wife, Annette Roque,
who is filing for divorce, left for Den-
mark. His exile was swift and stun-
ning—another embarrassment for NBC.
ne midsummer morning in 2000,
Lauer used Today’s internal-
messaging system to get the atten-
tion of a production assistant
twenty years his junior named Addie
Zinone. “I hope you won’t drag me
to personnel for saying this,” he
wrote. “But you look fantastic.”
Zinone, who’d been a star athlete at Tem-
ple University in Philadelphia, was soon to
leave Today to become a newsreader at a West
Virginia ailiate. Her last gig for Today was to
be the 2000 Democratic National Convention
in Los Angeles, a few weeks away.
Not long after getting the irst message, she
received a second. “OK . . . NOW YOU’RE
KILLING ME,” it started, in capital let-
ters. “YOU LOOK GREAT TODAY! A BIT
TOUGH TO CONCENTRATE.”
The telegenic anchors of the post-Cronkite
era were rock stars of the broadcast world,
and many acted like it. When Nightline’s Ted
Koppel gave a eulogy for former ABC News
anchor Peter Jennings in 2005, he touched,
albeit coyly, on his late colleague’s prowess
in the “bedroom department.” “Peter was
 famously, at times notoriously, attractive to
women,” Koppel told the twenty-two hun-
dred mourners at Carnegie Hall. “Even so,
he only married four of them.”
Lauer, who paid his dues on local TV before
being tapped as a Today guest host in 1993,
had also earned something of a reputation.
“Women were throwing themselves at his
feet,” notes a senior source at the network
who counts himself among those still willing
to defend him, although not publicly, as some-
one unfairly sacriiced on the altar of #MeToo.
“He was Matt Lauer—he was a star.” Rumors
of his extramarital afairs with other stars,
among them NBC’s own Natalie Morales,
would periodically appear in the gossip col-
umns. (These rumors have been strenuously
denied by both Lauer and Morales.)
And there were whispers about his mar-
riage to Roque, a Dutch-born former model.
After being set up on a blind date, the couple
had married in Bridgehampton in 1998, ten
years after Lauer’s irst marriage, to Nancy
Alspaugh, had ended in divorce. In 2006,
Roque iled divorce papers accusing him of
“extremely controlling” behavior and “cruel
and inhumane treatment,” but subsequently
withdrew them.
“This is Matt-freaking-Lauer. Right?” says
Zinone, now a forty-two-year-old mother of
two who lives in California. “At the height of
his success. He can do no wrong.”
Lauer had booked a quiet table at Palio, a
now-defunct Italian power-lunch spot in mid-
town Manhattan, in July 2000, and Zinone
agreed to join him.
“You became such friends with everybody
else but not with me,” she recalls him say-
ing, referring to Today costars Ann Curry, Al
Roker, and Katie Couric. “And it gets into
‘Oh, I’m such an old guy.’ He turned it on so
that I would sort of be like, ‘Oh, Matt, come
on, you know that’s not true.’
“I was like perfect prey,” Zinone says.
Within minutes of their return to company
headquarters, Lauer messaged again, plead-
ing with her to rendezvous in a room over
about Lauer’s violations UNTIL THAT MONDAY. In truth,
ING RUMORS for more than a month.
Studio 1A. By then fully aware of what he was
up to, Zinone hesitated. She replied, mention-
ing Lauer’s wife. But he insisted; a car would
be arriving for him imminently. “A nervous
wreck,” she assented, and the two began what
would turn into a weeks-long afair.
On another occasion, he summoned her to
his oice, even though his assistant sat just
outside. “He pushed the button to shut the
door. And then I was like, ‘Matt, [she] is out
there’. . . but it’s like it didn’t matter. I mean,
nothing happened. He tried. But I was like,
‘Oh, no. No. No.’. . . Like, ‘Are you kidding?
There are people right outside.’ ” (It is now
well established that the button at his desk
was a common feature in NBC’s oices en-
abling all executives and top talent to swing
doors shut but not lock them, as some early
news reports alleged. The devices were in-
stalled by GE when it owned NBC.)
As planned, Zinone left for West Virginia
and a career that would alternate between
TV anchoring and military service, includ-
ing two tours in Iraq.
Soon after the afair began, and again in
2006, just after Lauer had been served with
divorce papers, tabloid reporters approached
her with questions about the Today host. More
than once, she says, she was ofered money
to speak. In 2006, Zinone asked if Lauer had
a private email they could use to communi-
cate rather than his NBCUniversal address.
“Nope, this is it,” Zinone remembers him
saying. “What’s up?”
“I was like, ‘Wow.’ It just shows that over a
period of time, from my perspective, he ei-
ther felt entitled or never felt like he was going
to be called out or face consequences for it.”
In 2009, she returned to her alma mater,
Temple, to be inducted into its journalism
hall of fame for her work in Iraq as part of the
Army’s media unit. Lauer was there to receive
a media-excellence award. They exchanged
hellos and made awkward small talk.
ore straggly on top than he used
to be, his famously luxuriant eye-
brows now tinged with gray,
Andy Lack was surely struggling
with déjà vu when in March 2015
he found himself riding the ele-
vators at 30 Rock once again. In
1993, he’d been hired as presi-
dent of news to right the ship at
Dateline following a scandal involving pick-
up trucks rigged with explosives for a seg-
ment about GM vehicles catching ire. Now,
after a decade at Sony and Bloomberg, he
was back—this time with the grander title
of chairman of NBC News—to manage an-
other crisis.
A month before Lack’s rehiring—and
just three years after the bungled iring and
tearful farewell of Curry, Meredith Vieira’s
Today successor—Nightly News anchor Brian
Williams was suspended for making up de-
tails about his reporting trips. Lack gave the
anchor job to Lester Holt in June and parked
Williams at MSNBC, with opportunities to
return to the main network on special news
days. Holt has proved to be a credit to the
network, and Williams has attracted no fur-
ther controversy. Lack’s next big move—
spending $69 million to hire Megyn Kelly
away from Fox News—did not pay of so
well. After much initial fanfare, Kelly’s
Sunday-night magazine show has nearly iz-
zled into oblivion, and ratings for the nine
o’clock hour of Today, which she now pre-
sides over, haven’t been much better. Noth-
ing, however, has tarnished Lack’s reputa-
tion, or that of NBC, more than the events
of the past year.
Most of us learned of Lauer’s fate from
Guthrie and Kotb, who had no choice but to
begin that Wednesday broadcast with an ex-
planation of his absence. Among the irst to
react was President Donald Trump. “Wow,
Matt Lauer was just ired from NBC for ‘inap-
propriate sexual behavior in the workplace,’ ”
he tweeted. “But when will the top executives
at NBC & Comcast be ired for putting out
so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s
past!” NBCNews.com dutifully reported the
president’s tweet, but it excised those last ive
words. (Precisely what Trump was insinuat-
ing remains unclear.)
The scandal broke just under two months
after Harvey Weinstein had been exposed,
and many more heads would roll in the com-
ing weeks. Damage control was everything.
One of the irst steps the company took was
to sever all ties with Lauer and scrub from
its websites any promotional materials fea-
turing the former Today host. “That was all
they cared about,” one source who’s still on
the digital team recalls. “No one for one sec-
ond thought to ask us how we were doing.”
In a new statement, NBC insisted “un-
equivocally” that “current NBC News man-
agement” had known nothing about Lauer’s
violations until that Monday. In truth, sources
at the network say they had been hearing ru-
mors for more than a month. A few weeks
earlier, three news outlets, including Vari-
ety, had begun looking into Lauer’s behavior.
In one instance, an NBC employee found a
Post-it note from a National Enquirer reporter
on the front door of their home.
“Matt was confronted by several of us di-
rectly, on diferent occasions,” one senior
NBC source conirms. “We sat down with
him, looked him in the eye, and said, ‘Is there
anything you can think of that even you don’t
consider to be harassment that might fall
into this category?’ And every one of those
times he said there’s nothing. On a couple of
those occasions, he said, ‘I’ve been racking
my brain.’ Those were his words.”
So it seems they weren’t quite blindsided.
But what about all the years prior? “People
know,” says journalist and media critic Ken
Auletta, who has covered the network for more
than twenty-ive years. “People [inside the net-
work] know a lot more than people outside do
and gossip a lot more and resent a lot more (a)
because they think it’s wrong or (b) because
they’re jealous or (c) because how the fuck is
this guy getting away with it?” Zinone is also
sure people at the network knew. Years ago,
when she was still in Iraq, a colleague at Today
proposed doing a segment on her. A producer,
she says, not only nixed the idea but also bad-
mouthed Zinone for no apparent reason. They
“had to have known something,” she says.
“Why not just say, ‘Nah, that’s not a story I’m
interested in’?”
Many of the same NBC executives who’d
professed shock at Lauer’s behavior were at
a private Friars Club roast for the anchor at
a Manhattan hotel in 2008. Also in atten-
dance was Trump, then the host of Celebrity
Apprentice. The proceedings were recorded
by a reporter from The Village Voice. One
after another, speakers delivered a fusil-
lade of sexually charged innuendos. Couric
rehearsed a David Letterman–style Top
Ten list; number two referenced a sex act
between Lauer and Curry. Jef Zucker, then
chief of NBCUniversal, spoke of Lauer’s
nights on an oice couch because of marital
troubles at home. Joe Scarborough, cohost
of Morning Joe on MSNBC, commented
on the night’s events on-air not long after
Lauer’s iring. “The whole theme was that
he does the show and then he has sex with
people, with employees,” Scarborough said.
“So was this whispered behind closed doors?
No. It was shouted from the mountaintops
and everybody laughed about it.”
What’s more, in a 2012 appearance on
Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live,
Couric was asked about Lauer’s most annoy-
ing habit in the years she worked alongside
him. “He pinches me on the ass a lot,” she
replied. Days after his termination, a video
snippet surfaced that apparently showed a
moment during a Today commercial break in
October 2006 when Lauer seemingly made
a crude comment about Vieira. “Keep bend-
ing over like that. It’s a nice view,” he was
heard to say.
Sources at the network say that NBC News
had long operated as a kind of boys’ club
in which such peccadilloes and intraoice
lings were swept under the rug. In recent
years, however, that had started to change,
prompted by the 2012 appointment of Patricia
Fili-Krushel as the chair of NBCUniversal
10 8 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
News Group. Fili-Krushel in turn appointed
Deborah Turness as the irst female news-
division president. During their tenure—
both left 30 Rock by early 2017—two senior
male news employees were shown the door
for bad behavior, an in-house mini-drama
that has not been previously reported.
But it also seems true that Today operated
within NBC News as a change-resistant
clique that looked down on its less proitable
division cousins, even Nightly News. “It is a
staggeringly locked-in culture,” notes one
former staf member. At its center was Lauer,
who routinely dismissed suggested tweaks
to the Today formula, even in the post-Curry
years, when the show slipped to number two
behind ABC’s Good Morning America. “It is
ADDIE PATRICIA
ZINONE FILI-KRUSHEL
he former “Today” Appointed chair
production assistant of NBCUniversal
told reporters last News Group in
year that she had 2012, she was
an afair with replaced by Andy
Lauer in 2000. Lack in 2015.
a little bit of a Greek tragedy,” the same per-
son comments. “He just became so power-
ful, everything got sucked into that vortex.”
But once the allegations against him
emerged, suddenly it was no longer about
him; it was about the network. “While the
anchor is a godlike igure, the most import-
ant thing is keeping the good name of the
network,” Auletta says. “When Andy Lack
ired Matt Lauer, he didn’t just ire him be-
cause he was outraged by his behavior. He
ired him to protect NBC.”
Two days after Lauer’s dismissal, it was
reported that NBCUniversal CEO Steve
Burke had appointed the company’s own
legal counsel, Kim Harris, to lead a review
of what had happened, a decision that struck
some observers as suspect. “Anyone who was
afraid to talk before the investigation is not
likely to speak up when attorneys from inside
their company try to interview them,” the ac-
cuser’s lawyer, Wilkenfeld, told Esquire. “Al-
most always in scandals of this kind there’s
not just one bad actor,” notes Mark Feldstein,
a broadcast correspondent for twenty years
(two of them at NBC) who now teaches jour-
nalism at the University of Maryland. “There
is some systemic rot.”
The felling of Halperin and then Lauer em-
boldened more women to step forward and
share long-hidden secrets, including Zinone,
who opened up to Megyn Kelly a week before
Christmas. “I had no idea there were others,”
she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I wasn’t the
only one. I wasn’t the only one who caved.
I wasn’t the only one who fell under that
spell.’” Early this year, she cofounded a group
called Press Forward; it aims both to encour-
age victims to tell their stories and to help
draft new guidelines for protecting and nur-
turing women in the media workplace.
ANNETTE DEBORAH
ROQUE TURNESS
Lauer’s estranged Fili-Krushel named
wife first filed for her News president
divorce back in in 2013; two male
2006, citing “cruel employees were fired
and inhumane for bad behavior
treatment.” during their tenure.
Jessica Steyers, who was at NBC Sports on
and of from 2004 to 2010 as a researcher,
writer, and producer and helped cover four
Olympic Games, also spoke of constant harass-
ment by coworkers that was never addressed.
Steyers says she reported the behavior, but
“the overall sense was that nobody wanted to
do anything.” Then there was the lewd com-
ment from a producer who saw her kneeling
on the ground talking to someone at a national
gymnastics championship in Houston: “When
you’re inished on your knees, can you please
come over to me next?”
Steyers’s story came via UltraViolet, a
women’s-rights group that posted ads on
LinkedIn and other online platforms asking
NBC employees to volunteer personal stories
of harassment or abuse. She and two other
women I spoke to on the condition of ano-
nymity said they were neither surprised by
the Lauer scandal when it broke nor hope-
ful that actions taken since, including the
internal review, would bring about mean-
ingful change. Some also relected on the net-
work’s questionable handling of big stories
about powerful men intimidating or abus-
ing women. After NBC neglected to report
on the Access Hollywood tape for four whole
days, the story, arguably the most import-
ant of the election, leaked to The Washington
Post, which turned it around in just ive hours.
The delay may have had to do with
shielding the other man on the tape, Billy
Bush, who only shortly before had be-
come a Today host. “NBC News had [the
tape],” says the senior source at the net-
work, who thought others at NBC found
the tape “damaging to Billy” and “didn’t
want to take down their own guy. They got
hammered for that.” Bush was, in the event,
fired. For its part, the network has said it
took time to legally vet the story and decide
where it should air. That’s plausible. But at
the very least, this seems to say something
about the network’s sense of urgency. “I
felt that over the years the journalism was
getting softer and softer,” notes a recently
departed employee who worked at NBC
News for more than a decade. “If you wanted
something serious on-air, you were con-
stantly embattled.”
In the minds of many, the Trump-tape
iasco later became conlated with the net-
work’s handling, in 2017, of the Harvey
Weinstein afair—in particular the deci-
sions to allow the journalist Ronan Farrow
to take his months-long investigation into
Weinstein elsewhere, and then to ignore it
in the irst hours after the scandal broke in
The New York Times.
“I think it’s all of a piece,” Feldstein says.
“All of this put together suggests a really trou-
bling culture when it comes to truth, which
is what a news organization values above
all else. Truth in owning up to sexual mis-
conduct. Truth in reporting what it knows
about. All of this shakes the public credibility
of NBC News as an independent journalis-
tic institution.”
NBC still struggles to justify its decision
last summer to take a pass on the material
Farrow had on Weinstein by suggesting it
fell short journalistically. “We reached a
point where he believed his story was ready
for broadcast. At that time, he did not have
a single victim or witness to misconduct by
Harvey Weinstein that was willing to be iden-
tiied, not one,” a senior source at NBC says.
NBC News president Noah Oppenheim,
who’d returned to NBC from Hollywood—
he wrote the screenplay for Jackie, the 2016
biopic about Jacqueline Kennedy—report-
edly made the same case at a staf meeting a
day after Farrow implied on MSNBC’s The
Rachel Maddow Show that the network had
caved to outside pressure.
Even if Farrow did have more work to do,
as NBC maintains, why abandon all the in-
vestment already made and allow a com-
peting news organization to benefit? Al-
though he was a contractor, Farrow was
working with full-time NBC employees
and had spent eight months on the story.
“I still don’t understand why they didn’t
run it,” says Auletta, who helped connect
him with The New Yorker. (Farrow won a
Pulitzer prize for the story.)
“This story has revealed so much about
the evil of men,” Farrow said while accept-
ing a 2017 Vital Voices Solidarity Award in
December. “The crimes, the abuse of power,
the men who preyed upon the vulnerable, the
men who maintained a veil of silence around
that predation.” Now he has a book in the
works, provisionally titled Catch and Kill,
a phrase previously associated with David
Pecker’s National Enquirer. It promises to
ofer a starkly diferent version of Farrow’s
experiences at the network, including a dis-
missal of the notion that their parting of ways
was amicable, an idea that NBC still clings
to. “Nobody here thought that there was any
bad blood,” the senior source at NBC says.
“And when he broke the story, we were all
proud of him.”
Farrow is likely to challenge NBC’s asser-
tions regarding the progress he had or hadn’t
made—for example, he had audio of Wein-
stein admitting to sexual assault on a tape re-
corded by the NYPD. A source involved at the
time says the network canceled interviews out
from under Farrow—one with a Weinstein
victim ready to talk for the irst time—and
ordered the producers working with him not
to take any more calls on the story.
On October 5, the day The New York Times
published its irst bombshell scoop on Wein-
stein, naming Ashley Judd as a victim in the
lead, NBC was the only network not to even
mention it on its evening news broadcast.
Even the next day, while its rival morning
shows pored over the fast-breaking scandal,
Today referred to it only briely in the run of
the news digest. A segment was planned for
that morning, according to the senior source
at the network, but it never aired.
Producers of both Nightly News and Today
strongly deny that the network actively inter-
fered in their decisions. “It is patently false to
say we were ordered to kill or ignore the story,”
says Janelle Rodriguez, senior vice-president
of editorial in charge of Nightly News. Simi-
larly adamant were Libby Leist and her coex-
ecutive producer at Today, Tom Mazzarelli.
“We were never told how to cover the Wein-
stein story. Any suggestion otherwise is to-
tally false,” they say in a joint statement
NBCUniversal provided to Esquire. “NBC
News has run 158 stories on or mentions
of Weinstein since the news irst broke,”
Rodriguez says, adding that “NBC News
pursued, booked, and aired the irst tele-
vision interview with a Weinstein vic-
tim within three (business) days of the
Weinstein story breaking in the Times.”
Yet none of that explains why the net-
work, unlike its competitors, failed to fully
cover the scandal in the hours after it broke.
he NBCUniversal review was
inally released in May. The seven-
page report noted that “within two
weeks” of Lauer’s iring, the com-
pany received information about
“three additional women” who’d
been inappropriately approached
by him dating back to 2000, 2001,
and 2007, respectively. Yet it ex-
onerated management, insisting
no one in NBC News leadership
had received “any complaints
about Lauer’s workplace behavior prior to
November 27.” (The report did note that
Lauer “could be flirtatious . . . and would
openly engage in sexually oriented banter
in the workplace,” which “may have contrib-
uted to an atmosphere where some employ-
ees who may have had concerns assumed noth-
ing would be done to address them.”) Lack
simultaneously sent a “Dear colleagues”
memo to employees, lamenting that the “last
few months have been extraordinarily dii-
cult.” Once again, the network’s explanation
was met with skepticism.
“What Matt Lauer was able to do does not
happen as a one-of; this happens as the re-
sult of a culture and a pattern of protecting
stars and making them untouchable,” says
Karin Roland, UltraViolet’s campaigns chief.
“An internal investigation of NBC investigat-
ing themselves, their own management, and
work culture is a sham, a classic case of a fox
guarding a henhouse. It needs an external, not
internal, investigation. They need to investi-
gate not just Lauer but the management and
the culture that allowed that to continue.”
Days before the report was released, Tom
Brokaw found himself accused by a former
NBC correspondent, Linda Vester, of mak-
ing unwanted advances on her in the 1990s.
Though diferent in degree, the allegations,
published by The Washington Post and Variety,
nevertheless threatened the reputation of the
network’s mascot of journalistic gravitas. In an
email to friends that became public, Brokaw
suggested that Vester had had a mediocre
career, was being “melodramatic,” and “had
trouble with the truth.” He’d been the victim
of a “drive-by shooting” and implied that he
had been used by Vester to advance her career.
(He said he’d helped her land a job at Fox.)
A letter in defense of Brokaw quickly sur-
faced, signed by more than one hundred
women, both formerly and currently at NBC.
It did not originate inside the network, but it
did circulate on the newsroom loor. NBC re-
porters who might have had reason to cover
the Brokaw story were required to make ref-
erence to the letter.
When advertisers gathered at Radio City
Music Hall this past spring for a preview of
NBC’s fall season, the network’s own Seth
Meyers told the crowd, “It’s not surpris-
ing for NBC to be (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 53)
S eptember 2018_Esquire 1 09
 One
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T R A ed d t y s
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upper-middle-class community, the only child
of Chips, an adman and writer, and Ann, an
artist. His parents still live nearby.
“Ready for the ive-dollar tour?” he asks.
Photographs by Our plan is to trace the path from what he calls

GREG his “privileged bourgeois background” to the

upper-upper-class town of Richmond, where

WE’RE at the first stop on Tom Hardy’s

literal tour down memory lane, and he’s
already causing trouble. The caretaker of
St. Leonard’s Court, an apartment building
in the leafy London suburb of East Sheen,
comes out to the driveway to say that a tenant
has lodged a noise complaint. Hardy leans
back in the saddle of the ofending source, a
Triumph Thruxton itted with a not-so-subtle
1200cc engine. “Must be hard for someone
who’s home at 3:00 P.M. on a Tuesday do-
ing fuck-all, innit?” he says to the caretaker,
who’s already in retreat. Then, overriding
his knee-jerk snark: “It won’t happen again.”
Williams
“I’m the youngest person to own a lat on
this block,” Hardy, forty, tells me, sounding
both proud and bemused. He bought the place
ifteen years ago, moved out six years later,
and now uses it as a crash pad for out-of-town
guests. He didn’t choose the location for its so-
cial scene, if the few geriatric residents shuf-
ling by are any indication. Rather, he was
the prodigal son returned: He grew up in the
he now lives with his wife, actor Charlotte
Riley, and their child, his second. (He also
has a ten-year-old son with assistant director
Rachael Speed.) The journey is short in dis-
tance—a little more than two miles—but
ultramarathon-long in life experience.
“Behind the Laura Ashley curtains, there
was naughtiness and fuckeries!” he begins like
an overenthused docent. I point out that’s a
line he’s delivered many times to many writ-
ers. He shrugs. “It’s easier to say that than to
go deep-sea diving into it.” To Hardy, a iercely
private man and a reluctant public igure,
the canned story serves the useful purpose
of making an unsuspecting person feel like

TWO WHEELS AND A GRAVEL ROAD Jacket and jeans by Belstaff; T-shirt by Alternative Apparel; boots by Triumph; sunglasses by Carrera. 111
 S
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they’re getting to know the real Tom. “Should
we fuck of?” he asks as we pull on our gear.
Except for the beat-up jeans, his ive-foot-
nine frame is covered in black, from his hel-
met to his motorcycle boots. We get on our
bikes and fuck of.
Five minutes later, just past the prep school
he attended as a boy, Hardy spots a commo-
tion, and we pull over. A woman, blood cov-
ering her face, lies faceup, half on the side-
walk and half in the street. A few bystanders
are crouched around. As Hardy approaches,
he says, “I know her.”
MAE,
IT’S
the mother of one of Hardy’s childhood
best friends.* He drops to one knee and takes
her hand in his. Someone in the crowd tells
us that Mae tripped while walking her dog.
She’s slipping in and out of consciousness.
“Mae, it’s Tommy,” Hardy says. “Squeeze
my hand. Keep talking to us. Can you open
your eyes?” She moans. He tries out a joke.
“Are you Canadian?” he asks. She manages
a word: “No. ” He says, “Not even a little
Canadian?” She doesn’t reply.
By the time the ambulance arrives, Mae
is responding, but barely. Shortly after, her
son Albert pulls up on his bicycle. When
he sees his mother laid out, he bites his ist.
Hardy wraps his arms around his friend,
both to comfort him and to keep him at a
safe distance.
The paramedics load Mae onto a stretcher,
and Hardy asks if they can bring Albert,
too, then asks again to make sure they re-
member. They say yes, but they’ll irst check
Mae’s vitals.
After the ambulance doors close, Hardy
turns his attention back to Albert. “Your
mom took a whack to the forehead. But I’m
not concerned immediately, ’cause
she’s responding better than when we
arrived. And ’cause they’re not rush- “NINE TIMES OUT
ing of. You settle in at the hospital,
and then we’ll meet you.” Albert pro-
tests, but Hardy stops him. “I’m one WHEN SOMEBODY SAYS,
‘DON’T
of your best mates, and I love you.”
He slips money into Albert’s pocket.
“Just for now,” he says. As soon as the
ambulance leaves, bound for Kings-
ton Hospital, he calls Albert’s wife.
For the half hour we’ve been here,
do THAT,’
Hardy has not stopped moving. He’s
talked himself through each step
as if checking of boxes on a crisis
to-do list. Suddenly, he turns to me
and considers our circumstances. We
began the day as writer and subject,
but that dynamic dissolved the mo- MY INSTINCT IS
ment he saw Mae. “There was no in-
terview here,” he says. “We ind our-
selves in a situation where we needed ‘THAT HAS TO BE DONE.’”
* SOME NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED.
to put everything on hold.” A smile cracks
across his face. “Welcome to my neighbor-
hood. I told you there’s always something to
ind behind the Laura Ashley curtains.”
Private
Tom and Public Hardy: These are the
two sides that deine him. That his time is split
between work life and family life, and that
his obligations toward both are sometimes
at odds, isn’t unique. However, his steadfast
struggle to separate them is; he’d be thrilled
if never the two should meet. But they do,
with increasing frequency, in ways that are
beyond his control.
Public Hardy may be an accomplished ac-
tor in the U. S., but in his home country he’s
a national treasure. In June, he was awarded
the title Commander of the Order of the Brit-
ish Empire, which, while not as prestigious as
knighthood, is on the same scale. In February,
Glamour UK named him the sexiest man of
2018. Madame Tussauds in London recently
displayed his likeness reclining on an oxblood
chesterield couch, one arm perched atop the
back cushion like an invitation. (“Cosy up to
Tom on his leather sofa and feel his heartbeat
and the warmth of his torso in what is surely
the hottest seat in town,” hypes the wax
museum’s site.) He tells well-worn anec-
dotes to keep Private Tom concealed, and he’s
always on alert.
We meet for the first time the day be-
fore the accident, at the Bike Shed, a mo-
torcycle club and café in Shoreditch where,
last year, he spent his fortieth birthday. It’s
Hardy’s favorite place in London—not sur-
prising, as he’s an investor in the company,
which plans to open a location in Los
Angeles soon. Every few minutes during
our conversation, he nods hello to yet
OF TEN,
TO SAY,
another bearded, inked-up passerby. He’s
wearing a loose T-shirt and cargo pants with
enough pockets to it all the world. Brown
fuzz dusts the crown of his head. A copper
beard stippled with gray blankets the lower
half of his face.
He answers my irst question—how he’s
doing—without missing a beat: “I’m tired.”
He’s been working a lot, mostly on Marvel’s
Venom (October 5), in which he plays the
title role, a reporter named Eddie Brock whose
body is hijacked by an alien symbiote. Venom
has remained one of Spider-Man’s best-known
foes since he irst appeared in comic-book form
in the late eighties. At times, he’s an outright
villain; at others, including in Hardy’s hands,
he’s more of an antihero. He can’t discuss
the plot, but he says the tone of the movie,
directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), is
“dark and edgy and dangerous.”
The three-month shoot, which ended in
January, took him to Atlanta, New York,
and San Francisco, where the movie is set.
“I see America by where the tax breaks are,”
he jokes. Next, he headed to New Orleans
to play a syphilitic Al Capone in Fonzo, directed
by Josh Trank (Chronicle). That crew went
hard: nineteen hours a day for six weeks. The
day they wrapped, he lew home, threw on
a suit, and attended the royal wedding with
Riley. (All he’ll say about why they landed the
coveted invite is that “it’s deeply private” and
“Harry is a fucking legend.”) The work wasn’t
the hardest thing; it was, he says, spending
such long stretches away from his family.
Yet workwise, Hardy has arrived at what
you might call a stakes moment, one that’s
twenty years in the making. At the dawn of his
career, after landing just two small roles, albeit
in big projects—Band of Brothers and Black
Hawk Down—he scored his irst major part,
as the bald, asexual villain in 2002’s Star Trek:
Nemesis. But the movie tanked, snuing buzz
over his excellent performance. Five
years of forgettable ilms and a few
distinguished stage performances
passed before Hardy played lead
roles that fully showcased his tal-
ents: the homeless drug addict with
a heart of gold in the BBC’s Stuart:
A Life Backwards (2007), for which
he shed nearly thirty pounds, and
the most violent inmate in Britain in
Bronson (2009), for which he packed
on ifteen pounds of muscle.
Physical change is just part of
Hardy’s exacting, chameleonlike
transformations. “One can em-
bellish with lair or an accent,” he
says. “But ultimately you need to
ground the character in some form of
recognizable truth.” Hardy will talk
your ear of about acting theory—
Stanislavsky versus Adler, presenta-
tion versus representation, the use of
113
clowning and mask work. “I’m a complete geek
about it,” he says. But those seams don’t show.
At his best, Hardy so thoroughly embodies a
character, in both body and spirit, that he all
but disappears.
Take a scene from 2015’s The Revenant.
Hardy plays Fitzgerald, the coldhearted fur
trapper and the target of revenge for Leonardo
DiCaprio’s Glass. One night, around a camp-
ire, Fitzgerald makes a veiled threat to a sus-
picious travel companion. (To watch, Google
“God is a squirrel.”) He never raises his voice,
but it’s as if he’s ripped out the man’s heart.
Hardy’s performance earned him both an
Oscar nomination and, after losing a bet with
DiCaprio over whether he’d receive such rec-
ognition, a tattoo on his right arm that reads
LEO KNOWS ALL.
His knack for magnetic unease can inject a
blockbuster with edge: Mad Max: Fury Road,
Inception, and, most notably, The Dark Knight
Rises. But aside from Fury Road, whenever he’s
assumed the lead role—Lawless, Warrior, This
Means War, The Drop, Locke, Legend, Child
44—the results have come up short critically,
commercially, and sometimes both. Venom is
Hardy’s most visible role yet.
“Sounds like a lot of pressure, doesn’t it?”
he half-jokes. But he says he’s not concerned
about box-oice returns; as always, he’s con-
sumed with building a good character. He ad-
mits he knew little about Venom when he irst
read the script. “So I spoke to the only person
I could really trust in this environment: my
older boy.” His comic-book-loving son “was
a huge inluence on me doing the role.”
Hardy prepped for the movie for more than a
year. He undergoes a rigorous process to shape
each performance, complete with its own ar-
got. A script is a “case ile,” to be “unpacked”
via “investigation.” He often begins by using
personalities, both real and ictive, as lode-
stars toward which he guides his portrayal. The
voice he developed for Al Capone in Fonzo is
based on Bugs Bunny’s; to prove it, he plays
me a clip of the raw footage on his phone.
Sure enough, he sounds like the cartoon rab-
bit with a severe case of vocal fry. In Venom,
the dual roles of Eddie Brock and Venom re-
minded him of three wildly diferent traits
of three wildly diferent people: “Woody
Allen’s tortured neurosis and all the humor
that can come from that. Conor McGregor—
the überviolence but not all the talking. And
Redman”—the rapper—“out of control, liv-
ing rent-free in his head.” Those are not de-
tails he revealed to the execs at Sony, which
is producing the movie. “You don’t say shit
like that to the studio,” he says.
Hollywood is having a stakes moment of
its own. Disney’s acquisition of Fox is the
latest sign that the studio system is strug-
gling to adapt to the rise of streaming ser-
114
vices, among other things. Sony weathered
a rough patch last year—a nearly $1 billion
write-down—then recovered with the help
of the ifth- and sixth-highest-grossing ilms
of the year worldwide: the Jumanji sequel
and Spider-Man: Homecoming, the feverishly
anticipated relaunch of its most valuable
property. The studio now plans to develop
a franchise of interconnected Spider-Man-
related movies that will ill the cofers for years.
Venom is the irst oicial entry.
“If the odds are stacked against Sony, that’s
not my fucking business,” Hardy says. “It’s
irrelevant.” He burnishes an image of himself
as a creative lone wolf, and in the third person
no less: “Tom is very mercenary when it comes
to work. I cannot give a fuck what the writer,
or the director, or Larry in Baltimore thinks
about my choices.” (He later clariies the per-
spective shift: “Sometimes I talk in the third
person because it’s a lot easier to see myself at
work as a piece of meat. So when Tommy says
he doesn’t give a fuck what you think, it’s only
because I give too much of a fuck, and it gets
to a point where it stiles me.”) But it’s hard to
square his claims of artistic purity with the oc-
casional very non-lone-wolf detail like, “Mar-
ket research shows that the biggest fan base for
Venom is ten-year-old boys in South America.”
If this movie does well, there will be sequels.
And if Sony builds its cinematic Spidey uni-
verse, Hardy may well appear in those, too.
Beyond those commitments, he’s vague about
his post-Fonzo plans, most of which don’t in-
volve acting. “What I’d like to do is produce.
Write. Direct,” he says. Through his produc-
tion company, Hardy Son & Baker, he’s work-
ing on the second season of Taboo, a moody
period drama set in early-1800s London that
he stars on and cowrites with his father. The
irst season was a mixed bag—its premiere
ranks as one of the most streamed episodes
of any BBC show, but historians criticized its
accuracy and U. S. viewers met its FX airing
with indiference—yet his stature is such that
the BBC green-lighted the second season.
He also optioned Once a Pilgrim, a thriller
by a veteran of the Parachute Regiment, the
elite airborne infantry of the British army;
he’s considering directing the adaptation.
Hardy’s future looks rosy. And yet, more
than anything, he feels worn down. Physically,
sure: He’s walking with a limp. He says he
tore his right meniscus on the set of Venom,
but he doesn’t know how it happened. “At the
end of a job, I normally end up on the side of
the road,” he says. “And then carrying the tod-
dler around on my shoulders. . .” He lets loose
a two-note cackle. “Things get in the way of
looking after yourself.”
But the fatigue is also mental. Maybe it’s
because the growing demands of the job, es-
pecially the time spent far from his wife and
 E
“Sou ASY B
n E
Hard ds like I N G G
in po y half- a R
jokes lot of p E E N
tent
Suit a ial fr abou ress
nd sh a n chis t his lea ure,”
irt by e sta d
rter role
Gucc
i; vint
age t Veno
ie, sty
list’s
own. m.
children, are beginning to outweigh its di-
minishing gratiication. When I ask if being
forty has changed how he feels about his
career, this time he answers in the second
person. “You’ve summited Everest. It’s a
miracle that you’ve made it anywhere near
the fucking mountain, let alone climbed it.
Do you want to go all the way back and do it
again? Or do you want to get of the moun-
tain and go fucking ind a beach?” He tugs his
left temple so hard that it looks like the skin
might tear. “What is it that draws you to the
craft? At this age, I don’t know anymore. I’ve
kind of had enough. If I’m being brutally hon-
est, I want to go on with my life.”
A F T E R ThE
ambulance leaves with Mae and Albert,
Hardy suggests that we stop at a few places
on our way to the hospital. Not for my ben-
eit, but for his friend’s. “Albert needs to be
alone with his mum and his thoughts,” he says.
“He’s going to be taking care of her, so it’s im-
portant he pays attention. Sometimes, when
there are other people around, that’s hard to
do.” Hardy isn’t trying to swashbuckle; he’s
thinking of how to best help two loved ones.
And, apparently, a guy he just met: Look-
ing me up and down, he says, “We’ve had a
bit of a shock ourselves. We could use some
sugar.” We set out for a refreshment stand
in a nearby park he irst came to as a toddler
with his mother to paddle around the kid-
die pool, and then as a teen with Albert and
others to play rugby.
When we arrive, the stand is closed. As we
get back on our bikes, a father walks by carry-
ing his son, a chubby boy with an explosion of
straw-colored curls. “How old are you?” Hardy
asks the boy.
“He’s two,” the dad beams.
“When will you be three?”
Hardy asks.
“July,” the toddler says softly.
“That’s really soon!” he says.
“You’re a bit older than my young-
est, who’ll be three in October. Oh,
you’ll be a big boy by then. You’re
already a big boy. Do you want to sit
on my bike?” The boy buries his face
WANT To DO
in his father’s chest. “I appreciate
I’ve made you feel nervous. This is
what I will do: I will disappear,” he
says, which could double as his two-
sentence acting manifesto. He revs
his engine over and over. As we de-
part, the boy watches Hardy, his
mouth agape.
IT AGaIN?
BRUTALLY
IF I’M BEING
We cut into Richmond Park, a
twenty-ive-hundred-acre expanse
that’s equal parts polished and un-
tamed. When something catches
Hardy’s attention—stags in the ON WITH MY LIFE.”
116 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
brush, a view of the Thames, a tree with
knotted bark—he raises two ingers to his
eyes in a V, then points so I see it too, like I’m
his Dunkirk wingman.
We pull over at a dead end. With our en-
gines rumbling, Hardy tells me that his par-
ents moved to this part of London to enroll
him in the best schools they could aford. The
area is among the wealthiest in the UK, but it’s
also an economic patchwork where council
houses sit blocks away from mansions. “Grow-
ing up, you mix and mingle. You can sit in the
shit if you want to, or you can make something
of yourself,” he says. “Or you can end up un-
der too much pressure and fading out young.”
As a child, Hardy had a strong relationship
with Ann, but he butted heads with Chips.
Father and son made up years ago, and Hardy
resists going into detail about their diicult
past. “My father was the most wonderful of
teachers in a world that can be cruel,” he al-
lows. “He treated me like an adult, as opposed
to changing his persona for his child. There
was no ilter. Do you understand? No ilter.”
In his teens, Hardy wobbled. “The cen-
trifugal force in my life is a natural dispo-
sition to not be happy with the way I feel,”
he says. That, combined with a robust con-
trarian bent—“Nine times out of ten, when
somebody says, ‘Don’t do that,’ my instinct
is to say, ‘That has to be done’ ”—got him
into a fair bit of trouble. He hung out with the
wrong crowds; he fought in school. “I grew
up in the neighborhood being a dick,” he says.
“I’ve learned and will continue to learn from
being a dick. To try and somehow chisel my-
self into being a human being so I can respect
myself when I look in the mirror. And that’s a
procedure that will go on until I die.”
Starting at thirteen, he struggled with al-
coholism and other addictions. He still has
a soft spot for those with similar demons.
In April 2017, when two kids riding stolen
“YOU’VE SUMMITED
E V E R E ST.
DO YoU
HONEST, I WANT TO GO
mopeds were T-boned at an intersection and
tried to run, Hardy, who lived nearby, ap-
prehended one of them. The Sun headline
sums up how the press covered the incident:
“Tom Hardy Catches Thief After Dramatic
Hollywood-Style Chase Through Streets Be-
fore Proudly Saying, ‘I’ve Caught the C**t.’ ”
He disputes the details of what was reported—
“It wasn’t much of a chase; when I found him,
he was in fucking rag order”—but that’s be-
side the point. The tabloids missed the real
story: After the incident, he tracked down the
kid he turned in and got him help. “He must
stand accountable for what he’s done,” Hardy
tells me. “But he’s got issues, and he’s in a bad
way. Do we just give up on a sixteen-year-old?”
As a boy, Hardy was given second, third, and
fourth chances. Along the way, he discovered
that acting ofered an outlet for his baneful dis-
content. He attended one drama school, then
another, got kicked out twice, and was cast in
Band of Brothers before he graduated.
Still, for years, he questioned his chosen
path. Hardy even signed up for a Parachute
Regiment training course—but never fol-
lowed through. “Oh, mate, I did so much
backpedaling,” he says. “The reality is that
where I belonged was not there. The last per-
son defending the realm was Mr. Hardy.”
He calls the decision to back out “one of my
biggest regrets. I wonder what life would’ve
been like. I would’ve loved to have served
and been useful.”
In 2003, at twenty-ive, Hardy cleaned up
with the help of a twelve-step program—
he calls it “my irst port of call”—and he’s
been sober ever since. “It was hard enough
for me to say, ‘I’m an alcoholic.’ But staying
stopped is fucking hard.” Sitting on his Tri-
umph, at the center of the place that held all
the risks and possibilities that would deine
him, Hardy sounds almost wistful.
We take of through the park. He rides with
his legs bowed out, his left hand rest-
ing on his knee, and his right hand
holding steady on the throttle. When
he rips on a vape pen, white plumes
swirl around his head and dissipate
into the damp air.
WE HEAD to Richmond.
The town sits within the borders of
Greater London, but its roots are
as much in the countryside as in the
city. Generations of famous Brits
seeking refuge have called it home:
Queen Elizabeth I liked hunting
stags in the park; Charles I relocated
his court here to avoid the plague;
Mick Jagger lived near the Thames
with Jerry Hall, who, though now
married to Rupert Murdoch, appar-
ently still co-owns the home they
shared. (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 52)
 “I g CAN
rew NO
up N B
tinu I’ve lea . . . bei A L L
con
e to rned ng
a
!
Jum lear a d
n fro nd wi i
ll ck.
psu
it b
y Al mb
pha
Indu
eing
stri a di
es. ck.”
Lighting the Bonfire
Tom Wolfe died this past spring at the age of eighty-eight. Before he became famous for best sellers
The Right Stuf and The Bonire of the Vanities, he was one of the greatest magazine writers who ever lived,
and certainly the most indelible stylist. His first signature story for a national magazine appeared in these pages
in 1963. After having a pitch about tipping turned down, Wolfe was sent to Los Angeles to visit a custom-car
show but got writer’s block. Faced with a deadline, his editor, Byron Dobell, asked Wolfe to provide enough
information for him to write text to accompany a photograph. Wolfe stayed up all night and handed him a
long memo. Dobell made a few amendments, removed “Dear Byron,” and proclaimed it “an astonishing piece.”
Three excerpts by Tom Wolfe

From “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!)
That Kandy Kolored (Thphhh-hhh!)
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby . . .,”
November 1963
THE FIRST good look I had at customized
cars was at an event called a “Teen Fair,”
held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles
beyond Hollywood. This was a wild place to
be taking a look at art objects—eventually, I
should say, you have to reach the conclusion
that these customized cars are art objects, at
least if you use the standards applied in a civ-
ilized society. But I will get to that in a mo-
ment. Anyway, about noon you drive up to a
place that looks like an outdoor amusement
park, and there are three serious-looking
kids, like the cafeteria committee in high
school, taking tickets, but the scene inside
is quite mad. Inside, two things hit you. The
irst is a huge platform a good seven feet of
the ground with a hully-gully band—every-
thing is electriied, the bass, the guitars, the
saxophones—and (two) behind the band, on
the platform, about two hundred kids are do-
ing frantic dances called the hully-gully, the
bird, and the shampoo. As I said, it’s noon-
time. The dances the kids are doing are very
jerky. The boys and girls don’t touch, not even
with their hands. They just ricochet around.
Then you notice that all the girls are dressed
exactly alike. They have boufant hairdos—
all of them—and slacks that are, well, skin-
tight does not get the idea across; it’s more
the conformation than how tight the slacks
are. It’s as if some lecherous old tailor with
a gluteus-maximus ixation designed them,
striation by striation. About the time you’ve
managed to focus on this, you notice that out
in the middle of the park is a huge, perfectly
round swimming pool; really rather enor-
118 Se pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
mous. And there is a Chris-Craft cabin cruiser
in the pool, going around and around, send-
ing up big waves, with more of these boufant
babies bunched in the back of it. In the water,
suspended like plankton, are kids in Scuba-
diving outfits; others are tooling around
underwater, breathing through a snorkel. And
all over the place are booths, put up by shoe
companies and guitar companies and God
knows who else, and there are kids dancing
in all of them—dancing the bird, the hully-
gully, and the shampoo—with the music of the
hully-gully band piped all over the park
through loudspeakers.
All this time, Tex Smith, from Hot Rod
Magazine, who brought me over to the place,
is trying to lead me to the customized-car
exhibit—“Tom, I want you to see this car that
Bill Cushenberry built, The Silhouette”—
which is to say, here are two hundred kids
ricocheting over a platform at high noon,
and a speedy little boat barreling around
and around and around in a round swim-
ming pool, and I seem to be the only per-
son who is distracted. The customized-car
exhibit turns out to be the Ford Custom Car
Caravan, which Ford is sending all over the
country. At irst, with the noise and peripheral
motion and the inchoate leching you are lia-
ble to be doing, what with boufant nymphets
rocketing all over the place, these customized
cars do not strike you as anything very special.
Obviously they are very special, but the irst
thing you think of is the usual—you know,
that the kids who own these cars are proba-
bly skinny little hoods who wear T-shirts and
carry their cigarette packs by winding them
around in the T-shirt up near the shoulder.
But after a while, I was glad I had seen the cars
in this natural setting, which was, after all, a
kind of Plato’s Republic for teenagers. Because
if you watched anything at this fair very long,
you kept noticing the same thing. These kids
are absolutely maniacal about form. They are
practically religious about it. For example,
the dancers: none of them ever smiled. They
stared at each other’s legs and feet, concen-
trating. The dances had no grace about them
at all, they were more in the nature of a hoe-
down, but everybody was concentrating to do
them exactly right. And the boufant kids all
had form, wild form, but form with rigid stan-
dards, one gathers. Even the boys. Their dress
was prosaic—Levis, Slim Jims, sport shirts,
T-shirts, polo shirts—but the form was con-
sistent: a stovepipe silhouette. . . . I went by
one of the guitar booths, and there was a little
kid in there, about thirteen, playing the hell
out of an electric guitar. The kid was named
Cranston something or other. He looked like
he ought to be named Kermit or Herschel; all
his genes were kind of horribly Okie. Cran-
ston was playing away and a big crowd was
watching. But Cranston was slouched back
with his spine bent like a sapling up against a
table, looking gloriously bored. At thirteen,
this kid was being fanatically cool. They all
were. They were all wonderful slaves to form.
They have created their own style of life, and
they are much more authoritarian about en-
forcing it than are adults. Not only that, but
today these kids—especially in California—
have money, which, needless to say, is why all
these shoe merchants and guitar sellers and
the Ford Motor Company were at a Teen Fair
in the irst place. I don’t mind observing that
it is this same combination—money plus
slavish devotion to form—that accounts for
Versailles or St. Mark’s Square. Naturally, most
of the artifacts that these kids’ money-plus-
form produce are of a pretty ghastly order.
But so was most of the paraphernalia that
developed in England during the Regency. I
mean, most of it was on the order of starched
cravats. . . . But the Regency period did see
some tremendous formal architecture. And
the kids’ formal society has also brought at
least one substantial thing to a formal devel-
HE HAD LIFTOFF Wolfe, in an atypical dark jacket, classing up an otherwise forlorn stretch of Cape Kennedy, 1972.
opment of a high order—the customized cars.
I don’t have to dwell on the point that cars
mean more to these kids than architecture did
in Europe’s great formal century, say, 1750
to 1850. They are freedom, style, sex, power,
motion, color—everything is right there.
Wolfe, raised in Richmond, Virginia, with
a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, was
something of an outsider in the statuspheres
of New York and California society that he
detailed with such relish and wit. But he didn’t
delve into the most fashionable subjects of the
moment—civil rights, the war in Vietnam,
women’s lib. Instead, he celebrated stock-car
drivers and, later, astronauts as true heroes
at a time when there was nothing less hip than
the space program. In this brief 1967 essay, he
displayed his wide-ranging curiosity, describ-
ing how he gathered information from dis-
parate sources, almost as if he were trying to
create for himself a prototype Internet.
From “How You Can Be
as Well-Informed as Tom Wolfe,”
November 1967
I used to read three, four papers a day when I
worked on newspapers here. That was mainly
to keep up with what little was going on in
our poor old fading craft. I don’t ind any pa-
per worth going over every day now. You can
get the news a day earlier, usually, and almost
as fully, on the radio. . . . As for truly original
and enterprising reporting, it is almost all in
magazines today. . . .
I look at a whole lot of monthly and quar-
terly magazines, hobbyists’ magazines, socio-
logical and psychological journals, car maga-
zines, sports magazines; you never know what
nice bijoux you are going to ind. But the ones
I would particularly like to mention are the
trade magazines. They contain all sorts of
information about the new artifacts and general
look and feel of life in this country. I know of
no other way you can read about it.
Partly it’s curiosity. In Concrete Construction,
for example, I see that the American Smelting
and Reining Company has built a concrete
chimney 828 feet high at its plant near El Paso,
Texas. In other words, about eighty stories
high, or thirty stories higher than the Wash-
ington Monument. It is a rather great-looking
object. It is only sixty-two feet wide at the base
and tapers up, up, up, up. Every day, while they
were building it, some guy would look down
the chimney with a bomb-sight-style instru-
ment to see if it was coming up straight. I won-
der what it felt like to look down the damn
thing every day, say, from forty stories up and
so on. I wonder if he got to dreading it or if it
was a big deal. I wonder what would have hap-
pened if his vision had been of and the things
started going in an ever-so-slight spiral.
120 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
Partly I am on the lookout for the meta- outfit in Mountain View, California, he encoun-
phors of the future. The metaphors we use tered a way of doing business that was nothing
today are pretty worn out. We still talk about short of radical.
people with hatchet faces and craggy brows,
for example, even though the number of peo- From “The Tinkerings of Robert
ple who ever use hatchets or look up at crags
anymore must be small. We still read about
Noyce,” December 1983
“stone-faced” Ed Sullivan. We still read about
“barking up the wrong tree,” “an ax to grind,” One day John Carter came to Mountain View
“a pig in a poke,” “a tough row to hoe,” all of for a close look at Noyce’s semiconductor
which is out of the old-homestead past. That operation. Carter’s oice in Syosset, Long
is why I read Architectural Record a lot, for ex- Island, arranged for a limousine and chaufeur
ample. I am fascinated with the new mate- to be at his disposal while he was in California.
rials that are going into buildings. I am sure So Carter arrived at the tilt-up concrete build-
they will eventually be as natural to us as the ing in Mountain View in the back of a black
standbys we are used to, wood, stone, brick Cadillac limousine with a driver in the front
and plaster. Already in this country they are wearing the complete chaufeur’s uniform—
making roofs of laminated glue purlina with a the black suit, the white shirt, the black neck-
little extruded vinyl inishing here and there, tie, and the black visored cap. That in itself was
walls of transparent acrylic, loors of mag- enough to turn heads at Fairchild Semicon-
nesite, Ultralor and Ruberoid Royal Stone- ductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and
glow. Hell, tomorrow it may be possible to a chaufeur out there before. But that wasn’t
use beautiful twentieth-century metaphorical what ixed the day in everybody’s memory. It
sobriquets like Ruberoid Royal Stoneglow was the fact that the driver stayed out there for
Ed Sullivan and everybody will know what almost eight hours, doing nothing. He stayed
you mean (“The Look of Stone, The Practi- out there in his uniform, with his visored hat
cality of Vinyl Asbestos”). . . . on, in the front seat of the limousine, all day,
In Electrical World I see that during the riot doing nothing but waiting for a man who was
in Detroit, the utility company, Detroit Edi- somewhere inside. John Carter was inside hav-
son, sent crewmen in to repair 61 poles, 27 ing a terriic chief executive oicer’s time for
transformers, 41 additional capacity fuses, himself. He took a tour of the plant, he held
30 4800-volt primary spans and 21 second- conferences, he looked at igures, he nodded
ary spans. The company told them that no one with satisfaction, he beamed his urbane Fifty-
had to go into the riot area if he didn’t want to. seventh Street Biggie CEO charm. And the
Yet of eighty linemen on the crew—the men driver sat out there all day engaged in the task
most exposed to the snipers—there was only of supporting a visored cap with his head. Peo-
one man absent the whole time, and he had just ple started leaving their workbenches and go-
been in the hospital for an operation. Whatever ing to the front windows just to take a look at
may explain this gung ho performance by a this phenomenon. It seemed that bizarre. Here
group of union wage earners in the year 1967 was a serf who did nothing all day but wait out-
interests me as much as the cause of the riot. side a door in order to be at the service of the
haunches of his master instantly, whenever
One of Wolfe’s final magazine profiles, “The Tin- those haunches and the paunch and the jowls
kerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose in might decide to reappear. It wasn’t merely that
Silicon Valley,” is also one of his best. Though he this little peek at the New York–style corpo-
eschewed his usual pyrotechnics in favor of more rate high life was unusual out here in the brown
straightforward prose, his instinct for the story hills of the Santa Clara Valley. It was that it
everyone else was missing remained intact. When seemed terribly wrong.
this long profile appeared in 1983, in the nascent A certain instinct Noyce had about this
days of the personal-computer revolution, most new industry and the people who worked in it
people thought of the tech industry as a field for began to take on the outlines of a concept.
hopeless nerds, if they thought about tech at all. Corporations in the East adopted a feudal
(And this was before nerds were cool.) But Wolfe approach to organization, without even be-
grasped the magnitude of the industry’s role in ing aware of it. There were kings and lords,
business as well as its potential to transform the and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and
way we live. Here he profiles serfs, with layers of protocol
Robert Noyce, who coinvented and perquisites, such as the car
the integrated circuit and You’ll want to read the rest of and driver, to symbolize supe-
cofounded Fairchild Semicon- Tom Wolfe’s masterpieces in full. riority and establish the bound-
ductor and Intel—in the process We’ve digitized every story from ary lines. Back east the CEOs
fostering a corporate culture that every issue in our trailblazing had oices with carved panel-
eighty-five-year catalog. Read
still holds in Silicon Valley. But in the rest—and dig up some more ing, fake ireplaces, escritoires,
the early sixties, when the CEO gems while you’re at it—at bergères, leather-bound books,
of Fairchild’s New York–based classic.esquire.com. and dressing rooms, like a suite
parent company visited Noyce’s in a baronial manor house. Fair-
 1 the silicon frontier! Noyce was determined
2 like gold rushers. . . .
3 no jacket, no necktie, just a checked shirt, khaki
child Semiconductor needed a strict operating
structure, particularly in this period of rapid
growth, but it did not need a social structure.
In fact, nothing could be worse. Noyce realized
how much he detested the eastern corporate
system of class and status with its endless gra-
dations, topped of by the CEOs and vice-pres-
idents who conducted their daily lives as if they
were a corporate court and aristocracy. He re-
jected the idea of a social hierarchy at Fairchild.
Not only would there be no limousines and
chaufeurs, there would not even be any re-
served parking places. Work began at eight
A.M. for one and all, and it would be irst come,
irst served, in the parking lot, for Noyce...and
everybody else. “If you come late,” Noyce liked
to say, “you just have to park in the back forty.”
And there would be no baronial oice suites.
The gloriied warehouse on Charleston Road
was divided into work bays and a couple of rows
of cramped oice cubicles. The cubicles were
never improved. The decor remained Glori-
ied Warehouse, and the doors were always
open. Half the time Noyce, the chief adminis-
trator, was out in the laboratory anyway, wear-
(1) In New York City, 1965. (2) Wolfe’s
car-culture piece as it appeared in Esquire’s
November 1963 issue. (3) The assignment card for
a 1964 profile of Cassius Clay. ($850? Deal!)
ing his white lab coat. Noyce came to work in
a coat and tie, but soon the jacket and the tie
were of, and that was ine for any other man
in the place too. There were no rules of dress
at all, except for some unwritten ones. Dress
should be modest, modest in the social as well
as the moral sense. At Fairchild there were no
hard-worsted double-breasted pinstripe suits
and shepherd’s-check neckties. Sharp, elegant,
fashionable, or alluring dress was a social blun-
der. Shabbiness was not a sin. Ostentation was.
During the start-up phase at Fairchild Semi-
conductor there had been no sense of bosses
and employees. There had been only a com-
mon sense of struggle out on a frontier. Every-
one had internalized the goals of the venture.
They didn’t need exhortations from superi-
ors. Besides, everyone had been so young!
Noyce, the administrator or chief coordina-
tor or whatever he should be called, had been
just about the oldest person on the premises,
and he had been barely thirty. . . .
The spirit of the start-up phase! My God!
Who could forget the exhilarations of the past
few years! To be young and free out here on
to maintain that spirit during the expansion
phase. And for the time being, at least, here
in the early 1960s, the notion of a permanent
start-up operation didn’t seem too farfetched.
Fairchild was unable to coast on the tremen-
dous advantage Noyce’s invention of the
integrated circuit had provided. Competitors
were setting up shop in the Santa Clara Valley
The atmosphere of the new companies was
so democratic, it startled businessmen from
the East. Some ifty-ive-year-old biggie with
his jowls swelling up smoothly from out of
his F. R. Tripler modiied-spread white col-
lar and silk jacquard-print necktie would call
up from GE or RCA and say, “This is Harold
B. Thatchwaite,” and the twenty-three-year-
old secretary on the other end of the line, out
in the Silicon Valley, would say in one of those
sunny blond pale-blue-eyed California voices:
“Just a minute, Hal, Jack will be right with you.”
And once he got to California and met this Jack
for the irst time, there he would be, the CEO
himself, all of thirty-three years old, wearing
pants, and a pair of moccasins with welted
seams the size of jumper cables. Naturally
the irst sounds out of this Jack’s mouth would
be: “Hi, Hal.”
It was the 1960s, and people in the East were
hearing a lot about California surfers, Califor-
nia bikers, hot rodders, car customizers, Cali-
fornia hippies, and political protesters, and the
picture they got was of young people in jeans
and T-shirts who were casual, spontaneous,
impulsive, emotional, sensual, undisciplined,
and obnoxiously proud of it. So these semicon-
ductor outits in the Silicon Valley with their
CEOs dressed like camp counselors struck
them as the business versions of the same thing.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. The
new breed of the Silicon Valley lived for work.
They were disciplined to the point of back
spasms. They worked long hours and kept
working on weekends. They became absorbed
in their companies the way men once had in
the palmy days of the automobile industry... .
Noyce used to go into a slow burn . . . when
the newspapers, the magazines, and the
television networks got on the subject of
the youth. The youth was a favorite topic in
1968. Riots broke out on the campuses as the
antiwar movement reached its peak following
North Vietnam’s Tet ofensive. Black youths
rioted in the cities. . .. The press seemed to en-
joy presenting these youths as the avant-garde
who were sweeping aside the politics and
morals of the past and shaping America’s
future. The French writer Jean-François Revel
toured American campuses and called the
radical youth homo novus, “the New Man,” as
if they were the latest, most advanced product
of human evolution itself, after the manner
of the superchildren (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 53)
 GIVE THAT This page:
Coat, jacket,
HANDSOME MUG A REST. sweater, and
trousers by Louis
THE LATEST PIECES Vuitton; shoes
($770) by Fratelli
Rossetti.
FROM LABELS LIKE
Opposite:
VUITTON, Trench coat
($2,795), jacket
VERSACE, AND ($1,795), shirt
($550), and tie
PRADA ($175) by Versace.

ARE SO FRESH
YOU WON’T
HAVE TO RELY ON YOUR
GOOD LOOKS.
Photographs by
JEREMY LIEBMAN
Styling by
NICK SULLIVAN

1 23
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sweater ($1,750),
and trousers
($790) by Bottega
Veneta; hat by
Borsalino.

Opposite:
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shirt ($1,120),
and tie ($270) by
Prada.

SUIT JACKET
OR FLIGHT
JACKET? WHEN
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AND SPORTSWEAR
BOTH LOOK THIS
GOOD, THERE’S
NO NEED
TO TAKE SIDES.
1 25
126
 This page:
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Right: Jacket ($1,790),
turtleneck sweater,
shirt ($690), trousers
($830), and shoes
($995) by Salvatore
Ferragamo.

Opposite:
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turtleneck sweater
($820), ski pants
($1,200), and boots
($1,365) by Moncler
Grenoble. Right: Coat
($2,120), shirt ($350),
tie ($220), and trousers
($435) by Corneliani.

WHETHER YOU
OPT FOR
A CLASSIC
BLAZER,
TOASTY PUFFER,
OR OLD-SCHOOL
TOPCOAT,
THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF
WAYS TO
SEEK COVER.
 ANNOUNCE
YOURSELF WITH A
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GET A FEEL FOR
PLUSH
MOLESKIN.
A LITTLE TEXTURE
ALWAYS
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128
 This page:
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suit ($12,095), shirt
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($350) by Kiton;
loafers ($670) by
Fratelli Rossetti.
13 0
 This page:
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sweater ($298),
trousers ($228),
and boots ($298)
by Michael Kors.

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by CALVIN KLEIN
205W39NYC.

ALL-AMERICAN
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AND SHEARLING
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SHOULD ALWAYS STAY IN
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For store information see page 155. Prop styling by Chelsea Maruskin. Grooming by Lisa-Raquel at See Management for R+Co.
 For eons, the earth has had
the same amount of water—no more, no less.
What the ancient Romans used
for crops and Nefertiti drank?
It’s the same stuff we bathe with.
Yet with more than seven billion people on the planet,
experts now worry we’re RUNNING OUT
OF USABLE WATER.
The symptoms are here . . .

13 2
 . . . multiyear droughts, large-scale crop
failures, a major city—Cape Town—on the
verge of going dry, increasing outbreaks of
violence, fears of FULL-SCALE
WATER WARS. The big question:
How do we keep the H20 flowing?
By Alec Wilkinson
Illustration by
Sean Freeman
 Having evaporated from lakes and rivers and oceans and returned as snow and rain,
has been through innumerable uses. DINOSAURS DRANK IT. The Caesars
It’s been places, and CONSORTED WITH THINGS, that you might not care to
I. All the Water
There Is
HERE’S A CONCEPT: paper water. Paper wa-
ter is water the government grants certain
farmers who are drawing water from a river
or a watershed in, say, California. The phrase
describes the water the farmer, under pre-
mium conditions, is entitled to. Practically,
however, paper water is mostly notional wa-
ter, conceptual water, wish water, since over
the years California has awarded many times
as much paper water as there is actual wa-
ter—which, to distinguish it, is quasi-legally
called wet water. Some paper water might be
made real during years of exceptional abun-
dance, but most of it will forever be specula-
tive and essentially useless, since it can’t re-
alistically be traded, having no value. Paper
water thus amounts to a type of hypothetical
currency, backed by the Bank of Nowhere,
Representing Nothing since 1960 (or there-
abouts), when modern water troubles arrived
in America and especially in California, where
13 4 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
the wildly expanding citizenry required new
state and federally managed water systems
run by Watercrats.
Paper water is also a signiier of a domestic
and global concern called peak water, a term
proposed in 2010 by the hydrologist Peter
Gleick in a paper he wrote with Meena Pala-
niappan that was published in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences. Gleick meant
the phrase to be applied to worldwide circum-
stances, such as those that currently prevail in
Cape Town, South Africa, where, as a result of
a ferocious three-year drought, the taps might
before long run dry, possibly in 2019—Day
Zero, it’s been called. The U.S. is also afflicted.
In fact, Gleick regards California, with its
relentless, outsized, and wildly conlicting
demands on water, as a “laboratory for all of
peak water’s concerns.”
Peak water derives conceptually from peak
oil, a phrase irst used by a geophysicist named
M. King Hubbert in 1956. Peak oil means
that the planet has only so much oil, and that
eventually it will grow suiciently scarce that
what remains will be too expensive to collect.
Hubbert predicted that U. S. oil production
would reach maximum output between 1965
and 1975, and in 1970 it did, but it has risen
lately because of new means of recovering oil,
such as fracking. Some people still believe in
peak oil, and others think there will always
be plenty of oil, because there is more we ha-
ven’t found yet.
That water was in a position similar to oil
occurred to Gleick when people would ask if
he thought that the world, with its popula-
tion growing alarmingly and climate change
causing certain places to become disastrously
water-soaked (South Asia, Texas) while others
(Cape Town, California) are water-starved,
would ever use up its water. “My irst reac-
tion was ‘We never run out of water,’ ” Gleick
says. “But there’s groundwater in China and
India and the Middle East and in America in
the Midwest and California that we really are
using up just like oil.”
Water cannot be created or destroyed; it
can only be damaged. When Gleick says we’ll
never run out, he means that at some point,
millions of years ago, there was all the water
the water we consume
did, too.
think about.
THIRSTY?
he Colorado River Delta, in Northern Mexico,
photographed in 2010. Most years,
nearly all the river’s water is diverted long before
it reaches the delta.
there is, a result of the law of the conservation
of matter. Having evaporated from lakes and
rivers and oceans and returned as snow and
rain, the water we consume has been through
innumerable uses. Dinosaurs drank it. The
Caesars did, too. It’s been places, and con-
sorted with things, that you might not care to
think about. In theory, there’s enough fresh-
water in the world for everyone, but like oil or
diamonds or any other valuable resource, it
is not dispersed democratically. Brazil, Can-
ada, Colombia, Peru, Indonesia, and Russia
have an abundance—about 40 percent of
all there is. America has a decent amount.
India and China, meanwhile, have a third of
the world’s people and less than a tenth of
its freshwater. It is predicted that in twelve
years the demand for water in India will be
twice the amount on hand. Beijing draws wa-
ter from an aquifer beneath the city. From
being used faster than rain can replenish it,
the aquifer has dropped several hundreds of
feet in the last forty years, and in places the
city is sinking four inches every year. As for
the world’s stock, however, nearly all of the
water on earth is salty; less than 3 percent is
fresh. Some of that is in rivers, lakes, aqui-
fers, and reservoirs—the Great Lakes con-
tain one ifth of the freshwater on the earth’s
surface—and we have stored so much wa-
ter behind dams that we have subtly afected
the earth’s rotation; but two thirds of all the
freshwater we have is frozen in the earth’s
cold places as ice or permafrost, leaving less
than 1 percent of the world’s total water for
all living things. Much of that gets a rough
ride. American ponds and streams and lakes
and rivers contain fungicides, defoliants, sol-
vents, insecticides, herbicides, preservatives,
biological toxins, manufacturing compounds,
blood thinners, heart medications, perfumes,
skin lotions, antidepressants, antipsychotics,
antibiotics, beta blockers, anticonvulsants,
germs, oils, viruses, hormones, and several
heavy metals. Not all of these are cleansed
from water before we drink it.
There are two kinds of numbers, I believe,
big ones and little ones, but here are some
big ones by way of context: According to the
World Health Organization, among the two
billion people who have no drinking water
provided to them, 844 million travel more
than thirty minutes to a river or a tap, where
they sometimes receive water contaminated
by human excrement. Such water has the risk
of diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and
polio. Nearly 850,000 people die each year
from diarrhea, a cruel circumstance in areas
short on clean water, since diarrhea works
its efects by means of dehydration. Bangla-
desh, India, Rwanda, and Ghana have some
of the most tainted water.
The simplest hardships to invoke are hun-
ger and thirst. Only a few hours of depriva-
tion will acquaint a person with both. Half a
gallon of drinking water a day is what each
of us needs to drink to stay alive. (An Ameri-
can uses roughly eighty to a hundred gallons
a day, including toilets, baths and showers,
dishwashers, washing machines, and so on.)
In the dry parts of the world, or the semidry
parts where there are too many people and
no water-delivery system, the search for that
daily half gallon can be dire, and sometimes
past dire. A survey in 2015 of members of
the World Economic Forum in Davos listed
“water crises” for the irst time as the world’s
leading threat, ahead of “spread of infectious
diseases” and “weapons of mass destruction.”
Each year Gleick’s organization, the Paciic
Institute, updates its Water Conlict Chronol-
ogy, a compilation of disturbances around the
world involving water. In 2017, there were
more than seventy incidents, dozens of them
deadly, mainly in the Middle East and Africa.
In 1997, there were only three.
II. Haves and
Have-nots
STATIONARITY, A TERM from statistics, ap-
plies to contexts in which the past predicts
the future. When water experts say that we
are “outside stationarity,” they mean that the
slaphappy way that the world uses water has
brought about so many unexampled circum-
stances, so many overburdened systems and
areas of deprivation and depletion, that we
cannot know how matters will unfold. Some-
times water specialists say that the earth is
experiencing water stress. The Nile, the Rio
Grande, the Yellow River in China, the Indus
in Asia, and the Colorado (which sustains the
American Southwest from Phoenix to Las
Vegas to San Diego) are tapped out. The Ganges
lows, but it’s unspeakably ilthy.
With water, there are “distinct classes of
water haves and have-nots,” according to Jay
Famiglietti, who is the senior water scientist
at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the
California Institute of Technology. (Earth sci-
ence is part of NASA’s charter.) “The wet ar-
eas of the world are the high latitudes and the
tropics, and the areas in between are getting
drier,” he says. The supercharged hurricanes
and typhoons that have resulted from global
warming move water around within the re-
gions that already have water but do nothing
for the parched places.
America has hot spots, too. California had
its own Zero Day not long ago when, in Tulare
County in the Central Valley, an area of cor-
porate farms, something like a thousand wells
went dry in towns such as East Porterville,
meaning that more than seven thousand
people found themselves occupying houses
where you would turn on a tap and nothing
came out. The water table has been diverted
by means of deep wells and irrigation sys-
tems serving the sprawling farms. The county
began delivering bottled drinking water,
and there were free public showers. Water
to lush toilets and do laundry came from
tanks parked at the ire station. People illed
barrels and hauled them home.
A quarter of all the food grown in America
comes from the Central Valley—oranges
and grapes are raised in Tulare, along with
dairy cows and cattle—so having it go even
partially dry is not a small concern. “No one
really knows what happens, if this were to get
worse,” Famiglietti says. “Our water security,
and therefore our food security, is at far greater
risk than people realize. Aside from the cri-
sis of humans not having water, we’re also go-
ing to be losing these major food-producing
regions like the Central Valley. Agriculture
will migrate to where the water is, maybe the
southern parts of South Dakota and south-
ern Idaho. There is already some agricultural
migration to those regions.”
S eptember 2018_Esquire 1 35
 That may sound simple, relatively, a cul-
tural shift, like the past migration of workers
and jobs from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.
However, climate change, with its disrup-
tion of the rain cycle, making severe storms
even more severe and diminishing the snow
pack in seasons of drought, makes it impos-
sible to know which areas will remain stably
wet. Cape Town is sufering now because “a
once-in-a-millennium event,” as it has been
described, has been occurring since 2015—
scant rain in the region for three years.
In California, rain became scarce in 2011
and stayed scarce for ive years. Suicient rain
fell during the winter of 2016 that the drought
appeared to have ended, since people could see
rivers running and reservoirs illed that had
seemed nearly empty before. Water experts
view the matter diferently. They make a dis-
tinction between surface drought and ground-
water drought. Five years of overdrafting in
the Central Valley left a groundwater deicit
that the rains didn’t replenish.
Aquifers commonly contain water that went
underground thousands or millions of years
ago and hasn’t come out since—it’s called fos-
sil water. Groundwater, however, is as vulnera-
ble to contamination as surface water. An over-
drafted aquifer near a coast can have seawater
seep into it and ruin it. Arsenic occurs naturally
in rocks and can ind its way into the water ta-
ble, also ruining it. An aquifer near an industrial
dump might be polluted by man-made chemi-
cals. In the Central Valley, some wells are con-
taminated by nitrates, which come from fertil-
izer, leaky septic tanks, and big cattle-feeding
operations; drinking nitrate-polluted wa-
ter can bring about conditions such as blue-
baby syndrome, in which the ingertips of
babies turn blue from insuicient oxygen.
Finally, an overdrafted aquifer can be de-
pleted. Whether it returns is a matter of how
it was illed in the irst place. Porous aquifers,
ones beneath sand and gravel, as in the Central
Valley, can recover with rain. Aquifers that
lie beneath rock deposits or in gaps between
them, and especially ones in places where
rain is sparse, might not recover in a time
frame that means anything against the mea-
sure of a human life span. In India, so many
farmers have killed themselves from despair
over disappeared groundwater, and the pov-
erty it enforces, that there is a category called
suicide farmers. In 2016, more than 11,300
farmers took their own lives.
III. See You in
Six Thousand Years
BESIDES CALIFORNIA, the other American
place in water jeopardy is the High Plains,
which sits on top of an aquifer called the Ogal-
lala. The Ogallala is sometimes described as
an ocean of groundwater. One of the largest
13 6 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
known aquifers in the world, it runs from South
Dakota to Texas, more or less in the shape of a
monkey wrench. Near the top, in places, it is
a thousand feet deep, and at the lower end, in
places, there are areas where it is as shallow as
only a few feet. The Dust Bowl, which played
out above the Ogallala, was, in a way, a peri-
od phenomenon. All the water necessary to
sustain the crops that now cover the plains
was always there, but a few feet deeper than
Depression-era farmers could reach with
windmill pumps. Electric pumps, which only
became widespread by the end of the thirties,
made it accessible.
For decades farmers thought the Ogallala
was inexhaustible. According to Scientific
American, drawing on government studies,
by 1975 the amount of water taken each year
from the aquifer equaled the low of the Colo-
rado River, and now the annual draw is about
eighteen times that amount. Farmers have
been pumping out four to six feet a year in
places where half an inch is being added. As
far as continuing to be useful, the Ogallala
might be exhausted by 2070. A reasonable
estimate is that it would take six thousand
years for rain to replenish it.
IV. A Water-Crisis
Tour
PETER GLEICK IS sixty-one, and he looks like
the scholar he is. He is tall and gangly, with a
thin face and glasses, a gray beard, and wispy
gray hairs that rise from his crown like solar
lares. He grew up in New York City, where he
was a Cub Scout and learned from his father to
identify birds in Central Park. He went to Yale,
then he moved to California and got a doctorate
in energy studies from UC Berkeley. In 1987,
he was one of four founders of the Paciic In-
stitute, which specializes in water policy, and
in 2003, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
ZERO DAY
A dam near Cape Town in March with
almost nothing to dam.
Toward the end of 2011, someone anony-
mously mailed him a private document from
the Heartland Institute, a conservative think
tank that denies climate change. The docu-
ment described a plan to produce a curricu-
lum for kindergarten through twelfth-grade
students that disputed climate change. It
also described the institute’s contributions
to climate scientists who cast doubt on cli-
mate science.
“I could have thrown it out. I could have
sent it to a journalist,” Gleick told me. “But
I chose to try to verify it myself.” He set up
a Gmail account under the name of one of
Heartland’s board members and asked Heart-
land to send him the institution’s most recent
documents. What he received he dispersed to
journalists, who published them. The Heart-
land Institute said that one of the documents
was forged. Gleick wrote a piece in the Huf-
ington Post acknowledging what he’d done
and apologizing for his deception.
“My board was not happy,” he said. “I
stepped down, they made an investigation
that eventually supported my version, and I
was reinstated.” Meanwhile, the Heartland
Institute bought petergleick.com, where you
can read “Why Isn’t Paciic Institute’s Peter
Gleick in Jail?” Regardless, in 2016, Gleick
stepped down after nearly thirty years as the
Paciic Institute’s president and now spends
most of his time writing in an oice on the in-
stitute’s premises. He is considered to be an
eminent authority on water issues around the
world and is regarded as especially knowl-
edgeable about California’s circumstances.
The Paciic Institute occupies a Victorian
house among an enclave of such houses in
Oakland. One morning I met Gleick there,
and then we drove east to visit what he called
some “peak water signifiers”—a sort of
water-crisis tour.
We were going to a walnut farm irst. On the
way, as we passed rolling green hills, Gleick
explained that there are three components
to peak water, the irst being peak renewable
water. “A renewable resource is low limited,”
he said. “You never run out of it, like sunlight.
Most water is renewable—rainfall, snowmelt,
rivers—but in more and more places around
the world, we’re running into limits brought
on by peak use. The classic example is the
Colorado River, hardly a drop of which ever
reaches its delta, in Mexico, anymore. It gets
used up entirely along the way.”
Even an overtaxed river like the Colorado
is partly renewable. “You get more the next
year when it rains and snows,” Gleick con-
tinued. “It’s not that there’s never water, but
there’s a limit to how much you can take, and
that limit, its peak, is the renewable low of
the resource.”
Gleick calls the second component of peak
water peak nonrenewable water. “Just like
peak oil,” he said. “An aquifer is not sustain-
able if humans pump it faster than nature
charges it. The people in the Central Valley
who have seen their wells go dry are experi-
encing peak nonrenewable water. There is
still water there, but the groundwater level
has dropped, and only the farms can aford
to dig the deeper well. You could ind other
water for these people—you could hook them
up to a municipal system that’s maybe hooked
up to a river. No one’s dying of thirst. But
we cobble together ixes when we run out.
So you go back to this question: Are we run-
ning out of water? Yes, sort of, with nonre-
newable resources, and yes, sort of, with
renewable resources.”
The walnut farm was about ifty miles north
of Oakland, in Winters. “More and more
orchards are going in, because they make
money,” Gleick said. “There’s a distinction
between ield crops—cotton, rice, wheat, and
corn—which you plant every year, and per-
manent crops, like fruits and nuts. Permanent
crops need permanent water. If you have a
drought and you’re growing wheat or alfalfa,
maybe you fallow your ield for a year. But
if you’re growing almonds, you’ve got to
water these trees or they die, and it’s a twenty-
year investment sometimes before they
produce a crop. That puts more pressure on
groundwater. The advantage with trees is you
can use drip irrigation, meaning you can tar-
get the roots, and apply the right amount of
water at the right time, because there are
monitors in the soil. Drip irrigation is more
eicient than lood irrigation, where you sim-
ply lood the ield and hope you’re watering at
the moment the crop needs it most.”
The walnut farm, Sierra Orchards, was
owned by a forward-thinking farmer named
Craig McNamara, who looks a lot like his fa-
ther, Robert McNamara, the secretary of
defense under Kennedy and Johnson. We
bumped down mud roads in an electric cart,
which McNamara drove, and we saw the
trees and his drip-irrigation system and how
it works with a computer program to let him
know when the soil is dry, and at the bottom
of a small declivity, we stood beside Putah
HaLF
EMPtY?A water-crisis primer
40
PERCENT
Projected share of the world’s
population—more than three
billion people—living in areas of
severe water stress by 2050.
450
PERCENT
Increase in number of violent
incidents spurred by conflicts over
water between 1997 and 2017.
(In 2018, water violence has occurred
in Ukraine, Syria, Mali, and Iran.)
700
MILLION
High-end estimate of number of
people displaced due
to water shortages by 2030.
55
PERCENT
Projected increase in global water
demand by 2050.
11
Number of major cities most
likely to experience severe water
shortages in coming decades: São
Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo,
Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico
City, London, Tokyo, Miami.
80
PERCENT
Share of industrial and municipal
wastewater released into
global water systems untreated.
842,000
Number of people—including
361,000 children under
the age of five—who die each
year from diarrhea due to
contaminated water, or lack of
adequate sanitation
or hand-washing facilities.
SOURCES: THE UNITED NATIONS,
THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, THE PACIFIC
INSTITUTE, THE BBC
Creek, which he draws from. Since the creek
was running high, he was looding some of his
ields with creek water to restore the water ta-
ble. Finally, McNamara showed us hedgerows
he’d planted to attract insects and birds and
a huge machine by a barn that was convert-
ing walnut shells into organic matter he could
use for fertilizer. Bookkeeping is what goes
on in most farm oices I’ve ever visited, but
McNamara’s was like a command center
where he could ind on a computer screen
what he needed to know about which square
yard of his orchard needed water and which
square yard had enough.
As Gleick and I drove away, he said that
McNamara was noteworthy in trying to do
more with less water. “The hedgerows and
recycling shells, those are things that most
farmers think cost money and don’t provide
an immediate or obvious return. They’re
smart from a sustainability point of view, but
if you’re maximizing return, you don’t do
them. That’s why his neighbor’s using pesti-
cides. It’s more expensive to put in smart ir-
rigation systems and soil-moisture monitors,
but you make up the money by being organic.”
V. “Secret, Occult, and
Concealed”
THE WAY WATER is used in the Midwest and
West, and elsewhere around the world, exem-
pliies a nineteenth-century principle called
the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of
the commons means that when there is a re-
source available to everyone, and the resource
is unregulated—in the nineteenth century
it was the common land for grazing cattle—
people will use it to their own advantage un-
til it is consumed rather than conserve it to
everyone’s advantage. It is a principle that
still applies widely, to overishing, say, in the
North Atlantic, and the disappearance of cod.
Several colloquial rules, made at the start
of the twentieth century, govern water in the
West, and sometimes they contradict one an-
other. Where water is shared, from a river,
say, the rule that usually prevails is “irst
pump, oldest pump” or “irst in time, irst in
right.” These older rights are also called “se-
nior rights” or “pre-1914 rights.” They mean
that even if you are upstream of another farm,
if the downstream farmer’s rights preceded
yours, you can’t have water until he has all
he wants. People without senior rights might
get paper water.
California farmers who draw from wells
don’t deal in paper water, since so long as
the wells are on their property, the farm-
ers are entitled to drill as deep as they
like. In India, in parts of China, and in the
U. S., with groundwater it’s the “law of the
biggest pump,” which allows a farmer to
drain the water from (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 54)
S eptember 2018_Esquire 1 37

ccording to the Chi-
nese calendar, 2017
was the Year of the
Cock. 2018 is the
Year of the Dog.
And, in Dog years,
this is also the Year of the Cock Pill: Viagra.
The revolutionary erectile-dysfunction
drug is celebrating the twentieth anniver-
sary of its Brobdingnagian launch in a most
auspicious way: by inally going generic.
The ramifications for generic sildena-
fil (the scientific name) are huge for your
pocketbook and your health. Viagra’s high
demand and cost (about seventy dollars
a pill) have made it among the most boot-
legged meds in the world, and one of the
top sellers for Internet pharmacies. A study
presented at the World Meeting on Sexual
Medicine found that 77 percent of Viagra
sold online was fake. Counterfeit Viagra
and similar impostors have been linked to
liver damage, strokes, and death. Just a few
years back, former Los Angeles Lakers star
Lamar Odom ended up face-planted in a
Nevada brothel from coke and phony herbal
fucklements. “He was taking herbal Viagra,”
brothel owner Dennis Hof said at the time,
“and a lot of it.” The availability of generic
sildenail cuts the price of the pills in half
and promises greater assurance that the pill
you pop won’t be your last.
But while Viagra is poised to go wider
than ever before, the inside story of its
launch is not widely known. How did a
group of oddball underdogs in America’s
most conservative pharmaceutical conglom-
erate, Pizer, bring it into existence? At the
time, the idea of selling Viagra was consid-
ered crazy at best and immoral at worst.
In fact, it’s a miracle that it ever came to
be at all. In addition to the people within
Pfizer who were in an uproar over the
“dick pill,” four major groups began rally-
ing against it before its launch: the Catholic
church (which thought it was immoral),
medical experts (who insisted patients
140 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
would be too embarrassed to ask for the
pill), business execs (who thought it would
make Pfizer a laughingstock), and legis-
lators (who lobbied against the pill for the
same reason as the church).
It was the job of two unlikely guys at
Pfizer to overcome them all: Rooney
Nelson, a young Jamaican marketing whiz,
and Sal “Dr. Sal” Giorgianni, a crusty Ital-
ian pharmacist from Queens who became
Viagra’s medical expert. Together, Nelson
and Dr. Sal became the dynamic duo of
erectile dysfunction, wooing angry reli-
gious leaders, skittish politicians, and
cynical pharma nerds from all over.
Against all odds, they succeeded, making
Viagra one of the most successful and emu-
lated launches of all time, and the basis
for today’s $3 billion erectile-dysfunction
industry. Now, on the drug’s twentieth
birthday, they’re sharing their story for the
irst time.
hen Rooney Nelson arrived for his
irst day of work at Pizer’s corpo-
rate office in New York City after
completing his MBA at Florida A&M, he
thought it was anything but cool. Com-
pared with Jamaica, where he was born and
raised, it seemed like an “exceedingly con-
servative” company, illed with thousands
of somber employees, many of whom
wouldn’t leave their desks without irst put-
ting on a suit coat. “It was not a hip kind of
place,” he says with a laugh.
Pizer had been around since 1849 and
had made its name as the chief producer of
penicillin during World War II. In recent
years, however, it had fallen behind larger
pharmas such as Merck and Johnson &
Johnson. It was looking for a break. It came,
as breaks often do, when least expected.
Scientists at Pizer’s lab in the small coastal
town of Sandwich, England, had made a
strange discovery while testing a drug that
treated chest pain by expanding blood ves-
sels. When given the drug three times a
day, volunteers were reporting muscle
aches, headaches, and some discomfort
while swallowing. Oh, and, as one investi-
gator relayed to Ian Osterloh, the clinical
researcher heading the study for Pizer in
1991, some were getting hard-ons, too.
Treating erectile dysfunction had long
been considered an exotic hack involving
penile injections and pumps. While Oster-
loh was intrigued by the report of increased
erections among the chest-pain-medication
volunteers, it didn’t muster much of a reac-
tion. Impotence wasn’t acknowledged as a
clinical problem, he says, and if so, it was
thought to be psychological, not something
that could be ixed with a pill. “Nobody at
that time really thought, Gosh, this is fan-
tastic,” he recalls.
But Osterloh was among those who
thought it merited more study. He can still
remember his feeling of helplessness as a
junior doctor at the UK National Health
Service when a forty-year-old man asked if
he could be treated for impotence. Osterloh
had gone to his boss to inquire, only to be
told there was nothing they could do.
Pizer agreed to what he calls a “low pri-
ority” pilot study for twelve men to see if
these uprisings were just an anomaly. But
when the subjects also experienced erec-
tions, Osterloh and the others realized that
they had more than a cure for chest pains on
their hands. They seemed to have stumbled
on a pill that could give guys erections.
David Brinkley, the head of Pfizer’s
new product-planning group, was enticed
enough by the discovery to see if it had the
potential to go to market. Gay and progres-
sive with a flair for marketing, Brinkley,
like Nelson, felt he was an outlier within
the staid company. And it didn’t take long
after he began discussing the drug in-house
to ind that many didn’t share his opinion.
“To have conversations about sexual-func-
tion drugs was diicult for a lot of people,”
Brinkley says. “It was not considered digni-
ied medicine.” The management told him
that it was not in the business of marketing
side efects—erections or otherwise.
But after enough volunteers reported
getting erections from the drug, there was
no doubt about it anymore: This was no
side efect; this was a direct result. In 1996,
Pizer gave Brinkley the green light to bring
this pill to the public. It was named Viagra,
a meaningless word chosen, if anything,
because drugs that started with the letter V
were considered powerful-sounding.
Viagra would only work, Brinkley knew,

if he could overcome the biggest—and for
Pizer, the riskiest—challenge of all: being
taken seriously. It wasn’t just the outside
world that presented a problem; it was the
viability within the company itself. When
Nelson irst heard from Brinkley about the
“dick pill,” as they called it, he had the same
reaction as just about everyone else there:
He cracked up. “The early conversation,”
he recalls, “was laughter.”
If Viagra was going to become anything
but a punch line, Brinkley needed a launch
team with the right mix of brash and
style to handle it. And Pizer had just the
odd couple for the job: Rooney Nelson
and Dr. Sal. “Have you ever seen that
Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Twins?”
Nelson says with a laugh. “We were
Twins. He’s sort of a short, chubby, Ital-
ian, gregarious guy, and I’m this kind of
tall, black, not-that-friendly guy that’s all
about business.”
Nelson, an up-and-coming marketer at
Pizer, not only had the right edge to launch
Viagra; he also had the perfect connections.
He’d spent the past couple years working
on Cardura, a treatment for the symptoms
of enlarged prostates, and had cultivated
relationships with urologists around the
country, the exact group they needed to
Left: The very first Viagra print ad. It appeared
in Esquire in August 1998. Above: Bob Dole’s
erectile-dysfunction-awareness campaign.
endorse and, ultimately, prescribe Viagra.
It would be his job to convince them.
Dr. Sal was the ideal complement to
Nelson. A wry middle-aged clinical phar-
macist with five kids and two degrees
from Columbia, he was Pfizer’s director
of external relations, the medical expert
responsible for managing the company’s
image and reputation—two things that
Viagra, more than any other drug he’d
encountered in his eighteen years there,
put at risk. “Pizer then was still a very, very
conservative company with very conserva-
tive roots,” he says, “and we were about to
go of and sell a drug that was for sex.” With
Dr. Sal’s medical expertise and Nelson’s
marketing lair, it would be up to the two of
them to sell the sex drug to the world.
hat the hell is this? I don’t know
what it’s doing to my brain.” The
feedback from the men in the early
Viagra focus groups went along these lines.
“They were horrified,” as Nelson puts it.
“The irst reactions were ‘You’re kidding,
right?’ You know: ‘Where’s the camera?
I’m on Candid Camera.’ ”
The volunteers in the clinical trials were
also skeptical. Nelson and Dr. Sal sat eagerly
in a urologist’s oice one day as ten patients
anxiously iled in. But the goal wasn’t just to
make money. There was something deeper
that both of them recognized. Impotence was
a real problem, one that, by being overlooked,
was condemning generations, including the
legions of baby boomers, to lives of frustration.
The men had volunteered to be part of
one of Viagra’s early clinical trials, a first
step toward bringing it to market. It was
a double-blind, placebo-controlled, ran-
domized trial, which meant neither the
physician nor the patient knew who’d be
getting a placebo. After taking the drug,
the patient received what was called “visual
sexual stimulation.” The VSS of choice:
Debbie Does Dallas. “I’d like you to watch
it,” Nelson would tell the patient, “and I
want to see if you get an erection or not. If
you get an erection, there’s no cameras or
anything, just so you know. If you have an
erection, you know, feel free to masturbate.
Here’s a vial. When you’re done, could you
put the ejaculate, the semen, in that vial,
close it up, and come back out?”
To determine what, if any, impact Viagra
had on ejaculation, the team had to mea-
sure the amount and consistency of the
semen. It was still so new that they had
no idea what might happen. “You don’t
know what this drug is doing,” Nelson says.
What it was doing was something they’d
never anticipated. Some patients reported
that they were having blue-tinted vision,
a condition known as cyanopsia. It turned
out that one of the enzymes restricted by
Viagra in order to create an erection caused
sensitivity in some rod cells in the eye,
causing some subjects to temporarily pick
up more strands of blue light. A more last-
ing symptom presented in the volunteers
who reported not just erections but four-
hour ones—a temporary side effect that
many patients didn’t mind. “Most people
thought it was kind of cool,” Nelson says.
With the trials showing positive results,
they had to ind the right allies to get behind
Viagra. In pharmaceutical marketing, just
like in any other culture or industry, there
are the whales, the big shots whose vote
of confidence is essential to a new prod-
uct’s success. The group consisted of the
high-powered, high-priced medical practi-
tioners: the heart surgeons, neurosurgeons,
and the like. At this time, the 1990s, pharma
companies had their own kind of legiti-
mized payola—spending millions to wine
and dine doctors into endorsing their meds.
To sell an erection drug, however, meant
swaying the doctors who were way lower
down the pecking order: the urologists.
Compared with brain surgeons and cardiol-
ogists, urologists were the Dunder Mifflin of
the pharma world: nerdy, unsexy, and unac-
customed to the warm fuzz of marketing
crews. But that was about to change.
The mid-nineties were the heyday for
pharmaceutical junkets, but Viagra marked
the irst time that unglamorous urologists
were the ones being seduced. Pizer would
fly a dozen of them to an all-expenses-
paid weekend at the (c ont i nu e d on p a ge 1 50)
S eptember 2018_Esquire 1 41
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1 43
 W
o
H
are stars made in Hollywood? Some-
times it starts with Lisa in accounting.
Director Jon Chu was on deadline to
cast the part of Nick Young, the male
lead of his film Crazy Rich Asians (out
now), based on the best-selling novel
by Kevin Kwan. But despite going so far
as to invite anyone to submit a video
audition on social media, Chu hadn’t
found the perfect Nick—the magnetic,
Oxford-educated heir of one of Singa-
pore’s wealthiest families.
Enter Lisa from accounting. She had
met this guy Henry Golding five years
ago when he hosted travel shows for
the BBC and the Discovery channel,
and she was struck by his charisma,
his British accent, and . . . well, look at
him. Chu follows him on Instagram.
Golding screen-grabs the notification.
Asks his manager what it means when
a Hollywood director randomly follows
you. “They’re casting for Crazy Rich
Asians!” he’s told. He starts read-
ing the book. But before he’s able to
finish, Chu gets in touch. “I’ve got two
questions for you: Can you act, and
will you read for me?” One audition
later and Golding is a newly minted
actor in this year’s biggest rom-com.
Pure luck? Maybe. But then you learn
about his Jedi-mind-trick-like optimism.
“Hi, I’m Henry. I’m a television host” is
how he would introduce himself when
he was twenty-one, having left behind
his job as a hairdresser in London to
make it in Kuala Lumpur. The catch?
He wasn’t a TV host. But the fake-
it-till-you-make-it attitude worked.
“Sometimes it’s just that mental switch
in yourself that changes and opens
doors that you would never imagine,”
says Golding, now thirty-one.
Although it’s unusual for a first-
time actor to nab such a huge role,
it’s rarer still for the part to have such
social significance: Crazy Rich Asians
is the first American film with an all-
Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club,
based on another novel about the Asian
diaspora, was in theaters more than
twenty-five years ago. The potential
for this movie to bring Asians to the
forefront in Hollywood in the wake of
recent whitewashing scandals like
Tilda Swinton’s casting as a Tibetan
monk in Doctor Strange is not lost on
Golding, or the rest of the close-knit
cast. “Everybody was from a differ-
ent part of the world: the UK, Australia,
America, we had Singaporeans, Malay-
sians, and they’d all been through trials
and tribulations of being Asians in non-
Asian countries, of always having this
turmoil of ‘Do I belong here?’ We knew
that this film would be putting every-
body on the path of normalizing leading
roles with Asian faces attached to
them,” he says.
“Jimmy O. Yang [Bernard Tai in
Crazy Rich Asians and Jian Yang on
Silicon Valley] really highlighted
the fact that he never spent time—real
time—with other Asians in entertain-
ment. He was just like, ‘This is why
we’re not united enough. This is some-
thing we should be striving for—just
supporting each other.’ We haven’t
gotten to a stage where we can help
push each other onto the platforms
that we need to be pushed onto to get
the word out to the rest of the world.”
While he wants to continue telling
Asian narratives—he recently wrapped
the film Monsoon, about a man who
returns to Vietnam to spread his par-
ents’ ashes—he and his team are
focused on leading Hollywood roles.
He’ll costar alongside Blake Lively and
Anna Kendrick in Paul Feig’s A Simple
Favor (out September 15), a fun, twist-
filled suburban whodunit. “I’ve become
like Paul’s nephew,” he jokes. But
Golding’s dream job? “Anything that
Denis Villeneuve is attached to, like
Dune. I would love to be in a Bond
movie. I would love to be in Star Wars.
I’m ready to work hard.” Plus, he’ll
have no trouble introducing himself.
—Kevin Sintumuang
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Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, and give
them $2,500 each for their time. Pizer could
easily spend $200,000 per trip to entice
them. “Urologists, they had never really been
to places like that; they had never eaten like
that; they had never drank like that,” Nelson
says. “So you had a really primed group that
was receptive to hearing your message.”
Over dirty martinis and lollipop lamb
chops, Nelson would look out into the room
and wonder how he was going to energize
them. He pitched them on how he was going
to make them as cool and desirable as open-
heart surgeons. “This is an opportunity for
you to be at the cutting edge of what could
be the most revolutionary product in a long
time in medicine,” he said. But there was one
problem, they quickly told him: They never
talked about sex with their patients. There
was no reason to discuss impotence, because
they had no remedy. “No physician asks
about things that they can’t treat,” as Nelson
puts it. “It was a wall of silence.”
The only way to succeed was to break the
wall. He and the team developed what Dr. Sal
called a series of “doorknob conversations,”
named after that moment when men, often
on the way out of the doctor’s oice, would
inally ind the courage to ask about a cure
for impotence. Their solution: Be straight
with them. “Why don’t we just make this
real simple and say, ‘If they think they have
it, give them the medicine, tell them how
to take it, set realistic expectations, and let
them go for it,’ ” Dr. Sal says the conversa-
tion went. “And it’s either going to work or
it’s not going to work.”
But while Dr. Sal and Nelson were making
headway with urologists, they were encoun-
tering mounting skepticism within Pfizer.
“Some medical groups felt that maybe we
shouldn’t be marketing such trivial medicine,”
Dr. Sal says. “But as the old joke goes, it’s only
trivial if you don’t have the problem.”
Part of the issue, they realized, was seman-
tics. No guy wanted to tell his doctor he was
impotent. The word had too many negative
overtones: weakness, helplessness, steril-
ity. “In the early days,” says Brinkley, “just
talking about impotence was taboo. You
150 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
couldn’t even say the word penis.” They
needed to come up with something better
than impotence. Viagra’s medical team came
his is blasphemy! This is immoral!”
Nelson and Dr. Sal listened
patiently inside a conference room
released. They’d assembled a roundtable of
deacons, pastors, rabbis, and others to gauge
their reactions to the boner pill. It was part of
their due diligence for this uncharted terri-
tory, an important litmus test for what kind of
resistance they’d meet by releasing the drug.
“There was concern that there might be
religious objection,” says Brinkley, who’d
had feelers out all the way up to the Vati-
can for a response. At this roundtable, it was
already going south. “Why would you even
do this?” one clergyman asked in dismay.
“If that type of product ever comes on the
market, I will organize protests against it.”
It seemed like a very real possibility that
the launch could trigger a kind of “sex
panic,” Brinkley says, from the moral major-
ity. “They don’t want insurance or tax dollars
paying for people’s boners.” It seemed they
were also prepared to sensationalize Viagra,
alleging that it would give men erections and
also drive them to sex-crazed sprees that
would spread AIDS. “As a gay man,” Brin-
kley says, “there was a fair amount of eye
rolling that went on behind closed doors.”
They were also getting flak from inside.
As word spread throughout Pizer, Nelson
and Dr. Sal began hearing more and more
jokes and derisive comments from cowork-
ers they passed in the halls. “We’re going
to be a laughingstock,” one person would
say. “Are we going to have Playboy Bunnies
in the lobby?” joked another. Others were
more pointed. “Are you guys crazy?” they’d
ask. In Nelson’s estimation, the cards were
stacking against them. “Fifty percent of the
people within the company that knew what
was going on thought it would never launch
and never should launch,” he says.
Normally, when launching a new drug, a
company would take pains to methodically
introduce it to the world in advance, prep-
ping the market, doing press, and so on.
But Viagra was too volatile to leave vulner-
able to these elements. So the team made a
counterintuitive—if not seemingly hare-
brained—decision: They would launch
completely in stealth, going public with it
only twenty-four hours later if and when it
was approved. “I had an epiphany, a eureka
moment,” Nelson says. “The less we talk
about this, even internally, the better we are.”
Discreetly, the team reined this strategy
in thousands of focus groups. They narrowed
it down to three possible ways—or “product
profiles”—to present Viagra to the world.
The first option was the most direct: It’s a
drug that can cause erections and enable
men who have lost their ability to have sex.
The second was more scientiic: Viagra can
treat a disease called erectile dysfunction and
allow men to return to normal physiological
capacity. The third took a diferent approach
completely, skirting the details of the drug
and focusing instead on its delivery system:
For the first time, there’s a pill that can be
used to treat a condition that has always been
treated by invasive surgeries.
After thousands of focus groups, they
arrived at the answer: option number three.
Viagra is a pill—safe, cheap, and easy. A guy
would merely get a sample, pop it into his
mouth, and see how it worked. This was the
perfect way to get men to look at the drug.
As Nelson puts it, “I’ll try it! And if it doesn’t
work, who gives a fuck?”
The strategy succeeded. In the later focus
groups, the pill hit big. By February 1998,
Pfizer was ready to launch the drug. But
there was one important hurdle remaining:
approval by the Food and Drug Administra-
tion. Pfizer had spent nearly $100 million
on Viagra up to that point, and there was no
guarantee that the world’s irst erection pill
wouldn’t go limp.
n March 27, 1998, Nelson, Dr. Sal,
Brinkley, and the dozen others on
Viagra’s core team gathered around
a fax machine in a conference room in Piz-
er’s New York headquarters. They were
awaiting a message from the FDA regarding
whether their eighteen months of eforts had
finally paid off. Shortly before noon, the
answer spooled out. A lawyer ran her eyes
over the page and read it aloud: “The FDA
has approved sildenail citrate for the use of
erectile dysfunction in men.”
Nelson shouted, “Oh my God! Fuck me!
Yeah!” He fell on the loor in relief, joined
by the others. But they couldn’t celebrate
for long. The FDA approval meant it was
time to launch a drug that still had yet to be
announced to the world.
Right on the heels of the approval,
there was a more pressing matter: the side
effects required to be listed on the label.
The regulatory board had hit them with a
black-box warning about taking Viagra with
nitrates—a combination that could result
in a heart attack. Most companies would
try to bury the black box as much as possi-
ble. But Brinkley surprised his team. He told
the group to lead with it. “We’re going to
encourage people that if you’re on a nitrate,
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do not take Viagra,” he said. “That’s going to
be the irst thing we’re going to say.”
Nelson thought Brinkley was “batshit
crazy.” There was no precedent for such a
maneuver. But Brinkley, Nelson recalls, held
irm. “Rooney,” he said, “you have to trust
me on this.” His reasoning was that Viagra
was going to be such a hit that they didn’t
need to risk hiding anything about it, even if
it meant equating sex with death.
With everything ready to go, the team
booked a massive launch meeting at the
World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida,
to introduce Viagra to Pizer’s three thou-
sand sales representatives. The average sales
rep was a good-looking twenty-five-year-
old—“The guy looked like a quarterback,
and the girl looked like freaking Candy the
cheerleader,” Nelson says—but that didn’t
make the challenge any easier. “We needed
to make them comfortable with talking
about sex,” he says. They did this by get-
ting everyone used to saying all the right
words. They went around the room and had
everybody say erection ive times. “Erection!
Erection! Erection! Erection! Erection!”
They had to get the general public talking,
too. They needed someone who could
deliver the message soberly and credibly.
During the clinical trials, they learned from
a urologist at Walter Reed that former sena-
tor and presidential candidate Bob Dole was
interested in participating. Dole had been
partially paralyzed during World War II and
was himself sufering from erectile dysfunc-
tion. After trying Viagra successfully, he was
more than ready to speak out on behalf of the
drug to help others. It was just what the team
needed. “The important thing was to nor-
malize the medical condition,” Brinkley says,
and Dole proved to be the ideal messenger.
When Viagra finally hit the market, for
eight to twelve dollars a pill, it was an instant
phenomenon. As expected, it also became
the butt of late-night-talk-show jokes and
provoked the ire of the moral majority. But it
sold wildly. Pharmacists reported illing ten
thousand prescriptions a day, which easily
outpaced scripts for the launches of top
drugs such as Prozac and Rogaine. Viagra
sales would reach $1 billion in its irst year.
“It’s the fastest takeoff of a new drug that
I’ve ever seen,” Michael Podgurski, then the
director of pharmacy for Rite-Aid, gushed to
Time. Newsweek called it “the hottest new
drug in history.”
For the team behind the scenes who
launched Viagra, the success gave them a
deeper satisfaction, too. Dr. Sal was eating
at a steakhouse in Monroe, Louisiana, with
his wife when he overheard some men at a
nearby table talking about erectile dysfunc-
tion. It illed him with pride. “My God,” he
said. “We’ve accomplished one of our goals,
which is to talk about this as a real medical
152 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _E sq u ire
problem, not as a sexually dirty kind of thing,
and take away some of the stigma associated
with older persons having intimacy.”
Nelson learned four rules for launching
something that’s never been done before.
“Number one, expect to be laughed at if
you’re doing something that’s going to be
a breakthrough,” he says. “Number two, be
real wary of experts; they’re going to tell you
all the reasons why that thing’s not going to
work. The third thing: Have people on the
team who really understand the business
you’re in.” And, inally, he says, be prepared
to be hated. “If you expect to change the
world, you’re going to get a lot of love, but
you’re going to get a lot of hate. You got to
run the math. The hate’s probably going to
be a fraction of the love.”
And as Dr. Sal learned, there was plenty
of love to go around. Not long after Viagra
came out, his father asked him if he could
hook him up. “Hey, can you get me some
samples?” his dad asked.
“Absolutely not!” his mother replied sar-
donically. “Don’t even think about it, Sal.”
oday, twenty years after Viagra’s
launch, it’s never been easier to get
the little blue pill. Pizer just released
its nonprescription version, dubbed Viagra
Connect, in Britain, the first country to
approve over-the-counter sales of Viagra.
Though the patent on Viagra doesn’t
expire until 2020, Pfizer negotiated a deal
that allowed Teva Pharmaceuticals to begin
selling a generic version last December. Not
only is the pill considerably less expensive;
it’s now all the more accessible. Roman, a
new start-up, is an app that screens men for
erectile dysfunction and gets a prescription
delivered right to their door.
While Viagra is going mainstream like
never before, there’s more opportunity on
the horizon for treating other such maladies.
“There are still a lot of sexual dysfunctions
where we don’t have treatment,” Oster-
loh says, “such as lack of sexual desire in
men and women.” An estimated twelve
million women sufer from sexual desire dis-
order. The leading contender for treatment is
bremelanotide, which is being developed by
AMAG Pharmaceuticals and Palatin Tech-
nologies. They have completed successful
trials and hope to have it available by 2019.
When asked what’s coming next for men,
Nelson, who has since left Pizer to run his
own marketing irm, cracks a devilish grin.
“You really want the dark-web version of
this?” he asks. The future, he goes on, will
feature artificially intelligent sexbots and
drugs that will enhance the experience fur-
ther. “There’s going to be a pill that increases
not only erections but pleasure,” Nelson
says. “That’s going to be the cocaine of sex.
It’s the ultimate pill.”
THE WILD ONE
Hardy’s place. The wall between us that
crumbled upon seeing Mae—or seemed
to, anyway—is fortified just as quickly.
When Private Tom reaches playfully for
my stack of questions and I instinctively
pull them back, he casts a leery eye. “I
see I’m not in the circle of trust,” Public
Hardy says, when in fact I just got booted
from his.
“Can I get a double espresso?” he asks our
waiter.
“For sure,” the waiter says. “By the way, big
fan. I always know if you’re in a movie, it’s go-
ing to be a good one.”
“Thanks. But don’t put your money on that,”
Hardy says. “I’ve got to be crap at some point.”
“I would say you’re one of my top three best,”
the waiter says. “Action actors,” he clariies.
“I think I’m a bit too old now for action.”
“Except for the next Expendables,” the
waiter jokes.
“I’m tempted to ask who the other two
are,” Hardy says after the waiter walks of. “I
showed great restraint. Great restraint.” He
might claim that the opinions of others don’t
matter, but this is driving him crazy. “Who
are the fuckers?”
When the waiter returns, I ask. “Mark Wahl-
berg,” he says without delay, as if he were wait-
ing for the question. Hardy, stone-faced, says
nothing. “And Matt Damon.”
Finally, Hardy speaks. “Can I give you
this?” he says, handing over a plate, any plate,
just to send the waiter on his way. Almost as an
afterthought, he adds, “Thanks, man. Good
company.”
He deals with this sort of thing all the time.
“I’ve crossed the line of being a public igure.
And I accept that means to a certain degree I’m
public property,” he says, “even though I proj-
ect an image of myself to them,” acknowledg-
ing Public Hardy in all but name. Most peo-
ple he meets are lovely. But “the downside of
being overt is you invite darkness,” he says.
“It only takes one person to cause real harm.”
He defends himself as if someone has called
him out. “That’s not being paranoid. That’s
just facts.”
By iltering which parts of himself become
public, he’s mostly okay with the balance of
Private Tom and Public Hardy. Except, that is,
when it comes to his children. “I will pose for
you, and photos of me and my wife are ine,” he
says. “But if someone takes a photo of my kids,
all bets are of. I will take the camera of you and
beat the fucking shit out of you.” His voice con-
tains no hint of exaggeration. “That’s the one
that hurts. My kids didn’t ask for what my job
is.” He pauses. “There’s something that really
upsets me about the imposition of a grown-up
world on a child.”
When we spoke earlier about his relationship
with Chips, he said he was working to become
a better father by learning from the mistakes
of his own. “In trying to protect my children,
I’ll probably give them their own dose of prob-
lems,” he told me. “But I don’t want them to
go through what I went through.”
AT Kingston Hospital, we make our way
to Mae’s room. She’s feeling better, but
dried blood still cakes her face. She and
Albert don’t know who or what to expect next,
or how long it will be. Hardy asks what she re-
members—“Hit the pavement,” she says.
“Made a nice sound”—and what still hurts. We
unload snacks we brought, and then we wait.
The three relax into a familiar rhythm. Age
LIGHTING THE BONFIRE
(co ntinued from page 121)
in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
Homo novus? As Noyce saw it, these so-called
radical youth movements were shot through
with a yearning for a preindustrial Arcadia.
They wanted, or thought they wanted, to return
to the earth and live on organic vegetables and
play folk songs from the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. They were antitechnology....
They were the reactionaries of the new age.
They were an avant-garde to the rear. They
wanted to call of the future. They were still-
born, ossiied, prematurely senile.
If you wanted to talk about the creators of
the future—well, here they were! Here in the
Silicon Valley! Just before Apollo 8 circled the
moon, Bob Noyce turned forty-one. . . . And he
was one of the oldest CEOs in the semiconduc-
tor business! He was the Edison of the bunch!
He was the father of the Silicon Valley!
has smoothed but not erased the boys’ mis-
chief and the mom’s sass. Hardy jokes to Mae,
“All right, lovely, want salt-and-vinegar chips
with a side of infectious disease? Pick up a lit-
tle souvenir?” She smirks.
Hardy squeezes some sanitizer onto his
hands and rubs it, then reaches for a chip.
“Don’t do that,” Mae says. “Wipe of your
hands irst. It’s not for eating.”
“It’s better than eating disease,” Albert
weighs in. “I’d rather be sanitized to death.”
“I’m gonna take my chances,” Hardy says.
“How’s your mum and dad?” she asks.
“Very good, actually,” he says. “It was my
mum’s birthday last week.”
“Twenty-one again?”
“I’m glad to see you’re cracking jokes,”
Albert says.
“Me too,” Mae says.
When she leaves the room with the help of
a nurse, Hardy turns to Albert and delivers a
dose of optimism: “She’s walking, mate. That’s
a good sign. The next thing we’re going to get
is an X-ray, or maybe a CT scan if they’re con-
cerned about bleeding or swelling in the brain.
They’ve got to check all the boxes.”
Once Mae is back, Hardy steps out to talk to
the nurse without saying why. “Is he using his
THE PEACOCK PATRIARCHY
(co n t in u ed f r o m p age 10 9)
dramatic—we are home to the number-one
drama on television. A show that each week
gives us twists and turns, heartbreaking re-
veals, and this season the departure of a
once-beloved character. I’m talking, of
course, of ‘This is the Today show.’ ”
After being rehired by NBC News to re-
claim some of its luster, Lack has achieved
something close to the opposite. He has
presided over one public-relations disaster
after another while ABC News has continued
to nip at the heels of both Today and Nightly
News, frequently overtaking them in the rat-
ings. Whether Lack and his team, including
Oppenheim, can persuade Comcast CEO
Brian Roberts to give them more time to set
things right remains one of the most closely
watched decisions in the industry.
The tabloids periodically fizz with spec-
celebrity powers?” Albert asks me. “Not the
irst time I’ve witnessed that.” He laughs, then
quiets. “But it’s a nice tool to have.”
Hardy returns without explanation. A few
minutes later, the nurse comes in. “She’s go-
ing to be seen next.”
Like that, Mae is at the top of the list.
Though Hardy is coy about how much
he played the fame card, it’s clear his job
here is done. As we say goodbye, Mae pulls
him in close. “I want you to know that I
have plans to see Venom,” she says. “You’ve
done something that’s close to my heart. You
know I’m a sci-i freak.”
“You’re gonna enjoy this one,” Hardy says.
“This one’s just for you. And for my boy.”
Hardy wants to exert control over his world.
The brutal irony is that the more successful
he becomes, the more the world controls him.
But as we walk out of the hospital, I suggest
that while his celebrity might feel like a bur-
den, in the instance of Mae and Albert it was...
He inishes my sentence: “Perfect.”
At the exit, an orderly chases us down. “Tom!
Tom Hardy!” We stop. “I just love your mov-
ies. Can I take a picture?” Two more fans fol-
low. He smiles as they gather around in the hos-
pital parking lot and start snapping selies.
ulation of a Lauer comeback, if not at NBC,
then somewhere else, possibly a cable-news
channel. But that is unlikely, at least for
now. “Could he come back in three years?”
Auletta asks. “Maybe. America’s a surpris-
ingly forgiving country and loves comeback
stories.”
Lauer remains secluded at the beach. He
has been negotiating with his soon-to-be ex-
wife’s divorce lawyers and attempting to of-
load properties—his Sag Harbor home has
been listed for $12.75 million, and his Upper
East Side pad sold for a reported $7 million
in April. (He was also spotted driving a Land
Rover with a “For Sale” sign in the window.)
Lauer has broken his silence on only three
occasions, each time conceding that he’d
erred but simultaneously downplaying his
misdeeds. “I fully acknowledge that I act-
ed inappropriately as a husband, father,
and principal at NBC,” he said in a state-
ment in April, before adding that “any alle-
gations or reports of coercive, aggressive, or
abusive actions on my part, at any time, are
absolutely false.” After NBC released the results
of its review in May, he put out another state-
ment, saying, “There are aspects of the NBC
report with which I clearly disagree.”
Every now and again, he gets snapped by the
paparazzi, carrying pizza to his car or sitting
astride a brand-new Harley-Davidson. In those
pictures, he looks much like the old Matt Lauer
we all used to know so well. Or rather the Matt
Lauer we didn’t.
S eptember 2018_Esquire 1 53
DRIP...DRIP...DRIP
(c on ti nu ed from page 13 7)
underneath his neighbor by drilling a deeper
well, since groundwater doesn’t observe
boundaries. So many treaties and arrange-
ments and agreements govern water use in
the West and have for so long that a court
in 1861 wrote that the “secret, occult, and
concealed” nature of the resource made it
impossible to control. Impossible then, ap-
parently impossible now, with voracious use
in between.
VI. The Upside
BY A SIGN AT the entrance to the Harvey O.
Banks Delta Pumping Plant, outside Tracy,
Gleick pulled over and opened a map. Out the
window was a broad expanse of brown cattails
and a long reach of deep blue water with the
sun shining on it and gleaming like a strip of
chrome. “We’re here,” Gleick said, pointing
on the map to an extensive line of blue run-
ning mostly east to west. “The mouth of the
San Joaquin River, where the Sacramento and
San Joaquin join. It’s the largest delta on the
West Coast.”
Above the marsh, a red-tailed hawk slid
across the sky like a skateboarder. “The third
concept of peak water is peak ecological wa-
ter,” Gleick went on. “Peak renewable and peak
nonrenewable efectively describe the prob-
lems with supply and demand. A third prob-
lem, though, are the ecological damages that
result from human use of water. Say we take
more and more water from a river. We grow
more food, we make more widgets, we get an
economic beneit, but the ecological cost also
grows as isheries sufer and wetlands dry up.
Eventually, the negative ecological costs out-
weigh the economic beneits. We deine that as
the point of peak ecological water.”
Gleick pulled the car back onto the road and
turned onto a blacktop leading to the pump-
ing station, which we could see like a fort half-
way up some hills, about a quarter mile ahead.
Through pipelines and canals, the station sends
water south from the delta as far as Los Angeles,
which gets the bulk of its water from the north.
The deltas and estuaries it draws from tend to
be breeding and nursery areas for birds and ish
154 S e pt e m b e r 2 0 1 8 _ E sq u ire
as well as migratory stopovers for birds. “Taking
water from the San Joaquin Delta,” Gleick said,
“there’s longstanding, serious, peak-ecological-
water concerns about salmon extinctions in the
delta, other ish extinctions, and also how it acts
on the Paciic lyway,” a major migratory route
for birds that goes over the region.
From a slight movement of color in the ield,
he identiied a meadowlark landing on a fence
post, like one of those people who need only
a few notes to name a song. “There is a ield
of study in ecology called ecological valua-
tion,” he continued. “What’s the value of an
endangered ish species, or worse, extinction?
The fact that we’re bad at valuing those things
doesn’t mean that there’s no value to them.
Peak water should never mean that people are
dying of thirst. If we get to that point, that’s a
failure of governments. Instead, peak water’s
going to be felt irst by ecosystems and agri-
culture and economies. We’re already seeing
peak-water constraints hurt our economies,
especially with the drought, in farmers having
to fallow land, which leads to unemployment.
“I think people in California have under-
stood for a long time that our water system
is not in balance,” Gleick went on, “but they
see the problem through their own lenses. If
you’re a farmer and you see salmon or the delta
smelt as responsible for water being used in a
way that doesn’t beneit you, you think you can
do without the ish. If you care about the ish,
you may think the farmer could grow some-
thing diferent, or the same thing diferently,
and use less water. Neither group talks to the
other, but it’s a false dichotomy to think that
the only way to solve the human water prob-
lem is to give up water for ish.”
Gleick believes there are two solutions—
the hard path and the soft path, notions
also derived from energy policy. The hard path
wrings water from the environment mainly by
means of dams and tunnels for transferring
water and by desalinization plants. It’s what
World Bank guys and engineers are trained
to do, Gleick said. The hard path exempliies
twentieth-century thinking, which in turn was
based on the nineteenth-century notions that
resources were boundless and that science
could control nature. There are still places to
put dams, but dams are very expensive, and
desalinization is too costly to be practical any-
where except places such as the Persian Gulf,
where oil pays for it.
Hard path believes that no water should es-
cape being used, and it is indiferent to the vi-
tality of an ecosystem. By its reasoning, a de-
pleted system can be shed for a new one, the
way new oil deposits can be found. The dis-
carded system will expire or recover, but the
caravan will have moved on. An example is
the Colorado River, the passage of which is
so oversubscribed that only once in the last
twenty years has the river reached its delta
in Mexico with any low.
Soft path involves conservation and tactics
such as storm-water capture or wastewater
treatment and reuse—twenty-irst-century
thinking, Gleick calls it. “We are already treat-
ing wastewater, stuf you lush down your
toilet,” Gleick said. “We are not yet drink-
ing that water, because we don’t need to.
They drink it in parts of Africa and in Singa-
pore, where they call it ‘new water,’ a means
of branding it. We use it for nonpotable pur-
poses: irrigation, cooling power plants, and
restoring groundwater.”
Gleick turned into the parking lot of the
pumping station, where there were only a cou-
ple of cars. “I’m a big fan of California agricul-
ture,” he said, “but I’m also a big fan of ecosys-
tems and reliable urban water supply. I think
we can have a healthy agricultural economy
and meet basic human needs for water and
still save the ish, but not the way we’re do-
ing things today.”
“What if things don’t work?” I asked.
“The dystopian vision, which I don’t think
will happen, because I hope and think we’ll
be smarter than that,” Gleick said, “but the
dystopian future is one in which we lose more
and more isheries, the winter-run Chinook
salmon go extinct, the delta smelt disappear,
bird migrations plummet, the Salton Sea”—a
saline lake fed by Colorado irrigation run-
off—“disappears, and toxic dust spreads
over southern California, the way it did when
the city of Los Angeles drained Owens Lake.
Plus a number of farms go out of production,
and considering how reliant the country and
the world are on California farms, the efect
is widespread. Also, urban water gets more
and more expensive, because we have to turn
to desalinization, consequently more popula-
tions lack access to safe and afordable water,
and we see more and more East Portervilles.
“What makes me optimistic,” he went on, “is
that it’s obvious we can do things diferently.
I would be doing something else if I didn’t have
that optimism, although it’s tempered in two
ways. One is, while I truly believe we’re mov-
ing toward sustainable water management and
use, I think bad things will happen along the
way. We’ll lose some things permanently, like
species. The other thing is that not everybody
will sufer equally. The rich can isolate them-
selves to some degree from climate change
and water problems, but the poor will sufer.
Those weren’t rich communities in the Cen-
tral Valley that had their wells dry up.”
For several minutes, we stood beside the aq-
ueduct and simply watched the water lowing
south, the way people stare at a deep hole in the
ground. Then Gleick said, “When you start
butting up against peak-water limits, you have
to start doing things diferently. We’re not go-
ing to build many more big dams, and we’re
overdrafting groundwater, but that will drive
innovation. This is the direction we have to go.
There’s no more new water.”

VII. The Downside
EARLIER, Gleick had said, “In California, we
have all the world’s water problems in one form
or another. There’s one exception. We don’t re-
ally have violence, yet.” Elsewhere, they have
their share. In 2016 in Darfur, seventy people
were killed “in clashes between farmers and
herders over access to water resources and
land,” according to the Paciic Institute’s Wa-
ter Conlict Chronology.
In recent years, many of the conlicts in
which people have been killed over water have
taken place in India. Some of the occasions in-
volved protests over dams or canals, and some
were farmer-versus-herder disputes. In 2014,
in northern India, during a drought, a group of
bandits announced that they would kill peo-
ple who lived in villages near their hideout
unless the people brought them water every
day. Twenty-eight villages said they would take
turns paying what they called a “water tax.”
Indirectly, water afects civil migration,
which in turn afects politics in the form of
responses to migration, such as the rise in Eu-
rope of right-wing nationalism and the elec-
tion in Italy in March of populist factions op-
posed to immigrants. Last year, speaking at
the Vatican’s Pontiical Academy of Sciences,
Pope Francis wondered “if we are not on the
path towards a great world war over water.”
People who think a water-conquest war is
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unlikely tend to point out how diicult it is to
move water, but it isn’t any more diicult to
move water than it is to move oil.
Gleick thinks that water is less likely to
cause a war than to be used as a weapon. In
2014, in the journal Weather, Climate, and
Society, he published a paper called “Water,
Drought, Climate Change, and Conlict in
Syria.” He described the area’s water con-
licts, which are ancient—the irst, accord-
ing to the Water Conlict Chronology, ap-
pears to have occurred forty-ive hundred
years ago when a king named Urlama diverted
water through canals to deprive an enemy
of it. More recently, climate change and
the scarcity of freshwater resulting from a
drought between 2006 and 2011 led to what
one expert described as the “most severe
set of crop failures since agricultural civili-
zations began in the Fertile Crescent many
millennia ago.” Gleick’s paper discussed
how all this encouraged the discontent that
led to Syria’s civil war. “No one argues that
climate change or drought caused the civil
war,” he told me. “But they had an inluence.
And after the civil war started, there were
massive and unrelenting attacks by pretty
much all the parties on civilians and infra-
structure, including, explicitly, water re-
sources. Attacks on the water-treatment
plants in Aleppo, attacks in Iraq on local
water systems—use of water as a weapon.
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ISIS took over dams on the Tigris and Eu-
phrates and released water on downstream
villages to prevent attacks on their bases.”
“Water Wars” makes a ine headline, Gleick
said, but he thinks any such conlict between
nations would be more complicated. “India
and Pakistan have been ighting forever over
water in the region of Kashmir,” he said, “but
if it breaks into war, water would only be a part
of the cause. Egypt has threatened Ethiopia
over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
Ethiopia is building over the Nile at the border
of Ethiopia and Sudan. Egypt is completely
dependent on the Nile, but would they ac-
tually attack the dam? I don’t think so, but
it’s possible.”
The future is rarely a continuation of the
present, and doesn’t usually play out as we ex-
pect. Maybe we don’t run out of water. Maybe
science inds a better means of providing drink-
able water from castof water and sewage. We
tend to think of societal calamities as happen-
ing in places where the people are diferent
from us, yet matters of race and culture seem
irrelevant when we all require a half gallon of
water each day to survive. When a region runs
out of water, the people left there don’t really
die of thirst. They die mainly from the diseases
that come from drinking bad water. In these
places, the equation is succinct: Demand, sim-
ple human need, the assertion, even, of a right,
overwhelms supply.
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