T RU M P : The YEAR of L I V I N G S H O RT - F I N G E R E D LY By G R AY D O N

CARTER

INSIDE the KARDASHIAN PARIS HOTEL HEIST! By MARK

SEAL

The 22016
ALSO H O L I D AY 2 0 1 6 / 2 0 1 7 Holiday
WHAT DOES
PETER THIEL GIFT GUIDE
REALLY WANT? BIGGER!
BETTER!
By D AV I D M A R G O L I C K NO
N U T C R AC K E R S!

AIRBNB 2.0 : PLUS

HALFWAY
TO WESTWORLD? WHO HACKED
By K AT R I N A B R O O K E R SSILICON
VALLEY’S’
CROWN
CO
JEWEL?
J ?
y B R YA N
By
BURROUGH

J. Law!
Baby,
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Hot
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IF THERE’S’S O
ONE PERSON
SO WHOO CA
CAN
REDEEM 2016, IT’S THE FREEWHEELIN’ JENNIFER LAWRENCE
By JULIE MILLER Photographs by PETER LINDBERGH

“OH, MUST WE DREAM OUR

D R E A M S A N D H AV E T H E M , T O O ? ” The Making of T Dark, Nasty Side
The
—Elizabeth Bishop
A Christmas Story of ... Maple Syrup?!
By SAM KASHNER By RICH COHEN
 HOLIDAY 2016/2017 No. 677 VANIT YFAIR.COM

FEATURES
134 LAST CALL, 2016
Imagine the party of the year as Beyoncé, Huma
Abedin, Ivanka Trump, and company wait for the ball
to drop. Illustration by Barry Blitt.

136 STAR WITHOUT A SCRIPT By JULIE MILLER

With her Oscar-winning leap to superstardom, Jennifer
Lawrence is re-inventing the Hollywood dream. Beyond
an impressive slate of upcoming movies, including
this month’s Passengers, she has turned her power toward
Clockwise from above: Jennifer Lawrence (page 136); Hot Tracks (page 96); Airbnb personal goals. Photographs by Peter Lindbergh.

144
co-founder and C.E.O. Brian Chesky (page 158); A Christmas Story (page 168).
INVADING APPLE By BRYAN BURROUGH
With shadowy companies selling spyware to the highest
bidder, the fear is that iPhones could be controlled
remotely, to monitor their users. A recent Apple hack
reveals how close Big Brother is getting. Photographs by
Joseph Sywenkyj and Dan Winters.

150 L’AFFAIRE KARDASHIAN By MARK SEAL

When Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in a
Parisian hotel last fall, the Instagram-loving, paparazzi-friendly
star faced a grim reality: her glamorous life was all
too easy to track. But there are other reasons Kardashian
was such an easy target—and the thieves so elusive.

156 A SHARED REALITY

Spotlight on Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg, whose third

L AW RE NC E PH OTOG RA P HE D BY P ET E R L IN DB E RG H; DRE S S BY D I OR . CHE SK Y P HOTO GRA P HE D BY A RT STRE I BER.

movie together, Patriots Day, is about the Boston Marathon

P HOTO GR A PH © MGM /E VE RE TT CO L LE CT I ON (A CH R ISTM AS STORY ) . F O R DE TA IL S , G O TO VF.COM / CREDI TS

bombing. By Peter Berg. Photograph by David Bailey.

158 AIRBNB HITS THE ROAD By KATRINA BROOKER

Despite opposition in major cities, Airbnb seems
unstoppable, making Brian Chesky one of the most
powerful C.E.O.’s in Silicon Valley. Chesky hopes
that’s just Act I, as he works to give travelers a whole
new experience. Photographs by Art Streiber.

162 STICKY BUSINESS By RICH COHEN

The world’s largest producer of maple syrup, Quebec
created a cartel that would regulate the market. But recently,
new threats have emerged, from a major syrup heist to
a thriving black market. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

166 GRAND MOTEL

Spotlight on the Canadian comedy series Schitt’s Creek,
as it kicks off its third U.S. season. By David Kamp.
Photograph by Andrew Eccles.

168 SANTA GETS HIS CLAWS By SAM KASHNER

The holiday-movie genre was jolted out of its sentimental
rut in 1983, when A Christmas Story showed something
every family could recognize. That little sleeper film is now
an American tradition.

30 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com CONTINUED ON PAGE 34 H OLIDAY 2016/2 017

 CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 30

VANITIES
65 HEY JUDE
From Fendi to foosball, V.F.’s annual gift guide
has something for everyone.

FANFAIR & FAIRGROUND

93 31 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF THE CULTURE
Après-ski In the Spirit of Gstaad. Hot Tracks.
Hot Type. According to Anna Kendrick; what to watch.

102 AROUND THE WORLD, ONE PARTY

AT A TIME
V.F.’s third annual New Establishment Summit, in San Francisco,
and a dinner in celebration of Frieze Masters, in London.

COLUMNS
108 V.C. FOR VENDETTA By DAVID MARGOLICK
By bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media,
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel bankrupted Nick
Denton’s online empire. An act of revenge, it was also a war
Clockwise
C
Clo
lockw
k ise
kwi
ise from
fr above:
abo a sugar shack in Quebec (page 162); Holiday Gift Guide (page 68); of competing visions. Photo illustration by Sean McCabe.
the Hôtel de Pourtalès, in Paris, site of the Kardashian robbery (page 150).
115 GILLIAN’S RAINBOW
Spotlight on Gillian Anderson, who has emerged

SU GA R SHACK PH OTO GRA P HE D BY J ON AT HA N BE CKE R; J ACKE T A ND CA P BY F I L S ON . PHOTOG RA P H

BY M A RC PI A S E CKI /G ET T Y I MAG ES ( H Ô TE L DE P O URTA L È S) . F OR DE TA I L S, GO TO VF. CO M/ CRE DI TS
as a transatlantic treasure of stage, screen, and page.
By Henry Porter. Portrait by David Downton.

117 THE 2016 HALL OF FAME

Closing out a year of apocalyptic events and political
poison, V.F. nominates the brave bright spots—Simone Biles,
Megyn Kelly, the Obamas, and more—in a portfolio.
Plus: Remembering the legends lost. Text by James Wolcott.

ET CETERA
42 EDITOR’S LETTER FROM 9/11 TO 11/9
58 CONTRIBUTORS
62 LETTERS BAD BLOOD
82 60 MINUTES POLL
106 IN THE DETAILS ISABELLA ROSSELLINI
192 PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE DJ KHALED

34 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com CONTINUED ON PAGE 39 H OLIDAY 2016/2 017

 HOLIDAY 2016/2017 No. 677

CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 34

VANIT YFAIR.COM
.co
Covering Silicon Valley,
Wall Street, and Washington, D.C.

Obsessing over TV, film,

awards, and more

Tracking celebrity, fashion,

and—why not?—royals

Above, Jude Demorest. Below, the 2015 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
DE MO R EST PHOTO GR A PHE D BY KE N NE TH WI L L A R DT.
PH OTO GRA P H, BOTTO M, BY J UST IN B I S HO P

HOLIDAY 2 016 / 2 017 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

 EDITOR’S LETTER

FROM 9/11 to 11/9

“Only in America / Land of opportunity” —Jay & the Americans

God, I love this country. no federal taxes for nearly two decades,

ANNI E LE I BOVI TZ
ONLY IN AMERICA could a serial bankrupt and who refused to release his tax re-
pass himself off as a successful busi- turns, be put in charge of the Treasury
nessman. (And almost none of those and the Internal Revenue Service.
he bankrupted were even regular busi- ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who thinks
nesses. They were casinos—where people climate change is a hoax, and some-
essentially come to lose their money.) thing invented by the Chinese, be put in
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who of- charge of not only the Environmental
fended Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and Protection Agency but also our nego-
African-Americans, as well as women, tiations with other nations—at the most
babies, and the handicapped, become calamitous environmental period in the
the Republican nominee for president. earth’s modern history.
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man for whom truth negotiator with the Russians, the Chinese, and ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who surrounded
is an inconvenient concept feel comfortable the North Koreans. himself with political second-raters like Ru-
referring to his opponent as “lying” and dolph Giuliani and Chris Christie be put in
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man whose staff report-
“crooked.” charge of forming the team to run the next
edly took away his Twitter account because he
ONLY IN AMERICA, a nation built on a history of U.S. government.
couldn’t control himself be given the nuclear
immigration, could a man who married two codes. (Thank you, President Obama, for ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who earned the
immigrants—one of whom is alleged to have pointing out that one.) contempt of his Republican rivals for being a
worked illegally when she first arrived—run on con man and a fraud—and who implicated the
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man with a negligible
an anti-immigration platform. father of one of his rivals in John F. Kennedy’s
record of charitable giving and not a single
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man with a legendary assassination—ultimately reap the support of
day’s experience in public life be raised to the
reputation for stiffing small-business owners those very same rivals.
highest public office in the land.
and wage laborers be able to pass himself off ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who threatened to
as a champion of the little guy. ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who kept a vol-
throw his opponent in jail and to sue the women
ume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside rule
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man run for the presi- over the second-largest Jewish population in
who have accused him of sexual harassment, who
dency with one of his heralded accomplish- denigrated the judge who will preside over the
the world.
ments being the fixing of a skating rink in New trial of his bogus university (because the judge is
York’s Central Park, a job the city had bungled ONLY IN AMERICA could a man whose résumé of Mexican heritage), and who has 75 outstand-
for years. (It’s a feat most backyard rink rats in of failed businesses and alleged sexual ha- ing lawsuits (including two for fraud) be put in
Canada pull off before their 13th birthday.) rassment is so miserable that he would have charge of the Justice Department.
trouble finding work at a copy shop be named
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who brags about ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who does not un-
chief executive of the world’s largest economy.
groping and kissing women without their derstand the separation of powers, and who has
consent win 53 percent of the vote among ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who has skirted advocated for the use of torture regardless of na-
white women. the law for more than four decades be put in tional and international law, be thought prepared
charge of choosing new justices for the na- to swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and de-
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who avoided the
tion’s highest court. fend the Constitution of the United States.”
draft—with a deferment for pesky bone spurs
on his feet, which somehow did not hinder him ONLY IN AMERICA could a man whose foreign-affairs ONLY IN AMERICA could a man whose primary na-
from playing tennis—and who insulted war he- experience consists of negotiating deals for hotels tional exposure was appearing on a reality-TV
roes and their families become the commander and golf courses—and perhaps arranging for invest- show become the reality that so much of the
in chief of the greatest military power on earth. ments by Russians—become the most powerful world feared.
ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who lashed out man on the planet. (And at a very perilous time.) Do not tell me America is no longer a land of
over the flimsiest of slights become our chief ONLY IN AMERICA could a man who has likely paid opportunity. —GRAYDON CARTER

42 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 ®

Editor GRAYDON CARTER

Managing Editor CHRIS GARRETT Design Director CHRIS DIXON

Executive Editor DOUGLAS STUMPF Features Editor JANE SARKIN Creative Director (Fashion and Style) JESSICA DIEHL Photography Director SUSAN WHITE
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Our Man in Kabul TOM FRESTON Our Man in Saigon BRIAN MCNALLY Our Man on the Street DEREK BLASBERG Architecture Consultant BASIL WALTER

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Editor, Creative Development DAVID FRIEND

vanityfair.com
Director MICHAEL HOGAN
Editor MATTHEW LYNCH Editor, The Hive JON KELLY Deputy Editor KATEY RICH Projects Editor KELLY BUTLER
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Hollywood Editor HILLARY BUSIS News Editor BENJAMIN LANDY Vanities Editor LAUREN LE VINE Story Editor KIA MAKARECHI Line Editor STEPHANIE HORST
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Development: Engineering Manager MATTHEW HUDSON Product Director ZAC FRANK Senior Manager, Analytics KRISTINNE GUMBAYAN
Software Engineers EDDY ESPINAL, TYLER CHADWICK Front-End Engineer RAFAEL FREANER

Contributing Editors
HENRY ALFORD, KURT ANDERSEN, SUZANNA ANDREWS, LILI ANOLIK, ROBERT SAM ANSON, JUDY BACHRACH, CARL BERNSTEIN, PETER BISKIND,
BUZZ BISSINGER, HOWARD BLUM, PATRICIA BOSWORTH, MARK BOWDEN, DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, ALICE BRUDENELL-BRUCE,
MICHAEL CALLAHAN, MARINA CICOGNA, EDWIN JOHN COASTER, RICH COHEN, JOHN CONNOLLY, SLOANE CROSLEY, STEVEN DALY,
BEATRICE MONTI DELLA CORTE, JANINE DI GIOVANNI, KURT EICHENWALD, LISA EISNER, BRUCE FEIRSTEIN, STEVE GARBARINO, A. A. GILL, PAUL GOLDBERGER,
VANESSA GRIGORIADIS, MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS, LOUISE GRUNWALD, BRUCE HANDY, DAVID HARRIS, JOHN HEILPERN,
REINALDO HERRERA, CAROL BLUE HITCHENS, A. M. HOMES, LAURA JACOBS, SEBASTIAN JUNGER, DAVID KAMP, SAM KASHNER,
MICHAEL KINSLEY, FRAN LEBOWITZ, ADAM LEFF, DANY LEVY, MONICA LEWINSKY, MICHAEL LEWIS, DAVID MARGOLICK, VICTORIA MATHER (TRAVEL),
BRUCE MCCALL, BETHANY MCLEAN, PATRICK MCMULLAN, ANNE MCNALLY, PIPPA MIDDLETON, SETH MNOOKIN, NINA MUNK,
ELISE O’SHAUGHNESSY, EVGENIA PERETZ, JEAN PIGOZZI, WILLIAM PROCHNAU, TODD S. PURDUM, JOHN RICHARDSON,
LISA ROBINSON, DAVID ROSE, RICHARD RUSHFIELD, NANCY JO SALES, ELISSA SCHAPPELL, MARK SEAL, GAIL SHEEHY, MICHAEL SHNAYERSON,
SALLY BEDELL SMITH, JAMES B. STEELE, MATT TYRNAUER, CRAIG UNGER, DIANE VON FURSTENBERG, ELIZABETH SALTZMAN WALKER,
BENJAMIN WALLACE, HEATHER WATTS, JIM WINDOLF, JAMES WOLCOTT, EVAN WRIGHT, NED ZEMAN

In Memoriam INGRID SISCHY (1952–2015), FREDERIC MORTON (1924–2015), CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949–2011), TIM HETHERINGTON (1970–2011),
DOMINICK DUNNE (1925–2009), DAVID HALBERSTAM (1934–2007), MARJORIE WILLIAMS (1958–2005), HELMUT NEWTON (1920–2004), HERB RITTS (1952–2002)

Contributing Photographers
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
BRUCE WEBER, JONATHAN BECKER, MARK SELIGER, PATRICK DEMARCHELIER, LARRY FINK, TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS, SAM JONES,
JONAS FREDWALL KARLSSON, NORMAN JEAN ROY, SNOWDON, MARIO TESTINO, GASPER TRINGALE Contributing Artists HILARY KNIGHT, ROBERT RISKO,
TIM SHEAFFER, EDWARD SOREL, STEPHEN DOYLE

Contributors
Senior Photography Producer RON BEINNER Special Projects Art Director ANGELA PANICHI
I LL UST RATI ON S BY M A RK MATCHO

Digital Production Manager H. SCOTT JOLLEY Associate Digital Production Manager SUSAN M. RASCO Production Manager BETH BARTHOLOMEW Associate Editor S. P. NIX
Photo Associate JAMES EMMERMAN Accessories Associate ALEXIS KANTER Art Associate SUSAN WIDDICOMBE Photography Production Assistant KALINA KRABEL
Photo Assistant EMILY LIPSON Stylist DEBORAH AFSHANI Video Associate ALYSSA MARINO

Communications
Executive Director of Communications BETH KSENIAK Deputy Director of Communications LIZZIE WOLFF
Associate Director of Communications/Contributing Style Editor, VF.com RACHEL TASHJIAN Communications Assistant OLIVIA AYLMER

HOL I DAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 45

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56 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 CONTRIBUTORS

BARRY BLITT
For “Last Call, 2016,” on page 134, famed
New Yorker and New York Times illustrator Barry
Blitt created the likenesses of 36 of 2016’s most
public personalities and assembled them at a grand
get-together, where their interactions reveal their
signature characteristics. Aside from the more dignified
attendees, Blitt says, “Most of the participants are
equally repugnant,” adding, “I naïvely hoped this might
be the last time I’d have to draw Donald Trump.”

PETER BERG
Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg (left)
illuminates what unites him and Mark Wahlberg, star
of Berg’s new film about the 2013 Boston Marathon
bombing, Patriots Day, in “A Shared Reality,” on
page 156. “We pursue the themes of brotherhood built
on the most extraordinary aspects of humanity
and adversity,” says Berg. “We find stories worth telling
and do everything in our power to tell them.”

RICH COHEN
For “Sticky Business,” on page 162, Contributing
Editor Rich Cohen traveled to the holy land of maple
syrup, in Quebec, where a Canadian cartel controls
the majority of the world’s supply and proudly
negotiates high prices for it. “They believe in what
they’re doing,” says Cohen. “They’ve figured out how
to control the greatest product in the world. Before
they started, nobody could earn a living making
syrup—now everybody’s getting rich because of it.”

JULIE MILLER
In “Star Without a Script,” this month’s cover story,
on page 136, Julie Miller profiles Oscar-winning actress
Jennifer Lawrence, star of the upcoming science-fiction
romance Passengers. Lawrence was reportedly paid
$20 million for the movie—a career milestone that
is offset by the unprecedented perils of modern movie
stardom. “At 26, Jen has come of age as a megawatt
movie star in an era of boundless social media,”
says Miller. “Everyone needs them, but for a movie
star in 2016, boundaries are a means of survival.”
BY KA R E N BA L L A R D, PA S CA L PE R ICH, J USTI N B I SH OP, STE P HE N KID D

PETER LINDBERGH
PH OTO GRA P HS : F RO M TO P, CO URT ESY O F B A R RY B L IT T,

On an extravagant movie set, celebrating Jennifer

Lawrence’s skyrocketing career, photographer
Peter Lindbergh captured the actress and Hollywood
feminist icon for “Star Without a Script,” on page 136.
A pioneer of realist photography, Lindbergh is a
perfect match for Lawrence, who has earned exceptional
appeal by maintaining a natural, down-to-earth
persona. On top of that, says Lindbergh, “Jennifer
kept up an excellent spirit while soaking wet for
a few hours. I’d call that quite unique.”
CON TI NUED ON PAGE 61

58 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 CONTRIBUTORS

CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 58

DAVID MARGOLICK
In “V.C. for Vendetta,” on page 108,
Contributing Editor David Margolick
investigates the dispute between
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton
and venture capitalist Peter Thiel,
who bankrupted the company
by underwriting Hulk Hogan’s
$140 million lawsuit against it.
“Whether or not the ruling’s upheld,
even billionaires can’t throttle very
many journalists for very long,”
Margolick says. “Gawker may be
dead, but Gawkerism will continue
to reappear in many other forms.”

DAVID BAILEY
For “A Shared Reality,” on page 156,
British photographer David Bailey—
winner of the 2016 Infinity Award
for Lifetime Achievement—delighted in
getting to know Mark Wahlberg and
Peter Berg. “They were two straight-up
guys,” says Bailey, adding, “When I
saw Wahlberg’s biceps, I wanted him on
my side.” A book of Bailey’s work on
the primitive Naga people of India
and Burma, Bailey’s Naga Hills, will
be published by Steidl in the spring.

KATRINA BROOKER
Journalist Katrina Brooker has profiled
members of the Silicon Valley elite since
the dot-com bubble burst, and she
delights especially in tech personalities
who surprise her. Brian Chesky,
co-founder of Airbnb, has followed
the triumphs and downfalls of business
leaders for nearly as long. His belief
that innovation precludes failure
courses through Brooker’s profile,
“Airbnb Hits the Road,” on page 158.
Says Brooker, “While we’re worrying
about what’s happening today,
Chesky’s watching the horizon.”
PH OTO GRA P HS : F RO M TO P, BY L AW RE N CE S CH IL L E R/ LJ S COM M UNI CAT I O NS, L .L .C ./

SAM KASHNER
Contributing Editor Sam Kashner
GE TT Y I M AGE S; © DAVI D B A I L EY; BY MI CHA E L MUR PH RE E ; HE NRY DI LTZ

caught up with Peter Billingsley and

other cast members from the classic
1983 film A Christmas Story for “Santa
Gets His Claws,” on page 168. “It’s
hard to top any truly great performance,
and Peter’s performance, as Ralphie, is
as good as any of Shirley Temple’s,”
says Kashner. “Child actors often create
indelible portraits of themselves as
children, and I think the actors from
A Christmas Story have come to a cold
peace with the fact that what they
made is a small masterpiece.”

HOL I DAY 2 016 / 2 017

 LETTERS

BAD BLOOD
A biotech villain in Silicon Valley; an old sex scandal gets a new twist;
a presidential exit interview for the ages

with her hand pressed to her forehead in dis-

tress, I immediately recognized the woman!
It was film star Mary Astor, John Barry-
more’s love in the film Don Juan, Humphrey
Bogart’s mysterious lady in The Maltese Fal-
con, Judy Garland’s mother in Meet Me in
St. Louis. My conjecture was confirmed
when I read that the article was an adapta-
tion from Edward Sorel’s book Mary Astor’s
Purple Diary.
In the drawing of Mr. Kaufman’s inti-
mate moment with Mary, he is also instantly
recognizable. His likeness rises far
UNTESTED above mere caricature, as does that
Theranos of Miss Astor. Both as an artist
founder and and writer, Mr. Sorel is a very tal-
C.E.O. Elizabeth ented, clever man. I look forward
Holmes in
to reading his book.
2015.
SAM-STEVEN SIPORIN
Palm Springs, California

I
enjoyed the Mary Astor trial story, but
I remember one salient detail that was
the most interesting part and indeed

I
just read Nick Bilton’s “The Talented nies that made similar claims (a pinprick of was the last comment on the matter. When
Ms. Holmes” [October], and I want blood determining health and risks of certain George Kaufman was finally cornered by re-
to compliment him on a great piece. diseases) and could not successfully interest porters after the trial was over and asked for
This article hit me as containing the most enough high-level media. I decided to go no a comment, his witty reply was “I do NOT
accurate depiction of Theranos’s culture. further when an Associated Press reporter keep a diary.”
The company hired me in 2012 as a for- told me she would look only at information DARYL MOAD
mulations chemist, and I was on board for backed by published peer-reviewed-journal Winnipeg, Manitoba
about one year before I left. I worked with studies. Reading that Holmes had no studies
chief scientist Ian Gibbons and was quite to substantiate her claims should have imme-
troubled when he never returned to work. diately raised red flags. THE VIEW FROM THE OVAL
My heart goes out to his family. Thank you, SHIRA HIRSCHMAN WEISS

I
Nick, for properly uncovering the disgust- Teaneck, New Jersey want to express my supreme thanks for
ing culture of this company and its founder, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s interview with

N
Elizabeth Holmes. ick Bilton’s account of a tech- President Obama. I feel sorry that the
NIC BLAIR company concept built on marsh- next POTUS will not be of the same caliber.
Denver, Colorado mallow brings to mind the dream I have perused a few of Ms. Goodwin’s
sequence in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic books. My husband and I really like her

I
was absolutely spellbound by Nick Bil- Verses in which the mystical and charismat- stories about her love of baseball and the
ton’s article. I remember wistfully think- ic Ayesha leads a group of followers on a Brooklyn Dodgers. (Yogi says Jackie was
ing how nice it would be to create a $9 lengthy foot pilgrimage that ends disastrous- out. I believe Yogi.)
billion enterprise that hoped to change the ly in the Arabian Sea. Thank you, too, Annie Leibovitz, for your
world. Bilton deserves a Pulitzer Prize for JAMES E. HADDOW usual wonderful photos.
his incredible piece of journalism. Windham, Maine KATHLEEN ANDREWS
WILLIAM M. OWEN London, Ontario
Deerfield, Illinois

AFFAIR OF THE CENTURY

W
Letters to the editor should be sent electronically with
hile I feel bad for Elizabeth

K
the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone
Holmes because I want a smart, udos to artist Edward Sorel for his number to [email protected]. All requests for back issues
industrious young woman to suc- droll and masterly illustrated story should be sent to [email protected]. All other
J E NN Y HUE STO N

queries should be sent to [email protected]. The magazine

ceed, I am extremely surprised her company “The Ecstasy & the Agony” (Octo-
reserves the right to edit submissions, which may
made it as far as it did. Years ago, I tried to ber). When I saw his delightful drawing of be published or otherwise used in any medium.
consult in P.R. for nutrigenomics compa- a nude lady reclining on her chaise longue All submissions become the property of Vanity Fair.

62 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 HOLIDAY
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 2016/2017

{ THIS
MONTH ‹ Gifts! Gifts!
p. 68
s! G
Gifts!
ifts!
p. 70 p. 72
Gifts!
G ifts! G
Gifts! Gifts!
p. 75 p. 76 p. 77
&
more
Gifts!
p. 80
{

VANITIES D E MOR E ST W EAR S A

D R E S S BY G U CC I ;
E A R R IN G S BY H AR RY
WIN STON ; R I N G
BY B UL G AR I .

@vf.com
To go BEHIND THE
ST Y LE D BY RYA N YO UNG; HA I R BY N ICO L A S E LD IN ; M A KE UP BY VI CKY ST E CKE L ;

SCENES of Jude
Demorest’s Vanities
photo shoot, visit
MA N I CUR E BY M A R Y S OUL ; F OR DE TA I LS , GO TO V F.CO M/C RE DI TS

VF.COM/HOLIDAY
2016/2017.

JUDE DEMOREST
AGE: 24. HOMETOWN: Detroit, Michigan. A REVELATION: “I grew up in church, seven days a week. The service was very
music-driven, so the pastor created a performing-arts school down the street. There was drama, dance, and choir
rehearsal—it was my training.” WESTERN UNION: At 16, Demorest followed her passions to Los Angeles. After trying
everything from backup dancing to singing, she signed with Epic Records under the iconic producer L. A. Reid. “I learned about the whole music industry from
him.” CHART TOPPER: Demorest ended up co-writing the hit single “Work from Home,” which Reid acquired for Fifth Harmony. “I write whenever I’m not on set.”
A NEW EMPIRE: This summer, writer, director, and executive producer Lee Daniels held a nationwide search for Fox’s girl-group series, Star (debuting next month).
“It was 10 auditions and Lee was part of every one.” ROLE MODELS: After nabbing the show’s eponymous title role, Demorest is keeping company with her co-stars,
who include Queen Latifah, Lenny Kravitz, and Naomi Campbell. “I watch and learn what may have taken years if this hadn’t been my first project.” REALITY TV:
“Girls who look like Star aren’t represented on television. It’s an honor to be a part of Lee’s bravery and the very real stories he wants to tell.” — KRISTA SMITH

HOL I DAY 2 016 / 2 017 PHOTOGRAPH BY KENNETH WILLARDT www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 65
 Hermès pen,
$1,380.
(Hermès stores
Gucci bag, $3,500.
VANITIES
(gucci.com)
nationwide)

Gift Guide
David Yurman Smooth WOMEN
bracelet, $8,500.
(davidyurman.com)

Larkspur & Hawk

earrings, $1,400.
(larkspurandhawk.com)

Mizuki cuff, $3,990.

(Bergdorf Goodman)

Fendi Mink Fur and Metal

ABClick Charms, $350 each.
(fendi.com)

Apple
Watch,
$1,249.
(apple.com)
The Cambridge Satchel
Cartier Drive de Cartier Company bag, $130.
small-watch, $8,750. (cambridgesatchel.com)
(cartier.com)

Tom Ford
pendant, $590.
Hermès scarf, $740.
(tomford.com)
(Hermès stores
nationwide)

Barneys New York

Max Mara Atelier Venetian slipper, $250. (barneys.com)
coat, $3,190.
(us.maxmara.com)

Richard Ginori candle,

$195. (gumps.com)
Mansur Gavriel
Sun bag,
PH OTO GRA P H BY TI M HO UT ( GUCCI B AG ); F O R DE TA I LS , GO TO V F.CO M /CR E DI TS

$1,295. Valextra pouch,

(mansurgavriel $345. (valextra.com)
.com)

Céline Tri-Fold
bag, $3,100.
(celine.com)

Tommy Hilfiger
bracelet, $100.
(uk.tommy.com)

Boucheron Quatre Clou

Charvet scarf, de Paris bracelet in
$285. (Charvet yellow gold, $6,850.
boutique, Paris) (us.boucheron.com)

68 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 VANITIES
Kaymet tray, $148.
(barneys.com)

Gift Guide
WOMEN
Louis Vuitton Zippy coin
purse, $440.
(louisvuitton.com)

PHOTO GRAPHS BY TI M HO UT (ARAKS PAJAMA TO P, S E R MO N E TA GL OVE S ), JO HN MAN N O

(T WELVE HO ME AZURE SC ARF); FO R DETAI L S , GO TO VF.CO M/ CR E DI TS
Sermoneta classic Kate Spade
gloves, $99. Cartier ring, $6,400. (Cartier note-card set, $25. Olivia von Halle robe, $975.
(sermonetagloves.com) boutiques nationwide) (katespade.com) (net-a-porter.com)

Balenciaga
Twelve Home Azure
Bistro clutch,
scarf, $295. Cole Haan
$1,645.
(info@twelvehome Hamilton Grand
(Neiman
design.com) Oxford shoes,
Marcus,
Dallas) $280.
(colehaan.com)

Van Cleef & Arpels brooch, Proenza Schouler

price upon request. Curl clutch, $850.
(vancleefarpels.com) (proenzaschouler.com)

The Row clutch,

$1,590.
(net-a-porter
.com)

Araks pajama
top, $340;
Chloé sweater, bottom, $255.
$1,995. (araks.com)
(net-a-porter.com)

Verdura clock, Jennifer Fisher ring,

$1,350. $265.
(verdura.com) (jenniferfisherjewelry.com)

Salvatore Ferragamo minaudière, $1,990.

(Salvatore Ferragamo boutiques nationwide)

Delfina Delettrez
ring, $2,430. Stuart Weitzman
(Delfina Delettrez shoe, $398.
boutique, London) (net-a-porter.com)

Loewe coin purse,

$380.
(loewe.com)

70 H OLIDAY 2016/2017
 VANITIES WaterRower Classic rowing
machine, $1,495. (waterrower.com)

Gift Guide
MEN
Coach
1941 shirt, $195.
(coach.com)

Baccarat Harmonie
decanter, $1,315, and
Gucci tie, tumblers, $270, for a set of Best Made Co. Monochrome Belgian dart set, $128.
$200. two. (us.baccarat.com) (bestmadeco.com)
(gucci.com)

Ermenegildo Zegna gloves, The Savoy Cocktail Book,

$495. (zegna.com) $18. (shopatthesavoy.com)

Salvatore Ferragamo coat,

$3,450. (Salvatore
Bottega Ferragamo boutiques
Veneta desert nationwide)
boots, $820.
(bottega
veneta.com)

Mark and Graham travel

Cartier cuff links, $3,200. shoehorn, $49.
(cartier.com) (markandgraham.com)

Valextra
messenger bag,
$1,780.
(valextra.com)

Google Cardboard VR viewer, Begg & Co. Orkney

Balenciaga hoodie, $695. $15. (store.google.com) Cary scarf, $450.
(mrporter.com) (beggandcompany.com)

Loro Piana James Drap robe, Paravel duffel bag, $345.

PH OTO GRA P HS BY T IM H OUT ( COACH 19 41 S HI RT, G UCCI T IE , SA LVATO R E

$3,650. (loropiana.com) (tourparavel.com)

F E RR AGA MO COAT ) ; FO R DE TA I LS , G O TO VF. CO M/ CR E DITS

Anderson & Sheppard

pocket-squares, $67
each. (shop.anderson-
sheppard.co.uk)

72 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 Moncler
Asperge jacket,
VANITIES J. Crew Chup for J. Crew
socks, $36. (jcrew.com)
$1,815.
(moncler.com)

Gift Guide Jack Spade travel kit, $148.

MEN (jackspade.com)

Le Corbusier & Pierre

Jeanneret: Chandigarh,
India, $190.
(theline.com)

A. Testoni slippers,
$325. (nordstrom.com)

MoMA Design
Store Foosball
table, $800.
(momastore.org)

Turnbull & Asser

handkerchief, $95.
(turnbullandasser.com)
Tiffany & Co.
watch, Anderson &
$12,000. Sheppard jacket,
(tiffany.com) $2,130. (shop.
anderson-
sheppard.co.uk)

Meisterstuck Ultra
Black LeGrand
fountain pen,
$870. (Montblanc
boutiques
nationwide)

Tod’s
sweater,
$875. (Tod’s
boutiques
nationwide)

BeatsX wireless
earphones,
$150. (apple
.com)

Louis Vuitton
Pochette Jour
GM, $740.
PH OTO GRA P HS BY T IM H OUT ( A NDE R SO N & S HE PPA R D J ACKE T, T UR NB UL L

Prada belt, $480. Isaia 7 Fold tie,

(louisvuitton.com)
(prada.com) $225. (isaia.it)
& A S SE R HA N DKE RCH IE F ) ; FO R DE TA I LS , GO TO V F.CO M /CR E DI TS

FPM Bank Trunk on Wheels,

$1,395. ([email protected]) Shinola
Runwell bicycle,
$2,950. (shinola.com)

Polo Ralph Lauren Tuxedo

Bear sweater, $395.
(ralphlauren.com)

75
 VANITIES Cedes Milano
caviar bowl,
$950, and
spoon, $90.
(barneys.com)

Hermès Carnets D’Equateur teapot,

Gift Guide
$970, and cup-and-saucer sets, $315 and THINGS
$330. (Hermès stores nationwide)

PHOTO GRAPHS BY TI M HO UT (AS KI N O S I E CHO CO L ATE MALT B AL L S ), JO HN MA N N O

(HUGO GUI NNE S S CUT FLOWE R S ); F O R DE TAI L S , GO TO VF.CO M/ CR E DI TS
Khavyar caviar,
varieties from $12 to $150
per oz. (khavyar.com)

Smythson Bee
Fornasetti Sardine Rosso correspondence card,
Hugo Guinness Cut Flowers (unframed), diffusing sphere, $525. $45 for a set of 10.
$410. (johnderian.com) (net-a-porter.com) (smythson.com)

Midipy log TechnoGym

holder, $643. Wellness
(artedona.com) Rack, $950.
(technogym
.com)

Pendulux Robot clock, Anya Hindmarch Bespoke Dunstone

$299. (pendulux.com) seating chart, $675. (646-852-6233)

VANITIES D. Porthault bib, $85.

(dporthaultparis.com)

Tesla Model S for

Kids, $499. (tesla
Gift Guide .radioflyer.com)
KIDS

J. Crew Max the Monster

bag, $50. (jcrew.com)

Hansa Jennifer Fisher

Toys giraffe, necklace,
$1,260. $650. (jenniferfisher
(modaoperandi jewelry.com)
.com)

Stella McCartney Kids sunglasses,

$135. (stellamccartney.com)
N ECKL AC E) ; F O R DETA I L S, GO TO V F.COM /C RE DI TS
P HOTO GR A PH BY TI M HO UT ( J E NN I FE R F I SH ER

Tokyobike Little
Little People, Big Dreams: Amelia Earhart, Tokyobike, $295.
$15. (amazon.com) (tokyobikenyc.com)

76 VANIT Y FAIR H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 Askinosie Chocolate malt
balls, $15. (askinosie.com)

Waterford
Lismore Essence
champagne
saucer, set of 4, DJI Osmo stabilized
$350. camera for
(waterford.com) smartphones, $569.
(dji.com)

Hunting Season Horn Yastik by Rifat Özbek Ikat pillow, $230.

table lighter, $395. (yastikbyrifatozbek.com)
(hunting-season.com)
Georg Jensen Torun letter opener,
$255. (georgjensen.com)

Tangram Smart Rope,

$80. (apple.com)

Marshall Headphones
Woburn speakers, $549.
(marshallheadphones.com)

The
Impossible
Collection
The Conran Shop of Design, Aspinal of London
croquet set, $360. $845. poker set, $695.
(conranshop.co.uk) (assouline.com) (aspinaloflondon.com)

Juniper Books Nancy Dior Baby bag, $2,100.

Drew set, $90. (800-929-DIOR)
(juniperbooks.com)

Alpha Industries
Youth NASA MA-1
jacket, $85.
(alphaindustries
.com)

Coach Rexy
puzzle, $395. Yikes Twins
(coach.com) dog slippers, $28.
(barneys.com) Bonpoint Diva dress,
$325. (bonpoint.com)

Burberry Heritage trench coat,

$850. (us.burberry.com)

Loog electric
guitar, $199.
(loog.nyc)
MoMA
Design Store
kite, $40.
(momastore.org)

Tommy Hilfiger State Bags Mini

scarf, $40. Kane backpack, $45.
(tommyhilfiger.com) (statebags.com)

HO L I DAY 2 016 / 2 017 77

 VANITIES Be merry
and look bright …
Gift Guide
BEAUTY

7
1 4

11 6
10

12 8

9
13
16

15
18
17

14

21
19
22

20

1. EB Florals Rooster with Flock of Coqs Chestnut & Lemon Flower fragrance, $3,900. (Bergdorf Goodman) 2. Louis Vuitton Fragrance Case, $5,450.
É
FOR DE TA IL S, G O TO V F. COM /C RE D ITS

(louisvuitton.com) 3. Cire Trudon Louis XIV candle, $190. (ciretrudon.com) 4. Guerlain Néroli Outrenoir, $260. (saksfifthavenue.com) 5. Annick Goutal Tenue
de Soirée, $190. (us.annickgoutal.com) 6. Rag & Bone Amber eau de parfum, $140. (rag-bone.com) 7. Byredo Belle de Tanger eau de parfum, $230.
(neimanmarcus.com) 8. Fleur Cashmere candle, $45. (fleurcollection.com) 9. Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady Hair & Body Oil, $190. (fredericmalle.com) 10. Bond
No. 9 SoHo fragrance, $335. (bondno9.com) 11. Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv Ultimate Lift Regenerating Youth Creme and Re-Nutriv Ultimate Lift Regenerating Youth
Serum, $295 each. (esteelauder.com) 12. YSL Rouge Pur Couture Star Clash Edition, $37. (yslbeautyus.com) 13. Jo Malone London Orange Bitters Deluxe candle,
$205. (jomalone.com) 14. Maison Francis Kurkdjian Grand Soir, $215. (neimanmarcus.com) 15. Aedes de Venustas Grenadille d’Afrique eau de parfum, $245.
(aedes.com) 16. Dior Diorific Matte Fluid Velvet Colour Lip & Cheek in 004 Luxury, $38. (dior.com) 17. YSL Sparkle Clash Palette Holiday
2016, $95. (yslbeautyus.com) 18. Chanel Les Exclusifs de Chanel Boy, $185. (chanel.com) 19. Altaia Ombú, $210. (beautyhabit.com) 20. YSL Touche Éclat
Strobing Light, $42. (yslbeautyus.com) 21. Tom Ford Vert Bohème, $225. (tomford.com) 22. Nars limited-edition Rita Audacious lipstick, $32. (sephora.com)

80 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com P H OTO GRA PH BY JEFF HARRIS H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 THE 60 MINUTES/VANITY FAIR POLL

THE MODERN WORKPLACE

T
he job world certainly has changed since the wild and job? More money, obviously, but younger folks are also looking for
woolly days of Mad Men and three-martini lunches. new opportunities, and the thirtysomething crowd—perhaps juggling
What would our grandparents make of nap pods and a family and a house in the suburbs—craves more money and more
mental-health days? We would find these modern prac- flexibility. With corporate C.E.O.’s earning so much more than the
tices very hard to explain, according to this month’s rank and file, it’s natural to wonder how much “so much more”
survey. But we’d like to bring back features of yesteryear. More 1 is the right amount. Roughly half of us think a C.E.O. ought
than 20 percent of us, for instance, pine for the days of the to earn about 10 times an average worker’s salary. Sounds
Which
handshake deal. What would tempt someone to leave their would be the most
good, but the actual figure is nearly 200 times.
important thing for
you to consider if you
@vf.com were looking for
This poll was conducted on behalf
of CBS News by SSRS of Media,

YRS. 30+ YR
See the complete Pennsylvania, among a random

18–29
a new job?
P O L L R E S U LT S.
Go to VF.COM/
S. sample of 1,017 adults nationwide,
interviewed by telephone
September 28–October 2, 2016.
HOLIDAY2016/2017. Some low-percentage answer
choices may have been omitted,
and some numbers have
been rounded off.

34% MONEY 35% 45%

MEN

6 2
TAL-

40% OPPORTUNITY 25% ANNUAL BONUSES

HEAL

Which one
Which job perk
would be the hardest AND REGULAR of these is the
FLEXIBILITY 26%
TH

PAY RAISES
18% best way to keep
to explain to your
DAYS

an employee

PODS
grandfather?
motivated?

TO NA RESPONSIBILITY 9%
| 30%

9%

E M P L OY E P IN | 2 0% DEPENDS 1%
17%
FREQUENT 33%
E MOTIVA
TION RET
REATS | 1
8% PRAISE FROM HAVING PRIDE
9% THEIR BOSS 3% IN THE WORK
PATERNITY LEAVE | 15%
THE THOUGHT OF
BEING OUT OF A JOB
THEY DO

10x 20x 100x

1%

NO ANSWER BEING ABLE 46%

THEY SHOULD BE
7% 4% TO FLIRT WITH YOUR PAID THE SAME
MARTINI LUNCHES CO-WORKER

50x
7% 5%
HANDSHAKE 14%
DEALS MEDIA | 37% 15% AS MUCH AS THEY CAN/ 2%
NO LIMIT

200x
21% DRUGS AND PHARMACEUTICALS | 30%
5 3
62% BANKING | 19%
6% How much
Which one of the TECHNOLOGY | 7% more than the
following business
average pay of an
practices would you
employee is it
most like to bring
fair for a C.E.O.
back in style? 12% to earn?
A GUARANTEED
RAISE EACH YEAR I DON’T KNOW
FILM STILL FROM MARY EVANS/RONALD GRANT/EVERETT COLLECTION

4
7. What’s the worst thing Which
about your current job? one of these
A sampling of answers from You never get a break from it.
industries engages
the 1,017 people surveyed: in the greatest
I have to look at a screen. amount of unethical I work with teenagers all day. They have hormones.
behavior?
The chance of being blown up on a deployment. Meeting strangers. Waking up in the morning.

The fact that I can’t come in anytime that I want. The sexual harassment. Having to preach every Sunday. Co-workers.

Getting old. I haven’t had a raise in 10 years! Competing with lower-wage overseas jobs. The pay.

82 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017

 INTRODUCING
VANITYFAIR.COM’S
NEW DAILY MENU

Covering Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, D.C.

Obsessing over Hollywood—movies, TV, awards, and more …

Tracking celebrity, fashion, and—why not?—royals.

VISIT VF.COM TO SAMPLE THE BEST OF ALL THREE, OR GO STRAIGHT TO OUR DEDICATED LANDING PAGES:
V F H I V E . C OM V F H W D . C OM V F VA N I T I E S . C OM
 3 1 DAY S i n t h e L I F E o f t h e C U LT U R E HOL IDAY 2 0 16/ 2 0 17

Æ DAVEED DIGGS’S NEXT ACT p. 96 ROLLING STONES: BACK WITH THE BLUES p. 96 THIS MONTH IN BOOKS p. 98 AND MORE …
PH OTOG RA P H © T HE ALPI NA GSTA AD

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HOLIDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 93

 DÉJÀ BLUE
‘ <
t certainly wasn’t planned,” says Keith Richards
about the Rolling Stones’ new blues album, Blue
& Lonesome. “We just ran through some blues
numbers to get the sound in the studio,” he adds, “but
the more we listened to the stuff, we realized we had
to obey orders.” For the Stones, recording 12 tracks in
five days is a first in their 54-year career, and, Richards
says, “it all happened by itself.” Here, he shares his
thoughts with Lisa Robinson on a few of the classics
covered on their new album, out December 2.

“Blue and Lonesome”

—Little Walter
“Little Walter inspired all of us with his work with
Muddy Waters. He was Muddy’s harp
player for most of the 1950s, and it was always

‘ Hot Tracks standout stuff.”

“Hate to See You Go”

DAV EED DIGG S —Little Walter
“A lot of the songs on this album are Mick’s and
my Top 10. Mick’s harp playing is great;
this is where Mick Jagger can shine and where
ecause of this Hamilton fairy dust, I have so many doors open nobody else can put a foot.”
to me now,” says Tony Award–winning actor-rapper Daveed
Diggs, whose dual roles as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson were standouts “I Can’t Quit You Baby”

PHOTOG RA P HS BY CHR I S CR IS MA N ( DI G GS ), M A RK SE LI GER (RI CHARDS); FO R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

in that American musical theater phenomenon. Diggs, currently on the ABC series —Willie Dixon/Otis Rush
Black-ish, is also on tour with his rap group Clipping, and has plans to start work on a “Willie Dixon was probably the King of
solo rap album. Here, he talks with Lisa Robinson about life after Hamilton. the Chicago blues, the Big Daddy of Chicago
and Chess Records; head and shoulders
LISA ROBINSON: You left Hamilton this sandwich’—not to have to worry about if I above everyone. A lot of Muddy Waters‘ hits
past summer. Are you sick of talking could buy a sandwich when I was hungry. were Willie Dixon songs.”
about the show? L.R.: You’re known as a very
DAVEED DIGGS: It’s a good thing that fast rapper. What is the idea behind “Ride ’Em On Down”
I love the show and the people who built Clipping—your rap group with —Eddie Taylor
it, because I just as easily could have Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson? “Eddie Taylor—a great guitar player and a
been in a hit that I didn’t love. But I like D.D.: Clipping is a very specific, lovely voice. He isn’t a name that would
that people are starting to find out that concept-y thing. We have all these rules: jump out at you unless you were really into the blues,
I do other things. we don’t sample drums, we create all our but he was very well known in blues circles.
L.R.: Other than the attention, how did own sounds, I don’t speak in the first And, like most of that Chicago-blues stuff, there’s
Hamilton change your life? person. We come from a background of lovely interplay with the guitars. Always two
D.D.: In almost every way. It’s pretty rare experimental music like John Cage … guitars—the ancient form of weaving.”
for an actor, or artist, to be able to ask Philip Glass.
yourself, ‘What do you want to do?’ and L.R.: How will your solo rap album
I’m in that position now because of differ from Clipping?
Hamilton. I’m able to say no to a lot of D.D.: Less formal, just rap songs about
things. I’m not worried about money: I whatever I want them to be about. A little
take cabs now—I never took cabs my entire more straight-ahead. All these ideas I’ve
life. My mantra about what a level had that I thought I’d get to someday …
of success would be was ‘just buy the maybe someday is right now.

BAC K I N B OX E D
Out now: some influential albums re-released for the holiday season. David Bowie’s Who Can
I Be Now? is a boxed set that features work from 1974 to 1976, including Young Americans and Station
to Station ... Lou Reed’s massive set, Lou Reed—The RCA & Arista Album Collection, includes such
gems as Transformer and Street Hassle … The Band celebrates the 40th anniversary of The Last Waltz with
a collector’s edition featuring the original soundtrack of their last concert, Martin Scorsese’s
extraordinary concert film, and a replica of Scorsese’s shooting script ... And the divine Bette Midler,
who stars on Broadway this spring in the much-anticipated Hello, Dolly!, releases a
deluxe edition of her 1972 debut, The Divine Miss M. — L . R .

96 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
 rom the winter sky comes Michael Cha- stories of the late activist, playwright, and film-
bon’s radiant Moonglow (Harper). This maker Kathleen Collins want to know Whatever
close-to-the-bone novel, in the works since his first, Happened to Interracial Love? (Ecco). Siri Hust-
was inspired by the stories Chabon’s grandfather vedt’s insightful essays on art, sex, and general
told on his deathbed. The narrative unwraps to re- judgment join forces in A Woman Looking at
veal a multi-layered, tragicomic package containing Men Looking at Women (Simon & Schuster). Co-
some of Chabon’s favorite toys: love, family, Jewish lin MacCabe’s Perpetual Carnival (Oxford)
identity, model-rocketry, and full-scale war. Of seamlessly switches the reels between film and
the model rocket in question, the Pulitzer Prize– literature. Mary McCartney reminds us to be
winning author writes, “It was at once a prayer not afraid of greatness with her unprecedentedly
sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer.” intimate photos of actor Mark Rylance and com-
The same could be said for this genre-swirling tale. pany in Twelfth Night 13.12.15 (Heni). Peter
You better not pout: Will Schwalbe and his Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds (Farrar, Straus and
great taste are coming to town with Books for Giroux) sells us on the sentient cephalopod and
Living (Knopf). Dava So- the history of our own con-
bel breaks the observatory sciousness, one tentacle at

Hot Type
ceiling in The Glass Uni- a time. Stay woke, friends.
verse (Viking). The short — S LOA N E CROSLEY

IN SHORT
Kevin Dann has come to Expect
Great Things (TarcherPerigee) from bicentennial
birthday boy Henry David Thoreau.
Banana Yoshimoto’s novels are like jewel
boxes, and Moshi Moshi (Counterpoint) is no
exception. Sasha Sokolov’s classic
Between Dog and Wolf (Columbia University)
is intricate and rewarding—a Russian
Finnegans Wake. Carrie Fisher goes beyond
the side-buns in The Princess Diarist (Blue Rider).
Robert Harris gets a bead on the Vatican
in Conclave (Knopf). Mark K. Shriver takes a
Pilgrimage (Random House) in search
of the real Pope Francis. Photographer John
Loengard frames us all, Moment by
Moment (Thames & Hudson). Terry O’Neill
(ACC) takes us on a 50-year-long tour
of his iconic pictures. Shane Mitchell gets a
taste of the world in Far Afield (Ten Speed).
Kevin Morris goes for a slam dunk in his debut
novel, All Joe Knight (Grove). My, what big
fictional teeth Emily Fridlund has in History of

PH OTO GR A PHS BY L O L A H A KIM I A N ( OR I EN T E XP RE S S : TH E LE GE ND OF T R AVE L ),

Wolves (Atlantic Monthly Press). Joshua Jelly-
Schapiro accesses a tropical archipelago in
Island People (Knopf). Michael Tisserand inks a
black-and-white life gone Krazy (Harper).
Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass’s final work

T IM H OU T ( B OO KS ) ; F O R D ETA I L S, GO TO V F.COM / CR EDI TS

demonstrates how Of All That Ends (Houghton
Mifflin), his legacy lives on. Robert Wagner
gets close up on the glam dames in I Loved Her
in the Movies (Viking). Sisters One, Two,
Three (Lake Union) is Nancy Star’s unnerving
variation on Martha’s Vineyard. High jinks
and heart ensue in Paul Muldoon’s Selected
Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Samanta
Schweblin’s electric story reads like a
Fever Dream (Riverhead). If Our Bodies Could Talk
(Doubleday), they’d want James Hamblin taking
dictation. Let’s shack up with the .0001
percent in Steven M. Price’s Trousdale Estates
Vintage luggage tags from
(Regan Arts). — S . C .
Orient Express: The Legend of Travel
(Assouline), by Sixtine Dubly.

Capturing a Continent
Too often photography, like writing, from Africa is dominated by disaster porn—visions of war-torn villages, child soldiers, dictators, and disease.
But with the new picture book Everyday Africa (Kehrer Verlag), which has grown out of the popular Instagram project begun in 2012
by Peter DiCampo and V.F. staffer Austin Merrill, a whole other landscape emerges. Here’s the rich variety of life across the continent caught in
moments that offer a more intimate, nuanced view, shorn of stereotype. No wonder the Everyday concept is fast expanding to all corners
of the globe, where camera phones are revolutionizing how we bear witness to daily reality. — A N D E R S O N T E P P E R

98 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

 APP ALBUM
What’s the first thing Kendrick Kendrick is not a big concertgoer
looks at on her phone (“I think you’re mistaking me for
each morning? “I’m so basic,” someone who gets out”), but she
she says, “but usually Twitter, says she has “just gotten into”
because that’s how you find Solange Knowles’s album A Seat
out if somebody died in the night. at the Table. “I feel like it’s kind
There’s that classic pit in your of too cool for me—but it’s bringing
stomach when you see somebody’s me into a new level of cool just by
name on the trending topics having it play near me.”
and you think, Please don’t
be dead; please just be caught B EYO N C É S O N G
drunk driving.” Ever since Beyoncé’s BET Awards
performance, Kendrick says,
AC T O R “Freedom” (featuring Kendrick
Martin Freeman—best known, Lamar) has been her “jam.” (“I was
Stateside at least, for his like, Oh my God, I’m at
roles in the BBC’s television series church, on the floor, speaking in
Sherlock and the Hobbit film tongues right now.”) But her
franchise—is “under-appreciated,” old standby is “Countdown.” She
Kendrick argues. “I feel explains, “When it comes on,
like people should be screaming you feel like ‘Oh, this is my song,
bloody murder about this is my secret favorite
what a genius that man is.” Beyoncé song.’ And then, every
girl knows the lyrics, but
M OV I E you still feel cool.”
George Cukor’s 1939 film
The Women is Kendrick’s H O L I D AY T R A D I T I O N
favorite movie of all time, but, in Kendrick says, come the
terms of recent fare, she ACCORDING TO: holidays, she enjoys listening to
recommends the documentary Stevie Wonder’s Christmas
Tickled. “If people have
ruined [Tickled] for you, then
Anna Kendrick music and decorating cookies.
“I know [cookie decorating]
fuck those people. It’s sounds normal, but I get so into it
one of those movies where you The actress—whose first book, and so detailed,” she says.
don’t want to know a Scrappy Little Nobody, “It’s one of those things [where]
ton about it. You can watch the is out now—recommends some my constant anxiety is assuaged
trailer, but don’t read by just the specific and focused
anything about it because people, places, and things act of putting tiny dots
it goes off.” By J O S H D U B O F F on sugar-cookie snowflakes.”

WATCH LIST
H I G H C AST L E ) , F RO M M A NAGEM E NT + A RT I STS + SY ND IC ATI O N ( KE ND RI CK ), F RO M TB S ( S E ARCH PART Y)
P HOTO GR A PHS F RO M A 24 ( 2 0 TH CE NT URY WOM EN ), F RO M A MA Z O N PR IM E VI DE O ( T H E M A N IN T HE
By R I C H A R D L AW S O N

What to go see: What to tune in to: What to stream:

20TH CENTURY WOMEN SEARCH PARTY THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE
SEASON TWO

A radiant, intelligent Annette Bening; A cast of young, hip comedy Rising Australian actress Bella
WHO’S Greta Gerwig doing maybe up-and-comers, including Arrested Heathcote joins the sprawling cast,
IN IT her best work ever; and Billy Crudup Development’s Alia Shawkat, which includes Rufus Sewell
as a sad-eyed Lothario. and John Early. and Rupert Evans, this season.

WILL REMIND Old Cameron Crowe meets a little The Brooklyn bite of Girls The series is based on Philip K. Dick’s
YOU OF David Sedaris, filtered through Beginners. applied to a Hal Hartley mystery. 1962 alternate-history thriller.

Mike Mills’s finely acted, wisely written This offbeat (and sometimes An engaging premise—
coming-of-age tale, set in 1979 deliberately off-putting) series speaks in what if the Allies lost World
WHY NOW Santa Barbara, is a movie about life a millennial vernacular that is War II?—provides plenty
that is bursting with it. Take the sensitive sharp and unsettling. It’s piercingly funny of grand intrigue, with a big
bohemian in your
y family to see it. and not afraid to be grim. science-fiction twist.

WHEN YOU In theaters Now airing on TBS. On Amazon

CAN SEE IT December 25. December 16.

100 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017

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 HOL IDAY 2 016 HOL IDAY 2 016/ 2 017

Conan O’Brien
and Jessica Diehl

Jean Pigozzi,
Jony Ive,
Sarah Jessica Trevor Traina,
Parker and and Juliet
Richard Plepler de Baubigny

Vivi Nevo, SUMMIT LEAGUE

Ron Meyer, and
James Allison Tom Freston The proverbial “room where it happens”
and Sean Parker was at capacity at the third annual
Marcus Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit,
Samuelsson in San Francisco. A market-moving
Yuri Milner, crowd, which included hedge-funders,
Michael Evans, movie stars, and founders and C.E.O.’s
and Travis of the world’s biggest tech and media
Kalanick
companies, connected over meals,
cocktail receptions at the St. Regis and
the Ferry Building, and two days
Walter Isaacson, of state-of-the-art programming at the
Jason Blum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Barry Diller, and
CON TI NUED ON PAGE 105
Bryan Lourd Gabriel
Sherman

George Lucas
and Mellody Hobson
take in the final
presidential debate.

Brad Grey John Lasseter,

and Ted Kathleen Kennedy,
Sarandos and Kevin Feige

Cocktails at the
San Francisco
P HOTO GR A PHS BY J UST I N BI S HO P ( F ER RY B UI L DI NG , J O N ES ,
L UCA S , M IL N ER , STAGE) , HA N NA H T HO MS O N (A L L OTH ER S)

Jeff Bezos
Ferry Building.

Jim Gianopulos
and Eddy Cue

Bob Iger

David Zaslav and

Aryeh Bourkoff

Rashida
Jones
Names
Nam
N am
ameess
Teekay
Te
TTee
eeeekka
kay
ay
ay

Bobby Kotick and H OLIDAY 2016/2 017

Leslie Moonves
 CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 102

Jeff Koons and

the BMW Art
Car of his design.

Lynsey
Addario
and Annie
Leibovitz
Mariachis
welcome guests Nick Bilton and
to the Ferry Building. Sarah Ellison
Larry
Gagosian

Hamdi
Ulukaya

Frank Rich and

Fran Lebowitz
Anne Wojcicki and
Esther Wojcicki

Opening-night
cocktails
at the St. Regis,
s,
presented
by Giorgio
Armani.

Aaron
Levie Andrew Ross
Sorkin, Mary
Marty Parent, Beth
Baron Peter Chernin Priscilla Chan, Comstock,
and Susan Darren Walker, and and Michael
Wojcicki Mellody Hobson Moritz

Simon Sebag
Montefiore
and Charles Cyril Blot-Lefevre, Ed Vaizey
Finch Olivia Le Tonqueze, and Clementine Ron Arad and
and Helly Nahmad Fraser Yana Peel
Eric Gael Boglione,
Fellner Alice Brudenell-Bruce,
Laura Bailey, and
MASTER OF ARTS
Countess Andrea Dellal
Charles Finch and Helly Nahmad hosted artists
of Woolton
and collectors at a private dinner, during Frieze
Masters 2016, at Mark’s Club, in London.
PHOTOG R A PHS : TOP, BY J UST IN B ISH OP ( CHA N, LE VI E , MA R IACHI S , AN N E WOJ C I CKI ) ,

Waris Richard E.
Ahluwalia Grant
and Eugenie and Saffron
HA N NA H THOMS ON ( A LL OTHE R S) ; BOT TOM, BY SHAU N J AME S COX

Niarchos Aldridge
Ben Cura
and Olga
Kurylenko

Lady
Amelia
Windsor

Elisa Lasowski,
Anatole Maggiar,
and Anna Brewster

HO L I DAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 105

 IN THE DETAILS

What You Should Know About

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI
A PANOPLY OF ECCENTRIC BIOGRAPHICAL DATA RE: THE ACTRESS-MODEL-AGRICULTURALIST

A
neat trick, exuding mystique SHE HAS spent much of her adult life in
and down-to-earth affability the United States and is a naturalized
at the same time. Isabella U.S. citizen. She feels American “in the
Rossellini’s silent-movie-star way that I’m working—to evolve from
features and milky complexion have modeling into acting, directing, writing,
twice compelled the cosmetics house and going back to school,” she says.
Lancôme to make her its public face— “It’s America that gave me that sense
first in the 1980s, and once again in of freedom and possibility.”
2016, the year she turned 64. But SHE HAS two adult children: Elettra
Rossellini is also a freewheelin’ gal with Wiedemann, a model turned food writer
mud beneath her fingernails, raising and editor, and a son, Roberto Rosselli-
chickens and harvesting honey on her ni (named for his grandfather), a model
organic farm in Brookhaven, New and aspiring photographer.
York, out on Long Island. A lifelong SHE RECALLS the impetus for Elettra’s get-
lover of animals, she has made a mark ting into food writing to be the funda-
in recent years with her wonderful mental modeling question, How do I
Green Porno series of Web shorts about eat and not get fat? “Unfortunately,” she
animal behavior, produced for the Sun- says, “the answer is ‘Do not eat pasta.’ ”
dance Channel and featuring Rossellini SHE LOVES pasta. So, she says, did her
in all manner of beaky and buggy cos- father, who, in the days before the wide-
tumes, delivering uninhibitedly silly but spread availability of quality Italian
genuinely educational monologues. groceries outside of Italy, “traveled with
(“When they come out of the egg sac, pasta in his luggage.”
my babies are ravenous. If I don’t let them eat me, they GOOD EGG SHE BELIEVES that the foremost trait she inherited from her
Rossellini,
would eat each other. We spiders ... are cannibals!”) photographed in
father is being a good raconteur.
As an actress, Rossellini is still best known for her per- New York City. SHE BELIEVES that the foremost trait she inherited from
formance as a nightclub singer in David Lynch’s Blue her mother is being orderly: “I clean my house franti-
Velvet, but she cuts a fierce figure in Hulu’s new dramat- cally, like she did.”
ic series Shut Eye, as the matriarch of a Roma crime family that OF THE celebrated individuals she got to meet thanks to her parents,
controls L.A.’s network of psychic shops. (A much richer premise she was most inspired by the Magnum photographer Eve Arnold,
than it sounds.) Herewith, some facts and insights gleaned from the journalist Oriana Fallaci, and the director Federico Fellini.
an afternoon conversation with the uncategorizable star. SHE HAS met two U.S. presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
SHE WAS forever transformed, at the age of 14, when her father gave
SHE SHARES a birthday, June 18, with her twin sister, Ingrid, and her the book King Solomon’s Ring (1949), a seminal study of
Sir Paul McCartney. She has been thrilled by the McCartney coin- animal psychology and intelligence by the Austrian scientist
cidence since childhood, and, she says, “I always wish him a very Konrad Lorenz.
happy birthday—mentally, because I have never met him.” GIVEN HER zoological bent, she surprised her relatives in her late
SHE IS especially keen on two breeds of heritage chicken that she is rais- 20s when she fell into, of all things, modeling: “When I became
ing, the Campine, an ancient Flemish bird said to have been coveted a model, the family was like, ‘Whaaat? Her?’ ”
by Julius Caesar, and the Cochin, “lovely because it’s very feathery.” SHE CREDITS her fashion-world experience with helping her create
SHE RAISES her chickens for eggs, not for meat. the elaborate costumes for her Green Porno films.
HER NAMELESS farm (“Everybody calls it Isabella’s Farm”) is part SHE DESCRIBES her deadpan commitment to playing horny, confused,
of a Community Supported Agriculture (C.S.A.) cooperative that and fearful animals as “my homage to Buster Keaton.”
sells eggs and produce to Long Island locals and to such Brooklyn SHE HAS now taken the Green Porno concept on the road, performing
restaurants as Roman’s and Marlow & Daughters. monologues onstage, Spalding Gray–style. Her next one is entitled
SHE IS slowly pursuing, between acting jobs, a master’s degree in ani- “Intelligence,” though she is aware that the scientific community
mal behavior and conservation at Hunter College, in New York City. would prefer her to use the term “cognition.”
SHE COMMUTES to school from Long Island by train. She finds driving REGARDLESS OF terminology, she is endlessly fascinated by animal
“boring,” though, via farm life, she has behavior—how, for example, a trained Seeing
learned to drive a pickup and a snowplow. Eye dog understands a command to find its
SHE IS fluent in French, English, and Ital-
ian. She grew up conversing with her par- “I CLEAN master a chair. “If you think about chairs,”
she says, “a chair can be a bench. It can be a
ents, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman MY HOUSE sofa. It can be, you know, designed by Le Cor-
and the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, busier. And they’re able to generalize! How
in French and Italian. She did not pick up FRANTICALLY.” do they get that? They don’t sit on chairs!
English until she was in her 20s. That’s a cognitive ability.” —DAVID KAMP
106 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
P H OTO G R A P H BY GASPER TRINGALE H OLIDAY 2016/2017
 MEDIA

HAVING IT OUT
Gawker founder
Nick Denton
and Silicon Valley
entrepreneur

V.C. FOR VENDETTA

Peter Thiel.

Outed by one of Gawker’s Web sites in 2007, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel
vowed to destroy Nick Denton’s online empire. Nine years later, after

O
funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, he succeeded. That dramatic act
PH OTO GRA P HS BY B R UNO L E VY /CHA L LE N GE S- R EA / RE DU X ( THI E L ) , A L A N S CH I NDL E R/ CO URT E SY
of revenge capped a long battle—over sexuality, privacy, and the press O F L & L HO LD IN G CO MPA NY ( BACKGRO UN D) , STE P HE N YA NG/ A .P. I MAGE S ( D EN TO N)

By DAVID MARGOLICK

ne day in September 2014 the publisher Both graduated from fancy universities—
of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, sent an Denton from Oxford and Thiel from Stan-
e-mail to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley ven- ford. Both made their fortunes in the digital
ture capitalist and billionaire. It could easily world; in fact, it had brought them together
have been a message to a friend, or at least in San Francisco a dozen or so years earlier.
a kindred spirit, for, as many people who Both are gay, and both came out relatively
know them both have noted, the two have late. Both are libertarians, and nonconform-
so much in common. ists, and visionaries, and science-fiction fans,
They are contemporaries: Denton turned and workaholics, and wonks. Both have re-
50 this past August, and Thiel 49 two sisted getting old, Denton by attitude, Thiel
months later. Both were born in Europe— through human growth hormones. Both
Denton in England and Thiel in Germany. have a cultish kind of appeal. Both were still
108 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com P H OTO I L L U STRAT IO N BY SEAN M C CABE H OLIDAY 2016/2017
 MEDIA
wealthy in 2014, though as winner of one of he may have been thinking, Thiel had agreed er, which he called a “singularly sociopathic
Silicon Valley’s greatest daily doubles—he to have that cup of coffee. “Nothing came of bully.” But it overlooked a thought that
co-founded PayPal and was Facebook’s it,” Denton told me, and this is not surprising. Thiel, a lawyer and a chess master, had
first big investor—Thiel was exponentially For by the time he received that note Thiel cribbed from Jose Raul Capablanca, the
more so, a fact that stuck in the ultra- had already begun pouring millions of dollars great Cuban champion. In court as in chess,
competitive Denton’s craw. “Nauseatingly into a campaign to crush Denton and Gawk- Thiel had said, “you must begin by study-
successful” was how Denton once de- er Media, using Hulk Hogan, of all people, ing the endgame.” And the endgame of
scribed him. DOES NICK DENTON WISH HE as his cudgel. And by the time Denton and Hogan’s case may well have been a verdict
WERE PETER THIEL? a headline on Denton’s I spoke, Thiel had annihilated them all more that was either slashed or overturned on ap-
own gawker.com once asked. completely than even he could have imagined, peal—and a defendant, Denton, who would
But, in 2007, Gawker’s Silicon Valley trib- thanks to a Florida jury’s awarding Hogan thereby be at least partly vindicated. In set-
utary, Valleywag, had outed Thiel, or at least $140 million in his Thiel-funded lawsuit last tling, Thiel has shut that process down.

Bitchy, Breezy, and Snarky

“WE HAVE MORE IN COMMON

A
t his high-water mark, before the

THAN MIGHT MEET

Hogan lawsuit, Denton owned 40
percent of Gawker Media, a com-
pany valued at as much as $300 million

THE EYE,”
to $400 million. The outfit, which Denton
launched in 2002 with two egregiously
underpaid bloggers in his apartment, on
DENTON TOLD THIEL. Spring Street in Manhattan, had become
an Internet innovator, disrupter, and pow-
erhouse—an “octopus with chainsaws,”
Thiel thought it had. Both before and after March, sending Gawker Media and Denton someone once called it—consisting not just
that, Valleywag and Gawker had continued into bankruptcy and then killing off gawker of its eponymous gossip Web site but six
to ridicule Thiel, his investment decisions, .com altogether. It was the largest invasion of others covering everything from design and
his ideas, and his friends. It was such stories privacy payday ever against a major media tech (Gizmodo) to sports (Deadspin) to
that had led Thiel, in 2009, to label Valley- company, and perhaps the first ever to bank- women’s issues (Jezebel) to cars (Jalopnik)
wag “the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qae- rupt one. It was far more than Denton could to video games (Kotaku) to self-help tips
da” and to liken its writers to terrorists. handle, and it led in August to the fire sale (Lifehacker). It was also an Internet rarity,
Maybe, Denton hoped, Thiel had moved of Gawker Media to Univision for $135 mil- a media company that, unlike BuzzFeed or
on since then, or grown a thicker hide. So lion. But Univision swallowed up only six of Vox or Vice, had made it without outside fi-
Denton drafted his note, which he read to its seven Web sites; gawker.com, which gener- nancing, which meant it could say whatever
me off his iPhone one day this past Sep- ated 20 percent of its traffic and revenue and, it damned well pleased, and did.
tember. “Hey, Peter, this is a long shot but according to Denton, 80 percent of its tsuris, Gawker Media was the blogosphere’s
I’m going to try,” he began. “Would you was left to die. “Good riddance,” Thiel later version of a floating island—not unlike the
get together for coffee when I’m next in said of its demise. man-made, tech-friendly, libertarian ones
San Francisco? We obviously have our dif- “Totally, totally oblivious!” Denton said that Thiel once envisioned and invested
ferences, primarily over the politics of out- of himself, amazed at his own blindness in—beyond traditional journalism’s territo-
ing, and some of our coverage on Valleywag over what Thiel was up to. He laughed— rial waters. The goal, Denton liked to say,
and Gawker has been needlessly gleeful. more, it seemed, out of embarrassment was to reduce “the friction between the
But your political views, while mockable, than bitterness. thought and the page,” and his journalists,
are a breath of fresh air. We have more in On November 2, Denton announced often young, green, smart, and bratty (had
common than might meet the eye. I’d like that Gawker had settled the Hogan case. Holden Caulfield lived in the mid-2000s, he
to get some more constructive debate go- The settlement was for $31 million. It was, might have gone to Gawker to expose pho-
ing between the New Left, which is repre- he confessed, a “hard peace,” one to which nies) were the freest on the planet: free, that
sented rather heavily on New York editorial he’d reluctantly agreed largely to remove is, to trash or humiliate or dish or out with
operations, and the Valley libertarians. The the Gawker editor who’d posted the Hogan almost no adult supervision, least of all
enemy is stagnation, and the vested interests video, A. J. Daulerio (whom Hogan had from Denton, a superannuated kid himself.
that ensure stagnation, and yes, sometimes also sued and who, despite his negative net (Denton was, after all, someone who would
also the culture of Internet criticism that worth, had remained on the hook for $115 never call himself a C.E.O., because, as he
stymies original thought.” million in damages), out of Thiel’s cross- once put it, all C.E.O.’s were “douches.”)
“That’s all I got,” he concluded. “Let me hairs. But Denton, too, has a stake: the Until relatively late in its life, when it turned
know if there’s a conversation to be had.” as-yet unsigned deal should restore some to more substantive journalism (and also,
He closed with “Regards, Nick.” of his millions to him, and may even allow at times, to meaner, more punitive, and
He then read me Thiel’s response: “Nick, him to keep his beloved SoHo loft, site of potentially more defamatory gossip), much
I’m not sure that a political conversation what had once seemed would be an unend- of Gawker was spontaneous, unfiltered,
would be that constructive, but … ” Denton ing series of Gawker soirees. improvised—“the ultimate expression,”
began, only to cut himself off. “I’m not go- Denton, though, was not the only one Denton said, “of the journalistic id.” It re-
ing to share that with you,” he told me, at who wanted the case resolved. The papers flected what Denton called “iterative” jour-
least not without getting Thiel’s permission. had picked up much of what the generally nalism, in which readers would build on,
(“Just manners,” he explained.) He did show circumspect Thiel had said at a press con- or dismantle, the skeleton Gawker put out
me what Thiel had written, but would not ference two days before the deal was an- there. Click on “publish” first, then worry
let me copy it down. I remember only that nounced, including his support for Donald afterward about what was wrong. Unlike,
it was perfectly polite, and that whatever else Trump and his continued attacks on Gawk- say, Salon or Slate, Gawker felt like the first
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journalistic outlet that truly understood, instinctively insecure minority—then Jews in lated,” Denton concedes.) Daulerio, who left
and exploited, the Internet. postwar America, now gays—devoured each Gawker in 2013, nonetheless calls Gawker
And unlike, say, “Page Six” of the New other in full public view. “the best place I will ever work” and Den-
York Post, Gawker played no favorites and ton a “once-in-a-lifetime” boss. Then there’s

F
made no deals. No one in what Denton or its nearly 14-year run, gawker.com Tommy Craggs, executive editor of Gawker
called the “celebrity media industrial com- reflected Denton’s ever changing and Media when, in 2015, it ran the story that
plex” was off limits. Because Denton had often conflicting instincts, whims, nearly tore the place apart, about a married
few famous friends—that small fraternity crushes, and epiphanies. And whomever media executive’s alleged aborted assigna-
includes South Park co-creator Matt Stone he’d happened to meet at a party the night tion with a gay escort. Denton’s decision to
and CNN newsman Don Lemon—no one before and the state of his love life. The site remove that story from the Web site after a
could really lean on him. One Gawkerite re- was bipolar, or maybe schizophrenic, but it storm of criticism, much of it from Gawker
calls how, on his first day at work, someone was never the same for long; only the chaos, fans, marked yet another stage in his much-
shouted to Denton that Harvey Weinstein and the contradictions, were continuous. Mo- dissected and -debated evolution from amor-
was on the phone, upset about something. ments after one of Denton’s periodic pushes al ass to mini-mensch, a process variously
“Tell him to go fuck himself!” Denton for respectability, he might suggest exposés attributed to therapy, restlessness, pot, matu-
shouted back. (“‘Go fuck yourself’ is not on which public figures had dandruff, or rity, and marriage. Craggs resigned to protest
my style,” Denton says. “I’m not that ag- whether the editors of the leading women’s that decision, mainly because it was made in
gressive.” Weinstein, he adds, “was used to magazines had synchronized menstrual cy- consultation with a group that Denton had
massaging stories behind the scenes, and cles, or whether Peter Thiel was bad in bed. put together that included two people from
we didn’t do that.”) When Brian Williams, During their (generally short) tenures, the business side. He hadn’t spoken to Den-
the object of one of Denton’s rare celebrity Gawker writers regarded Denton with admi- ton until spotting him at one of Gawker’s
bromances and an inveterate Gawker reader ration, bemusement, puzzlement, and, a bit numerous wakes in August, when he ap-
himself—“[I] check your shit 10 times a day ostentatiously, contempt. It was fashionable proached him and shook his hand. “Nick is
by iphone,” he once wrote Denton—e-mailed to dismiss him with terms such as “robot,” easily the best boss I’ve ever had. And fuck
him to suggest that Gawker write about the “nihilist,” “villain,” or “sociopath.” “Dark Nick Denton,” he says.
singer Lana Del Ray’s bombing the previous Lord Balthazar,” they called him, after the In person, Denton—soft-spoken and with
evening on Saturday Night Live, gawker.com restaurant across the way from his Spring a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard on
posted Williams’s e-mail instead. Williams Street loft, where he hung out. Denton took what is habitually described as an outsize
hasn’t spoken to Denton since. none of it personally; speculation that he pumpkin head—seems as stoic and detached
Gawker Media pissed off Steve Jobs by had a dash of Asperger’s even pleased him, about his fate as one might expect a veteran
prematurely unveiling a new iPhone; helped since it made him seem more like a Silicon journalist, to whom even one’s own life is
to unseat Toronto mayor Rob Ford when it Valley genius. There was something almost but another story, to be. Whatever he did
exposed his penchant for smoking crack; extraterrestrial about him. “You get this to forestall it, he has now convinced himself
revealed the football player Manti Te’o’s sense that he’s this life-form that was sent to that Gawker’s demise was preordained and,
long-running relationship with a nonexistent earth to gather anthropological research and in the end, the greatest tribute it could have
woman; and helped bring down Bill Cosby. then send it back to the mother ship” is how been given: anything that pissed off so many
More recently, it devoted three weeks and Gawker reporter J. K. Trotter, whose me- people for so long was doomed. In fact, he
3,500 words to the architecture and mainte- dia beat included Gawker itself, puts it. But now says, it’s amazing it held on as long as it
nance of Donald Trump’s hair. And, most when all of Gawker came crashing down, it did; had Thiel not come along, some other
fatefully, in 2012 Gawker posted a grainy was gratitude—for launching their careers, thin-skinned billionaire (or “comic-book
video of Hulk Hogan with his best friend’s for letting them write whatever they wanted, villain”) would have. Mostly, he is relieved.
wife, before, after, and, for nine seconds,
during sex.
With its signature bitchy, breezy, snarky,
chatty style—which one of its shrewdest (and DENTON MIGHT
most appreciative) critics, the late David Carr, SUGGEST EXPOSÉS ON WHICH PUBLIC
FIGURES
of The New York Times, likened to mean
ninth-grade schoolgirls trashing everyone
else in the playground—Gawker became a
journalistic landmark, especially, perhaps, for
millennials. Less appreciated is the fact that it
also represented the greatest incursion ever of
HAD DANDRUFF.
a gay sensibility into mainstream American
journalism. And the Gawker saga—in which for giving them a home—that these writers Restless, increasingly estranged from his
one fabulously successful gay man tried to generally felt. Most, if not all, was forgiven. own creation, and starved for cash to pay
ruin another—also encapsulates an epoch Take A. J. Daulerio, who, as editor of his lawyers, he’d discussed unloading the
in gay history, a time when attitudes in both gawker.com, posted the Hogan video and company even before the Hogan trial. And,
mainstream culture and within the gay com- wrote the accompanying story, “Even for a thank God, with Univision taking on all of
munity about acceptance and respectabil- Minute, Watching Hulk Hogan Have Sex his employees, the only person to lose his
ity, privacy and duty, changed so fast that it in a Canopy Bed Is Not Safe for Work but job was he.
became impossible for journalists, gay or Watch It Anyway.” As Hogan’s case wended Denton remains convinced that Thiel
straight, to keep up. Though the stakes were its way through the courts, Daulerio grew came after Gawker not because it outed
obviously very different, Denton versus Thiel angry at Denton, feeling he had distanced him but because he resented Gawker’s cov-
may be the gay version of United States v. himself from the decision to post the sex erage of Silicon Valley generally. Still, he
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: a soap opera in tape. (“We could not talk about testimony admires Thiel—or, at least, says he does,
which members of a newly empowered but and other things, so he might have felt iso- having learned that flattering Thiel makes
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more sense than pissing him off. Denton Times, in Budapest, from which he covered himself, Denton was emphatic about out-
sees in him those traits, notably ruthlessness, the Iron Curtain’s collapse. He’d escape ing others, at least well-known others.
that Denton and other successful gay men regularly to Vienna, where he’d buy porn, Long forced to remain in hiding and then,
of their generation needed to survive. He sushi, and the latest issues of Macworld and in some instances, staying there even after
thinks Thiel is just insecure, that he needs to Wired. In 1998 he persuaded the F.T. to send they’d been free to leave, gays had been
be a genius and hates ridicule. Denton even him to San Francisco. During the next two tragically marginalized, he felt. “The era-
admires his stagecraft—how he managed to years, while shuttling between London and sure of gay people from the historical re-
present as a blow for privacy rights some- the Bay Area, he founded two start-ups, a cord, I think, has been a crime, and it’s a
thing Denton sees as an act of petty revenge. news aggregator and a social-events business. crime that continued until really very re-
“Canny positioning,” he calls it. Meanwhile, The success of the second, along with some cently,” he says. “People led lives that were
Thiel has single-handedly turned the much- real-estate investments, provided seed money invisible.” Since gays had so few role mod-
vilified Denton, whom even the mainstream for something else. It was in San Francisco els, those who had made it spectacularly in
the straight world should come forward, or
have it done for them. And what cost was
THIEL CONFESSED TO A GERMAN there if it was already common knowledge
among the cognoscenti? Journalists, he
PAPER THAT HE believed, had no business keeping open

CHECKED GAWKER
secrets. Journalistically and emotionally,
Denton was always a libertarian: it was for
others to determine “appropriateness.”
“QUITE OFTEN.” Denton wrote periodically (and sugges-
tively) on Thiel and friends, including “As
Decadent as Silicon Valley Gets,” a June
press largely abandoned in his moment of that he (briefly) met Thiel, whose ideas—like 2007 post detailing the “young playboys”
need, into something he’d never previously a system of money that transcended govern- of Thiel’s Founders Fund—a venture-
been: a martyr. ments—he found interesting. capital firm he co-founded in 2005—cavort-
Though Denton steadfastly won’t con- Denton found San Francisco surpris- ing, largely among other men, at a Playboy
firm it, sources at Gawker and also a person ingly boring. “I loved the idea of San Fran- Club–style mansion in San Francisco. “For
with knowledge of the meeting say that, two cisco, but it’s not a sexy place,” he says. “I all the financier’s social awkwardness, tee-
months after the Hogan verdict, Denton love cosmopolitan big cities and it’s just total aversion to alcohol and obsession
reached out to Thiel yet again, and, with the not that.” Worse, it had few black men—a with immortality,” Denton wrote of Thiel,
help of two high-level Silicon Valley interme- problem because they were the only men he he “always had a weakness for libertines.”
diaries, got Thiel to agree to see him in San dated. “They’re just more real,” he explains. The next month, Thiel confessed to a Ger-
Francisco. Asked, prior to the settlement, for (This is why, when false rumors arose in man paper that he checked the site “quite
details on the meeting, Denton, who built the wake of Thiel’s emergence as Hogan’s often.” Denton proceeded to tackle Thiel’s
Gawker on the gospel that everybody has funder that he and Denton had once been gayness more explicitly, only to encounter
the right to know everything, clammed up. lovers, Denton’s denials rang true.) And Sili- opposition. Max Levchin, a PayPal col-
“I’m constrained” is all, at long last, he fi- con Valley, overwhelmingly white or Asian league of Thiel’s whom Denton also knew,
nally said. And therein lies perhaps the most and straight and stilted, was still more un- pleaded with Denton to lay off, in part,
humiliating part of Denton’s defeat: a man appealing, whatever secrets it held. So he says Denton, because Levchin feared
who labored to expose Silicon Valley had came to New York in 2002, and, almost as a Thiel might suspect that his girlfriend,
ended up submitting to its rules. Eventually, hobby—until some tech thing came along— who worked for Thiel, had been a source.
though, he supplied corroboration of a kind. he launched his blogs. Gizmodo came first, (Levchin wouldn’t comment.) “I got a se-
When he volunteered, almost giddily, how in mid-2002, and several months later there ries of messages relaying the destruction
socially maladroit Thiel was—“He’s almost was Gawker. (“It sounded like how some- that would rain down on me, and various
bashful. Doesn’t even really seem to make body putting on a New York accent would innocent civilians caught in the crossfire,”
eye contact”—he was obviously speaking say ‘New Yawk.’ ”) Denton was unapologetic Denton later posted. Running out of time
from very recent experience. (Thiel declined about its focus: to him gossip, at least about and unable to find some non-gossipy way to
to participate in this story.) people of consequence, is a social emetic, write the story, Denton says, he shelved it.
flushing out privilege and mendacity, medi- Owen Thomas, the technology journalist
A 10-Year Vendetta ocrity and hypocrisy. And, besides, it’s fun. to whom Denton had passed the Valleywag

D
enton grew up in North London. Other Web sites, some that stuck and job in July 2007, was more persistent, and
Young Nick identified intellectu- many that did not, quickly followed. But, ingenious. Thomas, gay but more militant
ally with his father, a professor of still interested in tech, Denton commuted to than Denton, also knew about Thiel’s sexu-
economics, but was closer to his mother, a San Francisco in late 2006 to run his Sili- al orientation and was itching to write about
psychotherapist born in Budapest who’d con Valley blog, Valleywag. Looming large it. In fact, for anyone paying any attention,
survived both the Nazis and the Commu- on his beat was Thiel, who, Denton learned he already had. In a blog from October
nists. A childhood spent amid disputatious from colleagues—“It was all over the jour- 2007, he described how a smitten young
Hungarian Jews like her would one day nalistic grapevine,” he says—was not just woman had asked Thiel to sign something
help make polyglot New York feel more like one of the Valley’s biggest stars but one of for her after he had given a talk at a col-
home to him than anywhere else he’d ever its few gay ones. lege in Tennessee. “If that girl was hoping
been. A picture from his adolescence shows Denton dates his own coming out to to score more than just an autograph from
a nerdy boy reading a book by Isaac Asimov the mid- to late 1990s, but others put it Thiel, she’s due for a double-dip of disap-
in his backyard. later, and say he remains ambivalent about pointment,” Thomas wrote. Then, in “Peter
Following Oxford, he became a stringer at embracing gay culture generally. Perhaps Thiel Crush Alert!,” a month later, he re-
several newspapers, including the Financial because he had been slow to come out ported that a local (male) real-estate agent
112 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017
 MEDIA
had called Thiel “dreamy.” “We hate to him make nice with the press in general deal—TMZ had written about the video
break it to you … but Thiel’s taken,” Thom- and Gawker in particular. “I never felt this (and a Web site called the Dirty had posted
as wrote. “If he weren’t though, you’d have was the beginning of a 10-year vendetta,” screen shots from it) months earlier. And,
a better shot than that Tennessee girl who says Sicha; Thiel struck him as “quiet, to Denton, who cared so little about sports
lined up to get his autograph.” thoughtful, perfectly sane.” Perhaps these that he thought March Madness lasted into
Ordinarily, the post Thomas proceeded were feints with pawns as Thiel lined up his June, it mattered even less. But to Thiel and
to write that December would have been knights and bishops. Hogan’s lead lawyer on the anti-Gawker
considered a puff piece: Thiel, it said, was Gawker reporters knew how obsessed crusade, Charles Harder, of Beverly Hills, it
the smartest venture capitalist “in the world” Denton was with outing household names, proved the long-awaited casus belli.
and “more power to him” for pulling that and catered to his wishes. For instance, Blithely unaware that his world was under
off as a gay man in Silicon Valley, which, after the New York Post described an un- attack, and with their therapist officiating,
for all its purported tolerance, was, in fact, named gay star beating and raping his for- Denton married the 31-year-old actor Der-
rence Washington in New York’s American
Museum of Natural History in May 2014.
For Denton and his friends it was a joyous af-
“WE’RE TRUTH ABSOLUTISTS,” fair—“like watching Pinocchio turn into a real
DENTON WROTE. boy,” Daulerio later said. As one of Hogan’s

“OR RATHER, I AM.”

lawyers gleefully told jurors, this great avatar
of openness had all cell phones confiscated at
the door. (It was to ensure attentiveness rather
than to protect his privacy, Denton insists.)
The affair was covered in the Vows column of
homophobic. But, for most readers—and, mer boyfriend, Gawker asked readers to The New York Times, a feature that, naturally,
presumably, for Thiel himself—the takeaway guess the culprit, then named the winner Gawker had often skewered. Denton banned
was the headline: PETER THIEL IS TOTALLY and the runners-up—a stunt that later led Gawker’s Gawker reporter, J. K. Trotter, from
GAY, PEOPLE. The New Yorker once said the Gawker reporter who supervised the the proceedings; pictures of Trotter were post-
Thiel had a “pronounced aversion to con- contest to apologize, one of the periodic ex ed to keep him from infiltrating.
flict.” And for the time being, he did noth- post facto mea culpas that Denton’s min-
ing to strike back. But with Gawker, at least, ions have felt compelled to issue over the Smackdown Time

T
Thiel wasn’t so much non-confrontational as years. When Tracy Moore, of Jezebel, ad- he more the Hogan case ground
deliberate. “Peter figured out that Gawker vised readers, “Don’t out someone who on, the more precarious Gawker
would get so out of control that eventually doesn’t want to be out,” Denton pounced. grew: under Florida law, whatever
they’d do something so stupid that no one “She’s working at the wrong place,” he Hogan won, Gawker had to post up to
would defend them and he’d just wait,” says wrote. “We’re truth absolutists. Or rather, I $50 million toward the total damages, even
Keith Rabois, a Silicon Valley executive and am. And I choose to work with fellow spir- pending an appeal. Making matters worse,
PayPal alum whose friendship with Thiel its.” When Thiel told an interviewer earlier its insurance coverage didn’t apply, forcing
dates back to their law-school days at Stan- this year that “radical transparency” was it to turn to a Russian oligarch for funds.
ford. “He correctly forecast that they would a policy that East Germany’s Stasi would Meanwhile, weary of Internet nastiness
get worse in their behavior—that, inevitably, have favored, he may well have had Gawk- and preoccupied with his next thing—an
that crowd would massively screw up and no er, and Denton, in mind. interactive, comment-based Web site called
one would want to defend them.” (Thomas, If, as one Gawkerite says, Denton de- Kinja—Denton found himself ever more
now the business editor at the San Francisco veloped crushes on straight male editors aligned with Gawker’s critics. Two stories
Chronicle, says Thiel’s real beef with the whose fortunes waxed and waned with the in particular offended him; it was prob-
piece was that it turned off potential inves- state of his infatuation (a suggestion Denton ably no coincidence that each concerned
tors from Saudi Arabia.) laughingly dismisses), his fiercest and most children, for Denton and Washington were
Denton returned to New York, but Val- durable crush was on Daulerio, a rough- contemplating a family of their own. First
leywag, and Gawker, remained, incessantly, hewn throwback to the Five Star Final era came “Zoe Saldana Gives Birth to Hip-
on Thiel’s case, as a few additional head- of journalism, fueled by sex, controlled sub- ster Scum,” lambasting the actress for the
lines attest: PETER THIEL’S RICHER THAN stances, and a passion for great and gritty names (Cy, Bowie) she’d given her twins.
YOU, BUT NOT AS RICH AS HE’D LIKE YOU stories. Denton favored Daulerio for the Even worse was “Bristol Palin Makes Great
TO THINK; A FACEBOOK BILLIONAIRE’S BIG same reason he admired Andrew Breitbart, Argument for Abortion in Baby Announce-
DUMB FAILURE; FACEBOOK BACKER WISHES Lee Atwater (“a joyful warrior”), Rupert ment.” “Gawker is out of control,” Denton,
WOMEN COULDN’T VOTE. But Thiel indeed Murdoch (“one of the world’s great gos- who is pro-life, complained to a colleague.
bided his time until Gawker made the sips”), Roger Ailes, and various right-wing He’d stopped reading the full Gawker feed,
wrong move. So what is one to make of enemies of the traditionally liberal journal- he added, for fear of what he might find: he
that polite e-mail exchange with Denton? istic establishment: all were “buccaneers.” was “ashamed of the callow viciousness”
Or the wine-bar meeting Thiel had with It was Daulerio who’d posted Brian Wil- and “dull intellectual orthodoxy.” Denton
Gawker editor Ryan Tate in 2009 during liams’s note to Denton, who upon learn- rarely read anything posted on Gawker be-
which Thiel—“a little sweaty and difficult ing about it stormed up to him shouting, fore it went up; he deferred to his editors,
to talk to, kind of like Nick, hard to read “What the fuck are you doing?,” only to and, anyway, there was just too much of it.
his emotions,” Tate recalls—even joked realize that what Daulerio was doing was Then, in July 2015, came the story about
that it seemed he did negotiate with terror- his job. And it was Daulerio who, in early the married media executive. After 18
ists? A year earlier, Thiel had even enlisted October 2012, posted the Hogan video and hours’ worth of angry tweets, many from
both a New York lawyer and Choire Sicha, his accompanying story, a rumination on Gawker’s friends, Denton pulled it down.
the former Gawker editor widely credited how obsessed ordinary people were with “We let that idea gain roots, that freedom
with devising its distinctive style, to help boring celebrity sex. To him, it was no big is the freedom to do whatever the fuck you
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want,” he said at one of the several near- Hogan’s lawyers tossed out New York go-between, Denton and Thiel finally had
insurrectionary all-hands meetings that references like confetti, the better to make their secret tête-à-tête. It appears to have
ensued. “Actually it’s not. I don’t want Denton—“this guy … up there in New York accomplished nothing.
some guy blowing his brains out and that sitting behind a computer, playing God

T
being on our hands.” Most of his writers with other people’s lives,” as one of them, hiel and Harder continued to go af-
disagreed with his decision. The resigna- Kenneth Turkel, of Tampa, described him— ter Denton and Daulerio, seeking to
tions of Craggs and other staffers, including appear even more alien to jurors in Pinellas track down and tie up their assets.
gawker.com editor Max Read, followed. County, Florida, than a gay half-Hungarian Hogan’s lawyers, and some embittered Gawk-
Under normal circumstances, Hogan, Jew already was. So completely did the er alums, suspected that Denton stashed away
who is not a wealthy man, would probably jurors not get Denton that, in a question funds in Budapest or the Cayman Islands, but
have settled. (His lawyers had even warned submitted to the judge, one of them asked he says it isn’t so. (Two other Gawker journal-
the court that their client could “not af- Emma Carmichael, editor of Jezebel, ists, Sam Biddle and John Cook, faced allega-
tions in a pair of other lawsuits being handled
by Charles Harder, which Thiel may or may
not have also funded. Those cases, too, are
“IT’S STILL NOT TOO LATE covered by the proposed settlement, with the

TO RESOLVE THIS,” plaintiffs collecting damages in exchange for

dropping their cases.)
Denton and Daulerio vowed to fight on,
DENTON WROTE TO THIEL. and the prospects for an appeal—funded by
proceeds from the Univision sale—looked
good. Apart from strong First Amendment
ford an endless litigation.”) Gawker offered whether she’d ever slept with Denton. The arguments, it was hard to believe that any-
Hogan millions to go away, even though it verdict was anticipated, but the award—$115 one who boasted to Howard Stern, as well
insisted it had done nothing wrong. In fact, million in compensatory damages and an- as to others, about his sexual habits, about
both a federal judge and a state appellate other $25 million as punishment, totaling the size of his penis and where he likes to
court had ruled prior to trial that, because $40 million more than Hogan sought—was ejaculate and how he uses his mustache
Hogan was a public personality who made not. It was a great victory for Thiel, but, ac- during oral sex, as Hogan did, should have
his sex life a matter of public interest, the cording to a friend of his, he wasn’t gloat- elicited much sympathy in claiming inva-
post was protected by the First Amendment. ing; the friend told me Thiel worried that sion of privacy. (By discussing his sexuality
But, mystifyingly, Hogan never bit. Far from the ruling might not survive an appeal. Bar- ad nauseam, the argument goes, Hogan
it—an attorney for Gawker says that Hogan’s ring a settlement, that was where the history made it a matter of public interest.) Then
multiple lawyers dug in and cast their nets. of the case would be written, and Thiel rec- there is all of that evidence that Judge
Clearly, Hogan had someone else on his tag ognized, his friend said, that the case was Campbell—the most reversed trial judge
team. But who? To Denton, the prime sus- hardly “a slam, slam, slam dunk.” in her district—excluded. It’s also hard to
pects were all in Silicon Valley, where Gawk- Two months after the March 2016 verdict, agree, with respect to calculating damages,
er’s impertinence was an ongoing affront. Thiel was outed a second time, when Forbes that all 7,057,214 people who viewed nine
Thiel not only topped the list; everyone else identified him as Hogan’s sugar daddy. That seconds of Hogan sex for free would have
was tied for 10th. night, Denton again e-mailed Thiel, but, plopped down $4.95 for the privilege.
Already, the trial judge, a Jeb Bush ap- thinking an intermediary was called for, sent But with the settlement, none of this will
pointee named Patricia A. M. Campbell, it via Keith Rabois. “If Peter or anybody matter.
had proved unrelentingly hostile to Gawker, representing him wants to talk, my line is If it goes through, and Denton is sprung
Gawker’s team believed. She excluded a raft open,” Denton wrote Rabois. “It’s still not from bankruptcy, he stands to collect
of evidence from an earlier F.B.I. investiga- too late to resolve this without further dam- roughly one-third of what remains after Ho-
tion suggesting, said Gawker’s lawyers, that age to everyone’s reputation.” He said he gan, Denton’s investors, and those former
the wrestler (a) may have known he was was sorry for any embarrassment Thiel had Gawker employees with equity stakes in
being taped; (b) seemed more concerned suffered from the outing story, but that it had the company, are paid off. One reasonable
about the exposure of a racist rant than of been written “when gay people were invisible estimate is around $15 million—vastly lower
his private parts; and (c) was inconsistent in or marginal in Silicon Valley, and some of us than what he was once worth, but still with-
his testimony. Instead, according to Gawk- refused to go along with the omerta.” Far in striking distance of what Arianna Huf-
er’s attorneys, it was Daulerio and Denton from being moved, the next day Thiel de- fington got when she sold her eponymous
who were demonized by Hogan’s team. scribed Gawker to Andrew Ross Sorkin of Web site. It should be enough to spare Den-
Denton’s impolitic utterances—“Every in- The New York Times as a “singularly terrible ton having to sell his loft (on the market for
fringement of privacy is sort of liberating”; bully,” and called helping Hogan and other $4.25 million), followed by Soviet-style in-
“We don’t seek to do good. We may inad- Gawker “victims” one of the “greater phil- ternal exile to New York’s Upper West Side.
vertently do good. We may inadvertently anthropic things” he’d ever done. By year’s end, he should be able once more
commit journalism”; “I don’t think most Denton quickly posted an “open letter” to pick up restaurant checks, and his plans
people give a fuck [about privacy], actual- to Thiel on Gawker. “I thought we had all to start a family, shelved during the Hogan
ly”—were projected on a screen, while Den- moved on,” he wrote, “not realizing that, imbroglio, presumably can be revived.
ton himself was depicted as a bully, sadist, for someone who aspires to immortality, Not once since the Gawker sale has he
and pornographer. The high, or low, point nine years may not be such a long time as returned to Gawker’s old office, nor did
came when he was made to read Daulerio’s it seems to most of us.” He then called for he read any of the postmortems. Nor, he
Hogan post aloud, reciting graphic descrip- a “brief truce,” during which the two might insists, will he read this story. He did, how-
tions of oral sex and Hogan’s penis (“the hold a public debate or something similar. ever, read, and react to, some of what Thiel
size of a thermos you’d find in a child’s Thiel never responded. But with Jeremy said at his press conference on October 31:
lunchbox”) in his Oxford-inflected English. Stoppelman, the C.E.O. of Yelp, acting as that Gawker’s reporters were “not journal-
114 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2017
 Spotlight
ists” (“No one person, no matter how rich,
should get to decide who’s a journalist”); GILLIAN’S RAINBOW
that Gawker was a “flimsy” business (it had
made money until Thiel came along); that it
went after “small fry” (“Thiel is not ‘small
fry.’ Nor is Hulk Hogan”); and that Daule-
rio was an “aspiring child pornographer”—
a reference to an ill-advised but clearly
flippant remark that Daulerio had made
during his deposition. “Despicable,” Den-
ton says, “remarkably tabloid for someone
who sets himself up as a guardian of jour-
nalistic integrity.”
“Interesting—and scary” is how he de-
scribes Thiel. Still, Denton maintains that
his differences with him are more philosoph-
ical than personal, and bigger than either of
them. They reflect, he says, a battle between
two groups of people—the control freaks of
Silicon Valley and the buccaneering bloggers
that their technology unleashed—and two
notions of freedom: one in which you can be
free only when you’re yourself in public, and
another in which you’re free only when you
can protect yourself from, well, gawkers.
Gawker, Denton says, “emitted vast
quantities of truth into the ether,” and re-
defined journalism in the Internet age. He
even takes partial credit for another kind of
outing—of a presidential candidate. “When
I see the forthrightness with which main-
stream newspapers called Trump out for
lying, I see echoes of the blogs—the realiza-
tion that ‘Hey, this thing is so obvious, it’s
in front of us, we can’t pretend this doesn’t
exist,’” he says. “You can’t be so con-
strained by convention that you fail in your
central obligation to say what you see. And
Gawker was the fiercest of the blogs.” He’s
proudest not of the marquee stories every-
one rattles off—not so many, to be honest,

A
given the hundreds of thousands that it
did—but all the unmemorable ones, with
their “humdrum honesty.” He’s also proud
of what Gawker didn’t do, and, despite the
criticism that leaves it unmourned in many
quarters, defiant about its achievements t some point in the last year or so, Gillian Anderson has moved from
and methods. “We didn’t get anyone into the status of a wonderfully versatile actress to a national treasure in
any wars, we didn’t ruin anyone’s life, we both the United States and Britain, where she has lived since 2002.
didn’t get taken in by fabrication or plagia- Now 48 and the mother of three children, Anderson is still as
rism,” he says. “With hundreds of young, spookily beautiful as she was when she first appeared as agent
talented, but sometimes inexperienced writ- Dana Scully in The X-Files, in 1993. Age has brought a singular authority that comes as
ers, you’d have expected some major jour- much from her self-possession as from her experience and native talent. Anyone who
nalistic malpractice. Never happened.” saw the heart-rending and chilling madness of her performance in A Streetcar Named
His Zen attitude is at the core of what Desire, which played on both sides of the Atlantic and won her an Olivier Award nomi-
comes next for him: building Kinja, a com- nation last year, will know Anderson is capable of the greatest artistic achievement. The
munity of commentators through which infinite variety of her roles, whether as Stella Gibson in three seasons of the BBC’s The
Denton hopes to redefine journalism yet
Fall on Netflix or as Media in the forthcoming American Gods or again as Scully in
HA I R A N D M A KE UP BY B RYO NY BL A KE

again. “I’ve always wanted news just to be a

the rebooted X-Files, is overwhelming. And on top of all of this, the third novel in her suc-
conversation, where the interactions between
journalists and sources and subjects and tip- cessful, co-authored EarthEnd Saga was published in the fall. Perhaps her greatest re-
sters play out in a more symmetrical fashion, cent appearance was not really a performance. At a memorial in
so that the journalist doesn’t have a com-
Gillian Anderson, Trafalgar Square, London, for Jo Cox, the Labour M.P. slain in Brit-
drawn from
plete monopoly on what gets included and life at Claridge’s
ain’s year of madness, she read Dorothy Oger’s 2016 poem “I
what not,” he explains. “I’ve done the truth. hotel in London, Shall Stand for Love” and invested it with all the mature principles of
Now I want to do the reconciliation.”  in March. a thoroughly decent person. — HENRY P ORTER

HO L I DAY 2 016 / 2 017 PO RT RA IT BY DAVID DOWNTON 115

 PORTFOLIOO

Donald TRUMP & Hillaryy CLINTON

ate ’em, they are the magnetic poles of this polarizing year. Theirs was a clash of titans pitting
Because, love ’em or ha
woman power versus male prerogative, pantsuit versus panty-raider. On November 8, the Day of Decision, our long national nightmare
was supposed to end and our long national healing to begin, but the voters had other ideas.

the

2 016 HALL of FAME

T
In a year with apocalyptic overtones, there
were those who provided hope. JAMES WOLCOTT
raises a glass to them
he pop of the champagne cork to celebrate Blue Öyster Cult ominously crooned in that
the Times Square ball drop for 2017 can’t most sinister of lullabies, but how could we
come soon enough. Two thousand sixteen not fear the dark cowl in 2016, so busy was
is a leap year, with an extra day tacked onto his scythe, so prominent and beloved his
February, but it has felt a lot longer than that. victims? (See the “In Memoriam” section
The year didn’t leap so much as crawl un- to pay respects.) The big picture offered
der a heavy bombardment of bad headlines. no consoling perspective. It was only four
It seemed as if the graveyard shift would nev- v years ago that the world was supposed to
er end. “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” the band T E X T C O N T I N U E S O N P A G E 11 9 , I N S I D E F O L D O U T

HO L I DAY 2 016 / 2 017 I L L U STR ATION BY BARRY BLITT VAN IT Y FAIR 117
 PORTFOLIO
IN MEMORIAM
M
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 117 undergo a
tectonic-plate-cracking, kraken-releasing
cataclysm, according to the Mesoamerican
Long Count calendar. But 2012 came and
went without a hitch in its step, foiling the
doomsday preppers. Maybe the calendar
was simply off by a few earth orbits, because
2016 has had all the trimmings of apoca- a
lypse: earthquakes, drought, floods, plagues
(the Zika virus), civil unrest, the relentless
beating sun of global warming, and, of
course, the end of Brangelina. Even escapist
entertainment has offered little escape from
the daily flak. The fab four female revival of
Ghostbusters, which should have been a sum- m
mer lark, got bogged down in culture-wars
crossfire as nerd boys of all ages went on a Muhammad Ali,
keyboard rampage. Digital vigilantism runs photographed by
wild down the oddest avenues. Philippe Halsman
in 1963.
Two thousand sixteen is also an election
year, which only jacked up the End Times
jitters. Instead of a quadrennial jousting tour-
r
nament between two major parties, the presi-i
dential campaign devolved into a species of
pathology. It wasn’t the traditional spectacle
of patriotic bunting and dueling policy pro-
posals but a nationwide, free-floating anxiety
attack conducting an alien invasion of our
imaginations. “Around half of people sur- r
veyed (52 percent) say the election ‘is a very
or somewhat significant’ source of stress in
their lives,” wrote Brian Resnick at Vox, citing
data from an American Psychological Asso-
ciation report. Thank God the cable-news
punditry and the online peanut gallery were
on the job 25 hours a day to put vital devel-l
opments, no matter how trivial, into warped
perspective and make matters worse.
Yet every year has its redeeming events
and individuals, and even this monster mash
sprinkled enough grace notes to keep hope
alive on a respirator. Giving the Nobel Prize
in Literature to gravel-gargling, genius mag-
pie troubadour Bob Dylan—that certainly
woke everyone up and gave baby-boomers
a B12 injection, although the Bobster himself
played possum at first, initially giving the
Nobel jury the Greta Garbo treatment from
inside his personal space-time bubble before
acknowledging the honor. Perennial pro-
spective Nobel candidate, the novelist Philip
Roth, announced the donation of his per-
sonal library to the Newark Public Library, a
gesture of literary citizenship worth saluting.
Breaking an ancient Egyptian curse, the Chi-i
cago Cubs won the World Series (yea, Cub-
bies!), their first appearance in the October
classic since 1945. Fox News anchor Megyn
Kelly dispatching Newt Gingrich into the
ozone to work on his anger issues was a great
Harper Lee,
moment in television—the elegant kiss-off his photographed by
blustery “mansplaining” deserved. Villains Donald Uhrbrock
may periodically dominate the stage, but in 1961.

there are always heroes in the wings, awaiting

their cues. And so, lights up, meet the all-star
cast of Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame for 2016.
119 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016/2017
 Arnold Palmer,
photographed
by Bob Gomel
in 1963.

Nancy Reagan,
photographed by
Douglas Kirkland
in 1980.

F OR C R E D ITS , S E E PAG E 18 9

David Bowie,
photographed by
Sukita in 1972.
 Morley Safer,
photographed
by Patrick D.
Pagnano in 1982.

Patty Duke,
1967.

Bill
Cunningham,
photographed Patty Duke
by Arthur 19tk-2016.
Elgort in 2003.
 Gordie Howe,
photographed by
William N.
Jacobellis in 1968.
Elie Wiesel,
photographed by
William Coupon
in 1985.

Prince,
photographed
by Rob Verhorst
in 1995.

Zaha Hadid,
photographed
by Marco
Grob in 2010.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 PHO T O GR A PH S C ON T I N U E ON PAGE 125 122

 PORTFOLIO

Megyn
KELLY
Because in the molten
HA IR PROD U C TS BY R & CO. ; MAK E U P PROD U CTS BY L A NC ÔME ; NA I L E NA ME L BY D IO R;

aftermath of the upheaval

HA IR BY G AR R E N ; MA K E UP BY T YRON MACHHAUS E N; MA N IC U R E BY TAT YAN A MO LOT;

at Fox News that saw

SE T D E S IG N BY M ARY HOWA R D STU D IO; F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO V F. COM/ C R E DI TS

its founder, Roger Ailes,

wheelbarrowed out
the door and Sean Hannity
become Donald Trump’s
marionette, Megyn
Kelly, host of The Kelly
File and author of
the bombshell memoir
Settle for More (Harper),
remained icily impervious
and immaculately
composed, a Hitchcock
blonde unrattled even
by Trump’s dripping-fang
slurs, establishing
herself as Fox News’s
diamond star. Cross her
at your peril.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 P H OTO G R A P H BY PAT R I C K DEMARCHELIER VA NIT Y FAI R 125

ST Y L E D BY J E S S I C A DIEHL
 PORTFOLIO

Lonnie G.
BUNCH III
Because “Build it and
they will come” isn’t just
a Hollywood invocation.
On September 24, the
Smithsonian’s National
Museum of African
American History
and Culture opened in
Washington, D.C.,
with a dedication address
delivered by President
Obama. The tireless force
and principal mover
who made this dream
happen? Founding director
Lonnie G. Bunch III,
an educator and historian
who raised the money and
awareness to give African-
American heritage the
curatorial glory it deserves.
Result: advance sellout
crowds—almost as
hot a ticket as Hamilton!

G ROOMI N G BY ME R E D ITH BA R AF ; F OR
D E TA IL S, G O TO VF. COM/ C R E DI TS
ST YLE D BY MATTH E W MA R D E N;

126 VAN IT Y FA IR P H OTO GRA PH BY PL ATON

 PORTFOLIO

Lin-Manuel
MIRANDA
Because no lord this
year was higher a-leaping.
Not since Gore Vidal
published his novel Burr
have the Founding Fathers
received a hotfoot like
the one given by Hamilton,
the hip-hop musical,
written by and starring the
unquenchably talented
Lin-Manuel Miranda,
which tucked Broadway
in its fob pocket—a critical
and popular smash that
earned a ton of Tony
Awards, the Pulitzer Prize
for Drama, and a cast
performance at the White
House. His rocket’s
red glare shows no signs
of diminishing.

G ROOMI NG PROD U C TS BY MA LIN & G OE TZ ; G RO OMIN G

BY BI RG ITT E ; F OR D E TA ILS , G O TO V F. COM/ C R E D ITS

128 VAN IT Y FA IR P H OTO G R A P H BY MACKENZIE STROH H O L IDAY 2016/ 2017

 PORTFOLIO

Simone
BILES
Because she stuck her
landing like a superhero.
BY TATA HA R PE R ; HA IR A N D MA K E UP BY C A SE Y G OUV E IA ; SE T D E S IG N BY MATT HE W DAVI D SON;

Remember the grim

ST YLE D BY JU STI N D . K E N N E DY; HA I R PROD U C TS BY B UMBL E A N D BU MBL E ; MAK E UP PRO D UC TS

prophecies over what a

dystopian nightmare
the Summer Olympics in
PROD U C E D ON L OC ATI ON BY TOD D DA N A ; F OR DE TAI LS , G O TO V F. COM/ C R E DI TS

Rio de Janeiro might

be? It was anything
but, the joyous spectacle
and afterglow of the
Games lofted by the
cannonball power, agility,
and high-def personality
of gymnast Simone
Biles, who won four gold
medals and became
the most decorated
U.S. female gymnast in
Olympic history. Her
floor exercise alone was
an acrobatic classic.
Only four feet eight, Biles
stands giant-tall in the
sports annals.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 P H OTO GRA PH BY SAM JONES VA NIT Y FAI R 129
 PORTFOLIO

The
OBAMAS
Because as they prepare
to fly into the sunset,
we echo the cry of Brandon
de Wilde at the end
of Shane: “Come back!”
Barack Obama’s loping
elegance, grace under
pressure, pinpoint humor,
and Jedi dedication to
reason, excellence,
and democratic values in
the face of economic
collapse in 2008, a racist
scavenger hunt for his
birth certificate, and eight
years of conservative
PHOTOG R AP H BY Y UR I G R IPAS / COR BI S/ G E TT Y I MAGE S

obstruction will acquire a

storybook aura for
presidential historians.
Featuring a First Lady
whose strength, passion,
and oratorical power
conferred honor on us all.
Admit it, America:
we lucked out with the
Obamas. We can only
hope that, post-Obamas,
our luck hasn’t run out.

130 VAN IT Y FA IR H O L IDAY 2016/ 2017

 LAST CALL 2016

F OR T H E K E Y T O W HO I S W HO, T U R N T O PAGE 181

8:00 The punctilious Khans, Khizr and Ghazala, arrive on time, invi- Rodriguez. 9:13 Loaded with benjamins earned from Hamilton,
tation in hand. 8:13 Mistaking the event for a costume party, Roger Lin-Manuel Miranda seeks investment advice from mogul Rupert
Ailes and Gretchen Carlson enact one of his favorite fantasies and Murdoch, who gazes into the eyes of Jerry Hall and tells him to put all
arrive as Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia. 8:59 Misdirected by a spe- his money into supermodels. 10:01 Trump ladies collide. “Now that the
cial version of Pokémon Go customized for players hoping to reconsti- election’s over,” says Melania to Ivanka, “keep your hands off your
tute the Soviet empire, Vladimir Putin wanders in and spies mutual- father.” 10:08 At the potluck table, the Great British Bake-Off judges
admiration-society co-founder Donald Trump, who is loudly calling Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood summarily dismiss Anthony
attention to himself by inviting guests to go furniture shopping with him. Weiner’s spongy spotted dick but praise the saucy lemonade buns of
9:04 Suspecting a better party at Robin Roberts’s pad, Michael Stra- Beyoncé, who becomes distracted when she overhears her lyrics “Sor-
han ghosts his date, Kelly Ripa, leaving her to make small talk with ry, I ain’t sorry, I ain’t thinking ’bout you” being sung by the sullied C.E.O.
other suddenly solo acts Angelina Jolie, Huma Abedin, and Alex trio of Martin Shkreli, of Retrophin, Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos,
134 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
and John Stumpf, formerly of Wells Fargo. 10:48 Ryan Lochte, of ocally declares him the healthiest individual ever to kowtow to
the U.S. Bathroom-Door Removal Team, gets to work on the powder- President-Elect Trump, though at the same time the doc suggests that if
room portal, exposing a casual chat between Bill Clinton and Loretta Mr. Hannity is ever going to recover the use of his lips he will need to
Lynch. 11:05 Carrying a basket of s’morables, curse-crushing Cubs have them surgically removed from Mr. Trump’s rump. 11:46 In her
fan Hillary Clinton heads for her own rendezvous with destiny, only cups, the Zika mosquito snubs EpiPen profiteer Heather Bresch. “I
to stumble over an unexpectedly kneeling Colin Kaepernick, sending stick people because it’s my nature,” it sneers. “You do it to make mon-
the basket aloft. Fortunately it is intercepted by a drone piloted by Tom ey.” 11:55 Returning to obscurity, Ken Bone encounters thatch-roofed
Hanks, who attempts to land his craft on the surface of the punch bowl, livery driver Boris Johnson, who explains his special Brexit car ser-
at least until he spies Katie Ledecky, taking one more celebratory dip vice: “We leave, but we don’t know where we’re going.” 11:59
in the sangria. 11:19 Trump doctor Harold “Keep On Truckin’ ” Boom! What’s that? Another prime-time Matt Lauer interview crash-
Bornstein performs an instant physical on Sean Hannity and unequiv- ing to earth? No, no, just Baby 2017, eager to begin. 
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 I L L U STR ATIO N BY BARRY BLITT VAN IT Y FAIR 135
 Star Witho In a mere six years, Jennifer Lawrence has blazed past
every marker of Hollywood stardom, with no sign of
slowing down: this month’s science-fiction romance, Passengers,
will be followed by movies with Steven Spielberg,
Adam McKay, and Darren Aronofsky. In unreal circumstances,
Lawrence is learning to assert herself as a real person,
JULIE MILLER learns, whether that means equal pay, privacy,
or never being a bridesmaid again

S
ALL BUSINESS
Jennifer Lawrence,
photographed
at the Studios at
Paramount,
in Hollywood.
F OR DE TA IL S, G O TO V F. COM /C RE D I TS

LAWRENCE WEARS
A GOWN BY DIOR; STOLE
BY FRANCESCO
SCOGNAMIGLIO; HAIR
PRODUCTS BY KÉRASTASE
PARIS; MAKEUP
PRODUCTS AND NAIL
ENAMEL BY DIOR.

S
136
P H OTOG R AP H S BY PETER LINDBERGH • ST Y LED BY JESSICA DIEHL
ut a Script

VA NIT Y FAI R 137

 he bar of the Plaza Athénée, an elegant
Upper East Side hotel, is empty save for an elderly French couple sip-
ping Bordeaux at two P.M. when in bursts a tall blonde crackling with
energy. It is Jennifer Lawrence, wearing a black cashmere sweater, jeans
ripped at the knee, and black boots, her platinum hair chopped into
a chic bob. Delicate gold jewelry circles her wrists, neck, and fingers,
and her most pronounced accessory, a security team, looms nearby.
She orders tea and explains, “I am playing a ballerina in my next
movie so my first step is not drinking alcohol for every meal of the
day. Obviously I’m still drinking every day,” she adds, in the same
engaging, infectious manner America has come to love.
While most millennials are navigating student debt and entry-
level employment, Lawrence, who turned 26 in August, hasn’t so
much achieved the Hollywood dream as crushed and re-invented
it by blazing an unprecedented career trajectory. In the past five
years, she has won an Oscar (in 2013, for Silver Linings Playbook),
earned three additional nominations (for Winter’s Bone, American
Hustle, and Joy), collected three Golden Globes, gone full super-
hero in the $4-billion-grossing X-Men series, and fronted the nearly
$3-billion-grossing Hunger Games franchise. With her next film,
Passengers, Sony’s science-fiction romance, opening December 21,
Lawrence has joined Julia Roberts in an elite league of actresses who
have commanded $20 million for a movie. (Lawrence will also re-
portedly receive 30 percent of the film’s profits after it breaks even.)
While Roberts reached this paycheck peak when she was 32 (for Erin
Brockovich), Lawrence has already done so, a mere six years after
skyrocketing out of obscurity. (For additional perspective, Passengers
marks Lawrence’s 20th film, while Meryl Streep did not appear on-
screen in a feature film until she was 28.)
With her franchises behind her, Lawrence
has lined up a flurry of roles to fill the next
S
GUIDING STAR
chapter of her career: the aforementioned “I just dropped
F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO VF. COM/ C R E D ITS

Russian ballerina (turned spy) in Red Sparrow, my jaw and

directed by The Hunger Games filmmaker cried,” she says of
meeting an idol,
Francis Lawrence; war photographer Lynsey Paul McCartney.
Addario in It’s What I Do, directed by Steven
Spielberg; and Elizabeth Holmes, the contro- LAWRENCE WEARS
A GOWN BY
versial founder of the scandal-plagued Silicon ARMANI PRIVÉ.
Valley health-technology company Theranos,
in Bad Blood, written and directed by Adam
S
138 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
139
 McKay. She also has a role in Mother, a home-invasion horror movie texted me that she got my number from
directed by Darren Aronofsky, which was shot last summer in Montre-
al. “I don’t like waking up with nothing to do or going to sleep without
Woody,” Lawrence says. “I replied, ‘Fuck
off!’ And we’ve been really good friends
S
WORDS AND BONDS
accomplishing anything,” Lawrence says. “That really depresses me.” ever since.” The two of them texted every “I know we’d be
friends,” Emma
She had her big breakout role at the age of nine, when she played a day for a year after that. “I feel like it was
Stone says, “even
prostitute from Nineveh in a church play in her native Louisville, Ken- our version of The Notebook—365 texts.” if we didn’t
tucky. Lawrence was so unexpectedly convincing—“swinging her booty The friendship—between two actresses two do the same job.”
and strutting her stuff,” her mother has said—that family friends told years apart in age, presumably in conten-
LAWRENCE WEARS
her parents, “We don’t know if we should congratulate you or not, be- tion for similar roles—transcends the ugly A GOWN BY
cause your kid’s a great prostitute.” Five years later, Lawrence was dis- stereotypes of an industry infamous for VALENTINO HAUTE
COUTURE.

S
covered by a modeling scout and was so eager to embark on her career pitting females against one another. “I love
that she left high school early with a G.E.D. and moved to New York. my job,” Lawrence says. “I don’t know
Having reportedly banked $46 million last year—making her the what I would be without acting. So if there
highest-paid actress two years in a row—Lawrence is a long way from is someone who loves the same thing, it should bring us closer.
the horse farm where she was raised by her mother (a children’s-camp But it depends on how that person is, and Emma is so normal
manager) and father (the owner of a contracting business), along with and lovely.” This past October, while supporting Stone at a screen-
two older brothers. She is still a typical twentysomething in some ing of La La Land, Lawrence said, “If I wasn’t her biggest fan, I
ways, but with some extraordinary caveats. She is obsessed with Be- would’ve Tonya Harding’d her in the kneecaps.”
yoncé’s Lemonade, for example, but receives texts referencing the lyric “She may not even know this,” Stone wrote me in an e-mail,
“Becky with the good hair” from David O. Russell, her three-time di- “but there was definitely a time early on when I was like ‘OH HEY
rector (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Joy). “I mentioned MY EGO IS GOING NUTS SHE’S SO GREAT AND VIBRANT AND TAL-
the album and he just wanted me to know that he listened and cares.” ENTED I’M SCREWED I’LL NEVER WORK AGAIN GOODBYE YELLOW
She also met Beyoncé herself and verifies that, in person, the su- BRICK ROAD.’ Then I chilled the fuck out—and remembered we’re
perstar “looks like she was sent directly from heaven.” She watches completely different and there is room for everyone, even if it’s an
Real Housewives but texts executive producer Andy Cohen with feed- industry that doesn’t really seem to support that idea up front.”
back. (She produces her phone from a black purse to recite her last She went on: “We both really do love each other and care about
mobile missive to him: “Please somehow get this to the Real House- each other as people, beyond being actors. I support her complete-
wives of O.C.: Shannon, your mother-in-law is a dirty bastard and you ly when it comes to work and I feel the same from her, but I know
are completely right. Meghan, you have got to stop apologizing—these we’d be friends even if we didn’t do the same job.”
women are better at arguing than you. Sincerely, Jennifer’s period.”) Lawrence is also loyal to her close friends outside the industry
She is occasionally struck by insecurity and calls Paris Fashion Week and makes time to celebrate their personal milestones. “All of my
“the most intimidating time to be alive. You get ready in your hotel friends are getting married and having babies,” she says, revealing
and you’re like, ‘I look awesome.’ Then you walk outside, see the out- one role that she will absolutely never reprise. “Weddings rock, but
fits and people who are like seven feet tall, and are like, ‘I am a piece I will never be a bridesmaid again,” says the four-time survivor.
of garbage. I’m not going out anymore.’ ” But, having worked with “There needs to be a bridesmaids’ union. It’s horrendous. If anyone
Dior since 2012, she manages to get through it. asks me again, I’m going to say, ‘No. That part of my life is over. I
She worships the usual icons, but, more and more, they ap- appreciate the ask.’ If I do ever get married, I don’t think I will have
proach her, as Paul McCartney did to compliment her dancing bridesmaids. How can I rank my friends?”
to “Live and Let Die” in American Hustle. “I don’t think I spoke Not that she would have the time to plan a wedding if it were
back,” she says. “I just dropped my jaw and cried.” on her radar. Lawrence—whose longest relationship was with
X-Men co-star Nicholas Hoult—currently seems more focused on

F HA I R BY O DI L E GI L BE RT; MA KE UP BY F ULV IA FA RO LF I ; MA N I CUR E BY J E NNA HI P P; SE T DE SI G N BY CO LI N

DO NA H UE; PRO DUCE D ON L O CAT I O N BY A N T HO NY GR A NE R I; F O R DE TA I LS , GO TO V F.CO M /CR E DI TS
“She’s a Boss” professional, rather than romantic, collaborations. As for children,
or Lawrence, the jarring juxtapositions—between Lawrence’s maternal focus right now is her small brown dog, Pippi
real person and unreal circumstances—are softened Longstocking. Last Christmas, Lawrence’s mother commissioned
by the fact that she has made good friends in the a portrait of Pippi from a 14-year-old fan of Lawrence’s in New
business, such as Emma Stone, who understand Zealand. At first, the actress hung the portrait in her Los Angeles
Hollywood’s inherently bizarre pressures. Law- home only when her mom visited before realizing, “Fuck it. I am
rence and Stone met via mutual co-star Woody the person who has an acrylic painting of her dog,” and proudly
Harrelson, who appeared with Lawrence in The Hunger Games showcased it above her fireplace. “I am a psychotic dog mom in
and with Stone in Zombieland and predicted their compatibility. “She a way that I am genuinely embarrassed about. If I could put her

“I DON’T LIKE
WAKING UP WITH NOTHING TO DO,”
LAWRENCE SAYS.
140 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
141
142
FOR DE TA IL S, G O TO V F. COM /C RE D I TS
inside me and give birth to her I would.” Because of this, Lawrence
jokes that having actual children “would be dangerous. My kids
would be incredibly jealous because I would still be way more at-
tentive to Pippi than I would to them.”

T
hese days, Pippi and Lawrence are constantly on
the move—recently traveling together to Montreal
to film the Aronofsky movie with Michelle Pfeiffer,
Ed Harris, and Javier Bardem. Lawrence had been
wanting to work with the Black Swan filmmaker,
so when he pitched her the project, still without a
script, she immediately accepted. (“He is a visionary,” she says.) It
was in Montreal that she absentmindedly fed Pippi a sparerib, which
required an emergency vet run.
This fall, Lawrence flew to Africa to shadow photojournalist
Lynsey Addario as she documented South Sudanese refugees cross-
ing into Uganda. Although the experience offered her a rare veil of
anonymity (when introducing herself to a U.N. worker as Jennifer,
he replied, “Ahhh, like Jennifer Lopez”), she was haunted by her
uselessness. “The worst feeling about being there was that I wasn’t
helping anybody,” she says of the humanitarian crisis. “I was doing
a character study.” (Lawrence is also a producer on It’s What I Do,
the Spielberg film based on Addario’s memoir.) Lawrence, who has
donated generously to a number of charities (including $2 million
to a children’s hospital in her hometown this year), said she found
solace in vowing to visit again in a more active role.
And Pippi joined Lawrence in Atlanta, Georgia, for Passengers,
a big-budget project she tried, at first, to resist. “My plan was to do
a few more years of indies and remind people and myself how I
started,” Lawrence says, referring to Winter’s Bone, her 2010 break-
out, which earned her her first Oscar nod, at 19. Then she read the
screenplay, by Jon Spaihts (Ridley Scott’s Prometheus). “I wanted to
say no, but I kept coming back to it.”
Directed by the Oscar-nominated Morten Tyldum (The Imita-
tion Game), the reportedly $150 million movie stars Lawrence and
Chris Pratt as a journalist and engineer who
leave their earthly lives to journey to a distant @vf.com
colony. Due to a mechanical malfunction, both To watch Jennifer
Lawrence
characters wake up about 30 years into the 120- play QUESTION
year voyage and struggle to survive while hur- ROULETTE,
go to VF.COM/
tling through space. The co-stars share several HOLIDAY2016/2017.
love scenes that spark—an on-screen electricity
Lawrence says was easily summoned, since her co-star “could have
chemistry with a cactus.” Lawrence got along with Pratt’s wife (Anna
Faris, star of the CBS sitcom Mom) as well, appearing on her top-
rated podcast, Unqualified, and forming a “spin-off friendship” with
her. “I think women can sense if you are the kind of woman who is
going to run off with their husband,” Law-
S
STEP LIVELY
rence explains. “I don’t think I give off that
vibe. I give off the ‘Please like me!’ despera-
“Jen is the most tion. Which is not threatening.”
in-tune person As for Pratt, she says, “He is a ray of
I’ve ever met,” sunshine. We had to have a talk about his
says The Hunger
Games director good moods at four in the morning, when
Francis Lawrence. he was encouraging the crew and I’m
like the Grinch. I came on set like, ‘No
LAWRENCE WEARS
A DRESS BY more smiling. No more dancing.’ ” Pratt
ALBERTA FERRETTI; laughed when I raised the subject. “Jen
EARRINGS BY VAN
CLEEF & ARPELS. is really tuned into her emotions,” he told

S me. “If she’s mad, she’ll let you know. She

is very clear in her C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 8 6
www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 143
144 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com P H OTO G R A PH BY JOSEPH SYWENKYJ H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
INVADING
APPLE What if a government could wirelessly control any iPhone?
Last summer, a University of California grad student named Bill
Marczak stumbled across a piece of spyware that would
do just that. Probing a new arena of cyber-warfare, in which
shadowy firms sell spyware to repressive regimes such
as those in Bahrain, Egypt, and Uganda, BRYAN BURROUGH
reveals the details of the hack that shocked Apple
and security experts worldwide

UP-TO-DATA
Security specialist
and Ph.D. candidate
Max Bazaliy,
at his home, in Kiev,
Ukraine.

HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 145

 It is exceedingly rare to find a never-before-seen vulnerability that
allows a hacker to infiltrate the operating system of a computer or
mobile phone. Amazingly, the program Marczak had found would
be shown to target not one, not two, but three such vulnerabilities.
“Every new line of code, it was like, ‘Oh shit, this can’t be,’ ”
Blaich recalls. “ ‘Oh shit. Oh shit.’ It just went on and on.”
By nightfall, the two engineers were staring in disbelief. “This can
spy on audio, e-mail, text messages … everything. Someone spent a
lot of time creating this,” Blaich said.
Bazaliy, a purist, thought it the most beautiful code he had ever
seen. “There’s never been anything like this before,” he said.

T
here was a time, a few years back, when the most
sophisticated cyber-warfare tools were still developed
and used exclusively by the world’s most sophisticated
cyber-warfare combatants: government spy agencies,
such as the ultra-secret National Security Agency and
its counterparts in Israel and other developed coun-
tries and their arch-rivals in China and Russia. The surveillance and
monitoring capabilities that Edward Snowden unveiled to the world
in 2013 were shocking and little understood, but an ordinary citizen
he night it hap- could at least take comfort in the belief that, if he wasn’t a criminal
pened, right after midnight on August 10, Bill Marczak and his girl- or a spy, it was unlikely these tools would ever be used against him.
friend were staying up late to watch Star Trek reruns in their spare That was then.
one-bedroom apartment, in El Cerrito, California, just north of the Ever since Snowden, and even before, experts in cyber-security
University of California at Berkeley campus. have watched warily as a handful of obscure companies launched ef-
A trim Ph.D. candidate with dense brown hair and a disciplined forts to replicate and sell weaponized “government-grade” spyware
beard, Marczak wasn’t just another excitable, fast-talking Berkeley to the highest bidders. The ultimate prize, security experts knew,
grad student. He was a pioneering analyst in a new and unusual was the ability to hack remotely into the digital brains of the world’s
theater of cyber-warfare: the struggle between Middle Eastern free- most popular hardware—the desktops, laptops, tablets, and especial-
dom activists and authoritarian governments in countries such as ly the mobile phones made by Apple. And not just break into Apple
Bahrain and Egypt. He was also a senior fellow at Citizens Lab, the devices but actually take control of them. It was a hacker’s dream:
University of Toronto “interdisciplinary laboratory” that had almost the ability to monitor a user’s communications in real time and also
single-handedly discovered and alerted the world to how these gov- to turn on his microphone and record his conversations.
ernments were monitoring dissidents with spyware quietly marketed Programmers call this ultimate hack a “jailbreak.” Doing it with
by a group of shadowy European and Israeli companies that have wires and cables is not unheard of. Once or twice a year someone,
been labeled the first “cyber-arms dealers.” typically an attention-seeking hacker or computer-security start-up,
Before going to sleep, Marczak, always a tad obsessive, rolled out of will announce finding a vulnerability in the Apple operating system
bed to check his phone for messages. He was standing there in his boxer that allows a jailbreak. Apple, usually within weeks, issues a “patch”
shorts when he saw it. “Oh my God,” he exclaimed, hopping up and to fix it.
down with excitement, his bright eyes shining even brighter than usual. Just two weeks before Marczak and the engineers at Lookout en-
Across the bed, his girlfriend wondered, “What is it?” countered the strange new code, a Chinese company named Pangu
“I think I just found something huge,” he answered, before kiss- had announced a “tethered” jailbreak—one employing wires and
ing her and going into the living room, where he opened his laptop. cables—for Apple mobile operating systems between 9.2 and 9.3.3.
When his girlfriend woke the next morning, he was still there. It was the first “public” jailbreak released by anyone in five months.
Marczak had indeed found “something huge.” An activist friend But for those interested in hacking Apple devices, the holy grail
in the United Arab Emirates had sent him an e-mail containing a sin- has long been a remote jailbreak, that is, one done wirelessly, from
gle Internet link, which Marczak was almost certain would, if clicked, across the street or around the world. Only one is known to have
release malignant spyware into his mobile phone. He managed to iso- ever been created, a tool called jailbreakme, first released in 2007;
late a portion of its code, but it was so complex he decided to forward that, however, required a willing user and hasn’t been updated since
a copy across San Francisco Bay to engineers at a computer-security 2010. In September 2015 a little-known company named Zerodium
outfit called Lookout, whose offices high in a downtown skyscraper made waves in Silicon Valley by announcing it would pay a $1 mil-
afforded panoramic views from the Golden Gate Bridge to Oakland. lion “bounty” to anyone who brought it an actual remote jailbreak.
A pair of Lookout engineers, Andrew Blaich, a sandy-haired Two months later, without divulging what it intended to do next, Ze-
mobile-security specialist, and Max Bazaliy, an intense grad student rodium announced that someone had claimed the bounty.
from the Ukraine, were the first at the company to study the heavily Then, last August, came the startling confirmation from Apple
obfuscated code. itself: a genuine remote jailbreak “in the wild,” the one discovered
“What do you think it is?” Blaich asked. and identified by Marczak and the Lookout researchers. To every-
“I don’t know. Something really, really bad,” Bazaliy answered in one’s surprise it had been out there operating secretly for years.
his thick Ukrainian accent. “This is a James Bond story,” says Mike Murray, Lookout’s vice
It took all day for the two to realize just how bad. president of security research and response, a curly-haired 40-year-
146 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
old salesman type who formerly headed product-development se- harmful viruses and “worms” that could freeze or destroy software.
curity at G.E. “The guys who did this are James Bond villains, evil The growing chaos fed on itself. The more trouble black-hat hack-
arms dealers attacking dissidents in the real world. It’s real. It’s true. ers caused on the Internet, the larger computer-security companies
This is finding cyber-weapons being used against someone in the grew to fight them, often with the help of white-hat hackers. A turn-
real world. Before, people only suspected this might be out there.” ing point came in 2006, when someone infiltrated the computers at
“It’s kind of like a stealth bomber,” says Lookout security re- TJX, the parent company of such retail brands as T. J. Maxx and
searcher Seth Hardy, an intense, well-known former hacker. “It’s one Marshalls, and stole thousands of credit-card numbers. At the time
thing to know they exist. It’s an entirely different thing to have one it was a remarkable crime. While there had been attacks on banks
crash into your backyard.” over the years, the TJX hack showed both black hats and white hats
that there was serious money to be made in cyber-crime or in fight-

I
What Happens in Vegas ing it. For security companies and defense contractors, having one’s
n the beginning, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, there own hackers was no longer a luxury but an imperative.
were computer hackers, mostly hobbyists, who attracted a Then as now, the most valuable asset in a hacker’s arsenal is a so-
lot of media attention by sneaking into the innards of gov- called zero-day exploit, a previously undiscovered vulnerability in a
ernment and corporate computers and running up and piece of software, essentially a secret digital door to the inside. (“Zero
down their digital hallways unseen. It was, with some no- days” refers to the amount of time—i.e. none—a target has to fix an
table exceptions, viewed as harmless fun. entirely new kind of hack before damage can be done.) For a hacker,
That began to change in 1993, when a group of hacker pals put maintaining a zero day’s secrecy is paramount; once the exploit be-
together an impromptu convention of sorts in Las Vegas, on a week- comes known, the target—whether Microsoft, Apple, or another com-
end in late July or August, when hotel rates were the lowest. Called pany—will nail the software door shut, rendering the exploit unusable.
DefCon, a nod to a favorite hacker movie, WarGames, it grew every “It used to be that hackers would hold on to their zero days and trade
year and soon earned a reputation as an uproarious affair, featur- them for more access or knowledge,” says Hardy. “Not anymore.”
ing such shenanigans as pouring laundry soap into swimming pools By 2010 a true black market for zero days was emerging beyond
and hacking A.T.M.’s. By the late 1990s a few curious government the usual black market. The turning point came when a French
people began appearing. It became a kind of game: organizers held company named Vupen began to offer bounties for zero days, re-
a “Spot the Fed” contest, and if a claimant turned out to be right, portedly as much as $250,000. Vupen insisted its aim was keeping
he got an “I spotted the Fed” T-shirt. software safe, though many doubted that its intentions were so noble.
With the rise of online commerce, corporate types also became Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft responded with
curious about what these hackers could do with their own and bounties of their own. Though far less than what Vupen and others
other people’s computers. As a result, several computer-security were paying, these bounties offered white-hat hackers a way to make
companies sprang up and began hosting a companion convention money while keeping their ethics intact. In addition, as former hack-
called Black Hat, “built by and for the global InfoSec community … ers, they might also end up with lucrative consulting contracts.
[featuring] four days of intense trainings for security practitioners “Vupen led to a divide in the hacker community,” Hardy says.
of all levels.” “Do you burn zero days by selling them, or do you keep them se-
“The arrival of specialized computer-security companies who cret? Some hackers sold. But true black hats kept their cards close.”
exhibited at Black Hat was a milestone,” says Chris Soghoian, the In this new black market few knew exactly who the buyers were,
A.C.L.U.’s chief technologist. “You had all this money flowing in. but it was widely assumed that many were governments looking for
There were parties, organized by vendors, with international D.J.’s to clever new ways to spy on their own citizenry. “In 2011, 2012, there
spin music. Eventually they got rid of the Spot the Fed contest because was this transition point where it was still fashionable to brag about
there were so many feds coming, to the point where N.S.A. employees how much money you were making selling zero days,” says Chris
would grow their hair out just to be cool for that one weekend.” Soghoian, “while at the same time it was not yet unfashionable to
The relationship between hackers and the military-technology com- acknowledge that you were facilitating human-rights abuses by gov-
plex has always been an uneasy one. For every “white hat” hacker who ernments that use those tools.”
signs on to help a Symantec or a Lockheed-Martin, there is a “black The Zeitgeist shifted decisively in March 2012, when Forbes
hat” hacker who sneers at them as sellouts. By the early 2000s, black magazine published a memorable photograph of a pasty-faced
hats were emerging as a serious annoyance on the ever expanding In- black-marketeer who called himself “the Grugq,” sitting in front
ternet. What had begun in the 1990s as the odd Web-page defacement of a laptop in Bangkok. To his right was an oversize martini, to
became an epidemic, with hundreds of hackers, many from Russia his left an open bag of cash. “That photograph was a milestone,”
and Eastern Europe, competing to see who could spray the most digi- Soghoian observes. “There had never been a photo of a hacker
tal graffiti on government and commercial Web sites. Others released arms dealer. It brought a lot of attention to the industry. And, really,

“The guys who did this

are James Bond villains, evil arms dealers,”
says Lookout’s Mike Murray.
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 147
that was the last moment when it was socially acceptable for peo- researchers discovered would secretly load spyware onto the user’s
ple to brag about their role in selling exploits to governments.” computer. As they dug deep into the suspicious code, the research-
ers found repeated use of the word “FinSpy.”

A
Government Spies FinSpy was quickly identified as part of a spyware product
t the time, Bill Marczak knew little of this. He was named “FinFisher,” created and marketed by a British company
just another grad student, researching Big Data. called Gamma Group, which billed FinFisher as a new way for po-
Marczak was born in New York. His father worked lice and intelligence agencies to monitor criminals and spies. Like
in finance, moving the family first to Hong Kong several other new entrants into the spyware field, Gamma termed its
and then to the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, products “lawful intercept” tools. Just the year before, however, pro-
where Marczak spent his high-school years. When testers who had stormed Egypt’s state security headquarters carted
the Arab Spring unrest broke out, in late 2010, Bahrain soon became out boxes of internal government documents, one of them an offer
a riot zone, with young protesters seeking Western-style reforms fac- from the Egyptian secret police to buy the FinFisher program for
ing off in the streets against government troops. Marczak, by this $353,000. The Egyptian discovery suggested that Gamma, far from
time at Berkeley, watched with fascination as the violence unfolded. limiting its clients to those who targeted criminals, was quietly mar-
When activists went on Twitter seeking information on the kinds of keting FinFisher to authoritarian governments to monitor dissidents.
tear gas and weaponry the government was using against them, Mar- Marczak’s work seemed to confirm it. But Gamma, contacted by a
czak mined the Internet for answers. He began writing blog posts, Bloomberg News reporter, denied selling FinFisher to the Bahraini
which in 2012 led him and two other would-be activists to start an government, suggesting it was using a stolen copy.
advocacy group they called Bahrain Watch. A team of researchers at Rapid7, a Boston software-security
Things got strange in May 2012, when three of Marczak’s new outfit, set out to prove Gamma was lying. When a Rapid7 analyst
colleagues—based in Washington, London, and the Bahraini capi- named Claudio Guarnieri examined FinFisher’s code, he saw that
tal, Manama—received suspicious e-mails from previously unknown when he pinged the I.P. address of a collection server it replied with
correspondents. Marczak studied them with a security researcher an unusual response: “Hallo Steffi.” Guarnieri then used a pro-
named Morgan Marquis-Boire, who worked at Citizen Lab, then gram to survey every server on the Internet—roughly 75 million of
known mostly for its work tracking Chinese cyber-attacks on Ti- them—to see if others responded the same. It took a couple of long
betan activist groups. A link in the e-mails took the user to an weeks, but in the end the Rapid7 scan turned up 11 I.P. addresses
attached blank Microsoft Word document, which the two young in 10 countries, including Qatar, Ethiopia, and the U.A.E., that were
known to monitor dissidents.
But Gamma wasn’t alone. In July 2012, days after
Citizen Lab released its report on Gamma online, a Mo-
roccan activist group named Mamfakinch, which had
published articles critical of the government, received an
anonymous e-mail promising a sensitive scoop. A similar
e-mail, purportedly from “Arabic WikiLeaks,” arrived in
the in-box of the U.A.E. dissident Ahmed Mansoor, who
had been imprisoned for insulting members of the gov-
ernment. When Mansoor clicked an attachment in the
e-mail, it downloaded spyware onto his computer that
monitored his every keystroke and communication.
Both Mamfakinch and Mansoor contacted security ex-
perts. A Russian anti-virus company, Dr Web, was the first
to publish an analysis confirming that both of their devices
contained spyware marketed by a Milan-based company
named Hacking Team. Unlike Gamma, Hacking Team
was well known in cyber-circles. Founded by two Italian
programmers in 2003, it had become one of the first sell-
ers of commercial hacking and surveillance tools after its
GRO O MI NG BY R A ME E HUR WI T Z; FO R D ETA I L S, GO TO V F.COM / CRE DI TS

initial software package was embraced by the Milan police

to spy on Italian citizens. With offices in three countries,
including the U.S., it was probably the best known of the
new breed of cyber-arms dealers. It insisted it refused
to sell its products to a country blacklisted by NATO,
but a Citizen Lab report showed that its tools were be-
ing used by the Moroccan and U.A.E. governments.
Then came an ironic comeuppance. Someone, later
identified as a previously unknown hacker named
“Phineas Fisher,” managed to take control of Hacking
Team’s Twitter account and triggered a massive data
breach. The tweets contained links to more than 400 giga-
bytes of internal Hacking Team data, including e-mails,
corporate files, invoices, and source code. There was even
H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
 SECURE ENVIRONMENT
Lookout employees
Mike Murray,
Andrew Blaich, Kristy
Edwards, and
Seth Hardy, at their
San Francisco
headquarters.
Opposite, Bill Marczak,
a client list, which put the lie to the claims that Hacking Team wasn’t a booming business it is. One expert es- at U.C. Berkeley.
selling its products to repressive governments. The clients included timates the global market at $5 billion.
Morocco, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Egypt, Oman, Turkey, It was just a month after the Hack-
Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bah- ing Team data breach, in fact, that Zerodium, a company whose
rain, and Albania, not to mention three American clients: the F.B.I., C.E.O. had founded Vupen, announced its $1 million bounty for
the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Department of De- the mother of all commercial hacking tools: a remote jailbreak.

A
fense. (Hacking Team did not respond to requests for comment.)
“The Hacking Team thing was monumental,” says Chris So- few days after the Zerodium bounty was claimed,
ghoian. “Prior to that, the only thing that researchers had was cir- Marczak got a message from Rori Donaghy, a
cumstantial evidence that this was going on. They would find a Fin- London-based writer on human-rights issues in the
Fisher server in Morocco and say that’s evidence the government Middle East, who had been publishing articles crit-
was using it. Before Hacking Team, there was no smoking gun.” ical of the United Arab Emirates government for
But though a handful of Hacking Team clients, including the a Web site called Middle East Eye. Donaghy had
D.E.A., severed ties with the company, nothing much changed but received an invitation to join a panel discussion from a group he had
perceptions. Hacking Team, like Gamma, continues in business—and never heard of, “the Right to Fight.” He C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 8 9

“Apple had never seen

anything like this … incredibly sophisticated
nation-state attack.”
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 P H OTO G R APH S BY DAN WINTERS www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 1
0409
0
 L’Affaire
Virtually every detail of Kim Kardashian West’s Paris Fashion Week—jewels,
Instagram account. Until the early hours of October 3, when she was robbed at gunpoint
up with Kardashian West, MARK SEAL explains how the

150 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

Kardashian clothes, shows, parties—was documented, by the paparazzi as well as on her
in her hotel suite. Mining sources from Paris’s chief of police to the concierge who was tied
star’s glamorous reality became a terrifying vulnerability
PHOTOG R AP H BY D E N IS A LL A R D /R E A /R E D U X

CRIME SCENE
The Hôtel de Pourtalès,
where Kim Kardashian West was
robbed. Celebrities
seeking privacy often stay there.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 151

T
pansive office at 36. This was his first inter- “At this time, there is no doubt about the
view with foreign media, his press attaché reality of the crime,” the chief said.
told me, about what the police—and all of He also didn’t doubt that the case would
Paris—were calling L’Affaire Kardashian or turn out to be one of the most unusual of
simply “Kim.” his long and distinguished career. The heist
After taking office, nearly two years ago, was shaping up to be wilder than anything
Chief Sainte co-led the investigation into the ever shown on reality TV, and it had al-
November 13, 2015, massacre, when 130 ready consumed scores of man-hours of
people died in simultaneous, brutal Islamist the elite police brigade of Paris, tamed the
terrorist attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, world’s fiercest paparazzi, stunned Paris
Le Stade de France, and restaurants and ca- Fashion Week, and unwittingly unleashed
fés in Paris. a hotel night receptionist straight out of
Ironically, Kim Kardashian, while known French crime novels.

C
to millions worldwide, was not known to the
chief, at least at the moment when he was hief Sainte told me that times
awakened with news of her robbery. are tough for thieves in Paris.
“I asked my number two, ‘Who is this Banks have become im-
victim?’ ” recalled Sainte. penetrable, much of their
His night officer didn’t know, either. cash now dispensed by wire.
So the chief rose from his bed, went to his Brinks-style armored-truck
computer, and entered the name “Kim Kar- raids, once the rage, have been rendered
he call came dashian” on Google. technically impossible—the trucks are now
shortly after three A.M. on Monday, October “And I quickly understood who she is,” extremely well protected, and those with the
3, from 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the imposing he said, as his computer was flooded with knowledge to rob them are mostly in prison
fortress-like headquarters of the Paris crimi- images and information about the American for past offenses. “So the professionals have
nal police, overlooking the Left Bank of the reality-television star. “Now I know almost a solution: attack the person at home or in
Seine River. Founded in 1812, “36,” as it’s everything about her.” the street,” the chief said.
commonly called, became the model for The chief, sitting alongside his press aide, It’s called “home-jacking,” robbing the
crime-busting units worldwide, from Scot- smiled. rich in their residences, where, because of
land Yard to the F.B.I. “The personality of the victim, Kim Kar- France’s high taxes on personal wealth,
Pre-dawn calls from 36 are not unusual dashian, is not like anyone else,” he said. jewels, other valuables, and large amounts
for Paris police chief Christian Sainte, but “She has a lot of likes on Facebook!” of cash are often to be found. “Old, rich
the one that roused him from his bed early He could not give specific details about the people are very vulnerable,” said the chief.
that October morning would prove to be dif- robbery, since the investigation was ongoing “Or business owners, restaurant owners,
ferent. “Kim Kardashian, victim of V.M.A.,” and the perpetrators were still at large. But at who have cash at home. It’s quick. And you
said the night officer—V.M.A. meaning vol à the beginning of our conversation he forceful- can get a lot of money in a very short time.”
main armée, armed robbery. ly discredited rumors and at least one pub- Although home-jackings have plagued
Conventional time doesn’t exist for the lished report
chief of judiciary police in the perpetually that the robbery
roiling city of Paris, France. “I know every- was somehow
thing, day and night,” he told me in his ex- a hoax.

THE SCORE
Kim showing off
her $4 million,
20-karat-diamond ring,
on Instagram.

SEPTEMBER 28
With then bodyguard
Pascal Duvier,
arriving at the
restaurant L’Avenue.

152 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

 T
France for many years, the new wave is An American in Paris scooters and motorcycles, wondering all the
perpetrated by “a new type of gangster,” his was the dark side of the while where she was staying because the side-
explained veteran Paris police reporter Fré- Paris into which Kim Kar- walks outside her Paris hotel would be their
déric Ploquin. “They’re born in France, but dashian West landed by pri- home for the next six days. When her van
most of them are from North Africa: Alge- vate jet at Le Bourget Airport pulled up to the Hôtel de Pourtalès, at 7 Rue
ria, Morocco, Tunisia. And Romanian Gyp- at 10:40 A.M. on September Tronchet, behind the Madeleine Church, the
sies from France, whom we call Manouche. 28, accompanied by her as- photographers weren’t surprised. They had
They are smart, clever, and they know how sistant, Stephanie Sheppard, and her Ger- staked out many famous guests there, includ-
to follow someone on the Internet. They man bodyguard, the massive Pascal Duvier. ing Prince, who supposedly booked the entire
can also use violence, sometimes even when A battery of Paris street photographers, who hotel for a party shortly after its 2010 opening.
it’s not necessary.” kept abreast of Kim’s busy schedule through Other previous guests have included Madon-
Having gained entry into the residence, sources and social media, met her plane. na, Beyoncé and Jay Z, Marion Cotillard and
the home-jackers often perform what is For most stars, the photographers of Par- her partner, director and screenwriter Guil-
called a saucissonnage. “They treat you like is—surely, the fiercest paparazzi on earth—are laume Canet, and Manchester United soccer
PHOTO GRAPHS: FRO M LE FT, FRO M AVALO N, FRO M KGC -195/STARMAXI NC .CO M/NE WS CO M, BY MATTE O PR AN DO N I /

a sausage, in bondage,” said Paris writer to be avoided, cursed, and, in some cases, star Zlatan Ibrahimović, who actually lived in
Jean-Baptiste Roques, whose sister-in-law even attacked. But Kim was different. Dur- the hotel. Kardashian West and her husband,
was once terrorized by such an ordeal. ing last September’s Paris Fashion Week, she Kanye West, have stayed there many times, in-
“They put your family members in different greeted them with smiles, posed for them, cluding shortly before their wedding, in 2014.
rooms, tie you up, and ask each of you, thanked them. At times, it seemed, she even “Well, it’s not a hotel,” an executive at one
‘Where is the safe and what is the code?’ In dressed for them, or at least that’s how it of Paris’s grand hotels sniffed dismissively.
BFA/RE X/SHUTTERSTO CK, PASC AL LE SE GRETAI N/GETT Y I MAGE S, © AGE NC E /BE STI MAGE

a country where it is quite difficult to find seemed to them. “To me, she’s No. 1,” said “It’s an hôtel particulier, a private residence
guns, the rope is one of the most dangerous Marc Piasecki, one of the photographers transformed into a luxurious guesthouse.”
weapons a criminal can use. When the gang who chronicled Kardashian’s every public Nonetheless, its official name is the Hôtel
that robbed my sister-in-law was finally ar- moment throughout the week. A street pho- de Pourtalès, also known as the No Address
rested, they told the judge that they targeted tographer as opposed to a paparazzo—the Hotel. To be admitted, you have to be rich or
their victims thanks to the party pages in difference being, he said, “we don’t hide”— famous, or both—or be referred by someone
French Vogue. A few days after the robbery Piasecki met me in a café to scroll his iPhone who is. Its entrance is located in a historic
my sister-in-law’s father received a letter through endless pictures of Kim, which 1839 Florentine Renaissance mansion, which
from the gangsters in which they required added up to practically a minute-by-minute was purchased and refurbished in 2004 by
the appraisal documents for the jewels, so chronicle of her movements during Paris the young French hotel entrepreneur Alex-
they could sell them more easily. They Fashion Week, “because whatever she does andre Allard (who, in 2007, bought the then
threatened him with death if he didn’t com- you make money,” Piasecki said. faded Paris landmark hotel Le Royal Mon-
ply.” He responded by letter to a general- The photographers trailed her black Mer- ceau and restored it to five-star “palace”
delivery address in the Paris suburbs, as the cedes van from the airport into the city, on standards). The hotel opened in 2010, in a
thieves had demanded, saying the jewels new, 11-apartment annex
were old and he didn’t have appraisal docu- to the mansion. Rooms
ments. His life was spared but the jewels SEPTEMBER 30
were never found. At the Buro 24/7
Fashion Forward
Initiative, at
the Hôtel Ritz.

SEPTEMBER 29
With husband Kanye West OCTOBER 1
(on her right) in Arriving at the
the front row at the restaurant Kinu,
Off-White show. for dinner.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 153

 start at $1,120 per night, and there is a one- photographers, who sell their shots to media went to L’Avenue restaurant,” Piasecki re-
to-one staff-to-guest ratio. Jennifer Lawrence outlets and fashion houses for “anywhere calls, where Ukrainian media personality Vi-
reportedly stayed at the hotel days before the from three cents to $1,000, if a fashion de- tali Sediuk, famous for assaulting celebrities,
robbery, and Leonardo DiCaprio was sup- signer buys the picture,” says Piasecki. attempted to kiss Kim’s formidable ass before
posedly seen there two weeks after. In recent years Kim and Kanye have be- he was wrestled to the ground by her body-
More a home than a hotel, it was appar- come Fashion Week fixtures, “as expected at guard. The moment was captured by at least
ently a prime target for a home-jacking, with fashion shows as fashion editors themselves,” a dozen photographers, all tripping over one
lax security, no CCTV cameras—so that says one insider. “It’s commonplace for celeb- another “for a small piece of the cake.”
guests could come and go in privacy—and a rities to pop up at fashion shows, especially in “We always say, ‘Thank you, Kim,’ ” Pi-
code on the entrance door that, an employ- Paris. All of the big brands understand it as a asecki says and then adds, imitating Kim’s
ee would say, “is known by all,” because it marketing and P.R. expense, so you’ll see Mi- high-pitched reply, “And she says, ‘Thank
had allegedly not been changed in six years. chelle Williams at Louis Vuitton or Lily-Rose you, guys.’ ”
“Dozens of potential suspects know about Depp at Chanel, and they’re dressed by the “Lots of other celebrities are giving us
this place, because celebrities stay there for designers and typically exclusive to that one this,” he says, shooting the middle finger.
a long time,” says Frédéric Ploquin. “They appearance. But Kim and Kanye are differ- “She never does that.”
think they will be free of cameras, free to ent because they’ve become omnipresent at The next day, Thursday, Kim’s husband,
receive friends, visitors … but drivers, body- the collections, and they go to many shows.” Kanye West, flew in for the day, but was soon
guards, paparazzi, girl furnishers all … know “In the afternoon [of the first day], we back to New York to resume his concert tour
about this place. That makes maybe hun- went straight to the Balmain office,” says and to be with their children, North, 3, and
dreds of people who know about this place. Piasecki, where Kim was going to be fitted Saint, 10 months. Three days later, on Sun-
This makes the investigation very complex. by the firm’s young creative director, Olivier day, October 2, it was still a flurry of cloth-
You have hundreds of suspects.” Rousteing, in a peekaboo crocheted dress. ing changes and photo ops, most notably in

K
The outfit would cause jaws to drop at the the Riccardo Tisci/Givenchy fashion show
ardashian West stayed Balmain show when Kim, whose face graced in the Jardin des Plantes, where Kim, wear-
in the Sky Penthouse, the invitations, entered the venue—the Hôtel ing a white negligée (“boudoir style with a
which sprawls over 3,790 Potocki, the grand former residence of a lacy ivory-toned frock,” according to French
square feet and features noble Polish family. Vogue), sat in the front row with Courtney
360- degree views of the Kim and her entourage mistakenly en- Love and model Gigi Hadid. “And then
city. It costs as much as tered the office through the wrong door, she and her sister Kourtney went back to the
$16,800 a night. An hour after her arrival ending up in a school for young journalists. Hôtel de Pourtalès to change clothes,” says
Kim emerged, in a change of clothes, and “A Kardashian!” says Piasecki, showing Piasecki. “Then they went to the [Azzedine]
the photographers’ cameras celebrated her me pictures of a throng of iPhones hoisted Alaïa showroom for a private dinner.”
entry into the City of Light with blinding high by students for selfies with the Ameri- The dinner began at 9:45 P.M. in Alaïa’s
flashes. She was off and running, the pho- can reality-TV star. 1,200-square-foot office-kitchen, where Bi-
tographers chronicling her every clothing At six P.M., Kim was off to lunch. “We anca Jagger, architect Peter Marino, Vogue
change, frequently three per day Italia editor in chief Franca Sozzani,
and sometimes more, each new out- and around 60 others consumed truf-
fit representing more money for the fled scrambled eggs and Saint Honoré

OCTOBER 3
At Le Bourget Airport,
leaving Paris, the morning
after the robbery.

OCTOBER 2 (P.M.)
With sister Kourtney,
OCTOBER 2 (A.M.) arriving at
At the the Azzedine Alaïa
Balenciaga show. showroom.

154 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

 “I asked my number two, ‘Who is this victim?’ ”
said Police Chief Sainte. He didn’t
know, so the chief Googled “Kim Kardashian.”
PHOTO GRAPHS: FRO M LE FT, BY BERTRAND RI NDO FF PE TRO FF/G E TT Y I MAGE S , MARC PI AS E CKI / GC I MAGE S / GE TT Y I MAGE S ,

A
cake, with Louis XIII Cognac from the Find Me on Instagram in her paparazzi pack, but Piasecki recalled
Rémy Martin family, represented at the din- t the No Address Hotel a the pack grew so large that he could not be
ner by the Rémy Martin heiress, young and single receptionist worked sure, and in any case it had dispersed by the
© AGENC E /BE STI MAGE, BY NE I L WARNE R/NW ME DI A I MAGES , CL AUDE PAR I S / A.P. I MAGE S

glamorous Laure Hériard Dubreuil. “When behind the glass entrance. time Kim arrived at the hotel. “You have
Kim and Kourtney walked in, the room went The door is in the middle to understand we are focused on Kim,” he
silent. All of the guests were looking over at of a courtyard, which is said. Others would insist the thieves followed
them in the entryway,” recalled Spencer usually open to the public their victim not furtively in alleyways or dark
Bailey, editor in chief of Surface magazine, during the day. During my time in Paris, I corners but in the same way that Kardashi-
which co-hosted the dinner with Alaïa. walked freely through the street door and an West’s 85 million Instagram followers do:
As the sisters approached their places, into the courtyard, which houses an event on social media.
veteran Paris photographer Bertrand Rin- space and restaurant. A Fashion Week party, “Parisian Vibes,” read Kardashian West’s
doff Petroff shot them flanking the cherubic hosted by a Brazilian beer company, was first Instagram post from Paris, announcing
Alaïa. “When I finished taking the pictures, held there until the early-morning hours just her arrival to her followers at 2:31 P.M. on Sep-
Kim said, ‘Can you step aside so Kourtney before the robbery. Upon arrival, the guests tember 28. “This guy is always in my shot,”
can take a picture?’ ” recalled Petroff. “She had to squeeze past Kardashian West’s black she wrote of Duvier, her bodyguard, who was
basically documents everything.” Mercedes van. “Everybody was telling each behind her while she showed off thigh-high
Around midnight, when the black Mer- other, ‘Do you know there’s a Kardashian leather boots and a trench coat that “de-
cedes van left the party and returned Kim to upstairs?’ ” remembered fashion designer fied gravity” by barely covering her breasts.
the Hôtel de Pourtalès, it was without the usu- Christophe Guillarmé, who attended the par- Of the 15 Instagram photos she posted
al procession of photographers. “We decided ty along with around 80 others. “It was like from Paris, surely the most tantalizing for
not to follow,” says Marc Piasecki. “Because a joke: she’s upstairs while we are partying,” thieves would have been one posted on the
the day was over. Then the nightmare arrived.” Guillarmé added. “There was no bodyguard day after her arrival: a sexy selfie of Kardashi-
at the front door, no bodyguard inside. an West and some of her jewelry—diamonds
There was a girl at the entrance, who in her mouth and a 20-karat-diamond ring on
asked, ‘Are you coming to the party?’ her finger, which Kanye had reportedly pur-
And if you said yes, she let you in.” chased from Lorraine Schwartz Diamonds &
Kim returned around one A.M. Fine Jewelry at Bergdorf Goodman, in New
Five bandits arrived soon after. York, for around $4 million.
Some would say they had tracked Kim signed the post without words—only
their victim by embedding themselves three blue-diamond emojis.
I asked the chief, “Were the thieves fol-
lowing her on social media?”
THE POLICE CHIEF
He’d say only, “She gives information on
Christian Sainte,
social media all the time.”
who is leading the
investigation
Later, others would contend that the rob-
of the robbery. bers were amateurs, lugs who knew nothing
about Kim Kardashian, much less her social-
media presence. But no one disputes their
mode of transportation, which convinced Pa-
risians that they not only knew Paris well but
well enough to avoid traffic, security cameras,
prying eyes, and easily traceable evidence:
they came and departed by bicycle.

‘I
f you ride a bike in Paris, you have
to know Paris,” Frédéric Ploquin
told me, having himself arrived
THE CONCIERGE at our lunch on his bike, which,
Abdulrahman, who as with so many Parisians, is his
was held at gunpoint preferred mode of transportation.
with Kim at the “The Hôtel de Pourtalès is in the center of
Hôtel de Pourtalès. Paris, where there are a lot of CCTV cam-
HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 155
 Spotlight
eras. But on a bike you can ride the small
streets, where there are no cameras.” Best
of all, bicycles are virtually untraceable—no
license plate or registration, most of them A SHARED
looking alike—and are easily hidden or de-
stroyed. Wearing a cap and looking down, REALITY
its rider can traverse the back streets, unde-
tected and unrecognized.
“This is the first occurrence of a bicycle be-
ing used in a major robbery,” said the chief.
Various accounts of what happened next have
raged throughout the international media, but
the most complete versions came from Lon-
don’s Daily Mail, as well as from Le Parisien
and Paris television channel M6, whose report-

M
ers were the first to study the video captured by
a security camera near the No Address Hotel.
At 2:18 A.M. the camera showed three men
riding toward the hotel on bikes and wearing
“fluorescent security bibs,” according to Le
Parisien. Fourteen minutes later, “two more
stealth silhouettes” appear on foot, and a
minute later, a sixth man, making “a gesture
to hide his face under his hood,” appears.

T
he thieves might have come
and gone with the night,
and the story of the robbery
would have been known
only by the police and the
Kardashians until the case
was solved and the robbers caught. But then
ark Wahlberg
came the strangest character thus far, a man
and I have now done three films together: Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon,
who had been held at gunpoint and tied up
with Kim during the robbery. He was the and our third, Patriots Day, out in January, about the community of Boston
hotel’s night receptionist, and he was now an fighting to process the brutality of the marathon bombing. All three nonfiction.
anguished soul. Not because of his own brush Merciless tales of people uniting to face overwhelming odds. Every one starts
with death during the robbery but because he and ends with a deep belief in the value of persistence. We come from very
worried that Kim might think ill of him. different places—Mark from the meanest of the mean streets of the Dorchester
“A few days after the robbery a Web site section of Boston, me from the privileged upper-middle-class suburban com-
reported that Kim had told the police that the forts of Chappaqua, New York. Not much in common, or so it would appear.
concierge was very calm during the robbery,” What was shared, it seems, was a feeling, somewhere back in our most
says Benjamin Dargent, an editor at the formative of stages, that we were both underestimated, misunderstood, and
French magazine Closer, who was the first to as a result we both grew determined to change the narrative.
track down and meet the night receptionist. This is where persistence came in. We had no role models, no fam-
The word “calm” seared. Did it mean ily connections, no industry contacts, and no shortcuts. Somehow our paths
uncaring or, worse, “afraid”? Either way, converged. We recognized the same drive, the same ethic, and the same spir-
the night receptionist was “a bit upset about it. We were instantly certain that we would work well together, that we could
what they wrote,” says Dargent. “He told trust each other, and that we would be stronger as a team.
me that he was calm because he was held at So now we make movies about teams fighting to survive. We are both
ST Y LE D BY A LL A N KE NN EDY; GRO OM IN G BY J O HNN Y VI L L A NU EVA ;

gunpoint, and it was his way to save his life of the mind-set that nonfiction generally beats fiction. We want the contact
and Kim’s life.”
with the men and women who went through it—those families, raw with emo-
He wanted to convey his feelings to Kim.
tion but willing to open up to us and allow us the honor of protecting those
But he had no contact information for her.
epic legacies. Their truth inspires us. Now, with the third step of our trilogy,
So he asked the editor to publish a letter to
Kim on the Closer magazine Web site and he Patriots Day, we get to go back into this epic world of the truth. We have
been welcomed by the men and women of Boston with stories to tell. The po-
F OR DETA I LS , GO TO VF.CO M/ CR ED ITS

texted its contents:

“Dear Kim,” it read. “When you feel the lice, F.B.I., ambulance drivers, firefighters, hospital workers, public servants,
cold steel of a gun at your neck, it’s the mo- and survivors have all let us in and blessed us with the courage and grace
ment when remaining calm can mean the of their experiences, entrusted us with getting it right, with telling their mighty
difference between life and death, both our stories. This, for Mark and me, is where the pressure lies—the promise to do
lives. I hope you are feeling better.” them all proud. To do their children proud. Yes, it’s pressure, but, for us, that
Perhaps fearing retribution from the pressure is our fuel and our challenge to tell their story in a way that will
robbers, the night C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 8 4 make the world recognize true bravery. —PETER BERG
156 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com PH OTO GRA PH BY D A V I D B A I L EDYE C EMB ER 2 016
 Mark Wahlberg
and Peter Berg,
photographed in
London.

WA H L B ERG W EAR S
A S H IRT BY C I T I Z EN S
O F H U M AN I T Y;
WATCH BY PAT EK
P H I L I P P E.
B ERG W EAR S
A S H I RT BY P S BY
PAU L S M I T H .

HO L IDAY 2 01 6 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VANIT Y FAIR 157

 Airbnb Hits Airbnb may be fighting battles around the world—banned in Berlin,
New York—but its billionaire C.E.O. and co-founder, Brian Chesky, is already on
In a yurt in California’s Topanga Canyon, KATRINA BROOKER finds
in a very different direction from most of Silicon

G ROOMI NG BY JU LI E DY; F OR D E TA I LS , G O TO VF. COM/ C RE D I TS

BY THE BOOKINGS
Airbnb co-founder
and C.E.O. Brian Chesky,
with a replica
of an Airbnb rental
Airstream at the
company’s headquarters,
in San Francisco.

HAIR PRODUCTS BY BAXTER;

GROOMING PRODUCTS BY
LAURA MERCIER.

158 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

the Road
under assault in San Francisco, threatened in Barcelona, outlawed in
to the company’s next stage: providing travelers with excursions and adventures.
Chesky launching Airbnb Trips, which will further move his company
Valley: toward experiences only humans can provide

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 P H OTO G R A PH S BY ART STREIBER www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 159
 from the world to focus on a service that he percent.) With Airbnb Trips, you don’t even
believes is the future of his company. Airbnb need a home or a car to make money, just
Trips, officially launched in November, offers your time and talents. Reid Hoffman, who
travelers a series of excursions and adven- helped start PayPal, co-founded LinkedIn,
tures—and pushes Airbnb well past its couch- and is one of Airbnb’s earliest investors,
surfing origins. Chesky had invited me to tag unflinchingly compares the new service to
along as he personally tested an experience the launch of Apple’s iPhone, which made
called “The TV Writer’s Journey.” He and a it relatively easy for even non-engineers to
small team of Airbnb executives had recruit- become app developers. “This is essentially
ed some professional television writers to the same thing,” Hoffman says. “This allows
design a three-day tour that would give trav- people to develop all kinds of experiences no
elers a taste of what it is like to live and work one ever thought of before.”
in L.A. This is sort of the Airbnb version of
the NBC studio tour—offbeat, unpolished, ut while Chesky has been
and probably not for Grandma. (The yurt busy recruiting samurai and
was home to one of the writers; its toilet was hanging out with TV writers,
an outhouse over a compost heap.) It was day his original lodging business
two, and travelers were simulating what hap- is facing fierce vitriol from
pens in a TV writers’ room. lawmakers, community lead-
“I like the idea that there is this alternative ers, and disgruntled consumers. From New
universe,” a young woman in jean shorts said. York to Singapore—even the company’s home-
She’d signed up for the trip on a whim and town, San Francisco—cities are fighting to
ome nights, had no idea who Chesky was—other than that stop Airbnb’s sprawl, claiming it is driving up
Brian Chesky wakes up with his heart he was a big science-fiction fan who watched rents, displacing locals, and contributing to traf-
pounding. It’s a familiar feeling—one that Stranger Things on Netflix and 11.22.63 on fic, noise, and other problems that destroy com-
he’s had since the early days of Airbnb, Hulu. The plot they’d hatched was arguably munities. One city-council member in Aus-
the online lodging company he co-founded wilder than those of the two shows. It in- tin, Texas, says she’s heard concerns that
nearly 10 years ago. Back then, his fears volved a woman using some kind of space- school enrollment could drop in some neigh-
were not unlike those that plague most en- time transporter on her wedding day to enter borhoods as homes convert from family resi-
trepreneurs: he worried about running out a parallel universe where she was a stand-up dences to full-time Airbnb units. Last spring,
of money, building a product no one wanted, comedian—sort of Runaway Bride meets Doc- Berlin banned parts of Airbnb outright, and
his company going bust. There is little dan- tor Strange meets Inside Amy Schumer. local activists launched a “#boycottairbnb”
ger of that now. Airbnb, worth $30 billion, “What are the chances this could get made effort, complete with a spicy ad campaign
operates in every place in the world except into a real TV show?,” Chesky asked in all that reimagined Airbnb’s logo as, among
Iran, Syria, Sudan, Crimea, and North Ko- sincerity. Inside the yurt, for a few hours at other things, a set of testicles being snipped
rea. Roughly 100 million people—including least, he was just another guy on a trip. by a pair of large scissors. “Castrate Gentrifi-
Beyoncé, Kendall Jenner, and Gwyneth Pal- cation,” the caption read. U.S. senator Eliza-
trow—have used the site. And Chesky, at 35 wo years ago Chesky quietly beth Warren, who normally spends her days
years old, is a billionaire and one of the most pulled back from his day-to- battling Wall Street, has called for a regulato-
powerful C.E.O.’s in Silicon Valley. day duties running Airbnb’s ry probe into home-sharing sites.
Still, in the quiet dark hours, when there home-rental business to fo- In late October, New York governor An-
are no e-mails, no meetings, no calls or other cus on building these new drew Cuomo signed a bill that would fine
distractions, the chest tightening returns and excursions. If the service Airbnb hosts violating short-term-rental
wakes him. Only now his anxieties, while takes off, it could be what transforms Airbnb rules. Almost immediately, Airbnb filed a
just as existential, are more open-ended and from a one-trick Web site into a platform (in federal lawsuit against the state. “I was born
philosophical. “If we don’t grow past what Silicon Valley parlance) that eventually will in New York, so I never would’ve imagined
we originally invented, what led to your suc- allow individuals to sell all sorts of services, we would find a path in London, Chicago,
cess leads to your death,” Chesky told me. such as guided tours, musical outings, even Philadelphia, New Orleans, Paris, Am-
It was a bright morning in late September, car rides, which could put Airbnb in compe- sterdam, and Sydney, but not New York,”
and Chesky and I were sitting in a yurt in To- tition with Uber. The first batch of Airbnb Chesky wrote to me in an e-mail shortly after
panga Canyon, west of Los Angeles. There Trips will include lessons from a samurai Cuomo signed the law. “I believe we will find
was no cell-phone service, leaving Chesky master in Japan, training with long-distance a path forward [for Airbnb hosts], though it
uncharacteristically out of touch with Air- runners in Kenya, and surfing with a local may take longer than we had anticipated.”
bnb headquarters, in San Francisco. “It’s a pro in Malibu. Bans and fines are unlikely to stop Air-
Friday. God knows what’s happening right Selling experiences seems to be the logi- bnb’s expansion. It is simply moving too
now,” he said. Already that week, news had cal next step in the service economy’s inexo- fast: in 2013, Airbnb hosts lodged nine mil-
leaked that Google Capital was leading a rable shift to the sharing economy, in which lion guests, a number that could soar to
new round of investment in the site, the city people supplement wages or cobble together nearly half a billion in 2025, according to a
of Barcelona had threatened Airbnb hosts a living by giving rides to strangers or rent- recent report published by investment firm
with new enforcement measures, and Brit- ing out their spare rooms. (This year Airbnb Cowen and Company. Listings range from a
ain’s top property court had ruled that one will book $12.3 billion in rentals. The site $9,700-a-night château in France’s Loire Val-
London woman was breaking the law by takes a 3 percent commission from hosts ley to a $15-a-night futon in an Austin living
renting out her apartment on Airbnb. before fees and taxes; guests pay Airbnb an room—a steal in a city where the average ho-
Chesky had intentionally cut himself off additional service charge of roughly 6 to 12 tel room rate is $135 C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 8 7
160 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
THE BIG PICTURE
Chesky
(bottom, center)
poses in a
conference room
at Airbnb
headquarters.
 With the value of maple syrup at roughly $1,300 a barrel, 26 times more expensive
that controls 72 percent of the world’s supply. Investigating the Federation of Quebec

STICKY B
market for the authentic product, and defending it against Aunt Jemima and Mrs.

PHOTOG R AP H BY YA N NI CK G RA N D MON T/
TH E NE W YOR K T IME S / RE D U X

162 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

than crude oil, it’s time everyone knew about the not-very-shadowy Canadian cartel
Maple Syrup Producers, RICH COHEN discovers that its mission—ensuring a steady

USINESS
Butterworth—has created new perils, including Quebec’s Great Maple Syrup Heist

ON TAP
Sugar-maple trees
at the Sucrerie
de la Montagne,
in Rigaud, Quebec,
yield sap that
will be processed
into syrup.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 163

A
It’s an answer that would bring joy in Quebec—authenticity is
what FPAQ is selling. Canadian maple is real, while all those high-
fructose Jemimas are as phony as the bottle that is the body of Mrs.
Butterworth. In a world covered in plastic and going to hell, there’s
nothing more honest than sap. In Canada, people tell you the trap-
pers got it from the Indians, who got it from their ancestors, who
got it from the gods. It’s the death and rebirth of the forest turned
into wine. If consumers know that, it’s partly because of FPAQ,
which has turned Quebec into a brand.
Have there been side effects to all this success? Has the federa-
tion, with its quotas and its methods of control (quotas must be
enforced), reaped its own sticky harvest?
Start with those high prices. By making syrup production seem
like a good business instead of just an eccentric survivalist hobby, it
has brought a great increase in production, much of it in the U.S. Just
like OPEC, which, with its near monopoly, spurred the search for new
sources. With oil, it’s the deep deposits reached only by fracking. With
mericans are focused on syrup, it’s forests in Vermont, New Hampshire, and especially New
the wrong border. It’s not Mexico, with all this dubious talk about York State, which, Canadians tell you with a shudder, has three times
building a wall, but Canada, with its Mounties, and comedy writ- more maple trees than all of Quebec’s maple farms combined. The
ers who move among us, betrayed only by the occasional mispro- French province produces 72 percent of the world supply, but if
nunciation of “about,” that threatens our way of life. If this nation the Americans ever make the push to self-sufficiency, French Canada
was not founded on the free flow of syrup, it should have been. is cooked. In 2015, Quebec’s minister of agriculture, Pierre Paradis,
And now, as anyone with kids can tell you, the price of syrup has commissioned a report on FPAQ and the industry—just how far could
remained stable and high; it’s more expensive than oil. Is it Arab that 72 percent fall? While giving proper credit to the cartel, the report,
sheikhs who did this, Russian oligarchs? No. It’s Canadians, who, noting, among other things, how readily journalists like me compare
organized into an ironfisted cartel, have established a stranglehold FPAQ to OPEC, called on the federation to loosen its rules, scrap its quo-
on that honey-flavored elixir. tas, and let a thousand flowers bloom. “It’s a mafia,” a producer who
In short, FPAQ—the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Produc- has defied the cartel recently said to The Globe and Mail of FPAQ. “Last
ers—is OPEC. Formed in 1966, the federation was tasked with taking year, they tried to seize my syrup. I had to [move the product into New
a business in which few could make a decent living—the price went Brunswick] at night. This year, they hit me with an injunction.”
north to south with the quality of the yield, which went north to south And what about that most troubling of unintended consequences:
with the quality of the spring—and turning it into a respectable trade. the black market, the subterranean world of contraband sap where
This was accomplished in the classic way: quotas, rules. You control wildcatters move unmarked barrels through Elmore Leonard country,
supply, you control price. You limit supply, you raise price. Because the seedy history behind your stack of morning hotcakes or pan-
Quebec makes 72 percent of the world’s maple syrup, it’s been able to cakes, or, as they insisted everywhere I went, crêpes. Especially inter-
set the price. As of this writing, the commodity is valued at just over esting are the criminals, pirates of syrup nation, who, attracted by the
$1,300 a barrel, 26 times more expensive than crude. (If Jed Clam- peak prices, skulk through warehouses, waiting for the watchman to
pett shot up a sugar maple instead of a mountain holler, he’d have doze off over his Hockey News as the getaway truck idles.
been a whole different order of rich.) I discovered this for myself on

A
a recent trip to the supermarket. My son returned from the shelves Sweet Nothings
with a small artisanal jug of Canadian syrup—“genuine maple” has unt Jemima is a phony, a fake. In fact, there really was
prospered in concert with the boom in organic food—which cost … no Aunt Jemima. The original character was borrowed
$15! It shocked me. I stormed up the aisle to see for myself, where I from a minstrel show that was touring the South at the
discovered Aunt Jemima, companion of so many Sunday mornings, end of the 19th century. The original Jemima was a
in her babushka, costing just four bucks for a family-size jug. When white man in black face, possibly a German. The char-
I asked the cashier to explain this discrepancy, she pointed rudely at acter was re-purposed in the 1890s by an American
Aunt Jemima and said, “ ’Cause that’s not real syrup.” mill owner who sold pancake mix with an Aunt Jemima who, though
“Then what is it?” smiling beneath her headscarf, looks nothing like the Aunt Jemima
“I don’t know. High-fructose corn syrup? Food coloring? Goo?” of my childhood. In 1893, marketers hired C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 8 1
J ACKE T A ND CA P BY F I L SO N. PH OTOG RA P H, TOP, BY L E YL A ND CE CCO

NEARLY 540,000 GALLONS

OF SYRUP WAS STOLEN—12.5 PERCENT
OF THE RESERVE—WITH A
STREET VALUE OF $13.4 MILLION.
164 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
 CARTEL LAND
Above, barrels of
maple syrup at the
Global Strategic Maple
Syrup Reserve, in
Laurierville, Quebec.
Below, entrepreneur
and syrup producer
François Roberge
at his sugar shack, in
Lac-Brome, Quebec,
photographed
by Jonathan Becker.

HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 165

 Chris Elliott, Jennifer
F OR C R E D ITS , S E E PAG E 18 9

Robertson, Eugene Levy,

Catherine O’Hara,
Dan Levy, Annie Murphy,
Emily Hampshire, Sarah
Levy, Dustin Milligan,
and Tim Rozon,
photographed in Toronto.

166 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

 Spotlight

GRAND MOTEL

I
t was never quite enough, those in- is why the return of Schitt’s Creek is so wel- son, David, played by Levy’s real-life son and
termittent doses of Catherine O’Hara come. The series, in which O’Hara and Levy the show’s co-creator, Dan Levy.
and Eugene Levy administered every star as a fallen, formerly wealthy couple The younger Levy says that in the new sea-
few years via Christopher Guest’s reduced to living with their adult children in son the focus is now on the self-centered char-
ensemble movies. Not after SCTV, where the show’s titular backwater town, kicks off acters’ figuring out how to function as a loving
the two Canadian actors made their names its third U.S. season on January 11, on the family. Not that the sitcom is about to morph
in the late 70s and early 80s, acclimating cable channel Pop TV. into The Waltons. “We’re very slow learners in
their fans to regular hits of their fearless, For Levy, who says he was “scared at SCTV the Rose family,” he says. “No one’s learning
nuanced, out-there comic brilliance. Which to play anyone who remotely resembled that much.” — DAVID K A MP
me,” Schitt’s Creek marks a departure, in that
it’s “about the straightest thing I’ve ever done
in my career.” Dapper in bespoke suits from the
old life of his character, Johnny Rose, he cedes
the terrain of abject loopiness to O’Hara’s de-
lusional Moira and to the Roses’ offspring: their
narcissistic daughter, Alexis, played by Annie
Murphy, and their pansexual fashion-victim

P H OTOG R APH BY ANDREW ECCLES www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 167

 YOU BETTER
WATCH OUT
Ralphie, just before
Santa pushes him
down the exit slide.

The cinematic holiday once ruled by Irving Berlin, Charles Dickens, and
Story. Looking back at the movie’s ingredients—the comic genius of
a cast that seemed like any American family—SAM KASHNER describes how

Santa Gets
168 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017
FRO M T HE E VE R E TT COLLE C TIO N

It’s a Wonderful Life now belongs to a little 1983 sleeper, A Christmas

radio star Jean Shepherd, the low-budget magic of director Bob Clark,
a fluke project punctured the cozy sentimentality of Hollywood tradition

His Claws
HOLIDAY 2 016 /2 017 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 169
 I t’s not A
Wonderful Life anymore. It hasn’t been since
1983, the year of A Christmas Story—the now
classic film about nine-year-old Ralphie Par-
ker’s thwarted desire for a forbidden Christ-
mas present: an official Red Ryder Carbine
Action 200-Shot Range Model air rifle with
a compass in the stock and this thing that
tells time. A sleeper of a movie, A Christmas
Story forever changed the cozy, sentimental
holiday-movie genre.
When we think of pre-1983 holiday mov-
ies, we think of plum puddings like Charles
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (the best of sev-
eral incarnations being the 1951 version, in
which Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge);
the 1942 Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn
Years later, when he
was moving his acting
career in another direc-
tion, Peter Billingsley,
who played Ralphie,
took Robert McKee’s
famed three-day crash
course in screenplay
writing. McKee—aptly
portrayed by Brian
Cox in the satirical
Charlie Kaufman film
Adaptation—is some-
thing of a gruff guru in the art of storytell-
ing. Billingsley recalled how McKee told his
screenwriting hopefuls, “Don’t tell me
you’re going to create a new genre for your
explained that it
was a ritual every
Christmas Eve for
this family to come
A HAIRY LITTLE
CHRISTMAS
Above, the Higbees
holiday procession.
Opposite, the
Parker family on
Christmas Eve.

and its 1954 cousin, White Christmas; the movie. Everyone’s always saying there’s a to the restaurant,
rather dark 1946 Frank Capra drama star- new genre. There is no new genre. There sit around a table,
ring James Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life; are comedies, dramas, and tragedy.” But and recite dialogue from every scene. “That’s
Miracle on 34th Street the following year— then Billingsley was surprised to hear McKee when it began to sink in,” said Clark. “This
saccharine despite the bracing skepticism of say, “There’s only one movie that I can ar- low-budget fluke of a movie” had become a
an eight-year-old Natalie Wood, who refuses gue has been a new genre in the modern quintessential Christmas tradition.

C
to believe in Edmund Gwenn as Kris Krin- era, and that movie’s a little movie—I don’t
gle. (She’s wrong, we’re told.) know if you guys have heard of it—called A lark auditioned 8,000 kids for
So when A Christmas Story premiered, Christmas Story.” the role of Ralphie, beginning
in 1983, we suddenly had a new kind of Though the movie did respectable box of- with the 12-year-old, bespec-
L A RGE PH OTO GRA P H © MGM /UA E NT E RTA I NME N T/

holiday movie, one that acknowledged—even fice, it disappeared in just a few weeks. But tacled Billingsley, who was
PHOTO FE ST. IN SE T CO U RTE SY OF RE UB E N F RE E D

relished—the “unbridled avarice,” the com- over the years its popularity grew, and 14 already one of the most suc-
mercialism, the disappointments, the hurt years after its release, it had become such a cessful child actors in com-
feelings, and all-around bad luck that, in re- staple of holiday fare that TNT began running mercials in New York in the 1970s (appearing
ality, often define the merry season. In other it in a continuous loop at Christmastime. as “Messy Marvin” for Hershey’s, selling hot
words, what real Christmas was like in real The movie’s director, Bob Clark, who died dogs with New York Yankees manager Billy
families. It brought a bracing blast of satire in a 2007 car accident, once recalled being Martin, and promoting video games with
and realism, wrapped up in a hilarious, pitch- in a restaurant in New Hampshire when he basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
perfect tale of a middle-class family negotiat- overheard a family at a nearby table speaking Clark shied away at first, thinking Peter per-
ing the perils of Christmas, recalled through what sounded like dialogue from A Christmas fect for the role but too obvious a choice.
the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. Story. Turned out, it was. The maître d’ Gail Billingsley, Peter’s mother, told V.F.,

“My guess is either nobody will go to see it, or mill

170 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
ions of people will go to see it,” Roger Ebert said.
171
PHOTOG RA PH S COURTE SY O F CHR ISTI A N D UP ON T ( F L ICK ) ,
BY FR E D W. M C DA R R AH/ G E TT Y I MAGE S (S HE PHE R D ) ,
BE TT Y P E TR E LL A (R A N DY ) , © MGM/ UA E N TE RTA IN ME N T
COM PA NY / PHOTOF E ST ( A L L OTH E RS )
 LET IT SNOW
Clockwise from top left: screenwriter
Jean Shepherd; Flick’s triple-dog-
dare; Randy in a bind; director Bob Clark
with Peter Billingsley and Ian Petrella;
the bully Scut Farkus; the Parkers after
Ralphie drops the f-bomb.

www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 173

 Ralphie’s rapture as his hand glides up the lamp’s

174 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com H O L IDAY 2016 /2 017

 prosthetic fishnet leg—that reaction was totally real.
“They [auditioned actors] in California, and but loving dad who forever does battle with I figure grew up in a family of four or five
in a couple of other countries,” before they the family’s smoke-belching furnace and sisters and married young,” Shepherd said.
went back to their first choice. Clark later with his neighbors’, the Bumpuses’, passel “She digs the Old Man, but also knows he’s
admitted to Gail, “He walked in, and he had of hound dogs. Darren McGavin—remem- as dangerous as a snake.” Melinda Dillon
us from the beginning.” bered for his title role in the 1970s television was cast on the basis of her role as the mom

P
horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Close En-
eter, who grew up in New and in supporting roles in films and televi- counters of the Third Kind. She had begun
York City, is related to the sion—brings just the right amount of gruff her career as a coat-check girl at Second
bootlegger turned restau- tenderness to the role. Screenwriter Jean City, the improv-comedy theater in Chicago,
rateur Sherman Billingsley, Shepherd felt that McGavin got the charac- where she would soon begin performing. At
founder and owner of the ter exactly right. “I saw the Old Man … as 23, she played the mousy wife, Honey, in
L ARGE PHOTO GRAPH © MGM/ UA E N TE RTAI N ME N T/

Stork Club, a centerpiece of a guy who grew up hustling pool games at the original Broadway production of Ed-
PHOTO FEST. I NSE T CO URTE SY O F R E UB E N F R E E D

café society from speakeasy days through the age of 12 and was supporting himself ward Albee’s searing drama Who’s Afraid
the 1960s. But that glory didn’t extend to at the age of 14.” Abandoned by his parents of Virginia Woolf? and was nominated for a
his descendants. Until Peter was nine, his when he was a teen, McGavin had a hard- Tony. She was also nominated twice for an
family of six shared a one-bedroom apart- scrabble life that made him a believable, Academy Award—first for Spielberg’s Close
ment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hard-boiled dad, trying to provide a good Encounters of the Third Kind and again for
before moving to California and eventually Christmas for his family against the indigni- Absence of Malice, opposite Paul Newman.
settling in Phoenix. ties of 1940, small-town American life at In A Christmas Story, Dillon has a sweet-
Ralphie’s father, Frank Parker—always the dawn of rampant consumerism. ly comedic presence that threatens to dis-
referred to as “the Old Man” in the movie— Irascible as the Old Man can be, he is solve into creative anarchy. She’s a vigilant
is a perennially grumpy, obscenity-spewing, in fact the Grinch Who Saves Christmas mom but is still a child at heart, apparent
for Ralphie, by—spoiler when she encourages her youngest, Randy
alert!—getting him his cher- (Ian Petrella), a fussy eater, to pretend he’s
ished but heretofore denied a pig at a trough. Randy really gets into it,
Red Ryder BB gun. (Every- snorting and plunging his face into his meat
one else—including the loaf and mashed potatoes, while he and his
department-store Santa— mom dissolve into fits of laughter.
just tells Ralphie, “You’ll “In a way,” Shepherd said, “the movie
shoot your eye out!”) Jack is about these people, not Christmas or
Nicholson was considered Santa Claus.”
for the role, though it’s hard

T
to imagine anyone else but Storybook Christmas
McGavin in the part. “I he movie was based on a
love [Jack],” Clark later handful of monologues by
said, “but thank God he the comedic radio personal-
didn’t [end up with the ity and writer Jean Shepherd.
part] because Darren (That’s Shepherd’s folksy,
is the Old Man.” Even streetwise voice you hear in
better, McGavin, who the voice-over narration as Ralphie’s adult
died in 2006 at the age self, telling the tale.) Shepherd’s radio career
of 83, was good with spanned four decades, ending up at WOR, in
kids. Billingsley recalled New York City. His semi-autobiographical sto-
he “didn’t feel conde- ries were performed without scripts and were
scended to. A lot of characterized by colorful titles, such as “Lud-
people don’t like child low Kissel and the Dago Bomb That Struck
actors,” but McGavin Back” and “A Fistful of Fig Newtons.”
wasn’t one of them. The screenplay adaptation was written
“Ralphie’s mother by Shepherd himself, along with Bob Clark
is the kind of woman and Shepherd’s third wife, Leigh Brown. It
all started when Clark was in Miami driving to
pick up his date, and he heard Shepherd on
the radio telling the story of Flick, a boy who
A LEG UP
Production designer
is triple-dog-dared into putting his tongue on
Reuben Freed’s a metal pole in the dead of winter, instantly
plan for the leg lamp. freezing it to the pole. Clark had never heard
Opposite, Ralphie and a story told quite like that. He was so en-
his mom inspect thralled he was 45 minutes late for his date,
the Old Man’s prize.
just circling the block to hear the rest of the
story. He resolved right then, “I will do a
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 175
 movie of this man’s work.” It took 12 years.
“There’s a sense of nostalgia built into A
Christmas Story,” the actor and director Jon
Favreau says. He credits A Christmas Story
with being one of the main inspirations for
his movie Elf (in which Billingsley had a
small role—as an elf). Favreau recalled how
he “knew Jean Shepherd’s voice from the ra-
dio. My dad used to listen to his monologues
on AM radio. I remember hearing it in the
car. I think that the combination of the narra-
tion, the movie’s classic look, and, of course,
Billingsley’s wonderful open face and his per-
formance really drew you into the movie and
made you feel connected emotionally.”
Fans of Shepherd’s radio monologues
include a roster of some of America’s most
original performers and writers: Jules Feiffer,
Tom Wolfe, Jerry Seinfeld, Penn Jillette (of
Penn and Teller), Donald Fagen (of Steely
Dan). Seinfeld especially. “He really formed
my entire comedic sensibility. I learned how
to do comedy from Jean Shepherd,” he
once said. Hugh Hefner was also a big fan;
he published 23 of Shepherd’s short stories
in Playboy, and he would play A Christmas
Story late at night at the mansion. He loved
it, and the Playboy Bunnies loved it!

S
hepherd’s stories were first im-
provised on his radio program
in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s.
The children’s-book author and
Playboy cartoonist Shel Silver-
stein and Shepherd’s second
wife, actress Lois Nettleton, encouraged
him to write the stories down. In 1966, they
were collected and published in In God We
Trust: All Others Pay Cash, which became a
best-seller. Wildly popular, Shepherd per-
formed at Town Hall in New York City in
a sold-out performance, and had three solo
shows at Carnegie Hall.
Shepherd hated the idea that people
thought his work was nostalgic. He described
it as “anti-sentimental, as a matter of fact. If
you really read it, you realize it’s a put-down
of what most people think it stands for—it’s
anti-nostalgic writing.” Shepherd’s biographer
Eugene Bergmann points out that the line in
the film that best describes Shepherd’s atti-
tude toward life is when they’re getting ready
for Christmas dinner and the Old Man is
sitting in the living room reading the funny
papers. “The viewer can see the Bumpuses’
hounds starting to trot past him,
but he doesn’t see them, because
COURTE SY OF CHR ISTI A N D UP ON T

the paper is blocking his view.

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
And, of course, we know what’s This Cleveland
going to happen—the hounds house, which was
are going to get hold of that used for the movie,
Christmas turkey.” So Shepherd is now a major
tourist attraction.
says, in his voice-over narration,
“Ah, life is like that. Sometimes
176 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 177
Ralphie imagines himself routing Black Bart’s outlaw
 at the height of (the bully “with the yellow eyes”), they are in would actually stick to the pole. It was quite
our revelries, when fact sloshing through foam as if from a wash- a hit with the boys: they all took turns stick-
SON AND A GUN
Ralphie seeks our joy is at its ing machine that’s lost its mind. ing their tongue on the airhole. At one point,
justice with his zenith, when all is Another brainstorm of Clark’s was to everyone left Schwartz standing there stuck
Red Ryder Carbine most right with the cut the floors out of the set so the camera to the pole as they scattered for lunch, “just
Action 200- world, the most un- would be at Peter’s height, at four feet two like in the movie when they leave him there,
Shot Range Model
air rifle.
thinkable disasters inches, so that the perspective is not that of helpless, as the morning bell rings at Warren
descend upon us.” the adults looking down on the child actors G. Harding School.”
Even the depic- but Ralphie’s point of view, looking up, try- In the fantasy scene in which Ralphie imag-
tion of Santa Claus ing to make sense out of the frustrating and ines himself routing Black Bart’s outlaw gang
himself is anti-nostalgic. He just wants to unfathomable adult world. with his Red Ryder BB gun (while dressed
hang up his suit and go home. And how The set was mostly harmonious, but there in a rhinestone shirt and magnificently furry
does he get rid of Ralphie, after Ralphie fi- was one particular source of friction: Clark chaps, a cross between Elvis’s jumpsuit and
nally gets to the front of the Santa line but and Shepherd didn’t get along. Shepherd an alpaca), Ralphie spits tobacco juice a cou-
is too overwhelmed to remember what he was just too protective of his material, look- ple of times. Actually, it really was tobacco
wants? Santa’s elf pushes him down the exit ing over Clark’s shoulder and making sugges- juice. The propman gave Billingsley some Red
slide. But Ralphie turns, desperately climbs tions. When the director’s back was turned, Man chaw, and within minutes the 12-year-old
back up, suddenly remembering to ask for he would come up to one of the actors with actor started sweating. “We shut down for an
the Red Ryder BB gun. That’s when Santa’s his own ideas of how the character should be hour or so,” Billingsley recalls, “when I just
black boot pushes Ralphie in the face, right played. The director would call “Cut,” and as had to lie down on the couch.” For the rest of
back down the slide. soon as he left the set, Shepherd would lean the scene, they gave him ground-up raisins to
in and say to Billingsley, “Ralphie’s really like chew on. “This was long before they knew what

I
Tinseltown this.” Bob would come roaring back and say, to do with kid actors.”
t took Bob Clark’s success as the “Jean, get away from the actors!” As for Ralphie’s pink bunny suit, sent by
director of the high-grossing gross- Clark had storyboarded every shot in the his clueless aunt, who was still laboring un-
out movie Porky’s in 1982—which movie on index cards, down to the small- der the misconception that Ralphie was four
ushered in an era of raunchy teen- est detail. He had to quickly countermand years old, and a girl—“That was rough,” Bil-
sex comedies—before MGM green- Shepherd’s interference—the shoot couldn’t lingsley reminisced on the 20th-anniversary
lighted A Christmas Story. That’s afford two directors. Finally, Clark had to DVD. “It was quite uncomfortable putting
not surprising, Billingsley has pointed out: “I bar Shepherd from the set. Bergmann re- that on in front of the crew—and it was
think it took so long to get made because the called, “Shepherd was a perfectionist with hot! It was nasty.” Or, as his film father de-
movie, by modern-day standards, is about his own material, but Bob Clark had a bud- scribed it, it was “like a pink nightmare.”
nothing. It’s a family a couple of weeks be- get and a schedule that he had to meet, and (Billingsley still has the rhinestone cowboy
fore Christmas, and the kid wants a BB gun. he already figured out how this all should suit and the pink bunny suit in his posses-
That’s not exactly a pitch in which you’d say, be done, and he couldn’t have Shepherd sion, stored in a vault.)
‘Let me get the president of the studio on constantly interrupting.”

W
the phone!’ ” MGM finally gave Clark $4.4 Shepherd does make a cameo appear- Christmas with the Kids
million to make A Christmas Story. Accord- ance in the movie, Hitchcock-like, as a stern hen the Old Man
ing to a 2013 book on the making of the film older man scolding Ralphie for breaking wins “a major award”
by Caseen Gaines, he was so eager to make into the long line to see Santa at Higbees in a newspaper write-
the movie that he gave up his director’s fee department store. in contest, he’s over
and contributed $150,000 of his own money. Dupont first met Clark as the English the moon to discov-
Once he had his cast assembled, there producer on a Sherlock Holmes mystery, er that it’s a full-size,
were production challenges. First was the Murder by Decree, with Christopher Plum- fishnet-stockinged, and high-heeled woman’s
problem of location. They scouted 20 cities, mer and James Mason, which Clark was leg that has been made into a lamp. “It’s
finally settling on Toronto for the interiors and directing. One of Dupont’s two sons, Phil indescribably beautiful,” the Old Man says.
Cleveland for the exteriors. It was appropri- Dupont—currently an assistant director film- He considers it a work of art, placing it in
ately winter, and cold, in Ohio, but there was ing the FX series Bones—described his father the front window for all his neighbors to see.
no snow that year. Snow had to be hauled and Bob Clark as having had an especially Ralphie is also impressed with the leg lamp,
in from ski resorts hundreds of miles away. collegial working relationship. Dupont was stroking the shapely limb when it’s excavated
René Dupont, a producer along with Clark, involved in every aspect of the production. from its packing crate. His patient, sweet-
even had additional trucks of snow stand- His younger son, Christian Dupont, who faced mom is alarmed.
ing by (that’s what made him so good at his spent time on the set of A Christmas Story, Reuben Freed was the production designer
F RO M TH E NE A L P E TE RS COL L E CT IO N

job—anticipating the unanticipated). When remembers his father working on the logis- who came up with the design of the leg lamp.
the weather got warmer, they concocted fall- tical problem of how to film the scene of He showed Shepherd some sketches of what
ing snow out of potato flakes, used shredded Flick’s tongue stuck to the metal flagpole. he imagined it might look like. Clark didn’t
vinyl as snow set dressing, and further em- Scott Schwartz, who played Flick, ex- let any of the boys see the lamp until the cam-
ployed firefighter’s foam. In vignettes where plained how the scene was actually created. era was rolling and it was lifted from the huge
Ralphie, his friends, and his little snowsuited They built a plastic pole and drilled a tiny crate marked FRAGILE (or “Frageelee—it must
brother, Randy, are fleeing from Scut Farkus hole in it that sucked in air, so Flick’s tongue be Italian,” says the Old Man). So Ralphie’s

gang while dressed in magnificently furry chaps.

HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 179
 He appeared in some commercials and audi- easy to copy, so samizdat editions began cir-
A Christmas Story tioned for A Christmas Story when he was 10. culating, and the video was prominently dis-
He was surprised to see that more than 100 played in stores during the holidays because
rapture as his hand glides up the lamp’s pros- kids had shown up for the audition, but the it was the most recent Christmas movie avail-
thetic fishnet leg—that reaction was totally real. next day, he got a callback. “I went in to audi- able. “People discovered it and began sharing
The other members of the cast not in the scene tion for Bob Clark,” Anaya recalls, “who asked it, and buying it, and ritually watching it, and
were no less impressed. On the anniversary me to do two ‘crazy’ things. So, first, I acted it just sort of steadily grew.”
DVD, R. D. Robb, who played Ralphie’s bud- like a rock star—I was into Van Halen then. At the same time A Christmas Story was tak-
dy Schwartz, recalled, “I loved the leg lamp. And then for the second crazy thing, I farted ing off, MGM was collapsing. Heavily in debt,
That thing was sexy as hell.” really loud. I got the part.” it sold its film library to Ted Turner in 1986. One
Most of the young actors—Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella was raised in Los Angeles and of those films was A Christmas Story, which is
Scott Schwartz (Flick), R. D. Robb, Zack Ward started acting at the age of three. He was cast to how it turned up on Turner’s SuperStation
(Scut Farkus), and Yano Anaya (Grover Dill)— play Randy, Ralphie’s little brother, when he was cable channel. It was really Turner’s idea to run
stayed in Stouffer’s hotel in downtown Cleve- eight. “Anywhere else in the country,” he says, it as a perennial holiday movie. When Turner
land during the three-month shoot. The city “if you’ve got a hyperactive kid, most places will Broadcasting merged with Time Warner Inc.,
of Cleveland kept its Christmas decorations up put their kids on Ritalin. But in L.A. you take in 1997, Time Warner began running the film
for the duration, to help out the small-budgeted them to a talent agency.” Randy did not have on a continuous loop, from Christmas Eve
movie. As is typical with through Christmas Day,
boys 10 to 14 years old left on TNT (Turner Network
to their own devices, there Television): 24 hours of A
were water balloons thrown Christmas Story—12 show-
out of 14th-story windows, ings over the holiday season
middle-of-the-night deliver- (in 2004 it moved to TBS).
ies of hundreds of dollars’ On the 20th anniver-
worth of food, and wet rolls sary, “Bob, Peter, Scotty,
of toilet tissue thrown from R.D., Ian, and I were in-
windows onto moving buses vited to a screening of A
in the streets below. Or they Christmas Story in Orange
would knock on doors in County to benefit Toys for
the early hours, pretending Tots,” says Zack Ward.
to be housekeeping, then “We go down, there’s a
run away. The Artful Dodg- lineup four people wide,
er of the group was Scott two and a half blocks long,
Schwartz, who at 14 was of over a thousand people,
the oldest and had been on and we’re like, What? And
bigger movie shoots before, the mayor of the town calls
such as The Toy, in which it ‘Honorary Christmas
he co-starred with Richard Story Day.’ I felt like I was
Pryor and Jackie Gleason. in a Dr. Seuss story.
Zack Ward, the redhead- “So little kids come up,
ed actor in the coonskin hat I’m signing autographs,
who played the bully Scut and the mommies and
Farkus, said that indeed he daddies are like, ‘Honey,
does not have, nor has he this is Scut Farkus’—and
ever had, yellow eyes, but the kids are looking around
his red hair gave him that for Scut Farkus because
classic, Irish-bully appear- I’m a grown-ass man, but
ance. “I’ve been working Ian Petrella, Melinda Dillon, and Peter Billingsley I still have the red hair and
since I was a kid, part-time while filming A Christmas Story in Cleveland. the goofy eyes, and they’re
jobs since I was six years looking around, and their
old, shoveling snow, working in stores. I grew a lot of lines—“He was either giggling or falling eyes are slowly gelling on my face. And the par-
up poor,” he recalls. Even though Ward had down”—so, in the audition, “they were just look- ents point to a picture, the kids see the picture
relatively brief screen time in the movie, he ing for personality. I happened to have the right of me going ‘Rawrrr,’ and then they’re looking
made a big impact. “The genius of what Bob personality—very goofball, that’s basically it.” back at me, and I lean in and I go, ‘You grow
did,” he recalls, “was to give me a fantastic, up.’ And they have this little moment where
villainous entrance, to the perfect music, Peter
and the Wolf—but also a perfect exit. I get beat-
en up, blood’s coming down my face, I’m cry-
W hen the film was released, movie critic
Roger Ebert said, “My guess is either
nobody will go to see it, or millions of people
they just kind of numb out. I always get kind
of tingly about it because you’re part of that
moment with somebody. For a second you’re
ing like a little bitch, the hat comes off, and I’m will go to see it.” The movie was a sleeper, getting this epiphany—the Farkus epiphany.”
just a little boy. I don’t know if there’s a better but over the years it grew in popularity. It
metaphor than that.” first appeared on television, on HBO, in 1985, New Year’s Hangover
Even more daunting is Scut’s little sidekick
and toady, Grover Dill, played by Yano Anaya—
around the time it was released on VHS. “It
was the beneficiary of great timing, as video- I n later years, Billingsley ended up staying
away from the conventions and celebrations
B ET T Y P ET RE L L A

a diminutive toughie with a gangster’s sneer. “I cassettes were becoming popular, so people of A Christmas Story. “I don’t do the conven-
started when I was about five when my mother would start [watching] it on VHS around tions,” Billingsley says, “because I was looking
got me training [as an actor],” Anaya told V.F. Christmas,” says Billingsley. VHS tapes were forward in my life, pursuing new things. The
180 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
other way is you run from it. I never understood
that, especially something that brings a lot of Last Call, 2016 (See page 134)
people a lot of joy. And by the way, it’s not
going anywhere, so you better get comfortable
12
with it. You can’t remove it from the culture.” 1 2 3 6 8
5 9
Just as A Christmas Story was beginning its 4 10 14
13
perennial life on television, Shepherd’s influence 7
11
began to recede. Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan, 16 18
17
one of Shepherd’s night-owl fans who was trans- 15
20 26 28
fixed by Shepherd’s “modernist knowingness,”
19 21 23
noticed “a strain of grandiosity creeping into 24 25
27
Shepherd’s routines… He didn’t drink himself 22
29
to death like his pal Jack Kerouac, or OD like
32 34
Lenny Bruce,” Fagen wrote, “but he gradu- 30 31 36
33
ally succumbed to that very real disease of self-
loathing and its accompanying defenses.” Shep- 35

herd retired to Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf

Coast, and passed away in 1999, two years after
Turner Broadcasting began its 24-hour Christ-

KEY
mas marathon showing of his movie. (1) Melania Trump, (2) Ivanka Trump, (3) Michael Strahan, (4) Kelly Ripa, (5) Huma Abedin, (6) Alex
But long before that, Shepherd had begun Rodriguez, (7) Angelina Jolie, (8) Ryan Lochte, (9) Bill Clinton, (10) Loretta Lynch, (11) Colin Kaepernick, (12)
dismantling his own legacy, going as far as to Heather Bresch, (13) Hillary Clinton, (14) Matt Lauer, (15) Ghazala Khan, (16) Khizr Khan, (17) Gretchen Carlson, (18) Roger
Ailes, (19) Lin-Manuel Miranda, (20) Rupert Murdoch, (21) Jerry Hall, (22) Anthony Weiner, (23) Beyoncé, (24) Martin
renounce his career on the radio—his count- Shkreli, (25) Elizabeth Holmes, (26) Harold Bornstein, (27) John Stumpf, (28) Sean Hannity, (29) Vladimir Putin, (30) Donald
less hours spinning tales deep into the night—as Trump, (31) Mary Berry, (32) Paul Hollywood, (33) Tom Hanks, (34) Katie Ledecky, (35) Ken Bone, and (36) Boris Johnson.
“just another gig,” a mere stepping-stone to tele-
vision and the movies. Shepherd never realized household, there’s very much a sibling battle, ie’s target on Christmas morning an old metal
the movie had changed the holiday-feel-good there’s a mother trying to hold things together sign, partially obscured, that says, GOLDEN AGE.
genre forever. Five years after A Christmas Story and hold her place, there’s probably financial “It’s the GOLDEN AGE sign that ricochets that
came Scrooged, Mitch Glazer and Michael trouble, the father’s do-it-yourself aspect of the BB back at him and [knocks off] his glasses and
O’Donoghue’s marvelous, modern—if not household: nothing is sourced out—he’s go- almost shoots his eye out,” Bergmann explains.
postmodern—takedown of Charles Dickens’s ing to handle it! Yet through all that, there’s a “Talk about irony. You only see that sign, and it’s
A Christmas Carol. And in 2003, Will Ferrell, genuine sense of love and protection within the partly covered, but I’ve seen uncovered versions
fresh from the North Pole, would wander into house, and yet the words ‘I love you’ are never of it—somebody was selling one on eBay.”
the Lincoln Tunnel in Elf, the same year that uttered in the movie. Still [one of the last shots] But even if our golden age is rusty and ob-
Billy Bob Thornton would take the black-booted, is just that simple gesture touching the mother scured and being sold on eBay, A Christmas
disgruntled, department-store Santa of A Christ- for the first time in the movie. And in that mo- Story nonetheless reflects a golden age. Zack
mas Story and blow it up like a Macy’s Thanks- ment it says all you need to know about that Ward sums it up: “I’ve seen five-year-old kids
giving Day Parade balloon in Bad Santa. relationship … it tells you how that guy loves squat down in front of the TV and not talk
So A Christmas Story—despite Shepherd’s her, he’s there for her, and that’s it.” while they’re watching it. There’s no song from
disclaimers—has become our cozy, sentimental Billingsley also emphasizes that the one Frozen, there’s no dancing, no talking reindeer
holiday movie. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” person who comes through with the Red or snowman. It’s kids, in a time when that five-
says Billingsley. “I don’t know if it was the first, Ryder BB gun is the father, the one person year-old doesn’t care if it’s a little white boy or
but it certainly was one of the best embodi- Ralphie never asked. The Old Man just knew girl, little black boy or girl, Hispanic, Asian, Jew-
ments of a real family. There’s tension, there’s instinctively what his son wanted. ish—it doesn’t matter: they don’t care. They’re
some fear of the father, there’s anxiety in the Bergmann noticed that Clark uses as Ralph- watching it because that’s their family.” 

Sticky Business through Aunt Jemimas, printing up frankly case of Butterworth, Jemima, who knows
offensive catchphrases such as “Let ol’ Aun- what. Jemima stands for everything Canadi-
tie sing in yo’ kitchen.” The Aunt Jemima on ans distrust about the planet and the syrup
the label today is a composite, a dream of much of it consumes.
antebellum domesticity, the bosomy warmth It’s one of the things FPAQ was organ-
of Sunday in Dixieland, where Jim calls Huck ized to battle. Phony syrup and its lies, fake
“honey” as they float down the big river. backstories cooked up for Aunt Jemima and
Why does that trademark still exist? Probably her pal, Mrs. Butterworth. Caroline Cyr,
because no group has yet turned its attention a spokesperson for the federation—perfect
to it: #jemimasoracist. Enjoy your view from name for a syrup lady—seemed especially
the Stop & Shop shelf, Aunt Jemima, your irritated by varieties of what is essentially
days are numbered. high-fructose corn syrup, products that of-
Which is what I was thinking about as I ten decorate their labels with maple trees
C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 6 4 Nancy Green, drove across Canada, en route to perhaps and log cabins, implying a connection to the
who’d been a slave in Kentucky, to play the holiest place in syrup. America has its forest that simply does not exist. FPAQ fights
Aunt Jemima, which she did till her death, in Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In case of with advertising and fancy recipes—Crustless
1923. By the 1930s, General Mills, which had embargo, nukes, Mad Max. Canada has a Vegetable Quiche with Maple Syrup, Crêpes
bought the company, had begun to churn Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. In with Kale and Maple Syrup, Maple-Almond
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 181
 and sealed in a barrel, forklifted and stacked. could be in Thunder Bay by now! In most
Sticky Business Each barrel carries a label with a grade (Ex- cases, when a boring, bureaucratic job turns
tra Light, Light, Medium, Amber, Dark) and interesting, there’s trouble.
Truffles—but mostly by controlling the quality percentage. When maple water exits a maple Inspectors called FPAQ HQ and sounded
and quantity of the product. tree, it’s 2 to 4 percent sugar. As it’s boiled, the alarm. Just like that, the facility was
Hence the Reserve. the sugar concentrates. To be syrup, it must swarming with cops. It was a great mystery.
be 66 percent sugar. Below that, it’s not sta- There were no security cameras. Who would
Barrel In ble. Above 69 percent, it turns into something steal syrup? And, even if some sick bastard

H ere’s how it works: there are 13,500 maple-

syrup producers in Quebec. Each is
permitted to send a fixed amount to FPAQ for
else. Butter. Taffy. Candy. There were two or
three guys cruising around on forklifts, in hair-
nets. “We’re all waiting for the spring,” Cyr
wanted to, what would he carry it away in?
How far could he get?
The investigation was headed by the Sûreté
sale that year, a quota that was established in told me, “when this place will be filled with du Québec police, which was soon joined by
2004, even as U.S. production has exploded barrels.” Being in syrup is like being a tax ac- the Royal Mounties and U.S. Customs. They
(up 27 percent from 2015). Members of the countant. Three or four weeks of intensity fol- promised to spare no expense. These heartless
federation—Quebec’s bulk producers are lowed by months of waiting and wondering. criminals would be brought to justice, and the
required to join—give their harvest over to I asked Cyr if there’d ever been a spill. She syrup, described as “hot,” would be recov-
FPAQ, which inspects, tastes, and grades the looked at me like I was a fool. I told her about ered. About 300 people were questioned, 40
syrup. Some of it is sold immediately; the a molasses spill that had once smothered Bos- search warrants executed. It was not O.J. and
rest is stored in the Reserve. Producers are ton’s North End, a wave that upended trees, the knife. It was not the bearded doctor and
paid only when the syrup is sold, which can drove horses mad, and killed 21. “No,” she one-armed man. But it was special, strange.
mean years. FPAQ keeps $540 for each barrel, said calmly. “We have never had a spill.” There was something stirring about making
a kind of tax that pays for the advertising, the The Reserve is a monument to collective off with all that syrup; it boggled the mind. It felt
testing of the recipes, the upkeep of the Re- planning, to thousands of little guys each less like a crime than a prank, what you might
serve, and so on. In this way, the federation giving up a little freedom in return for secu- do to your brother if you were all-powerful and
steadies supply, filling the coffers in banner rity. Canadians call this a better life. Ameri- he had a lot of syrup. Of course it was seri-
years, satisfying demand in fallow. In this way, cans call it socialism. Austrian economist ous business to FPAQ; nearly 540,000 gallons
the price of syrup is stabilized, benefiting even Friedrich Hayek might call it “the Road of syrup had been stolen—12.5 percent of the
the competitors across the border. to Serfdom.” It’s like all the other roads in Reserve—with a street value of $13.4 million.
The Reserve is in Laurierville, a town in Quebec. Calm and predictable, without a It became known as the Great Maple Syrup
the heart of Quebec. Steeples, snowy roads, single Camaro blasting Bon Jovi, or a sticker Heist and was said to be among the most
hills, old men in berets eating croissants at of a cartoon man flipping you off while pee- fantastic agricultural crimes ever committed,
McDonald’s. It’s reached via spotless high- ing. But it’s had the perverse effect of pool- which, granted, is an odd subset. Everyone
ways where no one tailgates or cuts you off ing wealth, of creating just the sort of target figured it was people who’d done it—Martians
or honks in anger. It’s just the polite double Willie Sutton meant when he supposedly don’t love syrup—but no one could figure out
beep in Quebec, a state of play that seems said he robs banks because that’s where the how. “Try to think up the scenario and it’s
connected to how most syrup producers money is. Cyr encouraged me to lift one of impossible,” a friendly hotel waiter told me in
have been content to leave the free market the barrels. I couldn’t budge it. Imagine try- Montreal. “Syrup is heavy. And sticky. How
for the safety of a cartel. It’s a better life, ing to steal one of those barrels—now imag- do you hide it? Who do you get to smuggle it?
with less road rage, but also not as colorful, ine trying to steal 10,000. Where can you sell it? It’s like stealing the salt
nor as interesting, and forget about the wind- out of the sea.”
fall and resulting spree. Inside Job It was most likely an inside job. Not a
Caroline Cyr met me at the back door of
the Reserve and took me on a tour. As I said,
it’s the holy of holies, where oceans of syrup,
I t was the Lufthansa heist of the syrup
world. In the summer of 2012, on one of
those July days when the first hint of autumn
member of FPAQ—though rogue syrup pro-
ducers have their theories—nor a manufac-
turer, but a tenant who happened to be rent-
the accumulated wealth of Canadian forests, cools the northern forest, Michel Gauvreau ing space in the same facility. That would
hibernates, sometimes for months, sometimes began his precarious climb up the barrels in mean access: keys, ID card, reason to be
for years. I had a clear mental picture of the St.-Louis-de-Blandford, a town outside Lauri- there. FPAQ supplied the motive. The value
Reserve: huge vats, surface crusted and cov- erville, where part of the Reserve was stored of the commodity, the tight control of sup-
ered with flies; tanks reached by tottering zig- in a rented warehouse. Once a year, FPAQ ply, the resulting black market. (In the post-
gurats; visitors in perpetual danger of falling takes an inventory of the barrels. Gauvreau apocalyptic world, as Mad Max runs the
in and doing the slowest, stickiest, sweetest was near the top of the stack when one of the gauntlet for petrol, Canucks will be fighting
dead man’s float of all time. In fact, the Re- barrels teetered, then nearly gave way. “He al- over those last precious drops of genuine
serve, which might hold 7.5 million gallons on most fell,” Cyr said, pausing to let the picture maple.) Several conspirators were pursued,
a typical day, is a warehouse filled with bar- form. A small man, astride a tower of syrup, including alleged ringleaders Avik Caron
rels, white drums stacked from floor to ceil- realizing, suddenly, there’s nothing beneath and Richard Vallières. Working with a hand-
ing, nearly 20 feet high. There was a Charles his feet. Normally, weighing more than 600 ful of others, some with knowledge of the
Sheeler–like quality to the place, an industrial pounds when filled, the barrels are sturdy, so trade, they apparently went after the bounty
awesomeness, the barrels in endless rows, the something was clearly amiss. When Gauvreau like Mickey in the Night Kitchen, dreaming
implied weight of them, persnickety and precise knocked on the barrel, it tolled like a gong. their dream between midnight and dawn,
in a way that seems especially Canadian. It’s When he unscrewed the cap, he discovered it when the world is half realized, insubstan-
almost like the life we know, but not quite. empty. At first, it seemed like this might have tial. According to the prosecutor, the gang
It’s so close, yet so different. A treasure trove, been a glitch, a mistake, but soon more punk would truck barrels out of the Reserve to
with inventory, at any given time, worth per- barrels were found—many more. Even barrels a sugar shack where they would siphon the
haps $185 million. The syrup is tested when it that seemed full had been emptied of syrup syrup in the way you siphon gasoline from a
comes in, then sent through a Willie Wonka– and filled with water—a sure sign of thieves semi, feeding it, a cask at a time, into their
esque conveyor system where it’s pasteurized who’d covered their tracks. My God, they own ramshackle barrels and then re-filling
182 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
 the originals with water. As the operation phone while looking out at the desert sand syrup really is oil. It’s not man-made, nor
grew, the masterminds allegedly brought and deep-blue sea; gleaming storage tanks; invented. It’s the land. The people working
on accomplices and began siphoning the oil tankers stacked to the horizon. I was ex- in the trade are merely its enablers, acting as
syrup directly from barrels in the Reserve. pecting something like that from FPAQ. A middlemen or agents. No one creates syrup.
Nearly 10,000 barrels of syrup were stolen gleaming tower, walls covered with maps, When we sat down, Trépanier spoke about
and trucked to points south and east, where tacks showing the location of each rogue. I oil, telling me the analogy goes only so far. Oil
the market is free. So far, prosecutors have instead found myself in a very non-evil office can be found almost anywhere on the planet,
brought four men to trial. outside Montreal, standing beside Simon he said. Sink a drill, you’ll hit it. But maple
The case was worked in the textbook way. Trépanier, the tall, sweetly bearded execu- syrup comes only from the red- and sugar-
Chase down every lead, question every wit- tive director of FPAQ, who was pointing out maple forests found in the upper right-hand
ness, identify the ringleaders. In December a window, annotating the landscape as if it corner of North America, just where you’d
2012, the police arrested two alleged ringlead- were a passage in a book. sign your name if this were a test. “That’s
ers and one other suspect. A large portion of The country around Montreal is strange. why FPAQ is necessary,” he told me. “If one
the syrup would ultimately be recovered. It As flat as Illinois, extended sunsets, vistas. country stops producing oil, the slack can be
took serious sleuthing. The story of the heist But here and there mountains rise without picked up by others all over the world. But if
is currently being developed as a movie, star- the prelude of foothills. Flat, flat, mountain, we have a bad season here, you’re going to
ring Jason Segel. I don’t know much about flat, flat. A landscape designed by a person have a year without maple syrup. That’s why
the movie, but my guess is the criminals will with no experience in geology, nor knowledge the Reserve is so important.”
be the protagonists. That’s how Hollywood of tectonic plates. When I asked Trépanier to Trépanier handed me a drink box, the
usually does it. But kind you pack with
it’s the cops who lunch. It was filled
achieved the mirac- with maple water as
ulous. If it’s hard to it comes from the
steal syrup, imagine tree, before it’s been
how much harder it boiled into syrup,
is to recover syrup butter, taffy. Thick
that’s been stolen. and not quite deli-
Like oil, syrup is a cious, it made me
fungible commod- think of the heavy
ity. Once it’s on the water the Nazis
market, it’s just syr- were experimenting
up. Oil is oil. Syrup with in attempts to
is syrup. build an A-bomb.
So how did they I sipped it slowly
do it? as Trépanier told
Gumshoe po- me the history of
licework, retracing maple syrup, where
the footsteps of the it comes from, what
criminals, following it means. In Salem,
their trail through the Wampanoag In-
the black market, dians taught starv-
a trail that led past ing British farmers
LOCK, STOCK, AND BARREL
lonely crossroads Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers communications officer how to bury a fish
and out of Quebec. Caroline Cyr at the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, 2015. head beside corn
The goods were seeds, a natural fer-
scattered: some of it in New Brunswick, which explain, he pointed out each mountain—a tilizer that greatly increased yield. In Quebec,
is as loose with syrup as Deadwood was with chain of peaks, an archipelago, what the Ca- Indians, probably Algonquins, showed French
silver claims; some of it across the border in ribbean might look like if the plug could be trappers how to tap maple trees and collect
Vermont, stashed in the factory of a candy- pulled and the sea drained—and said, “Vol- the heavy water that the Indians used as balm
maker who swore he had no goddamn idea canoes. Extinct volcanoes. They blew up and and elixir. To Canadians, it’s a story of coop-
the syrup was hot. Several of the crooks have died and over time were covered by forests. eration. The Indians had the sap but did not
PH OTO GRA P H BY CHR I STI NN E M USCHI / TH E NE W YO RK T I ME S / RE DU X

pleaded guilty and have paid fines or are serv- It’s where the city gets its name. Montreal realize its potential until the French brought
ing sentences. Vallières has pleaded not guilty comes from Mount Royal.” We stood for a over the cast-iron pots needed to boil it down.
to trafficking and fraud. The other alleged moment, looking. And I got the sense that Each side had half, Trépanier explained. When
ringleader, Avik Caron, has pleaded not guilty we were looking at something more than a they came together, they made something new.
to theft, conspiracy, and fraud. He allegedly panorama, more than the view to the east.
cooked up the conspiracy and is to go on trial Peaks and forests, gullies and ravines, hollers Drinking the Forest and
in January. He could get 14 years, but that’s in and hidden places, the sun rising and falling, the Landscape
Canadian, so I’m not exactly sure.

The Giving Tree

the earth pitched on its axis, winter giving
way to spring, time unraveling from solstice I n some ways, François Roberge comes
across as a man in the midst of a mania.
to solstice. We were looking at the seasons. His wife, charming, exasperated, and game,

I don’t know what the home office of OPEC We were looking at syrup. It’s why it’s holy seems to think so. He spent part of his child-
looks like, but I do know what I think it to French Canadians. They got whipped by hood on a farm in Quebec but left when he
looks like. Glass and steel; massive desks the British and have had to live as a minor- was barely out of school. He got a job in the
occupied by sheikhs in flowing robes, kaf- ity in their country, but they still retain the lower precincts of the garment trade, then
fiyehs, and Vuarnets, quoting prices on the sweet essence of the New World. In this way, worked his way up. He is currently president
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 183
 operations. One cranks out underwear, ted- candies you stop eating only when you feel
Sticky Business dies, sexy garments, swimwear. The other ill. We talked about rogue producers, wild-
cranks out syrup. Fifty-four barrels last year, catters angry at the cartel. He thought a mo-
and C.E.O. of La Vie en Rose, a Canadian boiled off and loaded up and sent into the ment, then said, “But, you know, when you
lingerie company akin to Victoria’s Secret. world. During the season, he’s at his desk in get into the politics, it’s easy to forget what
More than a dozen years ago, at the insis- Montreal from six till noon, then in his car, this is all about.” He led me to the barnlike
tence of his kids, Roberge bought a chalet on barreling down those super-polite highways, main room of his facility, where he stood
one of those odd peaks outside Montreal. As then in the woods, working the lines. beside a gleaming stainless-steel machine
he does not especially like to ski, he began He led me through his forest, which was that cooks maple water down to 66 percent
to cast about for something to do while his as white and pristine as a forest in a story- sugar. It was being tended to by a master,
family was off on the slopes. In this casting book, crossed by a river that triumphed in a Roberge’s mentor. Friendly and warm, the
about, he remembered that, when he was on waterfall. He wore rubber boots and a heavy master explained everything in a language I
the farm, he enjoyed chopping down trees. coat and moved fast, smiling as he talked. don’t understand, but by following his ges-
For Roberge, felling a fat trunk was like hit- He showed me the network of tubes that tures and eyes I could see where the water
ting a perfect tee shot. He bought a stretch of suck sap from the trees like poison from a came in and how it worked its way through
forest near the chalet, then went to work with snakebite. He explained the process, how the the pipes and tanks, exiting into a bowl as
chain saw and ax. There was an operating tubes carry sap to a tank where excess water syrup. Roberge poured me a glass. Golden,
sugar shack already on the grounds, which is drained away, and how what’s left contin- blond. I waited for it to cool, then sipped
was fine with Roberge. His only change was ues on to the sugar shack. We sat in a warm slowly, as if it were 20-year-old scotch. It
to paint the shack pink, a nod to La Vie room in back of the shack, the pasteboard went to my head in the same way, delicious
en Rose, which means seeing life in pink. walls covered with mounted animal heads, and pure. Like drinking the forest, the land-
He quickly became interested in the works. which I contemplated—is that a wolver- scape. Roberge filled several jugs for me,
Then more than just interested. By the time ine?—as he loaded me with the products of the first batch of the season. They were still
I met Roberge, he was heading two major his operation. Taffy. Butter. Little maple-leaf warm when I got back to Montreal. 

Kim Kardashian West the University of Paris, Sorbonne, studying se- him open it with a key from the front desk.
miotics and speech analysis.” Kim heard someone in the suite and asked,
According to what Abdulrahman told “Hello?” But nobody replied. Two of the men
Entertainment Tonight, three men appeared burst in. As she screamed, one of them pulled
at the glass door of the Hôtel de Pourtalès. her out of bed.
Abdulrahman, thinking their all-black garb “He attacked her, holding his gun in her
indicated they were French police, opened face,” Abdulrahman has said. “She was cry-
the door, and quickly there was a pistol at his ing, she was screaming, saying, ‘Don’t kill me, I
back and cuffs on his wrists. have babies, don’t kill me, please, I have babies!
“Where are the security cameras?” one of I’m a mom! Take whatever you want!’ She was
them asked, to which Abdulrahman respond- wearing a white bathrobe and her hair was tied
ed that there weren’t any. “Are you kidding up.” A letter from her attorney Martin Singer
me?” the thief replied, then asked how many to the Huffington Post, obtained by TMZ, said
C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 5 6 receptionist signed rooms were in the hotel, and if any had safes. that both Kim and the concierge “believed they
the letter with a pseudonym: “The Night.” Told there were 11 residences, the robber said, might be killed at any moment.”
The letter went around the world, but with “Oh, that is nice—we will do them all.” Now the night receptionist became hos-
no apparent response from Kim. So “The “They were not professional at all,” Abdul- tage, negotiator, and translator. “I tried to
Night,” a 39-year-old man from northern Alge- rahman added of the thieves, whose ages he calm her because the guy was crazy,” Abdul-
ria, who would later say he had “lived through estimated as between 40 and 50. “They were rahman told Entertainment Tonight. “He was
the Algerian terrorist period” and was familiar confused. They were improvising… They told screaming, and also Kim was screaming, and
with the horrors of death and mayhem, went me, ‘Don’t panic. We’re here for money.’ ” he told me to shut up. I told her, ‘Shut up,
public, using only the name Abdulrahman. He They inquired about Kanye West. “I told shut up, please calm down.’ ”
left his job and did several interviews, which, I him, ‘The rapper is not here,’ and he was “When I tried to calm her, she asked me,
was told, by French law he had the right to do, upset, like, ‘Don’t play with me like this. I ‘Are we going to die?’ ” he said. “I told her, ‘I
since he was also a victim of the crime. mean, the wife of the rapper,’ ” recalled the don’t know.’ ”
night receptionist. “D’argent! D’argent! D’argent!” the thieves
Au Voleur! The robbers decided to hit the Sky Pent- demanded: Some money! Some money! Some

I n an interview with me, Abdulrahman elab-

orated: “What pushed me to go before the
media was the enormous amount of false spec-
house first, where Kim was awake in bed in
a white bathrobe, alone. Her longtime body-
guard, Pascal Duvier, who had been at her
money!
But Kardashian West had only around
$1,000 in euros.
ulations, which did not stop, and especially side throughout Fashion Week, had been sent “She believed that he was there for the
that they were directed at Kim, accusing her of off to guard Kourtney and their half-sister, ring,” Abdulrahman told Inside Edition,
inciting the incident for insurance purposes.” Kendall Jenner, at L’Arc Paris, a nightclub and she handed one of them her 20-karat
Abdulrahman explained to me that “I that doesn’t get started until after one A.M. diamond ring. “He takes it like this [he pan-
didn’t work directly for the hotel but for a tomimed the thief examining the ring, dis-
security enterprise, which works at the hotel,
but generally speaking it is my principal work-
place. I also work in several other important
T he wooden door to the suite had a single
lock, no bolt. The thieves “marched” the
night receptionist to the door “by the scruff of
missively] and said, ‘It’s nice,’ ” and put it
in his pocket.
The thieves bound Kim’s wrists and an-
locations in Paris. I am a doctoral student at his neck,” according to the Mail, and made kles, repeatedly asking her for money. After
184 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
she began screaming, according to Abdulrah- the shows. “Some people hated it. Some peo- officers specializing in armed robbery and or-
man’s account in the Daily Mail, one thief ple loved it. At one show, I sat between two ganized crime, led by Madame Commissioner
taped her mouth shut with “a long piece people with opposing views. On one side was Agnes Zanardi, an expert in the “smash and
of tape, all the way around her head,” and a person who was really upset by the whole ep- grab” jewel robberies that have plagued luxu-
she was carried into the bathroom, where she isode and said it was appalling that someone ry jewelry shops in Paris.
was placed on the floor. should be robbed and held at gunpoint, and Kardashian West has hired one of the most
that it was a shame for France. On my other famous lawyers in France, Jean Veil, son of the

T hey were apparently ready to move on to

the other 10 residences, but Kim’s cell
phone lit up with a call from Pascal Duvier.
side was someone who said that she had no
compassion for the incident because of how
much Kim flaunted her extravagance, particu-
politician and former minister of health Simone
Veil. Jean’s clients have included former French
president Jacques Chirac, L’Oréal heiress Fran-
“I told them, ‘You know who is ringing now? larly those rings, on social media. Both made çoise Bettencourt-Meyers, and former Interna-
It is her bodyguard. If she tional Monetary Fund chief
doesn’t answer, he will come Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
with police.’ ” Two weeks after the robbery,
The job was cut short, on French television, Veil
and the thieves left with a said that Kardashian West
score beyond their wildest would return to France if
imaginings: the 20-carat dia- summoned by the judge. In
mond ring and a jewelry box another television interview,
containing 12 other items— the attorney added, “I found
whose total value has been her particularly calm, serene,
estimated at $5.6 million. in a matter that must have
Having been in the building upset her very much, when
for only 49 minutes, they we know the conditions in
departed, several on their which she was actually as-
bicycles, some exposing saulted: tied up, with a gun
their faces to an adjacent towards her. We shall see
business’s security camera. what happens next.”
“The bag with the jewelry Every morning, the bri-
hangs from the handlebars gade briefs the police chief
of one of the thugs… The on the progress of their in-
bag appears to contain Kim vestigation in a conference
Kardashian’s stolen jewels,” room adjacent to the office
reported Le Parisien. where I sat with the chief,
The next day, a resident who told me, “We can say
on Rue Tronchet found that there is a professional
Kardashian West’s platinum team that committed this
cross, worth an estimated crime, and they seem to be
$31,000, on the sidewalk organized,” he said. “That’s
near the hotel and turned why the B.R.B. is on the case.
it in to the police, who, ac- The B.R.B. has experience
cording to the newspaper, with people who attack with
“deduced that one of the arms, and a big part of the
criminals had fallen off his brigade is now working on
bike while getting away.” the Kim Kardashian case.”
Escaping her bondage, Some say that nothing
Kim found her longtime less than the image of this
friend and stylist Simone Ha- great city hinges on solving
rouche, who had been asleep the crime, as the robbery
in the downstairs bedroom has become a Kardashian-
and had locked herself in a style media sensation,
bathroom after “hearing the CLICK CLICK ZOOM discussed, dissected, and
commotion,” according to E! Photographer Marc Piasecki, outside the Hôtel debated worldwide. Even
News. Harouche had already de Pourtalès, in Paris. Hillary Clinton took time
called Duvier and Kourtney. from the presidential cam-
The police arrived a few minutes after the rob- valid points.” (Kim refrained from using social paign to exclaim on television, when asked
bery, sealing off the crime scene, gathering evi- media for an entire month, but then couldn’t about the robbery, “Wow. I felt really bad
dence, and interviewing the victims. After sign- resist posting a sexy photo of herself to pro- for her.” And the mayor of Paris’s Eighth
ing a statement, Kardashian West was able to mote a line of cell-phone cases.) Arrondissement, where the robbery oc-
leave the country that morning. An investigating curred, told Paris Match, “The whole world
judge was appointed to the case, to work with To Catch a Thief is talking about this story … because it’s
both the prosecutor and Kim’s attorney.
On the morning after, in the hothouse
atmosphere of the Paris fashion shows, the
B ecause of the star status of the victim,
and the value of the jewelry, the case is
being handled by the elite Paris crime unit La
Kim Kardashian. The image of Paris will
still take a hit. We must stop these offenders
as soon as possible!”
robbery was “debated like a trend or a new de- Brigade de Répression du Banditisme, known Chief Sainte said, “I’m very confident,”
signer,” said one fashion leader who attended as the B.R.B., a brigade of 100 plainclothes when asked about the pressure he and the
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 P H OTO G R APH BY TOM WATSON www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 185
 of mine followed the black van to the airport, how an idea struck him in the wake of the
Kim Kardashian West and a photographer friend showed me his robbery: to gather his fellow photographers
photos of Kim leaving Paris. She was walking in a rare token of solidarity. “To show our
B.R.B. are under to catch the thieves. The on the tarmac with her bodyguard, and she support to Kim, we have taken a photo of
pressure is intensified, considering that Paris had a black blanket over her head.” a group of almost 25 French photographers
has lost an estimated $1 billion in tourism He looks down at his lap, mournfully. “It standing in front of the Eiffel Tower,” he
revenue since the 2015 terrorist attacks. “It’s was like night had come during the day,” he says. All 25 laid their cameras on the ground
important because of the implication: Is Paris says. “The whole family left. Kim was sup- in homage. Because the paparazzi showed
secure? It’s important economically. So that’s posed to attend other shows, major shows: their faces, which would swiftly end their
another reason why it is important for us to Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu. But they left! ability to shoot from the shadows, they made
solve this case,” he adds. My first thought was The dream is over. I’m only one copy of the picture and sent it only
not kidding. There are lots of photographers to Kim, with a salutation:

I ndirect victims of the crime were the photog-

raphers of Paris, who were robbed of their
revenue with Kim’s departure. Like the city’s
thinking that. She’ll never come back. There
will be lots of security. [In fact, a month after
the heist Pascal Duvier was dismissed and re-
To Kim and the Kardashians
We don’t love you because we need you
police chief, they were awakened with news of placed with a security detail of three men for We need you because we love you
All the very best
the heist. “Colleagues saying, ‘There’s been a Kendall’s 21st-birthday party at a Los Angeles Your favorite French paps
problem with Kim!’ ” says Marc Piasecki. restaurant.] There will be a before and an after.
He raced from his home in the suburbs This was the only big, major celebrity that we Then they picked up their cameras and
into the city on his scooter, but it was too late. were authorized to take photos of without any headed back into the streets. “Miranda
“My colleagues told me she had left the Hôtel problem. We could talk to her! So it’s hard.” Kerr was arriving from Los Angeles,” ex-
de Pourtalès at 7:15 A.M., going straight to Le I think Piasecki might get emotional, plained Piasecki. At press time, no arrests
Bourget Airport,” he says. “Two colleagues but then he pulls himself together to tell me had been made. 

Jennifer Lawrence century spent concerned about how others mance she had with Coldplay front man Chris
perceive her, Lawrence has turned a corner Martin in the summer of 2015. More recently,
and, as evidenced by her Passengers paycheck the gossip mill linked her to Aronofsky. Don’t
and on-set confidence, has begun asserting look to Lawrence to confirm the rumor,
herself. For the first leg of her career, Law- though. In an age of unabashed oversharing,
rence’s stoic Hunger Games heroine, Katniss she is a throwback in that she has perfected
Everdeen, was an inspiration to young women. the now ancient art of personal discretion—a
Now she doesn’t need the cloak of character tremendous feat, considering her age and sta-
to empower audiences. tion as one of the most public figures in the
Although she’s gotten career advice from world. Sure, she’ll offer fans delectable per-
some of her Oscar-winning predecessors, such sonal details (see: her confession to having a
as Shirley MacLaine and Jodie Foster, Law- crush on Larry David), but only on her terms.
rence has come of age as an actress in an un-
communication.
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 143

I found it startlingly refreshing. It’s nice to

work with somebody and know exactly where
deniably new Hollywood frontier—one marked
by declining ticket sales, expanding distribution
channels, omnipresent paparazzi, and fans
I t helps that, in a culture measured in
clicks and likes, friends and followers,
she stays off social media, her only Web
they stand. She’s a boss. It’s pretty awesome.” literally stalking their idols on the street and footprint being the obligatory Facebook fan
via social media in a relentless hunt to feed a page. Despite her efforts, she is still pop-
Ingénue to Star never-ending Internet appetite. Despite these culture catnip and top gossip fodder for the

L awrence was not always so assertive.

Last year, after the Sony hack revealed a
gender wage gap among the American Hustle
pressures, Lawrence has gracefully leapt from
endearingly unvarnished ingénue to white-hot
star without succumbing to the demons that
glossies. She doesn’t read the rumors (“I
try to just live in a nice little imaginary co-
coon”), but her relatives do—and buy into
cast, Lawrence took responsibility for not re- ensnare even non-celebrities her age. each tabloid twist with the rest of America.
alizing her worth and negotiating for it. “I’m Her greatest struggle has been privacy. And “My brother asked me the other day, ‘Every-
over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state while she has adjusted to her hordes of fans, body online thinks you and Amy [Schumer]
my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that,” she does offer them a gentle caution: “You aren’t friends anymore,’ ” she says, annoyed.
she wrote in an essay for Lenny, an e-mail might think you know me, but when you ap- “And I said, ‘Oh, really, because everything
newsletter co-created by Lena Dunham. Al- proach me you’re a total stranger to me and online is always true.’ ” (For the record, she
though Lawrence was the first to admit that I’m scared.” She sighs. “I get very protective and Schumer are still friends and are plan-
her particular problems as a workingwoman of my space. It took me a long time to be ning on starring, once their schedules relax,
“aren’t exactly relatable,” her sentiments— able to do that. But if I’m eating dinner and as sisters in a comedy they wrote together.)
about being concerned that others like her somebody comes up and a flash goes off from Her own online interests skew more medical
rather than fighting for herself—were, and the someone’s iPhone camera, I am really rude to than movie-star, and she tends to fall down
essay went viral. that person. Then other people at the restau- Google rabbit holes searching for “funny-
“I feel like something really clicked when I rant will see and be like, ‘Oh, damn, I don’t looking bacteria.” (“I’m sure you do that all
was 25,” Lawrence reflects. “It’s not as scary want to do that.’ Privacy is a full-time job and the time,” she deadpans.) Lawrence says the
to say what you mean anymore. Remember I work very hard at it.” first book she read was called How My Body
how scary that used to be? Like ‘What if they As part of this mission, Lawrence does not Works, and she requested autopsy books for
think I’m mad at them?’ Now it’s like ‘They comment on her dating life past Hoult. She her last birthday. Despite her lifelong curios-
better think I’m mad!’ ” After a quarter- neither confirms nor denies the reported ro- ity, she says she has always been “too emo-
186 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
tional” to actually consider medicine as a instantaneously appears and whisks it away
career. But it doesn’t seem coincidental that
she found another way to study humans—by
without explanation. “Ever since I was a
kid, I was always calling shit out,” she says,
Ê ON THE COVER
playing them on-screen. an eye still on the waiter, who returns with a Jennifer Lawrence
But it is not just her curiosity and one-in- new bowl of popcorn and disappears again. wears a dress by Dior.
Hair products
seven-billion charisma that renders her Holly- “See, they were totally aware that was stale!” by Kérastase Paris.
wood’s rare double-barreled movie star—able Lawrence crows, her silent hunch proven Makeup products and
to attract mass audiences and critical recogni- correct. She plunges her hand back into the nail enamel by Dior.
Hair by Odile Gilbert.
tion. Francis Lawrence, who directed most of bowl. “I knew!” Makeup by Fulvia
the Hunger Games series (and is not related Farolfi. Manicure by

A
to Jennifer), has his own theory about Law- lthough it seems that Lawrence has al- Jenna Hipp. Set design
by Colin Donahue.
rence’s superpowers. “Jen is the most in-tune ready conquered Hollywood, the Oscar Produced on location
person I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s uncanny, winner has an offscreen ambition she’s kept by Anthony Graneri.
but her gift is that she can read people so closely guarded. “The directing bug hit me Styled by Jessica Diehl. Photographed exclusively
for V.F. by Peter Lindbergh at the Studios at Paramount,
quickly and use that on-screen. I would hate two years after I got the acting bug,” she in Hollywood. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
to date her because you would never be able admits. “But in the same intense way, only I
to get away with anything.” haven’t been able to get better at it because I
“She has unbelievable clarity,” Stone haven’t had time to do it yet.” To prepare, she tious conversationalist. But at the end of the
echoed. “She can witness a situation or meet has studied each filmmaker she’s worked with, day, she is not satisfied to simply discuss. As
a person and see through the entire thing al- from Russell to Aronofsky, carefully compiling her résumé shows, this 26-year-old would
most instantly. It’s stunning.” notes. Granted, Hollywood has plenty of ac- rather get right into the action. And with her
When I bring up this compliment, Law- tors publicly eager to move behind the cam- near future fully booked, and her newfound
rence waves it off. She has a different way era. What makes Lawrence somewhat unique confidence in place, we likely won’t know any-
of describing her depth of perception. “I’m in this scenario is that she demurs from dis- thing about Lawrence’s next chapter until she
a good bullshit detector,” she says, digging cussing the aspiration any further. turns that page herself. “I would prefer to just
her manicured nails into the bowl of pop- That’s the thing about Lawrence: she may do it,” she says, smiling and flicking the last of
corn sitting on the table between us. A waiter be Hollywood’s most charmingly unpreten- the popcorn into her mouth. 

Brian Chesky will again next year. Says Buffett, “I would like bnb offices around the world.) In the fall of
to invest retroactively.” 2014, Chesky focused on developing an idea,
not yet fully formed, on which he believed the
Code Name: Snow White company’s future hinged. He gave co-founder

I n the summer of 2007, Chesky was unem-

ployed, living in Los Angeles, and trying to
figure out what to do with his life. He picked
Nate Blecharczyk responsibility for daily opera-
tions of Airbnb’s homes business. It was an in-
sane time to switch gears: Airbnb’s growth was
up a book that he says changed everything for exploding. That year, listings were about to reach
him—a 912-page biography of Walt Disney, a million for the first time; the company was hir-
The Triumph of the American Imagination, ing hundreds of new employees; it was opening
by Neal Gabler. “I was living one life, kind a dozen new offices, from Beijing to São Paolo,
of going down the predictable road, and I and had just built a new, 170,000-square-foot
read this biography,” Chesky says, one bright headquarters in San Francisco.
a night. Airbnb,
C ON T I N U E D F RO M PAGE 16 0 morning at Airbnb headquarters. “That had Still, Chesky felt compelled to start plot-
still privately held, won’t disclose revenue or a huge impact on me.” While other start-up ting Airbnb’s next move. “I had this sense of
losses, but it reportedly hit $900 million in founders are known for their edginess (Uber’s urgency or crisis,” he says. “You can’t stay
revenue in 2015. It has raised more than $4 Travis Kalanick, Tesla’s Elon Musk), Chesky the same.” He began to think about how to
billion in outside equity and debt financing; its is unblinkingly earnest. (“He has no negative turn Airbnb into the kind of company whose
investors include a Who’s Who of Silicon Val- ego,” says angel investor Shervin Pishevar.) name has the power to persuade consumers
ley venture-capital firms (Greylock, Sequoia Chesky can recite episodes from the anima- to try anything it sells. “If Nike decides it’s
Capital, Andreessen Horowitz) and a number tor’s life by heart: the fraught production of going to create a hotel or Apple says it’s go-
of high-profile individuals, such as Amazon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the public ing to create a hotel, I want to check out the
founder Jeff Bezos. Tech start-ups typically ridicule heaped on the early days of Disney- Apple or the Nike hotel,” says Chip Conley,
burn through their investors’ money; Airbnb, land, the near bankruptcies. a hotel-industry veteran, whom Chesky hired
on the other hand, generates cash. The site He credits the book with helping him make to help him bolster the Airbnb brand. “If Dell
takes payment immediately when a traveler the decision to move to San Francisco, to start were going to create a hotel, I don’t know if
books a stay and remunerates its hosts after Airbnb—and now to re-invent the company. people would really seek it out as much.”
the trip begins—on average 40 days later. “It’s After reading the biography for a second time, Chesky asked his friend, mentor, and Air-
a huge business,” says Warren Buffett, the in 2011, Chesky hired a Pixar artist to draw bnb investor Jeff Bezos for advice. He wanted
C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, who has met storyboards depicting an Airbnb customer’s to know how Bezos decided to shift Amazon
with Chesky and advised him on management experience from the moment he or she leaves from selling books to, well, everything when
issues. Buffett has watched Airbnb’s growth home. Out of 33 storyboards, only two depict- critics said the move was folly. Chesky says
in his hometown of Omaha. Two years ago, ed the traveler at an Airbnb home. Bezos told him, “If you don’t want to be criti-
during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, Chesky realized the lodging business was cized, don’t do anything.”
hundreds of attendees began staying at Airbnb just a small part of what Airbnb could become. In the beginning, when his plan was still
rentals. It happened again this year, and likely (Copies of these storyboards now hang in Air- amorphous and unshaped, Chesky called
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 187
 It was art, not hockey, though, that would cent Pennsylvania State University study—paid
Brian Chesky lead him out of upstate New York. “Brian for by a hotel lobbying group—found 40 per-
came in with his portfolio. I remember him cent of booking revenues in 14 major U.S. cit-
the new project by the code name Snow being nervous about it,” says Sue Ellen Wil- ies come from hosts with multiple listings on
White—in a nod to his hero. He started with liams, a former art teacher at Niskayuna High Airbnb, likely professional Airbnb operators.
a small team, just him and six others. Today School, recalling the time Chesky showed up The watchdog site Inside Airbnb produced a
the group has 200 people. (Airbnb has 2,500 in her classroom with some drawings. She was study that showed landlords in Venice Beach,
employees.) They work out of a separate stunned by his talent. “When you think of a California, can make four times more listing
space within Airbnb headquarters, away from hockey player you think of gross motor skills. a property on Airbnb for a year than leasing
the bustle of everything else happening at the Brian had incredible fine motor skills as well,” it to a single tenant. A recent Harvard Uni-
company. In the weeks before the launch says Williams, now 50 years old. She encour- versity experiment found that guests with dis-
of the new service, the team will work around aged him to attend Rhode Island School of tinctively African-American-sounding names
the clock. There are more than 500 new trips Design, where he would meet Joe Gebbia, were 16 percent less likely than guests with
and a marketing campaign to review, and the with whom he would start Airbnb. Caucasian-sounding names to be accepted
mobile app needs to be redesigned to accom- When Chesky and Gebbia launched by Airbnb hosts. Earlier this year, the hashtag
modate the excursions that will be added to AirBed & Breakfast, in the fall of 2007, they #airbnbwhileblack gained traction on Twitter
the site. Chesky loves it. “Brian operates really weren’t expecting much. They were art-school as consumers started sharing experiences of
well in a time of crisis,” say Elissa Patel, his kids, not coders. (Third co-founder Blechar- rejected or canceled stays.
girlfriend, a technology executive turned artist czyk, a Harvard-trained software engineer, Chesky has enlisted a team of connected
whom he met on Tinder. joined a few months later.) At first, they were political insiders to help the company defuse
Chesky has urged his team to think cinemat- looking for a way to make rent by building a criticism and lobby lawmakers. Chris Le-
ically. He even had some of them read a book Web site to advertise space in their living room hane, a former aide to President Bill Clinton
on screenwriting. Using the Pixar storyboard as where tourists could sleep on air mattresses. who joined Airbnb last year as head of global
their model, the team began documenting real Even after the site became more popular, few policy, now has several hundred people on
travelers on real trips. They learned that most thought Airbnb was a billion-dollar idea. his team, up from a dozen or so in 2013. Le-
tourism is pretty boring: marching through “I remember we were talking to an inves- hane’s team has organized Airbnb’s hosts into
museums and monuments no local would ever tor who was drinking a smoothie, and halfway “clubs” (really, they are political-advocacy
visit. They also learned that travelers would be through the conversation he gets up and he just blocs) that the company can deploy in any
willing to scrap these in favor of more unusual, leaves,” says Chesky, who declines to name city that gives Airbnb trouble. The clubs can
memorable excursions—such as a midnight the guy who bolted. “And we thought he just be surprisingly effective: hosts in Chicago used
bike ride or a costume party. like … I don’t know, had to [move] his car. I tweets and petitions to successfully lobby law-
One of the hardest problems that his haven’t heard from him since.” Mike Maples, makers to enact new rules favorable to Airbnb.
team needed to tackle was how to offer these a partner at the Floodgate venture-capital firm, Lehane admits the company in its early days
kinds of supposedly unique trips to an audi- admits he didn’t think people would welcome failed to work with cities and disgruntled cus-
ence of millions of potential customers. “We strangers into their home and passed on an op- tomers; now he urges his staff to be proactive.
spent 160 hours handcrafting each trip,” portunity to invest in one of Airbnb’s earliest In Philadelphia, for example, Airbnb created a
says Chesky. “We couldn’t figure out how to fund-raising rounds. “It still pains me,” he says. system to help the city track professional Air-
make the economics work.” In order for trips bnb listers so that officials could regulate those
to be profitable for guides, each excursion Growing Pains businesses differently from the way they did
needs about six to eight travelers; for Airbnb
to make money, millions of tourists need to
participate. To help both sides get the scale
W hen Chesky and his co-founders start-
ed Airbnb, nearly a decade ago, none
of them, or anyone else, could have predicted
occasional hosts. To address the racial-bias al-
legations, Airbnb hired Eric Holder, former at-
torney general of the United States, and Laura
they need, the company is using a concept the consequences of what they are building. Murphy, formerly of the American Civil Liber-
it calls “batching,” in which Airbnb uses its By turning every home into a potential place ties Union, to help it draft new rules for hosts
data and algorithms to match the preferences of commerce, Airbnb has forced its hosts and and an anti-discrimination policy. Lehane’s
of travelers with guides. (The guides set their communities to address a knot of regulatory talk about collaboration with lawmakers loses
own prices and cover their costs.) and liability issues. More broadly, Airbnb— persuasiveness when he lapses into a Silicon
The hospitality industry is right there with along with Uber and a few others—is at the Valley–like tendency to characterize regulators
Airbnb. In September, Marriott launched a center of an ongoing debate about the future and regulations as hopelessly out of step with
program that aims to give guests access to local of work and the impact of technology on so- technology. “We have to actually help cities
artists and musicians. Travel site Booking.com ciety and culture. understand what tools they need to move from
started Booking Experiences this summer, a Airbnb likes to advertise how it has helped the horse and buggy to the car,” he says.
service to help travelers find and reserve events. families make mortgage payments and even

C hesky grew up in Niskayuna, New York,

on the outskirts of Albany. He dreamed
stave off foreclosure by providing them with
new income streams. “Home-sharing has
been an economic life preserver,” a young
O ne evening in downtown Los Angeles,
a newly recruited Airbnb Trips guide
walked me through her plans to offer a three-
of playing professional hockey. His parents, mother in Queens testifies in a current TV day wine tour of her neighborhood, Echo Park.
two social workers, put him on skates almost spot running in New York City. But local of- A sunny, knowledgeable sommelier with a You-
as soon as he could walk. He was small for ficials such as Jumaane Williams, a New York Tube channel dedicated to wine tasting, she was
his age but determined not to let his stature City councilman who represents a swath of recruited by Airbnb for her expertise and her
get in his way. He studied short players of the Brooklyn, don’t buy Airbnb’s claims that it open personality. On our trip, she took us to
National Hockey League to learn a style that is preserving home ownership. “I liken them the home of a friend, a guitar-maker, to drink
would allow him to outskate bigger players. to drug dealers,” says Williams, who suggests and learn about local wines. She’s a highly ed-
One whose style in particular he copied was that whatever new income Airbnb brings into ucated, tech-savvy millennial who understands
Pavel Bure—“the Russian Rocket”—known for a neighborhood is outweighed by unruly visi- that her future depends on how well she can
his ability to accelerate quickly, unexpectedly. tors, rising rents, and absentee owners. A re- navigate the fast-changing digital world. Who
188 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
 CREDITS
needs to go to a wine store or consult an expert PAGES 119–22: Photographs: Hervé Léger by Max Azria; shoes by Kevin Murphy. Makeup
when there’s an app to do the job? clockwise from top left, © Philippe by Giuseppe Zanotti Design; products by Charlotte Tilbury,
Halsman/Magnum Photos, necklace by Chanel; rings by MAC, and Tom Ford. Hair
Indeed, much of Silicon Valley is building from the Life Images Collection/ Aurélie Bidermann and Chanel. by Taylor Byers (Dan Levy,
technologies that will most certainly displace Getty Images, © Sukita/Morrison Dan Levy’s suit by Alexander Milligan, Rozon), Annastasia
the need for human labor. “We’re at the be- Hotel Gallery, from mptvimages McQueen; shirt and tie by Dior Cucullo (Chris Elliott,
ginning stages of becoming a robotics com- .com, from Avalon, from Trunk Homme; shoes by Saint Laurent Hampshire, Sarah Levy,
Archive, from the New York Post Paris. Annie Murphy’s dress Robertson), and Ana Sorys
pany,” Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick said at Archives/Getty Images, from by Monse; shoes by Stuart (Eugene Levy, O’Hara, Murphy).
Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit this Trunk Archive, from Redferns/ Weitzman; earrings by Oscar de Makeup by Ricky Boudreau
fall. Driverless cars may soon replace the need Getty Images, from the Condé la Renta; bracelet by Eddie Borgo. (Sarah Levy, Milligan, Rozon),
for Uber drivers. Software can now read and Nast Archive, © Douglas Emily Hampshire’s top by Pink Lucky Bromhead (Hampshire,
annotate legal documents faster and more ef- Kirkland, from the Life Images Tartan; pants by Boss; shoes by Murphy, O’Hara), and Candice
Collection/Getty Images. Converse. Sarah Levy’s dress Ornstein (Elliott, Dan Levy,
ficiently than lawyers can. Surgeons may soon PAGES 166–67: Styled by Skye by Club Monaco; shoes by Eugene Levy, Robertson).
find parts of their jobs done by machines. Even Kelton. Jennifer Robertson’s dress Pierre Hardy; bracelet by Eddie Set design by Caitlin Doherty.
hotel clerks may become obsolete as the big ho- by Boss; shoes by Michael Borgo. Dustin Milligan’s clothing Produced on location by
tel chains experiment with software that allows Michael Kors. Eugene Levy’s by Maison Margiela; shoes by Full Serve Productions.
clothing and shoes by Boss. Boss. Tim Rozon’s shoes by FOR DETAILS,
a guest to check in and unlock his or her door
Catherine O’Hara’s clothing by Harris for Davids. Hair products GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
with a smartphone. Chesky, however, sees a
bright future for people like the cheerful som-
melier and other members of the creative class. Chesky’s mind the excursions will provide tal- not exist in the future,” Chesky says. “What
The company relies on human labor, and Air- ented individuals—some of them former law- will humans do in the future? They will do
bnb Trips, he argues, is technology in the ser- yers, surgeons, and Uber drivers perhaps—with things only humans can do.” If Chesky’s gam-
vice of bringing people together, to experience a source of income or even a livelihood. “It’s bit pays off, Airbnb may very well be the thing
new things in real life, not on screens. And in very easy to tell you 10 jobs that may or may standing between us and the robots. 

Cyber-hack for Arab news and gossip. Digging deeper, them, but stopped short of naming NSO.
he found each was associated with something For Marczak this amounted to unfinished
called “SMSer.net.” When he searched the business.
Internet for servers with “SMS” in their do-
main names, he found about 120, almost all
associated with mobile-phone companies in
developing countries such as Mexico and Mo-
T he e-mail Marczak received that night last
August in Berkeley came from Ahmed
Mansoor, the U.A.E. dissident, who remained
zambique. Next Marczak checked who had under relentless harassment by his government.
registered these domain names. Most of the Mansoor had been imprisoned and beaten on
street addresses associated with the domain the street, then had his passport confiscated.
names were seemingly located in Israel. Someone stole his car. His bank account was
“That’s when I thought, Hmm, I wonder if drained of $140,000—all while he was fighting
this is NSO,” he remembers. off multiple attempts by the U.A.E. govern-
C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 4 9 thought a link NSO Group was a six-year-old Israeli spy- ment to hack his computers and phones.
included in the e-mail looked suspicious. ware company so secretive it didn’t even have What got Marczak so excited was a U.R.L.
Marczak discovered that clicking it took the a corporate Web site. Marczak knew of it from he spied at the bottom of a text Mansoor had
user to a Microsoft Word document that a single entry on an Israeli Ministry of Defense sent: “sms.webadv.co.” He remembered it as
contained only a logo and a description for Web site, in which the company claimed to one of the hundreds of servers he had linked
the fake “the Right to Fight” group—while have developed cutting-edge spyware. Check- to NSO: here, it appeared, was the evidence he
secretly inserting spyware onto the user’s ing further, he was surprised to find that two needed to pin the Stealth Falcon campaign on
computer. He checked with other Persian years earlier it had sold a controlling stake in the Israeli company. In his living room, Mar-
Gulf dissidents and found that many had its business to Francisco Partners, a San Fran- czak wrote a program that allowed his laptop to
received the same strange e-mail and had al- cisco hedge fund, for $120 million. impersonate a mobile phone, the device Man-
ready clicked the link. As Citizen Lab often Though he strongly suspected NSO soft- soor would have used. By doing so, he hoped
did, Marczak gave this unknown attacker a ware was being used in the Stealth Falcon to reconnoiter the spyware’s server, wherever
code name: Stealth Falcon. attacks, Marczak couldn’t prove it. Whoever it was, without infecting his computer. The
Once Marczak identified the server that it was, he realized, knew what they were do- Hacking Team tools released by Phineas Fish-
had sent the e-mail, he “fingerprinted” it and ing. By the time Marczak finished tracking er worked only on older versions of Android
began to search the Internet for other machines Stealth Falcon, the following spring, he found phones; if contacted by a newer version, it sent
with the same fingerprint. There were hun- its campaign had originated from 67 different back a harmless “decoy” page. Marczak as-
dreds. Each had a domain name. Most were servers and had lured more than 400 people sumed this program worked the same way.
registered with a “privacy protection” service, into clicking its links and loading spyware It didn’t. When Marczak clicked the link
meaning Marczak couldn’t learn who had onto their devices. He also discovered that contained in Mansoor’s e-mail, his Safari
registered the domains. But about 10 weren’t. 24 U.A.E. citizens had been targeted with the browser suddenly opened and then immedi-
Checking the names and addresses of the enti- same spyware in posts sent via Twitter. Three ately shut. Monitoring what was happening in
ties that had registered the sites, he realized the had been arrested shortly after. Another was the background, he could see what appeared
information was all fake. So he checked to see convicted of insulting the U.A.E.’s rulers in to be the first stage of a spyware program up-
if these fictitious users had created other sites. absentia. His Citizen Lab report, issued last loading onto his laptop. Before it could do any
One had. It had created three domain May, described the Stealth Falcon attacks in damage, he severed the connection.
names, all impersonating a popular Web site detail, suggesting that the U.A.E. was behind But he had seen enough. In an attempt to
HO L IDAY 2 016 / 2 017 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 189
 Code Red in Stage Two was all about how to find the
Cyber-hack
impersonate Mansoor, Marczak had been us-
M any spyware programs are packaged
in three stages. Stage One infiltrates the
user’s device. Stage Two prepares the device for
kernel. The only reason to find a kernel is to
attack it. The only reason to call for the kernel
is to attempt a jailbreak.”
ing the penultimate version of the Apple O.S., monitoring; when finished, it contacts a server To their surprise, the subprogram con-
iOS 9.3.3. The NSO spyware, if that’s what it to deliver the actual spyware package. The tained a second zero-day exploit. Two zero
was, could clearly infiltrate it, via Safari. And spyware’s delivery and setup constitutes Stage days in one program: no one had ever seen
because the newest version of iOS, 9.3.4., Three. Because it had taken control of Mar- anything like it. Bazaliy thought it had to be
didn’t change anything in Safari, Marczak re- czak’s Safari browser, the Lookout analysts were a remote jailbreak. But unless they could find
alized the spyware had to be using an exploit confident that Marczak’s code was Stage One and analyze the third stage of code, there was
never before seen: a zero day. of spyware using a zero day. “A Safari exploit is no way to prove it. Any chance of that, howev-
“Wow,” he said aloud. huge,” Murray says. “If you have that, you can er, had died the moment Marczak clicked on
When he went to study the JavaScript get into any Apple device in the world.” the link. It appeared they were at a dead end.
code he had captured on his laptop, however, The code Marczak discovered was “ob- Then they got lucky. As the team at Look-
Marczak was disappointed. It was gibberish, fuscated,” that is, jumbled so thoroughly it out struggled to unravel the strange code that
page after page of heavily obfuscated code. was impossible to understand. It took several Wednesday, Marczak was surprised to receive
This was above his pay grade. To figure out hours for Blaich and Bazaliy to identify the a second message from Mansoor. He had
what the program actually was, he would hidden program’s components and line them gotten yet another suspicious e-mail, and, in-
need serious help. up in order. After that, they searched for a way credibly, it contained a link that directed him
One of his Citizen Lab colleagues sug- to find the program’s second stage. Unfortu- again to sms.webadv.co. The U.A.E. govern-
gested that Marczak reach out to Seth Hardy, nately, Marczak had severed his connection ment, Marczak wagered, was not only per-
a former Citizen Lab analyst who worked at before Stage Two could upload. Worse, the sistent but overconfident, or at least uncon-
Lookout, a top-shelf purveyor of security soft- link he had clicked was a “single use” link, the cerned about being discovered.
ware that specializes in mobile phones. digital equivalent of a “Mission: Impossible”
Lookout had been founded in 2007 by three
University of Southern California computer-
security specialists: John Hering, Kevin Ma-
message that bursts into flame after one listen.
But Bazaliy and Blaich thought they might
locate it if they could track down the server
T his time he wasn’t taking any chances.
What he needed, Marczak realized, was
to impersonate Mansour’s iPhone; if the host
haffey, and James Burgess. While fooling where the spyware originated. Already they server saw the link clicked by a different kind
around with new technologies the three dis- could see a series of U.R.L.’s in the Stage One of phone than Mansour’s, it might suspect
covered a vulnerability in the Nokia 3610’s code. Once they had identified which one was something amiss. Mansour used a slightly
Bluetooth connection to wireless headsets, likely the original server, they saw that it could older phone, an iPhone 5, running the 9.3.3
giving unauthorized access potentially to be contacted only by a computer in the Middle version of iOS. Marczak began asking around
millions of mobile devices. They informed East. Bazaliy set to work building a V.P.N. (virtu- his office in downtown Berkeley, seeing if any-
Nokia, but the company would not take the al private network) tunnel, a commonly used bit body had one. It wasn’t an easy favor to ask;
problem seriously because it believed Blue- of software that masks a telephone’s G.P.S. co- after all, he intended to infect the phone with
tooth communication was limited to a 30- ordinates, routing his path to the server through cutting-edge spyware. Still, after a few hours
foot range. a series of foreign countries before finding one his office-mate, a computer-security specialist
To prove their point the three hackers built he could use in the U.A.E. By scanning each of named Nicholas Weaver, volunteered that his
a “BlueSniper rifle”—a piece of hardware that the U.R.L.’s, the team was able to identify bits girlfriend had just upgraded her iPhone but
enabled them to extend Bluetooth’s range to and pieces of code it believed to be Stage Two. had kept the older model to use to listen to
more than a mile—and took it to the 2005 There was just one hitch: “It looks like a music at her job in a winery.
Academy Awards, where they easily collected jailbreak, but it’s encrypted, which is a prob- Thursday morning, having wiped the old
data from dozens of celebrities’ phones. Nokia lem,” recalls Bazaliy. “We have no idea what phone clean of data, Weaver brought it into
was finally persuaded to fix the problem. algorithm it was using for its decryption.” the office the two men shared. They closed the
Seth Hardy took the call not long after They spent hours that day searching for the door behind them; no one else knew what they
sunrise. “He told us this suspicious link algorithm before realizing the answer had been were attempting. With Weaver at his shoulder,
had compromised an iPhone with just one in front of them all along. Eventually Bazaliy Marczak first set up a wireless access point, es-
click, which suggested someone had weap- realized that Stage One must know how to de- sentially a mini-network all his own, the better
onized a zero-day exploit,” Hardy recalls. “I crypt Stage Two in order to launch it. So they to contain the dangerous code. He then hooked
mean, that’s incredibly rare. It sounded like searched for elements of a decryption algorithm his laptop via Wi-Fi to the old iPhone, so that he
it could be big.” in Stage One and slowly pieced one together. could watch on his computer screen the images
Hardy thought of Max Bazaliy, a 29-year- It was only upon decrypting Stage Two that of whatever code secretly invaded the phone.
old Ph.D. candidate at Kiev Polytechnic. they began to amass evidence of what the pro- Lastly he arranged a V.P.N. so that the phone
Bazaliy was the only person at Lookout gram was. The key lay in references within the appeared to be calling from the U.A.E.
who had actually created a jailbreak, albeit code to the iPhone’s digital brain, called the When they were finished, Marczak pasted
a “public” jailbreak using wires and cables. “kernel.” The way Apple, like many computer- the link into the phone’s Safari browser. Then,
He and Andrew Blaich furrowed their makers, protects the kernel from infiltration is with a deep breath, he clicked on the link. In
brows as they scrolled down the code, near- by “randomizing,” or constantly changing, its an instant a blank Web page opened—and
ly 1,400 lines of multicolored commands in internal address; if a hacking program can be then closed itself 10 seconds later. “Ohhhh,
seemingly random order, tossed about like viewed as a hunter, the kernel is a jackrabbit that’s an exploit,” Marczak murmured. He
a salad. “This is clearly seriously bad stuff, that constantly darts between hedgerows to had seen enough spyware to realize the sudden
but we had no idea what it was,” recalls hide from it. The eureka moment came when opening and closing of Safari almost certainly
Mike Murray, the engineers’ boss. “So we Bazaliy found the code “calling” for the ker- meant a hostile program was using an undis-
said, ‘Let’s guess at the worst-case scenario nel, much as a hunter would use a duck call covered exploit to hack into the phone. It took
and see if it’s that.’ A worst-case scenario is to find ducks. “This is how Max knew it was a a few seconds for him to fully comprehend
a remote jailbreak.” jailbreak,” Mike Murray explains. “The code what this might mean: if alien code next headed
190 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com H OLIDAY 2016/2 017
for the kernel, he might be seeing a remote the actual spyware. If all the code to this point ever seen them in one piece of software before.”
jailbreak “in the wild,” as programmers call it, had been thousands of aliens preparing the “It was amazingly sophisticated,” says
something no one had ever witnessed before. Earth for invasion, this was the mother ship. Blaich. “Normally spyware is a battery hog.
“O.K.,” he said, “this is completely not For several moments Marczak and Weaver One way you know you might be infected is if
possible to do.” watched in silence, stunned to see evidence of you get messages saying your battery is low.
Suddenly lines of colorful computer code an actual remote jailbreak in the wild. Then There is actual code in here that makes it
began manically unspooling down his screen: Marczak saw the danger they were in. If the battery-conscious. If it senses it’s using too
a view of the alien code invading the phone. spyware was transferring information back to much battery, it will actually shut itself down.”
“The phone is totally calm,” he remembers. a host, the data might well include the phone’s “It’s amazing,” says Seth Hardy. “It will wait
“But the laptop is going crazy.” If Stage One of actual G.P.S. coordinates. The host would till the user goes on Wi-Fi to send off large pack-
the code was the Safari exploit, this new code know where they were. ets of information, to avoid killing the battery.
had to be a full Stage Two, a version of which “I think we should shut it down,” Marczak We’d never seen anything like that before this.”
the Lookout engineers had already begun as- said. The next step was to alert Apple. Murray
sembling. It was designed to break down the Weaver saw it, too. “Shut it down,” he said. wanted to hold off till they fully understood
kernel’s defenses in preparation for delivery of Once they were certain the entire Third the program, but Marczak insisted they call
the actual spyware. And that, Marczak realized Stage had loaded, Marczak ripped out the immediately. The risk to iPhone users was
with a start, was exactly what was happening. cables connecting the phone to the laptop. too great. A conference call was arranged
The code was attempting a remote jailbreak. Then he snatched up the phone, turned off its that Monday. “Apple is pretty funny,” Hardy
power, and placed it in a metal desk drawer remembers. “So we told them we had a re-

T his all happened in a matter of seconds.

In the next moment or so, he and Weaver
watched the laptop screen as alien code invad-
they kept for the rare occasions they needed
to isolate a piece of hardware. The connection
to the host was severed.
mote jailbreak. And they were like, ‘Yeah yeah
yeah, we’ve seen this before—send us what you
have.’ So we did, and a few hours later they
ed the phone’s kernel. When the code on his For a moment they just sat there, grinning called back and, you know, very serious, [said]
laptop screen paused, then began once more, like children. Then both men let out whoops ‘O.K., send us everything you got.’ ”
they could see it had now finished its prepara- of joy and exchanged an exuberant high five. Apple managed to issue a “patch” to fix the
tions and was seeking to establish contact with “Damn,” Weaver finally said. “It feels three zero-day exploits just 10 days after the
a host—no doubt a computer server controlled good to be a gangsta.” call, an engineering feat that surprised many of
by the U.A.E. government. But for some rea- All that weekend the Lookout team worked those involved. An Apple spokesman declined
son the phone didn’t make contact. Its request around the clock studying the beast Marczak comment, but a Silicon Valley security consul-
went unanswered. had captured. They found a third zero day in the tant who works closely with the company says,
Marczak scrunched his brow. Ninety sec- complete Stage Two, making this probably the “Apple had never seen anything like this—ever.
onds later the phone tried again. “There it most sophisticated spyware ever identified. Max This was an incredibly sophisticated nation-state
goes,” he said, expecting it was a momentary Bazaliy discovered several references to “NSO,” attack, kind of breathtaking in its scope. This
glitch. But this call too went unanswered. He deepening their conviction that the Israeli com- took a herculean effort on their part to patch
and Weaver exchanged glances. This was odd. pany was responsible. If so, what they were it so fast. It was Katy-bar-the-door over there.”
“Why is it failing?” Marczak asked. seeing was likely NSO’s flagship surveillance
They watched in silence as the phone tried
a third time and failed. Then it tried again.
“Please work, please work,” Weaver began
software, called Pegasus. (NSO executives could
not be reached for comment, but in August,
NSO emphasized in a statement to Forbes that
I t’s an uplifting story, but the fact is Apple
and other computer-makers are fighting
a losing battle. As long as there are hackers,
to whisper. it does not operate spyware, but merely sells it. they will continue to find ways to hack any de-
But the fourth call too went unanswered. “The company sells only to authorized govern- vice that interfaces with them. These dangers
“Maybe they’re onto us,” Marczak suggested. mental agencies… The agreements signed with were highlighted this fall when a New England
“Maybe,” Weaver said. “But I don’t see how.” the company’s customers require that the com- company found itself the target of a mass
The code made a fifth call. Nothing. No one pany’s products only be used in a lawful man- denial-of-service attack from millions of non-
was answering. Marczak was starting to grow ner. Specifically, the products may only be used computer “zombie devices” connected to the
dejected. It appeared this was a solid attempt for the prevention and investigation of crimes.”) Internet—most notably baby monitors.
at a remote jailbreak, but not a successful one. By reverse-engineering it, they found that “What these cyber-arms dealers have done
Then, on the sixth call, the server an- it could simultaneously monitor a phone’s is democratize digital surveillance,” says the
swered. A connection was established. Sud- e-mail, Internet use, keystrokes, Skype chats, and A.C.L.U.’s Chris Soghoian. “The surveillance
denly the laptop screen burst into a blizzard a slew of other applications. It could turn on a tools once only used by big governments are
of lightning-fast code, “just this huge unmiti- microphone and listen to a user’s conversations. now available to anyone with a couple hun-
gated blob” of code being delivered from the “We’ve seen all these capabilities by themselves,” dred grand to spend.” In fact, they may be
host directly into the phone’s kernel. It was says Mike Murray. “I don’t think anyone has coming to your iPhone sometime soon. 

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 PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

DJ
KHALED
The record producer, Snapchat king, and (Red) ambassador—
whose new book, The Keys, is out this month—reveals his mantras
for avoiding “They” and finding the greatness in life

W hat is your idea of

perfect happiness?
Health, life, everything
around me on a daily basis, being
grateful for life—every day is a
most overuse? “We the best,”
but it’s the truth! What is your
greatest regret? I have no
regrets—life is beautiful. What or
who is the greatest love of your
blessing. What is your greatest life? God and my newborn son,
fear? I fear nothing, except for Asahd Tuck Khaled. When and
flying. Which historical figure where were you happiest? I’m
do you most identify with? My happy every day I wake up, man.
grandma. She understands me. You know what I’m saying? What
Which living person do you most do you consider your greatest
admire? Jay Z. He’s a mogul. He’s a Sagittarius like me. I achievement? Staying away from They—whoever is bringing
love his business moves. What is the trait you most deplore negative energy to positive vibes. If you were to die and
in others? People who do not love. If you are not loving, come back as a person or thing, what do you think it
you are not living. Why wouldn’t you love? What’s the would be? We’re forever—we don’t use those words. What
problem? What is your greatest extravagance? Every day is your most treasured possession? Life. Where would you
is a great extravagance, when I wake up and rise up and like to live? I love Miami. Miami is my home, but we travel
breathe—life. What is your favorite journey? Life. Every everywhere too. What is your favorite occupation? Being
day it’s time for greatness. Every day climbing that great! What is your most marked characteristic? My
mountaintop where you get the key, and each key leads to whole body. Everything about me is great. What is the
the next key. On what occasion do you lie? I don’t lie. I quality you most like in a woman? Someone being grateful
speak what I know. I don’t need to lie. What do you dislike about everything in life. Who are your favorite writers?
most about your appearance? I love my appearance; I The author of the Holy Koran. What is your motto? “We
love everything about me. Which words or phrases do you the best.” “God is the greatest.”
192 VANI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com I L L U STRAT IO N BY RISKO H OLIDAY 2016/2017