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A(NOTHER) STUDY IN SCARLETT The movie goddess who frst captivated America in 2003’s Lost in Translation continues her seduction with this month’s Under the Skin and the new Captain America. But of-camera, Scarlett Johansson is engaged, pregnant, and willing to get real. Photographs by Craig McDean. By L IL I A NOL IK
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NEXT F-STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE Spotlight on Larry Fink’s new photo book, The Beats, from late-50s Greenwich Village and beyond. By Gerald Stern.
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V.F. PORTRAIT: NEIL PATRICK HARRIS By L IN-M A NUEL MIR A ND A As Neil Patrick Harris headlines Broadway’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a theater colleague charts Harris’s irresistible re-inventions, from Doogie Howser on up. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
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THE SNOWDEN SAGA By SU Z A NN A A NDR E W S , BR YA N BUR R OUGH , A ND S A R A H E L L IS ON When N.S.A. contractor Edward Snowden leaked data from top-secret fles to three journalists, he stunned the U.S. government and sparked a global debate about privacy and security. V.F.’s investigative team follows the twists and turns that propelled a 29-year-old computer whiz into the pages of history.
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LONDON CALLING May’s “It Girl,” British model Suki Waterhouse, has Hollywood in her sights.
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER IGNORED Spotlight on Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime’s all-star look at climate change. By Cullen Murphy. Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.
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TOO RICH, TOO THIN, TOO TALL? By PA UL GOL DBERGER The residential towers rising fast in Midtown Manhattan are breaking records: ultra-tall, ultra-thin, and ultra-expensive. Designed for the top 1 percent of the 1 percent, these superscrapers cast fresh shadows—social and economic—on the rest of the city. Photographs by Stephen Wilkes.
ON THE COVER
SCARLETT FEVER
Scarlett Johansson, photographed in New York City.
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Scarlett Johansson wears a dress by Dior Haute Couture; earrings from Fred Leighton. Hair products by Phyto. Makeup products and nail enamel by Dolce & Gabbana. Hair by Orlando Pita. Makeup by Diane Kendal. Manicure by Megumi Yamamoto. Set design by Piers Hanmer. Produced on location by GE-Projects. Styled by Olivier Rizzo. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Craig McDean in N.Y.C. For details, go to vf.com/credits.
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By Krista Smith. Photograph by Cuneyt Akeroglu.
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ACT ONE, TAKE TWO Spotlight on Act One, the new Lincoln Center show based on Moss Hart’s unbeatable theater memoir. By Jim Kelly. Photograph by Mark Schäfer.
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THE CASE OF THE MISSING BIKINI Spotlight on Alexandra Daddario, turning heads in HBO’s True Detective. By Priya Rao. Photographs by Ralph Mecke.
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A FUNDAMENTAL FIGHT By PA UL E L IE Given a death sentence in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for writing The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding. A quarter-century later, Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and others recall the ensuing war over his words, and the cultural divide it foretold. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.
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A GIRL FOR ALL SEASONS Spotlight on Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka, in her last season as Sally Draper. By Bruce Handy. Photograph by Williams & Hirakawa.
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FANFAIR & FAIRGROUND 73
31 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF THE CULTURE ÒDream CarsÓ at Atlanta’s High Museum. Private Lives: Kyle DeWoody. Hot Type. BulgariÕs India-inspired fragrance; Viktor & RolfÕs caramel-infused perfume; ChantecailleÕs 15th-anniversary rose cream. J. Ralph
opens the doors to his secret studio in N.Y.C.
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AROUND THE WORLD, ONE PARTY AT A TIME From Lupita, J-Law, and Amy Adams to Alfonso, Spike, and Leo, the A-list lit up V.F.Õs annual Oscar party, in its new location in West Hollywood.
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DEATH AND THE CITY By J A ME S W OL C O T T Next month’s HBO movie of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, The Normal Heart, is a searing reminder of the way New York City’s gay community was decimated by aids—a plague that the establishment tried to ignore. Photo illustration by Sean McCabe. CONTINUED ON PAGE 32
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KI E RN A N SH IP KA P HOTO GR A PHE D BY WI L L I A MS & H I RA KAWA ; CL OT HI NG BY TO MM Y HI L F IG ER ; J E WE LRY BY TI FFANY & CO . (191). 43 2 PA R K AVE N UE SK Y LI NE PHOTOGR A PH ED BY ST E PH EN W IL KE S ( 170 ) . I LL UST RATI ON BY RI SKO . F O R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS
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THE FRONT PAGE 2.0 By MIC H A E L K INSL E Y Newspapers may be in trouble—layofs, bankruptcies,
foreign-bureau closings, etc.—but, as V.F.’s new columnist explains, serious newspaper journalism is not.
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KEYS TO THE DIVINE Spotlight on British pianist
Stephen Hough, who plays in many media.
By Annalyn Swan. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.
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PERFECTION ANXIETY By A . A . GIL L As the super-rich buy, collect, and vacation themselves into boredom, they face a rarefed problem: how to live up to their money. Illustration by Paul Cox.
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EVAPORATED By JAMES HARKIN With more than 60 reporters dead and many others kidnapped, Syria is the world’s most dangerous dateline. Among the missing: Austin Tice and Jim Foley, who vanished in 2012. A fellow reporter picks up their trail.
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FOR THE LOVE OF BASQUIAT By INGRID SISCH Y Dazzled by Jean-Michel BasquiatÕs work, Herbert and Lenore Schorr supported his craft and acted as surrogate parents to the young artist, before he overdosed in 1988. Drawings from their unparalleled Basquiat collection go on show in New York next month.
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LITTLE ORPHAN LANY Impossible Interview: Pope Francis vs. Kanye West.
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IN THE FLESH
Neil Patrick Harris, photographed in West Hollywood.
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EXCLUSIVES IT’S MADDENING Read VF.com flm critic Richard Lawson’s spoilerfree review of the new season of Mad Men, and check in weekly for his smart commentary on television and movies. FOOD FOR THOUGHT Feast on Roots frontman Questlove’s Top 10 meals from around the globe. BEAUTY AND THE BILL In the age of Perfection Anxiety, luxury beauty products are getting more elaborate, expensive, and exclusive. See a list of the most indulgent products on the market. SALLY FORTH By BRUC E H A ND Y Read an extended interview and see extra photographs of Kiernan Shipka, who plays the mischievous Sally Draper on Mad Men.
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VIDEO OH, WHAT A NIGHT! A compilation of the greatest moments from Vanity Fair’s annual Oscar party, from the parking-lot-to-party preparations, to Bill Murray’s dance moves, to the stars who focked to the In-N-Out truck at the end of the night. BEHIND THE LENS See on-set footage from actress Tatiana Maslany’s Vanities photo shoot with Miguel Reveriego. SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS Take in sky-high scenes from the top of the residential high-rise One57, which soars 1,004 feet above the ground. 38
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Contributing Photographers ANNIE LEIBOVITZ BRUCE WEBER, JONATHAN BECKER, MARK SELIGER, PATRICK DEMARCHELIER, HARRY BENSON, LARRY FINK, TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS, SAM JONES, JONAS FREDWALL KARLSSON, DAVID LaCHAPELLE, MICHAEL O’NEILL, NORMAN JEAN ROY, SNOWDON, MARIO TESTINO, GASPER TRINGALE, FIROOZ ZAHEDI Photographer-at-Large TODD EBERLE Contributing Artists HILARY KNIGHT, ROSS MacDONALD, ROBERT RISKO, TIM SHEAFFER, EDWARD SOREL, STEPHEN DOYLE
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CONTRIBUTORS
1 2
4
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Bryan Burrough
1
As Edward Snowden few from Hong Kong to Moscow, the entire world watched. These cinematic moments and those that followed—reported from Hawaii, Iceland, and Hong Kong—were the focus of special correspondent Bryan Burrough’s contributions to “The Snowden Saga” (page 152). “To me, the central question was ‘Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor?’ ” says Burrough. “I have to say I’m still not sure how I feel.” 2
Sarah Ellison
Reporting from Berlin, London, and Washington, D.C., for “The Snowden Saga” (page 152), contributing editor Sarah Ellison discovered that the proliferation of mass leaks has become our modern-day arms race. “My assignment was to look into how this act of nearly unprecedented journalism came about,” says Ellison, who found that “a battle has developed between the people who leak and the people who are tasked with making sure they won’t.”
Suzanna Andrews
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Michael Kinsley
This month, contributing editor Michael Kinsley makes his frst appearance on Vanity FairÕs masthead after more than 30 years with The New Republic. Considering the future of print—the subject of his inaugural column, “The Front Page 2.0” (page 114)—Kinsley blames the doomsday rhetoric on journalists themselves. “Newspaper people in general love to gripe and be pessimistic,” he says, “including me. We aren’t inclined to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” CON TI NUED ON PAGE 54
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PH OTO GR A PHS BY G LE N NA GOR DO N ( 4) , M ICHA E L M URP HRE E (3 ) , MA R K SCHÄ F E R ( 1) , DA NI E L L A Z A LC MA N ( 2 )
3
Focusing on Edward Snowden’s childhood in suburban Maryland through his years as a contractor for the N.S.A., contributing editor Suzanna Andrews says the challenge in reporting “The Snowden Saga” (page 152) was not in its scope but rather in the territory. “When the Western world’s entire press corps is following a story, as in this case,” she says, “it is harder to fnd the quiet place where the real answers are.”
CONTRIBUTORS CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 48
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1
3 4
1
Stephen Wilkes
To capture New York City’s evolving skyline for “Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?” (page 170), photographer Stephen Wilkes spent an afternoon in a helicopter observing Midtown Manhattan’s billionaires’ row, so called for its luxury high-rises. “To get a sense of the views that these apartments are going to have—it was exciting to see that,” says Wilkes. An exhibition of his photographs opens at the Peter Fetterman Gallery, in Santa Monica, this fall. 2
Craig McDean
“She’s such an intelligent, well-rounded person. You could speak to her about anything,” says photographer Craig McDean of cover subject Scarlett Johansson. As a contributor to Vogue, AnOther, W, and i-D magazines, McDean has worked with Johansson several times over the years. “I felt very at ease shooting her again. There is that element of familiarity and trust that makes the experience so fulflling,” he adds.
Paul Goldberger
Contributing editor Paul Goldberger sees the rise of ever taller luxury residential buildings in Manhattan as a mixed blessing. While the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic admires the minimalism of some, as he admits in “Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?” (page 170), the towers cast shadows across Central Park and its social landscape. Goldberger prefers New York’s many pre-war buildings: “I don’t really think I’m a 90th-foor-in-Midtown type of guy.” 4
Paul Elie
It’s been 25 years since Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his controversial, sprawling fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. In “A Fundamental Fight” (page 180), Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, revisits the uproar that surrounded the book’s publication. “The best writers are always a step ahead of current events,” says Elie. “Rushdie was several giant leaps ahead.”
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PH OTO GR A PHS COU RTE SY O F PAUL E L I E ( 4) , BY GRE G GO R MA N ( 1) , Q UI NTO N J O NE S ( 2) , GA S PE R TR I NGA L E ( 3 )
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EDITOR’S LETTER
ould any writer outside of that wicked satirist Tom Sharpe or Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes (the two fellows who wrote the 1983 flm WarGames) have plausibly invented the saga of Edward Snowden? An aimless young man with a passion for computers and video games somehow turns himself into a tech whiz and gets hired as a high-security-level Über-geek by the C.I.A. Before long he is contracted to the National Security Agency, America’s all-seeing and all-hearing eyes and ears, and is grappling with a crisis of conscience over its boundless surveillance. He suddenly fnds he has access to everything in its vaults because he is working in Hawaii: the outpost there has vulnerable data lines to the mainland, and so the N.S.A. wants a backup of its vast holdings. It gives the job to Snowden. He makes more than one copy of countless documents. And then he fees to Hong Kong with the goods. When Washington learns about his absence, it tries to cancel his passport—but haplessly gives Chinese authorities his middle name as “James” instead of “Joseph.” Snowden is allowed to depart Hong Kong for Moscow. With him is a pretty young legal researcher with no apparent legal training. She’s been assigned to him by none other than Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks mastermind who is desperate to make himself part of the story. In order to disseminate some of the top-secret documents he has spirited away, Snowden has meanwhile laid bait for several reporters, all of whom confrm his bona fdes and get to work. Back in Hawaii, Snowden’s pole-dancing girlfriend, Lindsay, posts risqué pictures of herself on her blog.
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hat is just the life-as-satire part. The frightening part is everything else: what the Snowden documents actually reveal. Most people suspected that the U.S. government was snooping about with considerable abandon. But no one knew that the N.S.A.—with the War on Terror as its evergreen pretext—was attempting to collect details of every phone call made in America (and millions more made in other countries). Or that it was tapping into the fber-optic cables running between the overseas data centers of big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo. Or that phone and Internet companies were themselves serving as the N.S.A.’s instruments. As was the case when George W. Bush and Tony Blair were running things, British authorities, this time through their N.S.A. counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, proved to be willing collaborators. (Among Snowden’s revelations: in a case of the British being British, the GCHQ collected, in bulk, millions of often sexually explicit images taken from Yahoo Webcam chats and saved them in the agency’s databases.) Amazingly, this regime of near-total surveillance probably did not cross any legal boundaries—it may be criminal, but not technically a crime. The powers invested in the U.S. government in the wake of 9/11 are vast and insidious—very much the “dark side” that Vice President Dick Cheney promised us. The safeguards against that power are riddled with loopholes.
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ne way of dealing with a huge—and hugely consequential—subject is to assemble an enterprise team of superb reporters and let them go at it. A decade ago we published a sort of triptych of long-form narrative dispatches that attempted to explain what has become the story of our times. “The Path to Florida,” written by David Margolick, Evgenia Peretz, and Michael Shnayerson, went beneath the surface irregularities that occurred in the crucial, kingmaking southern state during the 2000 presidential election. “The Path to 9/11,” written by Ned Zeman, David Wise, David Rose, and Bryan Burrough, described the dysfunction among the nation’s intelligence agencies—and the political and security failures—that left us open to the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. “The Path to War,” written by Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, illustrated each step of how President Bush and his advisers used false intelligence to take us into the nine-year, $1.7 trillion war in Iraq, which resulted in as many as 500,000 fatalities. The Snowden story in a way brings the long, sorry saga up to the present. The morality of the sort of spycraft the N.S.A. has been engaged in is a thorny issue. The intelligence community—unleashed by Bush and Cheney after 9/11, with the mandate never to let it happen again—points out, not without some justifcation, that it has to be everywhere the terrorists are. Still, it’s a little difcult to see which terrorists were hiding in Angela Merkel’s cell phone. Last summer, as Edward Snowden successfully sought asylum in Russia, where he continues to live, a team of Vanity Fair reporters took up the challenge of telling his chaotic and improbable story from start to fnish. Bryan Burrough (the lead writer), Sarah Ellison, and Suzanna Andrews spent six months following the many trails that wind in and out of the Snowden afair. When I say “following,” I don’t mean just fguratively—they went to Hong Kong, to England, to Iceland, to Germany, and around the United States. In the course of their reporting they interviewed scores of people connected with the story; Snowden himself responded to voluminous queries. The collaborative result, “The Snowden Saga,” on page 152, is more than just a gripping and astonishing tale. It is a warning shot.
L
ooking back on the Snowden afair—and forward to what it portends—I can’t help thinking of a famous Washington maxim: “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal—the scandal is what’s legal.” The maxim has a name, Kinsley’s Law, and I’m delighted to note that with this issue the man who came up with it, Michael Kinsley, joins the staf of Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. Mike’s pedigree is distinguished—former editor of The New Republic and Harper’s, former co-host of Crossfre, founding editor of Slate, and onetime columnist for Time and The Washington Post, with a Rhodes scholarship stufed in a coat pocket somewhere. He comes at everything from an unusual angle, and with a sly wit, and he has a habit of puncturing rhetorical façades. A political gafe, he once said, is “when a politician tells the truth.” We welcome Mike —GRAYDON CARTER to the magazine. MAY
2014
N I GE L PAR RY
C
EDWARD SNOWDEN and the SECURITY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
LETTERS
CLOSE ENCOUNTER
INSIDE THE ACTORS PORTRAIT STUDIO
Sean Penn and Chuck Close on the set of the no-frills Hollywood Portfolio shoot.
The Hollywood Portfolio gets real; Eve Babitz emerges; CalArts’ class of characters; and more
A
s a longtime Vanity Fair reader, I can’t say how pleased I was to see the actors who happily submitted to sit for the photo style of Chuck Close’s brilliant eye [“The 2014 Vanity Fair Hollywood Portfolio,” March]. He managed to capture something so important, especially to readers of a magazine known for its photography (and for its beloved Hollywood Issue)—reality! These days, almost everything we see in photography is airbrushed to hell, leaving many regular humans feeling somewhat … well, less. It’s no big secret that many people overlook or accept this perfection, perhaps as a way to escape the actual world, which can be quite ugly and inhuman. That Close’s amazing pictures seem almost hyper-real here is not just because they captured every line, wrinkle, and imperfection. What made these photos so special is
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that they are simply, beautifully human. Bravo to V.F. for letting some real Hollywood beauty and humanity grace your famous pages. LAURIE GUIDA QUALE Cranford, New Jersey
W
hen I saw the frst Chuck Close photo of Brad Pitt in your Hollywood Portfolio my thought was “My, he’s not aging well.” As I turned the pages, I realized these photos are all terribly unfattering. However famous or iconic the photographer may be, he didn’t do most of these subjects—some of them arguably the best-looking people on earth—any justice. KIM L. ROBSON Julian, California
T
his one isolated project that Close has done for V.F. needs to be put into the context of the evolution of his entire body of work. Back in the 70s, his enormous black-and-white por-
P H OTO G R A P H
BY
MYRNA SUÁREZ
traits were classic examples of photorealism. Then he moved into using an ink pad, re-creating photos on similarly sized canvases using only his thumbprints. Later, he began using more color and diferent brush techniques that weren’t as lifelike. While the portrait project in V.F. seems simplistic, and, according to many readers who have commented, isn’t in fact art, I’d argue that it’s part and parcel of who Chuck Close is and how he’s brought his work full circle. He has always photographed the subjects of his paintings. And that’s what he is doing here. NICOLE WILLIS-GRIMES Reno, Nevada
I
loved the Hollywood Portfolio. The pictures seemed like a cross between those in high-school yearbooks and famous mug shots. In a good way, though. But Forest Whitaker? He has the sweetest smile of anyone around. You MAY
2014
LETTERS made him look like a grumpy teacher at report-card time. How could you? BONNIE SHIMMIN Claremont, California
THE GIRL WHO LOVED L.A.
T
hank you, Lili Anolik, on behalf of myself and all other Eve Babitz fans, for doggedly pursuing this talented writer until she agreed to be interviewed [“All About Eve—And Then Some,” March]. Babitz’s evocative writing style is on a par with that of her more famous contemporary Joan Didion. My theory as to why Babitz never achieved Didion’s level of renown is that the publishing industry prefers downbeat stories about L.A. such as Didion’s to Babitz’s upbeat take on her native city. PAIGE GOLD Los Angeles, California
T
hanks so much for the interview with Eve Babitz. A friend who lived in L.A. turned me on to her decades ago. I have read and reread her books Sex and Rage and Eve’s Hollywood dozens of times. She has had a huge influence on my artistic life. Too bad she told that English teacher who wanted her to speak to his class to go fuck himself. Any writer could learn a lot about how to tell a story and capture a time in the most amusing way possible from reading her stuff. I hear Babitz’s books now go for $100 and up on eBay. Maybe some publisher will get wise and realize there is a huge audience for her books about the 60s music-art-andacting scene from a fascinating insider. LIZ CHADWICK Orlando, Florida
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICES
I
wish this excellent article had mentioned how instrumental research economist Buzz Price was to the creation and success of CalArts [“The Class That Roared,” by Sam Kashner, March]. Walt Disney entrusted Buzz with fulflling Disney’s dream of starting a university for the arts. Price dedicated more than 40 years of his life to CalArts and even continued to serve on the board during his fnal years.
# VFLETTERS
The Vanity Fair Oscar party is always an occasion to talk—and tweet— about. Below, the highlights from guests inside the party and out.
@LLCOOLJ The @VanityFair party was sexy�
@ALBERTBROOKS Was not invited to the Vanity Fair party but the people here at Field and Stream are terrific
@JACKIEJCOLLINS The @VanityFair party was a blast. I was there from 5pm until 2am. A marathon good time!!
@CATEDUNKK dreamt I babysat for all the celebs while they were at the Vanity Fair party
@REALDONALDTRUMP Sissy Graydon Carter of failing Vanity Fair Magazine and owner of bad food restaurants has a problem— his V.F. Oscar party is no longer “hot”
@PATBRADLEY99 Just passed the Vanity Fair party. They have an Oscar-shaped topiary. So that’s cool.
@LAURENSBLUM I love that in real life the Oscars are in a shopping mall and the Vanity Fair party is in a Chin Chin parking lot. #hollywoodglamour
VAN I T Y FA I R
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THE WENDI CHRONICLES
Y
our contributor Mark Seal is incorrect in saying that Wendi Deng may have been romantically involved with a former head of state of the United Kingdom [“Seduced and Abandoned,” March]. I’m quite certain that Queen Elizabeth II did not have an afair with Deng. While Deng may have had a firtation with the Queen’s former senior minister, Tony Blair, Blair was not head of state. As the U.K.’s head of state, Elizabeth Windsor will be succeeded by one of her descendants. Now, if Deng scores Prince Charles, William, or Harry, Mark Seal’s article may prove to be retrospectively accurate. ANA CAPPELLUTO Montreal, Quebec
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MARK CONIGLIO Co-founder, Troika Ranch Berlin, Germany
@BLACKSAB67 “This is the Edge!!!”—me to the Edge last night the second he stepped into the Vanity Fair party.
BRAD JASHINSKY Burbank, California
he greatest thing about CalArts is the incredible border crossings among all of the artistic métiers represented there: music, dance, theater, visual art, and, yes, flm and animation. I remember during my frst year there as a music-composition student, I complained to my mentor, Mort Subotnick,
who was one of the founding artists at CalArts, that the classroom organization was annoyingly haphazard: to get to each class, I was constantly walking from one end of the building to the other. He asked me, “And what do you see on those walks?” “Well, I have to pass by the dance studios, and then the gamelan room and the animation studios and … ” “Exactly!” he interrupted with a big smile. “You have no choice but to see everybody creating.” CalArts was about inter-disciplinary collaboration, and everything I experienced there—right down to the layout of the classrooms—pushed students to encounter an artistic world much bigger than the one on which they were personally focused. Soon I was collaborating with choreographers, dancers, writers, and many others; the powerful experiences I shared with those talented artists became the foundation of an artistic career that, I can happily report, continues nearly 25 years later. I grew so much during those precious four years. I will remain ever grateful that I was lucky enough to be immersed in the openness and energy of that very special place.
PHOTOGRAPH BY @HELLOIMJESSE
Jesse Aparicio caught a glimpse of the Oscar party in a state of undress.
don’t know much about Wendi Deng or Rupert Murdoch, nor do I care, to be honest, but this article really irked me. I fnd the media often portray successful and ambitious women as “gold diggers.” The article is petty and childish. Why is it that when women rise up they are picked apart? ALEJANDRA AGUIRRE Vancouver, British Columbia CON TI NUED ON PAGE 62
MAY
2014
LETTERS
STARS IN HIS LENS
I
was taken by the article on Sid Avery, which was long overdue [“Hollywood’s Private Eye,” by Michael Callahan, March]. I was shocked when he died and no one ever made a fuss about it, because he was one of the greatest photographers in Hollywood. Anyway, here in Vanity Fair I am turning pages, and I come upon this picture of Sid Avery as a young man. Then beneath it is a picture of his studio in Hollywood, on Wilcox and Selma, one block south of Hollywood Boulevard. At the time, I was working for the Rose Marie Reid swimsuit company as a stylist. We had to have a headshot, which would run in the newspapers together with an article telling people that they could bring all their ftting problems to us and we would resolve them in one swimsuit. There was a little ad agency called Medberry Barth, and it booked Sid Avery to take my photograph. This was in 1954. I went on the road and used the picture [printed below] and everything was fne. About 20 years later, Rose Marie’s company folded, and I was working with Jane McGowan, a photographer. We had an assistant named Theo, a young Dutchman and a very sweet person. He got tired of Jane and went to work with Sid Avery. As it happens, a couple of weeks later, Sid needed somebody to decorate a French foral cart for one of his shots for Max Factor. Well, Theo knew I painted, and he suggested me. I went, I did, and, lo and behold, I was Sid Avery’s stylist for the next 10 years. Some of our clients were Schwinn bicycles, Max Factor, US Steel, and Munsingwear, among many others. One of the models was Alana Stewart. I went to get a beautiful gown from Jean Louis for Alana to be photographed in, and I think we were photographing Brown Jordan lawn furniture at Descanso Gardens. And, of course, it’s early in the morning, because Sid loved to photograph sunrises and sunsets. So Alana was sitting in a beautiful chair. Sid was shooting through raindrops. It was all fake rain—we had rented a rain machine—and the operator gave us just the right amount of rain. And, believe it or not, I painted an elephant white in the back of the studio. His name was Bimbo. I believe I painted him with whitewash. I didn’t have to rinse
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him of. That was somebody else’s job. I’m the artist: I do; I don’t undo. I’ve really had a wonderful life. This is how the Munsingwear underwear ad with Tom Selleck was done: All of the underwear was knit. The shirt goes inside the shorts. The bottom hem of the shirt would leave a welt under the shorts; you can’t undo all of the makeup and take the shirts of, so what you do is reach up under the shorts, pull the shirt down, and cut the seam of of the shirt so there were no lumps in the shorts. So I had to do that. It was the frst time I saw these guys, and I didn’t even know their names, and here I am pulling the shirts under their shorts and cutting them of. Needless to say, I think they were very nervous about that, but none of them said a word—they were truly gentlemanly and businesslike. That was the frst episode I had with Tom Selleck. I did another one where we did a shot for Playboy for “What sort of man reads Playboy?”—well, Tom Selleck. We shot it at Paradise Cove. It was done by Sid Avery’s assistant, Harry Lyle. Then one day I called to hire Tom for another shot, but he was no longer available, because he was going to be a grand star. And now here I am in St. George, Utah, at the request of my brother, living in Spring Gardens assisted living. My brain still works.
My hands are questionable. I still play an organ. I paint and teach painting, and I am in my 98th year. GABRIELLE VON KAHRS St. George, Utah
CORRECTION: On page 236 of the March issue (“Slaves of the Red Carpet,” by Vanessa Grigoriadis), we misstated the length of Cate Blanchett’s involvement with the Sydney Theatre Company. While Blanchett has been a co-director of the company since January 2008 and has been instrumental in making the Sydney Theatre Wharf, in Sydney Harbor, environmentally friendly, she did not contribute to nor take part in the theater’s initial construction, in 1979. Editor’s note: A number of the letters included here originally appeared as comments submitted to VF.com. Letters to the editor should be sent electronically with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number to
[email protected]. All requests for back issues should be sent to
[email protected]. All other queries should be sent to
[email protected]. The magazine reserves the right to edit submissions, which may be published or otherwise used in any medium. All submissions become the property of Vanity Fair.
More from
THE V.F. MAILBAG
To begin this installment, a magazine is judged by its (March) cover: “Though the six men pictured looked handsome and quite wonderful, they were dressed all wrong! They wore a combination of black-tie and white-tie attire,” writes Lois Fenton, from Mamaroneck, New York. She elaborates on that nettlesome fact before adding, “I realize this is hardly the most urgent problem facing us today.” So very true—in a time with so many other cover problems facing us. “I am an AfricanAmerican woman and I am highly insulted by the placement of the black women on this cover,” writes Marie Wilson, of Chicago. “They are isolated in the middle of the picture.” On the other hand, Angie Comer, of Pasadena, California, is “a struggling female writer-director who’s black” and finds it “so hard going to movies today and watching the lack of diversity on the screen,” but was nevertheless “pleased to see the cover of your Hollywood Issue. Thank you for recognizing there are talented, hot, and beautiful actors and actresses working today who are not white.” And Connie U. writes from Louisville, Kentucky, to say, “I would like to thank you for highlighting the up-and-coming black actors. My daughter is an undergraduate theater major [and this issue] gives her some hope for the future.” In non-cover-related news, Patrick Hasburgh observes from Sayulita, Nayarit, Mexico, that “it’s hard to make [Rupert Murdoch] look like a victim, but I think V.F. has done it” (“Seduced and Abandoned,” by Mark Seal). Vicki Stafford Bohls, from Austin, Texas, has some qualms about Robert Wagner’s memoir excerpt: “It is ludicrous to think that Robert Wagner has the memory he lays claim to, from 50 to 60 years ago, of houses belonging to actors, actresses, movie directors, and studio heads.” And, finally, PJ Adams, of Laguna Niguel, California, thinks that “James Wolcott’s puissant prose packs more punch into two paltry pages than any other pundit in Vanity Fair. Long may he scribe.” Not pscribe?
MAY
2014
P HOTO GR A PH CO URT ESY O F GA B RI E L LE VO N KA H RS ; I L L USTR ATI O N BY DA N C A SS A RO
CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 60
which one of these decades had the worst music?
how do you most often listen to music?
guitar / 26% saxoPhone / 25% Piano / 21% vioLin / 14% the drums / 7% radio fLute / 5% 49% iPhone, iPod, mP3
digitaL music service 17%
PLayer 15%
42%
2 cade /
cd PLayer 9%
men want to be drummers. women want to be singers. and ipanema leaves us cold
hiP-hoP katy Perry 26%
3 whose concert would you most want to see with your daughter?
tayLor sWift 39%
4
10%
ROCK
which band would you go back in time to see?
a song sounds best when sung in…
ish /
64%
n/
10 %
engL
20% men
12%
wo
23%
25%
29%
34%
men 13% 19%
25%
drummer
5%
6
7%
which musical artist would you want your child to study?
the beatLes / 33% mozart / 32% michaeL jackson / 14% biLLie hoLiday / 9% jay z / 5%
hip-hop 5
50%
Lead singer
who would you most like to be in a rock band?
www.vanityfair.com
R&B
CoUNTRY
9%
7
9%
POP
13 %
Lia
h/
i ta
nis s Pa
buddy hoLLy & the crickets / 22% 2% % /1 n / queen / 21% se rma e u ge the jimi hendrix exPerience / 21% ug rt % the doors / 13% Po /6 ch nirvana /11% n e fr
van i t y fa i r
See the complete poll reSultS.
19%
one direction 11% miLey cyrus justin 5% bieber 3%
comPuter 6%
8
{
@vf.com
73%
JAZZ record PLayer/ turntabLe 1%
64
jazz or hip-hop, which is more important?
th is d e
2000s / 15%
1990s / 13%
the sexiest instrument to play?
% 1980s / 14
12% 1970s /
10
9
to the radio when we want to hear music? So risky. Even selecting stations by genre can’t give us the same kind of control or flter as CD players, turntables, computers, and various iDevices—all of which trail badly in our poll. And if the sexiest instruments to play are the guitar, the saxophone, and the piano, then why, if we could join a band, would we instead assume the role of lead singer (women) or drummer (men)? Finally, it should not go unnoticed that in the “sexiest instrument” category the fute won a few admirers—no doubt the benefciary of the Ron Burgundy Bump.
Lead guitarist keyboardist bassist
which musical form has reached its peak?
This poll was conducted on behalf of CBS News by Social Science Research Solutions of Media, Pennsylvania, among a sample of 1,017 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone February 5–9, 2014. Some low-percentage answer choices have been omitted.
may
2014
PhotograPhs © D. hurst (jazz microPhone), © oleksiy maksymenko (9), both from alamy; © mirrorPix/sPlash news/corbis (one Direction); by jon koPaloff/filmmagic (bieber, Perry); from afP (7), from cbs Photo archive (8), by Peter Dazeley (hiP-hoP microPhone), mick hutson/reDferns (Drummer), ethan miller (swift), tim mosenfelDer (leaD singer), from PoPPerfoto (4), all from getty images; by steve granitz (10), jim sPellman (cyrus), both from wireimage. Digital colorization by lorna clark (all excePt 7, 9, microPhones)
W
hen it comes to taste in music, predictable is never as interesting as unpredictable. Just apply F. Scott Fitzgerald’s defnition of “a frstrate intelligence” to one’s listening choices, and you’ll concede that “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind” is defnitely a positive thing. So we appreciate some of the contradictions in this month’s poll. And yet, one wonders. 1 If Americans feel that the worst music of the last 44 years is being made right now, then why do we also turn
IN THE DETAILS What You Should Know About
DAVID CHANG A PA N O PLY of E C C E N T R I C B I O G R A PH I C A L DATA R E : C H E F D O M ’S F R ET F U L R A M E N M A ST E R
I
bonjis made from farro and smoked spelt, and hozons made from lentils and chickpeas. HIS ACHIEVEMENTS notwithstanding, he is constantly haunted by feelings that he is out of his depth, even in the kitchen. He ascribes this to han, a uniquely Korean form of angst that manifests itself as both a resigned acceptance that life is difficult and a grim determination to struggle through this difculty. HE IS especially troubled by his meteoric rise to fame as it compares with the relative obscurity in which one of his idols, Alex Lee, formerly the executive chef at Daniel, continues to work. HE IS soothed more by mountains than by beaches. He is particularly taken with the Tetons, in Wyoming. HE DOES not drink cofee and leans on no other stimulant, being inherently, in MEAL TICKET his own words, “a pretty fucking hyper dude.” Chef David Chang, HE LONG ago forsook golf, a sport his father foisted photographed upon him as a child, yet he retains an admiration for in N.Y.C. Bruce Lietzke, an 80s-era pro golfer who was notable for playing a very light schedule of tournaments. “I guess he was the type of person I wish I could be,” says Chang. “Naturally HE IS the Virginia-raised son of Korean immigrants—educated gifted, but always aiming for the middle.” in Vienna, a suburb of Washington, D.C., but well acquainted HE IS often inspired by sports fgures, particularly those who with Richmond, where his father had a business. Culinarily, this succeed against the odds, such as the Seattle Seahawks’ Rusbackground has come to bear on such Chang creations as his sell Wilson, who was thought to be too short to be a Super Honeycrisp-apple kimchi with jowl bacon and Noodle Bar’s fried Bowl–caliber quarterback. HE WISHES he could embrace his eclectic C.V. with the brio with chicken served two ways, southern-style and Korean-style. HIS QUASI-SOUTHERNNESS further surfaces via an abiding love of which Shaquille O’Neal has embraced his, “from the Reebok the Allman Brothers and a lingering if no longer wholly felt pumps to the Shaq Fu video game to the awful movies and rap sentiment, inculcated in him in his schoolboy days, that Rob- albums. I appreciate people who are happy.” HIS FAVORITE book is the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s ert E. Lee was “the coolest guy of all time.” HIS FAVORITE Allman Brothers album is Eat a Peach. One transla- ranty, nihilistically comic novel Old Masters, which, though it concerns two men talking in an art museum, Chang likes to tion of the word momofuku is “lucky peach.” interpret as an allegorical commentary on the culinary world. HE IS a David by billing, but a Dave in everyday practice. HIS FAVORITE extra-vocational activity HE HATES the taste of dill. is fy-fshing, which satisfes him, parHE IS not fond of ofal, which, he sheep“MAN, adoxically, “because it’s constant disishly admits, puts him out of step with satisfaction.” the prevailing ofal-chic hegemony. HE IS currently consumed by the idea HE DOES not own a car. of expanding the parameters of what HE IS single and childless, though the soy sauce and miso paste can be, thought of children appeals. HE HAS spent much of his life deliberworking in his culinary lab to proately evading anything that smacks of duce new, soy-less interpretations of normalcy. Of late, however, he fnds these fermented foodstuffs—which RIGHT NOW.” himself thinking, “Man, normal might he has named, respectively, “bonji” be really nice right now.”—david kamp and “hozon.” His team has developed
NORMAL MIGHT BE REALLY NICE
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P H OTO G R A P H
BY
GASPER TRINGALE
MAY
2014
GRO O MI NG BY A L L I E SM IT H; F OR D ETA I L S, GO TO V F.CO M/ CR ED ITS
t’s hard to believe that this August will mark 10 years since David Chang opened his frst restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in New York’s East Village. That place, whose optimized versions of ramen and pork buns electrified the burgeoning food blogosphere of the mid-aughts, has since begotten nine further New York City establishments (if you count his fast-proliferating Milk Bar dessert shops), five more Chang-branded places in Toronto, and a restaurant in Sydney, not to mention a Wonka-esque culinary lab in Brooklyn. Chang is also a guiding force behind Lucky Peach, a gorgeous, high-production-value literary food quarterly published under the aegis of Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s imprint. Chang impressed himself upon the food world as a profane, gonzo, emotionally volatile enfant terrible. But now, at the age of 36, he is après-enfant and pas si terrible, a dialed-down and more refective man—if still as complicated and self-fagellatory as ever. Herewith, some data gleaned from an early afternoon’s worth of Chang time.
CONVERSATION Out to Lunch with
QUESTLOVE A
H I S N E W T O N I G H T S H O W G I G , H I P - H O P C O O L M E E T S C U L T U R A L E S TA B L I S H M E N T
guested as a professor at New York hmir Khalib Thompson— University). His Grammy Award– better known as the genius winning band—which he founded 27 drummer Questlove, of the years ago with its M.C., Tariq Trotter Roots—has a new album out (Black Thought)—has broken through next month, beguilingly titled And Then an unspoken corporate race barrier You Shoot Your Cousin. It was excuse on late-night TV and transformed the enough to meet at one of his favorite habitual talk-show format by bringing places, Han Dynasty, in downtown the band front and center. “I don’t Manhattan, as his chauffeur-driven think we’re a talk show,” Questlove black Mercedes waited outside. said. “I think we’re a variety show. I The Roots are now famously The grew up in an age when everyone had Tonight Show’s hip-hop house band. one. There was The Sonny and Cher “You’re a million miles away from Show; there was Tony Orlando and Doc Severinsen,” I said, and menDawn. Flip Wilson had a show.” tion of Johnny Carson’s bandleader, Jimmy Fallon—about whom he says, renowned for his gaudy clothes, made “The spirit of J. M. Barrie is in him”— him laugh. “Matter of fact, he’s more was raised on variety shows, too. It was flamboyant and radical than I’ll ever Fallon who insisted that wary NBC be! He had ducks on his jackets.” executives make the Roots his house Questlove, who is six feet four band. Purist critics complain, howinches—and down from 400 pounds ever, that the cool Questlove is now to about 300, thanks to his personal part of the establishment he once opposed. chef—was wearing a modest gray hoodie with a “What happened to hip-hop’s outlaw spirit?” Lego heart pinned to it. It so happens he’s a siBy JOHN HEILPERN I asked him. lent partner in a hoodie store, owns six houses “It ate Eve’s apple a few years back,” he reand about 2,000 pairs of sneakers, and built a plied disarmingly, and reminded me that hip-hop began as a state-of-the-art library to house his 70,000-strong record colfurious protest movement more than 30 years ago. “Subcullection. “Isn’t that rather a lot of sneakers?” I asked. tures are all well and good, but there’s danger in it. You can “I have a lot of self-control,” he said in his calm, measured be a seed for so long, but after a while you’re going to have to way. “I’m not overindulgent. But if you offered me sneakers, or grow into a big-ass oak. And spawn off acorns that can grow, if you offered me records, I will give away C.I.A. secrets. I will you know?” become Julian Assange! That’s a big confession!” “Yet white people were once scared of hip-hop artists like you.” “Questlove—it’s you!” said a waitress with delight. “Everybody was scared of hip-hop—including black people. “How you doing?” he said. He knew what he wanted to My father hated it. We had arguments about it. ‘I didn’t send order as if he’d been looking forward to it all morning: “I’ll you to private school to spit into a microphone and hold your take a ginger ale, the dan dan noodles, and the dry-pepper nuts!’ He was generalizing—but I think when it scares parents wings mild.” it’s doing something right. Frank Zappa scared parents. Cap“You want Spicy Level Five or Three?” tain Beefheart scared parents. If it’s not scaring parents, then I “Level Four,” he replied. “Not Nine.” Level Nine, he told me, don’t think it’s worth anything.” blows your head through the roof. For the engaging Questlove, the wires have become crossed Born in 1971, Questlove is the remarkable son of a successin a mash-up with our cultural past. “Ice Cube is the new Cliff ful 1950s doo-wop singer. (His mother also sang in the band.) Huxtable!” he said. “The same guy who said, ‘You don’t like Considered a musical child prodigy, he could play the drums how I’m living? Well, fuck you!,’ is now the owner of one of when he was two. “They let me wail,” he said. (“Wail”: make the biggest family franchises of black movies. And I’m not an emotional noise with drumsticks.) “Matter of fact, they mad at that. I would be more chagrined if, at the age of 44, demanded I wail. Because I grew up at a time in PhiladelIce Cube is still trying to pose like he’s a threat to society. It’s phia when half my block was dying of crack. So for my para new age. The most dangerous perents to be inconvenienced by noise son in music right now is a Disney was more or less a satisfaction. tween! Hannah Montana is the new Because if the house was silent, it “I HAVE A LOT OF Ice Cube. She’s the one that parents meant I was outside on the streets.” are like, ‘Oh my God! Cover your Questlove possesses a professoeyes!’ Twenty-five years ago, it was rial, encyclopedic knowledge of eva young black male.” � ery conceivable musical style (he has
SELF-CONTROL.”
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P H OTO G RA PH
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PL ATON
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H A IR BY MA I SH A ST EP HE NS -T EACHE R ; GRO O MI N G BY MA R IA C. SCA L I
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AND MORE …
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French designer Paul Arzens’s lightweight 1942 electric car, l’Oeuf Électrique (the Electric Egg), is one of 18 inventive automobiles on display in the new exhibition “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas,” at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, until September. For more on other concept cars featured in the show, turn to page 74.
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The General Motors Firebird I XP-21, 1953.
Back to the Future
n recent decades, automotive design has been elevated into dynamic principles. A high-roofed 1936 Stout Scarab—with a sidethe realm of fne art. And, starting next month, some of the most mounted door and reconfigurable seating—predates the modern imaginative, museum-worthy automobiles will be presented in a minivan by nearly 50 years. A 1941 Chrysler Thunderbolt displays cutting-edge exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. America’s frst folding metal roof, now de rigueur for luxuThe show, “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, ry convertibles. A 1956 Buick Centurion features a Visionary Ideas,” guest-curated by veteran autorear-mounted camera and in-dash TV monitor, the earliest application of a now ubiqmotive writer Ken Gross, features 18 radical uitous reverse-viewing system. concept cars—one-of-a-kind or limitedA 1959 Cadillac Cyclone edition models with advanced capahosts radar-aided proximity bilities—that have helped redefne and crash-avoidance sensors, automotive design. features now touted on the “They’re dreams on wheels,” 2014 Mercedes S-Class. And says Gross, “each of which repa 1955 Chrysler Ghia has a resents an interesting idea on jet-inspired turbine engine the part of a designer who which—presaging the use had a vision of what the auof such alternative fuels as tomobile could be.” corn ethanol and recycled The show—created in confryer grease—could run on sultation with Sarah Schleunnearly anything. ing, the museum’s curator of Not every innovation decorative arts and design— found its way into producalso includes sketches and models that provide historical contion. Versatile as the turbine text and help explain what Gross cars were, including the Chrysler calls the “visual thinking” that led Ghia and a 1953 General Motors to the creation of these chimeras. Firebird I, they were too hot, loud, Familiar brands like Cadillac, Chrysler, and inefficient for daily use. Wedge and Ferrari are represented, as are such shapes like the 1970 Ferrari 512 S Modulo lesser-known marques as Stout and Tasco. and 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero infuenced The vehicles on display were created throughthe design of decades of supercars, but none were The BMW gina out America and Europe, from the 1930s to the 2000s, as impossibly low as the Lancia, with its barely hip-level Light Visionary Model, 2001. and their designs extend beyond the edge of each era’s sensiroof. And there has yet to be a car like the 2001 BMW gina, bilities—extrapolating past concepts such as Art Moderne, with its revolutionary polyurethane-coated spandex skin, caSpace Age, and Brutalism. The wide range of hand-crafted automopable of shifting shape as speed, aerodynamics, or the driver demands. biles share a common trait: they have paved the road ahead. “Astonishing as they were when they were frst produced,” Gross A 1935 Bugatti Type 57S Aerolithe has elegant teardrop curves says, “some of these ideas are still ahead of their time. Which just that lean back from the wind in an early adoption of today’s aeroproves the power of dreaming.” —bre t t berk The Chrysler (Ghia) Streamline X “Gilda,” 1955.
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A new exhibition showcases conceptual vehicles, from the Jazz Age to the modern era, that have paved the way for the future of design
yle DeWoody, the 29-year-old daughter of artist James DeWoody and philanthropist, collector, and Whitney Museum board member Beth Rudin DeWoody, always knew she was destined for a career in the arts. “Well, you can’t un-drink the Kool-Aid,” she deadpans about a childhood of museum tours and studio visits. Her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, occupies the second foor of a three-story former Masonic lodge; the frst foor houses Grey Area, the company she and business partner Manish Vora founded in 2011. “Grey Area is this undefned space between art and design where art is made functional and the functional is made art,” DeWoody says of her assembly line of whimsical, unexpected artist collaborations. Her wares can be found in specialty shops around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum gift shop. A big seller is the Fake Roley series, which is a line of platinum-silicone bracelets in the shape of Rolexes, an idea the artist Shelter Serra (Richard Serra’s nephew) had when he was making sculptures of the casts of fake Rolex watches he bought on Canal Street. “But I especially love the more participatory experiences,” DeWoody says, referring to a line of yoga mats she produced with artists such as Wim Delvoye and Kon Trubkovich, which debuted at mass yoga classes at Art Basel Miami in
December. Last New York Fashion Week, she commissioned 10 artists to guest-design the windows at Bergdorf Goodman. When the artist Peter Dayton customized a vinyl cover for DeWoody’s Smart car, the automotive company contacted Grey Area about making it an ongoing project. “The art world should be taken seriously, but it should also be a place to play and have fun,” DeWoody explains. “I like to make an impact, to engage those who aren’t easily engaged in the arts, and even more to ofer a powerful memory or experience.” This summer, the art-book dealer Glenn Horowitz is lending Grey Area his grounds in East Hampton, which DeWoody hopes will e become an art-world playpen. Her mission statement: “With this space I want to play, to collaborate with creative characters and concoct absurd yet necessary ideas and then invite others to participate, experience, and support. That’s not too much to ask, right?” The art world can be a tough place, but family can be the toughest critics of all. DeWoody’s parents are proud of her—“My mother can’t stop handing out my business card, which has resulted in some really random phone calls from strangers”—but she says her family hasn’t yet ofered an ofcial artistic critique. “At least not to my face,” DeWoody says with a smile. “Which I appreciate.” —derek bl asberg
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BEN HOFFMANN
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2014
HA I R P RO DUC TS BY J UL I EN FA RE L; M A KE UP PRO DUC TS BY D I OR ; H A I R BY J ULI E N FA R E L; MA KE UP BY D EA N NA ME L L USO ; F OR DE TA I L S, GO TO VF. CO M/ CR E DITS
Kyle DeWoody, photographed in her Brooklyn home, which doubles as Grey Area headquarters.
A Harry Benson portrait of Halston and staff at home in Manhattan for the October 1978 issue of Life, from Halston and Warhol: Silver and Suede (Abrams), by the Andy Warhol Museum. Inset, a 1925 Bavarian Car Club poster from Car Posters (Antique Collectors’ Club), by Emmanuel Lopez.
or all his deadpan cool, Colson Whitehead is one of our most merciless and astute social satirists. In The Noble Hustle (Doubleday), he converts his awkward introduction to high-stakes poker into a comedy jackpot. Classic tales get a clever female spin in story writer Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Anthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits, this time in his W.W. II novel, All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner). A son suspicious of his single mom’s new beau turns spy in Mona Simpson’s Casebook (Knopf). Two tortured brothers seek transcendence in Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The second edition of Betty C. Monkman’s The White House (Abbeville) is impeccably curated. Sandra Tsing Loh lets rip in her riotously funny menopausal memoir, The Madwoman in the Volvo (Norton). Obsessive literary fandom and loneliness propel the unhinged hero of Jaime Clarke’s Vernon Downs (Roundabout) into madness. Francine Prose’s lesbian Nazi racecar driver is one of the Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (Harper). Jennifer Esposito ofers straight talk in Jennifer’s Way: My Journey with Celiac Disease (Da Capo Lifelong). Jeff Bauman lost his legs in the Boston Marathon bombing, only to come back Stronger (Grand Central), written with Bret Witter. Ramiro A. Fernández selects rare and classic photos from his collection for Cuba Then (Monacelli). Set in Haiti, Roxane Gay’s frst novel, An Untamed State (Black Cat), is a roundhouse kick to notions of privilege. Damian Fowler maps the grief of a widower as he fights for his family in Falling
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Through Clouds (St. Martin’s). Former nanny Nina Stibbe’s w ide eyed missives from 1980s literary London are cached in Love, Nina (Little, Brown). New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast guides her aging parents into their fnal panels in Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury). Krista Bremer’s love story embraces marrying a Libyan Muslim in My Accidental Jihad (Algonquin). Lydia Denworth raises a son with a cochlear implant in I Can Hear You Whisper (Dutton). Albert J. Devlin prod uces The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan (Knopf). A meditative retreat at Auschwitz is the setting for Peter Matthiessen’s novel In Paradise (Riverhead). Love, white hot, consumes Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin-era novel, One Night in Winter (Harper). Katty Kay and Claire Shipman crack The Confdence Code (HarperBusiness) for women with their eyes on the front ofce. Game on. — e l i s s a s c h a p p e l l
istorian Donald L. Miller has a soft spot for the pulsing New York of the Jazz Age. In his encyclopedic new book, Supreme City (Simon & Schuster), he traces the birth of modern urban life and lifestyle through that period’s grandest buildings, its incandescent bit players (the Daily News sleuth who snapped the 1928 execution photo of murderer Ruth Snyder; ironworkers— many of them Mohawk Indians—who helped erect the skyline), and a cavalcade of large metropolitan lives, from impresarios (Flo Ziegfeld and Texas Guinan) to bootleggers (William Vincent Dwyer), to power brokers (architect Raymond Hood and book publisher Horace Liveright). Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory. — d a v i d f r i e n d
in short V.F. contributing editor William D. Cohan calculates The Price of Silence (Scribner) in the Duke lacrosse rape scandal. The 40s (Random House) brims with The New Yorker’s hits. Brett Forrest exposes The Big Fix (Morrow). Glenn Greenwald profiles Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. whistle-blower with No Place to Hide (Metropolitan). Boris Friedewald spotlights Women Photographers (Prestel). Carla Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como (Rizzoli) will spin your head. Richard Corliss hits home with Mom in the Movies (Simon & Schuster). Laurie David, Kirstin Uhrenholdt, and Katie Couric champion healthy recipes in The Family Cooks (Rodale). Amanda Vaill trips after Hemingway and his cohorts in Hotel Florida (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Pope Francis blesses us in The Church of Mercy (Loyola Press). Joel Selvin’s Here Comes the Night (Counterpoint) shadows rec ord producer Bert Berns. Randy M. Correll, Gary L. Brewer, Grant F. Marani, and Roger H. Seifter collaborate on Designs for Living (Monacelli). Food writer Ruth Reichl bakes a novel, and it’s Delicious! (Random House). Christopher Buckley’s But Enough About You (Simon & Schuster) delivers the laughs. “Serial wedding guest” Jen Doll tells all in Save the Date (Riverhead). Samantha Hayes’s bad-nanny thriller is Until You’re Mine (Crown). Tatiana de Rosnay’s newest best-seller will be The Other Story (St. Martin’s).
MAY
2014
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City of Dreams
La Vie en Rose hantecaille
Indian Summer his spring, Bulgari debuts its new fra grance Omnia Indian Garnet—a love letter to India and its sumptuous gemstone and perfumery traditions. Conceived by mas ter perfumer Alberto Morillas, the scent,
bottled as a sculptural work of art, conjures exotic Eastern aromas with notes of zesty mandarin and seductive amber. The exquisite fragrance is worthy of a maharani. ($82 for 2.2 oz.; bulgari.com) —cat buckle y
celebrates its 15th anniversary with one of the world’s most natural healers: the rose. Made to help amp up the skin’s immune system, La Crème à la Rose de Mai —infused with pure rose extract—proves the woody perennial is more powerful than its delicate reputation would suggest. ($210; chantecaille.com)
—alyssa
reeder
Bonbon Eau de Parfum. Bottom, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren.
Something Sweet
“Whatever we do, it starts with the name—we visualize the words,” declares Rolf Snoeren of the Dutch designing duo Viktor & Rolf, known for their avant-garde couture and conceptual glamour. He is speaking of Bonbon, their new, one-of-a-kind caramel-infused fragrance, out this spring at Saks Fifth Avenue. The idea of
Bonbon started with a simple bow, a concept that’s always been in their runway repertoire. “The bow is an archetypal way of decorating something, making something special out of something ordinary,” says Viktor Horsting. The face of Bonbon is model Edita Vilkeviciute, whose nude body is painted with rows of pink ribbons and bows while an oversize fragrance bottle is steady on her lap. The ad reinforces the notion that “fragrance is something that is very intimate —it’s about the skin, as it’s on the skin. The idea is to blur the line between skin and clothing,” explains Viktor. And with that, here comes the bow, a flacon made to look like fabric with a potion that embodies haute couture dessert. ($165 for 3 oz.; saks.com)
—sunhee
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Above, 2005; left, 2006 spring/ summer readyto-wear.
grinnell
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2014
PHOTO GRAPHS BY MARTI N HARVE Y/GE TT Y I MAGE S (PAL AC E ), PHI LI P RI CHE S (HO RSTI N G); F O R DE TAI L S , GO TO VF.CO M/ CR E DI TS
Rambagh Palace, Jaipur, India. Insets: top, Bulgari “Summer” necklace, from the Four Seasons High Jewelry Collection; bottom, Omnia Indian Garnet Eau de Toilette.
J. Ralph, photographed in his studio, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Below, a 1950s Seeburg 200 Jukebox with original vinyl 45s.
prietor, J. Ralph (also known as Josh), the 38-year-old composer, recording artist, and music producer who has retroftted the vast performance space as an audio refuge—shown here for the first time. A giant central stage bears a clavichord, drum kits, an enormous Chinese gong, Duke Ellington’s grand piano. Here and there, as if from some Tim Burton fever dream, are dioramas, altars, bordello-style sofas, an absinthe bar—and a huge cast-iron aquarium, around which he hosts salons that have attracted guests such as Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels and the late Lou Reed. Josh got his frst break at age 19 when rapper Chuck D invited him to direct a music video for Public Enemy. The composer has gone on to score Left, the theater’s two Oscar-winning docusignature “Piano mentaries (Man on Wire and Bar,” designed and hand-built by J. Ralph; The Cove), followed by the
n a nondescript street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side lies an architectural treasure that has been tucked away for 100 years. Up narrow stairs, through the back of a Chinese bakery and a laundry room, is a steel door. Inside, lit by votive candles and candelabras, are tiers for long-gone balcony seats, organ bays, walls painted blood red. These are the bones of the cavernous Clinton Star Theatre, built in the 1910s for vaudeville shows. Today, however, it is a one-of-a-kind recording studio. “This is the last private playhouse in New York City—and it’s totally unknown,” says its beaming pro-
below, some of his collection of vintage recording equipment.
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Oscar-nominated Hell and Back Again, and Chasing Ice, for which he was a 2012 bestsong nominee. In the late 90s, J. Ralph happened upon the abandoned Clinton, fnding the old box theater so acoustically well proportioned—for the sound reverberations, the notes’ decay rates, the tones it generated—that he transformed it into his own creative sanctuary. He brought in stratospherically high-end recording equipment (both antique and modern) calibrated to capture the essence of live performance so that he could then lay tracks onto his favorite medium: heavyweight vinyl. As he went on to record his signature spacey themes for TV, flm, and commercials, his lair became a hideaway for music insiders. And over the years, recording artists as varied as J. Ralph’s tastes (Norah Jones and Joshua Bell, Liza Minnelli and Wynton Marsalis, Ben Harper and Karen O) have found their way up those stairs, through the laundry room, and into this timeworn vaudeville hall. —basil walter
MARK SCHÄFER
MAY
2014
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MAY 2014
A R O U N D t h e WO R L D, O N E PA RT Y a t a T I M E
STARRY, STARRY NIGHT A star-studded parade of guests posed for paparazzi on the green-and-white striped carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar party before entering this year’s custom-built venue, in West Hollywood.
PH OTO GRA P HS BY J U STI N B IS HO P ( PA PA RA ZZ I ) , PA S CA L L E S EG RE TA I N /GE T T Y I MAGE S (N YO NG ’O ) , VA LE R I E MACO N/ A F P/G ET T Y I MAG ES ( J ON ZE ) , HA NN A H TH OM SO N ( L ETO , L IG HTS )
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Spike Jonze and Alfonso Cuarón Jared Leto
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Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga Harvey Weinstein, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jonah Hill Jennifer Lawrence
PHOTO GRAPHS BY JUSTI N BI SHO P (I OVI NE , SCO RSE SE ), CHRI S GE O RGE (VE RSAC E ), HANNAH THO MSO N (ALL OTHE RS)
Rick Rubin and Chris Paul
STARRY, STARRY NIGHT This year, the Vanity Fair Oscar party was granted its own address at a new location on Sunset Boulevard, elevating its glamour and intrigue to new heights. The evening kicked off with an intimate dinner prepared by celebrated chef Thomas Keller. After the awards, the room began to pulse with music, laughter, and excitement as movie stars, musicians, business tycoons, models, and politicians made their way in to the hottest party in Hollywood. The revelry—toasting, kissing, posing, and partying—continued until nearly dawn.
Elizabeth Banks and Reese Witherspoon Larry David and Will Arnett
Martin Scorsese
Bette Midler and Stevie Nicks
Amy Poehler and Patricia Clarkson
Jason Bateman, Paul Rudd, and Adam Scott
Emilia Clarke, Greta Gerwig, and Allison Williams
Jimmy Iovine and Liberty Ross
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Sofía Vergara and Irina Shayk
Bono, Portia de Rossi, and Ellen DeGeneres Amy Adams
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Bill Murray Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Channing Tatum, and Zooey Deschanel
Sidney Poitier and Quincy Jones
Diane Lane and Penny Marshall
Bradley Cooper
Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller
Pink and Reina Hidalgo Adam Levine and Jon Hamm
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Behati Prinsloo, Lily Aldridge, and Irina Shayk
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Anjelica Huston and Tom Ford
Harrison Ford
Lady Gaga
Taylor Swift, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Jaime King, and Karlie Kloss
Sir Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevell
Rupert Murdoch and David Geffen
Kate Hudson Liam Hemsworth and Chris Hemsworth
PHOTOG RA P HS BY CHRI S GE O RGE ( GAG A , M c C ARTNE Y), HANNAH T HO MSO N ( A H ME D, E LL I SO N, HU DSO N , M URDO CH, SI GN), JE FF VE SPA/ W IR E IM AGE ( HE MSWO RT H) , J USTI N B I SH OP ( A LL OTHE RS)
Megan Ellison and Robyn Shapiro
David O. Russell
Kerry Washington Miranda Kerr Robert De Niro
This year’s party was given its own address in the city of West Hollywood by the Montgomery family, the longtime owner of Sunset Plaza.
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t the risk of outing myself as an uncommon churl, news of an HBO adaptation of Larry Kra mer’s play The Normal Heart didn’t exactly ring my dinner bell with excitement. My re sponse was more along the lines of “Why this? Why now?” Like an Arthur Miller classic brought down from the attic, another rollout of Kramer’s stage drama threatened to release the dust bunnies of a diligently worthy uplifting enterprise; it seemed like a noble gesture, a solemn nod from the pre mier paycable outft that has stormed the ramparts with Game of Thrones and fshed godless dread out of the mazy bayou with True Detective. Like a lot of us, I’ve gotten spoiled by HBO’s freshness. To be presented on HBO over Memorial Day weekend, The Normal Heart touts a quickonthedraw director (Ryan Murphy, he of Glee and American Horror Story) and a Justice League cast (Julia THE NE VER-ENDING STORY Clockwise from top: Mark Roberts, Mark Rufalo, Joe Rufalo and Taylor Kitsch in The Mantello, Jonathan Grof, Normal Heart; Matthew McConaughey Alfred Molina, Jim Par and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers sons), but the original Club; a protest at the 1994 Gay Pride material has none of Parade in N.Y.C.; Mark Lamos and the goldlamé splendac Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion; And the Band Played On; ity of HBO’s royal tada Aidan Quinn in An Early Frost; last Memorial Day week Emma Thompson in Angels end—Steven Soderbergh’s in America; playwright Liberace fandango, Behind the Larry Kramer. Candelabra, which went lawdy missgaudy and enshrined Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in a rococo array of falloftheRomanEmpire ensembles. The Normal Heart is a much squarer construc tion, which may account for its durability. It goes in no new directions, but the direction it goes drives ferce. Still, why this, why now? The HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart, Originally produced at the Public Theater in 1985 and triumphantly revived in 2011 Larry Kramer’s 1985 play about the aids crisis (with Ellen Barkin making her Broadway debut, for which she won a Tony), Kramer’s in New York City, isn’t just a worthy project. play is one of the landmark documents of the Like Dallas Buyers Club, it’s a shocking reminder plague years in New York City, when the aids outbreak ravaged thousands of lives of how the Establishment fiddled as thousands of mostly young gay men in their prime as of mostly young gay men died panic and paranoia feasted on everyone’s
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PH OTO GR A PHS © F O CUS F E ATUR E S/ PHOTOF E ST ( DAL L AS B U YE R S CL UB , B OTH ), © H BO /E V ER ET T CO LL E C TI O N (AND T HE BAND PL AYE D ON), © HBO /PHOTO FE ST (ANGE LS IN AM E R ICA, T HE NOR M AL HE ART ), © NB C/ PH OTO FE ST ( AN E AR LY F ROST ) , BY CI N DY O RD /GE TT Y I M AGE S ( KR A ME R) , © S A MUE L GO LDW YN FI LMS/E VE RE TT CO LLE C TI O N ( LONGT IM E COM PANION), © MI CHAE L S. YAMASHI TA/CO RBI S (PROTE ST)
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JAMES WOLCOTT
WOLCOTT fears while political, media, and medical pillars of propriety stood impassively by, auditioning for the role of Pontius Pilate. One of the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Kramer was at the epicenter of the engulfment, sounding the loudest alarm over the dire consequences of denialism. Ousted from G.M.H.C. for being such a ferociously outspoken and temperamentally disruptive lone ranger, Kramer wrote The Normal Heart with the urgency of an ambulance siren and the wrath of a lion. The play didn’t allegorize
Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfre of the Vanities. But a syllabus is no substitute for an active, engaged awareness, and an Establishment that looked away as long as it could during the aids epidemic looks back as seldom as possible, the passage of time and the glass tower prosperity of the realestate boom banishing the trauma to the outskirts of commemoration. Manhattan has become so expensive a proposition that even its ghosts have been priced out of their haunting places. In “The Gentrifcation of aids,” included
THE AIDS NIGHTMARE REFUSES TO REST
IN THE AMNESIAC FOG TO WHICH AMERICA CONSIGNS IT.
the situation. It blasted the rafters, pointed fingers, and named names, most excoriat ingly that of then mayor Ed Koch, who was widely assumed in the gay community to be a closet homosexual, a craven impostor. (When an aide in The Normal Heart insists, “The Mayor is not gay,” the rejoinder is “Oh, come on, Blanche.”) The Paddy Chayefsky an humanism, rhetorical blammo, bristling nerves, and siege mentality in Kramer’s play arguably hold up better than the magic real ism of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (which HBO mounted onscreen in 2003, directed by Mike Nichols), and Ryan Mur phy’s version delivers the shock waves, the diatribes, and the tears. That HBO’s produc tion of The Normal Heart follows so soon on the boot heels of Dallas Buyers Club suggests that the aids nightmare refuses to rest in the amnesiac fog to which America consigns its shameful chapters. The duty to the dead re quires our attention, and these are forgetme nots that go of like hand grenades.
in her slim, elegiac collection The Gentrif cation of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagi nation, playwrightnovelistessayistactivist Sarah Schulman contrasts the magnitude of loss from “1981 to 1996, when there was a mass death experience of young people,” with the minuscule trace residue left on the conscience and consciousness of so many survivors and those who came after. “Their absence is not computed and the meaning of their loss is not considered.” She contrasts the casualty toll of aids—“81,542 people … died of aids in New York City as of August 16, 2008”—with the mourning and aveng ing of the “2,752 people [who] died in New York City on 9/11.” “The disallowed grief of twenty years of aids deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead,” she argues. A Freedom Tower pokes the sky from Lower Manhattan, but the aids dead, though far greater in num ber, have no memorial, their names unrecord ed on any wall or along any refecting pool.
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A
or those who were around and mor ally awake through those years and the aftermath, there is a sense that the aids devastation has evaporated in cultural memory, the period sanitized and nostalgi fed by John Hughes comingofagers (The Breakfast Club), Dynasty shoulder pads, and the Bolivianmarchingpowder benders of Bright Lights, Big City. Harrowing, heart breaking films, novels, and memoirs testi fed to the tragedy as it unfolded, from the TV drama An Early Frost and flms such as Parting Glances, Longtime Companion (which still holds up beautifully), and Philadelphia to Randy Shilts’s investigative masterwork And the Band Played On (turned into an HBO flm in 1993), Paul Monette’s memoir Bor rowed Time, David Wojnarowicz’s essay col lection Close to the Knives, Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now,” and the “Masque of the Red Death” chapter in
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s in a Hitchcock flm, the horror in The Normal Heart introduces itself in innocent daylight. Nineteen eighty one. The Fire Island ferry deboards and the screen bulges and glistens with buf, bronzed bodies exalting in liberty like sailors on shore leave. Only Ned Weeks (Rufalo) seems less than strutting proud of his physique, self consciously tugging his shirt as if his abs weren’t quite ready for inspection. He doesn’t own the inner pounce of a true pagan. He’s reluctant to take the Nestea plunge into the big bopping party on the beach, and he’s briefy arrested (as who wouldn’t be?) by the spectacle of four men conjoined in a cluster hump under the trees, as if forming a mytho logical beast. The bell toll that sounds that closing time in paradise is the telltale cough of a young man who collapses on the sand, the overhead camera angle signaling its por tentousness. That cough is like the first shot
heard in a war, the cue for the assault waves to come crashing. The Normal Heart immerses the viewer in how fast and overwhelmingly everything came to a feverish siege for the gay community. Coughs that might be shrugged of as a touch of fu deepen into racking con vulsions, and many who were strapping ft or elegantly slender only a few weeks earlier become emaciated, pale, covered with sores, trembling, terrifed, ostracized, neglected, re jected, bedridden, then gone. So many gone that it’s hard to keep track. In The Normal Heart, Jim Parsons plays a G.M.H.C. activ ist who, after getting word of the death of a friend or contact from aids, removes the vic tim’s card from his Rolodex and keeps the accumulating cards of the dead in his desk, his way of honoring their names. He’s terrifc in the flm, as are Julia Roberts, dynamized as she whizzes around in her wheelchair with the ofcious dispatch of a doctor who doesn’t have an idle or frivolous moment to spare for obstructionist fools (she wields her scowl like a weed whacker), and Mark Rufalo, in the tricky role of Larry Kramer’s mouthpiece and standin, who can kill a party with his righteous fervor faster than Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were and, as his frustration escalates, hectors both friends and foes like a burning prophet, yet remains vulnerable, sympathetic, the deserving focal point. His tactics may be mistaken sometimes and his manners lacking, but he sees the mag nitude of the aids crisis taking monstrous form, fueled by fear and hatred of homo sexuals and other minorities. They want us dead is the protagonist’s primal scream. Al though the disco selections on its soundtrack aren’t the most original, The Normal Heart is very good at recreating the grubby Green wich Village vitality and disrepair of Man hattan’s last bohemian hurrah, the lopsided mounds of uncollected garbage in the street, the quarrelsome meetings in hot rooms where the fans do little good and everyone’s irritable and sarcastic, the hospital wards where aids patients are treated as lepers and that have all the charm of Iron Curtain prisons. Why this, why now? Because as the decades pass we are in danger of forgetting forever what went down. Nothing done now can make up for what wasn’t done then, but The Normal Heart, like Dallas Buyers Club, reminds us that this is how it went down in that Reagan era so many of our softer minds still want to remember and cherish as a beau tiful painted sunset. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE • Who
is Larry Kramer?
(Michael Shnayerson, October 1992) • Assessing
Angels in America
(Christopher Hitchens, March 1993, and Michael Hogan, June 2003)
MAY
2014
MICHAEL KINSLEY
THE WAY IT WAS Multiple editions, breaking news on the afternoon commute, November 22, 1963.
THE FRONT PAGE 2.0
In most hand-wringing debates about the future of newspapers, high-quality journalism is seen as doomed by the Internet. The author—V.F.’s newest columnist—begs to disagree
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PH OTO GR A PH BY CA R L MY DA N S/ TI M E & LI F E P IC TU RE S/ GE TT Y IM AGE S
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y friend Nicholas Lemann, who recently stepped down as dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has done his time and then some at symposia and similar gatherings to discuss the Future of Newspapers in the Age of the Internet. Nick says he has one frm rule about such discussions: “You’re not allowed to say, ‘It will all work out somehow.’ ” If you want to play with the big boys, you’ve got to say how. Unfortunately, having thought about it for a bit, I’ve more or less concluded that the ongoing crisis of newspapers—going bankrupt, being sold for peanuts, fring staf, cutting foreign bureaus, and so on—will all work out, somehow. I can’t tell you how, but I can tell you why. It’s partly Stein’s Law, named after the late Herbert Stein, an economist who served as chairman of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers. Stein’s Law is more or less the opposite of Lemann’s Dictum. It holds that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This is a conservative notion, a clarion call to inaction on almost any subject: problems tend to resolve themselves. And then there’s that old Chinese curse: May your dreams come 2014
KINSLEY true. If you could go back to, say, 1994, two decades ago, and if you could have told newspaper publishers that soon they’d be able to produce and distribute a daily newspaper at no cost for newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink), that they could shut down those huge presses and dispense with troublesome unions once and for all, and that they wouldn’t even need paperboys (or girls) anymore to throw the paper into the neighbor’s bushes—if you could have told them that all these costs were about to plummet to near zero—the publishers would have thought, Now, that sounds like a pretty great deal. I’ll take it. So how has this unexpected gift from God turned into such a disaster for them? There must be large amounts of either incompetence or bad luck involved. Anyone, like me, whose solution is a vague “Things will work out somehow” lacks standing to blame the problem on other people’s incompetence. So we will call it bad luck.
I
t’s not true that the publishers have just stood by while the Internet has stolen their business. Way back in 1981, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, under its leader that year—Katharine Graham, the C.E.O. of the Washington Post Co.—made a big lobbying push for a law forbidding AT&T, then a governmentsanctioned telephone monopoly, to sell classifed ads electronically. The publishers argued that the telephone company’s monopoly guaranteed the company profts that it could then use to subsidize the development of an electronic Yellow Pages, which would threaten one of their most proftable products, classifed ads. It was a bold argument. The newspaper industry had a higher rate of return on its investment than the phone company did. Nevertheless, the publishers were correct in seeing classified ads as the first thing they would lose as their business went online, though they missed the fact that the telephone company itself was about to be split into little bits and that it was some guy named Craig who would take this particular proft center from them. Although it is hard to believe now, when The Washington Post can be bought by Amazon’s Jef Bezos for pocket change of $250 million, but just 15 or 20 years ago, before the commercial arrival of the Internet, there was no sweeter sinecure in American capitalism than owning the one newspaper in a one-newspaper town. And cities as large as Los Angeles and Washington had effectively become one-newspaper towns. It was heaven: you could earn huge monopoly profts from advertisers like the big department stores, which had nowhere else to go. You were automatically a civic leader. And if you got bored, or your family needed cash, you could sell out to Gannett, which
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always stood ready to gobble up monopoly newspapers and lower the tone. At symposia and seminars on the Future of Newspapers, professional worriers used to worry that these monopoly or near-monopoly newspapers were too powerful for society’s good. It couldn’t go on, and therefore it didn’t. Donald Graham, publisher of The Washington Post during the crucial years, understood what a sweet deal his paper had. To the frustration of many Post reporters, Graham resisted all temptations to spend
ic, however. Fashion has changed, incredibly quickly. Really, in just the past three or four years. On an airplane, it has become strange to see anyone lugging an oldfashioned book. Any sense that e-books are déclassé or unsuitable for serious reading has simply evaporated. One man is responsible: Jef Bezos, with the Kindle. His legitimation of electronic reading will be seen as a far more important contribution to saving newspapers than his purchase of the Post. (Note: my wife is a director at Amazon.)
RICH FOUNDATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS
APPEAR EAGER TO JUMP IN AND SUPPLY FOREIGN OR OTHER PRESTIGE NEWS IF NEWSPAPERS WON’T.
millions trying to compete with The New York Times as a national newspaper. Except for two or three bedraggled copies, often yesterday’s edition, you rarely ran into the Post outside the Beltway (or maybe in central Manhattan). Today the Post is, through no fault of Don Graham’s, an international newspaper, easily available anywhere in the world. But fnancially it’s a basket case, as are most other newspapers. In 2000, the Tribune Company paid $8.3 billion for the Los Angeles Times and several smaller papers. Today the Tribune Company wants to sell all its newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune itself, and can’t seem to fnd a buyer at any price. The New York Times Company bought The Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and sold it for $70 million in 2013.
B
ut why did this happen? What happened to all that money newspapers were supposed to save? Well, you save the money only if people are actually willing to give up the paper paper in favor of a computer screen. And at frst people wouldn’t do it, unless the content was actually about computers, or pornography. “I don’t like reading on a computer screen” was the most familiar comment I heard when I started Slate, an online magazine, in 1996. Around that time, at a public panel discussion about (what else?) newspapers and the Internet (future of), a professor cut of a member of the audience who was making this point. “Your problem,” he intoned, “will be solved actuarially.” And he was right. Older people have died of and younger ones have been reading on a computer screen all their lives. The change was not merely demograph-
Bezos deserves less credit (but maybe not a lot less) for another key development: the willingness of people to pay for online content. It’s been a two-step process, and it’s not over yet: frst, getting people to pay online for hard goods, like a book, and then getting people to pay online for online goods, like a newspaper. A second reason the predictable bonanza for newspapers didn’t materialize immediately was that they lost their comfortable monopoly. Now, instead of being the only newspaper in town, every Englishlanguage newspaper in the world is competing with every other one. They are also competing with new ways to compile and deliver news, made possible by this new technology. Some of these new ways amount to theft of traditional papers’ content—though it goes by the fancy name of “aggregation,” or the even fancier name of “curation.” A successful aggregation Web site can be far cheaper to run than a traditional news organization, some of which still hire grownups and send them to expensive places where news is actually happening. One of the major aggregators, who has taken an old property and made it proftable for the frst time in a century, took me on a tour of his new aggregation facility, somewhere deep in the Maryland suburbs, where rent is cheap. It was a pathetic sight. Dozens of recent college graduates—paid 75 cents an hour—sat chained to their computers grinding out blog items, while editors stood above them with whips, shouting, “Blog, you worthless scum. Blog more. A dozen new items by lunchtime or there’ll be no day-old pizza for anyone. Blog, I tell you,” and so forth. (Or maybe, come to think MAY
2014
Spotlight
KINSLEY
GRO O MI N G BY B I RGIT T E PHI L I PPI DE S; F O R DE TA IL S, GO TO VF.CO M /CR E DI TS
of it, I imagined that scene. Just as I did the quote that follows.) Probably the most successful of the aggregators is Arianna Hufngton, whose Hufngton Post—named as a gentle poke in the eye to The Washington Post—was sold to AOL for more than The Washington Post went for. Arianna said, “Darling, what is all this fuss? I ask you: how is what we do any diferent from what is on the op-ed page every day of the week? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday … What comes after Wednesday, darling? Where is my assistant? Anyway, we read the newspaper and comment on it. They read the newspaper and comment on it. Has Nicholas Kristof ever been sold into slavery? Has Tom Friedman been to Ukraine? Well, perhaps he has, but you see my point, darling. Everybody aggregates. Let him who is without sin … who said that, by the way? I believe the Hufngton Post will say it very soon. Perhaps tomorrow. May I borrow your cell phone?” In a couple of recent speeches, the C.E.O. of the New York Times Company, Mark Thompson, has suggested that the high quality of the Times’s content—the very quality that alarmists claim is becoming unafordable as a result of bloggers and other cheap competition—will be the paper’s salvation, because people will pay real money for it. (He cautions that the Times is sui generis and that this high-quality strategy won’t work for ordinary, runof-the-mill papers such as … any paper other than the Times.) With admirable, or possibly insane, frankness, he says the Times’s intention is to reduce reliance on advertising and to squeeze its most loyal readers as much as possible to pay for the content they consume. “The frst plank of our new strategy,” Thompson said, “is to develop additional pay oferings aimed at those who tell us they would certainly pay us something for Times journalism but less than the $200 or so which is our current lowest digital subscription—though we also intend to create enhanced oferings for those who tell us they would pay us even more.” He promised “fresh expressions of our journalism … with their own integrity and appeal.” And: “Despite any false rumors you may have heard to the contrary, all editorial leadership rests—as it always should and will”—with the editorial side. That is, news will not be infuenced by advertisers. (“Native advertising” is the delightful but bewildering euphemism for advertising that looks like editorial content. Its main efect is to make editorial content look like advertising.)
T
here will always be a demand for high-quality news—enough demand to support two or three national newspapers, on papyrus scrolls if necessary. And the truth is that if only two or three newspapers survive, in national or global competition, that will still be more competition than we have now, with our collection of one-paper-town monopolies. A second truth is that most newspapers aren’t very good and wouldn’t be missed by anybody who could get The New York Times or USA Today and some bloggy source of local news. A third truth is that former roadblocks—people’s refusal to get their content online or to pay for it—are melting away like the snow. A fourth truth is that rich foundations and individuals appear downright eager to jump in and supply foreign or other prestige news if newspapers won’t. Former Times executive editor Bill Keller just quit the paper to help start a nonproft to cover justice issues. Paul Steiger, formerly managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, founded ProPublica—a nonproft that produces top-quality investigative journalism. Somewhere in that agglomeration of developments, newspapers will survive in some form or other at least equal to any available today. It will all work out somehow. � M AY 2 014
KEYS TO THE DIVINE Stephen Hough, photographed at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, in New York.
S
tephen Hough has a mystic’s face—angled, ascetic, inward-looking—that seems right out of a Zurbarán painting. And more than once Hough (pronounced “Huff”), a Roman Catholic convert, contemplated becoming a priest. But in the end he chose a different path—or, to be more precise, paths. At 52, Hough is Britain’s most protean pianist: he has been on an extended North American tour, culminating with a New York recital on April 13. Juilliard-trained, he won the prestigious Naumburg piano competition at 21 and went on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2001: “America,” he says gratefully, “has been central to my life.” Hough’s thoughtfulness masks astounding energy. He’s a poet, professor, painter (his first London show of heavily impastoed, Abstract Expressionist– style canvases sold well), and composer (of, among other things, two masses). He also blogs—almost 600 wise, witty posts for The Telegraph since 2008, on topics ranging from Lou Reed to what it means to be a gay Catholic. It is the rarefied world he creates at the keyboard, however, that truly sets him apart. He can power through man-eating Liszt and Tchaikovsky concerti with the best of them. But for Hough, God is mostly in the details—the beautifully articulated inner voices, the crystalline clarity of lyrical passages, the precision of the pedal. From the moment he walks onstage, erect and beautifully turned out in a dark Nehru jacket, he radiates a higher sense of purpose. “A priest once said to me, ‘Think of a priest going to the altar as you walk out on the stage,’ ” he says. “I would hate to think that anyone thought I was coming to preach. But art and music open up things that you can’t put into words. It’s about bringing — ANNALYN SWAN joy when you go out there.” PH OTO G RA PH
BY
JONATHAN BECKER
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SOCIETY
GE T IT STR AIGHT
PERFECTION ANXIETY
For the super-rich, perfection can be a chore.
After spending $19 million on their wedding, and $85 million on an L.A. mansion, James Stunt and Petra Ecclestone have purchased one of Britain’s great cultural treasures, a 17th-century, $20 million Van Dyck. So, what’s it like to have too much money? Very stressful
H
By A . A . G I L L
e catches your eye with a sideways glance and an enigmatic expression. Indicating what? Curiosity? Trepidation? A little insecure arrogance? Anthony Van Dyck’s fnal self-portrait is a work of mesmerizing depth and dexterity. Within a year he would be dead. Is there a whisper of premonition? Van Dyck is the godfather of British portraiture, the artist who put a face to the 17th century and the birth of the new-model middle class. And that, perhaps, is what’s on this face. It is the frst glimpse of upwardly mobile anxiety. The painting is considered one of Britain’s greatest cultural treasures, and it was recently sold for $20 million to a buyer who wants to take it to Los Angeles. The National Portrait Gallery in London badly wants to keep the Van Dyck in the country and is attempting to raise matching funds to prevent it from going abroad. Sandy Nairne, the director of the gallery, says he is determined to save it for the nation. The export has been delayed until summer. The expectant owners are Petra Ecclestone, the 25-year-old daughter of Formula One mogul Bernie, and her husband, James Stunt, who sounds, unfortunately, like a
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I L L U STR AT IO N
BY
PAUL COX
MAY
2014
SOCIETY character from a Martin Amis novel, and who looks, even more unfortunately, like a character from a Martin Amis novel. The couple had a $19 million wedding, where she wore a $130,000 Vera Wang dress. Six-thousand-dollar bottles of Château Pétrus were served. He collects Pétrus, too, of course, and keeps it in a special cabinet made by David Linley, the Queen’s nephew. He also collects cars: Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces. And 17th-century portraits. Petra bought them one of the most expensive
surdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to fnd the best tailors. I know of a man who gets his suit pants made in Italy and the jackets on Savile Row. In his underwear, he’s short, fat, furry, and stooped. Only the fathomlessly rich suffer from Perfection Anxiety. There is no relativity to wealth. It’s all absolutes. It’s either impeccable, the best, the rarest, or it might as well be Walmart. The stress of value for money is magnifed exponentially when it gets into the billions. The myth of King Midas, who
THERE IS NO RELATIVITY TO
WEALTH. IT’S ALL ABSOLUTES. homes in Los Angeles County, for $85 million, where one assumes the Van Dyck will hang. It’s Aaron Spelling’s old place in Holmby Hills, which, famously, contains Candy Spelling’s gift-wrapping room. It goes with Petra’s London house, in Chelsea, which is worth $90 million.
A
t this point, we should all take a deep breath and step back from the frothing goblet of sparkling snobbery that we are quafng and that is so marvelously intoxicating. Oh, the pleasurable indignation of smirking at the young and tastelessly rich. But, really, why shouldn’t a Van Dyck spend a few years in an L.A. party palace, along with the Pétrus and the Rolls? Who’s to say what new money should or shouldn’t accumulate? Turn this question around and try to see it, as Joel Grey might put it, through their eyes. There is a terrible dichotomy in extreme wealth. After a bit, the money stops working. There are a statistically minute but quantitatively considerable number of people who now have more money than they know what to do with. And that money accounts for quite a lot of the world’s wealth, so we all have a passing interest in what becomes of it. How do I, as a frugally paid journeyman hack, know it stops working? Well, I’ve been asking folks who service the overly minted. There is a name for their panicked ennui: Perfection Anxiety. When you have 15 houses, yachts in three oceans, planes, cellars, mistresses, surgery, a library, and a personal charity, new purchases become just a matter of upgrading. And this is where the Perfection Anxiety kicks in. What you need is to have not just the most but the very, very best. The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who’s got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more ab-
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was cursed to have everything he touched turn to gold, would be worse if everything he touched turned out to be gold leaf. And it’s not just the suspicion that all your stuf isn’t utterly perfect. It’s also the anxiety of maintaining perfection once it’s achieved, and, as a result, constant discontent. A crooked Picasso, an unplumped scatter cushion, a faint mark on the handwoven silk wallpaper can drive them to a frothing distraction. And when you’ve got the best of everything, when you have your tea fown in from a micro-garden in Darjeeling and it still tastes rather like tea, when you’ve designed your own scent made from the squeezed glands of civets and the petals of rare orchids and that fails to give you the high— “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer”—then you’re reduced to collecting art. Art is good for those with Perfection Anxiety because you never get to the end of it. And the competition is ferce, and the prices are absurd. No picture bought for more than $50 million has ever made a proft, a contemporary auction expert tells me authoritatively, but it doesn’t stop people from buying them. There have been lots of papers written on collecting and collectors, and they turn out to be mostly men. And while they imagine their collections begin as random or serendipitous interests, they are invariably revealed to be emblematic of some deeper loss, some attempt to fll an unbridgeable gap, to repair a childhood wound. They will set out to visit every World Heritage site or to shoot every large animal on every continent, trying to wring some last buzz of excitement or sense of wonder out of the failed high of money. When all the veins have broken down, when you’ve upped the experience dosage to absurd levels, there’s
always Fabergé eggs or overpriced wine. The only super-rich person I know said that, actually, after you’ve bought, consumed, collected, donated, and holidayed yourself into triple-ply boredom, the thing that actually keeps you spending is the expectations of others: your family and friends, and their friends, and the servants. No one ever writes about the terrible anticipation of wealth that comes from people who are merely solvent. You are the focus of so much wishful thinking, so much smiling avarice, you feel responsible to live a life of steepling extravagance. Particularly the young. That’s why they have $20 million weddings and hire a pop star to sing “Happy Birthday” to them. The pressure to live the dream is intense. Because, if you say, Look, actually, spending a lot of money is a diminishing return, it’s an efortful bore, it doesn’t deliver the rush—well, where does that leave the ever expanding universe of capitalism and consumption? It’s miserablist Commie heresy. It’s like blowing your nose on everyone else’s pay slip. Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we already secretly know that it doesn’t do what it promises. Nothing has ever given us as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our frst wage at the end of that frst exhausting week, paid in folded cash. Now we’re 10 times richer, but we’re not 10 times happier. And all that’s just a cartoon truism. If we had billions, we don’t realistically believe that we’d be a billion times better off. As one art dealer said to me, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to.”
T
he thing with Perfection Anxiety is that it seems to accept mostly new money, and it particularly aficts those who make their money early. Old, inherited wealth is generally already bound up in property and trusts and obligations and lawsuits. So it would seem that the best we can hope for is to be wealthy but to be without cash. Being able to aford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE • Art
and wealth (Ingrid Sischy, December 2006, and Tom Wolfe, November 2012)
• The
yacht life (Mark Seal, May 2005 and November 2010) and the private-jet crowd (Anonymous, October 1998, and Tom Wolfe, September 2009)
• London’s
super-rich at One Hyde Park
(Nicholas Shaxson, April 2013)
• America’s
1 percent problem
(Joseph E. Stiglitz, May 2011)
• The
age of excess (Stephen Leacock, December 1915, and Michael Shnayerson, December 1997)
MAY
2014
The BEST
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LETTER FROM SYRIA
WITHOUT A TR ACE
Members of the Free Syrian Army in the streets of Damascus, Syria, 2013. Insets: left, reporter Austin Tice in a photo from his Flickr photostream, Syria, 2012; right, photographer Jim Foley in Aleppo, Syria, 2012.
EVAPORATED
Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. More than 60 have been killed there since the war began, and many others have been kidnapped, becoming pawns in the conflict. The author picks up the trail of two colleagues, Austin Tice and Jim Foley, who vanished in 2012
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n May 23, 2012, a 30-year-old Georgetown University law student and former Marine captain, adapting to his newly reduced circumstances as a freelance journalist, crawled under a fence from southern Turkey into northern Syria. Austin Tice had not yet published a single article, but it didn’t matter. Since mass demonstrations had spilled over into a full-scale armed insurgency against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad six months before, Syria was the story that everyone wanted—all the more so because, with the Syrian government keeping a tight lid on visas, hardly any journalists were in the country. Just about the only way inside was to smuggle yourself under the protection of armed rebels, which suited Tice just fne. As a soldier, he already had tours in Afghanistan and Iraq under his belt. Now his ambition was to go back to the region with a fresh pair of eyes and launch a new career as a journalist. His guide was a bespectacled Syrian-American in his early 50s named Mahmoud—wiry and stubborn, a bit like an older, shorter, Syrian version of Tice himself. After I met him, Mahmoud would show me training videos he had made, one revealing a pro-regime militiaman lying dead at his feet. Tice and Mahmoud bonded quickly, as people do in war zones; Tice would poke fun at Arab procrastination and Mahmoud would call him “White Boy.” Until a few months before, Mahmoud had been leasing out heavy equipment in Atlanta; MAY
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L A RGE P HOTO GRA P H BY GO RA N TO MA S EV IC / R EUT E RS /L A N DOV; I N SE T, R I GHT, BY N I CO L E TU NG
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By J A M E S H A R K I N
LETTER FROM SYRIA now he was a soldier in the new Free Syrian war. Every person in this country fghting Army and on his way to becoming a brigade for their freedom wakes up every day and commander. Things were changing fast, and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge it was possible to believe that before long that death could visit them at any moment. the rebels would be in Damascus, and Syr- They accept that reality as the price of freeia’s creaking Ba’thist regime would be his- dom᠁ They’re alive in a way that almost tory. Within two days, Tice and Mahmoud no Americans today even know how to be.” had made it to a rebel base in the province In late July, Tice made it through to Daof Hama, where Mahmoud had contacts. mascus, where for two weeks he fell in with “Writing like a maniac,” Tice wrote on Twit- another hospitable group of rebels in the subter, “taking photos, working like crazy.” urb of Darayya. But he couldn’t help worTice turned out to be a gifted journalist. rying about the growing number of attacks Laid out in scattershot bursts on Flickr and on journalists, and worrying as well that his Twitter, mixing descriptions of feld maneu- reports on human-rights abuses by the rebvers with the Free Syrian Army and refer- els, not just by the regime, might put him in ences to country pop, Tice’s information harm’s way. “I don’t want to get murdered trail made for a thrilling, hard-charging in Syria,” he’d written to Mahmoud. He alternative to the fak-jacketed pupwas in Darayya for his 31st birthday, petry of much war-zone reportand he was characteristically COMR ADES ing. He bantered about soccer gung-ho: “Spent the day at an Tice in Syria with with rebels in the central SyriMahmoud, his fxer and a Free Syrian an province of Homs, drew on Army member, his military background to ana2012. lyze the weapons and strategy of both sides, and ribbed The New York Times and the rest of the international media for their inability to put a journalist on the ground. (“Srsly guys if any of y’all wanna come down here, I would love some company,” he wrote on Twitter.) Tice’s headstrong, impudent side wasn’t to everyone’s taste—on at least one occasion his rebel hosts had
JUST ABOUT THE ONLY WAY INTO SYRIA
WAS UNDER REBEL PROTECTION, WHICH SUITED TICE JUST FINE.
to put him under house arrest for his own safety—but he had the merit of being funny. “Tonight made a good-faith effort to explain gay rights to a fun and well-meaning group of Syrian guys,” he wrote at one point. “Yeah, not the time, not the place.” In Homs, Mahmoud left to go back north, after which Tice was passed from tiny battalion to tiny battalion, making friends quickly and trusting those he met with his life. By July he had made it to Yabroud, a city north of Damascus, and was writing for The Washington Post. It was around this time, too, that he composed a kind of mission statement as a defense of what he was trying to achieve. “So that’s why I came here to Syria,” he wrote on his Facebook page, “and it’s why I like being here now, right now, right in the middle of a brutal and still uncertain civil 126
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FSA pool party with music by @taylorswift13. They even brought me whiskey. Hands down, best birthday ever.” That would be his fnal tweet. Two days later, on August 13, Tice apparently left for the Lebanese border and a much-needed vacation. With the exception of a single, deeply ambiguous video which popped up on the Internet six weeks later, nothing has been heard from him since.
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yria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the confict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the death of Marie Colvin, in
a blizzard of Syrian Army shells in Homs in February 2012, much of the Western media drew back from covering the country. Meanwhile, a lightly resourced, laughably paid, almost wholly uninsured cadre of freelancers, often armed with little more than a notebook and a mobile phone, infiltrated Syria anyway. A few were crazy narcissists or war-zone tourists, but most were serious reporters. Four-ffths of all journalists working in Syria, according to one estimate, are freelance and answering to no one but themselves. Austin Tice was one of these. So was I. Our paths had even crossed. Three weeks before he disappeared, while cooling my heels in the Turkish border town of Antakya, waiting for someone to take me into Syria, I’d asked my hosts at a Free Syrian Army safe house whether any Western journalists had passed this way before. Just one, they said—an American named Austin who had stayed with them for a week. They kept in touch with him on Facebook— he was still inside. Among the small band of Syria journalists, everyone quickly learns about everyone else. The week before, on another foray into northern Syria, I’d rolled up at a disused soccer feld to interview a local rebel commander. I ran into two glazed-looking European journalists sunning themselves outside an impromptu media office. The journalists were Balint Szlanko, a Hungarian, and Vedat Xhymshiti, an Albanian Kosovar. The media ofce had been heavily shot up by a regime helicopter; that hadn’t stopped Balint and Vedat from sleeping on its roof. The pair had recently shared the roof with another freelancer—an affable, devil-may-care video journalist named Jim Foley, whom one of them had known when reporting in Libya. Foley was a seasoned reporter, and this was his second trip to rebelheld Syria. A month earlier, stranded in the suburbs of Homs, he’d run into Austin Tice. For over a week, according to a Syrian who was with them, the two stayed up late into the night talking about anything and everything. Tice spent much of the time shooting of his mouth about the amateurism of the Free Syrian Army, and Foley had to quiet him down. All these men would soon be kidnapped. Balint Szlanko thinks he was arrested by a security team working for a powerful rebel militia; Vedat Xhymshiti was taken twice by diferent groups he believes were Islamic extremists—during the past year and a half, hard-core Islamists under the thin umbrella of al-Qaeda have become a growing presence in the fght against the regime. On each ocMAY
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LETTER FROM SYRIA casion, the men were freed within 24 hours. Jim Foley would not be so lucky. On November 22, he was returning from Syria to the Turkish border with another Western journalist and a Syrian fxer when they stopped of at an Internet café in Binnish, a town in Idlib province that they had been using as their base. It was Thanksgiving and the journalists went online, fling work and chatting with friends. After an hour or so they left the café and fagged down a taxi to take them to the border. Somewhere along the way the taxi was intercepted and the journalists were extracted at gunpoint and driven away. Like Austin Tice, Jim Foley and his companions simply vanished. Despite immense eforts by their families and friends, there has been no real news of them since. I frst got the details of Jim Foley’s kidnapping, a month after it happened, by way of a Syrian who goes by “Yasser.” I had known Yasser before the uprising, and he has been involved with the revolt from the beginning. He and his Free Syrian Army colleagues were working on the assumption that Foley had been driven to a nearby Shiite village, called Fua, by pro-regime shabiha—the ruthless militias who do so much of Assad’s dirty work—and then dispatched hundreds of kilometers south to Damascus. Some while later, in May 2013, GlobalPost, one of the news organizations Foley had worked for, advanced much the same scenario. Relying on “multiple independent reports from very credible confdential sources,” GlobalPost reported that Foley was being held in a Damascus prison run by Syrian Air Force Intelligence, the most feared arm of the shadowy Syrian security state, along with at least one other Western journalist, probably another American—possibly Austin Tice. The investigation was the work of Kroll, a frm of private security contractors that GlobalPost had hired at considerable expense. Besides Tice and Foley, at least two other American journalists have been kidnapped and are missing in Syria. So are two journalists from Spain, four from France, two from Sweden, one from Britain, one from Denmark. Most of them are freelancers. All told, more than 30 journalists are missing in Syria. Add in foreign-aid workers and assorted adventurers and the fgure climbs even higher. Some of the families, including that of the journalist who was traveling with Foley, have been persuaded by their advisers and governments that the best course of action is to keep quiet (and I will say nothing about those journalists here). The dangers in Syria are increasingly acute. In the summer of 2013, I phoned a Syrian fxer in rebel-held Aleppo who sounded scared out of his wits. He’d just been released from two weeks in a jihadi prison, and the journalist he had ferried across the border was still being held captive; he himself was only at his M AY 2 014
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desk to advise journalists against coming to Aleppo. “Don’t come to Aleppo” was all he kept saying. “Do not come.” Around the same time, I was talking to a Spanish freelance journalist, Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, who’d spent a few days with Foley and Tice in the suburbs of Homs and had been arrested by Islamic militants before, when he surprised me with the news that he was shortly heading back inside. Two weeks later he was again in the custody of the same group; at the time of this writing, he still is. The Business of Kidnapping
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his is how it goes. Blindfolded, with your hands tied behind your back, you’re manhandled into the backseat of a car. With your head forced down into the brace position, a burly shabiha on each side, you can’t see a thing. But hearing is enough. What you can hear is the screeching of the vehicle and the thumping militaristic pop music as your captors sing along to “God, Syria and Bashar” on the radio. After what seems like hours, you’re pushed out of the car at a military airport. You can hear the whir of helicopter blades. A few hours later you’re in Damascus and being driven at full throttle to a security compound, where you’re deposited in your own tiny concrete cell deep underground. That’s if you’ve been kidnapped by the regime. I’ve spoken to over a dozen journalists who have been arrested or kidnapped in Syria and later released either because a ransom was paid or for some inexplicable reason of the captors’. The description above was furnished by a European who, several weeks before Jim Foley went missing, was given safe passage into the pro-regime village of Fua by a gang of shabiha before being betrayed into the hands of another gang
TAKEN Foley and Tice are among more than 30 journalists missing in Syria.
of shabiha, and thus falling into the custody of the Syrian authorities. (In return for his release his employer undertook not to speak about the case and must remain unnamed.) A month later, in December 2012, the NBC correspondent Richard Engel had just crossed the Turkish border into Syria when he was held captive for fve days by suspected pro-regime paramilitaries. Around the same time, a German freelance journalist named Billy Six was driving through the countryside of northern Syria when he was taken at a checkpoint by the Syrian Army. The Syrian regime, according to Billy Six, claimed to know nothing of his detention until, thanks to a random encounter with another prisoner, his government got definitive wind of where he was, and eventually won his release. Austin Tice had told Mahmoud that he wanted to be the frst American journalist to get all the way from rebel areas in the north to Damascus. Mahmoud replied, “Dead or alive?” If Tice is alive, he is likely being held in the capital itself and he likely has the company of other foreigners—even if he doesn’t know they’re there. For the frst two weeks of his detention, the European journalist arrested in Fua was held in what he now takes to be a “foreigners’ complex” in Damascus—a prison within a prison— specially designed to hold prisoners like him. The Syrians I have spoken with agree. Foreign captives are very valuable to the regime, said one veteran of Damascus political prisons, and are always held separately. They might even function as an internal currency within the Syrian security state. “There are a vast array of different intelligence agencies all jockeying for position,” said the European journalist kidnapped www.vanityfair.com
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in Fua. “They can use high-profle prisoners as leverage among themselves, as well as for their dealings with the outside world.”
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traveled to Damascus on a rare journalist’s visa in September 2013. Army or shabiha checkpoints had been thrown up on almost every corner; men with leather jackets and gray, regulation Ba’thist beards hung around at intersections, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. In the center of the city I came to Umawiyeen Square, with its
regime at some point early in his detention. Someone is still taking a close interest; the last Facebook message Mahmoud sent Tice on August 12, 2012, was only accessed on October 29 the following year. The theory that Jim Foley was abducted by pro-regime shabiha, however, a theory propounded by Yasser and endorsed by the GlobalPost, makes very little sense. Foley was traveling from the rebel stronghold of Binnish en route to a rebel border crossing called Bab al-Hawa; the whole point of that circuitous
FOREIGN CAPTIVES ARE VALUABLE
TO SYRIA; THEY MIGHT EVEN FUNCTION AS AN INTERNAL CURRENCY. stunning view of Mount Qasioun. Most journalists stay in this area when they’re in town, in a clutch of luxury hotels dotted around the square. Ironically, if Austin Tice is in the custody of the Syrian government, he’s probably in this neighborhood, too. Within a short walk of the square you will fnd the headquarters buildings of the various components of STAGED? A video showed Tice Syria’s security state, plus the in the custody headquarters of the army and of Islamists—possibly air force. The whole area is misdirection by laced with security compounds. route was to avoid the regimethe regime. Almost all contain prisons, most held outpost of Fua and the atof them deep underground. At tentions of the shabiha. Six months some of the side entrances are the beearlier the area would have been thick ginnings of underground carriageways; on with regime agents, but now both Fua and nearby mounds of grass, men pop up from Taftanaz airport were under siege by Syrian camouflaged manholes and keep walking. rebels and wild-eyed foreign jihadis. In exA month and a half after Tice went miss- tensive interviews with journalists who have ing, a 47-second video appeared which worked the area and know it well, I talked seemed to show him in the custody not of the to no one who had any enthusiasm for the regime but of Islamic militants. The produc- theory that Foley could have been spirited tion values, the freshly laundered, Afghan- away to Fua. (The Assad regime has denied style clothes of the supposed Islamists, even having Foley in its custody.) the way they chanted “Allahu Akbar” (God he truth is that there are shabihais great), seemed wildly of-kilter, as if its like gangs on both sides of Syria’s producers were engaged in a deliberate confict. The term is nearly 30 years parody. As soon as I saw it, I got in touch with a young man named Amjad Siofy, old and originally referred to gangs of smugone of the rebels Tice had befriended in An- glers along Syria’s borders whose regime takya; by then Siofy was back in the suburbs connections gave them license to do as they of Damascus working for the Free Syrian pleased. Since the outbreak of the uprising, Army and, in his spare time, trying to work many have simply transferred their loyalties out what had become of Tice. “Faked,” he to the fledgling Free Syrian Army and set wrote to me on Facebook. “Now we know about smuggling arms. For some of these gangs, kidnapping for ransom is a way of life; he is with the regime.” Two sources close to the case told me war-ravaged Syria has made it a fourishing that it appears Tice or his computer was at a business. In March 2013 the BBC’s wellprison facility under the control of the Syrian known world-affairs correspondent, Paul
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Wood, was traveling in Syria with a group of rebel-friendly smugglers when he and three colleagues were abducted by masked gunmen at a checkpoint. They were held for 10 days in a tiny concrete cell under one of the smugglers’ homes; it ended only when they overpowered a guard and forced their way out. The kidnappers had started by claiming they were regime-afliated shabiha; it soon became clear that they were a criminal gang fying the fag of the Free Syrian Army and working closely with Islamic extremists. In the early stages of the confict, Syria’s rebel armies had been happy to protect visiting journalists with their lives; if the world could only see the iniquities of the Syrian regime, the rebels thought, the Western powers would be shamed into large-scale military intervention on their behalf. When that didn’t happen, some of them found a more creative use for the journalists slipping into Syria—as commodities to be traded for cash. The pseudonymous French filmmaker Mani, whose freelance work from rebelheld Syria has won him awards, was in no doubt that journalists had become a fund-raising tool. “This war has been going on for almost three years,” he told me. “Resources are low, and military groups need money.” A month after Paul Wood’s kidnapping, an Italian reporter named Domenico Quirico and a Belgian teacher named Pierre Piccinin da Prata were traveling together near the city of Al-Qusayr when they were taken by bandits working for a large rebel militia called the Farouq Brigade; it took fve months and a considerable ransom to get them out. (In an interview on the Syrian-Turkish border, a well-connected rebel from Al-Qusayr told me that the ransom for the pair was around $5 million, $4 million of which seems to have come from the Italian government.) Two weeks after that a French-American photographer named Jonathan Alpeyrie was likely betrayed by a fxer soon after he crossed the Lebanese border into Syria; nearly three months and several mock executions later, he was released after $450,000 was paid by a pro-regime businessman to his Free Syrian Army kidnappers. No convincing ransom demand has ever been forthcoming in the case of Jim Foley or most of the others kidnapped after him in rebel-held northern Syria. One explanation is that whoever is holding them thinks they’re dealing with spies. Every Syrian journalist I’ve ever met has been accused of being a spy. When Austin Tice’s Free Syrian Army friends in Antakya found none of his journalism online but lots of information about the Marines, they drew the conclusion that he was an American agent. Tice MAY
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LETTER FROM SYRIA was canny enough to be aware of this suspicion; in one of the tweets he left behind, he complained that “a lot of ppl assume I’m CIA, in a sort of sad, ‘America does care!’ kind of way.” As the sense of betrayal by the West deepened among the rebels, however, feelings of vague hope were supplanted by outright suspicion and contempt. A rebel commander I’ve been in touch with for more than a year—when I phoned him, he was in Libya buying weapons—assured me that the Free Syrian Army had very good reason to interrogate embedded foreign journalists: “Some of them are working with the regime.” BBC rules don’t allow Paul Wood to speak about his kidnapping, but he told me he’s weary of the spy allegation. He wonders what the rebels can be thinking: “You want to say, ‘You fucking idiot. You’ve got one donkey and a Kalashnikov. Why would I be spying on you?’ ” Independent newsgathering does represent a direct threat to one group, however—
the Islamist zealots whose power grab over northern Syria has been swift and brutal, and coincides with the spike in mysterious kidnappings. When, a year ago, a series of infuential clerics declared it to be the duty of every Sunni Muslim to wage war on the Syrian regime—whose higher echelons are dominated by Alawi Muslims, an ofshoot of Shia Islam—the north of the country became a magnet for foreign jihadis, who quickly elbowed out weaker and sometimes corrupt local rebel groups. So attractive did the area become for puritanical Islamists that two different groups—the largely homegrown al-Nusra Front and the battlehardened arrivals from the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (isis)—were soon squabbling over the rights to the local al-Qaeda franchise. The Italian journalist Susan Dabbous, whose kidnappers announced their allegiance to isis midway through her 11 days in captivity, told me that her captors looked through every single image on her cameras, erasing them one by one. “I will cut your hands, so you can’t write,” their leader told her. Taking too close a journalistic interest in foreign jihadis would soon be grounds enough for detention; so would possession 130
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surrounding mountains. Over several weeks in the city I got to know a genial member of the rebel coordinating committee in Binnish who travels back and forth between there and the Turkish border. Like everyone else from the area I spoke to, he assumed that Foley had been taken by Islamists working with or alongside the al-Nusra Front. But since rebel battalions form and dissolve on a monthly basis, and many of al-Nusra’s more militant battalions have deserted it for the viciously puritanical isis, it wasn’t clear who The Taxi Driver might be holding Foley now—or whether he short drive from the border, the was alive or dead. Was there any chance Turkish city of Antakya used to that he’d been abducted by shabiha? “No,” be part of Syria. It might as well be the rebel said. The fact that the area where now—to the chagrin of some of the locals, he was taken was full of jihadi checkpoints, it has become a huge support base for that at least one of the kidnappers was Syrian rebels and the diaspora of wearing a mask, that there’d been foreign jihadis who have come no demand for money—all, he L AST WORDS from all over the world to help said, pointed to the involvement Tice’s birthday tweet with their cause. Anyone here of Islamist militants. was his fnal known who is not a spy or a soldier is a In the bar of an Antakya message; two days later, he would hotel a reporter from the rebel disappear. Shaam News Network, whom I’d been introduced to by a Syrian friend, even gave me a name. One of the men who’d stopped Foley, he said, was called Tahan; at the time, he was working alongside al-Nusra but was now the commander of another rebel Islamist brigade. Three months after he was kidnapped, the Shaam journalist told me, Foley was alive and being held close to where he was taken; mainstream rebel groups even sponsored a
of an American passport, or even one from a European country that supports the U.S. One freelance European journalist was informed that since he came from a pro-American country he must be a spy and deserved to be beheaded. Handcufed to a chair in front of a yelling, sword-wielding Somalian who spoke perfect American English, he was saved only by the intervention of friendly rebels who stormed the building and killed his kidnappers.
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“I DON’T WANT TO GET MURDERED IN SYRIA,” TICE HAD WRITTEN TO HIS FIXER, MAHMOUD.
deal-maker. The place has become a sprawling bazaar dedicated to buying guns, loyalties, and, occasionally, journalists. Free Syrian Army generals, Polish intelligence agents, al-Qaeda recruiters, Scandinavian hostage negotiators, American medics, Canadian security professionals, and ftfully employed freelance journalists—they all rub shoulders in Antakya, sometimes in the same hotel. Across the border from Antakya is Idlib, where Austin Tice stopped of on the road to Damascus and where Jim Foley disappeared. Its rolling felds of wild vegetation and its sites of rugged archaeological beauty make it look like some unspoiled, antiquarian golf course. Much of the business in Antakya gets done at Özsüt, a cofee bar overlooking Ataturk Square with an excellent view of the
mission to fnd him, but came back emptyhanded. It was to be the frst of many halfcocked and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to get him out. Another efort, in the spring of 2013, followed a possibly spurious tip that he’d been seen chained to a wall with others at an “execution camp” in Idlib. The investigating rebels quickly thought better of their rescue plan; they didn’t have the manpower to take on al-Qaeda. In Beirut, after months of trying to track him down, I fnally caught up with the taxi driver who had driven Foley and the others from Binnish on the day of the kidnapping. Many people interested in the case thought he was the key to solving it; some were convinced he was involved. But the gangly, punky 28-year-old who showed up fve hours late on a Beirut street corner—because he’d MAY
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LETTER FROM SYRIA been taking paying fares around northern Lebanon—looked nothing like a kidnapper. He’d left in a hurry shortly after the kidnapping, he admitted, but that wasn’t unusual amid regime air strikes and the growing chaos of northern Syria. In any case, he’d been hailed on the spur of the moment outside an Internet café because another driver had let the journalists down. He would hardly have had time to hatch a kidnapping plan. He ferried the journalists and their trusted fxer to the house they’d been staying at in Binnish, he told me, to collect all their stuff; then they’d driven back to the café, because the fixer had forgotten his mobile phone. Only after that did they set of properly. Six kilometers into their journey, along the old Aleppo road, the driver looked in the mirror and saw a Hyundai van racing up the road behind him. On the edge of Taftanaz, the van overtook him and forced him to a halt. Three men jumped out. All had guns, but only one was wearing a mask. The journalists initially refused to open the door, but the men kept screaming in Arabic and shooting crazily in the air until they did. They were then ordered to sit down on the ground and were securely tied. The man wearing the mask looked a little darker than a Syrian and was very likely a Bedouin or a Gulf Arab—even his Arabic when he barked “Igaad” (Sit down) at the journalists was that of a Bedouin or someone from the Gulf, and not at all the way shabiha from Fua would pronounce it. The kidnappers said to the driver, “Have these men paid you? Did you get your money?” It’s exactly the kind of thing puritanical Islamists say when they move into an area—their reputation is that, unlike some other rebel militias, they don’t steal from the people and are concerned for their welfare. It is not the kind of question a member of the shabiha would ask. The driver was sure of one thing. “These men were on a mission to take the journalists. It was not by chance.” They must have been tipped of, either via people who knew they were in town—everyone knows everyone in Binnish—or by someone in the Internet café. If a hostile al-Qaeda group was behind the kidnapping of Jim Foley, Antakya’s cottage industry of hostage negotiators and middlemen will not get very far. “There’s been a complete radio silence,” the partner of one missing journalist told me. “These people don’t want anything from us.” In informal conversations I’ve had with rebels, the Islamists of isis have admitted to holding a few Western journalists but say they’re unaware of the fate of others. Since many kidnappings seem likely to be the work of volatile subgroups operating under the general banner M AY 2 014
of isis, they may even be telling the truth. “The giant question,” one search-andrescue specialist who has worked on Syria cases told me, “is why won’t they talk to us? My theory? It’s like an internal stock market. They’re trading amongst themselves instead of doing the big buyout: ‘Instead of reaching out to families or governments, maybe I should pass the potato around frst.’ ” Another reason to pass the potato around is that kidnapping is a laborintensive business; the spike in abductions
new game in which the kidnappers are often not who they seem to be—and meanwhile keep changing places with one another. Peter Bouckaert, from Human Rights Watch, likens what’s happening to the glut of open-ended, industrial-scale foreign-hostage taking in 1980s Beirut. Back then, however, the U.S. and other governments knew exactly whom to deal with and what they wanted. In Syria, the former C.I.A. feld ofcer Robert Baer told me, “there are just too many groups. The Saudis and the Qataris are doing
FOUR-FIFTHS OF ALL JOURNALISTS IN SYRIA ARE FREELANCE, ANSWERING
TO NO ONE BUT THEMSELVES.
everything through intermediaries. People are being handed out money and told to ‘go blow shit up.’ I don’t see a fgurehead, any one person who has control.” It’s not just the journalists but the armed extremists who are freelancers in Syria. It’s another thing that makes the conflict there different, and so complicated to report. It must be galling WAR ZONE for Syria’s freelance journalists Aleppo, Syria, 2013. A local fxer’s urgent to think that they’re worth more advice to journalists: as cash cows and captives than “Do not come.” in Syria suggests a level of exfor any of the reporting they pertise imported from Iraq. The went there to do. These men and picture is of underground cells full women crossed a dangerous border of abused, terrifed captives, held in conto plug the gaps in our understanding ditions more appropriate for farmyard ani- of a many-layered confict. When the huntmals. Dotted around northern Syria’s ver- ing season came, they made easy prey. But dant countryside is an ancient cave network here is something of Roman catacombs and burial grounds else that is true: they @vf.com WAT C H A and many remote industrial facilities. In have a natural ability VID E O A B O U T places like these, far from prying eyes and to bond with anyone T H E SYRIA N inaccessible to regime air strikes, the rebels and see the world R E F U GE E CRI S I S . GO TO VF. CO M / store much of their weaponry and equip- through any point of MAY2 01 4. ment. These places also make ideal prisons. view. They are some of the most cunning Quicksand and resourceful people you’ll ever meet. If egime agents posing as Islamists, anyone can make it back, they can. � rebels afecting to be shabiha: the more you dig for information on FROM THE ARCHIVE missing journalists, the more it’s like wading For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE through quicksand. When guns and money are the only currencies that matter, infor• My Syrian kidnapping (Richard Engel, April 2013) mants say one thing one day, another thing • Marie Colvin’s final days the next. Or they die. Not long after my con(Marie Brenner, August 2012) versation with Tice’s young friend Amjad • Rape in Syria, an unspoken crime Siofy, Siofy was killed while trying to defuse (Janine di Giovanni, VF.com, July 2013) a bomb. “Evaporated,” someone who knew • My Afghan kidnapping him told me. What is clear is that journalists (David Rohde, VF.com, December 2010) in Syria have become pawns in a paranoid
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Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat with their collaborative paintings at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985.
FOR THE LOVE OF BASQUIAT
More than 25 years after Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a drug overdose, at 27, his most devoted collectors, Lenore and Herbert Schorr, are sharing their treasures in a show at New York’s Acquavella Galleries. Their memories of the artist, a surrogate son, illuminate his struggle to be seen
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e were living in Westchester County in the early 80s, and we would come into New York on Saturday mornings, stop at Jean’s, and he’d ask us to drive him to pick up some musical equipment that he needed,” remembers Lenore Schorr, who, along with her husband, Herbert, qualify as the most devoted early collectors of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died at 27, in 1988. “Having us drive him was clearly easier for him than his trying to get a taxi, because of the fact that he was black,” explains Lenore. “He used to joke that he needed to get Herb a driver’s cap, and that he’d buy us a hot dog afterwards.” After he’d lost faith in the art-world establishment, Basquiat even asked Herb, a scientist and self-described “nerd,” to take over as his dealer. No fool, Herb, he did not give up his day job. What he did do, though, with Lenore, was build an unparalleled collection of Basquiat’s work, some of it bought directly from the artist’s studio, all of it clearly chosen 2014
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From “Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Work from the Schorr Family Collection,” opening at New York’s Acquavella Galleries next month. (1) Untitled (Estrella), 1985, graphite and colored pencil on paper. (2) Untitled (Just Sour), 1982, oil stick on paper. (3) Untitled, 1981, acrylic, marker, paper collage, oil, paint stick, and crayon on canvas. (4) Untitled (Boxing Ring), 1981, oil stick on paper. (5) Untitled (Bluto Nero), 1982, acrylic and oil stick on paper.
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with eyes that knew what they were looking at. Talking to the couple 30 years later, one cannot help being moved by the mutual respect and afection that bonded this unlikely trio; they were surrogate parents to a surrogate son, whose relationship with his own parents was complicated and fraught. Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn. His mother, Matilde, was of Puerto Rican descent, and his father, Gerard, an accountant, had originally come from Haiti; they separated when Jean-Michel was 134
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seven. The artist spoke only loving words about his mother, who was the frst person to take him to museums, but whose emotional fragility landed her in psychiatric institutions. (Having permanently left his father’s home at 17, he did not hide their strained relationship.) Basquiat’s most infuential mentor was Andy Warhol, whom the young artist sought out, befriended, and collaborated with, much to both men’s pride. But the Schorrs provided a safe harbor. Their love afair with the art-
ist started in 1981, after he had decided to reject his famous (among grafti writers) tag as Samo© (which stood for “same old shit”) and become Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist in the so-called legit art world. Thanks to a dynamic group of shows put on by various collectives, word got out about his prodigious gifts, and the frst bite from a gallery came from Annina Nosei, a dealer with sharp antennae for talent. She offered him an exchange: he could use the basement of her MAY
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HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS Herbert and Lenore Schorr, in 1989, with Basquiat works at their home in Westchester, New York.
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ground-foor gallery as a studio, and she would sell the work. (Looking back, the zoolike aspects of the deal are even more blatant. What about “a room of his own,” with some light?) One day the Schorrs showed up. Nosei schlepped some Basquiat canvases up from the basement. The couple was curious but not convinced. Nosei said she wanted them to see one other work that she’d been saving for herself. Code for: Here comes the sales pitch, the Schorrs recall, laughing. But the painting, Poison Oasis, 1981, won them over, and so did the hauntingly beautiful young man who suddenly appeared. He remained in their lives until heroin stopped his heart, in 1988.
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he big news is that, come May 1, the couple will be sharing some of their treasures, in “Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Work from the Schorr Family Collection,” at the Acquavella Galleries, in New York, through June 13. Run there, if you can. In Basquiat’s hands, drawing is not lower in the hierarchy than painting, but an equally powerful medium, opening up infnite possibilities of self-expression. Whether simple or complex, modestly scaled or ambitiously epic, Basquiat’s drawings are the visual expression of pure energy. You can feel his brain and his hand working in concert when you look at the best of them. Indeed, the paintings themselves M AY 2 014
are powered by Basquiat’s electrifying line. The Acquavella show, driven by Eleanor Acquavella, is being curated by Fred Hofman, who co-organized the 2005 Basquiat exhibition, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum. It features 22 of the artist’s fnest drawings, created in the period 1981–86, plus a couple of related paintings. None of the work is for sale. The Schorrs have countless stories about major museums and institutions, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, turning down gifts of Basquiat’s work before he died. A wariness toward the artist, shaped by racial politics, played a major part in how he was treated and how his works were received during his lifetime. From today’s perspective, with a black American president in his second term, and an art world vibrant with the successes of a host of extraordinary black artists—Glenn Ligon, Wangechi Mutu, David Hammons, Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, Steve McQueen … the list could fll this page—the lonely battle that Basquiat and a few black artists before him waged against both blatant and covert racism seems all the more vivid. The Schorrs don’t mince words about the kinds of things they used to hear in championing the young artist. Herb would tell people Basquiat was brilliant. “You mean street-smart?” he’d be asked. “No, I mean brilliant,” Herb would reply.
spoke at Basquiat’s memorial, because, as the editor of Artforum in the 1980s, I got to know the artist well and commissioned a number of articles that introduced his work to the wider world. One of those articles, from 1981, “The Radiant Child,” by the magnifcently untamed, recently deceased poet Rene Ricard, the Jean Genet of the art world back then, remains the most perceptive piece on Basquiat written to this day. “How did he come up with the words he puts all over everything,” asked Ricard, “his way of making a point without overstating the case, using one or two words he reveals a political acuity, gets the viewer going in the direction he wants, the illusion of the bombed-over wall᠁ What he incorporates into his pictures, whether found or made, is specific and selective. He has a perfect idea of what he’s getting across, using everything that collates to his vision᠁ He seems to have become the gutter and his world view very much that of the downtrodden and dispossessed.” These days, when Basquiat’s work has become such a commodity, it feels good to be able to see a group of drawings, such as the ones the Schorrs gathered, in a setting where the din of the marketplace will be quiet for once. (The marketplace for Basquiat can also be ify—unfnished works were strewn around his loft, all the more tempting to pick up, especially when he was out of it. A Christie’s online auction of his works owned by a former roommate, who said they were gifts, was recently postponed because of a suit by Basquiat’s sisters, arguing against their authenticity.) In the early days Basquiat’s paintings went for around $15,000–$20,000; the drawings, for something like $600. A comparison shop, now that he’s the James Dean of the art world and the art world is depressingly similar to Wall Street, can’t be exact, because the Schorrs have never sold any of his works from their collection. But last year, a Basquiat painting was knocked down at Christie’s in New York for $48,843,750 (the top price paid for the artist so far), and the Schorrs said they’d been ofered more than $2 million for one of his drawings, a number of years ago. They could not aford his works if they were buying today, and even in the old days they had to be careful about what they spent. As Lenore says, “It was not about speculation—it was about love for the work.” And it shows. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE • The
last days of Basquiat
(Anthony Haden-Guest, November 1988)
• Basquiat, the film (Bob Colacello, • Basquiat’s
August 1996)
rare Polaroids
(Susan Michals, VF.com, November 2010)
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A l l I s VA N I T I E S . . . N o t h i n g I s F a i r
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Can you name who said what? * (1) I want you to take to the streets.
(2 ) The only thing that I pray is that my feet don’t fail me now.
(3) We people are thrown away, as if we were trash.
(4 ) I believe there’s a God above me.
ST Y LE D BY DE B OR A H A FS HA N I; HA I R P RO DUC TS BY F R ÉD ÉR I C F E KKA I ; M A KE UP PRO DUC TS BY CHA N EL ; NA I L E NA M EL BY O PI ; HA IR BY DAVI D VON C A NN ON ; MA K EUP BY SE RGE HO DO N OU; M A N IC UR E BY TR ACY L E E; F L OR A L ST Y L I NG BY A RI E L DE A R IE ; F O R D ETA I L S, GO TO VF.CO M /CR ED I TS
*ANSWERS TO QUIZ : (1) P.F. (2) K.W. (3) P.F. (4) K.W.
POURRI
Along with an abiding interest in an ambulatory Jesus, K A N Y E and P O P E F R A N C I S may have more in common than you might think.
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MASL AN Y WE A R S A D R E S S BY DSQ UARE D2; EA R R I N GS AND BRACE L E T BY C ARTI E R; RI NG BY VA N C LE E F & A R PE L S .
TATIANA MASLANY
28. PROVENANCE: Regina, Saskatchewan. NORTHERN START: The television darling started dancing at an early age, which led to auditioning for musicals and theater. “There’s just something in me that wanted to play and make believe.” ON THE SPOT: Maslany honed her acting talents by performing with a professional sketch troupe for 10 years. “I owe a lot of where I’m at now to what I learned doing improv. It’s a large part of who I am.” SERIAL SUCCESS: A fixture in Canadian television since the age of nine, Maslany hit the jackpot after landing the lead role in the cult-favorite science-fiction series Orphan Black. “I fought so hard [for the role]. I remember when I read the pilot script and synopsis, I started salivating!” SECOND ACT: With Season Two of Orphan Black premiering this month, Maslany—who earned a Golden Globe nomination this year for her performance—is keeping mum about new developments. “My teasers are so lame, because they’ve sworn us all to absolute secrecy.” And she’s looking beyond the series as well. “I’d love to do theater again. Somewhere in New York would be the absolute dream, you know?” — krista smith
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FRANCIS: Kanye, you are always welcome in my hostel. What brings you to the Vatican? WEST: Well, what if we made it the Kanyatican? Went in as partners? ’Cause I’m the Pope of my world, you feel me? I am the black Ray Kroc: billions and billions served. But I am still marginalized by the powers that be. And you, you got the capital, but your organ ization has P.R. problems. FRANCIS: What I am hearing, Kanye, is a young man who has allowed himself mul tiple opportunities for pleasure, but few for joy. Besides, I think you sell yourself short. From what I gather, your successes have been myriad. WEST: But they ain’t Ralphlevel! At the end of the day, I ain’t in control of nothing. François Pinault still controls Gucci. Bernard Arnault still controls Fendi. The McIlhennys still control Tabasco. William Wegman still controls all the Weimaraners. Who’s gonna be the Medici family for me, help me step up my game? 140
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IMPOSSIBLE INTERVIE W
KANYE WEST SPEAKS WITH
POPE FRANCIS B y DAV I D K A M P Illustration by ANDRÉ CARRILHO
FRANCIS: I think you should look not for help, Kanye, but for the helpless. You will find your greatest solace in acts of compassion. WEST: But I got work to do! Ain’t nothing keep ing me down but people’s blind preconcep tions. I can do it all: design window valances, put up fig preserves, throatsing like a Tuvan. I can have a baby if I want! I got a, I got a … what do you call it … a womb. Made of calf skin from Connolly of London. I can do Julie Taymor–level puppetry. I got a custom Mup pet avatar made of fine-ass felt! [Increasingly agitated] I got a, I got a … FRANCIS: Come now, shhh, let me wash your feet. WEST [Angrily]: I don’t want no papal footbath! FRANCIS: Please, Kanye, if I have given you offense, I apologize. WEST: Naw, it’s all right. We gonna hug it out, Frank. It’s just that … [breaks down, crying] FRANCIS [Readying the foot basin]: Shhh, shhh. There, there, Yeezus. Say “What up?” to Jesus. MAY
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carlett Johansson was my frst. Not that I was a virgin. I’d interviewed big-shot people before. Never a movie star, though. Still, I knew how to behave in front of one. The basics, at least. Do not smile or exclaim or look excited or obey your instincts in any way, shape, or form. Just be cool. I entered the Jewel Suite of the New York Palace hotel on Madison Avenue to catch the last hour of the Scarlett Johansson/Vanity Fair cover shoot on a Monday afternoon in late January. The Jewel Suite, in addition to being, as its name would suggest, a pretty oohla-la affair, was also an absolutely enormous one. And that day packed, crammed with photography people and wardrobe people and makeup people and magazine people and public-relations people, all of whom had assistants, and assistants to assistants, everybody in a heightened state of motion and commotion. And yet there was really only one person in the suite, and it was easy to sense where she was because she was the calm at the center of the frenzy, the still point around which so much activity hysterically spun. There she stood, a hand on one slim, out-thrust hip, in the middle of a room that was mostly window. She wore open-toed gold mules and an of-the-shoulder gown of pleated pink silk and boobalicious cut—something Lana Turner might have chosen, or Marilyn Monroe—her face pouty-lipped and sultry-eyed, skin and hair as luminously white as the pearls dripping from her ears and wrists and fngers. In front of her, a man with a camera was on his knees, fxing her in his lens, snapping away insatiably. On either side of her and behind her, the buildings of Midtown surged up out of the ground and into the heavens in ecstatic phallic salute. As they should have. She looked ravishing, radiant, sublime, good enough to eat. And as I joined the small throng that had gathered to watch, throwing subtle elbows to secure a better position, I realized that I was acting the opposite of cool, that I was acting totally and completely gaga. I realized, too, that Scarlett wasn’t just a movie star. She was a movie goddess, the purest strain of movie star. You know what I discovered happens when you’re around a movie goddess made up to suggest movie goddesses past in the throes of a cover shoot, i.e., a movie goddess at the ne plus ultra of her movie-goddess-dom? You become a man, even if you’re not one. You gawk. You gape. You leer. But then, you’re only doing what you’re supposed to do, what
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or the interview, Scarlett and I move to a diferent suite. At least, I move. Scarlett, her people inform me, is running late. I check the batteries in my tape recorder, recheck the batteries, take an anxiety pee, and otherwise cool my heels. Time’s passed since the shoot, but my sexualidentity crisis has not. I still feel male and sleazy, though male and sleazy in a diferent way. Less like a lurking, peeping El Creepo from a James Ellroy novel, more like one of those sad-eyed old roués that Marcello Mastroianni used to play in movies that made Europe seem decadent and soul-sick and fun to visit. And why shouldn’t I feel Marcello Mastroianni–esque? I’m in a fancy hotel room, a bottle of wine chilling in an ice bucket, waiting for a lovely girl to arrive, hoping to get her to do something she’ll regret when she does. Not sex stuf, obviously. But I am hoping she’ll commit an indiscretion—tell me something she shouldn’t, something personal, something juicy, something that will make for primo copy. At last, there’s a knock on the door. When I open it, I’m hit by my second realization of the day: in addition to being a movie star and object of desire and obsession and worship and fantasy, Scarlett Johansson is a human being. I’d gotten glimpses of this shocker of an alternate identity during the shoot. There was her manner with the crew—relaxed, funny, foulmouthed. And the ankle, wrist, and forearm tattoos, which let you know that though she was made up to resemble a bombshell from the 40s or 50s, and pulling of this look as few of her contemporaries could (her body, while small and slender, was also lush and curvy—no gym-bunny sinews on her), she was, too, a creature of her times, and subject to the fads and fashions of those times. And the way she would, when the camera’s eye was not on her, pump her fst to the music piped in through the sound system. At one point, she began to sing along. And as I listened, it occurred to me that an opportunity had been missed when she wasn’t cast as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. She has Daisy’s voice, a “husky, rhythmic whisper” that’s “full of money.” (Well, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, and Moët & Chandon, et al., didn’t choose her to endorse their class-act products because she seemed like she’d come cheap.) I’m straying of topic, though. My point is, the signs of personhood were there, but somehow I’d ignored them or dismissed them or shortchanged them, the glamour and starriness of the occasion overwhelming me, turning my brain and judgment to mush. Scarlett’s undeniably in earthling guise now, though, hair scraped back into a ponytail, skin un-makeuped, in clothes that are the opposite of hubba-hubba—loose black pants and top, eyeglasses with dark frames. Don’t get me wrong. She’s still beautiful—a total knockout—but beautiful in the manner of a beautiful grad student, of someone who happens to be beautiful but has her mind on other things, rather than in the manner of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, of someone who is dressed-to-the-nines, glammed-to-the-max, is hot, hot, hot and in your face about it. Scarlett politely yet frmly declines a glass of wine, which fusters MAY
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ST Y LE D BY O L IVI E R RI Z ZO ; H A IR P RO DU CTS BY P HY TO ; M A KE UP P RO DUC TS A ND NA I L E N A ME L BY D OL C E & GABBANA; HAI R BY O RL ANDO PI TA; MAKE UP BY DI ANE KE NDAL; MANI C URE BY ME GUMI YAMAMOTO ; SE T DE S IGN BY PI E RS HA N ME R; P RO DUCE D O N L OCATI O N BY GE - P RO J E CTS; P HOTO GR A PHE D AT TH E MARTI N KATZ–DE SI GNE D JE WE L SUI TE AT THE NE W YO RK PAL AC E ; FO R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS
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she intends you to do. She’s seducing the camera and thus, by extension, you, since you, again by extension, are on the other end of that camera. It’s sex between intimates and it’s sex between strangers. It’s sex in public and it’s sex in the mind. You can’t resist her and she knows it without ever acknowledging that she knows it. She treats the whole exchange, in fact, with a brisk nonchalance, neither shrinking from the attention she’s provoked nor making a big deal of it when it drops at her feet, just accepting it as it’s her due, her birthright, which is how she proves that it’s both.
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Johansson plans on making her directorial debut next year with an adaptation of the Truman Capote novella Summer Crossing.
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JOHANSSON WEARS A DRESS BY BOTTEGA VENETA, EARRINGS FROM FRED LEIGHTON; VINTAGE SHOES BY PRADA.
“I WAS UNINSPIRED BY MY JOB FOR A PERIOD OF TIME. I DIDN’T REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT THE PURPOSE OF IT WAS.”
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Johansson and her fancé, Romain Dauriac, are expecting their frst child this summer.
F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO VF. COM/ C R E D ITS
JOHANSSON WEARS A DRESS BY PRADA; EARRINGS FROM FRED LEIGHTON.
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me a bit. But then we start making small talk. We discuss the coldness of the suite (neither of us can fnd the thermostat), the weirdness of perfect strangers addressing you by your frst name (me: “But isn’t it nice when they say nice stuf?” Scarlett: “No! Then you feel like an asshole for being taken aback!”), the grossness of social media (“All of it drives me crazy”), and the night before’s Grammy Awards show, and my theory that musicians are wilder than actors (Scarlett, who being both—remember that album of Tom Waits’s cover tunes, the Brigitte Bardot/Serge Gainsbourg– inspired duets she did with Pete Yorn?—and therefore ought to know, laughs and says, “That’s probably not true”). She behaves with me, basically, the same way she behaved with the photography crew. And I start to notch down, relax, because she seems so unscary, so nice and normal. I hit the red button on the tape recorder. First, though, a recap for those of you living under a rock for the past 10-plus years:
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carlett, who grew up in Greenwich Village and is that ultra New York hybrid of half Jewish, half not, burst onto the scene in 2001. She emerged seemingly out of nowhere—actually, she’d already put in years of dues-paying as a child actress, was even nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her work in Manny & Lo back in 1997—to become the thinking man’s jailbait in Terry Zwigof’s Ghost World and the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. It was Sofa Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), though, which opened with a close-up of her heart-shaped bottom in see-through pink undies, that turned her into a genuine sensation. Two years later, still not yet 20, she was cast as the lead in Woody Allen’s Match Point, taking over for Kate Winslet, almost a decade her senior. (“Back then I was always playing older.”) All of a sudden, the nymph was a vamp. The movie made great use of the sulky droop of her lower lip, the glittering menace in her slanting eyes, as pure green as a cat’s. Her Nola Rice was moody, smoldering, dangerous, and would have eaten a milquetoast like Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Chris Wilton for breakfast had the script gotten out of her way. At that moment, she was poised to seize the kingdom, take over Hollywood. Only she didn’t. Between 2005 and 2009, she appeared in a series of can’t-miss movies that defed the odds, missed: The Island, The Spirit, The Black Dahlia, The Prestige. And though Woody was still using her as his leading lady, he was not using her particularly well. Scoop was charming but slight. And Penélope Cruz as Maria Elena, of the fashing eyes and faring temper, got all the best lines and scenes in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It was undeniable: Scarlett’s hot stuf was starting to cool. And Hollywood no longer seemed to have her full attention. She recorded the aforementioned albums. She married Ryan Reynolds. Well, the kingdom’s once again in the reach of Scarlett’s painted—today blood-red, though dried-blood-red—fngers. The turnaround began in late ’09, when she signed on for a revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. It was a risky move. She had little formal training. And Broadway people love nothing more than to see Hollywood people strut their stuf on stage because so often they fall fat on their button-cute faces. Scarlett, though, didn’t fall. She received not only out-of-this-world reviews but a Tony, as well. “I was uninspired by my job for a period of time,” she recalls. “I didn’t really understand what the purpose of it was, other than to stay relevant, which is so not what it’s about. But doing the play, I realized I could still own my own performance, that it was mine to present however I wanted to.”
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hese days, there’s a sense of restlessness, of urgency, of compulsion even, about how she’s conducting her career, a veritable storm of roles and projects and work, so many and so much it’s hard to keep track or up. She understands that the entertainment industry at its basest—i.e., truest—level is the fesh trade, and fesh only stays sweet and young so long. Competition among actresses is ferocious, unrelenting. Many are lovely, and not all are scrupulous. And at 29, she might well be at the height of her desirability and power, and you can feel her need to hurry, pack it all in, get it while the getting’s good. For several years she’s been involved in Marvel’s Avengers franchises, the latest installment of which, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, is being released this month. She campaigned hard for the part of the Black Widow, dyeing her fair hair red for her second meeting with Iron Man director Jon Favreau, an unusual move for so established an actress, and proof, I think, of her unfussiness, her refusal to put on airs or be above it all. (“If you want something, you have to go for it,” says Scarlett. “That’s something I learned early on. I was really competitive at a young age.”) The Black Widow could’ve just been a bimbo role, a chance to play a sex kitten in a catsuit, but Scarlett manages to make it more than that. She’s sly and sexy and tough and mysterious in a series that takes a far keener interest in the boys. Though it looks like she’s managed to turn that attitude around. It was announced in the trades in February that the Black Widow would be getting her own feature, big news since Hollywood has been reluctant to make a female-centered comic-book movie after the public stayed away in droves from Catwoman (2004) and Elektra (2005). (The ability to change a studio head’s mind. Talk about a superhero power!) Black Widow is a steady gig and a hefty paycheck, no small thing as it’s getting harder and harder to make money making movies, and mega-star ingénues, after all, have to eat, too. Plus, it frees her up to take on unlikely or difcult roles in small or precarious ventures. She returned to the theater last year for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, receiving respectful notices, if not quite the cries of rapture A View from the Bridge brought her. She was very funny running around in spike heels and short dresses, the cheesecake to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s stud mufn, in Don Jon. She also co-starred in Her, Spike Jonze’s Oscar-winning flm about a hipster ofce drone with trousers so high and a mustache so limp you just know all is not well with his penis who falls in love—the hipster drone, I mean, not the penis, though the penis, too, actually—with an operating system. Scarlett plays the OS1, Samantha. It’s quite literally a dis-
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Spotlight embodied performance, voice only. And since hers seems made for aural sex, so throaty/husky/smoky it’s capable of turning the blandest of remarks into the dirtiest of insinuations, of slithering into the ear like a wet tongue, it’s no surprise that she was cast in the part, a last-minute replacement for Samantha Morton. (Scarlett, on realizing what she was getting herself into: “I thought it was just voice-over work. My agent sent me the script and said, ‘Oh, it’s a few hours.’ I met with Spike and we ended up having this eight-hour meeting or something, at the end of which I was starving and dehydrated. And it was like, oh man, you know?”) Here’s what is a surprise, though: Samantha, as Scarlett portrays her, is utterly unfemme-fatale-ish. Is, on the contrary, full of pep and helpfulness and chirp. It’s a counter-intuitive choice—totally unexpected—and yet, when I refected on it as I walked out of the theater, totally apt. Perhaps, though, her most compelling project of all is Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, half sci-f thriller, half who-the-fuck-knows, which played at festivals last year and is hitting theaters this month. In it, Scarlett plays an alien (I think) who leads men to their dooms (I’m pretty sure). The dialogue, what little of it there is, is cryptic to the point of unfathomability, and is delivered in a heavy Scottish accent besides. (“Dialogue was kind of superfuous to the process,” Scarlett explains.) She does most of her acting with her eyes. With her body, too. There’s quite a bit of nudity in the flm, and nudity in circumstances that are less than glamorous. It’s an astonishing performance, without fear or vanity. Maybe the best of her career.
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carlett’s plans for the future include continuing to act in movies that are bold and fresh and good—Jon Favreau’s romantic comedy Chef, coming out in May, and Luc Besson’s sci-f action flm Lucy, coming out in August, to name two. But she’d like to start directing those kinds of movies, as well. For years she’s been trying to get an adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella Summer Crossing of the ground. It’s close to happening now. She and playwright Tristine Skyler have completed a script, and she’s received approval from the Capote estate—no mean feat. She’d originally hoped to begin shooting in fall of this year, but has decided to hold of until spring of next so she won’t have to rush. Says Scarlett, “[Summer Crossing] is not Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s not hot of the press. So we can give it the time it deserves to be properly prepped.” For various reasons, primary among them a wimped-out fear of ofending, I wait until the interview is nearly over, the last grains of sand rattling through the hourglass, before I bring up the two most potentially sensitive topics. The frst: @vf.com SodaStream, the Israeli manufacturer of doS EE S CARLET T it-yourself carbonated-beverage machines, JOHAN S S ON’ S S T Y LE EVOLU T IO N . for which Scarlett became celebrity brand GO TO VF. C O M/ ambassador in January. When the press MAY2014. revealed that SodaStream had a factory in the occupied West Bank, all hell broke loose. The criticism she received for allying herself with the company was scathing. (Worse even than the criticism she received for starring in Michael Bay’s The Island, which is really saying something.) As she talked about being called “the new face of apartheid,” I could hear the upset and hurt in her voice. I’m someone who responds to emotion and it’s my instinct to be on her side. And so I nodded C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 9 5
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A pair of Beatniks, photographed in a park near Cleveland, Ohio, 1958.
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he dark and beautiful images collected by Larry Fink in The Beats (out this month from Power house) were taken back in 1958 and 1959, when he was just 17 or 18 years old. They are of a group he identifies as the second genera tion of the mid20thcentury social and literary movement for which his book is named. (Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase “Beat Generation” in the late 1940s to describe the fledgling phenomenon in New York.) These are artists he lived with— poets, musicians, painters—who, by occupying the underground space beneath the Sullivan Street Playhouse, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, were not just spiritually and metaphorically “subterranean,” but literally so. The playhouse was on the same block as the famous jazz club the Village Gate, and by digging their way to the rear of the cellar, these young anticonformists were able to hear John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Art Blakey, whom Fink calls “the princes of expressive freedom.” Fink is a selfdescribed Marxist and reddiaper baby—a young, potfueled, jazzloving photographer. He recalls how he first resided on Minetta Lane when he moved to the Village. He would have lived near E. E. Cummings, as well as Beats such as Turk, Mary, Bobbie, Motha, Ambrose, Randy, Mike Stanley, and Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy), who hung out on MacDougal Street just a few feet away. In the late 50s, Larry was photographing, singing, smoking weed, and playing the mouth organ. Truth be told: he still does all — GER ALD STERN that today. PH OTO GRA PH
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it’s not long before he’s jumping through hoops, dancing with Mike Tyson, disappearing in a magic box only to reappear fanked by an army of Newsies. Watch him in extreme close-up as he delivers a tricky, heartfelt lyric that transcends the spectacle around him (I know it’s tricky because I wrote the lyric):
atch: Neil Patrick Harris at age 20, on the other side of four years as Doogie Howser, M.D. This is usually where the tabloid headlines start. A child star in a well-loved show? Welcome to oblivion. People will shout “Hey, Doog!” in the streets; VH1 will come calling when it’s time for I Love the 90s. What does N.P.H. do? He doubles down on his passions: magic and musical theater. Works at both (becomes president of the Magic Castle, in L.A.; stars in Rent, Cabaret, Assassins, Company) until he’s a revered practitioner in both felds. Adds a fendishly funny dose of selfawareness (a scene-devouring role as himself in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle that makes the world say, “Holy sh*t, how awesome is that guy!”). Watch: Neil Patrick Harris in 2013, surrounded by 140 Broadway performers at Radio City Music Hall, pulling of the most sensational Tony Awards opening number of all time. He starts on guitar, but
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There’s a kid in the middle of nowhere who’s sitting there living for Tony performances Singin’ and fippin’ along with the Pippins and Wickeds and Kinkys, Matildas and Mormonses So we might reassure that kid And do something to spur that kid Cuz I promise you all of us up here tonight, we were that kid.
And in that moment you know no one else could have pulled of this magic trick, because we knew N.P.H. as that kid, and we watched him transform into the supernova on our TV screens. Watch: N.P.H. at 40, on the other side of nine years as Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother. He’s doubling down on his passions again by playing the title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a beloved glam-rock cult musical making its Broadway debut. It’s a role that requires superhuman stamina, a fendishly funny dose of self-awareness, and constant re-invention. We know just the man for the job. We can’t wait to watch. �
ST YL E D BY DE BO R A H A F S HA N I; HA I R PRO DUC TS BY PA NT E NE ; MA K EUP P ROD UCTS BY MA KE UP F OR E VE R; HAI R BY DANI LO ; MAKE UP BY SAMMY MO URABI T; MA N I CURE BY MI CH EL L E S AUN DER S; S ET D ES I GN BY P ET E R K LE I N ; P ROD UCE D ON L O CAT IO N BY PO RTFO LI O O NE ; FO R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS
It’s the rare story—Child Star Becomes Bigger Star—but Neil Patrick Harris made Doogie Howser, M.D. a springboard to his great love, musical theater, and then How I Met Your Mother. As Harris leads Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway (and stars in A Million Ways to Die in the West), actor-lyricist LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA explains why N.P.H. is such a mesmerizing act. Photograph by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
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SNAKE EYES
Neil Patrick Harris with a Dumeril’s boa and a diamond python, photographed at the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood.
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PH OTO GRA P HS BY B A RTO N GE LL M A N/ GE TT Y IM AGE S ( SN OW DE N) , GR EG MAT HI E SO N/ M A I/ TI ME & L I F E PI CT UR E S/G ET T Y I MAG ES ( HE A DQ UARTE RS)
THE SENDER Edward Joseph Snowden, whose theft of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency represents the most serious intelligence breach in U.S. history. In the background, the headquarters of the N.S.A., Fort Meade, Maryland. “When you are in a position of privileged access,” Snowden has said, “you see things that may be disturbing. Over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up.”
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SPECIAL REPORT
THE SNOWDEN SAGA A SHADOWLAND OF SECRETS AND LIGHT
Whether hero or traitor, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is the most important whistle-blower of modern times, one whose disclosures will reverberate for decades to come. With extensive input from Snowden himself, SUZANNA ANDREWS, BRYAN BURROUGH, and SARAH ELLISON have the spy-novel-worthy tale of how a geeky dropout from the Maryland suburbs found himself alone and terrified in a Hong Kong hotel room, spilling America’s most carefully guarded secrets to the world
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fter setting up his personal security systems and piling pillows against the door so no one in the hallway could eavesdrop, he sat on the bed, anxious and alone, in a Hong Kong hotel room. He was 29 years old that night, May 24, 2013, but he looked much younger, thin and pale, like a college kid, in his blue jeans and white T-shirt. Someone who talked to him later described him as “terrifed,” and it’s easy to believe. He was walking away from everything he had ever known, his career, his girlfriend, his entire life, and now it appeared that his plan might fall through. He had come to Hong Kong four days earlier, his luggage filled with laptop computers and thumb drives containing tens
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of thousands of secret documents he had stolen from the U.S. government—docu ments that, he felt sure, would demonstrate how far overboard America had gone to protect itself from enemies real and imag ined. But time was running out. Soon his superiors would come looking for him, if they weren’t already. Before they did, he needed to give his documents to a journalist who would share them with the world, but none of the three he had contacted had yet traveled halfway around the planet to meet with him. Just that night the one who wrote for The Washington Post had passed. If it really had all been for nothing, if he really had spent months plundering govern ment computers for secrets no one would ever see, the best he could hope for was asylum in a foreign country—maybe Iceland, maybe Ecuador. If he failed, they would lead him away, in handcuffs, to prison. Or, he thought, maybe they’d just kill him.
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t had all begun some six months earlier, the way the best spy thrill ers do, with a whisper in an exotic locale. This time, as befts the de fning espionage story of our age, the whisper was frst typed into a computer and sent to an expatriate Ameri can columnist and former lawyer living in a greeneryshrouded villa in Rio de Janeiro, then to a provocative documentaryfilm maker at her apartment in Berlin, and last to a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist in his ofce in downtown Manhattan. The columnist, a 47yearold named Glenn Greenwald, ignored that strange frst over ture. Greenwald had transformed himself into a crusader in the fght against aggres sive government surveillance. His columns and blog posts for Salon, and for a British newspaper, The Guardian, had won him a devoted following among a broad coalition of civilrights and privacy activists. That frst email, one of many that had popped onto his laptop on the morning of Decem ber 1, 2012, was cryptic. The anonymous sender, saying he had information Green wald might be interested in, asked for his public encryption key (a socalled P.G.P. key), so they could have a secure online dis cussion. Greenwald didn’t have a P.G.P. key and wasn’t going to the trouble of getting one for so vague a promise. But the sender, whoever it was, wouldn’t give up. He sent Greenwald encryption tuto rials, one on video. Again Greenwald balked. Now he had to watch a video? And for what? The sender still wouldn’t give any sense of what he was ofering. After a month of fruit less backandforth, Greenwald put it aside, and the sender vanished back into the ether.
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ext, in late January 2013, the sender emailed documentary flm maker Laura Poitras. After appearing on a U.S. “watch list,” Poitras, 50, had been detained and searched dozens of times at international borders and had fought back against inva sive government surveillance. The emailer had read about her in one of Greenwald’s columns and had seen a short documen tary she had made on domestic spying by the National Security Agency, the giant U.S. government entity whose computers hoover up and analyze all manner of elec tronic communications from countries around the world. Poitras had a P.G.P. key readily at hand, but the sender’s next email instructed her on how to get on an even more secure sys tem. Once there, he assured her, “I am a se nior member of the intelligence communi ty᠁ This won’t be a waste of your time.” Poitras, possibly more wary than the sender at this point, responded, “I don’t know if you are legit, crazy, or trying to en trap me.” He replied, “I’m not going to ask you anything. I’m just going to tell you things.” Poitras asked if he had seen the government’s fle on her. He said no. He claimed he was contacting her because she’d been persecuted by the system he wanted to expose: “I bet you don’t like this sys tem,” he wrote. “Only you can tell this story.” The sender seemed legitimate, but Poitras was still nervous. She needed ad vice from colleagues with legal and nationalsecurity expertise. In early February, Poitras reached out to Barton Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist, who had covered na tional security for The Washington Post. “Laura asked if I could meet to talk about something confdential,” Gellman recalls. “And we both knew what she meant by confidential. She wanted to make it as private as we could make it.” Using en crypted messages as a precaution, they arranged to meet at a café in New York City’s West Village and, once there, walked to another café, to avoid anyone who may have learned of their meeting. After that, from time to time, Poitras would tell Gellman something her source was say ing, and he would give her his impres sions. The more it went on, the more they were both convinced that this was real. After the source described to Poitras se cret government surveillance programs, she arranged to meet with her colleague Glenn Greenwald at a New York City–area hotel, where he was attending a conference. Poi tras insisted he not bring a cell phone; the
N.S.A., she knew, had the ability to turn any mobile phone, even one that had been turned off, into a microphone. She had printed the sender’s emails, and Green wald read them and shared her excitement. In early May, Gellman began receiving cryptic messages of his own. The sender used a code name, “Verax”—Latin for “truth teller”—and again suggested he had something to ofer. A few weeks later Verax sent Gellman a PowerPoint presentation outlining an N.S.A. program called “Prism,” which secretly gathered data from technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Gell man recognized the explosiveness of the story and met with his editors at The Washington Post to get them on board, but then Verax asked that the paper print the article on Prism within 72 hours. Gellman said that the paper couldn’t promise to publish on a particular date, and would need far more time to authenticate the sender’s claim. The source then turned back to Poitras, who again brought in Greenwald. In late May the sender fnally asked to meet with them—in Hong Kong. At that point things got even more complicated. Because Greenwald worked for The Guardian, the trip—indeed, the entire endeavor—now became a Guardian project. But he had worked at the paper for less than a year, and because he lived in Brazil, and the paper’s main ofce was in London, with a satellite office in New York, few of its editors knew him well, much less trusted him with such an important assignment. On Friday, May 31, after he and Poitras arrived at The Guardian’s loftstyle U.S. offices, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, the paper’s U.S. editor, Janine Gibson, decided the pair needed a chaper one—a trusted Guardian veteran reporter. She summoned her 61yearold Washing ton correspondent, Ewen MacAskill. From the outset, the chemistry was strained. MacAskill, an afable Scot who spoke with a thick burr, didn’t know Greenwald and sometimes found his writ ing “strident.” Poitras was not asked to the meeting, so she sat alone at the far end of the newsroom, “hostile” in MacAskill’s view. She was unhappy at the prospect of introducing another journalist into the mix. When everyone else sat in Gibson’s office to review the Prism documents, MacAskill was unmoved. “I didn’t know anything about the N.S.A.,” he says. “I couldn’t grasp the signifcance of what we were looking at.” Afterward, Poitras was terribly upset, warning Greenwald that they were jeop MAY
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SNOW DE N WA S J UG GL I NG T H R E E JOU R NA L I STS . “H E DI D NOT WA N T TO BE PR E-E M P T E D,” GE L L M A N SAYS . “ T H AT WOU L D H AV E BE E N H I S WOR ST C A SE .” ardizing the entire project by taking along a Guardian reporter to Hong Kong. The source was expecting two people; if he saw a third, he might bolt. But the editors wouldn’t budge. The next morning, when Greenwald and Poitras rode in a cab to Kennedy airport, Poi tras was still nervous about including Mac Askill. MacAskill, meanwhile, was worried about the Guardian communications’ being monitored, and had worked out a coded exchange in which he could indicate the source’s veracity to his bosses. An editor was to ask: “How’s the Guinness?” If the source was genuine, MacAskill was to respond, “The Guinness is good.” The Guinness, as the world now knows, turned out to be very good indeed. What the three journalists discovered upon their arrival in Hong Kong, it seems safe to say, was the single greatest journalistic coup since the Pentagon Papers. The mysterious emailer was a young computer technician named Edward Joseph Snowden, who is now regarded as the most important whistle blower of modern times. Snowden’s is that rare story the importance of which is almost impossible to overstate. His revelations have triggered investigations by a presidential commission and several congressional com mittees, while putting immense pressure on American diplomatic relations with scores of countries—from Germany, where, Snowden revealed, the N.S.A. had moni tored Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, to Brazil, where it had done the same to President Dilma Rousseff’s. The Snowden affair triggered something like panic in the intelligence community and put the Obama White House on the defensive for months. The repercussions, it seems clear, are likely to persist for years, perhaps decades. Insofar as they lead to changes in the vast electronicsurveillance bureaucracy Washington has built since the terrorist at tacks of 2001, America will never again de fend itself against its enemies in quite the same way. “He’s not just revealing this re port said that or this—that is like water drip ping out,” says former C.I.A. director and N.S.A. chief Michael Hayden. “In Snowden’s case, it’s not just the buckets he’s dumping—he’s revealing the plumbing.” M AY
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he N.S.A. laid bare in Snow den’s documents is an agency that has the capacity to collect data about virtu ally every phone call made in America, not to men tion hundreds of millions of calls overseas. In order to collect even broader swaths of data, the agency works with its British coun terpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to intercept com munications traveling over fberoptic cables running between the data centers of Internet companies. The N.S.A. has infltrated video games, cellphone apps, and every corner of the digital universe, looking for suspi cious activity. Whenever it came up against a locked door online, protected by encryption, the N.S.A. attempted to break in, both by attacking specifc encrypted material and by creating weaknesses, or “back doors,” in encryption platforms. Inevitably, much of the information amassed—in fact, most—was about ordinary American citizens suspected of no wrongdoing. The revelations have challenged basic assumptions about what is private, ripping open debates, long festering, about safe guarding our nation versus safeguarding the Constitution. They have raised questions about whether we should be able, either collectively or individually, to keep a secret. Because of Snowden, we suddenly live in a very diferent world. People trust the Inter net and their devices much less than they did, because it is understood that those de vices can be used not only against individu als but also to control society and politics. Governments, meanwhile, are taking evasive and defensive actions. Hackers and the tech community are looking hard at new ways to ensure secure communications—at least for themselves, if not for everyone. “We were sleepwalking into abandoning our privacy, and Snowden has woken us up,” says Da vid Cole, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, who specializes in national security and constitutional law. Nevertheless, Snowden himself seems to be viewed with profound ambivalence by many Americans. Few, it appears, believe the country is worse of knowing what he has shown us. But many are not entirely com
fortable with the way he did it. Is Snowden a hero for our times—“a modernday Na than Hale,” in the words of another famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg? Or is he, in fact, a traitor? Defending his motives in responses to Vanity Fair seeking to correct the record and am plify his views, Snowden says, “Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away, because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there’s a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individ ual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I’m no longer alone.” Whatever you think of Snowden, there is no denying he has emerged as one of the most compelling fgures of the young century. The Jason Bourne–like aspects of his story— the cinematic international manhunt for the hero who says he only wants the truth to be known—alone are enthralling. A company in Oregon has issued an Edward Snowden action fgure. This story, based on dozens of independent interviews, given both to Vanity Fair and to others, is an attempt to take a closer look at Snowden himself and to explain how a seemingly aimless, geeky kid from the Maryland suburbs found himself in possession of America’s most carefully guarded secrets in a Hong Kong hotel room with pillows piled against the door.
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dward, the second of Lon and Elizabeth “Wendy” Snowden’s two children, was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. A port town on the Pasquotank River, two hours north of Cape Hatteras, the city is home to the largest Unit ed States Coast Guard air base in the nation, now run by the Department of Homeland Se curity. Generations of Snowden men were in the Coast Guard, including Edward’s father and grandfather. The Snowden clan—many of them military men and lawenforcement ofcers—is one of the area’s oldest; out on a country road next to the Rehoboth Bap tist Church, in the town of Maple, Snowden Cemetery has family headstones dating back www.vanityfair.com
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to 1886. Described as hardworking, conser vative, and proud, the family refects a tradi tional vision of America—“BSA” is etched into one young relative’s gravestone, for Boy Scouts of America. Nevertheless, it wasn’t particularly prominent. Before Edward made international headlines, only his grandfather Lonnie Glenn Snowden had left much of a public record. In November 1964, in the dead of night he lost control of his new Ford on a rural road, killing his passenger. He died less than four years later, at the age of 36, when, in the earlymorning hours, he again lost control of his car, which ran of a country road into a canal. His son, Lon, who was 7 when his fa ther died, was 18 when he and Wendy Barrett got married, in 1979, just out of high school. Edward was born four years later. Snowden’s mother hasn’t given inter views about her son, but his father, a re tired Coast Guard ofcer who now lives in Pennsylvania, has described him as a “gentle” child of exceptional intelligence. In 1992, when Edward was nine, the fam ily moved to Crofton, Maryland, just west of Annapolis, and within 15 miles, as it happens, of N.S.A. headquarters, at Fort Meade. With stately brick and clapboard homes on winding streets shaded by tower ing oaks, Crofton is a welltodo company town, home to thousands who work in the military and the intelligence community. Among Edward’s new classmates were chil dren whose parents could not say where they worked.
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dward entered Arundel High School in the fall of 1997. In the fall of 1998, he became ill with mononucle osis and missed several months of school. He never returned, dropping out before completing his sophomore year. He then embarked on what, from the outside, appeared to be years of teenage slackerdom. In retrospect, however, they must be considered as a pe riod of extraordinary selfeducation involv ing computer technology and the possibili ties of the Internet. He also took a number of advanced communitycollege courses, earning an advanced certifcation as a sys tems engineer.
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In fact, for fve years, from the age of 15, he appears to have spent much of his time on this or that computer. In 2002, after a bitter divorce from her husband, his mother bought a condominium in nearby Ellicott City and let Edward live there. Joyce Kinsey, who lived across a walkway, paints a vivid portrait of watching Snowden at a laptop in his din ing room hour after hour after hour, his con centration intense, into the late evening, then past midnight, and on toward daybreak. “I was interested in fguring out how complex systems ft together, so I put them together and tore them apart,” Snowden recalls of this period in his life. “All day, all night. I learned things that have helped me again and again in life.” In person Snowden was reserved, a bit on the quiet side. But in the virtual world he could be clever, arch, and witty. Much of his online evolution can be traced in postings he made in a chat room of a tech nology Web site called Ars Technica. (Ars Technica is owned by Condé Nast, which publishes Vanity Fair.) In what is believed to be his very frst posting, in December 2001, he wrote, “It’s my frst time. Be gen tle,” and followed up with questions about how to set up a Web server. His username was TheTrueHOOHA. In his subsequent early postings one can see a bit of pom posity, the pretentiousness not uncommon in an intellectually ambitious teenager. He referred to Newton and Goethe and mused on the nature of freedom. “It is the confdence of purpose,” he noted, “that allows you to be truly free.” His life wasn’t all online, of course. Around 2002 he joined a group of friends who were devotees of anime—a style of Japa nese animation with a nearcultlike following among computer geeks—and became their Webmaster. They hung out in the Fort Meade area and, as the Web site attests, engaged in a lot of ageappropriate silliness. There are photos of Snowden pulling down his pants to moon the camera in black underwear; with clothespins on his shirt over his nipples; in a tuxedo, dancing; in a leather jacket, in a car, with the caption “So Sexxxxy it Hurts! Ed Snowden, Gold Plated Xtacy.” On one of the photographs he wrote, “I like Japanese, I like food, I like martial arts, I like ponies,
I like guns, I like food, I like girls, I like my girlish fgure that attracts girls᠁ I really am a nice guy, though. You see, I act arrogant and cruel because I was not hugged enough as a child, and because the public education system turned it’s wretched, spiked back on me.” (Many Snowden observers have said it is unfair to judge him by the online posts allegedly made by him when he was young, even though they have been pored over by investigators trying to understand him.) It was all good fun, but it wasn’t much of a life for a bright 20yearold. As Snowden put it on Ars Technica, he was a man “with out a degree or [security] clearance who lives in Maryland. Read that as ‘unemployed.’ ” It was 9/11 that helped him point his way forward. Snowden has indicated that the attacks had a deep effect on him, and he favored the invasion of Iraq. In May 2004 he did what many underemployed 20year olds do: he joined the army. He said later, “I felt I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.” Snowden reported to Fort Benning, Geor gia, for basic training. He had enlisted in the army’s “18X” program, as a Special Forces recruit. He soon grew disillusioned, he has said, because he thought many of the other recruits seemed less interested in helping op pressed people than in killing them. Soon after arriving in Georgia, he broke both his legs in a training accident and, in September, he returned to Maryland, where he found a job at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language—as a secu rity guard. Then the seemingly impossible happened. In mid2006, barely 18 months later, Snowden got the job of an adventurehungry young man’s dreams: he was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency as a computer engineer.
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t’s so outlandish it seems like the plot of one of the computer games Snowden loved: aimless slacker hired by world’s top spy agency and given access to highly classi fed documents. Snowden himself could scarcely believe it. “I don’t have a degree of Any type,” he wrote on Ars Tech nica that May. “In fact, I don’t even have a MAY
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PHOTOG RA PH S: CL O CKW IS E F RO M TO P, © M A RK US HA N KE /COR B IS , BY DAVI D BU RN ET T/ CON TAC T PRE SS I MAGE S, FRO M JO HN FRO ST NE WSPAPE RS, © BO B BY Y I P/ RE UT ER S/ CO R BI S , BY FA B I O MOT TA /Â G EN CI A E STA DO /A . P. I M AGE S, R UBY WA SH I NGTO N/T HE NE W YOR K T IM E S /RE DUX
“AT F I R ST I T HOUGH T, T H I S I S J UST A K I D,” SAYS EW E N M AC A SK I L L OF T H E F I R ST M E ET I NG I N HONG KONG . “HOW CA N H E K NOW A LL TH E SE TH I NG S?”
P O I N T S O F C O N TAC T From left: Ewen MacAskill and Glenn Greenwald, of The Guardian, and the filmmaker Laura Poitras— all of whom met with Snowden at his hotel in Hong Kong—and Barton Gellman, of The Washington Post, who was also in communication with Snowden during this period. Snowden’s great fear, he wrote to Gellman, was of “omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”
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high school diploma. That said, I have $0 in debt from student loans, I make $70K, I just had to turn down ofers for $83K and $180K (they’re going in a diferent direc tions than where I’m heading), and my co workers have BSs, MSs, and ten to ffteen years of experience. Employers fght over me. And I’m 22.” These many years later there has been considerable speculation about how Snowden got the C.I.A. job. In fact, it isn’t hard to understand. He was part of the small army of techsavvy people the C.I.A. hired in the early 2000s to do battle with our enemies in the virtual universe. This wave of new hires was the C.I.A.’s belated attempt to catch up with a world— and a series of external threats—that had changed radically since the end of the Cold War, when grappling with Commu nist countries had been its core mission. When the Soviet Union imploded, in 1991, not only the C.I.A. but all the other U.S. intelligence agencies as well went through a crisis of purpose. It seems ridiculous now, but before 9/11 there was a moment when there seemed to be no overarching external threat to American security; some historians even threw around terms such as “Pax Americana” and “the end of his tory.” The country’s intelligence budgets were slashed, and stafng was cut dramati cally—some 23,000 jobs by one estimate. The 9/11 attacks woke America from its slumber. The C.I.A. and other law enforcement agencies were blamed not only for failing to avert the plot but also for not even sharing information among themselves that would have revealed the hi jackers’ presence in the United States. That collective failure produced a new mantra heard throughout the intelligence world: “Connect the dots.” That meant new and stronger computers, thousands of them, many with access to millions of pages of government information, so intelligence could be better shared and analyzed. In the intelligence community, power shifted downward, from senior agents, who often had trouble even logging on to their computers, to junior stafers with expertise in the new tools of spycraft. This younger crowd didn’t have much use for the in stitutional hierarchies favored by the Old Guard. Attempts to bridge the generation gap were sometimes awkward. The head of the N.S.A., Keith Alexander, a fourstar general, appeared in July 2012 at a Def Con hackers’ conference wearing a black andwhite Tshirt and jeans instead of his decorationresplendent uniform, to make a plea to the conference attendees: “You’re going to have to come in and help us.” 158
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nowden was hired not as a spy but to maintain the computer system’s network security. The job required him to have a top secret security clearance, a de cision that has raised eyebrows in some quarters, given what Snowden eventually did with it. Talk to people in side the agency, however, and this is a non issue. As the defenseandintelligence world dramatically expanded after 9/11, security clearances were handed out like Kleenex. Today nearly fve million Americans have some kind of security clearance, and about 1.4 million of those have a “top secret” clearance, many granted after background checks performed by private contractors focused more on speed, volume, and proft than on thoroughness. One former C.I.A. official points out, with justification, that there was nothing in Snowden’s background that would have prevented him from get ting a topsecret clearance. “He was so young,” says this person. “He didn’t have a history.” In early 2007, after barely nine months on the job, Snowden was transferred to Geneva, for which he was given diplomatic cover at the U.S. Mission to the United Na tions. The mission there is a glittering block of steel, concrete, and glass, bordered by wooded parkland, near Lake Geneva. It houses the ofces of the U.S. representa tives to several international groups, includ ing the World Trade Organization. Snowden had a fourbedroom government issue apartment near the lake. On Ars Tech nica, where he remained an active poster, he described his life in Switzerland as though he were a character out of a James Bond novel. He traveled extensively—to Bosnia, Romania, Spain—racing motor cycles in Italy and making friends with an Estonian rock star. He had a new BMW, from which he had the electronic speed lim iter removed, and he began investing in the stock market—at one point bragging that he had lost $20,000 in a single month. Snowden’s reaction to his new life under scores how very young, even parochial he still was. On Ars Technica, he joked, “I’m living in Switzerland. I’m the straightest looking man in the country.” In London he found Muslims “terrifying᠁ I didn’t want to get out of the car.” Overall, though, Snowden seemed to have been happy enough—things were “pretty cool,” he wrote at one point. The “girls” in Switzerland were “gorgeous.” In 2008 he opened a new thread on Ars Technica and said he’d had a vision in which his avatar’s true name had emerged from his subconscious and “flashed vis
ibly in that moment of unrestrained spite; in the indulgent teabag.” His new gamer name: Wolf king Awesomefox.
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oday, Snowden says that he was “drawn to the C.I.A. by a sense of duty, a desire to contribute. I wanted to do the hard work, not the easy stuff.” But in Geneva his feelings toward his new job grew more com plex. In fact, he has said, it began to sour him on intelligence work. He would later tell The Guardian he had been deeply dis turbed by an incident in which C.I.A. agents got a Swiss banker drunk and encouraged him to drive. When the man was arrested, Snowden claimed, the agents ofered to help in exchange for the banker becoming an in formant. Snowden has hinted that this was only one of many such incidents that trou bled him. “Much of what I saw in Geneva,” he said, “really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its im pact is in the world.” Mavanee Anderson, a onetime legal in tern at the Geneva mission, wrote last sum mer in the Chattanooga Times Free Press of her friendship with Snowden during this period. She recalled that he seemed to be wrestling with “a crisis of conscience of sorts.” In contrast to his sometimes fam boyant online persona, she said, Snowden was far more pensive, far gentler—an “I.T. genius” who took his martial arts very se riously. She described him as “kind and sincere,” “introspective,” and “a bit prone to brood.” Snowden has said he frst contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008. What information he had to dis close at that point isn’t clear, although a former C.I.A. official says his access to computers meant “he was in the system. He was reading the trafc” at the Geneva C.I.A. station. But Snowden held back, in part because he believed Barack Obama, elected that November, might introduce reforms. A rare glimpse of Snowden’s internal conflicts during this period emerged in an Ars Technica message that has since been widely quoted. It came in the form of a comment on a January 10, 2009, New York Times story, citing unnamed ofcials who discussed the Bush White House’s co vert plans to sabotage Iran’s main nuclear facility. Snowden expressed outrage at both the Times and its unnamed sources. “They’re like WikiLeaks᠁ They’re re porting classified shit,” Snowden wrote. “Who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this? Those people should be MAY
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shot in the balls᠁ hello? how covert … that shit is classified for a reason.”
is it now?
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he next month Snowden resigned from the C.I.A. The circumstances remain in dispute, but it appears to have been ugly. Two senior American officials, speaking on background, told The New York Times last October that he had received a derogatory comment in his personnel file from a supervisor who said he had suspicions that Snowden was trying to break into unauthorized computer fles and that, as a result, he had been sent home. (The day after the story ran, the C.I.A. issued a statement denying this account.) Snowden gave his version to the Times in an online interview: while angling for a promotion, he had gotten into a “petty e-mail spat” with a senior manager over faws Snowden had discovered in the C.I.A.’s human-resources software. His immediate boss told him to back down, but then allowed him to test the system. Snowden said he altered some of the code in an attempt to highlight the software faws; his boss signed of on it, but the senior manager became “furious” and took his revenge in the unflattering personnel comment. The incident convinced him, Snowden says, that trying to work through the system would lead only to reprisals. A retired C.I.A. ofcial who has made informal inquiries about Snowden in Geneva says he sensed broader diferences at work. “Part of the problem was that he was too smart to be doing the job he was doing,” this man suggests. “I think he would have liked to have been a player.” Whatever happened, by the time Snowden returned to the U.S. he seemed to be angry. Gone was the shy kid who had asked others on Ars Technica to “be gentle.” Now, when his opinions were challenged, he would respond by calling the challengers “fucking retards.” He termed Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, a “cockbag.” He railed against Obama’s support for an assault-weapons ban. Social Security outraged him. “Cut this social security bullshit,” he wrote at one point. On the sub-
ject of a safety net for the elderly, he wrote, “They wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.” Snowden says today that he is amused by reports of his “right-wing politics, based on what seem to be Internet rumors and thirdhand information, and I have read it with some amusement᠁ I support a guaranteed basic income, I think we should take care of sick people, I believe women can make their own choices, and that the government is at its best when it’s building bridges instead of bombs. Does that sound right-wing? But I also think it’s common sense that people have individual rights, a right to be left alone, and a right to protect our families from violence᠁ Personally, I’d describe my political thought as moderate.” His earlier online comments suggest frustration at losing his dream career. In any event, he wasn’t unemployed for long. As far back as his early teens, he had been intrigued by the idea of living in Japan. In early 2009 he got the chance, accepting a job with Dell in Tokyo. In addition to making computers, Dell managed computer systems for hundreds of corporations and more than a few government agencies. In Japan, Snowden worked at the Yokota Air Base, outside Tokyo, where he instructed top officials and military offcers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers. There he also designed a highly sophisticated data backup system called epicshelter. It used an advanced technology to place a shield around every N.S.A. site in the world, ensuring that the N.S.A. would be able to recover information from any of its locations, even if that site were completely destroyed in the event of war or another calamity. The N.S.A., in fact, was one of Dell’s most important and secretive clients.
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eferred to within the agency as “OPS2A,” the N.S.A.’s main headquarters building at Fort Meade is an 11-story cube of steel and black glass. Set on 350 acres in the Maryland countryside, just of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, it could easily be mistaken for a corporate ofce. It is surrounded
by satellite buildings and a parking lot for 18,000 vehicles. Guard posts, many protected by hydraulic barriers, dot the perimeter and are manned by armed N.S.A. police. With 35,000 employees and a $10.5 billion budget—that was a secret until Snowden leaked it—the N.S.A. is the largest and most sophisticated eavesdropping operation in the world. Officially founded in 1952, the agency had its genesis in the efort to decrypt German and Japanese codes during World War II. Whereas the C.I.A.’s focus is on gathering intelligence involving human beings—“humint”—the N.S.A. is the codebreaking, code-making, machine- andcomputer outfit, specializing in what is known as signals intelligence, or “sigint.” It is the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, and possibly the world. “At the N.S.A.,” one former top ofcial says, “an extrovert is someone who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” For decades the N.S.A. was the C.I.A.’s shadowy, little-noticed cousin, its contributions to national security barely known outside the intelligence community. Like the C.I.A., the agency suffered something of an identity crisis when the Cold War ended, only fnding its new mission in the “War on Terror” that followed 9/11. It responded with such operations as ThinThread, Trailblazer, Prism, Turbulence, Muscular, and others with similarly ominous-sounding names. In various ways they were all giant electronic dragnets, sucking up e-mails, phone-call information, cell-location data, and other communications records. In part, says Bruce Schneier, a leading security technologist and cryptographer who acted as a technical consultant to The Guardian on some of its Snowden stories, the N.S.A.’s “collect it all” mentality stemmed from unrealistic expectations in the wake of 9/11. “If you give the intel community the impossible mission of ‘never again,’ ” Schneier says, “the only way you can be sure you know that that thing won’t happen is to know everything that does happen.” It all comes down to the nature of the modern threat. “We used to collect Soviet radio transmissions from Strategic Rocket Forces in Moscow,” Michael Hayden explains. “We were looking for words of interest like
“ I SU PP ORT A GUA R A N T E E D BA SIC I NC OM E . . . . I BE L I EV E WOM E N C A N M A K E T H E I R OW N C HOIC E S ,” SAYS SNOW DE N. “D OE S T H AT S OU N D R IG H T-W I NG? ” M AY
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SIGNIFICANT OTHERS Clockwise from top left: Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend; Snowden; the house Snowden and Mills shared on Eleu Street in Waipahu, about 12 miles from Honolulu; and General Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency as the Snowden affair unfolded. Alexander had once attended the DefCon conference in jeans and T-shirt, asking hackers to “come in and help us.”
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EV E N T H E M A NAGE M E N T OF CR I T IC A L C O M PU T E R SYST E M S I S OU T S OU RC E D, “PU T T I NG T H E FA M I LY J EW E L S OU T T H E R E ,” SAYS W I L L I A M BI N N EY. ‘launch.’ There isn’t a civil libertarian alive that gave a damn that we were doing that.” But when you start looking for information pertaining to terrorists and their targets, the grid of search options is almost infnite. “If I’m going to do what I used to do for you, I have to be on that grid. And I’m going to be bumping into your Gmail. I didn’t decide to bump into your Gmail. I didn’t rub my hands together and go, ‘Eeeexcellent.’ [But] I have to be where the signals are.”
PHOTOG RA PH S BY B A RTO N GEL L MA N /G ET T Y I MAG ES ( SNOW DE N ), F RO M TH E G UAR D I AN (B OT TO M DO C UME NT), BY SAUL LO E B/AFP/ GET T Y I MAG ES ( A L E XA N DE R) , © LU IS S I LO S I II PH OTOG RA P HY / SPL A SH NE WS / CO RB I S ( MI LL S ), © SPL ASH NE WS/CO RBI S (HO USE )
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he signals today are everywhere, and the N.S.A. has long believed the public has no right to keep them private. When public encryption technology first became available, in the 1970s, the N.S.A.’s director, Bobby Inman, wanted to make it a government monopoly, the way nuclear weapons are. In 1991, the mass-market encryption software program called Pretty Good Privacy, or P.G.P., was developed. The tool was so revolutionary that its creator was investigated by the U.S. government for violating U.S. export regulations— “arms- trafficking”—when the technology became available overseas. Alarmed that widespread public encryption would limit law enforcement’s ability to catch criminals, the N.S.A. proposed that an encryption chip be installed in any newly manufactured telephone, pager, or other electronic device, to give the government potential access. That idea went nowhere, but the agency then pursued opportunities to insert the same kind of “back doors” into encrypted platforms through subterfuge. There were attempts by Congress to limit the N.S.A.’s new surveillance programs, but, as would emerge after Snowden’s disclosures, there was a lot that ofcials on the Hill didn’t know. Within the N.S.A., this confict was playing out with the emergence of several earlier whistle-blowers. One of the first was William Binney, an N.S.A. technical director of geopolitical and military analysis, considered by some to be one of the best cryptography analysts in history. A 32-year N.S.A. veteran, he was an architect of ThinThread, a major M AY
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dragnet program. But he became outraged when, on orders from the Bush White House, the N.S.A. deactivated the ThinThread privacy-control flters that prevented spying on Americans. Since federal law prohibits monitoring domestic communications without a warrant, he and other top ofcials, including senior analyst J. Kirk Wiebe, complained to Congress, to the Department of Defense inspector general, and even reportedly to a Supreme Court justice, but to no avail. In 2007, F.B.I. agents burst into Binney’s home in Severn, Maryland, dragged him out of the shower, and held a gun to his head, while his family watched. The agents said they were hunting for the person who had leaked information about the government’s secret warrantless-wiretapping program to The New York Times. Thomas Drake was another top N.S.A. official who had turned on the agency. Drake, after complaining formally to the N.S.A. and other government agencies, had leaked information about waste, fraud, and abuse at the N.S.A. to the Baltimore Sun, and this resulted in his being charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. The government’s case collapsed, but in the process Drake’s life was devastated: he lost his job, his security clearance, and his career. Today, he works at an Apple Store in Maryland. Snowden wasn’t employed directly by the N.S.A.—he worked for its contractors, frst Dell and then Booz Allen Hamilton. Like IBM, Boeing, Raytheon, and others, they receive multi-billion-dollar government contracts to provide everything an agency could need, from security guards and maintenance staf to satellites and supercomputers. Many of the contractors who service the N.S.A. are clustered in a set of sleek glass-and-steel buildings in a wooded area directly across from Route 295—and linked to the N.S.A. by a private road that passes beneath the highway. It’s called, fttingly, Connector Road. “The culture of the contractors is one of the huge elephants in the room,” says Drake. “Because 9/11 just opened up the foodgates. We have always had contractors in the government. We’ve even had contrac-
tors in intelligence, but historically it tended to be much more circumscribed᠁ What were historically considered government functions only are essentially being outsourced, contracted, to private industry, who are focused on how much money they can make, on shares, on revenue streams. It’s a proft center.” At the N.S.A., even the management of critical computer systems is outsourced to private industry—a very risky move, says William Binney. By giving away so much power, by allowing that kind of contract, “they are building in this access,” he says. “So when you do that kind of thing, now you are putting the family jewels out there with the contractors.”
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ertainly Snowden saw himself as a highly principled individual, especially with regard to those faults he found in the U.S. intelligence community. His feelings appear only to have grown stronger while working for Dell in Japan. When asked later by The Guardian how his views had evolved over time, he responded, “When you are in positions of privileged access … you see things that may be disturbing,” adding, “Over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up.” A turning point seems to have occurred in May 2010, when Bradley Manning, an army private, was arrested in Iraq for releasing what was then the largest-ever trove of confidential government documents to WikiLeaks, the organization Julian Assange founded that has served as a clearinghouse for government secrets. The trove included some 250,000 State Department cables, a half-million pages of army reports, and chilling videos of U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians and journalists were killed. Snowden has said he was influenced by Manning’s subsequent ordeal at the hands of U.S. authorities—Manning was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 35 years in prison—which made him wary of similar treatment for himself. In the summer of 2010, Dell promoted him to focus on clients other than the www.vanityfair.com
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N.S.A., and he was eventually transferred back to Maryland, where he led a team of experts in designing cloud-computing platforms and supercomputers for breaking passwords. There he lived with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. Friends have described Mills, an avid amateur photographer and dancer, as a free spirit— extroverted, garrulous, and sweet. Two years younger than Snowden—she called him “E”—Mills had grown up an only child in Laurel, Maryland, another bedroom community popular with N.S.A. employees. She and Snowden had met a few years before, after she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
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ttractive, blue-eyed, with long dark-blond hair, Mills was an inveterate user of social media. She blogged about her daily life in “L’s Journey” and regularly posted to her Instagram and Twitter feeds photos of herself in various stages of undress. Her exhibitionism would fascinate people later, but Snowden seemed oddly unaware of it. When an acquaintance referred to Mills as “your hot girlfriend,” Snowden replied primly, “My girlfriend is beautiful.” Back in the U.S., Snowden was assigned a new job at Dell, as a high-level systems administrator—or “sysadmin”— at an N.S.A. facility in Hawaii. Much of what is known of his life during the year he spent there, from April 2012 to May 2013, comes via Mills’s Internet postings. “Trying to avoid the changes coming my way,” she wrote in March 2012 in a post accompanied by a nude photo of herself, sitting on a bed, covering herself and her face. That month, while she stayed behind in Maryland to pack, Snowden left for Hawaii. She arrived in June and they rented a house in Waipahu, a suburb 20 minutes northwest of downtown Honolulu. The house, in a sprawling development of apartment complexes and middle-class homes called Royal Kunia, is a light-blue bungalow with a pitched roof on a corner of Eleu Street, a residential lane jam-packed with small homes
and lined, of-campus style, with dozens of cars and pickup trucks. None of the neighbors who later spoke to the press seemed to have had much to do with the young couple, but they thought them pleasant and neat.
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n his new job, Snowden worked at the N.S.A.’s Kunia Regional Security Operations Center (known as “the Tunnel,” because it’s underground). It was a 10-minute drive north, up a two-lane road that snakes through sugarcane felds. The Kunia facility—or at least its guard shack and an entrance road, lined with orange barriers—can be seen behind high wire fences in a military complex that includes Wheeler Army Airfeld and a naval security group. There are no signs to mark the N.S.A. facility, only a series of small fence markers that read, “warning. Restricted area. Keep out.” Analysts at Kunia are said to focus on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea. According to the N.S.A., Snowden had two jobs at Kunia. One was dealing with computer problems and questions from the staf. The other, as a sysadmin, was a kind of electronic-maintenance job in which, to aid in troubleshooting the facility’s computers and software, he was given wide-ranging access to the N.S.A.’s computers. Snowden moved smoothly into his new job, where he made friends and impressed supervisors. A co-worker who came forward in an anonymous e-mail sent to Forbes last fall wrote that Snowden was considered a genius at computers, if a trifle eccentric. There was perhaps a clue to Snowden’s mental evolution in his dress. The Kunia facility was chilly, and the sweatshirt Snowden wore most days was sold by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose motto is “Defending your rights in the digital world.” According to the foundation, “the seal on the back features a red-eyed eagle using his talons to illegally plug into the nation’s telecommunications system with the help of telecom giant AT&T.” At Kunia, Snowden would later claim in a statement to the Europe-
an Parliament, he spoke to more than 10 ofcials of his concerns about overreaching government surveillance, “none of whom took any action to address them,” he wrote. “Everyone in the intelligence community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations.” But, according to Rick Ledgett, the N.S.A.’s deputy director who would lead the internal investigation of Snowden’s leaks, Snowden made no formal complaints. And if he complained personally to anyone, Ledgett says, they have not acknowledged it. Snowden replies: “The N.S.A. at this point not only knows I raised complaints, but that there is evidence that I made my concerns known to the N.S.A.’s lawyers, because I did some of it through e-mail. I directly challenge the N.S.A. to deny that I contacted N.S.A. oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law, and I welcome members of Congress to request a written answer to this question [from the N.S.A.].”
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n today’s electronic bureaucracies, both government and corporate, a sysadmin operates within fairly loose guidelines; like a motorcycle rider, he is free to roam far and wide, but only as long as he stays in his own lane. Later, after Snowden went public, N.S.A. experts studying his activities could see that, almost from his frst weeks on the job, he had not only left his own lane but driven of the road entirely, zinging through open felds and peering into empty mansions. “He really went across policy lines and all kinds of things that he really shouldn’t have been able to get into as a sysadmin,” says William Binney. Looking at what Snowden was able to do, Jeff Moss, the founder of the hacking conference DefCon and one of the country’s most prominent informationsecurity experts, described the reaction of his peers around the world as one of widespread shock and surprise that the
“ I DI R E C T LY C H A L L E NG E T H E N. S . A . TO DE N Y T H AT I C ON TACT E D N. S . A . OV E R SIGH T A N D C OM PL I A NC E B ODI E S DI R ECT LY V I A E-M A I L ,” SAYS SNOW DE N. 162
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N.S.A.’s systems were so vulnerable to infltration. “It’s enough to make you think offense gets all the money, and nobody really gets much for defense,” Moss says. “I think everybody assumed because of all the movies we’ve watched—like Enemy of the State—and all the experience with Soviet- era moles, that there were probably good controls.” Only recently has the N.S.A. disclosed how Snowden could have had such wideranging access: he had been given a special assignment to copy millions of files from the central N.S.A. computers on the mainland onto servers in Hawaii, “building up stockpiles of data there that the island could use,” says Ledgett, in the event of a power outage or a cyber-attack. In retrospect, it seems astounding that a single person—and an outside contractor at that—would be given such power to root through the country’s national intelligence archives, but he was, according to the N.S.A. itself. The unique assignment was made necessary by Hawaii’s geographical remoteness. “Because Hawaii’s at the end of a lot of long, thin communication pipes, if there’s an outage, they’re sort of on their own,” says Ledgett. “And so he was moving copies of that data there for them, which was perfect cover for stealing the data.” It was that summer of 2012, Ledgett says, when Snowden made his frst illegal downloads. According to the N.S.A., one of those documents was the agency’s technical employment test, with the answer sheet. Snowden later took the test, and “aced it,” according to Mike McConnell, a former director of the N.S.A. and now the vice chairman of Booz Allen. Sometime in the fall of 2012, Snowden allegedly applied for a job at the N.S.A., got it, and then turned it down because he wanted a higher rank. “They ofered him a position, and he said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to be a G.S.-13. I want to be an S.E.S.,’ a much higher rank,” McConnell told The Wall Street Journal. According to this account, when the N.S.A. rebufed Snowden, “that’s when he turned.” “Of course I didn’t cheat on the exam, although I’d argue being able to hack a hacking examination probably makes you more, not less, qualifed for the job,” says Snowden. “This is just another artifact of a failed investigation, and I’m not sure why they trumpet it.” Snowden says he turned down the job ofer because he didn’t want that particular position. “A Booz Allen executive wouldn’t be in a position to know about N.S.A.’s internal hiring. I imagine he’s trying to do an unrequested favor for M AY
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the N.S.A. in hopes they won’t ask Congress to bar Booz from bidding on future N.S.A. contracts.” If Snowden was then experiencing some kind of mental turmoil, his new home life certainly wasn’t helping things. A few weeks after Mills arrived, she tweeted, “The universe is telling me something and I’m pretty sure it’s saying ‘get out.’ ” In July she blogged, “For those that have forgotten I moved to Hawaii to continue my relationship with E. It has been an emotional roller coaster since I stepped of the plane.” Mid-October, Mills blogged, was a time of “heavy conversations”; at one point, she complained of “stress paralysis.” She had been taking acrobatic- and pole-dancing classes in Honolulu and had managed to make friends there. At one point she fnally got Snowden out of the house to meet them. Until then, she blogged, he had made himself so scarce people “weren’t quite sure E. existed.” Around Thanksgiving, Mills returned to Maryland for a visit. She was still away on Saturday, December 1, 2012, when Snowden sat down with his laptop and tapped out his first message to Glenn Greenwald.
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reenwald was born in New York City to working-class Jewish parents and grew up outside of Orlando, Florida. An important infuence appears to have been his grandfather, a Florida city councilman who ran for ofce on a populist ticket and fought for the rights of poor homeowners against powerful land developers. After his parents split, his mother took a job as a cashier at McDonald’s. Being a gay teenager in the mid-80s brought stigma and opprobrium, but instead of crumbling under the weight of cultural disapproval, Greenwald decided, according to The Advocate, “You’re not going to tell me that I’m wrong. I’m going to show you that your actions are wrong,” an attitude that seems to have stuck with him. He studied philosophy at George Washington University and graduated from N.Y.U.’s law school in 1994, then got a job at the venerable New York frm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, selecting it out of about a dozen job ofers because it came with civil-union benefts. After 18 months, at age 28, Greenwald quit and started his own firm. There, alongside defamation and workers’-comp cases, he took on diffcult First Amendment issues, defending
neo-Nazis and other unpopular clients. Former colleagues describe his fierce work ethic. On the side, in 2002, according to BuzzFeed, he started a consulting company, Master Notions LLC, with his friend Jason Buchtel, a Los Angeles flm producer. The company had an entertainment arm that operated an online retailer called “StudMall,” for sexually explicit gay DVDs. Greenwald has said that, while he has no objection to pornography, he was simply the company’s legal consultant. After he was bought out of the business and he and his longtime boyfriend had broken up, Greenwald decided to take a two-month vacation in Brazil. There, on his second day, while on the beach, he met a 19-year-old Brazilian, David Miranda, fell in love, decided to stay, and began to wind down his legal practice. In October 2005, Greenwald started a blog called Unclaimed Territory, just two months before the world learned, in a groundbreaking story in The New York Times, about the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls after 9/11. It was red meat for Greenwald. “Bush defenders,” he wrote at the time, “are now at the point where, to defend the President, they are literally advocating that preserving privacy against the Government is unnecessary, worthless and even dangerous.” Unclaimed Territory was soon being cited in mainstream online magazines such as Slate, and two years later, in 2007, Greenwald was hired to write a regular column for Salon. When Janine Gibson, The Guardian’s U.S. editor, approached Greenwald about a job with the paper, he was intrigued but didn’t want to give up the million-plus audience he had built at Salon. In the end he agreed to write for The Guardian with the same deal he had at Salon: his columns would be edited solely for legal and journalistic concerns. Alan Rusbridger, the paper’s editor, says Greenwald “came with a community of his own readers. He wanted his own rules.”
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in 2007. Snowden had read the column, and it helped inspire him to reach out to her. Poitras had grown up outside Boston and, after high school, moved to San Francisco, where she studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2004, for My Country, My Country, she went to Iraq for more than eight months and embedded with the U.S. military during the Iraqi elections. She spent much of her time with Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh, an Iraqi medical doctor and Sunni political candidate. One day in November 2004, she was filming in a neighborhood where, the day before, Iraqi and U.S. military had raided a mosque during Friday prayer, and four people were killed. The next day, violence erupted in the neighborhood, and Poitras, who was flming nearby, captured some of it on video. An American National Guardsman was killed. American soldiers speculated that Poitras, who was seen on the roof of a nearby building that day, had known about the attack, though no evidence has ever been produced to support this claim. Poitras, who has never been questioned by anyone in the U.S. military about the incident, told The New York Times that “any suggestion I knew about an attack is false.” Two years later, she started being routinely detained by immigration ofcials.
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ll through that winter and spring, there had been no sense of an impending crisis at the blue house on Eleu Street. February 17 had been Mills’s 28th birthday. A week later she and Snowden went snorkeling. “Water and love dominated the weekend,” Mills tweeted, blissfully unaware of the changes Snowden was already planning for their lives. By that weekend, in fact, Snowden had decided to leave Dell. On the face of it he seemed to be trying to take a step up the intelligence ladder, shedding his job as a computer technician for actual espionage work; in fact, Snowden has indicated, he wanted access to more information he could download. Having passed on the N.S.A.’s job ofer, he applied for and received a job at Booz Allen Hamilton, where
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he would move to the “cyber-security” side of the N.S.A., tracking and targeting threats to the country’s information infrastructure. Booz is a consulting company, controlled by the well-connected Washington investment frm the Carlyle Group. Nearly all of its $5.8 billion in 2013 revenues were derived from federal contracts— with $1.3 billion coming from intelligence work alone. Snowden was to work at Booz as a “target” or “infrastructure” analyst; he would be paid $122,000 a year plus benefts and would have access to a whole new range of information. “His job was to look at cyber-adversaries,” says Ledgett, “people who were exploiting U.S. communications or U.S. computer networks. And his job was to pursue them as targets and try to fgure out what they were doing.” According to Snowden, the job was a gold mine of new information. “My position with Booz,” he said later, “granted me access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” On March 30, Snowden flew back to the mainland, where he spent two weeks at Fort Meade training for his new job. He returned to Hawaii on April 13 and the next day picked up keys to a new rental home. (Hoping to sell the house on Eleu Street, the landlord had declined to extend the lease.) Mills posted to Instagram a photo of the two of them, stretched out on the carpet in their new living room. Lying on his side, Snowden wears black jeans and a purple T-shirt. His glasses are of, and he is looking away from the camera. Mills is sprawled on her back in a sapphire-blue dress. Both are barefoot. “Carpet dancing,” she wrote.
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n early May, Snowden asked Poitras to forward a message to Barton Gellman, who had been communicating with her about her source since February. A Princeton graduate and Rhodes scholar who had spent 21 years reporting for The Washington Post, Gellman, while an aggressive reporter, was as reserved as Greenwald was outspoken. He had written a best-selling book, Angler, on Vice President Dick Cheney and his role in expand-
ing the government’s surveillance powers, among other things. Calling himself Verax, Snowden described the documents to Gellman, adding, “I understand I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.” He warned that even a journalist in possession of the material was in danger. “The U.S. intel community,” he told Gellman, “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of the information.” On May 16, Snowden contacted Gellman directly, and the two communicated steadily for the rest of the month. Snowden appeared resigned to his fate. “Perhaps I am naive,” he wrote, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” He said he felt the peril was so great, “I have risked my life and family for it.”
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nowden was deliberately juggling the three journalists and their outlets. Each one—Gellman, Poitras, and Greenwald— offered a decidedly different prospect. “He did not want to be pre-empted,” Gellman says, referring to the government stopping publication. “That would have been his worst case. This, I think, does help explain why he had multiple outlets. He didn’t know whether any of us would be there ultimately or our news agencies wouldn’t go for it, or someone would come and take the documents from us, or whatever. And you can see what a meticulous planner he is from everything that is out now.” Snowden explains that approaching three journalists was his own system of “checks and balances.” By Wednesday, May 15, Snowden had almost all of his documents ready. Even today, investigators are not sure how many, or exactly which ones, he took. They say that he had access to an astounding 1.7 million documents, and they estimate he eventually gave Greenwald and Poitras MAY
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P HOTO GR A PHS F RO M A .P. I MAG ES / A SSO C IATE D PR ES S TE L E VI SI ON ( DO CUME N T) , F RO M A .P. I MAGE S/SUNSHI NE PRE SS (ASSANGE ), FRO M E +/GE TT Y I MAGE S (FL AG), © SE RGE I I L NI TS KY /E PA /COR B IS ( M EDI A ) , BY TAT YA NA MA K EY E VA / RE UT ER S ( A I RL I NE R ), M A XI M S HIP E NKOV /E PA/NE WSCO M (AI RPO RT), FRO M SUNSHI NE PRE SS/GE TT Y I MAGE S (HARRI SO N)
J U L I A N A S SA NGE WA S LOOK I NG TO PU T H I M S E L F I N T O T H E ST ORY. S N OW DE N ’ S PRO M I N E N C E WA S “ H U M I L I AT I N G ,” SAYS ON E A S SA NG E OB SE RV E R .
ENDGAME From top: Snowden’s temporary Russian travel document; the airliner that flew Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; Assange’s associate Sarah Harrison, who traveled with Snowden to Moscow; the scene at Sheremetyevo International Airport, in anticipation of Snowden’s arrival. According to Glenn Greenwald, “The most shocking and significant stories have yet to be reported.”
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e arrived at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport and took the half-hour cab ride to his destination: Kowloon, the teeming Oakland to Hong Kong’s San Francisco. The hotel he had booked, the Mira, was a deluxe lodging attached to an urban mall on busy Nathan Road. At the front desk, Snowden handed over his personal credit card. “I used a personal credit card so the government could immediately verify that I was entirely self-financed, independent, and had, over time, withdrawn enough fnancial resources to survive on my own for years without anyone’s assistance,” Snowden says. “My hope was that avoiding ambiguity would prevent spy accusations and create more room for reasonable debate. Unfortunately, a few of the less responsible members of Congress embraced the spy charges for political reasons, as they still do to this day. But I don’t think it was a bad idea, because even if they won’t say it in public, intelligence-community ofcials are regularly confrming to journalists of the record that they know with a certainty that I am not an agent of any foreign government.” Once the credit card’s numbers entered the Mira’s system, C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 9 6
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few facts about Suki Waterhouse: she’s London-born, 22 years old, besties with Georgia May Jagger, the face of Burberry’s fragrance Brit Rhythm, and—oh—then there’s her relationship with Bradley Cooper. “Suki means ‘beloved’ in Japanese. They just wanted to call me anything weird,” Waterhouse says of her parents. “They were going to call me Kooky.” She started modeling as a teenager and initially worked mostly with the fashion photographer Rankin. “I wasn’t taking it very seriously, but Rankin always believed in me and would book me for everything and basically put food in my mouth. He set me off in the right direction.” Up to that point, Waterhouse had been focused on a different skill set entirely. “I was really into karate. I was competing heavily—doing competitions nationally—and then I smacked a girl in the face by accident really, really hard. It kind of shook me up massively, and it scarred me a bit.” Her talents don’t end there. Waterhouse recently designed a shoe for the Italian sneaker brand Superga, and is the face of the new campaign. In the end, however, it seems acting is her true love— Hollywood, you’ve been warned. Waterhouse has already landed a role in Love, Rosie (based on the book of the same name by Cecelia Ahern), out later this year, as the mean girl Bethany. “She is kind of annoying and a bit over the top— that was quite fun to do,” she admits. And she seems poised for even greater things. In spite of her youth, Waterhouse already has the maturity and grace to sum up and accept one of the business’s hardest lessons: “I have been modeling since I was 15—I am so used to rejection it doesn’t baffle — KRISTA SMITH me anymore.” P H OTO G RA PH
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CUNEYT AKEROGLU
ST Y L ED BY GI L LI A N W IL KI N S; HA I R PRO DUC TS BY DAVI NE S ; M A KE UP P RO DUC TS A ND NA I L E N A ME L BY BURBE RRY; HAI R BY A NGE L O SE MI N A RA ; MA KE UP BY L I S A E LD RI DG E; M A NI CUR E BY S HRE E N GAY L E ; F O R D ETA I L S, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS
50,000 to 200,000, most of which he had gotten while at Dell. During his short time at Booz, Snowden was downloading documents until the last minute. In late April, for instance, he discovered a court order granting the N.S.A. access to certain phone-call information at Verizon, the giant telecom company. The order, signed April 25 and entered into the N.S.A. computer system April 29, touched on a special interest of Snowden’s: the issue of legal standing—the fact that lawsuits against the government on surveillance issues kept getting thrown out of court because no one could prove they were specifcally being surveilled. On Friday, May 17, Mills left for a week of sailing with friends. Snowden told her he was going on a business trip and probably wouldn’t be home when she returned. He told his bosses at Booz Allen that he needed to take a medical leave because of his epilepsy. He downloaded the last of his documents from the N.S.A. server, loaded them onto one last thumb drive, and left work. The next day he walked into Honolulu International Airport, alone.
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Suki Waterhouse, photographed in London. WATERHOUSE WEARS A DRESS BY CHRISTOPHER KANE.
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ST YLE D BY HAYL E Y ATK IN ; G RO OMIN G BY A N D IE MI CH AE L S ( C AME RO N) A N D E RI C A S AUE R ( ALL OTHE R S) . IM AG E S: F ROM LE F T, BY DYL A N K AN E / S NA K E R IV E R HOTSH OTS , LU C IA N R E A D/ T HE YE A R S PRO JE C T, F ROM T3 ME D I A, AL L COU RT E SY O F S HOW TIME . F OR D E TA IL S, G O TO VF. COM/ C RE D ITS
Spotlight
Years of Living Dangerously executive producers James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub (with his golden retriever, Bet), David Gelber, Joel Bach, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with images of devastation and destruction from their new Showtime series, about climate change, photographed at MBS Media Campus, in Manhattan Beach, California. 168
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER IGNORED
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hen 60 Minutes veterans David Gelber and Joel Bach set out to produce a documentary on climate change, they knew they needed A-list talent. They just didn’t know how to get it. Then Bach remembered a college friend who had an uncle. Two weeks later the phone rang: “Hey, it’s Jerry Weintraub. How can I help you?” Weintraub (onetime head of United Artists, and producer of Nashville, Diner, and Ocean’s Eleven) and James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) signed on as executive producers. Doors began to open, and in came Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, Harrison Ford, and others. Topflight journalists joined the project, among them Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, and Lesley Stahl, of 60 Minutes. Years of Living Dangerously weaves together several strands of storytelling, Homeland-style—for instance, the increasingly savage wildfires in the American West; rising sea levels in Bangladesh; competition for water in the Middle East. Gelber and Bach had originally conceived their project as a movie. Weintraub had a better idea. “You guys are idiots,” he told them. “You think you’re going to get people to go to the theater to watch this? You want eyeballs? Do a TV series.” David Nevins, at Showtime, gave the idea a quick thumbs-up. It will air starting this month. “I watched all three presidential debates in 2012,” says Gelber, “waiting for a journalist to ask just one question about global warming. It never happened. What story is as big as climate change? Other than nuclear war, I — CULLEN MURPHY can’t think of one.” www.vanityfair.com
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Too Rich, Too
Ever taller, ever thinner, the new condo towers racing skyward in Midtown Manh the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue will be the highest residence PAUL GOLDBERGER looks at the construction, architecture, and market
PILL AR OF SOCIET Y
An aerial view of One57 and the shadow it casts over Central Park, dwarfing those of its neighbors.
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Thin,Too Tall? attan are breaking records for everything, including price. Sold for $95 million, in the Western world. As shadows creep across Central Park, ing of these super-luxury aeries, gauging their effect on the city’s future
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T hese days, it is not just a woman who can never be too rich or too thin. You can say almost exactly the same thing about skyscrapers, or at least about the latest residential ones now going up in New York City, which are much taller, much thinner, and much, much more expensive than their predecessors. And almost every one of them seems built to be taller, thinner, and pricier than the one that came before. Few people are inclined to mourn the end of the age of the luxury apartment building as a boxy slab. But what is replacing it, which you might call the latest way of housing the rich, is an entirely new kind of tower, pencil-thin and super-tall—so tall, in fact, that one of the new buildings now rising in Manhattan, the 96-story concrete tower at the corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue, 432 Park Avenue, will be 150 feet higher than the Empire State Building when it is fnished, and taller than the highest occupied foor of the new 1 World Trade Center. And construction on an even taller super-luxury building, 225 West 57th Street, is scheduled to begin next year, so 432 Park’s reign as the city’s tallest residence and second-tallest skyscraper will be short-lived. These buildings are transforming the streetscape of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, and they are transforming the skyline even more. Two new luxury apartment towers in the super-tall category are going up in Tribeca, at least so far. But the biggest impact has been in Midtown, in the blocks between 53rd and 60th Streets, where seven of the new condominiums are either under construction or planned. Four of them are on 57th Street alone, which day by day is becoming less of a boulevard defned by elegant shopping and more like a canyon lined
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IN WITH THE NEW
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The construction site of the new Extell tower, on 57th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The building will be cantilevered over its neighbor, the Art Students League, built in 1892, at right.
by high walls. (And that’s just the buildings that have been announced. There are others rumored to be in the planning stages, including one that would replace the venerable Rizzoli bookstore, also on West 57th Street.)
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f there is any saving grace to this tsunami of towers, it is in their very slenderness. From a distance they read as needles more than as boxes; what they take away from the street they give back to a skyline that has been robbed of much of its classic romantic form by the bulky, fat-topped offce towers that have flled so much of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. These new buildings will not exactly turn Manhattan into a sleek glass version of San Gimignano—“the city of beautiful towers”—but thin buildings at least make for a striking skyline, and they cast thinner shadows as well. Those shadows are no casual matter, since all of the new buildings are relatively close to Central Park, and they are arranged in an arc that extends from the southeast to the southwest corner of the park, not so diferent from the arc of the daily path of the sun. The impact will vary from season to season, but there is little doubt that the southern portion of the park will be in more shadow than it is today. Given the slenderness of the new towers, it might be more accurate to say that the southern end of the park is someday going to look striped.
towers: the Flatiron Building (completed in 1902), the now demolished Singer Building (1908), the Metropolitan Life tower (1909), and the Woolworth Building (1913). In those days, skyscrapers couldn’t be too bulky, because you couldn’t be that far from a window. Then fuorescent lighting, air-conditioning, sealed windows, and a preference for big, horizontal ofce foors took over.
The even more troubling shadow these buildings cast, however, is a social and economic one. If you seek a symbol of income inequality, look no farther than 57th Street. These new buildings are so expensive, even by New York standards, because they are built mainly for the global super-rich, people who live in the Middle East or China or Latin America and travel between London and Shanghai and São Paulo and Moscow as if they were going from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There have always been some people like that, at least since the dawn of the jet age, but it’s only in the last decade that developers have put up buildings specifcally with these buyers in mind. The Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, fnished in 2004, was New York’s trial run, so to speak, at targeting this new market for condominiums with spectacular views at exceptionally high prices. But it’s a global phenomenon, with buildings such as One Hyde Park, in London, and the Cullinan and the Opus, in Hong Kong. The new 57th Street may be New York’s way of playing with the big boys as far as global cities are concerned, but it comes at the price of making Midtown feel ever more like Shanghai or Hong Kong: a place not for its full-time residents but for the top 1 percent of the 1 percent to touch down in when the mood strikes. And yet, in other ways, these buildings are absolutely characteristic of New York, which has a long and honorable tradition of skinny
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ntil now, that is. Today, there is more money to be made from housing people in the sky than ever before in New York City. In part, this is because a building full of apartments requires far fewer elevators than an ofce building with its armies of workers. Add to that the facts that people are willing to pay dearly for views, particularly of Central Park, and that they will pay an even greater premium for an apartment that occupies an entire foor—well, if you pile a lot of full-foor or half-foor apartments on top of one another and try to give all of them a park view, you pretty much end up with a very thin, very tall tower within a couple of blocks of Central Park. “The super-tall, super-slender towers are a new form of skyscraper,” Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, in Lower Manhattan, told me. At 432 Park Avenue, which was designed by the architect Rafael Viñoly for the developers
RACE TO THE TOP
Upon completion, the superscrapers will transform Midtown Manhattan. Here’s a look at how they’ll stack up 225 West 57th Street
111 West 57th Street
Height: 1,423 feet.
When completed it will be the tallest residential building in the U.S.
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This upcoming tower is designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects. www.vanityfair.com
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Height: 1,396 feet.
Upon completion, the building will look down 150 feet at the Empire State Building.
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432 Park Avenue
Height: 1,397 feet.
157 West 57th Street Height: 1,004 feet.
“One57” is the frst of these trendsetting buildings to actually break ground and be occupied.
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53 West 53rd Street Height: 1,050 feet.
Pritzker Prize laureate Jean Nouvel is behind the tapered modern design.
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The upcoming 31-unit building will be relatively diminutive among its neighbors, at 51 stories. MAY
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Spotlight Harry Macklowe and the CIM Group, each of the 104 apartments will occupy either a full foor or a half-foor, and the loftiest of them, a fullfoor unit on the 96th foor, will be the highest residence in the Western Hemisphere, at least until the building at 225 West 57th Street goes ahead. Viñoly’s penthouse has already sold for $95 million to an unidentifed buyer, which is close to $11,500 a square foot; the average asking price in the building was close to $7,000 a square foot, almost three times the average for Manhattan luxury condominiums last year. In exchange for parting with this kind of cash, the residents at 432 Park will be able to look down on the Chrysler Building and just about everything else in Midtown, including their neighbors at One57, the 90-story blue glass tower at 157 West 57th Street, which will be completed later this year (although a number of units are already occupied). One57 was the frst of this new generation of super-tall, super-thin, super-expensive buildings, and it is astonishing to think that its height of 1,004 feet, just 42 feet shorter than the Chrysler Building, will make it the tallest residential building in the city for a few months only, until @vf.com 432 Park is fnished, S EE MORE probably next year. PHOTOS OF One57 attracted a ON E57. GO TO VF. COM/ lot of attention for the MAY 2014. sale of one of its two largest apartments for the then unheardof price of more than $90 million (to an investor group headed by the fnancier Bill Ackman)—and a lot more attention for the fact that its crane assembly broke loose and dangled ominously over the street during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, requiring the evacuation of seven square blocks around the building. Its developer, Gary Barnett, of Extell, spent about 10 years assembling the site, and in 2005 asked the French architect Christian de Portzamparc to come up with a design. Even before the new wave of super-tall buildings, the condominium market in New York had become much more design-sensitive, and putting the names of well-known architects like Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, or Robert A. M. Stern on buildings has become a marketing advantage. In fact, at
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ACT ONE, TAKE TWO
olks can argue over the best baseball book (The Boys of Summer? Veeck as in Wreck?) or the most madcap P. G. Wodehouse (Joy in the Morning? Leave It to Psmith?), but can there really be any spat about the best coming-of-agein-the-theater memoir? This is not exactly a teeming genre, but nothing can top Moss Hart’s Act One in its glossily romanticized telling of how a poor boy besotted with the stage ended up, at 25, working with one of Broadway’s comedic gods (that would be George S. Kaufman, then 40) on Hart’s first hit play, Once in a Lifetime. The book (published in 1959) ends with the play a triumph, giving no hint of Hart’s lifelong struggle with depression. He wrote seven more plays with Kaufman, including The Man Who Came to Dinner, and when he died, in 1961, two musicals he had directed were on Broadway: My Fair Lady and Camelot. It is a brave man who turns Act One into a play, so applause is due for James Lapine, frequent collaborator with Stephen Sondheim (Sunday in the Park with George). Lapine was drawn to Act One, which opens this month at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, partly because the Hart-Kaufman partnership echoed his work with the older and more famous Sondheim, and he captures what he calls the “picaresque” quality of the book not just by casting three Moss Harts (Tony Shalhoub as the oldest, Santino Fontana as the younger, and Matthew Schechter as the younger still) but by having actors play multiple parts. Shalhoub’s experience with Hart dates to his high school’s production of You Can’t Take It with You, in which he played Donald, a black handyman (“I went to a small high school” is how he explains the limited casting possibilities). College was where Fontana, whose most recent Broadway role was the prince in Cinderella, first read Act One, and he was struck by how Hart “compares his obsession with theater to an infection, and I feel that way, too.” Schechter, who is 13, has already played Broadway in Newsies, Richard III, and Waiting for Godot, where he played, naturally, “the Boy.” And how did Master Schechter prepare for his role as the young Mossie? His answer: “Just being a kid.” No Method — JIM KELLY actor could have said it better. PH OTO GRA PH
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e Portzamparc had completed the initial versions of his plans when the recession of 2008 began and real-estate development in New York ground to a halt. Barnett, a former diamond dealer whose quiet, understated manner masks a gambler’s instinct, was certain that the market would come back, and that when it did, most other developers would be caught with nothing to sell. If he could manage to start his building when things still looked bleak, Barnett thought, C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 9 3
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was obsessed with Nancy Drew growing up—I couldn’t get enough,” says Alexandra Daddario, the breakout star of television’s most talked-about new drama, True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. “There is nothing better than a really cool mystery: you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you keep turning those pages or watching that series.” But the role of Lisa Tragnetti, which gave viewers an eyeful—the Upper East Side native bared all in a titillating handcuff scene with Harrelson—almost didn’t happen for her. “I never read for Lisa,” Daddario says of her auditioning process. “I initially read for the part of Beth [yet another of Harrelson’s character’s mistresses, played by Lili Simmons], but they wanted me for this bolder, more adult role.” Prior to this, the 28-year-old Brearley and Professional Children’s School alum was known for her turns playing teenagers in Texas Chainsaw 3D and the Percy Jackson films. “I’ve been playing younger for so long, it’s exciting to do things that I’ve never done before,” she says. (Daddario got her start with commercials when her Merrill Lynch–lawyer mother and her father, a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, encouraged her to do something more creative than they had.) Especially when acting opposite Harrelson. “He is a really funny, nice guy even when my character was pretty racy,” she says. “I loved that Woody kept it sort of business as usual.” Harrelson was equally impressed. “She was incredibly focused, hardworking, and willing to try anything. She’s got those PH OTO GRA PH S
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RALPH MECKE
ST Y LE D BY DE B OR A H A FS HA N I; HA I R P RO DUC TS BY B UMB L E A N D B UM B L E; M A KE UP PRO DUC TS BY N A RS; NA I L E N A ME L BY CHA N EL ; HA I R BY MI CH A EL L ON G; MA KE U P BY DAWN B RO USS A RD ; M A NI CU RE BY N E TTI E DAVI S ; P RO DUC ED O N LO C ATI O N BY PE T ER Mc CL A F F E RT Y; F O R DE TA I L S , G O TO VF.COM /C RE DI TS
these prices it’s now gotten to be something of a necessity, the same way some women will only spend $3,000 or $4,000 on a dress if it has a famous designer’s name on it. Unfortunately, sometimes the result seems more like the architectural equivalent of a fancy label sewn into an ordinary garment. De Portzamparc—whose frst building in New York, the sculpted glass LVMH tower, on East 57th Street, was widely acclaimed—first envisioned One57 as a slender glass structure with a few setbacks marked by curving roofs; he hoped that the overall efect of the design would resemble a cascading waterfall. Once he had been through the meat grinder of the New York City development process, not much of a sense of cascading water remained, and the fnal version of the building turned out to be a flattened composition in various shades of blue and silver glass, striped on some sides and speckled on others. If the tower’s slender height made it appropriate to New York, its garish glass made it look more like a tall refugee from Las Vegas. Inside, however, the feeling is more luxurious, perhaps because, as Frank Lloyd Wright allegedly said about the Gothic-style Harkness Tower at Yale, the building’s interior is the one place from which you can’t see it. What you do see is Central Park and the city, spread out before you. Barnett, the developer, took me to the topmost penthouse on an exceptionally cold, clear day early this year, and the view of the park was nothing like what I was used to from windows 30 or 40 foors up in other buildings. From the 90th foor, you feel as connected to the sky as to the ground. The city is laid out like a map, and the enormous windows are less like frames for the view than wideopen portals to it. And inside, the high ceilings and large rooms make the place feel even less like a conventional apartment. The layout leaves an open vista through the apartment, so you can see north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and south to the new 1 World Trade Center tower.
Alexandra Daddario, photographed in Beverly Hills. DADDARIO WEARS SHOES BY JIMMY CHOO; JEWELRY BY VAN CLEEF & ARPELS.
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Daddario kicks back in a 1965 Chevrolet Chevelle. DADDARIO WEARS A SWEATER BY SPORTMAX; SKIRT BY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION; RING BY BULGARI.
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hypnotic eyes that people only get by wearing contacts, but hers are real and induce a feeling of euphoria. There was a scene where I come in, fight the guy she’s with, and she yells at me, and that was a little more challenging, but she has an ability to be flexible and real inside the scene.” Come 2015, audiences will see Daddario in a different guise, as the heroine in the upcoming disaster epic San Andreas, with Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. “Essentially a giant series of earthquakes hits Los Angeles, and I have to play this tough chick,” she says. “You’ll find me being a lot more heroic than I am in my real life.” — PRIYA R AO Somehow, that seems hard to believe. M AY
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When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or death sentence, on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, 25 years ago, the novel became more than literature. Talking to Rushdie and those who stood beside him—Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, E. L. Doctorow, and others—PAUL ELIE assesses the extraordinary impact of a prophetic, provocative book, which turned its author into a hunted man, divided the cultural elite, and presaged a new era
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THE ALLIANCE
S E T D E SI G N BY A N DR E W TO MLI NS ON ; LOC AL PROD UCT ION ASSISTANCE BY T HE PROD UCT ION C L UB; PHOTOG R A PHE D AT S PR IN G ST UD I OS, LOND ON; F OR D ETAILS, G O TO VF.COM/ CR ED ITS
A circle of friends and advocates (pictured here and on the following spread) provided crucial support to the author during the fatwa. From left: agent Caroline Michel, writer and editor Gerald Marzorati, novelist Ian McEwan, the BBC’s Alan Yentob, Salman Rushdie, and his sister Sameen, a retired lawyer, photographed in London, 2014.
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More of Rushdie’s allies, from left: writer Carol Blue, literary agent Andrew Wylie, publisher Frances Coady, editor Nan Graham, writers Siri Hustvedt and Martin Amis, author and editor Bill Buford, and Hustvedt’s novelist husband, Paul Auster, New York, 2014.
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obody said anything about The Satanic Verses at the Morgan Library that night, not even the author. But the book gave the evening an aura of the forbidden that will always surround Salman Rushdie. The Morgan is one of New York City’s grandest literary spaces—with three Gutenberg Bibles and a Shakespeare First Folio, for starters. On that night last November it was the site of a gathering to celebrate the Man Booker Prize, the venerable British award for fction. The guest of honor was Rushdie, winner of the prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children and then of the “Booker of Bookers” for the best novel in the prize’s frst 25 years. He swept in just after seven p.m., natty in a gray suit and patterned shirt, which matched the dress worn by his companion, the socialite Missy
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suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” Paul Theroux said. Here was a memorial service for Bruce Chatwin, the tousled, witty travel writer, who had died of aids (without naming the disease). Chatwin had converted to the Greek Orthodox faith in his fnal days, so the boldfaced names of literary London were crowded into a church in Bayswater that February afternoon in 1989. Not just writers; there were “socialites, aristocrats, lords and ladies, travel agents, art dealers, spies, toffs, yobbos, the Duke of Westminster,” Theroux now recalls. Not just any church: “a big Asiatic and gaudylooking Greek Orthodox thing, like a vast consecrated mufn, with bearded patriarchs intoning weird verses—over our irreverent, once cackling Bruce. Who wouldn’t laugh?” Rushdie wasn’t laughing. His novel had been under fre since the fall for its depiction of Muhammad, Islam’s founding prophet. Mullahs were burning the book on British high streets. India and South Africa had banned it. There were riots in Islamabad (fve dead) and Kashmir (one dead, 100 injured). That morning a BBC
reporter had cold-called Rushdie at his house in North London and told him Khomeini had issued a fatwa: how did it feel to be sentenced to death? “It doesn’t feel good,” he said. But it wasn’t going to keep him from the memorial for a friend. “Fuck it, let’s go,” he said. His then wife—Marianne Wiggins, herself a novelist—went with him to the church. They took seats not far from Theroux, who said, jokingly, “I’m not sitting near you—I don’t want to be in the line of fre.” Martin Amis, Harold Pinter, and Antonia Fraser were in neighboring pews. They all sat baffed through the service—what did a klatch of muttering religious patriarchs have to do with literature, anyway? A mob was waiting for them outside—a mob of reporters and photographers. “Are you Salman Rushdie?” A photographer snapped a picture of him, and it shows the arched eyebrows, comb-over, and boxy eyeglasses that caricaturists were already turning into “satan rushdy,” enemy of Islam. His friends attended a reception nearby; he went out into the menacing new world that he had seen coming better than anybody.
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Brody—and matched his Vandyke beard, now wholly gray. He greeted the publishing titans on hand: Sonny Mehta, Steve Rubin, Nan Talese. He chatted at the bar with his pal Bill Buford, the former fction editor of The New Yorker. Then he and Buford took the stage and talked about Rushdie’s role as the “godfather of Indian fction.” Their topic was Midnight’s Children, not The Satanic Verses, but the notorious book made its presence felt. There in a display of memorabilia was a frst edition of the novel, a Booker fnalist in 1988; a matted photograph of Rushdie, just past 30, slim, handsome, untouched by terror; and a fyer for a 1989 reading given by famous American writers (Sontag, Mailer, Didion, DeLillo) after Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, pronounced a fatwa, or death sentence, and placed a $1.5 million bounty on the novelist’s head. Terror is never fully out of mind when Salman Rushdie is in the house. Because it was a private event, the Booker talk did not appear on the Morgan’s calendar and Web site, and this was for the best: no need to raise the author’s visibility and prompt some kind of response like the ones that—25 years ago—sent him underground in the frst place.
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THE GATHERING STORM
From left: Rushdie in 1981, the year he won the coveted Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children. A British headline trumpeting the announcement of the fatwa, February 16, 1989. A 1989 New York City gathering in support of Rushdie: first row, from left, authors Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, and E. L. Doctorow; behind, Don DeLillo (with eyeglasses), John Gregory Dunne (with hand to his ear), and Norman Mailer (far right).
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here are plenty of moments from 1989 when the world changed: the meeting of man and tank in Tiananmen Square, the release of the dissident Czech playwright Václav Havel, the unbricking of the wall in Berlin. But nothing shook the world of belles lettres like the moment when an Islamic dictator said an Anglo-Indian deserved to die for writing a novel. “When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes,” Rushdie has written, and the ordeal of The Satanic Verses presaged the ways the world would change. The big themes of the past quarter-century were previewed there: the rise of Islamist fanaticism; the inequities that sparked a growing rage toward Western values; the impact of media in a global epoch. The controversy made Rushdie, for his day, an archetypal man on the run—as Edward Snowden is for ours—and he has spent his life since then trying not to be defned by it. Underground, he was forced to take an alias, and he compounded the frst names of the authors Conrad and Chekhov into a nom de guerre. He titled his 2012 memoir of the ordeal for this alter ego—Joseph Anton—and wrote it in the third person, as if to slip out
of the skin of his notoriety. It is a bold, brave book: the narration makes us feel the fatwa closing in around him, and the story is one Kafka or Kubrick might have imagined, a religious war waged against an ordinary man. It works so well that it keeps us from seeing how powerfully the novel and the fatwa defined the age for the people who knew Rushdie then, worked on the book, and stood up for it. Twenty-fve years later, they decided to retrace those terrifying months, as did the author, who opened up to Vanity Fair. “The Satanic Verses is the frst chapter of the very long and unpleasant story that has, as one chapter, 9/11,” Ian McEwan says. “I initially read the book in purely literary terms—as an extraordinarily playful, exceedingly intelligent novel—and it’s taken all this time to wrench it back into the realm of the literary.” “It was the first taste we had of the theocratic sensibility,” remarks E. L. Doctorow, who was active in a campaign by pen (the global organization devoted to defending free expression) in support of The Satanic Verses. “It was our frst taste of the relationship between faith and violence in that part of the world.” Martin Amis (who in a 1990 piece in
Vanity Fair profiled his friend who had “vanished into the front page”) says the controversy forced writers to be “more serious” about their work—and their rivals’ work, too. “The notion that writers are a bitchy, touchy, catty, competitive crowd, always scoring points of each other—this was absolutely obliterated by the Rushdie afair,” he believes. “Any writer who was bitchy or catty looked very trivial after the fatwa, because it was a matter of life and death.”
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ushdie was already known as a provocateur when he was chosen for Granta’s first “Best of Young British Novelists” issue, in 1983, along with McEwan, Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Graham Swift, all of whom would become his friends. Already Midnight’s Children had won the Booker Prize—and had drawn legal action from India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who felt her family had been defamed by Rushdie’s portrait. (The case was settled out of court. The ofending sentence was struck from subsequent editions.) “Granta was based in Cambridge, and
LOOKED TRIVIAL AFTER THE FATWA,” SAYS MARTIN AMIS. M AY
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Salman came down for a reading in that interregnum [before the Booker],” remembers Bill Buford, the journal’s editor and an early champion. “I warned Salman, ‘Sometimes fve people show up.’ ” But this time “half the Anglo-Indian population of Cambridge was there. A woman stood up and said to Salman, ‘Thank you for being the frst person to write about my India.’ ”
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ushdie had left his homeland for England at age 13, following the path of his rich and dissolute father. As a student at Cambridge, and later as an adman with Ogilvy & Mather, he had an agonized relationship to India and Islam. He was an outsider in India (as a Muslim), in England (as a “wog”), and in Islam (as an unbeliever), all at once. So he made Midnight’s Children and its successor, Shame, which deals with Pakistan, novels about doubleness. “He knew he could write a book that the AngloAmerican critics would get—all the clever boys,” Buford says, “but what the clever boys weren’t getting is that he was writing for that other audience, too.” On a roll, Rushdie started a giant-size novel about India, Islam, and London. “I
didn’t know if it was one book or three,” he has said. “I must have been feeling very confdent. I’d had these two very successful books, and that put a lot of fuel in my tank, and I thought I could do anything.” He spent the next fve years writing The Satanic Verses, applying the magic-realist touch to headline news: terrorist airline hijackings, pilgrimages to Mecca, rough-andtumble immigrant London, and Thatcherera British unrest. He made the Prophet into a comic fgure called Mahound (Muhammad, put profanely). He etched an acid portrait of a “bearded and turbaned Imam” akin to Khomeini. He took the novel’s title from a passage of Koranic lore in which words in praise of gods other than Allah—female gods, no less—were said to have issued from the tongue of the Prophet, placed there by the Devil. In the novel, those words of praise would be Mahound’s own. “We don’t talk about our novels while we’re writing them, but he explained the ‘satanic verses’ to me at a party,” McEwan recalls. “It was all new to me.” He was becoming politically engaged: publishing a book in support of the Sandinistas, joining Harold Pinter’s group of writers against Thatcher, and evolving as a voice against racism in Thatcher’s En-
gland, telling white Britons that until they discarded their prejudices “the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.” But his real struggle was with the Verses. “I thought of the novel as a huge monster I was wrestling with,” he says. “I was often worried that I would not be able to get on top of the beast and pin it to the ground. [When it was done,] I was utterly exhausted. One holds so much of a novel in one’s head during the years of work that when it’s done and the thing in your head evaporates it’s a little like having your brain removed. I felt lobotomized.” He had reason to think that the novel would enchant the London smart set and would speak for England’s people of color. The protagonists were themselves divided: Saladin Chamcha, a businessman “torn, to put it plainly, between Bombay and London, between East and West,” and Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood flm star who “has lost his faith and is strung out between his immense need to believe and his new inability to do so.” Doubleness shaped the depiction of “Babylondon”—“its conglomerate nature mirroring his own”—and of religion, which at different points is treated profoundly, done up in Bollywood-
INTO THE FIRE
From left: Marianne Wiggins (carrying coat), Rushdie’s wife at the time, exits their London home, 1989. Protesters rally against the U.S. publication of The Satanic Verses, New York, 1989. A policeman stands guard outside the London offices of Penguin, the book’s publisher, 1989. More than 60 people died as a result of the fatwa; none were Penguin employees.
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bright cinematic hues, and mocked in the manner of the novel’s own “blood-praising versifers” and “lampoonist[s].” The Satanic Verses, says E. L. Doctorow, was a “kitchen-sink novel—one in which the author puts in everything he can think of.” A few friends read it early on. “It was one of the grandest books I could remember reading,” Buford insists. “But about halfway through I realized I didn’t have the cultural equipment to appreciate it. What I wanted was to say to Salman, Could we go for a weekend and talk about your book? But what Salman wanted to know was ‘Well, is it good or not?’ ”
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The Art of the Deal
ndrew Wylie, the literary agent, sold The Satanic Verses to Peter Mayer, the publisher of Viking Penguin, on the ides of March 1988. Mayer’s small, familyowned house, Overlook Press, had published Rushdie’s frst novel, Grimus, in the U.S., but had gotten priced out of publishing Midnight’s Children. Now he was in charge of an international publishing company and was in a position to reclaim his lost author in a big way.
Wylie was representing Rushdie for the frst time. Today Wylie is a potentate whose list of more than 700 clients is ftted to his taste as snugly as his bespoke suits. Then he was an outrider with a yen for hard cases—radical journalist I. F. Stone, for one—and a reputation for having been a Max’s Kansas City scene-maker (late nights, graphic verse, public spats). As the story goes, Wylie read Shame and got in touch—“When I’m in London, can we have a drink?”—and when Rushdie said yes, Wylie caught the next fight over. Rushdie rebufed him. Some months later Wylie called and told him he was en route to London again. “He said, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘Karachi.’ He said, ‘What are you doing in Karachi?’ I said, ‘Representing Benazir Bhutto.’ ” Wylie later said that he signed Bhutto—heir apparent to her executed father as prime minister of Pakistan—just to impress Rushdie. They met in London and soon Wylie was representing the author in the United States. And representing The Satanic Verses. “I frst read 100 pages—Salman sent them to me in New York,” he recalls today. “I was stunned by them—by the broad imagination, the rich style, the humor and intelligence of the text. I knew from the outset
that the book was a masterpiece᠁ It was on the basis of those pages that we developed the plan about how best to sell the book internationally.” Wylie proposed that the surest way to get a big advance was through a worldrights, English-language deal with himself as the deal-maker. Rushdie agreed and parted ways with his U.K. agent, Deborah Rogers, joining Wylie and his U.K. partner, Gillon Aitken. Wylie, good to his word, landed an astronomical sum from Mayer: $850,000. The publisher carried the bulky typescript to the Adelaide Festival and bestowed it on editor Tony Lacey, who read it in three days straight. “I remember being thrilled by it,” Lacey now says, “though for a publisher it’s hard to separate the genuine literary thrill from the excitement of being offered the new novel of a major writer.” Mayer says he “read the book in one go on a fight from New Zealand to England. I didn’t understand all of it, because I don’t know a great deal about Islam. I didn’t know that ‘Mahound’ was a dirty word. I don’t say it proudly,” he adds; his was typical of “our Western ignorance of other societies.” And the sprint toward publication began. Viking editor Nan Graham was assigned
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ankaj Mishra—one of the leading Indian writers of the generation after Rushdie—was 20 when word of the novel reached Varanasi, which had seen religious violence. “My first, non-literary, selfish thought,” he confesses, was: “I hope there isn’t another Hindu-Muslim, Muslimpolice riot here.” Mishra wound up reading the “bits about Islamic history” in a clandestine copy of The Satanic Verses “smuggled in by the visiting father of an American exchange student and passed around in brown paper covers.” That’s because the book had been banned in India after a friendly interview with Rushdie was headlined an unequivocal attack on religious fundamentalism. Soon enough, a Saudi-funded newspaper in London ran a story about it, and The Satanic Verses was condemned—sight unseen. It was published in London on September 26, 1988, with a dust jacket describing it as a “great wheel of a book.” Penguin took out
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an ad (“Wonderful stories and fights of the imagination surround the confict between good and evil”) and threw a launch party for its list of autumn titles, at which Rushdie met Elmore Leonard and Robertson Davies. Rushdie had a high-spirited dinner with his editors. Lacey, the book’s U.K. editor, recalls the relative naïveté of that evening: “Salman, my paperback colleague Tim Binding, and I vying over who could recite the most Bob Dylan lyrics.” The novel of doubleness led a double life that fall. In one, it was reviewed, bought, read, and discussed by London literary people. Was The Satanic Verses “several of the best novels that Rushdie has ever written” (Times Literary Supplement)? “A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes” (The Times)? Or an adventure in “unreadability” (Observer), a “wheel that did not turn” (The Independent)? In its other life it was condemned by people who hadn’t read it. “I do not have to wade through a flthy drain,” said one detractor, “to know what flth is.” Much of the controversy centered on dream sequences involving the Prophet, which were photocopied and passed from imam to imam, such as the sequence in which the agonized unbeliever, Gibreel, dreams of a brothel where the prostitutes take the names of the Prophet’s 12 wives, the better to lure men of the pilgrim path. Rushdie had wrestled the beast to the ground—but the beast was still a beast. Penguin hoped that a second Booker Prize for him might quell the controversy. Bruce Chatwin—whose novel Utz was short-listed alongside The Satanic Verses— had suggested to Rushdie that they should make a plan to share the prize if either of them won. Rushdie and Peter Carey—nominated for Oscar and Lucinda—joked about the award. “I hope you win,” Rushdie said. “I couldn’t win if I wrote Ulysses.” On the night of the ceremony, security ofcers at the Guildhall detained a man who claimed he was a reporter named Salaman. As the short list was read out, a joker in the crowd gesticulated wildly, pretending that a bomb had just gone of. The Booker went to Peter Carey. In the weeks that followed, there was no groundswell among expat South Asian Muslims saying that the novel spoke for them. Instead, there were death threats and burnings of the author in efgy. Things started small, with a letter one imam addressed to a “Brother in Islam” calling for a signature campaign against “this Satanic book.” Only 20 people showed up for a demonstration in Bradford, in northern England. A burning of the novel near Man-
chester drew several thousand—but no media coverage. Wised up, some imams put out a press release before another burning—outside the Bradford police station. The size of the volume—542 pages—made it hard to ignite, one imam later claimed, laughing, “so we had to actually fnd a can of petrol to pour on the book.” It burned, eventually, and the stories plastered across the tabloids the next few days enshrined “the Rushdie afair” alongside the Sex Pistols, striking coal miners, and I.R.A. bombings as one of the peaks of post-Empire British discontent. “This is, for me, the saddest irony of all,” Rushdie said a while later, “that after working for fve years to give voice and fctional fesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might fnd some pleasure and much recognition in its pages.” It was darkly ironic, too, that the events swirling around the book—charges of blasphemy, demonstrations, book burnings, an imam fghting “by proxy”—could be found in its pages. The Satanic Verses was not just provocative: it was prescient. In its bravura opening passage, the protagonists Saladin and Gibreel—passengers ejected from a hijacked aircraft after a bomb explodes in midair—talk wildly to each other as they plummet to earth over the English Channel. That December, with the book in shops across the British Isles, Libyan terrorists exploded a Pan Am fight over Lockerbie, Scotland (a city mentioned in the book)—an attack that killed 270 people.
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here was a further irony, remembers author Reza Aslan—the Iranian-born American Muslim who ran into controversy last summer with his book on the historical Jesus. It’s that The Satanic Verses, as he reckons, actually wasn’t all that ofensive. “The view is that the novel presents a view of Islam that is profoundly heretical,” he says. “But for anyone with some knowledge of the Koran and the controversy, the surprise is how orthodox the novel is in its treatment of Islam. The passages about the satanic verses are perfectly in line” with many traditional commentators on the Koran. In line with scholars, yes—and yet both observant and secular British Muslims were outraged, A LOOMING marching against PRESENCE the novel near the Salman Rushdie, writer, London, Iranian Embassy on September 26, 1994. Hyde Park. “I tried to write against MAY
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to shepherd Rushdie’s book into print, and she enlisted as a second reader Chuck Verrill, who had recently “inherited” another Viking author, Stephen King. “It came in a box from Wylie: this extraordinary fatherson story, and an immigrant story, too,” explains Graham, now publisher of Scribner. “And funny too—though I worried that he called Mrs. Thatcher ‘Mrs. Torture.’ Here was a novel saying, ‘I am the colonized and I will speak your language better than you do—I will outsmart the colonizer.’ ” “The manuscript arrived trailing clouds of glory,” one former Viking colleague contends. “Peter decided that this was the book we would take into the major leagues of world literature, and when the big guy is saying that, the company falls in line.” Viking U.K. ordered a frst printing of 23,500 copies—sizable for little England. In New York, Graham pushed hard for 100,000 copies and a party at Da Silvano, in Greenwich Village. “We had an expensive immigration story to publish, and we had to be very ambitious. We told [the reps] what we had—that this was the greatest piece of literature to cross our desks in a very long time.” Publishing dates were staggered to create buzz: a British rollout in September; a U.S. debut the following February. Meanwhile, the head of Penguin India asked Mayer to let him delay publishing the novel to avoid triggering any public backlash. “Their order was for something like 200 copies,” Mayer recalls, “so I said, All right.”
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stereotypes,” Rushdie wrote, but “the zeal ot protests serve to confrm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Mus lim world.” Bruce Chatwin died; Marianne Wig gins told Rushdie that she was leaving him. Even so, he accompanied her to her own book party at Michelin House, in Chel sea, and all eyes were on them. “She and Salman were glissant, in pride,” the poet Robin Robertson recalls. “Then a wait ress dropped a tray of champagne and the whole place went silent.”
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Occupational Hazards
iking Penguin’s New York offices were located in a castiron building on 23rd Street between Fifth and Sixth. Just before the novel came out in America, there was a series of bomb scares. The offices were evacuated each time, leaving the staf to stand on the sidewalk for a couple of hours—“and it was winter,” one employee recalls. “It was cold out there.” “You would hope to fnd a phone booth where you could keep doing your work,” Nan Graham recalls. “Or I would finish lunch and call the office to see whether we were open—because otherwise I would just edit at the restaurant: at least it was warm there.” On some days the company would re main closed until the next morning, and em ployees would decamp to McQuaids or the Old Town Bar. A young man in editorial and a young woman in sales were turning the pages of The Village Voice on the sidewalk one afternoon when the word of closure came. There was an old Fellini flm playing at Cinema Village. They made a date of it. Eventually, they fell in love and got married. Gallows humor went around: If I have to get killed for literature, does it have to be for this guy? In London, authorities stationed police outside Penguin’s Kensington ofces and set up a metal detector. Penguin beefed up security in New York too. Fretful parents of assistants called Mayer and urged him to pull the book. At least one U.S. stafer quit rather than work in fear; another sought treatment for anxiety. Two dogs that sniffed mail—Sailor and Yalta—became known to all. “I didn’t know that it was an occupa tional hazard being a publisher,” Peter Mayer now says, seated in his smokeflled
SoHo ofce, at Overlook Press, which he rejoined after leaving Penguin in 1996. He recalls a bloodspattered letter that showed up at his apartment in Kensington; in New York, his young daughter was threatened, and parents at St. Luke’s School, on Hud son Street, asked him to withdraw her, lest a death squad come to the school and shoot the wrong student. He heard the same argument from the board in a building where he was try ing to land a coop: “ ‘What if the killers come and they go to the wrong door?’ I said, ‘The wrong door? You mean, if they come to my door, it’s the right door?’ ”
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Going Underground
ondon’s Reform Club, on the Pall Mall, has had many illustrious authors as mem bers: Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster—and Graham Greene, who, one winter’s day in 1989, lunched at the club with international writ ers living in London. “Rushdie!” he called out. “Come and sit here and tell me how you managed to make so much trouble! I never made nearly as much trouble as that!” “This was oddly comforting,” Rushdie recalled. England’s most famous living au thor was making light of the fx he was in. Then the fatwa against The Satanic Verses came down and things turned nasty, and London literary society took sides. “Nobody has a Godgiven right to insult a great religion,” John le Carré bellowed in The Guardian, “and be published with im punity.” He also proposed that Rushdie do the right thing and withdraw the book. V. S. Naipaul, who felt he had been taken to task for his own acid portrait of Kho meini in Among the Believers, decried the support for Rushdie as hypocrisy: “Certain causes are good, and then other causes be come good. Now the good people are say ing something else. I wish the good people were a little more consistent.” Germaine Greer (that good feminist) would eventually mock Rushdie as “a meg alomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin.” John Berger (that good Marxist) urged Rushdie to tell his publishers to cease and desist so as to stop a “holy war” before it started. Roald Dahl (beloved children’sbook author, professed antiSemite) was the most open in his contempt. “Clearly he has
profound knowledge of the Muslim reli gion and its people and he must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feel ings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and he cannot plead otherwise.” The Satanic Verses was selling strongly, and Dahl insisted that Rushdie had stirred up trouble to get “an indifer ent book onto the top of the bestseller list.” Dahl added dismissively: “He seems to be regarded as some sort of a hero᠁ To my mind, he is a dangerous opportunist.” The “hero,” meanwhile, was on the move. “I was hauled out of an editorial meeting” to take a call from Rushdie, British editor Tony Lacey recalls, “and I had to ask him what a fatwa was: I’d never heard the word. He said he would be going into hiding.” From hiding, Rushdie issued a state ment of regret for “the distress that publica tion has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sen sibilities of others.” From Tehran, Khomei ni doubled down: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell.” Reza Aslan, looking back (he was a teen ager when the book came out), says this was no surprise. Iran had just ended an eight year war with Iraq, and Khomeini was ea ger to change the subject. And this new war was personal. “An ofense against early Is lam—that, in the end, wasn’t the reason for the fatwa,” Aslan says. “The book’s vision of the blackturbaned mullah who opens his jaws and swallows innocent people—that is what was ofensive to Khomeini.” Rushdie’s friends circled round him. Deborah Rogers—the agent he had dis missed in favor of Wylie—put their rift behind them and suggested her country place as a safe house: who would look for him at a cottage owned by the agent he’d just dumped? Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser hosted a stealth reunion of Rush die’s family at their house on Campden Hill Square. As Ian McEwan lent Rushdie his cottage in Gloucestershire, a routine was taking shape, McEwan says: “Security people making a sweep of the house, and then Salman bounding in with a strange mixture of high energy, craziness, and re lief that he was all right.”
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Spotlight Rushdie: “It was the frst time I’d been able to meet with any of my friends since February 14᠁ We had a ridiculously fun ny and relaxed dinner together, as if we were all colluding in a fction of ‘normality.’ ” McEwan: “I remember standing the next morning with Salman in the country kitchen, a gray English morning, and he was the lead item on the BBC—another Middle East figure saying he too would condemn him to death. It was a very sad moment—standing buttering toast and lis tening to that awful message on the radio.” Rushdie: “Ian was very upset. For me, there were threats like this every day, some times two or three times᠁ I was shaken, I’m sure, but Ian is a loving man, and I think he was even more shaken than I was by the violence of the assault on his friend.” The British establishment set itself against the book and its author: from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie (who invoked England’s blasphemy laws), to the foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe (who deemed the novel “extremely critical [and] rude” about Britain). Even Jimmy Carter—he whose presidency had been quashed by Khomeini—weighed in against the “insult to the sacred beliefs of our Mos lem friends.” “I had an argument with Prince Charles at a small dinner party,” Martin Amis rec ollects. “He said—very typically, it seems to me—‘I’m sorry, but if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions, well then,’ blah blah blah … And I said that a novel doesn’t set out to insult anyone. ‘It sets out to give pleasure to its readers,’ I told him. ‘A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel.’ “The Prince took it on board, but I’d suppose the next night at a diferent party he would have said the same thing.”
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The Columns
alman Rushdie, in short order, was England’s most famous liv ing author, but he couldn’t go to America to promote his new book, such was the challenge of remaining among the living. There would be no canapés at Da Silvano. Instead, there would be a book launch like no other. At midday Wednesday, Feb ruary 22, a cadre of writers met at Jerry’s, on Prince Street, in Lower Manhattan, and then strode in the rain to the Columns, a loft
ADDRESS.” M AY
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A GIRL for all SEASONS Kiernan Shipka, photographed on Point Dume State Beach, in Malibu, California. SHIPKA WEARS A DRESS BY BALENCIAGA, JEWELRY BY TIFFANY & CO.; SHOES BY TABITHA SIMMONS.
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iernan Shipka is the 14-year-old actress who plays Sally Draper on Mad Men. She was six when she started working on the series, which debuted in 2007, and as Jon Hamm, who plays Don Draper, Sally’s dad, points out, “She’s been on the show longer than she hasn’t, in her life. That’s just a function of math.” She is, he says, “a preternaturally mature kid, and a pleasure to be around—in a way that sometimes most kids that age can not be so fun to be around.” Perspective she has in unyouthful abundance. “It’s such a blessing to be able to play a character for as long as any of us on the show have,” she told me recently over iced coffee. “And to play someone from the age of six while also being six, and then growing into a teenager.... To be able to evolve as a character like that is something you don’t get to do very often.” Indeed you don’t: actors two or three times her age would kill for a part like Sally. Across the series’ six seasons—its seventh and final season begins in April, a split run (ugh) that will conclude next year—Sally has become an increasingly central and interesting character, a victim of her parents’ neglect, or worse, but an observant one, and with a sharp tongue, for whatever soupçon of protection that’s worth. Last season she came to realize how little she really knew about her father, then—T.M.I.!—caught him on top of his latest mistress. Meanwhile, mom Betty’s finest moment of parenting came when she offered Sally a cigarette by way of mother-daughter détente. “That was definitely one of my favorite Sally moments,” Shipka said, “to see her smoke for the first time when the first time we ever saw her she —BRUCE HANDY was small and chubby and had a lisp.” Our little girl, all grown up. PH OTO GRA PH
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space near Houston Street. Several thousand people were in line outside. The occasion was a reading from The Satanic Verses, marking publication day. Across the street, a counterdemonstration was under way. “There was never an easier situation for pen: a respected Anglo-Indian with pals in London and New York’s literary circles versus the bearded brute in Iran,” Gay Talese refects. “We were all on a ‘safe’ and locally popular issue, for a change.” As Rushdie tells it in his memoir, the reading came about after Susan Sontag—who was president of pen—“whipped” her fellow writers into line. A photo from the next day’s Times shows an impressive row of New York literary lions: Sontag, tightly wound; Talese and Doctorow, somber in jackets and ties; Mailer loose of coat and collar; DeLillo staring at the camera from the background. Here again, like the gathering of the literary tribe at that church in London a few weeks earlier, were a generation’s great voices coming together with great clarity of purpose to recognize a writer’s life. The idea for the gathering came from Gerald Marzorati, who had carved out an excerpt of the book that ran in the December Har per’s, and then wrote a Rushdie profle for The New York Times Magazine. Why not a public reading of Rushdie’s novel, to be coordinated by pen and Harper’s publisher John “Rick” MacArthur? “I was given the task of choosing excerpts because very few people in New York had actually read the book,” Marzorati says, pointing out that the roster of participants was very broad—from Abbie Hofman on the left to Midge Decter on the right. Edward Said was there; so was Leon Wieseltier. Robert Caro was there; so was Tom Wolfe. Joan Didion was there; so was Larry McMurtry. The Columns held 500 people, and as the writers entered, cries could be heard from the demonstrators outside. “Death to Rushdie! Death to Rushdie!” The frst author stood up to read, and his opening remark was a kind of answer. “My name is Robert Stone,” he said, “but today we are all Salman Rushdie.” They read and spoke into the evening. Mailer said of the fatwa, “This must be the largest hit contract in history.” Talese recited the Lord’s Prayer. Wieseltier declared that “one day the Muslim world may recall with admiration its late-20th-century Anglo-Indian Voltaire.” Rushdie’s close friend Christopher Hitchens transformed a single sentence from the novel into a brilliant defense of the whole: “To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be—Mahound.” “It was inspiring and electrifying,” recalls Gerald Howard, a former Viking editor who was there. “It broke the fever of fear the literary world was living in.” 192
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here was one more surprise. A few days earlier B. Dalton had announced plans not to sell The Satanic Verses, and Waldenbooks decided to remove it from its shelves. This in turn had prompted a call for readers to boycott the two chains. At the Columns, writers denounced the giant booksellers; yet at the same time, many worried about the impact that a boycott might have on sales of their own books. Viking’s Nan Graham and Chuck Verrill got an idea. Maybe the king of horror fction could make this particular horror story turn out right. They reached out to Stephen King. And King called B. Dalton’s chief, Leonard Riggio, the same day. King gave Riggio an ultimatum: “You don’t sell The Satanic Verses, you don’t sell Stephen King.” B. Dalton carried The Satanic Verses—and sold it by the thousands. “You can’t let intimidation stop books,” King now says, recalling the episode. “It’s as basic as that. Books are life itself.” It felt like an ending. But the story of the story that is The Satanic Verses was just beginning. In the next few months it would play out daily, through events reported in the news section of the papers rather than the review pages. Bombs exploded in Cody’s bookstore, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and half a dozen bookshops in the U.K. The novel’s Japanese translator was shot and killed, its Italian translator stabbed, its Turkish translator attacked. Its Norwegian publisher was shot and left for dead. (He survived.) Two clerics who spoke out against the fatwa—one Saudi, one Tunisian—were shot and killed in Brussels. New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor derided the book (which he had not read), prompting an aggrieved open letter in the Times from 17 Catholic writers. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau devoted a week of “Doonesbury” to reporting the verdicts of the Tehranbased “Islamic Revolutionary Critics Circle,” which recommended “death by stoning for Leo Buscaglia, Erica Jong and Donald Trump,” and condemned Jefrey Archer, Eric Segal, Jackie Collins, and Michael Korda—the last “for his turgid prose in The Fortune.” Rushdie was now “a man with no fixed address” and a visit to him was a madcap affair. “I was told to go to a gay cruising area of Regent’s Park,” Marzorati says. “A guy would approach me and ask for a light, and I was to whisper a sentence I had been told to memorize. Then I was taken to a car, placed in the back, blindfolded, and driven to a safe house, which I have always thought was in Camden Town. There I found Rushdie, among his guards—already two-thirds of the way through a bottle of red wine—pufy, sleepless, heavier than when I had seen him last. We fnished a second bottle of wine. He was scared—mostly, I think, of the thought that this was the rest of his life. And who wouldn’t be? Of course, it wasn’t the rest of his life, except it was.” Rushdie embraced Islam; then, just as sud-
denly, he turned away. Many in England’s Old Guard rounded on him, having figured out that he was a popular cause but not a popular person. Sir Stephen Spender coolly explained that “it is mass immigration that has got him into the trouble in which he now fnds himself.” Former prime minister Edward Heath lamented that Rushdie’s “wretched book” had cost Great Britain “masses of trade.” Auberon Waugh asked “just how much we should exert ourselves, as deeply stained white imperialists, to protect him from his own people.” Hugh Trevor-Roper trumpeted that he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring [Rushdie’s] manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”
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n the following months two big things happened. The Ayatollah Khomeini—aged 89—died in Tehran, leaving the fatwa in place. And Penguin opted not to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback. A milestone in the annals of free speech degenerated into an episode in the history of corporate compromise. “We had a board meeting where the members were split right down the middle,” Tony Lacey remembers. “Editorial (me and others) [were] arguing for publication; others [were] arguing very powerfully that we had too many vulnerable employees around the world— someone saying it wasn’t us that would get attacked but somebody running a Penguin offce in Athens or Istanbul. “Peter [Mayer] swayed the meeting towards publication, and we decided to do it. But that very night a small incendiary device was thrown into a London bookshop, and the following day we postponed the decision.” Mayer insists that he and Penguin struck the right balance: they published the book, they held their ground in the face of great pressure to withdraw it, and they kept everybody safe. More than 60 people died in the controversy. None were Penguin employees. Andrew Wylie scofs at the idea that Penguin’s decision was an agonized response to rapidly unfolding events. “There was a concerted efort by the U.S. and U.K. publishing community to block the paperback publication,” he says frmly. “That efort was spearheaded by Peter Mayer of Penguin᠁ It was shameful, really; there was nothing admirable about it.” Gradually, Rushdie began to appear in public: led through a back door into Waterstones Piccadilly; conveyed by motorcade to Columbia University; taken by the Royal Air Force to Washington, where he lunched in secret with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other senators at the Capitol, then surreptitiously took tea with Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham in Georgetown. But he would be a man with no fxed address for another decade—into the age of Bridget Jones and Monica Lewinsky, of Amazon and al-Qaeda. MAY
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hen a book leaves its author’s desk it changes.” The world changes with it, and so does literature, if the book is strong enough. The Satanic Verses is a worldchanging book. In 1991, Don DeLillo brought out Mao II, a novel organized around the twin towers of literature and terrorism and featuring a writer in hiding. In 1993, Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and among those implicated was a blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had denounced The Satanic Verses. Amis, McEwan, and Hitchens were turning more and more to the subjects of terror and radical fundamentalism, and after the Trade Center was destroyed, claiming nearly 3,000 lives, the writers amped up the volume. “We respect Islam—the donor of countless benefts to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history,” Amis wrote, “but Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination.” McEwan focused a novel— Saturday—around a rally in London against the war in Iraq. Hitchens articulated his fervor against “Islamofascism,” eventually speaking out against all organized religion and explain-
ing how the events of 1989—when “my friend Salman Rushdie was hit by a simultaneous death sentence and life sentence, for the crime of writing a work of fction”—contributed to his eventual view that “religion kills.” By then Salman Rushdie had moved to New York and taken up an emphatically public life with Padma Lakshmi, the model and actress turned gourmand. Their life became a thousand and one nights chronicled unkindly in the tabloids, whose columnists seemed to begrudge him his very existence. He had close friends in America. Wylie was in New York, Hitchens was in Washington, and in time Martin Amis would join them, settling in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the Atlantic Avenue import shops, many of their signs in Arabic. “The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one,” Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses, and he has asserted the fact of his aliveness. In the quarter-century since the fatwa, he has published a dozen books and given scores of public readings and addresses. In 2007 departing prime minister Tony Blair successfully recommended him for knighthood. He has fulfilled a lifelong dream of
adapting Midnight’s Children into a feature flm. And he has seen The Satanic Verses become, remarkably, just another great book on history’s shelf, regarded less as a forbidden book (talk of the fatwa has diminished with the years) than as a classic of contemporary English-language literature. Christopher Hitchens’s very public passing from cancer in 2011 prompted Rushdie to refect on death and his friend. “With most writers, you can see the arc of the work,” he told Hitchens’s widow, Carol Blue, “and you know where the career is going. But with Christopher it’s as if he was stopped midsentence.” It is easy to forget, but Rushdie’s career might have ended midsentence, too. �
Midtown’s New Skyline
apartments at One57 would be commodities for investment, sold to limited-liability companies that had been created to shield the identities of their rich owners, people from around the world who would spend, at most, a few weeks a year there. From time to time, Barnett fgured, he would sell an apartment to a couple or a family who actually cared about what the place would feel like to wake up in every morning and to commute to work and take their children to school from, but these people, the ones for whom One57 would be a primary residence, were relatively few. Until recently, high-end residential real estate in New York meant venerable old cooperative apartment buildings on Fifth and Park Avenues and Central Park West. How could a new building without the history and solid, dignifed aura of, say, 1040 Fifth Avenue sell for prices that were even higher? But co-op buildings are strange animals, since you aren’t technically buying an apartment in them but rather shares of stock in a tenant-controlled corporation that owns the building, and every buyer is required to submit to a complex process of interviews, financial disclosures, and board approvals. In a co-op, you can’t hide your identity by buying your apartment in the name of a limited-liability corporation, but L.L.C.’s are an everyday occurrence in the New York City condominium market. Everything about the city’s co-op buildings, on the other hand, is structured to make it impossible to treat them as commodities. That, however, is precisely what the new condominiums are: tradable commodities, perfect for the speculatively inclined. They
are places in which to park your cash as well as yourself and maintain your privacy in the bargain. Fueling the market still more is the fact that New York real estate has been seen for a while as both safer and more reasonably priced than real estate in much of the rest of the world. However irrational the prices of the new wave of super-luxury condominiums look to New Yorkers, these properties are cheaper than their counterparts in Hong Kong and London, which have sold for as much as $221 million. Not for nothing did Jonathan J. Miller of the real-estate appraisal frm Miller Samuel call the new condominiums “the equivalent of bank safe deposit boxes in the sky that buyers can put all their valuables in and rarely visit.”
he would be ahead of the curve, the only developer ready with brand-new, super-luxury apartments when the next wave began. “We had a hole in the ground—what else could we do?” Barnett said to me as a way of justifying his decision to move forward. Still, his reasoning was counter-intuitive, since real estate usually lags economic recoveries rather than leads them. At a time when the best apartments in the city were going begging, the notion of adding a slew of new ones at higher prices than the apartments going unsold seemed nothing short of madness. But Barnett knew he wasn’t building for conventional buyers who were subject to normal economic cycles. Like Nick and Christian Candy, the brothers in London who built the absurdly expensive One Hyde Park Tower, or Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, another pair of siblings in the development business, who fnished 15 Central Park West just before the last downturn, Barnett had no illusion that he was building homes for people to actually live in. He knew that most of the C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 176
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FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE • Salman
Rushdie, out of the shadows
(Martin Amis, December 1990) • In defense of Salman Rushdie and the written
word (Christopher Hitchens, February 2009) • Remembering
Christopher Hitchens
(Salman Rushdie, February 2012)
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arnett’s financing partners accepted his rationale that, since the apartments in his building were going to be bought by people who were largely insulated from the efects of the recession, there was no reason to wait until the economy had fully revived to get the project started. Mere confdence that the world was not going to collapse altogether was enough. He started foundation work on One57 in 2010, when the rest of the real-estate industry, which was putting up buildings not as commodities but as places for people to live or work, was still in the dumps. De Portzamparc, in an unhappy concession to tighter economic circumstances, simplified his design, making the building’s façades flatter. The design compromises were not matched by price concessions, however. One57’s initial prices averaged $5,889 per square foot, www.vanityfair.com
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Midtown’s New Skyline and sales moved at such a fast clip that Extell raised the prices several times as the building was going up. Barnett famously refused to negotiate with interested parties, and they were not permitted into the building as it was going up. They could see nothing except plans and full-scale mock-ups of kitchens, bathrooms, and views in a sales center that Extell constructed in an ofce building two blocks away, its rooms lined with the same marble that was being used in the actual building. The center was intended to set a tone of such elegance that haggling over price would feel unseemly. A visit began with a 45-second flm of fowing water that gradually took the shape of the building, an allusion to de Portzamparc’s idea of cascading water. From there a potential buyer would move into a room with a six-foothigh model of the building at its center, and then, if inclined to get serious, go through another series of doors into the mock-ups of kitchens and bathrooms. The notion was to capture the imagination and to move, step by step, from mood setting to reality. It was enough to bring in a number of early buyers, including a Chinese mother who bought a modest ($6.5 million) unit for her two-year-old daughter; two investors, one from Hong Kong and one from Montreal, who are behind the fnancial success of the Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfger labels and who each spent around $50 million on a fullfoor unit; and Ackman, who put together a consortium of investors to buy an enormous six-bedroom duplex with a glass-enclosed “winter garden” at one of the building’s highest setbacks, on the 75th and 76th foors. They are presumably counting on the possibility that in a few years the apartment will be worth several times the $90 million they paid for it.
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arnett’s success with One57 left other developers to play catch-up. He himself has been so emboldened by One57 that he decided to try to do it again only a block away, in a building at 225 West 57th Street that will have a Nordstrom department store at its base. (One57 will have a Park Hyatt hotel on its lower foors.) The Nordstrom tower, which is being designed by the Chicago architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, will also be of glass, but more angular in shape than One57. And Steven Roth, of Vornado, another of the city’s most active developers, has hired Robert A. M. Stern, the apostle of traditional architecture who designed 15 Central Park West, to do a super-tall tower at 220 Central Park South, just north of Barnett’s Nordstrom tower. The early renderings for the Vornado tower show a thinner, more elongated version of his Central Park West building, mimicking the style of the past but recasting it into
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a shape that is very much of the present. The Vornado project and the new Extell project almost prevented each other from happening. In a sequence of events that makes clear how much New York real estate is part blood sport, part chess game, and part absurdist farce, Barnett had begun assembling the site for his building in 2005, the same year that Roth purchased an old rental apartment building at 220 Central Park South as a future development site. Barnett realized that if Roth put up a tall building on his Central Park South site it would block the all-important park views from his own site immediately to the south. So Barnett managed, without Roth’s knowledge, to purchase the lease for the Vornado building’s parking garage along with a small parcel in the middle of the larger development site. For more than seven years he refused to give them up, preventing Roth from redeveloping the site even after he had bought out the apartment tenants and cleared the building to prepare for its demolition. Roth sued Barnett to try to evict him from the garage, to no avail. The deadlock lasted until last fall, when, unwilling to sacrifice the vast profits that each was preventing the other from realizing, the men made a deal under which Vornado paid Extell $194 million for its parcel and some additional development rights and agreed to shift the site of the Stern-designed tower to the western edge of the Central Park South site. In exchange, Barnett agreed to push his tower slightly to the east, giving it a more or less open view to the park. One catch: the shift meant that the Extell tower would now be cantilevered over one of the city’s most distinguished landmarks, the Art Students League. The League received nearly $50 million for the privilege of giving Extell its development rights and permission to have the new building stick out over its roof. The Art Students League, which was designed in 1892 by Henry J. Hardenbergh, the architect of the Dakota and the Plaza hotel, is a city landmark, which means that the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission had the right to pass judgment on the design. The commission decided that having a 1,400-foot structure looming over the League building would not negatively impact the landmark. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times, likened the relationship between the two buildings to “a giant with one foot raised, poised to squash a poodle.”
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Keeping Up Appearances
ecause One57 is the first super-tall, super-thin building, it has become a lightning rod for criticism, and Barnett, who until now has been one of the city’s more publicity-averse developers, has assumed the role of lead public defender of the new super-tall towers. He was the only developer who appeared on the panel at a public forum about
the new buildings last February, where he walked into a lion’s den of 425 people, most of whom seemed to view the towers with feelings ranging from dismay to outrage. He followed up his appearance with a piece in The New York Observer in which he claimed that One57 “will generate more than $1 billion in real estate, sales, hotel occupancy and other taxes” over the next two decades. It is easy to think of the super-tall, ultraluxury towers as a story more about money than about design, and to a certain degree it is. But if the frst two buildings, One57 and 432 Park Avenue, are any indication, the interiors, at least, are designed to an exacting standard, with extremely high ceilings and expansive rooms to go with the awesome views, as if the developers realized that at prices upwards of $8,000 a square foot they couldn’t get away with the mean little rooms and cheap fnishes that they might peddle elsewhere. As Barnett said to me, “They’re getting something for their $40 or $50 million.” (Well, yes, you’d hope.) He added, “These people don’t want to get squeezed into a small box.” Both buildings have elegant bathrooms that are more in line with what you would expect to find in a custom, one-of-akind interior than a developer-supplied one. And both buildings have spectacular kitchens, which will in all likelihood prove once again the maxim that in New York the better equipped an apartment kitchen is, the less cooking goes on within it. Despite the garishness of One57’s exterior, I’m not ready to write of the entire super-thin, super-tall building type as incompatible with serious architecture. Viñoly’s 432 Park, on the outside, is as sophisticated as One57 is glitzy. Its façade is a fat, minimalist grid of smoothly finished concrete. As one looks at the building it’s hard not to think of Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect who is famous for making concrete feel more sensual and luxurious than marble. To some people, concrete is still concrete, no matter how refned its fnish, so you have to give Macklowe some credit for not pandering to the lowest common denominator of moneyed taste. Macklowe’s own apartment, in the Plaza, was designed by the late Charles Gwathmey, who did a great deal to shape the developer’s taste and gave him an obsession for detail that is more characteristic of an architect than a proft-driven builder. In the case of 432 Park, Macklowe seems not to have cut any corners; his philosophy has been to spend as much as it takes and fgure he’ll get it back by charging sky-high prices, like the $74.5 million he is asking for the full-foor apartment on the 87th foor, or the $30.75 million he wants for a threebedroom apartment down on the 64th foor. The tower is an essay in pure geometric form: it is a perfect square in plan, and rises straight up, without a single setback; all four façades are identical, made up of a grid of windows, every one of which is roughly 10 feet square. No windows are bigger, and no MAY
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windows are smaller. If the windows didn’t have glass in them, the whole building would look like one of Sol LeWitt’s tower sculptures from the 1980s. Macklowe is trying to sell restraint and opulence at the same time, which is not an easy task. To do it, he revved up a marketing campaign that is even more elaborate than the One57 efort, with a huge sales ofce in the General Motors Building that, like the one for One57, replicates fnishes, kitchens, and bathrooms of the apartments, which were designed by Deborah Berke, not Viñoly. There is also a hardcover book, a special magazine, and a Web site (with text in English, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, French, and Italian) that allows you to see virtual images of fnished apartments and photographs of the actual views from fve selected heights. The climactic moment in the sales center comes when you see the moodsetting film, produced by the design agency dBox, that shows images of luxury—think British country houses, private jets—that morph into images of 432 Park, all to the background music of Mama Cass singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Never has austerity seemed so alluringly posh, not to say decadent. If the size of the 432 Park Avenue tower, which replaces the old Drake Hotel, seems out of scale with its surroundings—which it is—it’s worth noting that it’s not the frst residential building in the neighborhood to have that problem. Diagonally across the street is the building that might be considered the true first super-tall, super-thin residential tower, the Ritz Tower. It was built in 1925 to the designs of Emery Roth and Carrere & Hastings, and it rose 41 stories to 541 feet, a height that seemed every bit as outrageous in the 1920s as 1,396 feet does now. Ayn Rand was almost surely referring to the ornate Ritz Tower in The Fountainhead when she wrote disdainfully of “a Renaissance palace made of rubber and stretched to the height of forty stories.” Two other new towers in the 57th Street
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when she concluded by saying, “There’s a lot of antiSemitism out there.” I nodded because I think she’s right: there is a lot of antiSemitism out there. And because over the C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 14 9
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area have to be considered as architectural efforts at least as serious as 432 Park. The frst, 53 West 53rd Street, the tapered tower beside the Museum of Modern Art, was designed by Jean Nouvel several years ago for the Hines development frm but has been delayed since 2009. The tallest tower that is not on a wide street or avenue, it has gained some notoriety because of MoMA’s plans to expand into its lower floors and in the process demolish a small architectural gem, the former American Folk Art Museum, built in 2001.
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On the Up-and-Up
nd then there is 111 West 57th Street, designed by the architectural firm SHoP, which will be the thinnest tower of all, and quite possibly the most elegant: 1,397 feet, balanced on a base only 60 feet wide. The builders of 111 West 57th are Kevin Maloney of Property Markets Group and Michael Stern, the head of JDS Development Group. Stern broke into the Manhattan luxury market just recently by converting an old Art Deco telephoneexchange building on West 18th Street into the exceptionally sophisticated—and exceptionally successful—Walker Tower. Stern is a passionate enthusiast of New York architectural history (he named the 18th Street building for its original architect, Ralph Walker), and he seems genuinely eager to add to that history. His tower, which will be sheathed mostly in glass on its north and south sides and will have supporting walls covered in bronze and terra-cotta on the east and west, will be slipped beside, and rise above, another landmark, the handsome, limestone-clad ofce building that houses Steinway Hall, the ornate piano showroom, at its base. SHoP’s design partners, Gregg Pasquarelli and Vishaan Chakrabarti, said that what they wanted most of all was to design a building that would feel as if it belonged in New York and no other place—that “has the DNA of New York, so you will know it wasn’t plucked of the skyline of Shanghai or
course of her career she’s consistently shown concern for the larger world—stumping for the Democratic presidential candidate in the last three elections, hosting fund-raisers for Obama, serving as Oxfam’s “global ambassador”—I trust her when she tells me that she researched SodaStream and found it to be a responsible and ethical operation. And because while I believe that people’s anger at Israeli occupation of Arab land is legitimate and real, I also believe that people’s anger at Scarlett’s association with SodaStream is, if not misdirected, then at least not proportional. (Note: This shitstorm too would pass. Scarlett continued to stand by SodaStream, even though it meant she and Oxfam had to call it quits. Then Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz tour started—onstage antics
Hong Kong,” as Pasquarelli said to me. The building will rise straight up on its northern side, facing the park, but on the south it will gently set back in a series of steps so that the north-south dimension of the tower gradually gets thinner and thinner until it has no depth at all at the top and becomes just a glass wall at the building’s crown. It is a subtle and graceful re-interpretation in modern form of the stepped-back, “wedding cake” towers of New York’s past, seasoned by a sprinkling of a classic New York material, terra-cotta, all put together in a way that makes deft use of today’s technology. Of all the new towers, it is the only one that gets ever more delicate as it rises, ending not with a climactic crown but by almost disappearing into the sky. These buildings have already given the 21st-century skyline the same kind of shock that the Ritz Tower gave it in the 1920s, when living 40 stories into the sky seemed brazen. Whatever impact all of this has on the cityscape, it will also have an efect on the handful of people who will live in these buildings, many of whom probably see these aeries as a chance to distract themselves from the ordinary woes that mere mortals sufer on the ground. Can height buy happiness? A few years after the Ritz Tower opened, the Waldorf Towers climbed even higher. Cole Porter maintained an apartment there for years. Could that be why he wrote a song that ended with the words “down in the depths of the ninetieth foor”? �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE • Paul
Goldberger’s Manhattan architecture tour: 15 Central Park West (September 2008), IAC headquarters (June 2007), the New York Public Library (December 2012)
• Matt
Tyrnauer’s Manhattan architecture tour: Lever House (October 2002) and the High Line (February 2009)
included simulated oral sex with a guy wearing a Bill Clinton mask—and the media had a new thing to wring its hands over.)
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ensitive topic No. 2: Scarlett’s engagement to journalist and adman Romain Dauriac. When I mention his name, my tone is tentative, borderline apologetic, because her love life is none of my beeswax, and I have no right to ask her about it, and yet that’s exactly what I’m doing. I see a wariness creep into her eyes. She doesn’t shut down, though, so I keep going, pointing out to her that he’s foxy and French. She agrees with me on both counts. I ask her if it’s easier being with someone who isn’t famous, since most of her squeezes—the high-profle ones, anyway—have been actors. (She’s been romantically linked with, among www.vanityfair.com
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Scarlett others, Josh Hartnett, Jared Leto, Sean Penn, and, obviously, Ryan Reynolds.) “It is,” she says, “but it’s more than that. We do diferent things. He’s in the whole art-scene world. So it’s nice, because we can enjoy each other’s worlds, but we don’t have our crazy conficting schedules and all that other stuf to contend with. And, you know, of course, actors, in general, they’re obsessed with emotions.” She pauses, then laughs. “Although, he’s French, so he’s also probably overly into his emotions.” I nod and laugh back, pleased that she’d decided to be so open. It’s only as I’m switching of the tape recorder that it occurs to me that her answer to my last question was less a candid response than an artful defection. After all, it tells me nothing about her feelings for Romain, why he’s the man she’s going to marry and spend, presumably, the rest of her life with. (Have a child with, too, I’ll discover six weeks after conducting this interview, when the tabloids and gossip sites fash pictures of her sleek silhouette bulging with what could only be a baby bump.) It occurs to me, also, that this encounter with Scarlett has actually been two
Edward Snowden
F R o M P A g e 1 6 6 he knew, it wouldn’t be hard for anyone in law enforcement to fnd him. He would change rooms but eventually ended up in 1014, a small space dominated by the bed, which is where, after closing the curtains, he set up shop. He was intent on wooing all three of his target journalists, the better, he has acknowledged, to get one to take the bait. He had kept in daily contact with Bart gellman, and by Thursday, May 24, he had sent him 41 slides of Prism documents, and a demand that the Post publish them within 72 hours. It was in the details of this request, gellman points out, that Snowden disclosed the hand he was playing: to reveal his identity and seek political asylum elsewhere. The slides would be his calling card: if the Post reprinted them, it would agree to reproduce the unique cryptographic signature of Snowden’s slides. Because the signature would be the same on both
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encounters with Scarlett, or, rather, one encounter with two diferent Scarletts. During the photo shoot she was Scarlett the star, a persona that’s almost pure artifce, a willful and glorious denial of reality, a celebration of the ideal and the mythic. It takes the beauty and sexuality and glamour that she naturally possesses and heightens those qualities, exaggerates and embellishes them, airbrushes them. This persona is not meant to be seen up close in the regular, workaday world but from a distance and at a remove, in the glossy pages of a magazine or on the incandescent screen of a movie theater or in the frenzied rapture of a dream. During the interview she was real Scarlett, but “real” with quotes around it, a persona that likely resembles who she is behind closed doors without quite being that. I understand why she’d need this second persona, a mask with her own face painted on it, basically, and why the wearing of such a mask would be necessary, if not to her survival than to her sense of self. Though maybe to her survival too. Fame and celebrity can tear those who have them to pieces. Just look at Marilyn Monroe. Just look at Lindsay Lohan. The second persona allows her to give you what you want—intimacy, revelation, nakedness—the illusion of those things, anyway,
Snowden’s and the Post’s slides, it would serve as concrete evidence that Snowden had leaked them, a fact he could then use as support for an asylum request. According to a Washington Post article gellman later wrote, Snowden thought he would apply to Iceland, which has strong Internet and press freedoms. “The strength of the reaction’’ to his disclosures, Snowden said, “will determine how choosy I can be.’’
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t was during these e-mail exchanges, gellman confirms, that Snowden revealed his identity to him and asked to meet in Hong Kong. But each of Snowden’s disclosures forced gellman to cross an additional threshold, and raised thorny questions about the relationship between a journalist and a source. “First of all, I now know the identity, [so] I now am responsible for protecting the identity of someone for whom the stakes are very, very high,” gellman recalls. “He thinks it’s possible that his life is at risk. I can’t say I know he’s wrong about that—it’s plausible. He certainly knows that his freedom is at risk. He certainly knows that the materials under some circumstances could be at risk (that is, that someone could steal them)—you know, in the very earliest days. So I’ve got that responsibility. “now I also know he’s out of the country and in the jurisdiction of a country that’s unfriendly to the united States, and I know that he wants to seek asylum. And I have to maintain the lines of what is a journalistic re-
which, as it turns out, is close enough, which, as it turns out, you’ll take, while allowing her to maintain her privacy in the midst of public display. It allows her to maintain, as well, her mystery, and mystery is essential to stardom, is what gives the power to fascinate, beguile, captivate, haunt.
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carlett and I leave the hotel suite together along with an older blonde woman—a P.R. person of some kind, I assume, since it was she who knocked on the door to let me know my time was up. We talk and laugh as we ride the elevator down to the lobby, but I can tell she’s tired. It’s been a long day, and I’m sure she’s eager to be alone, unwind, take off the mask. It’s cold when we step outside, and we shake hands quickly. I wait to see which direction she’s headed in and then go the opposite. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.com/ARcHIVE • Scarlett
Johansson, in full
(Peter Biskind, August 2005 and December 2011)
Johansson’s V.F. covers—and B-roll video (VF.com)
• Scarlett
lationship or opt for something else. I can’t help him evade u.S. jurisdiction—I don’t want to, and I can’t. It’s not my job. It’s not the relationship. I am a journalist. I’m treating him as a confdential journalistic source, and I will respect those confdences to the limits of my ability. And nothing more than that.” Despite the high-wattage nature of the story, gellman could not press ahead on Snowden’s timetable, something that clearly frustrated Snowden. Initially Snowden had no better luck with glenn greenwald. According to Luke Harding’s book, The Snowden Files, after months of having no direct contact with him, Snowden tried to reach him over an encrypted P.g.P. channel. “I have been working with a friend of yours,” Snowden said, referring to Poitras. “We need to talk, urgently.” He added, “can you come to Hong Kong?” But greenwald, who was finishing a book and couldn’t fathom what a security agency person was doing in Hong Kong, didn’t respond. Snowden then tried Poitras, asking if she might persuade greenwald to fy to Hong Kong “right now.” Poitras contacted greenwald, who fnally got back to Snowden. even then, greenwald was reluctant to travel so far until he knew more. “I would like some more substantial idea why I’m going,” he wrote Snowden, “and why this is worthwhile for me?” At which point Snowden replied, “I’m going to send you a few documents.” It was later that week, on May 31, that May
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“I would like some more substantial idea why I’m going,” he wrote Snowden, “and why this is worthwhile for me?” At which point Snowden replied, “I’m going to send you a few documents.” It was later that week, on May 31, that Greenwald and Poitras went to The Guardian’s New York ofces, in SoHo, and Ewen MacAskill was assigned to be the group’s overseer. The next day the uneasy trio—Greenwald, Poitras, and now MacAskill—boarded the long fight to Hong Kong.
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n Monday morning, June 3, Greenwald and Poitras went to meet their shadowy source at the Mira, leaving MacAskill behind at the W hotel, where they were all staying. Snowden had said to meet outside a restaurant at the mall; he would be carrying a Rubik’s Cube. They arrived early; he wasn’t there. When they returned later, they saw him, a thin young man holding a Rubik’s Cube. According to Harding’s book, they followed the instructions that he had sent earlier. “What time does the restaurant open?” Greenwald asked. “At noon,” Snowden replied. “But don’t go there. The food sucks.” Then Snowden glanced around. “Follow me,” he said. Both Poitras and Greenwald were shocked by how young he was. They had expected someone middle-aged, someone who had spent years learning the things he knew. Could he be real? In silence they followed him into the hotel lobby, then into an elevator and up to the 10th floor. The long hallway there, with its dim lighting and glass ceiling, seemed eerily appropriate, as if they were walking down a hall of mirrors. At Room 1014, Snowden inserted his keycard, and everyone stepped inside. They introduced themselves. The room was cramped, and Snowden’s suitcase was on the foor, open, displaying the few clothes he had brought with him. Angler, Barton Gellman’s book on Dick Cheney, sat on a table under the mirror. Empty containers of take-out food cluttered a small desk. On the foor next to the door was a glass of water. And next to the glass was a napkin with a drop of soy sauce on it. This was an old spy trick to detect if an intruder had entered when the occupant was away. Anyone who opened the door would spill the glass of water, which would change the soysauce pattern. Once inside, Poitras started filming almost immediately, positioning herself between two windows overlooking Kowloon Park, where children could be seen playing beneath the low clouds. The move was risky. It could have been too aggressive a step for a nervous source, but those who know Poitras say it was just a normal expression of her relentlessness and focus on her work. She and M AY
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Greenwald spent much of that frst day going over the documents Snowden had sent. They discussed Snowden’s background, and how he had come to his decision to leak this vast trove. The conversation took a philosophical turn, deploring the audacity of the N.S.A., with Poitras and Greenwald reveling in the proof of the government’s surveillance that had so far eluded them. Later, Greenwald told MacAskill, “Look, he’s young, but I think this guy’s credible.”
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n Tuesday, Greenwald brought MacAskill to the Mira. Poitras herself had moved there from the W to be closer to Snowden. When the two men arrived, Snowden politely greeted MacAskill, then returned to sit on the bed. “My frst reaction was relief that he was still there,” MacAskill says. He asked if he could record their conversation on his iPhone, at which Snowden recoiled. The N.S.A., he said, could overhear anything said on the phone and also use it to determine his location. Poitras ofered to put it in the refrigerator in her room down the hall. Once the phone was gone, Greenwald and MacAskill sat on chairs by the window, with Poitras standing between them, flming. Snowden lay on the bed, propped up on pillows against the headboard. While the others focused on documents, it was MacAskill’s job to observe Snowden, so he could relay to his editors whether he was credible. His first impressions of the slight young man in a white T-shirt and jeans were not encouraging, MacAskill admits. Listening to Snowden detail his background, MacAskill doubted every word he spoke. “At frst I thought, This is just a kid—how can he know all these things?” he recalls. “A couple of times, when he was talking about his life, my heart sank. Because I thought … training to get into the Special Forces, it just sent the panic buttons going. The idea that he would have done all these things—C.I.A. employee in Geneva, being in Japan for the N.S.A., being in Hawaii. And yet, he looked about 23. And not having been to university. I mean, this can’t be true. This guy’s Walter Mitty.” But at a certain point MacAskill’s doubts began to fade. There was just too much detail. Snowden provided his Social Security number, where he’d been to school, where he’d lived, details about his girlfriend and his parents, dates and places where he’d worked. He had printed pages and pages of his background. If he needed to get something of one of the laptops he had brought with him, he put a large blanket over his head and shoulders, one that obscured anyone else’s view of his screen and his keystrokes. By day’s end, Greenwald and MacAskill had fnished a draft of their frst article— about the N.S.A.’s indiscriminate collection
of Verizon customers’ phone records—which The Guardian planned to publish the next day. On Monday, in New York, Gibson pulled the shades in her ofce and scrawled out a plan for their frst story on a white dryerase board: seek legal advice, approach White House, get draft of story from reporters in Hong Kong. On Wednesday, June 5, after MacAskill fled the draft, the reporter assigned to seek comments, Spencer Ackerman—it was actually his third day at The Guardian—telephoned Verizon. A P.R. person took the message. Later, that person called back, asking about the court order in a way that made it clear there was a match in Verizon’s fles. “They called back and said, ‘What’s the name of the agency on the court order? And what is the date?’ … It was a bit like ‘Is it the pink one or the yellow one?’ ” Gibson recalls.
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y midafternoon The Guardian still hadn’t gotten anywhere with the White House. Because Ackerman’s e-mail to Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council spokesperson, didn’t include enough urgent detail, it took Hayden some time to return the call. When she did, she was shocked. That was the frst indication to the White House that there was a leak, but at this stage it seemed to be just a single document. Ackerman told her the paper intended to publish a story based on a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (fisa) court order. Their deadline was 4:30 p.m. Hayden scrambled to assemble a conference call among Janine Gibson, the deputy directors of the N.S.A. and the F.B.I., and the general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence. When the call fnally happened, at 5:15, Gibson described the document and the paper’s intention to publish that night. The government players on the line listened, astonished, according to one person on the call. The document, dated April 25, 2013, and stamped top secret, outlined the bulk collection of all of Verizon’s customers’ phone records for a period of 90 days. It was a renewal notice—that is, the renewal of a standing court order from the fisa court. It was a circular conversation, in which the government men were unable to discuss the document, and The Guardian was unwilling to budge unless they outlined a specifc security threat that would result from the document’s publication. Gibson pressed; she thought it was possible the government could have done this as a oneoff to investigate the Boston Marathon bombing. But for anyone from the intelligence community to even acknowledge the existence of a classified document may be a crime. One man on the line said tersely, “I’m not in the habit of committing felonies.” Gibson, who had practiced her talking points and was steady, stood www.vanityfair.com
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Edward Snowden her ground. “I think you’ll fnd, madam,” he replied, “that we are much better positioned than you are to say what is a national-security risk.” “No serious news organization would do this,” said another government voice on the call. To which Gibson replied, “I think you’ll fnd, sir, that we are much better positioned than you are to say what is a story.” The call lasted 45 minutes.
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hen the journalists had come to Snowden’s room that morning, MacAskill sensed something was wrong. In those first two days Snowden’s demeanor had remained unchanged—cool, focused, professional, resigned to his fate. But now they found him angry, shaken, deeply distracted. When they asked what was wrong, he said the N.S.A. was looking for him. According to intelligence sources, neither Booz Allen nor the N.S.A. yet knew that Snowden had taken classifed documents. At this point he was simply missing. It’s believed his family contacted Booz Allen when they couldn’t reach him, setting of alarms. “I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation,” Mills wrote that Monday. When Snowden was still missing on Tuesday, the N.S.A.’s eforts to fnd him intensifed. On Wednesday, a Century 21 real-estate agent, Kerri Jo Heim, was at the bungalow on Eleu Street with a photographer, preparing for an open house. At one point she was surprised to see two people, one a uniformed policeman, approach the front door. “They just asked if I knew what had happened to the former tenant, and I said I didn’t know,” Heim recalls. That morning at the Mira, Snowden “was emotional” and had been worrying about his girlfriend, MacAskill remembers. “He was still lying in bed. Just agitated.” Told of this, a person who knows Snowden well says, “Part of him is very naïve. I think he thought the world would see how fucked up what the N.S.A. was doing is and give him a part in a parade. I think he knew people would get mad, and charge him, but that the more that came out, the more people would say, ‘Hey, no.’ ” That frst Guardian story sent tremors through the N.S.A. Somewhere, it was clear, there had been a leak. But was it inside the N.S.A. or elsewhere? Verizon? A rogue congressional source? No one as yet had any sense of how serious this might be. “This data was coming in, but there was no context,” says one ofcial. The Guardian gave them very little to go on.
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he impact, however, became clear the next day, when Gellman called, seeking comment from the White House and the director of central intelligence for a Washington Post story based on what appeared to be a second batch of documents, those dealing with the Prism program. Gellman’s approach was direct and without embellishment. He e-mailed and called senior offcials, saying, as he recalls, “This is one of those once-in-a-very-long-time kind of things. I have something important to talk to you about. It’s a document with this title, this author, this date. Why don’t you go get it and tell me how you want to proceed.” By that point the N.S.A. had initiated an intensive search for the source of the leak, scanning every computer they thought relevant. “We had folks going through the networks, looking for the footprints,” Ledgett says. According to Ledgett, it took 48 hours to identify the likely culprit: a Booz Allen contractor named Edward J. Snowden, the same Edward J. Snowden, he learned, who had been missing since Monday. It was the N.S.A.’s nightmare scenario. In an odd confuence, both The Guardian and The Washington Post printed their Prism stories on the same day, Thursday, June 6. A sense of urgency pervaded the tiny hotel room as the week wore on and more Guardian stories appeared on Friday and Saturday. Everyone knew time was running out. On Thursday evening Greenwald had given a live interview on CNN, and the on-screen text identifed him as being in Hong Kong. With Snowden using his personal credit card, it was only a matter of time before someone tracked him down. MacAskill thought about it every morning when they knocked on the door of Room 1014. “Almost every day we thought he wouldn’t be there,” he says. “We thought he would be apprehended. Whenever we met, we half expected the door to crash open and the C.I.A. or the police would come barging in.” Once the first stories were published, Snowden wanted The Guardian to identify and interview him so he could state his motivations, to own his story. MacAskill repeatedly tried to talk him out of it. He had three sons around Snowden’s age and kept thinking what he would want any of them to do in such a situation: if Snowden went public, MacAskill knew, he would be throwing away everything he had ever known—his career, his girlfriend, probably his freedom. “I thought, This is a kid that’s going to prison for the rest of his life,” MacAskill recalls. “I kept saying, ‘Look, you should remain anonymous—the stories are just as good without you. As soon as your name comes out, your life is over.’ But he knew there would be inquiries at the
N.S.A., and he didn’t want to put his colleagues through all that.” On Thursday Poitras flmed an interview, eventually cutting it into a 121⁄2 -minute video they planned to post to The Guardian’s Web site after the weekend. Greenwald, who handled the questioning, had persuaded Snowden to ditch his white T-shirt and put on a gray dress shirt. By Sunday, June 9, they had fnished writing all the stories they could without further research. MacAskill asked Snowden, as he had several times, what he planned to do next. “He said he intended to stay in Hong Kong and fght extradition,” MacAskill recalls. “I pressed him: did he have an exit plan, a Plan B? And he didn’t. He just didn’t have a clear plan. He just hadn’t thought beyond that point. I actually thought he would be O.K. Once the stories came out, they gave him a lot of cover. It was unlikely the C.I.A. would come to arrest him then.” Snowden’s interview was scheduled to be posted on Monday in the early-morning hours, Hong Kong time. No one knew what would happen next. That evening, after saying their good-byes for the day, MacAskill realized that, despite all the flming, they had never taken a still photograph of Snowden. He returned to the Mira, and Snowden happily posed. “When I left I assumed I would see him in the morning,” he recalls. “I assumed he would be giving a press conference at some point on Monday.” MacAskill never saw him again.
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hat night everyone stayed up late, waiting for Snowden’s interview to go live on the Guardian Web site. The three journalists splayed themselves around Greenwald’s room at the W; Snowden remained alone at the Mira. Finally, at three a.m. Hong Kong time, it happened. The interview immediately went viral, ricocheting to media outlets and blogs around the world. “We got the response we fully expected,” MacAskill recalls. “The bubble just burst, and it went whoosh, and suddenly it was everywhere, on Twitter, all the media, everywhere.” Snowden chimed in from his computer. “He was really pleased,” MacAskill remembers. “He even made a few jokes.” Later that morning, Greenwald and MacAskill emerged to fnd the W’s lobby flled with camera crews and reporters. The two journalists answered a few questions, then scurried of. In the meantime, one enterprising reporter managed to identify a lamp next to Snowden in a photo on the Guardian Web site as one of those at the Mira. At that moment, Poitras was filming Snowden in his room as he prepared to leave. He wouldn’t say where he was going. By the time the frst reporters fnally made it to the Mira, he had vanished. MAY
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Lindsay Mills soon did as well. (It was rumored she fed to the West Coast.) Her melodramatic final blog entry, filed that Monday, read, “As I type this on my tearstreaked keyboard, I’m refecting on all the faces that have graced my path᠁ The ones I’ve held. The one I’ve grown to love the most. And the ones I never got to bid adieu. At the moment all I can feel is alone.” And on Twitter she wrote, before signing of, “I have lost my compass and fnd myself adrift in a sea of chaos. Goodbye my friends.” Mills being Mills, the Twitter entry linked to an Instagram photo of her wearing red panties and a white bra. She was seated cross-legged and holding a globe, with her back to the camera. The Whistleblower Out in the Cold
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rom the moment he left the Mira that Monday morning, Snowden became a pawn in an international game of chess. In the next few weeks an array of players would crowd around the board, including the U.S. Justice Department and numerous foreign governments, from American antagonists such as China and Russia to marginal aspirants such as Bolivia and Ecuador. Each had its own motives and strategy, though those motives and strategies were not always clear— with the notable exception of the White House, which wanted to arrest Snowden as a traitor. Those frst few days, as reporters raced around Hong Kong in search of Snowden, much of the media turned its focus to Iceland. In the fnal paragraphs of the Guardian story that Monday morning, Snowden had volunteered, somewhat airily, that he might seek asylum there, noting their commitment to Internet freedom. The capital, Reykjavík, was home to several notable transparency activists, including a onetime television reporter named Kristinn Hrafnsson, the ofcial spokesman and de facto No. 2 of WikiLeaks. “He mentioned Iceland specifically,” recalls Hrafnsson, a tall, white-haired man possessed of such icy Nordic cool some reporters call him Lurch. “So I thought we needed to reach out.” Hrafnsson brokered a conversation with several attorneys in Hong Kong who were working on Snowden’s behalf. “That led to a discussion,” Hrafnsson goes on, “in which I was asked to serve as intermediary to begin carrying messages to the Icelandic authorities.” In the meantime, the prime minister’s offce was besieged by the international press corps. “We started getting calls from the media on Monday, and it just never stopped,” remembers an Icelandic official involved in the situation. “We were caught totally off guard. We had heard nothing from Snowden, nothing from WikiLeaks, noth-
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ing from anyone. We kept saying, ‘We’ve received no formal requests from anyone.’ We were just reading the newspapers like everyone else. But we had to be very careful. There was immense support for Snowden here. It was like 50-50. A lot of people thought of him as a hero.” Hrafnsson “called me, and he called the Interior Ministry,” the ofcial recalls, “and he got the same message from both of us, the same thing we had been telling the media, that [Snowden] would have to be in Iceland to apply for asylum. What he was fshing for was giving Snowden a political ‘free pass,’ like a passport.” “I was disappointed,” Hrafnsson admits. “I thought this was a sorry response and an incredible lack of vision.” Trying to force the issue, he hurriedly wrote an oped piece for Fréttabladid, Iceland’s largest newspaper, critical of the government in outlining what was going on. “That’s Kristinn for you,” the ofcial says with a sigh. “It was the only thing he could do at that point.” Hrafnsson’s article struck a nerve, and a public outcry ensued. Out at Kefavík, Iceland’s international airport, reporters from London and New York began filing off planes and heading into the capital. Many of the Icelanders they interviewed said Snowden should be granted asylum. But Hrafnsson’s article, while generating a good deal of public support, essentially killed any chance of that actually happening. “The government, because of what Kristinn wrote, they would not help Snowden,” says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a onetime WikiLeaks ofcial who now heads a left-wing Icelandic political party. “It was quite counterproductive. He did this as I was trying to talk to the Interior Ministry for this same case. He kicked them all with one foot while asking for that kind of support.”
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ven though the government was not considering granting asylum, says the Icelandic ofcial, “now we had to prepare that Snowden would come. We actually thought that might happen, that he would just show up one morning at Keflavík. That was the nightmare scenario. That was also when we started hearing from the U.S. Embassy. The tone of the message was very professional, not threatening in any way. But still, we really feared Snowden would show up here. It would have been very hard to just arrest him and send him to the U.S. But it would have been very hard not to and still get along with the U.S.” Even as his aide-de-camp grappled with the Icelandic government, Julian Assange was desperately looking to be a player in the Snowden affair. Assange and his organization, founded back in 2006, were on their last legs. The WikiLeaks Web site, once used by
Bradley Manning and other whistle-blowers, struggled to continue operating due to legal concerns and a lack of money. Assange himself, the target of a sexual-assault investigation in Sweden, had been marooned inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London for more than a year. The U.S. Justice Department was investigating whether he had illegally solicited material from Manning. Now came the largest, most important leak of confdential documents in history, and Assange found himself on the outside looking in. “Assange, like an ageing movie star, was a little put out by the global superstardom of Snowden,” Andrew O’Hagan would write in the London Review of Books, in his account of working with Assange on a memoir. “He has always cared too much about the fame and too much about the credit.” Another source says of his reaction to Snowden’s prominence, “This is humiliating for him.” Snowden himself points out that his own views don’t always coincide with Assange’s: “We don’t share identical politics.” For one thing, Snowden believes that governments have a legitimate interest in security. “I am not anti-secrecy,” he says. “I’m pro-accountability. I’ve made many statements indicating both the importance of secrecy and spying, and my support for the working-level people at the N.S.A. and other agencies. It’s the senior ofcials you have to watch out for.” But there is much that he admires about WikiLeaks. “They run toward the risks everyone else runs away from,” Snowden says. “No other publisher in the world is prepared to commit to protecting sources—even other journalists’ sources—the way WikiLeaks is.” During a telephone press conference Assange bragged about assisting Snowden’s legal team in Hong Kong. For the moment, though, all he could do was talk. To do more, he needed someone at Snowden’s side. Unfortunately for him, WikiLeaks had no central office or permanent employees; it had only backers and volunteers, among the most eager of whom was a young woman named Sarah Harrison. She had joined WikiLeaks as an intern three years earlier and was known around London as Assange’s girlfriend. Harrison had been traveling in Australia but immediately agreed to fy to Hong Kong, where, Assange later announced (possibly with an eye toward avoiding legal prosecution), she would serve as Snowden’s “legal researcher”—never mind that she had no formal legal training. Snowden, however, would come to appreciate the help and support that Harrison provided. “Sarah is extraordinarily courageous,” he says. “She’s the kind of person who will walk through hell to do the right thing, and I think it’s fair to say that with the unprecedented and at www.vanityfair.com
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Edward Snowden times unlawful manhunt we saw last year, she got her chance.” By mid-June, Harrison had arrived in Hong Kong and made contact with him. Once Harrison was in place, Assange began working on the second stage of his plan: fnding a country that would grant Snowden asylum. The natural refuge was his own protector, Ecuador, so Assange began consulting with the embassy’s legal attaché, his friend Fidel Narváez, attempting to craft some kind of document that would grant Snowden safe passage to that country.
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nowden, meanwhile, remained in hiding in Hong Kong. Some believe he was at an out-of-the-way house arranged by the three attorneys he had retained who now oversaw his fate: Albert Ho, a prominent local legislator and fxer; his young associate, Jonathan Man; and a canny Canadianborn specialist in extradition matters, Robert Tibbo. None will discuss their roles today, but their two-pronged strategy was clear to everyone in the burgeoning community of human-rights activists in Hong Kong. Behind the scenes, they needed to feel out government ofcials to see how Snowden’s situation was viewed. That would take time, so the trio’s top priority was rallying public support, to make it harder for the Chinese to hand over Snowden to the Americans. “The thinking was, if we could get some attention on the actual person, we could ofer him some protection,” recalls Tom Grundy, a Hong Kong activist who became involved in the eforts to publicize Snowden’s situation. “We had to raise his profle. That way maybe he couldn’t just be ‘disappeared’ of the street, we thought.” The first step in their public-relations campaign was reaching out to a local reporter, Lana Lam, of the English-language South China Morning Post. On June 12, Snowden gave Lam an interview in which he claimed that the U.S. hacked computers all over China. By Friday, June 21, it was clear the sit uation was approaching an endgame. Snowden’s attorneys had made little headway with the Hong Kong government, which had held numerous internal meetings about the situation, without including Snowden’s lawyers. The problem, it turned out, was Albert Ho, who had long agitated for Hong Kong to enjoy a full and open democracy—the government didn’t trust him. Instead, according to The New York Times, an intermediary from the government had managed to get a message to Snowden directly. The message reportedly startled Snowden. If the U.S. requested his extradition, the
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Hong Kong government could not predict how a local judge would view his case. But it was entirely possible he would need to wait in jail until they fgured it out. What especially bothered Snowden, his lawyers would say later, was the intermediary’s assertion that he wouldn’t be able to use a computer while in custody. The one claim that offered Snowden hope was a suggestion that the government would welcome his departure from Hong Kong. (This version of events has been disputed by those close to Snowden.) But it was at that point, it appears, that he made his decision. He would go with Assange’s plan to head to Ecuador. He and Harrison booked the frst leg of the trip—an Aerofot fight to Moscow that left the next night, Saturday, June 22. From Moscow they would fy on through Havana and be in Quito in two days.
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ut by that same Friday night the situation again changed dramatically. That evening the news broke that the U.S. government had indicted Snowden on espionage charges and had asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant. All three of Snowden’s attorneys convened at his hiding place to decide what to do. Ho brought a dinner of fried chicken, pizza, and Pepsi. Snowden, backed by Harrison, was determined to leave Hong Kong as quickly as possible. The lawyers appear to have counseled caution. It was always possible that the call from the “intermediary” was a trap. Welcoming Snowden’s departure didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t be arrested if he appeared at the airport. Snowden asked the lawyers to make one last approach to the government, to see if they would guarantee him safe passage. All that Saturday they waited for some kind of response. Snowden decided to cancel his fight. Finally, at about six p.m., Ho would say later, he received an equivocal response from someone in the government. Reading between the lines, Ho guessed they would be safe going to the airport. Crossing their fngers, Snowden and Harrison made new reservations on a flight leaving Sunday. The next morning, accompanied by one of his attorneys, they were driven to Chek Lap Kok airport. Snowden wore his gray shirt and backpack, glancing about nervously as they strode into the international terminal. According to The Washington Post, they noticed men following them, whom they assumed to be plainclothes policemen. But no one approached them as they headed into the security lines. The moment of truth came when Snowden presented his passport for inspection. The day before, the Americans had canceled it. Spokesmen at the White House and the State Department would later claim they
had told Hong Kong the passport was no longer good. Hong Kong authorities insist no one told them. Ofcial Washington fred back that, in any event, Snowden should have been detained as a result of its extradition request. In Hong Kong, the justice minister would furrow his brow, tut-tutting about “irregularities” in the request. The U.S., he said, had demanded the detention of an “Edward James Snowden” in some documents. But his actual name was “Edward Joseph Snowden.” Hong Kong had asked for clarifcation, the minister insisted, but never heard back from Washington. As a result, Hong Kong had had no legal basis to detain Snowden. The explanation, as just about everyone in Washington and Hong Kong knew, was the thinnest of subterfuges. “The Hong Kong authorities were happy that Snowden was leaving. They just wanted to wash their hands of the whole thing,” says Law Yuk-Kai, director of Hong Kong’s Human Rights Monitor. “It allowed them to avoid an embarrassing situation between the mainland authorities and the U.S.” And so, that Sunday, Snowden and Sarah Harrison boarded Aeroflot Flight SU213 without incident. Snowden had his four laptops, but, he says, they had no government information on them and never did. He says he carried no documents. “I didn’t want to risk bringing them through Russia.” If all went well, they would be in Moscow by dinnertime.
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t that point probably fewer than a dozen people knew the most wanted man in the world was aboard a fight winging its way over remotest Siberia. And yet, by the time Snowden and Harrison peered out their window at Moscow’s Sheremtyevo International Airport, a throng of reporters and cameramen were waiting. The New York Times actually live-blogged their arrival. Ever since, those involved have been pointing fngers over who leaked Snowden’s itinerary. “Why was this made into a media situation before he was even safe?” Birgitta Jónsdóttir wonders. “Who said he was on the Moscow fight? Who? I’d like to know.” Jónsdóttir, like many others, believes it must have been Assange, or one of his acolytes, who leaked the news. “There was a massive mix-up somewhere, which was very serious,” she goes on. “I have to say, and this will surprise many people I know, but it was a massive mistake to include WikiLeaks in any of this. It didn’t help. It just made things worse. I mean, when you are making decisions on a person’s life, it must be done on solid ground. And this was out of control.” She makes a face. “I support WikiLeaks’ message,” she says, “but not its execution.” Assange had, in fact, issued a celebraMAY
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tory tweet while Snowden was still in the air that afternoon, but it came only after journalists had already learned he was on the fight. The frst to announce Snowden’s departure for Moscow appears to have been Lana Lam, of the South China Morning Post. Her story, which ran alongside a blurry photograph of a passenger in the departures area of the airport, was published at 3:31 p.m. Lam, unsurprisingly, won’t discuss the source of her information. That the leak came in Hong Kong suggests that a source in the government was behind it. The frst ofcial announcement of Snowden’s departure did, in fact, come from the Hong Kong government, which that afternoon issued an unusual press release that pointedly did not say where Snowden was heading.
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t Sheremtyevo, meanwhile, the crowd of journalists waited anxiously for Snowden to appear outside customs. They waited for a full hour, then another, and another. Finally word spread that he and Harrison were booked onto an Aerofot fight to Havana, leaving at 2:05 the next afternoon. They had seats 17A and 17C. Several journalists immediately purchased tickets of their own. The next day two dozen or so other journalists managed to make it into the boarding area, until a group of Aerofot attendants shooed them away. Everyone else fled onto the fight, craning their necks for any sign of Snowden. He hadn’t boarded yet. Finally, in the last minutes before departure, with still no sign of Snowden, a murmur spread among the journalists on the fight: “Ne uletayet, ne uletayet!”—Russian for “He’s not fying.” Snowden wasn’t coming, leaving a dozen journalists marooned on the flight, according to The Snowden Files. Max Seddon, then a foreign correspondent for the A.P., was left to post a forlorn photo of what might have been. “Standing next to Edward Snowden’s seat on fight to Cuba,” read the Twitter message above the picture of an empty seat. “He ain’t here.”
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hile Snowden was holed up, an N.S.A. delegation, led by General Keith Alexander, and the then director of the Threat Operations Center, Rick Ledgett, boarded a military jet to Hawaii to try to make sense of Snowden and the damage he had caused. For months after Snowden revealed his identity, it was hard to fnd anyone at the N.S.A. who would utter his name in public. This was to some extent a denial reaction, reflecting shock and embarrassment. There was also a sense of personal betrayal, says Ledgett, who adds, “It was like getting kicked in the stomach. “It’s the national-security implications, which are, you know, immense,” he conM AY
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tinues. “And it’s somebody who had one of these badges,” he says, fingering his own top-security-clearance badge, “who betrayed the organization᠁ You like to think that you have shared values, and you have shared reasons for being here, because it’s not the pay. So to realize the organization is harboring this person, who didn’t share those views, and then betrayed us that way … ” His voice trails of. He and Alexander talked to Snowden’s superiors and co-workers and “retraced his footsteps, saw what he did, saw where he sat,” says Ledgett. To assess the threat of more Snowdens, they had to understand what made people like him tick. What had driven this 29-year-old to give up almost everything he had ever known, possibly forever? Snowden has insisted it was all about principles, about a lone individual standing up to fght. “You can get up every day,” he told The Guardian, “go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that is the world you helped to create, and it’s going to get worse by the next generation and the next generation.” In the intelligence community, however, there is a starkly different point of view. “Snowden to me is just like the spies in the Cold War who went to work for the Russians because they believed ideologically,” says a former senior intelligence official. “Manning is clearly troubled psychologically and emotionally, but with Snowden you seem to have a true believer,” he says, “driven by the proposition that all information should be free.” In counter-espionage there is a template for evaluating the psychological motivations of those who are likely to spy, to become double agents. The acronym is mice, which stands for money, ideology, compromise or coercion, and ego. After the early, ideological Americans who spied for the Soviet Union, things devolved, experts say, as spies increasingly did it for the money and for ego reasons. For many of those who consider Snowden a traitor, he scores high on the ego motive. They cite the swagger in his Internet postings, the braggadocio of his public statements, including his claim to The Guardian that he had the power to wiretap anyone, “even the President, if I had a personal email.” (“Bullshit,” says Ledgett.) In Snowden’s Ars Technica posts, the former ofcial argues, “you don’t get any sense of a struggle, any inner debate, or confict, or concern … I think he is a narcissist, a lot like Rick Ames” (the 90s-era C.I.A. turncoat). What no one, not even Snowden’s most vociferous critics, suggests, though, is that Snowden did it for money or personal gain. “There are some whistle-blowers out there who do want to be deifed,” says Jesselyn
Radack, one of Snowden’s lawyers and the national-security-and-human-rights director at the Government Accountability Project, which advocates for whistle-blowers. But whistle-blowing, especially from within the intelligence world, where there is virtually no protection from whistle-blower laws, is too traumatic, Radack says, for anyone to do it lightly, or for ego gratification only. Radack was herself a whistle-blower—a former Justice Department attorney, she was pushed out of her job after objecting internally to the torture and interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old American who was captured fghting with the Taliban in 2001. She later leaked the information to Newsweek. In the process, Radack went “through hell,” as she puts it. No law frm would hire her; the government blackballed her privately and pursued her legally; she was ostracized. Among the many “smears that whistle-blowers are subjected to: that they did it for vengeance, fame, profit, or self-aggrandization. People try to pathologize whistle-blowers,” says Radack. Some might be naïve, others hopelessly idealistic or moralistic, or intense, but what all do, she says, is “underestimate the sheer force of the executive branch raining down on you.” And what all endure is a cavernous loneliness. “It’s this weird netherworld, very lonely and isolated,” she says. “And when you are charged with the Espionage Act”— as Snowden has been—“you are radioactive. You may as well be charged with being a pedophile cannibal.”
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o this day, no one, maybe not even Snowden himself, really knows how many documents he took; estimates vary wildly. Snowden cautions about some of the numbers that investigators have publicized, especially the 1.7 million fgure, which, he says, is “simply a scare number based on an intentionally crude metric: everything that I ever digitally interacted with in my career.” He adds, “Look at the language ofcials use in sworn testimony about these records: ‘could have,’ ‘may have,’ ‘potentially.’ They’re prevaricating. Every single one of those ofcials knows I don’t have 1.7 million fles, but what are they going to say? What senior offcial is going to go in front of Congress and say, ‘We have no idea what he has, because the N.S.A.’s auditing of systems holding hundreds of millions of Americans’ data is so negligent that any high-school dropout can walk out the door with it?’ ” Equally mysterious is who actually has the documents. Snowden is adamant: “I know exactly how many documents I have. Zero.” But for the other players involved, “I’m not sure we’ll ever know who has what,” The Guardian’s Janine Gibson says. Greenwald has said that only he and Poitras possess a www.vanityfair.com
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Edward Snowden full set. David Miranda, Greenwald’s boyfriend, carried some documents, encrypted on USB sticks, through Heathrow, on August 18, on his way home to Rio after a week in Berlin. He was detained by British authorities for almost nine hours—the longest time frame allowed without arrest under the country’s terrorism laws. Miranda’s fight was paid for by The Guardian, but the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, didn’t know who Miranda was until he got a call about the detention, because Greenwald had booked the fight through the New York ofce. Shortly thereafter, Rusbridger went public with another of the newspaper’s tangles with the British state. From the beginning, he was obsessed with keeping the 50,000 or so documents Snowden had given MacAskill in Hong Kong safe. To handle them at The Guardian’s ofces in London, the paper set up a special room, watched at all times by a security guard with a list of names of people allowed entry. Paper covered the windows, blocking any view, and the computers were “airgapped,” meaning that they had never been connected to the Internet. Documents were stored on USB sticks and never touched a network. Cell phones weren’t allowed inside, for fear that they could be used to somehow listen to conversations in the room or, worse, suck up the documents from the computers. The journalists didn’t know what the GCHQ or other spy agencies were capable of doing, so they imagined the worst. On June 16, 2013, The Guardian published a story detailing how British and American intelligence had spied on leaders at G-20 meetings in 2009, hacking delegates’ BlackBerrys and monitoring phone calls. On June 21, as the paper prepared a story on Tempora, a GCHQ surveillance program that collects data by attaching probes to fber-optic cables, British Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood showed up at The Guardian’s ofces to tell Rusbridger, “You have had your debate,” and he threatened the paper with legal action. Rusbridger tried to explain the futility of stopping the paper from publishing. The documents, he said, were all over the world, with Glenn Greenwald in Brazil and Laura Poitras in Berlin. Heywood pointed out that the British government was less worried about a blogger in Brazil than a national newspaper. On top of that, he said, the paper was at risk of being spied on by the Chinese or Russians. Plastic cups in Rusbridger’s ofce could be turned into listening devices. The documents, Heywood suggested, weren’t safe with The Guardian after all. “From my perspective, it was fairly hair-raising,” Rusbridger remembers. 202
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earful that the British government would attempt to stop the paper from publishing, Rusbridger handed the documents MacAskill had given him to ProPublica, a nonproft journalism operation in New York, for safekeeping. Then, seeking further safety for the documents, he called Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, and asked her if the paper could “store” the documents. He gave her no guarantee they could see them, but Abramson agreed. When Snowden found out about the handover, he was livid, and claimed that The Guardian had broken its agreement with him. He had explicitly avoided The New York Times, due to the paper’s decision to delay publication for nearly a year of its 2005 story detailing the N.S.A.’s Bush-era warrantless wiretapping. (Asked about this episode today, Snowden says, “The fnal public-interest decisions about journalism should be made by journalists.”) The Guardian continued publishing Snowden-related stories for two more weeks, until July 12, when Heywood dropped by again, this time to propose that the government come in and tell The Guardian how to keep the documents safe and eventually destroy them. He said the agency was worried about the 30 or 40 documents The Guardian had. Six weeks after the initial leak, the authorities still had no idea of the sheer volume of documents the journalists actually had. Rusbridger agreed to the meeting. But the next week, the prime minister’s press secretary texted with a dire warning that the paper needed to hand over the material immediately … or else. “It was so apparent that we would report it elsewhere and the material existed elsewhere,” Rusbridger recently recalled. “Nevertheless, there was a new steel and determination, and they wanted to stop us.” Rusbridger refused to give up the material, but he agreed to destroy what was in The Guardian’s London ofce. That afternoon, Abramson and her managing editor, Dean Baquet, went to the ofce, and Rusbridger gave them a list of 14 conditions for handling the material. The Times had to set up a secure room in its newsroom. According to Rusbridger, both papers could work on stories, but only the Guardian reporters could have access to the raw documents. Abramson agreed to the terms. That Friday, July 19, two GCHQ men came to the Guardian ofces with a machine to erase hard drives. They told the editors that they would have to use various drills and masks to protect against the sparks and smoke. The next day, they came back, and the editors took turns destroying the material that had given them the greatest scoop of their careers. Later, Rusbridger would carry around pieces of the destroyed hard drives, almost as totems. “Foreign media outlets will publish any-
thing on a foreign government,” Greenwald says. “People are much more conservative when it comes to reporting on their own governments. That’s why it was so stupid of the British government to destroy the Guardian hard drives.”
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ilicon Valley’s response to the Snowden leaks was fraught from the beginning. In the early coverage of Prism, companies like Apple, Google, and Yahoo denied knowledge of the program, prompting The Washington Post to update the online version of its story to incorporate the denials. It eventually became clear that these denials were a combination of honest ignorance—very few people inside the companies understood the terms under which they were cooperating with the N.S.A.—and a game of semantics. What it meant to “collect” someone’s information or to have “direct access” to a company server depended on how one defned those terms. Later, when the Post, reporting on an N.S.A. program called Muscular, described how the N.S.A. and GCHQ intercepted information as it fowed from one data center to another, the story was met with multiple seeming denials from Obama-administration officials. It wasn’t until Gellman and his technical adviser, Ashkan Soltani, reported a followup story, which described the technology in detail and showed the denials for what they were, that the full weight of the program became apparent. After the second story ran, a Google engineer who had spent 10 years working in the company’s online-security division posted a personal comment about the story: “Fuck these guys,” he wrote, referring to the N.S.A. The secrets revealed by Snowden to journalists have been vast and wide-reaching. Barton Gellman’s stories alone, in the Washington Post, have not only disclosed the Prism program but also revealed the U.S. government’s secret $52.6 billion “black” budget for intelligence gathering. Gellman showed that the N.S.A. collects hundreds of millions of address books globally and five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cell phones and their users. In addition, he revealed Muscular, which is even more aggressive than Prism in collecting user data. What the U.S. government fears most is not what Snowden has so far disclosed but what he possesses that remains secret. “We still don’t know exactly what documents he took,” says Ledgett. What the N.S.A. does know, he says, is that Snowden made off with at least 36,000 pages of what Ledgett refers to as “the keys to the kingdom.” By that he means “the whole database of requirements,” or orders, from government agencies—the State Department and the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security—to the N.S.A. requesting specifc foreign-surveillance information. That MAY
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data reveals not only what the United States knows about the military systems and intelligence operations of countries including Russia and China, but also what it doesn’t know. In addition to containing embarrassing revelations about spying on allies, the documents purportedly detail current operations against nations hostile to America’s interests. What the world has already learned may well pale in comparison with what remains under wraps. Intelligence offcials whisper about “a doomsday cache” in Snowden’s possession. Snowden retorts, “Who would set up a system that incentivizes others to kill them?”
T
he Snowden episode is far from over, and it’s hard to imagine exactly how it will end. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras parlayed their documents into a new media organization funded by Pierre Omidyar, the deep-pocketed eBay founder. They promise to continue their reporting on the N.S.A. based on Snowden’s documents. There are several initiatives in Congress, the most prominent of which, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, is an attempt to stop bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and to revise the fisa courts. In late March the Obama administration announced a legislative proposal to end the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Under the plan, specifc records could be obtained only by using a new kind of court order that involved permission from a judge. Once the requested records were obtained, a judge would also have to rule whether the N.S.A. could gather additional, associated records.
O
n October 9, Snowden was photographed standing beside Sarah Harrison on a boat on a river somewhere in Russia. They lived in a secret location, though one source close to Snowden says that they moved multiple times and at one point lived with an American family outside Moscow. Snowden and Harrision’s time together “was a little bit of a love-hate thing,” says a person close to WikiLeaks. “They were stuck in close quarters there for a long time.” Snowden is fastidious and Harrison is not, this person says. He griped about having to do all the dishes. Politically, they saw eye to eye on sur-
veillance, but little else. The day after he was photographed with Harrison, Lon Snowden arrived in Moscow for a six-day visit with his son—it was the frst time they had seen each other in six months. They met in a secret location, and even Lon wasn’t told where his son was living, he claimed. “I could be comfortable living the rest of my life [in Russia],” Lon later told reporters. “I’m certain that he could.” One of Snowden’s Russian lawyers said at the time that Snowden was soaking up Russian culture and learning the language, even reading Crime and Punishment, but he has since applied for asylum in more than 20 countries, according to CNN. Harrison moved to Berlin in November, but shortly before she did, a German politician had dinner with her and Snowden, who expressed a desire to be granted asylum in Germany or another democratic state. Mostly, the politician says, Snowden wished he could go home. For an article published in December by The Washington Post, Barton Gellman spent 14 hours interviewing Snowden in Moscow, during which time, Gellman wrote, Snowden never once stepped outside or opened the curtains. He characterized his new life as that of an “indoor cat.” This March 10, in his frst public appearance since last July, Snowden addressed thousands of attendees in a live feed at this year’s South by Southwest conference, in Austin, Texas. Though the connection, routed through several proxies to conceal his location, was spotty, Snowden reiterated his call to action: “The key is accountability. We can’t have ofcials … who can lie to everyone in the country᠁ We need public advocates᠁ We need a watchdog that watches Congress.” Focusing on technology and policy and saying nothing about his life in Russia, he urged tech companies to help regain the public trust by using— and improving—encryption and other privacy technologies. “Let’s put it this way: the United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally,” he said. “They still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalists, what they have, what they don’t have. Because encryption works.” Greenwald, speaking from Brazil to the SXSW crowd via video later that day, confrmed that he had read all of the documents
Snowden had given him. “The most shocking and signifcant stories have yet to be reported,” he said.
A
s Vladimir Putin pursues an increasingly aggressive anti-Western agenda, Snowden’s asylum in Russia has, in the eyes of some, taken on a sinister, new–Cold War cast. In mid-October, Snowden told The New York Times, “There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.” But Snowden’s actions have exposed dangers to democracy at least as great. We now know that the socalled “deep state”—a government within a government, organized around secrecy and surveillance—is not just the stuf of conspiracy theorists and writers of thrillers. Surveillance apparatus, however necessary some of it may be, has so far proved impossible to control. Safeguards against widening surveillance will have to come from outside government—frankly, from the ideas and expertise of people like Edward Snowden. When Snowden boarded that plane in Honolulu last spring, he passed irrevocably into a new life and a new world. And so did we. “What we’re seeing today in America is a new political movement that crosses party lines,” he says. “This post-terror generation rejects the idea that we have to burn down our village in order to save it—that the only way to defend the Constitution is to tear it up.” � Additional reporting by Lenora Jane Estes and Michael Joseph Gross.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE • The
Assange files
(Sarah Ellison, February 2011 and October 2013)
• Vanity
Fair investigates “The Path to War”
(Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, May 2004), “The Path to Florida” (David Margolick, Evgenia Peretz, and Michael Shnayerson, October 2004), and “The Path to 9/11” (Ned Zeman, David Wise, David Rose, and Bryan Burrough, November 2004)
• Whistle-blower
central
(Marie Brenner on Jeffrey Wigand, May 1996; Mark Hertsgaard on Rich Levernier and Chris Steele, November 2003; Michael Shnayerson on Bunnatine Greenhouse, April 2005; David Rose on Sibel Edmonds, September 2005)
• Web wars
(Michael Joseph Gross, April 2011, September 2011, May 2012, and July 2013)
VANITY FAIR IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2014 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 56, NO. 5. VANITY FAIR (ISSN 0733-8899) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, Chief Executive Ofcer; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President; John W. Bellando, Chief Operating Ofcer & Chief Financial Ofcer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Ofcer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing ofces. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. Canada Post: return undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 874, Station Main, Markham, ON L3P 8L4. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to VANITY FAIR, P.O. Box 37714, Boone, IA 50037-0714. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to VANITY FAIR, P.O. Box 37714, Boone, IA 50037-0714, call 800-365-0635, or e-mail
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PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE
Daniel
RADCLIFFE
At age 11 he first cast his spell on the world as Harry Potter. He and his boy wizard may be all grown up, but the star of this spring’s Broadway premiere of The Cripple of Inishmaan admits he still likes pancakes for dinner
W
hat is your idea of perfect happiness? Eating break
sounds like I’m running an auction. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? Nothing. I’m lucky. What is your most treasured possession? My treasure chest. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Something terrible
fast foods at a time of the day other than breakfast. Pan cakes for dinner—I’m happy. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My ability to invari
ably say exactly the wrong thing in any given situation. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Arrogance. What is your favorite journey? From the airport to home. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Of the seven? Chasti ty. On what occasion do you lie?
Press junkets, backstage at plays (if required), and on questionnaires, obvi ously. What do you dislike most about your appearance? My smile. It’s crooked. Which living person do you most despise? Someone you don’t know. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “You know.” I catch myself saying it about fve times per sentence when I’m nervous, and it’s annoying. What is your greatest regret? I’m 24! I think it’s a little early for all that. What or who is the greatest love of your life? So far it’s been working in the film industry. When and where were you happiest? It’s hard to pick one time. I feel like I’m quite a happy person. My ninth birthday was epic, though. Which talent would you most like to have? I wish I could draw. I think it’s possible to become good at most things just by practicing a lot. But no amount of time and efort will make me good at drawing. What is your current state of mind? Slightly taken aback by how deep this questionnaire wants to get. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I would talk slower. When I hear myself interviewed sometimes it 204
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I L L U ST RAT IO N
happening to someone I love and being powerless to help. Where would you like to live? London and New York. What is your most marked characteristic? I’m quite energetic. What is the quality you most like in a man? Intelli gence. What is the quality you most like in a woman? Intelligence. What do you most value in your friends? I like all my friends for diferent reasons, so it’s hard to pick one quality I value most highly overall. Who are your favorite writers? Mikhail Bulgakov, Tony Harrison, P. G. Wodehouse, Peter Cook, Tom Stoppard. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? The Master in The Master and Margarita. Who are your heroes in real life? My parents. Tom Brady. Tom Lehrer. What are your favorite names? Linus. Hannah. Joseph. Iggy. What is it that you most dislike? People who are convinced that being rude and being straight talking are the same thing. People who think that working in the entertainment industry means they can behave like entitled sociopaths. And small portions of food. If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? I have no idea. If I could come back as a person rather than a thing, I’d def nitely prefer that. If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? I would like to come back as a question setter on Jeopardy! How would you like to die? In a blaze of glory. What is your motto? “Don’t be a dick.” BY
RISKO
MAY
2014
