OCTOBER 2024

Gomez
INSIDE THE
FAR RIGHT’S

CATHOLIC
CELEBRITY
MACHINE
HOW A MELLON
HEIR BECAME

A MAGA
MEGA-DONOR
THE MAKING OF

SATURDAY
NIGHT LIVE
(THE MOVIE!)
Plus

MELINDA
FRENCH
GATES
ON THE FUTURE
OF GIVING

On the PERFORMANCE
of Her CAREER—and the
LOVE of Her LIFE
B y YO H A N A D E S TA
Photog raph s by
E M MA S U M M E RTON

FENDI BOUTIQUES 888 291 0163 FEN D I .CO M

WHEN I MOVE YOU MOVE
LUDACRIS
JESSICA ALBA

VE YOU MOVE
EY

Contents

The October Issue / No. 762

Vanities

62

22
22 / Opening Act Maisy
Stella on the role 10,000
girls wanted.
26 / The Gallery Prada’s
petite play on porcelain.
30 / Trending Maincharacter energy à la
Nora Ephron.
32 / Books A photo
chronicle of the jet set, plus
the best new nonfiction.
34 / My Stuff Gossip
maven Lainey Lui’s
favorites, from Beyoncé to
matcha perfume.
36 / Books & Totes Brilliant

new reads paired with
beautiful bags.
38 / Architecture In a

debut monograph, a design
star and a fiction writer
team up.
Columns

40
Meet the young, Godfearing, America-loving
defense tech entrepreneurs
of El Segundo.
By Zoë Bernard

18

Editor’s Letter

On the
Cover

12

20

Contributors

110

Proust Questionnaire

Selena Gomez’s coat by Prada; gloves by Seymoure; tights by Wolford; ring by
Prada Fine Jewelry. Hair products by Orlando Pita Play. Makeup products by Rare
Beauty. Nail enamel by Essie. Hair by Orlando Pita. Makeup by Hung Vanngo.
Manicure by Tom Bachik. Tailors, Hasmik Kourinian and Susie Kourinian. Set design by
Robert Doran. Produced on location by Viewfinders. Styled by Dena Giannini.
Photographed exclusively for VF by Emma Summerton in LA. For details, go to
VF.com/credits.
VA N I T Y FA I R

PHOTOGRAPH BY S E BA ST I A N

KIM

44
Party Planning
Inside Vladimir Putin’s
fever dream of a second
Trump presidency.
By Mikhail Zygar
Illustration by Mark Harris
OCTOBER 2024

S E L E N A G O M E Z ’ S B O O T S B Y L E S I L L A . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

Boys and Their Toys

Contents

The October Issue / No. 762

Columns

Features

46

48

62

74

Stranger Things

Both Sides Now

Give and Let Give

From brat memes to coconut
TikToks, how Kamala Harris
and Tim Walz learned
to stop worrying and love
the weird.
By Kase Wickman

A storybook romance,
an acclaimed film, and Only
Murders back in the
building—it’s a sublime time
to be Selena Gomez.
By Yohana Desta
Photographs by
Emma Summerton

Melinda French Gates opens
up about politics, fighting
for women’s rights, and
embracing her role as
mentor to a new generation
of philanthropists.
By Keziah Weir

The Billionaire’s
Secret

80

86

92

98

The General

Bad Faith

Funny Business

A House Divided

How Elizabeth Prelogar,
one of the most powerful
US solicitor generals in
a generation, is taking the
fight to the Supreme Court.
By Cristian Farias
Photographs by
Andre D. Wagner

JD Vance, Candace Owens,
Shia LaBeouf, and more:
The far right has developed
a robust Catholic celebrity
conversion operation.
By Kathryn Joyce
Illustration by
Marc Burckhardt

In Saturday Night, Jason
Reitman re-creates the
making of the hilarious first
episode of SNL, complete
with John Belushi, Dan
Aykroyd, and a fresh-faced
Lorne Michaels.
By Anthony Breznican

The notoriously private
Mellon family break their
silence about Tim Mellon
becoming a Donald Trump
mega-donor.
By James Reginato

Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s
family business grew on
profits from the Nazi regime
—just don’t ask him about it.
By David de Jong
Illustration by
Mike McQuade

Features

14

VA N I T Y FA I R

PHOTOGRAPH BY E M M A

SUMMERTON

OCTOBER 2024

S E L E N A G O M E Z ’ S C LO T H I N G A N D S H O E S B Y S A I N T L A U R E N T B Y A N T H O N Y VA C C A R E L LO ; G LO V E S B Y T H O M A S I N E ;
S T O C K I N G S B Y C A L Z E D O N I A ; N E C K L A C E B Y B U LG A R I H I G H J E W E L R Y. F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

48

®
Editor in Chief Radhika Jones
Deputy Editor Daniel Kile Executive Digital Director Michael Hogan

Director of Editorial Operations Kelly Butler Executive Editor, Features & Development Claire Howorth
Executive Editor Matthew Lynch Executive Hollywood Editor Jeff Giles Editor, The Hive Michael Calderone
Director of Special Projects Sara Marks Global Head of Talent Alison Ward Frank Editor, Creative Development David Friend
Senior Hollywood Editor Hillary Busis Senior Vanities Editor Maggie Coughlan Senior Hive Editor Meena Ganesan
Senior Editor Keziah Weir Global Entertainment Director Caitlin Brody West Coast Director, Editorial Projects John Ross
Editorial Operations Manager Jaime Archer Associate Hive Editor Jon Skolnik Politics Correspondent Bess Levin
Senior Hollywood Correspondent Anthony Breznican Senior Awards Correspondent Rebecca Ford
Hollywood Correspondents David Canfield, Julie Miller Culture Correspondent Nate Freeman Chief Critic Richard Lawson
TV Correspondent Joy Press Staff Writers Dan Adler, Chris Murphy, Erin Vanderhoof, Savannah Walsh
Special Correspondents Nick Bilton, Bryan Burrough, Katherine Eban, Joe Hagan, Molly Jong-Fast, Maureen Orth, Mark Seal,
Gabriel Sherman, Brian Stelter Writers-at-Large Marie Brenner, James Reginato Associate Web Producers Kathleen Creedon, Fred Sahai
Assistant to the Editor in Chief Daniela Tijerina Editorial Assistants Arimeta Diop, Kayla Holliday
Special Projects Manager Ari Bergen Special Projects Associate Charlene Oliver
Business Director Geoff Collins Senior Manager of Communications Dhara Parikh

Design & Photography
Senior Design Director Justin Patrick Long Visuals Director Cate Sturgess Art Director Emily Crawford
Senior Visuals Editors Natalie Gialluca, Lauren Margit Jones, Michael Kramer Senior Designer Khoa Tran
Visuals Editor, Photo Research Eric Miles Visuals Editor Allison Schaller
Associate Visuals Editor Madison Reid Designer Pamela Wei Wang
Fashion
Fashion Director Nicole Chapoteau
Accessories Director Daisy Shaw-Ellis Associate Menswear Director Miles Pope
Market Editor Kia D. Goosby Associate Fashion Editor Jessica Neises Assistant Fashion Editor Samantha Gasmer
Content Integrity
Senior Counsel Terence Keegan Production Director J Jamerson Research Director David Gendelman Copy Director Michael Casey
Associate Legal Affairs Editor Simon Brennan Production Managers Beth Meyers, Susan M. Rasco, Roberto Rodríguez
Research Managers Brendan Barr, Kelvin C. Bias, Audrey Fromson, Michael Sacks
Online Director of Copy & Research Rachel Freeman Copy Manager Michael Quiñones
Line Editors Lily Leach, Leah Tannehill Associate Editor S.P. Nix
Audience Development
Global Director of Audience Development Alyssa Karas Associate Director, Analytics Neelum Khan
Associate Director of Social Media Sarah Morse Audience Development Manager Tyler Breitfeller Associate Social Media Manager Burake Teshome
Video
Senior Director of Programming & Development Ella Ruffel Executive Producer Ruhiya Nuruddin
Director of Creative Development Claire Buss Director of Content Production Lane Williamson
Video Directors Adam Lance Garcia, Jameer Pond, Funmi Sunmonu Senior Manager of Creative Development Hannah Pak
Coordinating Producer Madison Coffey Associate Producer Emebeit Beyene
Vanity Fair Studios
Head of Film & TV Helen Estabrook VPs, Development & Production Sarah Amos, Jodi Hildebrand, Lajoie St. George, Andrew Whitney
Senior Director, Development & Production Lexy Altman Development & Production Managers Sarah Patzer, Samantha Smith
Senior Director, Acquisitions Sarah Lash Acquisitions Coordinator Rafael Peralta
Entertainment Associates Brigid Cromwell, Madison Hallman, Sydney Hemmendinger
Audio
Head of Global Audio Christopher Bannon Executive Producer Steven Valentino

Contributing Photographers
Annie Leibovitz
Jonathan Becker, Nick Riley Bentham, Norman Jean Roy, Collier Schorr, Mark Seliger
Contributing Editors
Kurt Andersen, Lili Anolik, Jorge Arévalo, Buzz Bissinger, Derek Blasberg, Christopher Bollen, Douglas Brinkley, Michael Callahan, Adam Ciralsky,
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sloane Crosley, Janine di Giovanni, Lisa Eisner, Alex French, Paul Goldberger, Adam Leith Gollner, Vanessa Grigoriadis,
Carol Blue Hitchens, A.M. Homes, Uzodinma Iweala, May Jeong, Sebastian Junger, Sam Kashner, Jemima Khan, Tom Kludt,
Hilary Knight, Wayne Lawson, Kiese Makeba Laymon, Franklin Leonard, Monica Lewinsky, Eric Lutz, Shawn Martinbrough, Ryan McAmis,
Bethany McLean, Katie Nicholl, Maureen O’Connor, Jen Palmieri, Anna Peele, Evgenia Peretz, Maximillian Potter, Robert Risko,
Lisa Robinson, Mark Rozzo, Maureen Ryan, Nancy Jo Sales, Elissa Schappell, Jeff Sharlet, Michael Shnayerson,
Chris Smith, Richard Stengel, Karen Valby, Diane von Furstenberg, Elizabeth Saltzman Walker, Basil Walter, Jesmyn Ward, Ned Zeman

16

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

Editor’s Letter

I have often thought
how fortunate we
Americans are that the
robber barons of our
Gilded Age, even while
they amassed vast personal fortunes,
nevertheless decided that part of their legacy
should be philanthropic. Because industrialists
like Carnegie and Rockefeller endowed
libraries and schools at grand scale, it became
understood that enriching oneself and one’s
family came with a responsibility to patronize
the arts and other creative and intellectual
institutions. That notion has persisted
through generations. And although giving,
even at a grand scale, cannot cancel out
inequality, it’s far better than no giving at all.
Last year at a breakfast with a handful of
journalists, Melinda French Gates mentioned
that she is often asked for advice on how
to give. Having come up on the tidal wave
of wealth creation in Silicon Valley and then
funneling that wealth on an extraordinary
level into the Gates Foundation, she’s a
pioneer and an expert, primed to counsel new
members of the millionaire and billionaire
clubs on what their legacies might look like
outside the boardroom. As Keziah Weir
reports, Melinda’s own philanthropic
work has undergone a seismic shift this year,
as she left the foundation she and her
ex-husband began in 2000 to strike out on
her own, doubling her efforts on lifting
up women and girls. I know from my own
work as a director of the board of CARE,
the global humanitarian organization, that
money spent improving the lives of women
and girls is the most effective path to
improving lives in general, since they have
the most untapped potential.
In this issue we spotlight a circle
of influential women whom Melinda has
18

VA N I T Y FA I R

mentored and supported in their desire to give back
on multiple fronts—from Sara Blakely’s focus on fostering
entrepreneurship to Anne Wojcicki’s championing of
scientists to Tsitsi Masiyiwa’s commitment to education,
food security, and disaster preparedness. Keziah also spoke
with Melinda at length about her renewed philanthropic
objectives, the experiences of sexism that helped inform
her point of view, and her endorsement of Vice President
Kamala Harris.
this is the first editor’s letter I’m writing since
Harris stepped up and into the presidential race, energizing the
Democratic Party and changing the course of the election.
The unprecedented shake-up has made for an electric summer
and fall in our newsroom as we follow the candidates and
their Diet Mountain Dew–loving vice presidential picks on the
road to November 5. I hope you’re following our coverage on
VF.com—from convention reporting to campaign analysis
to meme and merch scorecards (is Tim Walz a Chappell Roan
stan?)—and listening to our weekly politics podcast, Inside
the Hive. We are committed to keeping you up-to-date through
Election Day and beyond, in the way only Vanity Fair can.

ON THAT NOTE,

radhika jones, Editor in Chief

PHOTOGRAPH BY M A R K

SELIGER

OCTOBER 2024

Contributors

Clockwise from top left:
Sebastian Kim, Ryan McAmis,
Kase Wickman, Mikhail Zygar,
James Reginato, Kathryn Joyce.

Ryan MCAMIS

Kase WICKMAN

“GIVE AND LET GIVE,” P. 62

PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE, P. 110

“STRANGER THINGS,” P. 46

“Melinda French Gates’s only request
was that we play The Tortured Poets
Department,” says photographer Kim.
Luckily, his daughter is a Swiftie,
so he wasn’t caught off guard. Aside
from taking portraits and listening
to Taylor Swift, he is learning how to
cook Korean and Japanese dishes.

Illustrator McAmis, who is building a
scale model of a medieval cathedral
in his free time, thinks sketching from
interviews is the best way to capture a
person’s nuances. He had a “great time
combing through Stanley Tucci’s
videos all while learning how to make
Spaghetti Alla Nerano,” he says.

“It was fascinating to see how quickly
Harris’s campaign pivoted to this
messaging after Biden stepped aside
as nominee, proving that campaigns
really aren’t one-size-fits-all,” says
Wickman, a frequent VF contributor
and author.

Kathryn JOYCE
“BAD FAITH,” P. 86

Joyce is an investigative journalist,
editor, and author who first wrote about
the Catholic right for VF in 2020. Back
then, it was an overlooked part of
American Christian nationalism that
presaged the Church’s impending
civil war. “In 2024, the story has gotten
significantly weirder,” she says.
20

VA N I T Y FA I R

James REGINATO
“A HOUSE DIVIDED,” P. 98

“Tim Mellon has suddenly emerged
as the most consequential mega-donor
of this election cycle,” says VF
writer-at-large Reginato, who talked to
Mellon’s family and friends to learn
more about the little-known member
of the old money dynasty.

Mikhail ZYGAR
“PARTY PLANNING,” P. 44

Zygar was the founding editor in chief of
Russia’s only independent TV channel,
TV Rain (now in exile), and has authored
three books on the country. Since
relocating to New York in 2023, he is a
visiting professor at Princeton University
and writes “The Last Pioneer,”
a newsletter about the Kremlin.
OCTOBER 2024

K I M : N ATA L I A R E A D - H A R B E R . M C A M I S : C O U R T E S Y O F R YA N M C A M I S . W I C K M A N : M A R C G O L D B E R G .
J OY C E : J O S H W O O L . R E G I N AT O : C O U R T E S Y O F J A M E S R E G I N AT O . Z YG A R : C O U R T E S Y O F M I K H A I L Z YG A R .

Sebastian KIM

Dress by Chloé;
boots by Aeyde.
Throughout:
hair products by
Kérastase Paris;
makeup products by
Victoria Beckham
Beauty; nail
enamel by Chanel
Le Vernis. Styled
by Mindy Le Brock.

22

VA N I T Y FA I R

I ES
VA N I TA S VA N I TAT U M

PAGE 26

A PINT-SIZE
PRADA PURSE
PAGE 30

WIT & KNITS:
NORA EPHRON–
INSPIRED STYLE
PAGE 38

HOUSE PORN
WITH A
LITERARY TWIST

MAISY STELLA

knows how to think
outside the box
By Anthony Breznican
Photographs by
Daria Kobayashi Ritch

Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid
because her musician parents didn’t want
her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in
and tuning out. So the girls used their
imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake
cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a
baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap
opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my
husband!’ We would do that for hours. That
was our entertainment.” Only later, when
the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s
children on the country music drama
Nashville, did their mother and father relent.
“We bought a TV the day that me and my
sister got on TV.”
Now 20, Stella has broken through as the
wry lead of the irresistible coming-of-age
comedy My Old Ass, which Amazon MGM
OCTOBER 2024

23

Vanities / Opening Act

Clothing by Ferragamo;
shoes by Christian Louboutin;
socks by Calzedonia.

to appreciate the people in her life before
they’re gone. Some of it’s more practical, like
“Wear your retainer!”
Stella was born in Ontario and essentially
grew up on camera during six seasons on
Nashville, which she joined at the age of
eight. The show featured many songs she
wrote with her sister and propelled their
YouTube channel to around 720,000 subscribers. In the years since, Stella has become
an old hand at the ups and downs of Hollywood, making her reluctant to get too excited
for a project that might fall apart or not go
her way. When she read writer-director
Megan Park’s script for My Old Ass, however,
she felt “instant anxiety” at the idea of not
getting the role, especially since she’d heard
“10,000 girls” auditioned for it. “I knew how
bad I wanted it, and I knew how right it
felt,” Stella says. “So I just went full-on. I have
a shitty tuna-can boat, just like Elliott, and
I sent the producers a video of me giving
a tour of my boat.”
IN THE MOVIE, Elliott has only ever fallen for
other girls, but her unexpected yearning
for a local guy—someone her older self warns
her to stay away from no matter what—
complicates her sense of identity, leading to
hilarious, genre-tweaking conversations with
her best friends (as well as her future self )
about who she is and what she really wants.
“I know so many people that have had such
similar experiences,” Stella says. “I think it’s
much less common to be sure of what you
want. I mean, I’ve always been queer. I’m in
a queer relationship. But I’ve always been
open, and I’ve never been explicitly one
thing. I’ve been given the space and the room
to not put a label on myself.”
Now that the buzz around My Old Ass has
raised her profile in Hollywood, Stella is
plotting her next moves. “I just want to keep
making movies and I want to keep making
art and I want to keep figuring my shit out,”
she says. “I’m in a position right now where
I’m being considered for things, which is
earth-shattering to me.” She’s already shot a
new film, the surreal drama Flowervale Street,
with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor
playing her parents. “They were truly beyond
lovely, both of them,” she says. “Ewan is
the coolest that’s ever lived, and Annie has
such a gentle power about her that I was so
moved by.” Stella will be the one wowing
newcomers some day. It’s the whole point
of My Old Ass: She’s got a future. 

24

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

H A I R , S Y LV I A W H E E L E R ; M A K E U P , K A R O K A N G A S ; M A N I C U R E , S T E P H A N I E S T O N E ; TA I LO R , TAT YA N A C A S S A N E L L I .
P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y P O R T F O L I O O N E . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

Studios bought after it beguiled audiences at
the Sundance Film Festival early this year.
The movie, in theaters September 13, is
about a teenage girl named Elliott who’s
eager to grow up and get away from her
family’s lake-town cranberry farm—until
a dose of especially potent psychedelic
shrooms triggers a ghost-of-Christmasfuture-style visit from her 39-year-old self,
played by Aubrey Plaza. Older Elliott
comes bearing wisdom and warnings about
regrets to come. Most of it involves telling
younger Elliott how to avoid heartbreaks and

* A part of me

Vanities / The Gallery

Fashion

PLATE
Redolent of fine china, this petite
Prada handbag features textured
florals—little reliefs made in
spazzolato (brushed) calfskin
leather—that mimic the effect
of hand-painted porcelain.
Inspired by delicate tableware,
the dainty hard-bodied bag
is a true pocketbook: Keys or
a tube of lipstick will fit, a phone
not so much. No need for any
of that, because it’s pretty
enough for the curio cabinet.
—Daisy Shaw-Ellis

Photograph by

Prada bag,
$4,200.
(prada.com)

26

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

S E T D E S I G N , J I L L N I C H O L L S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

VANESSA GRANDA

Vanities / Trending
2

BEWITCHED

4

1. Hourglass Cosmetics
liquid blush in Craft, $36.
(hourglasscosmetics.com)
2.6Pandora bracelet,
$5,550. (pandora.net)
3.6Loro Piana pants,
$1,600. (loropiana.com)
4.6Aesop Eleos hand
balm, $33. (aesop.com)
5.6God’s True Cashmere
shirt, $2,490. (godstrue
cashmere.com) 6.6Miu
Miu shoes, $1,250.
(miumiu.com) 7.6The Row

3

1

5

7
9
8

9

Meet CUTE

Met Sally..., featured in the monograph Nora Ephron at
the Movies by Ilana Kaplan.
30

VA N I T Y FA I R

11

12

13

19

OCTOBER 2024

W H E N H A R R Y M E T S A L LY … : F R O M N O R A E P H R O N AT T H E M O V I E S / E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N / C O U R T E S Y O F T H E P U B L I S H E R .
BOOK COVER: COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHER . ALL OTHERS: COURTESY OF THE BRANDS.

10

From When Harry Met Sally…
to You’ve Got Mail, NORA EPHRON’s
singular style championed
the feminist perspective in
witty banter and chunky knits.
Nora Ephron at the Movies
(Abrams) explores her life, legacy,
and reinvention of the rom-com

*Source: IQVIA Spain Market TAM October 2023.

Vanities / Books

Six Pack
Gripping inquiries into all
aspects of humanity
AND THE ROOTS
OF RHYTHM
REMAIN
Producer Joe Boyd
(Nick Drake, R.E.M.)
follows roving threads
of sound—brass in
Istanbul, Cuban Jam Sessions,
Congolese rumba—and the artists
they influenced, from Bob Marley
to David Byrne. (Ze Books)
ABORTION
Since the fall of Roe,
Jessica Valenti has
tracked the state
of reproductive rights
from local bans to
ballot measures;
ahead of a pivotal election, she
lays out the landscape, presenting
a cogent case that bodily
autonomy wins votes. (Crown)

Past PERFECT
A new collection of photography presents a glittering jet set
but serves, too, as a moving meditation on the passage of time
IN THE EARLY 1980s, Vanity Fair, after a
47-year hiatus, was planning to relaunch.
To help fill the pages, art director Bea Feitler
turned to a trusted protégé: a 26-year-old
photographer with a hungry eye and a devilish grin. His name was Jonathan Becker.
Recently he’d been driving a cab. To scrape
by, he’d relied on free dinners from his pal
Elaine Kaufman, proprietor of the legendary
Upper East Side boîte Elaine’s. Even so, Feitler
saw promise in “the kid,” as she called him.
And in 1983, when VF took flight, Becker was
on board. His beat became New York’s corridors of power, its literary circles, its socialites
and swans. Before long he’d be jetting off to
Buenos Aires and Cap d’Antibes, applying
the wisdom he’d gleaned from mentors like
Brassaï, Jean-Paul Goude, and Slim Aarons.
Always stylish and a devotee of fine
design, Becker would become a denizen of
the beau monde he photographed. Some

32

VA N I T Y FA I R

40 years on, he continues to make masterly
portraits, collaborating with his subjects
to achieve, as he puts it, “an almost intimate
mutual understanding.”
This month Phaidon publishes Jonathan
Becker: Lost Time, edited by Mark Holborn.
(A companion exhibition runs at the Katonah
Museum of Art through January.) The book,
a photo memoir of Becker’s charmed life and
work, is a shrewdly paced gallery of royals,
rogues, and statesmen; artists and news
makers; pruned gardens and perfect interiors;
and, above all, individuals of impeccable
taste. Holborn’s poignant juxtapositions and
time shifts reinforce the sublime melancholy
of the passage of seasons, years, decades.
Becker’s lens is a Proustian hourglass
in which each grain is a gleam of light that
flashes, then lingers, then fades. Indeed,
Lost Time seems to rescue memory itself
—david friend
from oblivion.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

J O N AT H A N B E C K E R

AN IMAGE
OF MY NAME
ENTERS AMERICA
From the expansive
mind of novelist, poet,
and critic Lucy Ives,
stylish, sweeping
essays that consider the lure of
period rooms, Alanis Morissette,
Heidegger, and more. (Graywolf)
NO ROAD
LEADING BACK
VF contributor Chris
Heath traces the
harrowing accounts
of 12 Jewish prisoners
who escaped the
Holocaust killing site at Ponar,
Lithuania—as well as those of
bystanders—in this investigation
of truth and silence. (Schocken)
RECOGNIZING
THE STRANGER
This succinct and
thorough study of
humanism and turning
points collects novelist
Isabella Hammad’s
Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture
on Palestine, delivered in September
2023, and a substantial afterword
written this year. (Black Cat)
BY THE FIRE
WE CARRY
Rebecca Nagle, a
Cherokee journalist,
examines the thorny
history of a murder
case that ballooned
into a question of tribal land
rights in a narrative as propulsive
and affecting as it is infuriating.
(Harper) —Keziah Weir

OCTOBER 2024

BECKER: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLISHER . ALL OTHER BOOK COVERS: COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHERS.

Clockwise from top left:
Fran Lebowitz at the 2000 VF
Oscar Party; Brooke de
Ocampo, 2005; Jonathan
Becker’s self-portrait, 1977;
Lost Time; Ernest Hemingway’s
Idaho home, 2011.

Simon Porte Jacquemus

Jean Paul Gaultier

Pat McGrath

Honey Dijon

Victoria Beckham

Raul Lopez

Duffy

V I CTO RI A BEC K HA M : DA N JAC KSON . RAUL LOP E Z: A NDY M A RT IN E Z.
JE A N PAUL GAU LT IE R : PE T ER L I ND BE RG H. DUF FY: G L EN LUC HFO RD.

Are you ready for the runway?

FORCES
OF FASHION
OCTOBER 16, 2024

NEW YORK CITY

F O R TICKETS, VISIT W W W. VOGU E F OR C E SOF FA SH I O N . C O M/ N Y C

Vanities / My Stuff
1

2
4

3

5

Haute GOSSIP
LAINEY LUI, creator of celebrity news
devotional Lainey Gossip, swears by
espresso martinis and her mom’s vintage
Rolexes while keeping tabs on the A-list
Style File

Fried Rice
T-shirt (6), Frapbois
jeans. BELOVED BRAND:
Ganni. GO-TO SHOE: The
Mrs. Maisel Midheel by the
Office of Angela Scott (3).
EARRINGS: Maria Tash
Handcuff in white gold.
WRIST CANDY: Rolexes from
my mother’s vault. STYLE
ICONS: Michelle Yeoh and
Rina Sawayama.
DAILY UNIFORM:

6



Self-care

Dermalogica
Special Cleansing Gel (2).
SERUM: SkincCuticals C E
Ferulic (10). MOISTURIZERS:
Rhode Barrier Restore cream
during the day and Shiseido
Vital Perfection Uplifting
and Firming Cream Enriched
at night (9). MAKEUP
ROUTINE: Shiseido Sports BB
cream, Dior Forever Skin
Correct concealer (11),
Sephora Collection Charged
Up liquid eye shadow,
Sunnies Face Fluffmatte
lipstick, and Nature
Republic Essential lip balm.
HAIR CARE: RYO Damage
Care & Nourishing shampoo
and conditioner and a Wet
Brush. PERFUME: Maison

Margiela Replica Matcha
Meditation (1). WORKOUT:
Golf (12) wearing Piretti.


At Home

An air
fryer. THE UNEXPECTED: Our
marital annual golf trophy.
HOUSEPLANTS: Money trees
(8). DINNERWARE: Denby
pasta bowls are my favorite
(4). ART: A commissioned
portrait of Beyoncé.
FURRY FRIENDS: Two beagles,
Barney and Elvis.
RECENT ADDITION:

FACE WASH:

7
8

9

10

12

11

34

VA N I T Y FA I R



For Pleasure

How to End a Love
Story by Yulin Kuang (7).
WATCHING: Chinese and
Korean dramas. LISTENING
TO: Beyoncé and Raye.
INSPIRED BY: Chinese beauty
influencers on TikTok.
READING:



The Menu

Hot water.
An
espresso martini (5).
POWER SNACK: Jack Link’s
beef jerky. HOME-COOKED
SPECIALTY: Beef and tomato
stewy rice, Hong Kong
diner–style. TAKE-OUT ORDER:
Ravioli du Dauphiné from
Cafe Renée in Toronto.

MORNING CUP:

INDULGENT BEVERAGE:

OCTOBER 2024

L U I : C O L I N G A U D E T. 5 : T R I O C E A N / G E T T Y I M A G E S . 7 : C O U R T E S Y O F AV O N B O O K S . 8 : M A R T I N C H R I S T O P H E R /A L A M Y.
1 2 : G E O R G E H OY N I N G E N - H U E N E / C O N D É N A S T A R C H I V E . A L L O T H E R S : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B R A N D S .



Vanities / Books & Totes

Clutch LIT

MODEL HOME
In Rivers Solomon’s haunting
drama, Ezri and their sisters return
to their parents’ house in the
gated Dallas community where
they were the only Black family
and where an agonizing truth
about the past awaits. (MCD)

A REASON TO
SEE YOU AGAIN
From Jami Attenberg, doyen
of absorbing family excavations,
37 years in the life of the
Cohens: a closeted patriarch,
his foundering widow, their
daughters, poles apart. (Ecco)

REJECTION
Obsessively readable, acerbic,
Foster Wallace–inflected: In seven
linked stories, Tony Tulathimutte’s
characters—feminist incel,
zealous start-up guy, spurned
woman, rejected author—
fail to connect. (William Morrow)

INTERMEZZO
A chess prodigy in his early 20s
and his brother, a 30-something
lawyer, navigate various
relationships (their own thorny
one, plus complicated
romances) in Sally Rooney’s
compelling latest. (FSG)

Bottega Veneta
Liberta bag, $4,200.
(bottegaveneta.com)

The Row
mini Devon bag,
$3,900. (therow.com)

Khaite
The Cate handbag,
$4,800. (khaite.com)

Chanel
vanity case, $5,500.
(select Chanel boutiques)

36

VA N I T Y FA I R

PHOTOGRAPH BY

JOSEPHINE SCHIELE

ST YLING, KRIS JENSEN.

Style and substance abound in this selection
of smart bags and great fiction—befitting the
season, some are scary, but all are scary good

THE MIGHTY RED
Louise Erdrich sets her rich saga
against the backdrop of the
2008 economic crash in North
Dakota, where the teenage
daughter of a woman trucker is
set to marry a farming heir while
wooed by another man. (Harper)

IN THE DISTANCE
Published in paperback by the
indie Coffee House Press in 2017,
Hernan Diaz’s best in show
of an underdog debut—a surreal
Western about a Swede’s
adventures—appears in hardcover
for the first time. (Riverhead)

BLOOD TEST
In an Ohio town beset by opioids,
an insurance salesman learns that
he’s genetically predisposed
to violent crime—and, to hilarious
effect, finds himself barreling down
a deadly path in Charles Baxter’s
tender tale. (Pantheon)

THE EMPUSIUM
Olga Tokarczuk’s “Health Resort
Horror Story” finds a young
tuberculosis sufferer seeking
treatment in the Silesian mountains,
where questions of gender,
class, and mysterious murders
arise. (Riverhead) —Keziah Weir

Ferragamo
Fiamma crossbody bag,
$2,500. (ferragamo.com)

Fendi
Peekaboo soft handbag,
$6,500. (fendi.com)

Miu Miu
Arcadie bag, $3,050.
(miumiu.com)

Chloé
Bracelet bag,
$2,850. (chloe.com)
OCTOBER 2024

37

Narrative ARCH
In a new architecture
monograph, glossy brownstone
renovations and modern
masterpieces come alive through
an unusual inhabitant:
flash fiction By Keziah Weir
WHEN ARCHITECT ELIZABETH Roberts has a
creative block, it’s usually just a sign she hasn’t
collected enough information yet. For the
California transplant made famous by her
airy overhauls of New York town houses
(Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard’s
Park Slope brownstone and Athena Calde­
rone’s Cobble Hill Greek Revival among
them), this might mean the neighborhood’s
history, or how the rising sun hits a building.
Such was the case, too, when the owners of
a plot sprawling over a Catskills hilltop invited
her to submit a proposal. The possibilities
initially proved stifling; the home, she says,
“could be anything.” But in considering
the space, “I realized that these stacked stone
walls all over the property told me where
the house wanted to be.” They served not
only as a guide but also as the building’s
structure and a crucial design element. “After
hundreds of years, and understanding
the grade and the light and the views, these
farmers nailed it.”

38

VA N I T Y FA I R

One of Elizabeth Roberts’s
revamped Brooklyn
brownstones; a vintage
postcard from a Roscoe,
New York, lake; the living
room of the Roscoe
mountain house—stacked
stones inside and out.

Roberts has captured this layered
process in her first monograph, Collected Stories (Monacelli), which she
cowrote with Alanna Stang and which
chronicles projects ranging from that
mountain house to Rachel Comey’s
SoHo flagship. “I love doing bright,
open, glassy gorgeous things beside
dusty, ornate things,” she says—a
natural amalgamation, perhaps, of
the “wide­open spaces” of her Marin
County childhood and the NYC
“grit and history” that won her adult
heart. Likewise, in the book, sleek
images of a travertine­clad bathroom,
preserved crown moldings, and
her signature white walls (Benjamin
Moore’s mellow Cloud White in pristine
historic restorations and new builds; Chantilly
Lace to brighten a basement apartment
or the walls of her own architecture firm) live
alongside loose sketches and ephemera:
a vintage postcard from an upstate lake, a
Brooklyn map circa 1766.
But what breathed life into the book, for
Roberts, was the infusion of flash fiction by
Christine Coulson, the veteran of more than
25 years of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
whose Metropolitan Stories (2019)
imagined sentient artworks
and One Woman Show (2023)
described a human life through
museum wall labels. Coulson
may share Roberts’s appreciation
for white space—at least in her
windowless writing studio, lit by
skylights—but their methods are
practically inverse. Coulson asked
Roberts to send photos sans context, free­
associating pithy scenes, surreal and moving:
the end of a relationship from an image of a
historic bell, teens “fencing” upstairs prompt­
ed by a lofty entrance hall. “The stone had
pushed itself up through the floor,” Coulson
writes in response to the huge marble kitchen
island of an Italianate town house, “like a
gentle beast offering the ridge of its back for
utilitarian use.” (She has a wry eye for human
peculiarities: “It’s interesting, our desire to
move giant pieces of earth and rock into our
homes, at great expense.”)
The vignettes “are a metaphor for what
architects have to do all the time,” Coulson
says. “They build these beautiful places
and then they have to let people live in them.
In some ways, these stories are me living
in Elizabeth’s work.” 
OCTOBER 2024

F LO T O + WA R N E R .

Vanities / Architecture

LEAKS
HAPPEN.
ODOR
SHOULDN’T.
New FreshSense™ system
locks in odor and wetness from
bladder leaks—giving you up to
100% fresh protection.

Vanities / Industry City

Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech
universe trying to take on Silicon Valley—from
El Segundo By Zoë Bernard

F

FOR MORE THAN two years, in the small,
unassuming beach town of El Segundo,
California, dozens of young men have
gathered with a singular mission: to save
America. They will do this, they say, by
building the next generation of great
tech companies. They call what they are
building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing
code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these
men have a taste for the tangible: They

40

VA N I T Y FA I R

spend their workdays toiling in labs
and manufacturing lines, their nights
sleeping on couches and bunk beds.
Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building
nuclear reactors and military weaponry
designed to fight Russia and China.
Out in El Segundo, where the
saltwater-tinged air thrums with steady
plane traffic and oil refineries sweep
across the shoreline, these founders
see themselves as faithful foot soldiers
of American industry as well as
bold incubators upending Silicon Valley’s status quo.
“We’re pollinating different ideas,”
Augustus Doricko, the founder and
CEO of the cloud-seeding company
Rainmaker, which raised $6.3 million
from venture capitalists in May, tells me.
“We’re sick of nihilism and goofy
software products.” Behind him, on
Rainmaker’s office wall, hangs an
American flag the size of a dumpster.

to Los Angeles,
El Segundo is a factory town with a
laid-back temperament. The city is home
to fewer than 20,000 people and has
deep manufacturing roots: Nearly three
quarters of its land is dedicated to
industrial uses, including petroleum
refineries, power plants, and aerospace
manufacturers. It is imbued with Californian nostalgia. Patrons sip beer on bar
patios alongside their dogs. Below
billowing steam towers, the downtown
streets are flanked with retro diners and
vintage record shops.
The founders in El Segundo have
settled on an expansive terrain from
which to express sentiments that might
chafe progressive sensibilities. They
have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast
cars, tobacco products, and their lord
and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue-collar, often wearing blue

DESPITE ITS PROXIMITY

OCTOBER 2024

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y K H O A T R A N . D R O N E : C O U R T E S Y O F N E R O S .
H E L I O S : CO U R T E S Y O F P I CO G R I D. AL L O T H E R S : G E T T Y I MAG E S .

Boys and THEIR TOYS

Opposite is a life-size poster of Jesus
Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench
press below. “Right now,” he adds,
“Gundo is for hard tech what Florence
was for art during the Renaissance.”
For decades, cities across America
have aspired to assume Silicon Valley’s
mantle as the next technological hotbed.
It was rumored for a short while that
the entrepreneurial epicenter had shifted to Austin and then Miami. When it
comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places,
fueled by venture capitalists, who
have invested more than $100 billion in
defense tech companies since 2021,
many of which are located in El Segundo.
But the founders are adamant that
their city, despite its investment windfall,
is not Silicon Valley’s next act. In fact, it
is ideologically opposed to what they
consider the soft and comfortable world
of the Bay Area and the lightweight
commodities it now largely produces:
corporate subscription software and
trivial consumer applications.
“This is not San Francisco lite or
San Francisco plus a little bit of hardware,” says Zane Mountcastle, CEO of
the defense technology company
Picogrid. “It’s a different world from
San Francisco, and it has a completely
different mindset.”

HERE
TO SLAY

Vanities / Industry City
jeans, clean leather work boots, and
dark T-shirts with company emblems
embroidered on their breast pocket.
At the offices of the nuclear energy
company Valar Atomics, where I was
invited to attend a Bible study, Bibles
were propped up on desks beside
laptops. Valar Atomics’ head of business operations, Elijah Froh, who is
26 years old and has the straightforward self-assurance of a car salesman,
offered me a glass of raw milk, increasingly the drink of choice in many
conservative circles. Then he led our
small group in prayer and read aloud a
passage from Hebrews.
Later, Froh invited me into Valar
Atomics’ cigar lounge, where actual
cigars can’t be smoked due to a permitting issue with the building. We sat in
enormous leather armchairs beside a
small table stacked with cigars sealed in
Ziploc bags. On the wall hung four large
classical paintings depicting Columbus
discovering America, the pilgrims
arriving on the Mayflower, the signing of
the Declaration of Independence, and
the Constitutional Convention. Froh
told me that God needed businessmen
just as much as he needed missionaries,
and that God had put him on this earth
to build a nuclear energy company.
During the three days that I visited
companies in The Gundo, I saw three
women and spoke to one: the wife of
an employee at Valar Atomics who
attended the Bible study along with
her two young children. She had
moved to a house near the beach with
her husband three weeks earlier.
When I asked if she was meeting many
nice people, she laughed and said that
she was too busy taking care of her
children to leave the house.
Later, I asked a founder in The Gundo
why he thought there were so few
women. “You’re missing the point,” he
told me, claiming that this line of inquiry

is “a non-thing. It muddies the story,
and it distracts from our core mission of
trying to save the West.”
company in The
Gundo has a huge American flag in its
office, but the biggest—an object of
envy among all the Gundo founders—
is on the wall of Olaf Hichwa and Soren
Monroe-Anderson’s 15,000-squarefoot drone factory, Neros. Hichwa is a
wide-eyed, toothy 22-year-old from the
DC area. In May Neros raised nearly $11
million. In the Neros factory, Hichwa
showcased his company’s product: a
wickedly fast drone that he maneuvered
to terrifying heights above my head. Later, he showed me a video of Ukrainian
soldiers detonating a bomb, latched to a
Neros drone, on Russian artillery.
The war in Ukraine has both legitimized and popularized the efforts of
many founders in the defense tech
industry, especially Palmer Luckey, the
founder of Anduril. The Gundo founders
speak of Luckey often and reverentially. In 2017, Luckey left Facebook. He has
said he was fired for supporting Donald
Trump. (Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
denied that politics was a factor in Luckey’s departure.) Today, he is vindicated:
His company has been awarded multiple
lucrative military contracts. This year it
is seeking a $12.5 billion valuation.
Politically, Luckey is hardly a rarity.
In recent weeks many of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists
have rallied behind the former president, including Marc Andreessen and
Ben Horowitz, Sequoia partner Shaun
Maguire, and All-In podcast hosts
David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya.
(Sacks and Palihapitiya were reportedly both instrumental in helping Trump
pick JD Vance, who had a stint in venture capital, as his running mate.) It is
felt that Trump is an essential player in
Silicon Valley’s investments in defense

JUST ABOUT EVERY

“We’re sick of NIHILISM AND GOOFY
SOFTWARE PRODUCTS.... Right now,
Gundo is for hard tech what Florence was for
art during the Renaissance.”
42

VA N I T Y FA I R

tech. But during my conversations in El
Segundo, Trump came up only twice.
When I asked Froh if he supported
Trump in the 2020 election, he told me
he couldn’t remember who he voted for.
Fil Aronshtein, the voluble and charismatic founder and CEO of Dirac—an
“anti-software software company” that
generates assembly instructions for
industrial manufacturers—told me that
Trump was early to the idea that China
would someday figure as the United
States’ greatest threat.
Like many of the Gundo founders, the
threat of the “Great Red Dragon” weighs
heavy on Aronshtein’s mind. “China
wants to see the West and our way of
life and democracy collapse,” he says.
The El Segundo founders live in a world
in which military might is a moral obligation rather than a national necessity.
“Having an adversary is very interesting,” says Aronshtein. “Because it gets
people to work harder.”
Sometimes it seems that the El
Segundo founders are acting out a studied caricature of nostalgic Americana,
especially on X. At least some part of the
scene is pure performance. “It’s totally
intentional. You have to make it cool,”
says Cameron Schiller, the cofounder
and CEO of the aerospace manufacturer
Rangeview. “We’re trying to bring more
young people into manufacturing.”
Schiller is tall and lean, with the good
looks of a Hollister model. He tricked
out his office with a set of concert speakers, purple and orange mood lighting, a
jet engine, and a race car simulator.
The founders occasionally have private discussions about whether they are
posting too much on X. “We don’t want
this to be a fad,” says Aronshtein. When
I tell Isaiah Taylor, the 25-year-old founder of Valar Atomics, that the Gundo
scene seems a little contrived, he shrugs.
“Maybe we just really like America,”
he says. In The Gundo, patriotism is
theatrical, but it is not theater. “For me,
being patriotic is like asking me if I love
my mom. I don’t know why we in the US
have such a hard time with that.” The
tobacco products, the bench-pressing,
the jumbo-size American flags, the
devotion to God and country, all would
be happening, he tells me, “whether or
not there’s a spotlight on us.” 
OCTOBER 2024

TELLURIDE

TORONTO

CANNES

CANNES

CANNES

NEW YORK

LONDON

FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION

INTL FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION

FILM FESTIVAL

FILM FESTIVAL

FILM FESTIVAL

FILM FESTIVAL
SPOTLIGHT SELECTION

FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION

WINNER

WINNER

WINNER

JURY PRIZE

BEST ACTRESS

BEST SOUNDTRACK

“UNLIKE ANYTHING WE HAVE EVER SEEN.”
“BRACINGLY
ORIGINAL.”

“FEW FLEXES
COME BIGGER.”

“KARLA SOFÍA GASCÓN

“ZOE SALDAÑA
BRINGS A BURNING

ELECTRIFIES.”

INTENSITY.”

“SELENA GOMEZ

SPARKING

“A MARVEL.”

IS
ON ALL CYLINDERS.”

“A MIRACULOUS
MOVIE.”

“AN

ADRENALINE
SHOT.”

“A GORGEOUS MUSICAL EPIC
FROM FRENCH MAESTRO JACQUES AUDIARD.”
KARLA SOFIA

ZOE

SELENA

GASCON

SALDAÑA

GOMEZ

A FILM BY JACQUES AUDIARD
WITH

ADRIANA PAZ MARK IVANIR EDGAR RAMIREZ

IN SELECT THEATERS NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 13
NETFLIX PRESENTS WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS, PAGE 114 AND SAINT LAURENT PRODUCTIONS BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO PRESENT ORIGINAL SCORE & SONGS CLÉMENT DUCOL AND CAMILLE SCREENPLAY JACQUES AUDIARD BASED ON THE OPERA LIBRETTO “EMILIA PEREZ”, FREELY ADAPTED FROM THE NOVEL “ÉCOUTE” BY BORIS RAZON (STOCK) CHOREOGRAPHY DAMIEN JALET PHOTOGRAPHY PAUL GUILHAUME, AFC
EDITING JULIETTE WELFLING ARTISTIC DIRECTION AND COSTUME DESIGN VIRGINIE MONTEL SET DESIGN EMMANUELLE DUPLAY MUSICAL SUPERVISION PIERRE-MARIE DRU RE-RECORDING MIXER CYRIL HOLTZ CASTING CARLA HOOL, CSA AND CHRISTEL BARAS ASSISTANT DIRECTOR JEAN-BAPTISTE POUILLOUX LINE PRODUCER PAULINE LAMY COSTUMES ARTISTIC DIRECTION SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO
A WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS PAGE 114 PATHÉ FRANCE 2 CINÉMA AND SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH LIBRARY PICTURES INTERNATIONAL LOGICAL CONTENT VENTURES LES FILMS DU FLEUVE THE VETERANS - A GOODFELLAS COMPANY WITH THE SUPPORT OF LE CENTRE NATIONAL DU CINÉMA ET DE L’IMAGE ANIMÉE
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Vanities / True Bromance

Party PLANNING
Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he’s got big ideas
about a new world order. Think Yalta—on Fiji By Mikhail Zygar

I

which moment in US
history former president Donald
Trump imagines when he says, “Make
America great again.” He has never
given a definitive answer in any speech
or interview. But I know exactly which
moment Vladimir Putin imagines in
his own vision for Russian greatness.
It is February 1945, when Joseph Stalin,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston
Churchill divided the world in Crimea.
Three months remained before the
surrender of Nazi Germany, but it was
clear the Allies were winning. To determine what the world would look like
after the defeat of the Third Reich, the
Soviet premier, US president, and British prime minister went to the city of
Yalta, a resort area on the Black Sea.
Stalin achieved everything he wanted:
He convinced his then allies that he
should have his own “sphere of influence,” which included all of Eastern
Europe—Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria,
Romania, and what were then Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The leaders
also devised the United Nations Security
Council, on which they secured permanent seats for their countries.
This structure existed for the next
45 years, de facto collapsing along with
the Soviet Union. Putin once called the
breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th
century.” Throughout his presidency
Putin has said the world needs a “new

I DON’T KNOW

44

VA N I T Y FA I R

Yalta.” If the old world order no longer
works, a new one must be invented.
He began talking about this in 2007
during his famous Munich speech, in
which he challenged the US-dominated
unipolar world order for the first time,
and has repeated the proposal many
times since, including in his speech at
the UN in 2015, in Davos in 2021, and in
his addresses to the Russian parliament
almost every year. But for a new Yalta,
Putin needs suitable partners, including
a US president who would agree to
divide the world with him.
Since Soviet times there has been a
stereotype in the Kremlin: It is easier
to negotiate with Republicans than
with Democrats. This stems from the
détente between the USSR and the US
during the administrations of Richard
Nixon and Gerald Ford; Jimmy Carter,
the thinking goes, paid too much
attention to human rights. Kremlin officials still believe that Republicans
are constructive partners while Democrats are hypocrites posing as saints.
At first Putin considered George
W. Bush a suitable partner—after all,
Bush even “looked the man in his
eye” and “was able to get a sense of
his soul.” But after 2004, when the
US supported the Orange Revolution
in Ukraine and other “color revolutions” in the former USSR, Putin began
to fear that Bush wanted to overthrow
him too. Moreover, the Kremlin sincerely believed that Bush wanted
to become the military dictator of the
world. Putin was astonished when,
after Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s ratings
plummeted and he did not cling to
power, did not attempt to change the
Constitution, did not seek a third
term—the things Putin himself would
be ready to do for power.
Putin never trusted Barack Obama.
He always believed that when American
politicians talked about values, it was
all hypocrisy, masking some cunning,

inevitably anti-Russian plans. In 2013
Putin watched the (fictional) series
House of Cards and took it as proof that
he was right. All his expectations and
fears were confirmed: Indeed, American
politicians were cynical, cruel, and
deceitful. He just needed to wait for the
right person to come to power.
Back in 2011 and 2012 Putin believed
that the mass protests against his third
term were organized and funded by
the State Department under Hillary
Clinton. Therefore, in 2016, he had no
doubts. He saw the Democratic presidential candidate as a personal enemy.
From the moment Trump was
elected, the word Yalta became one of
the most popular among Kremlin officials. They were confident Trump
was the right person to agree to such a
spectacle. This did not mean Russian
authorities considered Trump their
puppet—the Kremlin never had any
means to influence him. Putin simply
believed Trump was morally close and
understandable to him: a fellow cynic
who also thought that money solved
everything. But the scandal over
Russian interference in US elections
ruined all these plans. No rapprochement occurred. Aside from a few brief
meetings during global summits, Putin
and Trump held only one full-fledged
negotiation—in Helsinki in 2018.
But now the Kremlin believes that if
Trump wins reelection in November,
everything will be different. It hopes he
will no longer pay attention to the liberal
media or the criticism of the Democrats.
Furthermore, the Kremlin is certain
Trump is ready (at least rhetorically) to

The Kremlin
harbors ANOTHER
DREAM, one it sees
as the ultimate
revenge for the Cold
War DEFEAT AND
THE COLLAPSE

of the USSR.

Putin is ready to be content with the
role of the third partner, a kind of
modern-day Churchill. Of course, he
wants to secure his place on the global
board of directors that is the UN
Security Council and expects to be
allotted his sphere of influence: the
countries of the former Soviet Union.
While fantasizing about the future
of the US under Trump, the Kremlin
harbors another dream. It sees it as the
ultimate revenge for the Cold War
defeat and the fall of the USSR. Putin’s
current advisers are confident the US
will eventually disintegrate, breaking
into several pieces like the Soviet Union
ultimately did. This would require the
right conditions and a leader who could
plunge the country into chaos. You
might be surprised, but the nickname
used for Trump in the Kremlin is the
American Gorbachev.
For them, Mikhail Gorbachev was
not a democrat or a reformer. For former KGB officers, Gorbachev was a

demagogue and a narcissist who desperately wanted to please the audience
but had no plan of action—a president
whose policies were so chaotic that the
empire began to collapse, with different parts declaring their independence.
This is wishful thinking, but Putin’s
inner circle would like to believe Trump
could become just such a president.
Moreover, since American cinema
is an important source of information
and inspiration for Putin’s analysts, they
have already received the necessary
confirmation from Hollywood: Civil
War, starring Kirsten Dunst, is evidence
to them that the situation in the US is
worsening by the day. The disaster film
is treated as almost a prophecy. They
are therefore convinced they are on the
right track. Just a little more and Trump
will agree to a new Yalta. And then
the US will disintegrate and Russia will
win the new Cold War.
Vladimir Putin believes that his
dream is not so unattainable. 

AL L F RO M G E T T Y I MAG E S .

dismantle the old world order and claim
credit for creating a new one.
The fantasies of Kremlin strategists
have developed like this: A new Yalta
Conference with Putin and Trump
might not necessarily take place in
Crimea. For greater symbolism, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, roughly
equidistant from Russia and the US,
would be more suitable. My sources in
Moscow, who wish to remain anonymous for security reasons, suggest that
such a summit could look good on Fiji.
Putin’s entourage understands that
despite his ambitions, he is not like
Stalin in 1945, and today’s Russia is no
match for the Soviet Union. Therefore,
the dreams of the current Kremlin
inhabitants suggest that another participant in the new “Big Three” should be
China, represented by Xi Jinping. They
believe that the real Cold War is beginning between China and the US, so the
upcoming “Yalta: Fiji” should formulate
the rules of this confrontation. And

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M A R K

HARRIS

OCTOBER 2024

45

STRANGER Things
The Democrats’ short hot summer of “weird”
By Kase Wickman

T

election is
shaping up to be the weirdest in
history—just ask Democratic political
operatives. The party of “they go low,
we go high” has asterisked that slogan:
This year, they go low, we go side-eye.
Yes, the left’s latest talking point has
emerged, and it’s passive-aggressive
and petty as hell: Those Republicans
are straight-up weird.
On July 25 the campaign for
Kamala Harris, whose brand-new
THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL

46

VA N I T Y FA I R

presidential bid was off to a running
start, said the quiet thing loud in a
press release reacting to an interview
Republican nominee Donald Trump
gave to Fox News: “Trump is old and
quite weird.”
This was just one of the takeaways
in the release, titled “Statement on
a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News
Appearance,” pointing out Trump’s
erratic and flustered behavior and positing that “when Trump wasn’t lying,
he was making threats.” Another bullet
point read, “This guy shouldn’t be president ever again.”
Harris has been beating the weird
drum since at least 2018, when, CNN
reported, she was confronted with
the idea of debating Trump in a hypothetical 2020 run. During prep, she
pondered how she’d respond if Trump
reprised how he had behaved during
his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016,
stalking back and forth and lurking
over her shoulder.

Harris said she’d simply turn around
and ask him, “Why are you being
so weird?”
It’s now the Democrats’ jibe of
choice toward the opposition.
Jesse Lee, a former senior official in
the Obama-Biden White House, tells
Vanity Fair that the revived messaging
matches the candidate.
“There’s definitely more of an energetic and kind of feisty attitude,” Lee
says of Harris’s aura compared with
President Joe Biden’s. “I think it’s a
smart recognition that part of how
people vote, understandably, is kind
of personality and just overall headspace. They don’t know every single
detail of every single policy, but they
have a sense of people. When you look
at somebody like JD Vance…once the
weirdness gets into the bloodstream
and gets into the ether, everything sort
of starts to feed into it. You start to see it
everywhere you look. And that’s really
the most effective kind of narrative and
framing you could do, where it takes on
a life of its own and people start to see
things through that lens.”
Given the quick pivot the campaign
made to embracing internet culture like
Charli XCX’s anointment of “Kamala
IS brat,” it’s no surprise that the party
has shifted to mirror Harris’s take-noshit realness too. Harris’s campaign
and surrogates have effectively made
the entire GOP a meme, with creators
like Minnesota governor turned VP pick
Tim Walz gleefully lampooning the
right’s VIPs in the press.
“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away.
They want to be in your exam room,”
he said of Republicans during a recent
MSNBC interview. “That’s what it
comes down to. And don’t get sugarcoating this—these are weird ideas.”
It’s in the framing: Banning abortion
and limiting the messages doctors
can share with patients sound like insurmountable policy issues that little old
me wouldn’t be able to impact. These
guys being “in your exam room”? Weird.
“I’m telling you: These guys are
weird,” Walz posted alongside a clip of
his appearance.
According to Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki, a former Biden

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y PA M E L A WA N G . P H O T O S F R O M G E T T Y I M A G E S .

Vanities / The Campaign Trail

administration communications official, the message coming out of Walz’s
mouth is effective because it casts him
as the straight-man foil to the GOP’s
drunk uncle at the Thanksgiving table.
“He looks like a normal guy,” she
says of Walz. “Just the ability for someone like him to kind of endorse that
idea and say, like, ‘This is not normal
behavior. These are not normal people,’
really added fuel to that fire.”
It’s fitting that to compete against
a former reality TV star, the Democrats have invoked the villain edit,
highlighting the most outlandish and
indefensible moments of the other
side. In a New York Times op-ed in
March, Primary Colors author Joe Klein
argued that “Democrats need to stop
playing nice,” calling Democrats “the
party of identity politics, always sensitive to insensitivity, often to a fault.”
Well, look at Harris on top of the ticket:
No more Mr. Nice Guy. Though, as Lee
points out, “calling somebody weird,
saying they’re a little bit weird, is not
the meanest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m
not sure I would put that in the glovesare-off category.”
The “big weirdo” theory isn’t new
news—it’s a strategy based on decades
of bad vibes. Media Matters deputy
director of rapid response Andrew Lawrence has long held the opinion that
Republicans are “weird freaks” and has
peppered the phrase through his posts.
While he says he feels a little vindicated,
he also notes that “mockery is such an
effective tool against these people.”
Here’s Kentucky governor Andy
Beshear after Vance commented
it was “very weird” that Beshear’s first
job was at his dad’s law office and
that he “inherited” the governorship
from his father.
“What was weird was [Vance]
joking about racism today and then
talking about Diet Mountain Dew,”
Beshear told CNN. “Who drinks Diet
Mountain Dew?”
Then there’s Illinois governor J.B.
Pritzker side-eyeing Vance’s criticism
of Harris for having no biological children: “The vice presidential candidate
for the Republicans is insulting women
who own cats. He has a weird view of
America, honestly,” he said on CNN.

In the same way someone calling
your potato salad recipe “...interesting”
will forever live rent-free in your mind,
these little jabs make a person doubt
the basic humanity of those in the running to run the country.
Even Republican cheerleader
senator Mitch McConnell despairs over
his party’s increasing weirdness.
In 2022, explaining away the GOP’s
midterm election performance, he
basically said, what can you do? “My
view was do the best you can with the
cards you’re dealt,” he said of his fellow
Republicans. “Now, hopefully, in the
next cycle we’ll have quality candidates
everywhere and a better outcome.”
No one is immune, no matter their
political affiliation. Former president George W. Bush was ahead of the
curve in dubbing Trump and his cohort

something that happens that reinforces
that, it’s really hard to get away from it.
The Biden debate, going into it, [Republicans said] ‘He’s old, he’s old, he’s old,’
and then he looked old. You can’t get
that out of people’s heads.”
Again, it goes both ways: “And so
you have Democrats saying, ‘They’re
weird freaks, they’re weird freaks,
they’re weird freaks,’ and then old clips
of JD Vance come out talking about
cat ladies.... Donald Trump talking
about Hannibal Lecter like he’s a real
person. All of that stuff just kind of
builds on itself until it becomes a part
of the zeitgeist.”
Progressive voters are noticing
this linguistic shift, and they’re
on board. One person on X wondered
why “anyone at all” would vote
for a Republican. “Hateful, cruel,

The party of “THEY GO LOW,
WE GO HIGH” has asterisked that slogan:
This year, they go low, WE GO SIDE-EYE.
weirdos. Officially, he attended Trump’s
presidential inauguration in January
2017. Unofficially, he reportedly turned
to his companions as they left the dais
and said, “That was some weird shit.”
Internet culture isn’t the only thing
inspiring Harris’s campaign. Modern
dating parlance offers the idea of “the
ick,” defined by the Cambridge
Dictionary as “a sudden feeling that
you dislike someone or something or
are no longer attracted to someone
because of something they do.”
Once you get the ick, you can’t
un-ick. Ever. In dating, that might
mean losing someone’s number. In
politics, the Democrats are hoping that
voters’ ick will translate at the polls.
Of course, the unified theory of ick
(politics edition) is nonpartisan, as
evidenced by a severe case of the ick
following Biden’s presidential debate
performance.
As Lawrence points out, “If you’re
making an attack and then there’s

misogynistic and like, vibey in a weird
unsettling way,” they wrote.
Legacki underlines that while voters
may disagree with one another on
points at the policy level, there’s room
for unity under the banner of pettiness.
“It allows for everyone to have their
own preferences and beliefs, but it
underscores this idea that Republicans
have become so focused on telling
other people what they can and cannot
do in their own homes, that it’s overshadowed every other thing that they
claim to believe in,” she says.
Surely, now that we’re firmly in the
era of If You See Weird, Say Something, the Democratic faithful cheered
when Senator Ted Cruz popped up
on Fox News and said, “Kamala can’t
have my guns. She can’t have my
gasoline engine. And she sure as hell
can’t have my steaks and cheeseburgers.” Kamala Harris is not asking
for your gently used ground meats, sir.
Don’t be so weird. 
OCTOBER 2024

47

NOW
SELENA GOMEZ
is seriously in love—
and making the best
work of her career.
With the audacious
Emilia Pérez hitting
theaters and Only
Murders in the
Building returning
to TV, the actor,
singer, entrepreneur,
and mental health
advocate talks
about the climb
B Y Y O H A N A D E S TA
48

VA N I T Y FA I R

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
EMMA SUMMERTON
STYLED BY
DENA GIANNINI
OCTOBER 2024

49

To say it’s unmistakable would be putting it mildly: You try going
This moment totally tracks, Gomez’s friend and Emilia Pérez
incognito sounding like Selena Gomez.
costar Zoe Saldaña tells me later. “I don’t fit well in circles where
“Yeah, it doesn’t work,” she tells me. “Literally one time
people only want to talk about themselves. Selena’s not like
I was in line for something. I was fully in disguise, and I was
that,” she says. “She’ll show you 300 pictures of her little sister
talking to someone. I don’t even remember what I said. And
and parents and grandparents.”
then the woman in front of me goes, ‘My God, it is you! I thought
When Gomez’s team files out, she settles on a couch the color
I heard your voice!’ ” That was years ago. “I was like, oh God,
of mulled wine. She looks cozy and hale in a denim Free People
what do I sound like to people? And then I also feel so silly
jumpsuit and Ugg slippers. Her skin is aglow, her hair volumionce I get busted.”
nous. She is, like some other stars of her magnitude, much more
slight in person, her features writ delicate. Gomez redid Rare
Gomez has long since given up on wigs and hats as cloaking
Beauty’s offices last year and shared a carousel of photos with her
devices. In the 25 years since she debuted on Barney & Friends
at the age of seven, she’s actually tried to let go of every kind
425 million followers on Instagram. At the time of our interview,
of disguise and be the same person in public and private. It’s a
she’s taking a break from the app but hasn’t announced it to her
gutsy endeavor for someone who, thanks to Instagram, has the
fans—the Selenators—because she has a habit of dramatically
announcing social media breaks, then logging back on less than 24
slightly scary-sounding distinction of being the most followed
woman on earth. For three years Gomez has been part of the
hours later to post a selfie or leave a comment somewhere. It’s one
delicious hit series Only Murders in the Building, and she’s just
of her more aggressively relatable habits, this inability to resist the
given the rawest performance of her career in the audacious
apps after boldly saying she’s done with them. “I learned not to say
movie musical Emilia Pérez. Gomez plays a Mexican drug lord’s
that anymore,” she deadpans. Right now, she’s trying to quietly
terrified but wildly resourceful wife. When the movie hits theenjoy her time in the analog world. “I’ve been loving it,” she says
aters in November, her work will surprise the many, many people
calmly. “I’ve been working out. I’ve been taking care of myself.
who didn’t know what a fiery actor she could be.
It’s the first time I’ve had a break in a little bit. So I feel good.”
We first meet in Los Angeles at the makeup company she
founded, Rare Beauty. It’s a slow, gray afternoon, but Rare
Beauty is flush with positivity, from the product names (lipsticks in shades like Worthy and Strong, eye shadow sticks
called Integrity and Well-Being) to the little slogans
on the bathroom mirrors like, “Find comfort in being
rare.” It’s all completely in earnest, and the compaRARE VINTAGE
Selena Gomez,
ny’s products are seriously good, as are the rewards:
photographed in
Rare Beauty is reportedly worth $2 billion.
Los Angeles on
July 29, with classic
Gomez’s office is bathed in white, pink, and
Hollywood in mind.
T HERE’S NO SHORTAGE of things to feel good about.
red—it’s a bouquet of a space. When I come in,
Gomez recently snagged an Emmy nomination
she’s surrounded by the smiling California team
Top by David Koma;
that keeps her carefully calibrated days as a movie
for best actress in a comedy for Only Murders, her
skirt by Tom Ford;
shoes by Alaïa;
star, TV star, pop star, beauty executive, and mental
first-ever acting nod, despite working steadily for
gloves by
health advocate on track. There’s a laptop on her
two decades. “I freaked out,” she says happily. “I
Thomasine;
stockings by
desk, a script for Emilia Pérez, and a list of questions
went to dinner with my friends that night. Maybe
Wolford; necklace
for a famous friend she “met through Taylor,” whom
[the voters] saw something in this past season that
by Prada
she’s interviewing for something later. There are
they hadn’t seen before.”
Fine Jewelry.
personal mementos too, like family photos and a
Gomez also became the most nominated Latina
Previous spread:
note from her 11-year-old sister, Gracie. “She’s funproducer ever in the best comedy category, thanks
jacket by Alaïa; tank
ny,” Gomez says warmly. She picks up the note and
to the series. She had no idea she was about to set
top by Commando;
skirt by Saint
reads it out loud: “Hi, sissy, I love you so much. The
a record. “When I heard that, I felt like I made my
Laurent by Anthony
next time I’m here, can we do each other’s makeup
dad’s side of the family proud,” she says. “It was realVaccarello; gloves
ly cool to have that be a part of my story. I’m grateful
and make a ‘get ready with me’ TikTok?”
by Fleur du Mal.

T

50

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

H A I R , O R L A N D O P I TA ; M A K E U P , H U N G VA N N G O ; M A N I C U R E , T O M B A C H I K ; TA I LO R S , H A S M I K KO U R I N I A N A N D S U S I E KO U R I N I A N ;
S E T D E S I G N , R O B E R T D O R A N . P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y V I E W F I N D E R S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

HER SPEAKING VOICE
IS A FAMOUSLY
SOOTHING LOW HUM.

for breaking barriers. Hopefully this is not a one-time thing.”
Gomez’s father, Ricardo Joel Gomez, is Mexican American. He
and her mother—the former actor Mandy Teefey, whom Gomez
has credited with steering her through some daunting poverty
early on and inspiring her career—named her after the Tejano
icon Selena and raised her in Grand Prairie, Texas. “It’s empowering and it’s alleviating,” Saldaña says of seeing Gomez make
history as a Latina. “When you meet her, you get the sense that
she is owning her growth and owning her life and her voice. I’m
grateful that our paths have crossed.”
The two of them met in Paris on the set of Emilia Pérez, a bold,
heartfelt, and visually lush Spanish-language musical that’s
about to have an eventful awards season of its own. The film
was written and directed by Jacques Audiard. It stars Spanish
actor Karla Sofía Gascón in the titular role, a brutal Mexican
cartel leader who kidnaps a lawyer (Saldaña) to offer her a job:
coordinating secret gender-confirmation surgery so the kingpin can transition and leave her old life behind. Gomez plays
Jessi, Perez’s dormant volcano of a wife. She’s a lonely young
woman and the mother of their two children who’s ferried from
safe house to safe house in armored vehicles laden with security
guards. As Emilia finds herself going down a different path in
life, so does Jessi. She’s emboldened to break out of her shell—
with all kinds of consequences.
Gomez calls Emilia Pérez a “fever dream,” but it’s not as wild
a leap for her as it may appear. She’s long pursued supporting
roles in unconventional, sometimes risqué work by auteurs, like
Harmony Korine’s endlessly zeitgeist-y Spring Breakers or Jim
Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die. “That’s intentional,” she tells me. “I’d rather be a supporting role. I’d rather
have four scenes in a Martin Scorsese film than be a lead in a
movie about a tomboy that comes into her own and falls in love
with the boy next door. Love those movies, totally watch those
movies—but that’s not something I’m necessarily interested in.”
Audiard admits he was only faintly familiar with Gomez, having seen her in Spring Breakers and the Woody Allen film A Rainy
Day in New York. But when she auditioned for Emilia Pérez, he
knew very quickly that he wanted to hire her. As for Gascón, she
was extremely familiar with Gomez, not least because she has
a 13-year-old daughter who’s a superfan. “There’s something
very special about her,” Gascón says of Gomez. Needless to say,
her daughter was excited about the project: “She told me, ‘You
better treat her well!’ ”
Gomez says she signed on to Emilia Pérez largely because of
Gascón, who plays the drug lord both before her transition and
after, pulling off a riveting dual performance. “She actually carried the whole film, and we followed her lead when it came to
anything sensitive,” Gomez says. “She challenged me. In some
of our scenes, she wasn’t afraid to get in my face. And I loved it
because I had to match that energy.”
Both Gascón and Saldaña offered their services if Gomez
ever needed help with the dialogue. The film is almost entirely
in Spanish, and while they’re native speakers, Gomez herself
is not. “Speaking it is not too terrible for me, but I’m not fluent.
I would say that I’m okay.” She grew up speaking Spanish but
lost fluency around the time she turned seven and that purple
dinosaur came into her life: “I got my first job, and everything
was English-dominated.”
The musical part of Emilia Pérez came easier. Gomez dove
into the singing and the often intense choreography, which
52

VA N I T Y FA I R

meant tapping back into her pop persona. “I can sing Spanish
really well,” she says, having released several songs in Spanish,
including the 2021 EP Revelación. She enjoyed recording the
songs for this film, which were written by French singer and
lyricist Camille with Clément Ducol, but wants fans to know she
doesn’t have plans to release any new music of her own at the
moment. “I don’t know if I’m ready, you know?” she says. “It’s
a vulnerable space. Acting has always been my first love. Music
is just a hobby that went out of control. Now it is a part of who I
am, so I don’t think I’m going anywhere. I’m just not ready yet.”

S
S HE’S STILL KEEPING tabs on the pop landscape. Gomez got a kick

out of Charli XCX’s Brat—particularly the bonus track, “Spring
Breakers,” naturally—and she’s going to see shows whenever she
can. “I love female artists,” she says. “I’ve been to all the girls’
concerts—Billie, Dua….” And of course, she can always pick up
the phone and call Taylor Swift, a longtime friend. “She is really
like a big sister to me,” she says. They talk about the industry
from time to time, with Gomez seeking advice on music or how
to navigate new friendships at their respective levels of fame.
More often than not, though, they’re just gossiping about the
things that all friends gossip about and comparing notes on the
latest season of Vanderpump Rules. “I’m on The Valley now,”
Gomez says, referring to the latest—and deeply haunted—spinoff of the Bravo reality series. “I’ve watched every episode of
Vanderpump, so I don’t care if it’s bad!”
Whenever she is ready to record her own music again, Gomez
also has a direct line to one of pop music’s most prolific producers:
Benny Blanco. The two collaborated on the 2015 hit “Same Old
Love” and the slinky 2019 track “I Can’t Get Enough,” featuring
Tainy and J Balvin. In the music video for the latter song, Gomez
wears silky pajamas and dances on an oversized bed; Blanco
dances alongside her in a giant teddy bear suit. The two were just
friends at the time, but things took a turn for the romantic in July
2023. At first, the pair were relatively low-key, but they’ve since
elevated to full-tilt public adoration, sharing mushy Instagram
photos and captions of one another. In his most recent public
display of affection, Blanco shared a tender throwback photo of
him and Gomez on the “I Can’t Get Enough” set: “i used to play
a teddy bear in ur music video and now i get to b urs in real life….”
Though they’ve worked together for years, fans seemed surprised that the two were dating, partly because Gomez is laid-back
while Blanco, who produced hits like Katy Perry’s “Teenage
Dream” and Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” is a world-class yapper.
Whatever the connection is—his brash, enthusiastic openness
paired with her dry humor—it clearly works. “I’ve never been loved
this way,” Gomez tells me. “He’s just been a light. A complete light
in my life. He’s my best friend. I love telling him everything.” In
May, Howard Stern told Blanco that he hoped the two of them
would get married. “You and me both,” Blanco replied. Gomez
smiles at the thought of Blanco saying it so bluntly and openly. “He

SHE’S TRIED TO BE THE SAME PERSON
IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. IT’S GUTSY FOR
SOMEONE WHO, THANKS TO INSTAGRAM,
HAS THE DISTINCTION OF BEING THE
MOST FOLLOWED WOMAN ON EARTH.

can’t lie,” she says. “After the interview, I was dying laughing.
Like, ‘Anything else you wanted to put out there?’ ”
Engagement rumors were flying as this story went to press, but
to be clear, marriage isn’t an institution that Gomez ever wanted
to rush into. Her mother gave birth to her when she was 16, and her
parents were only married for a few years. “It was hard on me,”
she says. “They were kids, so we were all growing up together.”
Even before she began dating Blanco, though, Gomez had a
firm plan in place to start a family by the age of 35. “Before I met
my boyfriend, I was single for five years, with the exception of
going on a few dates,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, if this is
the vibe, then what is the most important thing to me? Family.’”
In the past Gomez has said she would be open to adopting children, partly inspired by the fact that her mother was adopted. If
she hadn’t been, “I probably wouldn’t be here. I don’t know what
her life would’ve been like. She and I are very thankful for how
life played out.”
The theme of family pops up again and again during our
conversation. Gomez is a godmother to her cousin Priscilla’s
two children, so she gets a front-row seat to the wonderful and
sometimes brutal experience of being a parent. “She keeps it
real,” Gomez says of her cousin’s candor. She’s speaking excitedly about this, then briefly pauses. All this talk of motherhood:
It’s reminding her of something that’s been weighing on her. “I
haven’t ever said this,” she says, “but I unfortunately can’t carry
my own children. I have a lot of medical issues that would put
my life and the baby’s in jeopardy. That was something I had to
grieve for a while.”
Gomez communicates this calmly and without sentimentality. “It’s not necessarily the way I envisioned it,” she says of
becoming a parent one day. “I thought it would happen the way
it happens for everyone. [But] I’m in a much better place with
that. I find it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing

to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for
me. It made me really thankful for the other outlets for people
who are dying to be moms. I’m one of those people. I’m excited
for what that journey will look like, but it’ll look a little different.
At the end of the day, I don’t care. It’ll be mine. It’ll be my baby.”
Her family isn’t pressuring her into marriage, by the way, nor
is she pressuring Blanco. “We always make sure we’re protecting
what we have, but there’s no rules,” she says. “I want him to
always be himself. I always want to be myself.”
She means that in another way too: “I’m not changing my
name no matter what. I am Selena Gomez. That’s it.”

G
G OMEZ HAS BEEN managing not just her personal life in full pub-

lic view for years, but her health as well—particularly since 2013,
when she was diagnosed with lupus. She first spoke about her
diagnosis in an interview with Billboard in 2015, sharing that she
underwent chemotherapy to treat the chronic autoimmune illness, which causes the body’s immune system to attack healthy
tissue and can cause inflammation and affect internal organs.
Gomez was on her first solo tour, Stars Dance, when she was
diagnosed, and had gotten through nearly 60 shows before she
had to cancel the rest and get treatment.
In 2017 Gomez revealed on Instagram that she had gotten a
kidney transplant, sharing a photo of herself and close friend
OCTOBER 2024

53

Clothing and sandals
by Tom Ford; tights by
Falke; bracelet by
Bulgari High Jewelry.
54

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

55

“I’VE NEVER BEEN LOVED THIS WAY.
HE’S JUST BEEN A LIGHT.
A COMPLETE LIGHT IN MY LIFE.”

actor Francia Raísa, who donated the vital organ. “There aren’t
battles shared their stories with her. “I just started to embrace it,”
words to describe how I can possibly thank my beautiful friend
she says, “and I felt like it was a really good thing.”
“However,” she continues, determined to add a postscript,
Francia Raisa,” Gomez wrote in her caption. “She gave me the
ultimate gift and sacrifice by donating her kidney to me. I am
“I like to remind people that that is definitely nowhere close to
incredibly blessed. I love you so much sis.” The post was surwhere I am now. My mind was not right and chemically imbalprising and frank. It included photos of Gomez and Raísa on
anced, and it was really difficult. People were calling me a victim.
hospital beds holding hands, as well as close-ups of Gomez’s
That frustrates me, because being vulnerable is actually one of
postsurgery scar. The news went viral to such an extent that
the strongest things you can do. That narrative is not going to
take over my life. I’m grateful every day. And I have my days like
people who couldn’t name a Selena Gomez album suddenly
everyone else, but I’m no victim. I just survived a lot. There isn’t
had thoughts about her kidney. Later, the news that Gomez
and Raísa’s friendship had been badly fractured by hurt feela part of me that wants anyone to feel sorry for me.”
ings went viral too—just one example of what it means to
Gomez is still on a journey with her mental health but now
has tools and protocols to take care of herself. She loves using
be the most followed woman in the world. Late last year the
pair did the necessary repair work and are friends once more.
temperature as a healing mechanism and finds cold water or
While Gomez was dealing with lupus, she was also contending
space heaters to be soothing at different times. She’ll also do a
with serious mental health struggles, which got a close-up in the
mental exercise that’s hugely helpful: “I remind myself that I’m
shattering 2022 documentary My Mind & Me. The movie—directokay. I ground myself for a moment. ‘Where am I? I’m sitting
ed by Alek Keshishian, who made the legendary Madonna: Truth
down in the office. Everybody that I love is out there. There’s
or Dare—was originally meant to be a fun, artful way to capture
food. I can get something to eat. I can take a nap here before I
Gomez’s 2016 Revival tour, but it quickly morphed as she began
leave.’ I put myself into the present.”
struggling with panic attacks, anxiety, and debilitating depression.
“I’m ready for it all—it’s just now I’m properly medicated,”
“At one point, she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be alive right now,’” her
she adds with a laugh.
former assistant, Theresa Marie Mingus, says in the documentary.
Gomez donates a portion of sales from all Rare Beauty prod“ ‘I don’t want to live.’ It was one of those moments where you
ucts to the Rare Impact Fund, a philanthropic hub that aims
look in her eyes and there’s nothing there. It was just pitch black.”
to raise $100 million for organizations dedicated to educating
Gomez later attributed the devastation to the side effects of
young people around the world about mental health and getting
lupus. Shortly thereafter she was diagnosed with bipolar disorthem services. The fund has raised $15 million since its launch.
der as well. The tour was canceled, but her mental health did not
“Only around 2 percent of global health funding has historically
gone to mental health,” says Elyse Cohen, the president of the
improve and she suffered a breakdown in 2018. My Mind & Me is
fund and an executive vice president of Rare Beauty. “And cursuch a revealing document of pain that Gomez says she got cold
feet a few weeks before it was set to be released. “I asked my team
rently just about 0.5 percent of philanthropic funding is given to
if it was possible to pull out,” she tells me. “Lawyers
mental health. When you think about the prevalence
got involved, but we never took it to Apple because
of this issue and how low the mobilization of funding
Top by Saint
everything was locked.… When the movie came out,
is, there’s just such a severe gap. For us, it’s really
Laurent by Anthony
I didn’t look at anything for a few days, and then I was
about making a difference in the space.”
Vaccarello; hat
by Gigi Burris
scared to leave the house.” She was paralyzed by the
“I know it seems impossible,” Gomez says of the
Millinery; bra by
thought of the movie being out in the world but found
staggering
$100 million goal, “but it’s important
Fleur du Mal; gloves
her footing again, partly because fans facing similar
to me because it’s a crisis. There are a lot of people
by Urstadt.Swan.
VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

57

Jumpsuit by Chanel;
boots by Maison
Ernest; bra by
Fleur du Mal; belt
by Mimchik (thin);
vintage belt by
Chanel from
Albright Fashion
Library LA; gloves by
Bottega Veneta.
58

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

59

“I HAVE MY DAYS LIKE EVERYONE ELSE,
BUT I’M NO VICTIM. I JUST SURVIVED A LOT.
THERE ISN’T A PART OF ME THAT
WANTS ANYONE TO FEEL SORRY FOR ME.”

from every part of the world dealing with so much who are not
properly educated on it and don’t know where to go. I want it to
be accessible. There’s Planned Parenthood—that’s a resource
for women. I wish we had a version of that for mental health.
It would be so powerful if someone was—not to be too heavy
but—to try to take their life and then decided to go to a Planned
Parenthood [type of facility] that was free. I have big dreams for
what I would like to see.”

hadn’t really seen her act. I didn’t know her shows. But, you know,
Marty and I tend to overact, that’s kind of our comedic style—”
“Hold on, hold on!” Short says, interrupting.
“I meant that as a compliment,” Martin replies.
“Oh, I see. Keep going,” Short says.
“Somebody else might think, Oh, I have to compete with that,
so I better be really, really funny too,” Martin continues. “But she
didn’t go there in any way. Her point in the triangle was perfectly
leveled. She is really good. Her energy and tone—”
“What do you think when it comes to me?” Short says.
On and on they go, shooting jokes back and forth.
Gomez laughs when I tell her about the conversation later. “It’s
a blast, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s like the show! They’ve changed my
life and perspective on tons of things.” She’s become comfortable
getting in on the jokes, butting in to land some punch lines of
her own. “Marty and I have a riff we just do naturally, which is to
deeply insult each other,” Martin says. “Selena was very polite
for the first year, and then the second year she started to get into
T HE NEXT TIME I speak to Gomez, it’s at the tail end of July, just
it and give as good as she got.”
after her 32nd birthday and her dual Emmy nods. She’s preparing
Gomez is particularly excited about the fourth season because
for life to get intense again, with promotion duties for both Emilia
of the show’s meta quality. It follows the trio from New York to Los
Pérez and the upcoming season of Only Murders in the Building.
Angeles after a Hollywood executive decides to turn their story
The Emmy-winning series is now on its fourth seainto a film. (Eva Longoria plays Selena’s character,
son on Hulu, but the unlikely trio of amateur murder
Mabel, to hilarious effect.) The fourth season also sees
Dress, scarf, and
sleuths—Steve Martin and Martin Short as overly drathe return of Meryl Streep as Loretta, a working actor
choker by Gucci;
bodysuit by Cult
matic older men and Gomez as their sarcastic young
who is starting to make a name for herself.
Gaia; shoes
neighbor—remain supernaturally funny. Short has
It’s funny to think that—though Gomez is far youngby Tom Ford from
said he was nervous about meeting Gomez, expecting
er than her costars—she’s already an industry veteran
Albright Fashion
Library LA; eyeshade
an unapproachable diva. Instead, he and Martin met a
herself, having worked for 25 years. Only Murders feels
by Lynn Paik;
disarming woman excited to work with them and able
like the balancing force she needed after forging
stockings by Agent
Provocateur.
to hold her own in their esteemed company.
through the last few years in particular. She clearly
Throughout: hair
I talked to Martin and Short about Gomez on a
feels balanced in other ways too, which allows her to
products by Orlando
Pita Play; makeup
joint Zoom call, and if you’ve never seen Only Murhandle all the work required to be everything she is.
products by
“It’s as simple as this,” she tells me. “I don’t want peoders, this will give you a pretty good idea of the vibe.
Rare Beauty; nail
“I thought she was very smart,” says Martin. “I
ple to ever think I’m not grateful for what I have.” 
enamel by Essie.

T

60

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

Photograph by SE BAS T IAN K I M

GIVE
AND
LET
GIVE
MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her
role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it’s a little uncomfortable.
For Vanity Fair, French Gates opens up about her next act
and highlights six other women charting their own paths of generosity
By KE Z IAH WE I R
62

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

D

A young woman with
ample ambition gave a prophetic valediction to her graduating class at Ursuline
Academy. “If you are successful, it is
because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started
you in the right direction. Remember,
also, that you are indebted to life until you
help some less fortunate person, just as
you were helped.”
There’s something to be said for beginning with an ending—closed door, open
window, as they say. The first time I meet
this young woman, now the philanthropist Melinda French Gates, in a studio
high above Manhattan’s financial district,
she’s barreling toward the end of her fifth
decade. She’s also three years out from
her divorce from Bill Gates amid a pandemic in which their foundation became
the controversial global face of COVID
response and vaccine development. The
second time we speak, a few months later,
she has announced her departure from the
foundation so that she might funnel her
time (and $12.5 billion) into improving the
welfare of women and families—the mission of her company, Pivotal Ventures. It
DALL AS, 1982.

64

VA N I T Y FA I R

may be a new era of valediction for French
Gates, but she still evokes a high-achieving
student departing her hometown with the
sense that the best is yet to come.
Is it too on the nose to note that French
Gates requests as the soundtrack to her
shoot (and suggested by her daughter Phoebe) the triumphant breakup
anthems of The Tortured Poets Department? Or that the day before, when she
was photographed with a glittering Van
Cleef & Arpels band on her left ring finger, tabloid headlines blared news of an
engagement—but that it turns out she’s
not even dating that guy anymore, and
furthermore, she tells me, the ring was
actually a gift from herself, to herself?
That when I start to ask her when she
made the purchase, she answers breezily, “I think I bought it three years ago”?

G

IVING AWAY MONEY your family

will never need is not an especially noble act,” French Gates
wrote in her new Giving Pledge letter,
which she released, solo, in 2021. She
and Gates wrote their original founding

note in 2010, when they, together with
their close friend Warren Buffett, agreed
to donate the majority of their copious
wealth—most of it through the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.
In a 2008 Fortune cover story—French
Gates’s first major profile—Buffett
described the pair, calling Gates “smart
as hell, obviously. But in terms of seeing
the whole picture, she’s smarter.” To me,
he calls her “a longtime friend,” saying
“I very much admire what she is doing
for women around here and around the
world.” In that same profile, Gates said
of his philanthropic partnership with his
then wife: “I don’t think it would be fun to
do on my own, and I don’t think I’d do as
much of it.” (The month after the Gateses
announced their divorce, Buffett resigned
as a trustee of the foundation; shortly
after French Gates’s resignation, Buffett
told The Wall Street Journal that he had
amended his will, which leaves his fortune to a charitable trust overseen by his
three children.) The foundation, since its
inception, has reportedly disbursed $77.6
billion in charitable aid across the global.
The story of the former couple’s fortune has been as widely disseminated
over the years; French Gates, though,
has been more private. Her mother was
a homemaker, her father an aerospace
engineer—they “worked so hard to get
us where we are,” she says now. While
attending her Catholic girls school (its
Latin motto: Serviam, or “I will serve”),
she learned the programming language
BASIC on her dad’s Apple II and went
on to earn her bachelor’s and MBA from
Duke. She took a job as marketing manager at Microsoft in 1987, at age 22—she
has described the culture there at the
time as “acerbic”—and at a business
dinner she sat next to the CEO, nine
years her senior and a newly minted
billionaire. They started dating, marrying in 1994. French Gates left Microsoft
in 1996, upon the birth of the couple’s
eldest daughter, Jennifer, to raise their
eventual three children.
The foundation soon became its own
time-consuming venture. “Pick your target,” Buffett advised the Gateses early
on. “Once you pick your target,” French
Gates explains, “it will help the other
things to drop away.” Quickly their targets
became preventable sickness and disease
in the developing world and education
Stateside. It was French Gates who read

a New York Times article about children
in developing nations dying of rotavirus,
malaria, and tuberculosis, which she put
on Gates’s desk, and French Gates who,
while volunteering in Seattle schools, saw
the need for education reform.
Still: “If I went into a president or
prime minister’s office and I was with
my ex-husband, they would turn to him
first,” she says. “Unless I interrupted the
conversation, they could have just kept
going for the whole meeting.” Frustrated,
French Gates, who describes herself as
a “challenger,” took to speaking first
in meetings to ensure she’d be heard.
“I get that he was well-known and did
great things in the tech industry, but why
would they assume I knew less than him
about philanthropy when we had been
doing it together for almost 25 years? Why
make that false assumption? That, really,
was sexism.”
In the early years of the foundation,
“we just didn’t understand the role that
gender played,” French Gates says. “But
things just kept coming up for women—
contraceptives, or their health, or what
they wanted—that it started to make
me realize we were making a mistake.
If you came out with a new innovation,
you couldn’t assume it got in the hands
of men and women equally.”

M

in the Stanford Social Innovation Review
this summer. (French Gates herself cites
a major oversight at their foundation:
“In the early days,” she says, “we knew
that the biggest killers of children were
pneumonia and diarrhea. And so as we
worked on these vaccines, we eventually
got them out there. But we didn’t talk to
the industry players about the size of the
packaging.” The vaccine boxes were too
large to store in the refrigerators available to recipients. “You have to think
all the way down the line about those
problems.”) An essay accompanying the
2020 Smithsonian exhibition “Giving in
America” (which the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation helped support) mapped the
complex historical landscape. “Americans practicing the act of giving have
tackled prejudice and racism, economic
disparities, and the human suffering
they cause—sometimes tentatively, and
sometimes head-on,” writes Amanda
B. Moniz, the Smithsonian’s curator of
philanthropy. “On the flip side, the history
of philanthropy also reveals how the practice can reflect and reinforce inequity.”
There is enormous precarity associated
with tethering personal wealth to problem-solving, subject as it is to the whims of

the rarefied few. A New York Times report,
for instance, recently described the charitable giving of the world’s richest person,
Elon Musk, as “haphazard and largely
self-serving…. The foundation that houses the money has failed in recent years to
give away the bare minimum required by
law to justify the tax break.”
Gaining traction is an approach that
allows communities in need to determine
for themselves how funds are used—
through mutual aid and unrestricted
grants, for instance—as well as channeling giving into ventures that will lead to
substantive systemic change. “Recent
success engaging voters in Georgia, Arizona, and other states,” write Kramer
and Phillips, “demonstrates that philanthropy can mobilize voters and empower
the population to elect a more representative government that passes policies to
benefit everyone.”
This aligns with tactics French Gates is
now embracing. “My approach to philanthropy has always been data-driven, and
I think it’s important for philanthropists
to set ambitious goals and measure our
progress against those goals,” she wrote in
her new pledge letter. “I’ve learned, however, that it’s equally important to place

ODERN AMERICAN philanthropy

finds its urtext in steel magnate
Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 The
Gospel of Wealth. “The man of wealth,”
Carnegie wrote, should become the
“agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior
wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they
would or could do for themselves.”
There have been critics of Carnegie’s
the-rich-know-best model since its publication, but in recent years, as American
poverty levels rise and structural inequality persists despite sustained increases in
philanthropic donations, questions about
the efficacy of strategic giving have grown
louder. “Wealthy donors often lack the
lived experience to understand the
problems they attempt to solve and may
sidestep deeper solutions that undermine
their own wealth and privilege,” reads
an extensive report published by the
nonprofit FSG cofounder Mark Kramer
and political columnist Steve Phillips

“If I went into a president
or prime minister’s
office and I was with my
ex-husband, they would
turn to him first. Unless
I interrupted the
conversation, they could
have just kept going
for the whole meeting.”
OCTOBER 2024

65

Bissell, a leading philanthropist over a
century ago, was a staunch anti-suffragist because she believed government was
men’s work, while women’s power was
best wielded without political entanglements—but also because she worried
that Black women gaining the vote would
loosen the stranglehold wealthy white
women held on that power.) “I wanted to
be able to use every tool in my toolbox,”
French Gates says. “Some philanthropic
dollars, investment dollars—and to be
able to speak about policy. The LLC gives
me a lot of flexibility to do that.”
This spring French Gates announced
her second billion-dollar funding round
through Pivotal and began to release
what will total $200 million in flexible grants, including to the National
Women’s Law Center, the Center for
Reproductive Rights, and the nonprofit newsroom centering on women and
queer people, The 19th.
French Gates’s strategy at Pivotal couples data with lived experience. In 2023
her team met with six women and one
nonbinary lawmaker—New York state
senators Samra Brouk and Lea Webb,
Arizona state representative Lorena
Austin, and Florida state representative Michele Rayner among them—to
discuss specific issues facing individual
politicians. Brouk, the second sitting New
York state senator to give birth in the last
50 years, seems to be on French Gates’s

Her personal wealth
is vast, but it doesn’t feel
like a weight. “The weighty
part,” she says,“is when
you go out in the field
and you see the needs of
people on the ground.”
66

VA N I T Y FA I R

PHOTOGRAPH BY J O O N E Y

W O O D WA R D

TSITSI
MASIYIWA

trust in the people and organizations we
partner with and let them define success
on their own terms. Philanthropists are
generally more helpful to the world when
we’re standing behind a movement rather than trying to lead our own.” One of
the most important attributes she looks
for when hiring for Pivotal Ventures, she
says, is that the candidate is humble. “We
are stepping into communities where
the community knows far more than we
do about a space. The team that I have
around me, and will continue to hire for,
has to have a lot of humility.”
(She’s also, for the record, not interested
in perpetuating the performative habits of
apparently tireless CEOs, calling the idea
of minimizing sleep “so dumb.” She aims
for seven or eight hours—of the men she
has encountered who claim to sleep three
or four hours a night, “Some of us didn’t
want to be around them! Let’s be honest!”)
In 2015, unlike the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures as a limited liability company,
which, while typically not tax-exempt and
lacking the mandated transparency of a
foundation, can lobby and participate
in partisan political activity; in 2022,
she added the Pivotal Philanthropies
Foundation to her arsenal, a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit arm to aid in grant making.
(The relationship between charitable
giving and politics—and women—has
interesting historical precedent: Emily

LOCATION

UK, Zimbabwe, South
Africa, Uganda
PHILANTHROPIES

Higherlife Foundation,
Delta Philanthropies,
Masana wa Afrika
MISSION Support from
education to disaster
readiness

“Physically, spiritually,
mentally, I’m part of these
communities,” says Tsitsi
Masiyiwa, who is originally
from Zimbabwe. Masiyiwa
cofounded Higherlife
Foundation with her
husband, Strive, in 1996.
Her ethos: Go where the
people are. “Listen to
their stories and cocreate
solutions together.”
Her efforts were initially
spurred by Zimbabwe’s
HIV/AIDS crisis. “We
did not wake up with
money and say, ‘We are
going into philanthropy.’
It had nothing to do
with money. It was a
burden and a cause.”
French Gates met
Masiyiwa nearly a decade
ago. “To see her over the
years,” French Gates says,
“how she’s doing her
work, I’m so impressed
with her and how she’s
gone about it.” Masiyiwa’s
newest venture, Masana
wa Afrika (“the warmth of
the sun embraces Africa”
in Xitsonga), a grantgiving body, focuses on
small community-based
organizations that may be
overlooked given their
scale: “We think these are
the forgotten champions.”

OCTOBER 2024

67

VA N I T Y FA I R

and international camps;
Midwest
PHILANTHROPIES

Kode With Klossy,
Gateway Coalition
MISSION Provide
technical skills for youth;
ensure access to abortions
and wraparound care

Kode With Klossy, the free
coding camp for girls and
gender-expansive teens,
has seen exponential
growth since its founding
in 2015. “It’s this
ecosystem,” supermodel,
philanthropist, and
founder Karlie Kloss says—
and a self-sustaining
one: Hundreds of alums
return to the camp
as instructor assistants.
With 3,000 scholars
from 90 countries in
attendance this summer,
both in person and

virtually, the influence
has rippled into multiple
curricula, a teachertraining program, and
supporting alums as they
prepare to enter the
workforce. “She’s out
there making sure that
girls get a chance to fall
in love with tech,” says
French Gates, “and not
only see themselves in
this industry, but become
leaders of it.”
“For me it’s really:
How are we thinking about
the whole person in this
conversation?” Kloss says.
Though the two efforts of
Kode With Klossy and
Gateway Coalition do not
overlap, this holistic view
of the individual drives
both initiatives. “We didn’t
want to reinvent the
wheel,” Kloss says of
Gateway, “because so
many great people have
been in this space for a
very long time.”

in a society in which
wealth disparity can be so vast—in
which billionaires can exist at all—
seems like a sure sign that something is
broken. “I leave changing the system,
on this, to other people, because it’s a

T

HAT WE LIVE

PHOTOGRAPH BY M A EGA N

GINDI

H A I R , J A C O B R OZ E N B E R G ; M A K E U P , R O M Y S O L E I M A N I . H A I R P R O D U C T S , R + C O ; M A K E U P P R O D U C T S , E S T É E L A U D E R .
P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y V E R Y R A R E P R O D U C T I O N S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

KARLIE
KLOSS
68

LOCATION Virtual, US,

mind when we speak. “Let’s say you have
a child, but Albany is two hours away, and
you’re breastfeeding. Who’s going to take
that baby?” The process, she says, is no
different from how she began investing
in venture capital, where she sought out
women and people of color to learn what
it was like to run the gauntlet. “I had no
idea how bad it was, but the trends were
extraordinarily similar.”
From these conversations came ways
forward. “How do we help overcome
those barriers?” Paid family leave has
become a major initiative, for which Pivotal Ventures has partnered with such
organizations as the Bipartisan Policy
Center and MomsRising. “So that a woman who is a politician gets time off at the
birth of her child. She needs it, and quite
frankly, the man needs it too.” In America
many new fathers granted paid parental leave take less time off than they’re
offered; this, French Gates says, negatively impacts parents who take the full
amount. Seeing shared parenting on trips
to Sweden with the Gates Foundation,
she realized, “When you have a policy in
place for 30 years, it changes the norm.”
Beyond paid leave, French Gates is supporting organizations like the National
Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring
Across Generations, which are working
to build a more holistic, equitable care
system—childcare, yes, but care for the
elderly and those with disabilities too.
Her personal wealth remains, she says,
“surreal.” With it, “I feel a great responsibility.” But it doesn’t feel like a weight.
“The weighty part is when you go out in
the field and you see the needs of people on the ground. You see how they’re
struggling to make ends meet. A single
mom whose mother gets sick, who used
to be her childcare for her four-month-old
baby, that’s what’s hard.” But to French
Gates, there are answers to hard issues
if you ask the right questions. “What can
philanthropic dollars and/or investment
dollars and/or good government policy
or government resources, what can they
do to help support that mom?”

PHOTOGRAPH BY M AT H E W

SCOTT

CARI
TUNA

huge policy issue,” French Gates says.
“But when that policy passes, it doesn’t
change my actions.” Washington State
implemented a 7 percent capital gains tax
for high earners in 2021, the same year
French Gates permanently moved out of
the 66,000-square-foot lakeside complex
known as Xanadu 2.0 in Seattle’s Medina that she previously shared with Gates
and into an undisclosed neighborhood
where she’s pleased to finally be able to
walk to stores and restaurants. “I’m not
moving from Washington State because
there’s capital gains tax. I took a big hit on
it. That’s what’s right for society.” (French
Gates advocated for widespread capital
gains taxes in 2020; a Republican-led initiative to repeal the tax is on Washington
State ballots in November.)
For decades the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation—and its eponymous founders—steered mostly clear of partisan
politics and causes, a legal mandate for
the foundation and one of opportuneness
for the Gateses. French Gates’s individual political donations straddle the aisle:
In 2018 she gave $2,700 each to then Missouri Republican senator Roy Blunt and
Washington Democratic senator Patty
Murray. The following year she and Gates
received the George W. Bush Medal for
Distinguished Leadership, presented
by the former president and first lady.
A month later former president Barack
Obama surprised her on her book tour
with a recorded skit in which he pledged
to help French Gates support girls.
But this spring French Gates made her
first-ever presidential endorsement, for
Joe Biden. The time was right, she tells
me, because she believes a second term
with Donald Trump “would be dangerous” to reproductive rights and gender
parity. (In response to her endorsement,
Musk tweeted, “Might be the downfall of
Western civilization.” French Gates saw
the post: “I think it was silly.”)
In July, when Biden announced he
wouldn’t seek reelection, French Gates
waited only two days before publicly
endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris—with whom she’s worked several
times, including on an agriculture initiative leading up to Harris’s 2023 visit
to Africa. They were seated together
at a state dinner this year. “We are
like-minded on many issues,” French
Gates tells me when we speak the week of
Harris’s historic step-up—and they are,

LOCATION

San Francisco
PHILANTHROPIES

Good Ventures,
Open Philanthropy
MISSION Improve the
lives of as many people as
possible by helping
humanity thrive

In Cari Tuna’s assessment,
the issues governments
and companies aren’t
paying enough attention
to are an opening for
impact. “Philanthropy, at
its best, identifies society’s
blind spots,” Tuna says.
Originally a San
Francisco–based Wall
Street Journal reporter,
she left the paper in 2011
to start Good Ventures,
approaching her first year
much like a reporter
would: “I talked to
hundreds of people across
philanthropy, nonprofits,

government, science,
academia, trying to learn
about the landscape.”
“You can really see how
her experience as
a journalist has informed
her approach,” French
Gates says of Tuna. “She’s
rigorous about looking at
the data and figuring
out how to be as effective
as possible.” Once
connected with GiveWell,
she launched Open
Philanthropy, a grantmaking and philanthropic
advisory organization.
“As you see more
people coming into
philanthropy, more people
coming in at a younger
age, I do hope we see
more approaches,” says
Tuna. “More people
challenging the status quo,
challenging the traditional
ways of doing philanthropy,
and thinking really hard
about how to use this
privilege responsibly.”

OCTOBER 2024

69

She’s also, for the record,
not interested in perpetuating the performative habits
of apparently tireless
CEOs, calling the idea of
minimizing sleep “so dumb.”
70

VA N I T Y FA I R

PHOTOGRAPH BY M A EGA N

GINDI

LOCATION San Francisco

and Los Altos, California
PHILANTHROPIES

Breakthrough Prize in Life
Sciences, Anne Wojcicki
Foundation
MISSION Celebrate and
advance knowledge of
scientific achievements

“We can almost look
at philanthropy like
starting a company,”
Anne Wojcicki says. “I can
start projects that are of
great interest and I can
try to shift society.” The
23andMe CEO
cofounded and
sits on the board
(alongside Priscilla Chan
and Mark Zuckerberg,
Sergey Brin, and Yuri
and Julia Milner) of the
Breakthrough Prize, an
annual award for which
laureates each receive
$3 million—more than
twice the purse of the
Nobel Prize. “We should
reward people for, ‘You
did something amazing
recently.’ ” Wojcicki’s
aim to “make the science
relatable” reflects French
Gates’s admiration for the
CEO: “I love how she
talks about the example
that her mom set for
her—she taught Anne
early on that if she didn’t
like something, then
she should go out and
try to change it.”
“Anyone can be a
scientist,” Wojcicki says.
“It’s not that elitist, ‘Oh,
it’s only for white coats
and certain types of
people.’ ” What’s fun, she
says, “is getting kids to
recognize that potential.”

S I T T I N G S E D I T O R , S A M A N T H A G A S M E R ; H A I R , C H A R L E S M C N A I R ; M A K E U P , M A R I A O R T E G A . H A I R P R O D U C T S , O R I B E ; M A K E U P P R O D U C T S , C H A N T E C A I L L E . P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y V E R Y R A R E P R O D U C T I O N S . LO C AT I O N : FA S A N O F I F T H AV E N U E . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

her kids; she did a study of the Catholic
Church in partnership with professors
from Notre Dame. “I really wrestled with
it. But at the end of the day, I just saw too
much death in the developing world. And
women saying, ‘I can’t have another child
because I can’t feed it. I already have five.’
To me, you have to weigh the equation.
And so I finally said, well, okay, this is a
man-made religion. I use contraceptives.
I believe in them. So I need to speak my
truth. And ultimately I did.”
Still, in 2014, in a blog post for the foundation that has since been removed from
the website, she wrote that “the emotional and personal debate about abortion is
threatening to get in the way of the lifesaving consensus regarding basic family
planning,” noting that the Gates Foundation had decided not to fund abortion
measures. A decade later, to me, she says,
“When you have a law on the books that
helps women with their health, you don’t
ever roll it back, period. You just don’t.”
Already, Pivotal has partnered with
Vote Run Lead, the political candidate–training program that has worked
with 55,000 women, of whom nearly
60 percent have been women of color
and 20 percent from rural America. In
2023 elections, winning alums included Nadia Mohamed of St. Louis Park,
Minnesota, who became America’s first
Somali American mayor, and Shahana
Hanif, New York City’s first Muslim
woman elected to the city council. Other
Pivotal partners include Vote Mama

ANNE
WOJCICKI

from paid family leave to reproductive
rights. “I’m not specific about any candidate—how much money I put behind her
campaign,” she says, but “I absolutely
will support her.” French Gates rattles off
a list of superlatives about Harris: energetic, dedicated, smart.
“I could not have been more proud
of the current president, Joe Biden,” she
adds, “what he did, the courage and the
humility to say, ‘Okay, I need to pass the
baton. The time has come.’ He has worked
so hard for this country over so many
years, but it takes courage to step aside.
He did the right thing for the country.”
After years of keeping quiet on partisan issues, “It feels right to use my voice
in this way because we have places in
society that we need to get; quite honestly, we’re behind other high-income
countries. And so now in particular to
have a candidate like Kamala in the
race…” she says, pausing. “She sees the
issues society faces today. She’s not an
old-school ‘Let’s have all males at the
table.’ She sees what working couples are
going through, male and female.”
“We have to remind people that he
stacked the Supreme Court to do exactly
what happened,” she says of Trump. “We
had a law on the books for over 40 years
that got rolled back.”
For French Gates, a practicing Catholic,
the issue of abortion has been complicated. To even endorse contraceptives back
in 2012, she says, “was a big decision for
me.” She spoke with her parents and

OCTOBER 2024

71

SARA
BLAKELY
72

VA N I T Y FA I R

LOCATION Atlanta
PHILANTHROPIES

The Sara Blakely
Foundation
MISSION Support women
through education,
entrepreneurship, and
the arts

Sara Blakely’s greatest
mission is “to change
the way the world
sees and values women,”
including women
themselves. When she
founded Spanx in 2000,
hardly any primary patent
holders were women. In
2024 she pledged to
send a thousand girls, in
kindergarten through sixth
grade, to Camp
Invention, a five-day
camp put on by the
National Inventors Hall
of Fame with the United
States Patent and
Trademark Office.

“She uses her
platform to educate
other entrepreneurs, to
mentor them and say,
‘You can do this too,’ ”
French Gates says.
In 2019 Blakely
partnered with 3DE, a
nonprofit dedicated to
reengineering high school
education, to create a
“mindset series,” inspired in
part by her own integrated
curriculum: Wayne Dyer
cassette tapes her father
gave her that encouraged
visualization and
manifestation. “I started
crying and thought, I’ve
just spent 16 years
in school being taught
what to think and no one
has ever taught me how
to think,” says Blakely.
Blakely’s curriculum is now
in more than 60 high
schools impacting some
15,000 students, a
number that will double
in the coming years.

Lobby, launched in 2022 to harness the
political power of Democratic moms; the
Pipeline Fund, which aims to strengthen
a network of diverse progressive leaders with research and funding; and the
States United Democracy Center, which
combats disinformation and protects
voting rights.
From grassroots politics to philanthropic circles to the boardroom, “what
I see,” French Gates says, is that “if you
have multiple women versus one, they
can make changes.” She has always
been interested in collaboration, but
over the past decade, teaming up with
other women has become increasingly
important: Giving circles “are a way for
people to get used to giving at another
level”; collaborations with women like
Amal Clooney and Michelle Obama,
with whom she traveled to Malawi for
a campaign to end child marriage, offer
a chance to raise awareness and share
resources. “You start to realize, too,
who’s real, who does the real work—
these women are doing really deep
work—and who your friends are.”
There aren’t many people who come
close to sharing French Gates’s position:
a former member of a powerful tech and
philanthropic partnership who underwent a very public divorce. “I don’t
think you ever get comfortable with it,”
she says of having her personal life on
display. (French Gates has said a variety of factors went into the decision to
separate, but Gates’s relationship with
Jeffrey Epstein—which Gates has said he
regrets—and his affair with a Microsoft
employee in 2000, which was the subject of a 2019 internal investigation, both
played a part.) One person who might
understand is MacKenzie Scott, with
whom French Gates partnered in 2021
to disburse a series of $10 million grants.
When I ask whether Scott is someone
French Gates confides in on a personal
level, she’s characteristically private.
“We talk about all kinds of things,” she
says. “Our kids, what we’re doing in
life, how we like to spend our time.” It’s
a friendship, she says simply. “She’s a
lovely, lovely person.”
Despite her tendency toward privacy in the wake of her personal and
professional endings, French Gates’s
mindset is best described as whatever’s
the opposite of circling the wagons. “I
think the biggest difference I can make
P H O T O G R A P H BY B R AY L E N

DION

P H O T O G R A P H BY B R AY L E N

DION

CHIMAMANDA
NGOZI ADICHIE

is with people who are sitting on great
wealth because of the tax structure in
our country—if I can get them to start
moving that wealth, and move it beyond
the natural causes they would give to.”
Outside their alma mater or the hospital
that aided a loved one, would-be donors
worry that they don’t know enough
about various causes to give; that they
may be led astray. “Sometimes you have
to just demonstrate to them how easy it
is,” French Gates says. “Or help them
sometimes find the person that can be
in their organization.”
The roadblock is, again, a gendered
one. “Women may want to give to different causes than their husband, but she
doesn’t feel she has enough data to speak
up,” French Gates says. “Money can often
be tricky between a couple. But let’s say he
made it and yet she’s been the one doing
the philanthropy. I can sometimes help
arm her with a little more data. I can help
her with suggestions on the conversation.”
She continues: “The other thing to keep
in mind is women in this country outlive
men by about a decade. So who’s going to
end up with that wealth? Usually she will.”
To celebrate her milestone birthday
this summer, she launched a conversation series called “Moments That Make
Us,” in which she interviewed women like
Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King,
Megan Rapinoe, and others about turning
points and transitions. When I mention
to her that Harris, too, turns 60 this fall,
French Gates says, “You get to 60 and
you are reflective. You’re at a point in life
where you realize, my gosh, we all make
transitions all the time. Some we wanted to make, some we didn’t expect. But
I think by the time you get to 60, you’re
more reflective of those. And also: What
do you want to do, going forward, with
your next 10 or 20 years?”
After decades of working to help women, as she says, “step into their power,”
French Gates appears to be leaping into
her own. “I feel extraordinarily energized about the work ahead. It feels
like now is the right time,” she says. “I
never realized that going into my sixth
decade, turning 60, could be so exciting.”
“Now I’m the sole decision-maker about
these resources,” she says. “So that’s
just—it’s different than before. Quite
honestly, it feels quite good.”
“When I get a meeting now, I know it’s
because of me.” 

LOCATION US, Nigeria
PHILANTHROPIES

Purple Hibiscus Trust
Workshop
MISSION Foster and
support African literary
voices throughout the
continent

“It feels a little
strange to use that
word, philanthropy,”
Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie says. The Nigerian
writer, known for both
her written works—like
Americanah and We
Should All Be Feminists—
and public speaking,
views her work more as a
duty than anything else.
“I think that success is not
necessarily the natural
consequence of talent,”
she says. “There are many
talented people who just
don’t have opportunities
to become successful, and

so to be successful,
I think, brings a kind of
responsibility.” Adichie
does writing workshops
and teaches writing to
open doors for talent—
particularly African talent.
“Chimamanda is truly
a testament to the power
of women telling their
stories,” French Gates says.
“By sharing her own
story, she’s inspired other
women to share theirs.”
“Creative talent from
everywhere in the world is
wonderful, but obviously
my heart is in Africa.”
Books, Adichie says,
formed her. “I like to say
that literature is my
religion. Growing up,
I don’t know that I would
be the person I am
without books. And so
I think it’s profoundly
important that we make
sure that people who
want to live the life of the
mind can do so.”
OCTOBER 2024

73

T

H

E

B I

L

L

I

O

N A

I

R E ’ S

THE GERMAN
INDUSTRIALIST KLAUSMICHAEL KUEHNE,
BORN IN 1937, IS ONE
OF THE RICHEST
PEOPLE IN THE WORLD,
WITH MORE MONEY
THAN KEN GRIFFIN, OR
MACKENZIE SCOTT, OR
FRANÇOIS PINAULT.
WHERE DID HIS FAMILY
FORTUNE COME FROM?
THE NAZIS KNOW
By David de Jong

S

E C

74

VA N I T Y FA I R

R E T

Illustration by
Mike McQuade

OCTOBER 2024

75

ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON IN MID-NOVEMBER
2023, AN ELDERLY MAN WAS WALKING THROUGH
HAMBURG’S OHLSDORF CEMETERY, THE WORLD’S
FOURTH-LARGEST GRAVEYARD, TO VISIT THE BURIAL PLACE OF HIS FAVORITE SOCCER PLAYER WHEN
HE NOTICED SOMETHING VERY WRONG. SOMEONE
HAD SPRAYED “NAZI KAPITAL” (“NAZI FORTUNE”)
ON THE KUEHNE FAMILY’S TOMBSTONE, IN RED AND
BLACK, WHILE THE CRYPTIC TERM “M-AKTION” WAS
TAGGED ON ALFRED KUEHNE’S TOMBSTONE.

These weren’t just any family tombs:
The Kuehne dynasty is industrial royalty
in Germany. Klaus-Michael Kuehne, the
only child of Alfred and Mercedes Kuehne,
is the country’s wealthiest person, with a
fortune estimated at $44 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 87-year-old billionaire owes his
fortune to Kuehne + Nagel, the world’s
largest freight forwarder, founded by
Kuehne’s grandfather and Friedrich
Nagel in 1890. Kuehne has used his
wealth to build up a global transportation
empire. He is also the largest shareholder
of the German airline Lufthansa, shipping
behemoth Hapag-Lloyd, chemicals distributor Brenntag, Hamburg soccer club
HSV, and the company that owns North
America’s Greyhound bus lines. In 2023
alone, according to Bloomberg, he stood
to pocket $4.5 billion in dividends from
his empire.
In the context of Germany’s discreet
but clubby old money, where aristocratic
and industrialist heirs mingle at hunting
parties or go skiing in the Alps, Kuehne is
a loner. Despite his billions, he remains
outside Germany’s power circles and is
only spotted occasionally at financier
and merchant hangouts such as Hamburg’s Übersee-Club, a century-old
private members establishment founded
by the city’s Warburg banking dynasty.
76

VA N I T Y FA I R

Nazi graffiti on the Kuehne family gravestone
at Ohlsdorf cemetery in 2023. Previous spread:
Klaus-Michael Kuehne, honorary chairman
of Kuehne + Nagel, boasts a net worth of about
$44 billion. His father, Alfred Kuehne (inset),
ran the logistics company before him, making
his fortune in part by transporting looted
Jewish property during World War II.

Kuehne, who once described himself as
“exhausting, impatient, and unpleasant”
to work with, prefers to keep to himself,
either at his estate and office near Lake
Zurich, at his chalet in the Swiss Alps,
on his yacht, or at his villa on Mallorca,
to which he flies commercial. Despite
having been based in Switzerland for
almost 50 years, Kuehne has said his
roots remain in his hometown, Hamburg, where he was born and raised.

Kuehne is so devoted to Hamburg that
he has become its largest private investor
and philanthropist in recent years, even
though he spends most of his time outside
the city of 1.8 million residents, Germany’s second largest. The billionaire has
invested more than 100 million euros
in HSV and another 100 million euros
in the development of The Fontenay, a
luxury hotel in Hamburg. (He also owns
the five-star hotel Castell Son Claret on
Mallorca.) He has donated more than
70 million euros to the Kuehne Logistics
University, a private business school in
Hamburg, and gave millions to help build
Hamburg’s philharmonic, which resides
in a Herzog & de Meuron–designed
concert hall. Kuehne is negotiating with
Hamburg’s senate to finance the building
of a new opera house and told the city’s
largest newspaper in 2023 that his charitable foundation is willing to contribute up
to 300 million euros for the construction.
Kuehne’s public appearance has
remained virtually the same over the
years. A hulking figure in a suit, he has
ice-gray hair that looks like it’s been parted
with a ruler; his eyes look straight ahead;
his facial features are strong, including
his prominent overbite. He met his wife,
Christine, a cheerful woman with short
blond hair, late in life, on a holiday in the
Swiss mountains. They married in December 1989 when he was 52 and she was 51.
Kuehne writes poems by hand to her for
their wedding anniversary and her birthday, he told the German newspaper Die
Zeit. She sometimes spontaneously serenades him with arias by Puccini. Neither
of them like men with beards, according
to the tabloid Bild. Which is why a captain of their Benetti-built 130-foot yacht,
Chrimi III (which stands for Christine and
Michael), had to shave before being hired.
The only person he reveres more than
his wife is his late father, Alfred, whom
he succeeded as Kuehne + Nagel CEO
when he was 29. In 1975 Klaus-Michael
and his father moved Kuehne + Nagel’s
corporate seat and headquarters from
Germany to Schindellegi, a Swiss hillside
hamlet near Zurich, for tax reasons. The
only decoration on the wall of the Kuehne
+ Nagel boardroom is a portrait of Alfred.
“I learned the most from him,” Kuehne
has said about his father. “Companies
have to be managed individually—like a
family business.”
The thing about Alfred is that he built
part of the family business profiting from

P I C T U R E A L L I A N C E / G E T T Y I M A G E S . P R E V I O U S S P R E A D , S O U R C E I M A G E S : U L L S T E I N B I L D / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; H A M B U R G S TAT E A R C H I V E ; P U B L I C D O M A I N .

I.
A DIRTY
BUSINESS

the Nazi regime’s persecution and genocide of European Jews. After Adolf Hitler
seized power in Germany, Alfred and his
brother Werner, Klaus-Michael’s uncle,
ousted their Jewish shareholder from
Kuehne + Nagel. During World War II,
Kuehne + Nagel, led by Alfred and Werner, transported looted Jewish property,
primarily furniture, books, and art, from
occupied Western Europe to Nazi Germany as part of the so-called “M-Aktion,”
an abbreviation of “Möbelaktion,” which
translates to “furniture operation.” Over
two years, between 1942 and 1944, almost
70,000 homes belonging to Jews in the
Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg were systematically looted after
their inhabitants had been deported by
train to ghettos and death camps. The task
force overseeing the operation was part of
a Nazi organization dedicated to appropriating property during the war, named
after Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s
chief ideologue. After the war, the Kuehne
brothers may have escaped punishment
for their activities during the Third Reich
because of their ties to American, British,
and German intelligence agencies.
Kuehne + Nagel had a quasi-monopoly on the furniture operation, according
to Frank Bajohr, head of the Center for
Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. “Even in
the most remote places, the company
doing the furniture transports was always
Kuehne + Nagel,” says Bajohr. “Kuehne +
Nagel is in the same category of firms like
the ones that sold Zyklon B for use in the
gas chambers or that built the crematoria
in the extermination camps. Transporting
the stolen goods of people after they were
deported,” he adds, “is a kind of dirty
business far beyond anything I can comprehend.” Yet the role of Klaus-Michael
Kuehne’s firm and family in the Third
Reich is little known to the outside world.
Big German firms such as Deutsche
Bank, Volkswagen, and Bertelsmann
opened their archives years ago to allow
historians to examine their own lucrative
Nazi collaborations. The commissioned
studies unearthed that Deutsche Bank
aided the expropriation of hundreds of
Jewish-owned businesses and helped
finance the construction of Auschwitz;
that tens of thousands of men and women were used as forced and slave laborers
to mass-produce weapons at the Volkswagen factory; and that Bertelsmann
published antisemitic literature and

exploited Jewish slave labor. In 2000
the three firms joined more than 6,500
German companies, including Kuehne
+ Nagel, in agreeing to pay about $2.5
billion to a reparations fund that provided financial compensation to surviving
forced and slave laborers. But Kuehne +
Nagel has never opened its archives.
In 2022 Kuehne told the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung that no company
documents from the Nazi era were available, claiming that the company archives
in Hamburg and Bremen were destroyed
by Allied bombings in World War II. An
index of German company archives from

freedom and independence, according to
people familiar with the matter. But when
the final result was sent to Kuehne in early
2015, including a chapter on the activities
of his father, uncle, and firm during the
Third Reich, he refused to have the study
published. Kuehne rejected the study by
saying “my father wasn’t a Nazi” during
a phone conference, according to people
familiar with the conversation. When the
researchers refused to change the chapter, according to these sources, Kuehne
said the study wouldn’t be published
and ended the call. The 180-page study,
contractually owned by Kuehne + Nagel,

“KUEHNE’S STANCE PLACES HIM IN THE RANKS
OF THOSE WHO WANT TO ‘EXONERATE’
GERMAN HISTORY FROM ITS NAZI PAST.”

the 1990s shows that at least 10 meters
(30 feet) of archival files should be present at Kuehne + Nagel. This most likely
includes material from before and during
World War II, as the collection begins in
1902, according to Kuehne + Nagel’s
index page. “Use only possible with management approval,” it says on the page.
Kuehne also said in the SonntagsZeitung interview that he finds
commissioning independent historians
to investigate his company history akin
to blackmail. “We were approached by
some who would have liked to do this and
they asked for several hundred thousand
euros. They said we were obliged to do
it. I found that almost a bit extortionate,”
Kuehne told the Swiss newspaper. “So I
said, ‘We won’t do that. We have nothing
to hide, we acknowledge our guilt.’ ”
What Kuehne has not explained is why
he won’t release the study that sources
say he commissioned.
In early 2014 Kuehne commissioned
Handelsblatt Research Institute, the
independent research arm of German
newspaper Handelsblatt, to conduct a
study of his family firm’s entire history
for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniversary in July 2015. Researchers were even
given access to the company archive in
Hamburg and a guarantee of academic

remains unpublished and inaccessible.
Jan Kleibrink, the managing director of
Handelsblatt Research Institute, would
neither confirm nor deny Kuehne’s commissioning and shelving of the study.
Kuehne declined to be interviewed
for this article. Dominique Nadelhofer,
the spokesperson for the billionaire, his
holding company, his foundation, and
Kuehne + Nagel, declined to answer
detailed questions sent by VF. “Mr.
Kuehne was seven years old at the end
of World War II and therefore had nothing to do with the war,” Nadelhofer wrote
in an emailed statement. “He is now 87
years old and, again, these historical
events are beyond his control.”

II.
THE POLITICS
OF MEMORY
political leaders have accepted moral responsibility
and acknowledged the sins of the Nazi
past, centering remembrance as a component of German society. But recently
the country has seemed to regress. As
the last witnesses to the Nazi era die
FOR DECADES GERMANY’S

OCTOBER 2024

77

and the cultural memory of the Third
Reich fades, the right wing, increasingly mainstream, has attacked Germany’s
progressive ideals. For much of 2023, the
far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)
polled as the largest party, hitting an alltime high of 23 percent in the polls in
December. In June 2024 the AfD won a

But Kuehne’s refusal to more publicly
reckon with his family and firm’s Nazi
past plays into the hands of the revisionist movement, says Henning Bleyl,
director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation
in Bremen, a think tank affiliated with
the German Green Party. He has been
investigating Kuehne + Nagel’s wartime

“IF KLAUS-MICHAEL KUEHNE
DOESN’T WANT TO DO SOMETHING,
THEN HE DOESN’T DO IT. PERIOD.”

record number of votes in the European
parliament elections. The party captured
16 percent of the German vote and came
in second in the elections as concerns
about immigration and the economy
fanned voter discontent.
“Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck
of bird shit in over a thousand years of
successful German history,” the AfD’s
then coleader Alexander Gauland said
in a 2018 speech. The AfD’s extremist
wing is associated with antisemitism,
Islamophobia, and historical revisionism,
including the downplaying of Nazi crimes
and denigration of the Holocaust. In May
and July 2024, Björn Höcke, a leading AfD
politician and founder of its extremist
wing, was fined twice by a German
court for using the banned Nazi slogan
“Everything for Germany!” in his campaign speeches. Höcke has lamented the
construction of a Holocaust memorial in
central Berlin. Calling Germans “the only
people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital,”
he has demanded a “180-degree turn” in
the country’s “politics of memory.”
Kuehne’s politics could be described as
free-market conservative. “I believe that
support for the AfD will dwindle again,”
he told German newspaper Welt in 2017.
“Right-wing movements have no foothold
in Germany.” Since 2021 he has donated
about 200,000 euros ($220,000) to the
Christian conservative CDU, the establishment party for German business and of
former chancellor Angela Merkel. Kuehne
even once said he could envision himself
voting for the left-wing Green Party.
78

VA N I T Y FA I R

activities since 2015. These revisionist
narratives of Germany’s past are prominently embodied by the AfD, but the
far right in Germany, Austria, France,
and many other European countries use
historical revisionism to manipulate the
narrative around the Nazi era and World
War II to advance their political agenda.
“Even in past decades, it was unacceptable that Kuehne refused to deal honestly
with his family’s actions during the Nazi
era,” said Bleyl in an interview on the roof
terrace above his office in Bremen. “Now
it is even more of an issue because, as I
view it, Kuehne’s stance places him in the
ranks of those who want to ‘exonerate’
German history from its Nazi past.”

III.
“A SO-CALLED
ARYANIZATION”
unearthed
archival material by VF in Amsterdam,
Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Montreal,
and Washington, DC, detail the extent
of Nazi profiteering by the Kuehne brothers and firm. Alfred and Werner Kuehne
began profiting from the persecution of
Jews much earlier than is known: years
before World War II and mere months
after Hitler seized power in Germany on
January 30, 1933.
In late April of that year, the Kuehne
brothers ousted their Jewish partner and
co-owner Adolf Maass after he’d spent
I N T E RV I E W S AN D N E W LY

more than 30 years at the firm. Maass, 57
at the time, owned 45 percent of the Hamburg branch of Kuehne + Nagel, which he
had founded in 1902 and which was the
largest and most profitable part of the
firm. When Friedrich Nagel died heirless
in 1907, his shares went to his cofounder,
August Kuehne, the father of Alfred and
Werner. He died in 1932.
According to a signed and dated contract in the Maass family archive in the
Montreal Holocaust museum, Maass
signed over his shares and claims to the
Kuehne brothers on April 22, 1933, for no
compensation. The reason? An alleged
inability “to fulfill his capital obligations”
to the Kuehnes and the company. Such
accusations became a common method
in Nazi Germany to oust Jewish shareholders from their own firms. “This
wasn’t a free and regular business contract,” says Frank Bajohr. “The Kuehnes
used the political situation for their own
benefit. It’s no accident that this contract
was formulated in spring 1933. Maass
wouldn’t have signed this contract in the
years before Hitler took power. This was
a so-called Aryanization.”
“The constitutional element of an
Aryanization contract was that Jewish
ownership was completely eliminated
and that the company was handed over
in its entirety to non-Jewish owners,” says
Bajohr. “In this case, the Kuehnes.”
Nine days after ousting Maass, the
Kuehne brothers became Nazi Party
members, according to their denazification files in the Bremen state archive. In
the following years the Kuehnes developed their firm into a “national-socialist
model company,” an honorary title that
the Nazi regime awarded to Kuehne +
Nagel in 1937, the year that Klaus-Michael
was born. The Kuehne brothers would
declare in their denazification proceedings that Maass’s “Jewish origin caused
serious trouble” for the firm and themselves. The siblings claimed that Maass
left voluntarily and that they “derived
no personal economic advantage from
dissolving the partnership.”
In 1938 Kuehne + Nagel acquired the
Hamburg subsidiary of the Czech transport company Alfred Deutsch. The owner
was Leo Lewitus, a Jewish entrepreneur
forced to sell his firm by the Nazi authorities in tandem with the Kuehne brothers.
In 180 pages of correspondence during
the acquisition discovered by VF in the
Hamburg state archive, Kuehne + Nagel

A D O L F A N D K AT H Ë M A A S S : P U B L I C D O M A I N . B R E M E N : D PA P I C T U R E A L L I A N C E /A L A M Y S T O C K P H O T O .

managers wrote matter-of-factly that the
takeover was an Aryanization.
The start of World War II offered the
Kuehne brothers the first opportunity
for foreign expansion. In the footsteps
of the Wehrmacht’s military conquest
of Europe, Kuehne + Nagel grew rapidly:
The transportation firm went from seven branches in Germany in early 1939
to 26 branches across Nazi-occupied
Europe by late 1944, according to a
comparison by VF of company letterhead from the years before and during
the war listing all the offices. The company says it delivered supplies to the
German army. Another driver of growth
for Kuehne + Nagel was an agreement
with Nazi authorities to ship looted
Jewish-owned property from Western
Europe to Germany as part of the furniture operation, which took place from
spring 1942 through July 1944.
As Allied bombing raids on Germany destroyed homes and offices, the
demand for household items and furniture soared. In January 1942 Hitler
decided that all movable property owned
by Jews slated for deportation in Western
Europe was to be brought to Germany
and distributed.
A ledger from a Rotterdam freighter,
discovered by VF in the archive of the
Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust,
and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam,
provides a glimpse of the enormous
size of the operation. The ledger lists
360 ships commissioned by Kuehne +
Nagel’s Amsterdam office between June
1942 and August 1943 on behalf of the
Nazi authorities, which transported furniture across Germany stolen from Jews,
according to a handwritten note accompanying the ledger. One bill of lading, for
example, recorded 307 boxes of cutlery
and china, 105 beds, 93 bedsteads, 91
stoves, 62 bedside tables, 32 clocks, 17
ironing boards, 11 umbrella stands, 10
deck chairs, and 2 baby carriages being
shipped from Amsterdam to Bremen in
December 1942.
“The management at Kuehne & Nagel
was well informed about the ongoing
dispossession of the Jews. It is possible
that the managers did not know that the
owners of the property they were transporting were to be murdered. But they
nevertheless facilitated the economic
destruction of European Jewry,” writes
historian Johannes Beermann-Schön of
Frankfurt’s Goethe University.

From top: Adolf Maass, who was Jewish
and forced out of Kuehne + Nagel, with his
wife, Käthe, in 1933. The two were killed at
Auschwitz in 1944. The company was awarded
for conforming to Nazi ideology in the
workplace. Barbara Maass, granddaughter
of Adolf, memorializes her family story to a
crowd gathered in Bremen, Germany, in 2023.

Kuehne + Nagel also transported
looted art. It didn’t always arrive at its
destination. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, discovered
months after the war ended that Kuehne
+ Nagel had lost a 1944 shipment of 14
paintings en route from Paris to Germany. Gustav Rochlitz, a German art dealer
in Paris who acquired looted art during
the war, had bought the paintings from
the Nazi task force in charge of the furniture operation. The missing shipment
contained, among other works, seven
paintings by Matisse and one each by
Picasso, Modigliani, Gauguin, Cézanne,
Manet, and Pissarro, according to an OSS
document from August 1945 found by VF
in the National Archives in Washington.

Public auction records suggest that if all
of these works were genuine, they would
be worth tens if not hundreds of millions
in today’s art market.
The Third Reich and the transport
of looted property during World War
II made the Kuehne brothers very rich.
After ousting Maass in 1933, Alfred and
Werner began earning on average around
175,000 reichsmarks annually, according
to their denazification files—about $3.4
million today. By 1942, when the furniture operation began, the brothers had
hit their peak earnings: the equivalent of
about $4.6 million each.
Even though the Kuehne brothers
were considered “high-ranking Nazi
industrialists” by American investigators and “big time Nazis” by the British
authorities after the war, both ended up
being judged as mere “fellow travelers”—
Nazi followers who weren’t involved in
the regime’s crimes—in denazification
proceedings in 1948. No repercussions
followed. Their denazification files in the
Bremen state C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 0 6
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79

T H E
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VA N I T Y FA I R

G E

How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America’s low-key, high-powered solicitor general,
is holding the Supreme Court’s feet to the fire
By C R I ST I A N FA R I A S

+

Photographs by A N D R E D. WAG N E R

N E R A L
OCTOBER 2024

81

her Supreme Court debut as the next solicitor
general of the United States, Elizabeth Prelogar was walking
around her Capitol Hill neighborhood with a doctor and a
Rubik’s Cube. She went trick-or-treating with her two young
sons, as one does when Halloween is a big deal in the family.
The Senate had just confirmed her on October 28, 2021, and
Attorney General Merrick Garland swore her in the next day,
with her boys and husband by her side, as the Justice Department’s fourth-highest-ranking official. “It was a command
performance that Mom had to be there,” she once recalled.
Yet on her mind that day as she was going door-to-door was
the fate of abortion rights in Texas, which the state had all but
nullified with a new law, SB 8, allowing private parties to sue
neighbors, doctors, or anyone else they suspected of performing or assisting a person in obtaining an abortion—at the time
still a fundamentally protected right under the Constitution.
“SB 8 is a brazen attack on the coordinate branches of the federal
government,” she argued on November 1. “It’s an attack on the
authority of this court to say what the law is and to have that
judgment respected across the 50 states.”
As much as she tried, General Prelogar, as the justices
addressed her that morning, couldn’t convince a majority to let
the US government intervene in court to protect Texans from a
law “that clearly violates this court’s precEAGLE EYE
edents.” It was her first exposure during
Previous spread:
the Biden years, as solicitor general, to
Elizabeth Prelogar
what has been a coordinated, long-inalways sees the
bigger picture,
the-making assault on abortion rights at
even in the smallest
the federal level. The same five conservaof details.
tive justices who, in a parallel case, more
or less allowed the biggest state in the South to ignore Roe v.
Wade went all the way less than a year later in overruling it for
the entire nation with Dobbs. There, too, Prelogar lost.
As an advocate and a self-described “incorrigible optimist,”
she takes those losses hard. As a human too. “It’s hard as a human
who cares about the issues, and who recognizes that many of the
cases that I’m litigating have profound effects on people throughout our nation,” she told an audience earlier this year.
In this new, chaotic normal for reproductive freedoms—as
well as for gun rights, the future of federal agencies, and other
areas of the law that seem to be up for grabs—Prelogar, 44,
has had to make sense of a confusing legal landscape. And
she has had to be the face of a Democratic administration in
front of the most conservative, and unpopular, Supreme Court
in nearly a century—one remade by Donald Trump, beset by
ONE DAY BEFORE

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B

EFORE SHE PACKED her bags for Washington, Pre-

logar was thriving with her family in Idaho—or
at least adapting to the surreal early stages of the
pandemic. Prelogar, her husband, Brandon, and
two sons had moved from DC to Boise to stay
with her mother, Jeanne Barchas, a retired schoolteacher and
someone who has been a constant at key moments of her life,
according to friends. Even though it was a temporary move,

H A I R , N I C O L E A D A M S ; M A K E U P , A N I TA B A H R A M Y. F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

O

ethics scandals, and responsible for setting the American project back several decades.
In her Justice Department office in Washington, DC, a vase
holds the evidence of how busy the 48th solicitor general of the
United States has been: In it, a collection of quills—an old-time
souvenir the Supreme Court gives every advocate who argues
there—serves as a reminder of her nearly four years standing up
for the government. Despite this visibility and all the attention and
praise she gets from people who follow the Supreme Court closely,
most Americans would be hard-pressed to name one solicitor
general, let alone explain what this government lawyer does. It
may be the most low-key influential job you’ve never heard of,
tasked with defending the United States and its interests before
the high court—the only presidentially appointed officer required
to be “learned in the law.” That qualification doesn’t exist for the
attorney general or even the justices of the Supreme Court.
Prelogar’s tenure has been especially frenzied: In the term
that recessed in July alone, by one count, she argued nearly 20
percent of all the cases in which the government was involved,
the highest percentage for any solicitor general in a quarter
century or more. And of all the cases the court decided, her
office participated in the lion’s share of them. As Chief Justice
John Roberts and his archconservative supermajority have
asserted dominance and made it harder for Congress and the
president to govern, Prelogar has been there all along: making
sure the government, if it’s going to lose, will at least lose well.
Or wielding her oratory skills and legal argumentation to try
to convince, at minimum, two members of Roberts’s bloc to
rule for her side—or at least rule in a way where the damage to
our laws and institutions is manageable. Or averted for a time.
Because solicitors general tend to let their oral arguments
and legal filings do the talking, Prelogar declined to speak on the
record to Vanity Fair for this profile. Still, her voice comes through
clearly in everything her office touches, in speeches she’s given
at law schools and legal conferences, and even articles she wrote
or interviews she gave long before becoming the Justice Department’s top Supreme Court lawyer. I connected with dozens of
people who know her personally and professionally, whose recollections and insights reveal how this Idaho native with a sterling
record, who once aspired to be a journalist and happens to be a triple crown beauty pageant winner, ascended to a perch once held
by the likes of Thurgood Marshall, Robert Bork, and Elena Kagan.
As the nation was reeling from Dobbs, back in her hometown
of Boise a couple of summers ago, Prelogar was asked whether she feels a sense of futility in arguing before this Supreme
Court. “Although sometimes it might seem like the writing’s on
the wall and that a particular outcome is preordained, there is
always room to try to advocate effectively,” she said, adding, “I
try never to lose hope, but rather to focus on the things that I can
control, and on trying to present our case as effectively as I can.”

Idaho offered this “magical space” where the Prelogars could
honorees of President Bill Clinton. Her high school teacher Russ
stay connected to family and friends, Jordan Heller, who has
Heller (her friend Jordan’s father, as it happens) accompanied
known her since their days at Boise High School, tells me.
her to DC for the occasion. He showed me a note that Lizzi wrote
Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar was born Elizabeth Margaret
him before she left for Atlanta on a full scholarship to Emory. “I
Barchas at St. Luke’s hospital in Boise in 1980. She is the fourth
only hope the professors at Emory can live up to you,” she wrote.
child of the late Rudolf “Rudy” Barchas, an Idaho lawyer, and
As she excelled academically, she kept busy competing and
Jeanne, who worked as a special education teacher in the Boise
winning the crowns of Miss Idaho Teen USA (1998) and Miss
School District for more than two decades. According to people
Idaho USA (2001). News stories from this period show a vibrant,
who know the story, Prelogar was something of an “accidental
outgoing, and undaunted Elizabeth Barchas fully immersed in the
world of pageantry—one where beauty and brains weren’t mutubaby”; after her brother Eric, who is nine years older than her,
was born, her mother experienced many miscarriages. The Barally exclusive, and where stereotypes, at least when speaking to
chases adopted their second child, Leah, in part because they
reporters, didn’t hold her back. “The kind of pageant girl that
weren’t sure if they’d ever be able to conceive again after their
people think of is one that I would argue doesn’t exist anymore,”
she told the Idaho Statesman. Accompanying the article was a
second child, Joshua Daniel, died at birth in the 1970s.
collage of images from her personal pageant collection showing
Prelogar has shared memories of how her mother once took
her and her sister as young girls to watch their father in a big
her beaming in an evening-gown competition and posing with
criminal trial, remembering being
members of ’NSync and erstwhile
equally bored and fascinated by how
beauty pageant impresario Donald
the courtroom and its various actors
Trump. In a sidebar the 20-year-old
interact. One anecdote about her
listed her guilty pleasure (chocolate
PRELOGAR DREW
ice cream), favorite Boise activity
father that she hasn’t shared, and
A CONNECTION
that in some ways presages her own
(jogging on the Green Belt), and fanfuture in law, is how he once served
tasy job (Supreme Court justice).
BETWEEN HER TIME
as Jeanne’s defense attorney—and
Like a good journalist in training,
took her case all the way to the Idaho
Barchas wrote a first-person account
IN BEAUTY CONTESTS
Supreme Court and won. The story is
of this grueling slice of her life in the
AND AS THE TOP
a yarn, but suffice it to say Rudy BarAustin American-Statesman, one of
chas, before his daughter Elizabeth
the papers she interned at while in
ADVOCATE FOR THE
was born, convinced the state’s highcollege. In “Behind the Beauty,” she
U.S. GOVERNMENT.
est court that his wife’s misdemeanor
writes of how thrilling and unglamconviction for driving with an expired
orous pageant life can be—the long
“IF YOU WANT TO
registration “cannot be sustained.”
hours of modeling and walking
LOOK AT A
rehearsals, the cramped bus rides, the
In the 1970s, her father, a committed Democrat, went to work for Wayne
endless spotlight and freebies, the criTHROUGH LINE HERE,
Kidwell, at the time the newly elected
ses of confidence, and “the emotional
Republican attorney general of Idaho.
roller coaster in constantly comparing
I LIKE TO GO IN
Kidwell, who is now 86, shared fond
yourself to 50 accomplished, cheerFRONT OF JUDGES,”
memories of “Lizzi,” whom he recalls
ful, gorgeous women.” She recalled
as a bright and curious child who
calling her mother crying one day
SHE SAID.
would relish sitting on the lap of his
because her strut wasn’t the best:
wife, Shari, as she played the piano.
“Mom, I can’t walk.”
He and Barchas became good friends after he appointed him
People and friends familiar with this period of her life underin 1975 to run the attorney general office’s first-ever consumer
stand that participating in beauty contests was, in a way, one of
a piece with her numerous awards, achievements, and drive to
protection division. “I needed someone who believed in it,” he
says. I found numerous newspaper clippings of Barchas suing
go above and beyond, as well as a way to help pay for school. Her
to end the price gouging of milk, warning Idahoans about the
parents had some savings for her to pursue higher education, but it
quality of coal, and taking a stand on the environmental impact
wouldn’t be enough to cover Harvard Law School, where she was
of cloud seeding to address drought conditions. “Rudy really
admitted after finishing summa cum laude at Emory. She didn’t
enjoyed being a lawyer, and he really enjoyed his job as the head
go right away. She deferred three times—the first time to spend a
of consumer protection,” Kidwell says. “And I’m sure that must
year at University of St Andrews in Scotland on a full scholarship
have rubbed off on his young daughter.”
for a master’s degree in creative writing; the second to spend a
Idaho is where a 12-year-old Elizabeth Barchas would get up at
year in Russia studying media censorship on a Fulbright (where
the crack of dawn to take a half-hour bus ride to Boise State Unishe met her future husband); and the third time to go for the triple
crown in the 2004 Miss Idaho pageant, for which she spent the
versity, where she took college-level courses while still a seventh
grader because her school could no longer “meet her needs in
year promoting A Dad Just Like Mine, a self-published children’s
English and math,” according to a special education coordinator
book that was inspired by her father, who was diagnosed with Parat Basin Elementary School in Idaho City. In high school she conkinson’s when she was very young and lived with it for decades.
templated a career in journalism while she wrote for her student
Then representative C.L. “Butch” Otter of Idaho marked
and local papers. During her senior year she was one of two Idaho
the occasion of this final run as Miss Idaho in the congressiostudents selected to go to White House as Presidential Scholar
nal record. “Elizabeth’s platform is understanding individuals
OCTOBER 2024

83

with disabilities, and I am very proud of her continued committournaments in the country; this time, she and another teamment of community service for Idaho and across the globe,”
mate won the top title for the first time in Harvard’s history.
he said. (In 2021 both of Idaho’s Republican senators voted for
Singh, who became a dear friend and later officiated her wedding, recalled in an interview that besides her sharp writing and
her confirmation.)
In one Associated Press photo during the Miss America boardlegal thinking, which many students at Harvard had, what made
walk parade in Atlantic City, Prelogar appears to be having the
Prelogar stand out was her almost limitless level of stamina.
time of her life—smiling widely as she waves to the crowd, dressed
“What really set her apart, more than anybody else, is she has
to the nines in a blue gown and an ornate headdress, all the while
a truly remarkable ability to just focus and work for extended
holding a pair of Spuddy Buddies, an Idaho potato mascot of sorts.
periods of time very, very efficiently,” he told me.
Elaine Metlin, now a close friend who attended her wedding
This streak of excellence earned her coveted one-year judicial
and has seen Prelogar argue at the Supreme Court, recalled the
clerkships in Washington: first with then appeals judge Merrick
“magical summer” when she hired her as a nanny, right as she
Garland and then with justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Kagan.
Prelogar has spoken fondly of each of those experiences: how
was preparing to go to Harvard; she had to google her because
she seemed too good to be true, and the thought of having a Miss
Garland would absorb in an hour what would take her weeks
America contestant as a sitter made her wary. She was stunned
to research and write; how Ginsburg taught her that the law is
by the search results, and all her references checked out. Prenot an abstraction but impacts real humans; and how Kagan
logar’s farewell to a life of pageantry just as she was about to
appreciated dissent when discussing the law with her clerks.
enter her career in law seems like a lifetime ago. But appearing
Speaking with a number of her former co-clerks, I learned that
on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! last year, Prelogar drew a
Prelogar stood out in other ways: that she channeled Ginsburg’s
connection between her time in beauvoice so well that the justice gave her
ty contests and as the top advocate for
more opinion assignments; and that
the US government. “If you want to
early in her time with Kagan, who
look at a through line here, I like to go
had just joined the Supreme Court
“ELIZABETH DOESN’T
in front of judges,” she said.
after her term as President Barack
Prelogar’s Idaho roots have been
Obama’s first solicitor general, PreMELT DOWN.
evident even in the rarefied environlogar learned she was pregnant with
BUT SHE IS
ment of Supreme Court oral advocacy,
her first child. The baby was due in
where she has defended, against all
April, right as things get really busy at
JUGGLING A LOAD
odds, everything from pandemic-era
the court. After the baby was born, she
THAT WOULD CAUSE
measures and key environmental
went right back to work, and she made
actions to affirmative action in highit work: For a time, a nursery was set
MOST PEOPLE
er education and Biden’s student loan
up in an upstairs section of the court,
TO MELT DOWN.”
forgiveness program. In an exchange
and her mother was in town to help. “It
with Prelogar in a complicated tax
was clear then how extraordinary she
was,” Pamela Bookman, a Ginsburg
case last December, Justice Neil
Gorsuch was trying to draw a distinction between two concepts
co-clerk and a law professor at Fordham University, told me, “but
when he mentioned the age-old dilemma on how to pronounce
I think it has been made even more clear since then.”
the word potato: “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, I sometimes wonder,”
By then, working in the Office of the Solicitor General was
he said. Prelogar didn’t miss a beat: “I’m from Idaho, so I love
already in her sights. Neal Katyal, an acting solicitor general and
that.” “You totally get that,” Gorsuch shot back. She really did,
former deputy to Kagan early in the Obama administration, was
among the talented lawyers who wowed her from the Supreme
as the Supreme Court ended up ruling for the United States.
Court lectern. The world of Supreme Court advocacy is small
and insular, and so when Katyal returned to private practice,
ARVARD LAW SCHOOL changed the course of Prehis firm snapped up Prelogar. “Elizabeth is already being asked
logar’s life almost instantly. Once in Cambridge,
for by name by my biggest clients,” Katyal told The Wall Street
she ditched journalism and dove headlong into
Journal in 2012. A typical six-figure sign-on bonus that year was
the world of casebooks, moot courts, legal jourlarger than a Supreme Court justice’s salary.
nals, and Socratic thinking. She was a rock star in
But her real goal was becoming an assistant solicitor general,
then dean Elena Kagan’s administrative law class, according to
one of 16 career positions that are among the hardest to get in
the Justice Department because spots rarely open up. But as
people familiar with this period, but oral advocacy is where she
truly shone. She and her teammate Tejinder Singh were finalists
soon as one did in the summer of 2014, she applied. Michael
in their school’s storied Ames Moot Court Competition, appearDreeben, a longtime deputy solicitor general who has argued
ing before a bench that included the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court and was tapped
In an earlier round before then judge Gorsuch, she was named
as a counselor to special counsel Jack Smith, was among the first
best oralist. (Her mother bought her the Theory business suit
to zero in on Prelogar’s long-term goals. During a talk at Duke
she wore to the finals; now, 17 years later, as solicitor general,
last year, she recounted that in one of the interview rounds,
it’s her go-to attire whenever she argues at the Supreme Court.)
Dreeben asked her: “If you could have any job in the law, what
That was not enough: Prelogar went on to compete in a
would it be?” She replied: “Solicitor general.” The second part
national American Bar Association appellate advocacy comof that exchange, according to people familiar with it, was
petition, one of the largest and most competitive moot court
classic Dreeben, who deadpanned: “That’s one of two correct

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answers.” Prelogar, appearing relieved but intrigued—she went
in cold into the interview—asked him what the other one was.
“Supreme Court justice,” he said.
As an assistant, the cases she handled herself, seven in all,
were not the headline-grabbing kind—those belonged to her
boss or his deputies. Yet she did grab headlines in 2017, when
Robert Mueller selected Dreeben, at the time the Justice Department’s leading criminal law expert, to join his special counsel
team, which was investigating Russian interference in the 2016
election. Dreeben assembled his own team, focused on legal
issues related to the investigation, and Prelogar was among
those he handpicked to join him. Andrew Weissmann, a former
top DOJ prosecutor who wrote a book about the investigation,
told me of the “embarrassment of riches” that it was to have
people like Prelogar help argue one of his cases against former
Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. She also worked on key
sections of the Mueller report. “The legal team was in charge of
the overall writing, the structure, hammering out the law, and
making sure it all sounded like one voice,” Weissmann said.
In self-deprecating fashion, Prelogar has recalled feeling like
a fish out of water sitting at a lunch table full of hardened prosecutors as they shared war stories of flipping difficult witnesses.
“I’m just sitting there, feeling this tremendous sense of, like,
‘Who does not belong at this table?’ ” she has said. “I can’t flip
my kids and get them to cooperate with me.”

Once the investigation wrapped and Prelogar briefly
returned to OSG, as the office is known at the Justice Department, Andrew Goldstein, another Mueller prosecutor, helped
to recruit her to Cooley, a Palo Alto, California–based law firm
that represents the likes of Meta and OpenAI. Michael Attanasio, the chair of the firm’s litigation department, told me
that Prelogar was “the ultimate draft pick” to help build a new
Supreme Court practice at Cooley—and the door would be wide
open should she wish to return. “We’d
LETTER OF
take the door off the hinges,” he told me.
THE LAW
At Cooley, Prelogar took on highPrelogar sifting
impact pro bono work—including a
through files
in her office at
challenge to the Trump administration’s
the Department
mad dash to carry out a string of federal
of Justice.
executions and breaking legal ground
for LGBTQ+ rights in her home state of Idaho. “This was the
first case of its kind,” Chase Strangio, one of the ACLU lawyers
who worked with Prelogar on the challenge to an Idaho ban on
transgender athletes in school sports, tells me.
Yet her brief stint at Cooley coincided with Biden’s election, and
returning to government held strong appeal. Like prior solicitors
general, Prelogar had the prestigious legal credentials, including
her clerkship with the soon-to-be attorney general. Unlike prior
solicitors general, she was not exactly a creature of Washington politics, nor did she possess the C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 0 4
OCTOBER 2024

85

B

a

d

F

a

i

t

h

From exiled actors to academics,
influencers to intellectuals,
VF gets under the hood of the
Catholic right’s celebrity conversion
industrial complex
By KAT H RY N JOYCE
Illustration by MARC BURCKHAR DT

OCTOBER 2024

87

On

T h u r s day,

M ay

30,

593

years

a f t e r J o a n o f A r c wa s b u r n e d a t
t h e s ta k e , C a n dac e Ow e n s c a m e t o
S c o t t s da l e t o ta k e u p h e r swo r d.
It was the feast day of St. Joan, and there
was an evening Mass at Phoenix’s Joan of
Arc Church, then a trek to the suburban
Hilton, where an upstart group named
Catholics for Catholics was throwing
a party to welcome Owens “home.”
The group, founded in 2022 to declare
non-Catholic Republicans “more Catholic” than their Democratic opponents, was
presenting Owens its Joan of Arc Award
for “giving Christ the King his proper due.”
It was a month out from Owens’s April
announcement that she’d joined the
Catholic Church and two months since
she’d been fired by the right-wing Daily
Wire. The events weren’t unrelated.
As a pundit and livestream host with
an audience of millions, Owens has built
a career premised on outrage. Before
2016 she’d been one among many writers peddling women’s-interest hot takes.
But when she leapt right that year—after
liberals criticized her plan to create a
registry of online trolls—she found new
support on the alt-right. She made videos
declaring she didn’t care about Charlottesville and urged fellow Black voters
to wage a “Blexit” from the Democratic
“plantation.” She wore matching “White
Lives Matter” T-shirts with Kanye West
just before he began praising Hitler, then
stayed largely silent when he did.
It only followed that Owens’s conversion would come wrapped in controversy
too, namely her very public split with the
Daily Wire. The controversy centered on
her repeated use of the phrase “Christ is
king,” a mantra with a contested legacy
among Catholics but which in recent
years has become associated with the
young men who shout it the loudest—the
far-right “groyper” movement that follows
white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. Owens denounced the comparison as
guilt by association, but her other recent
comments—about WWII Germans being
the victims of a “Christian Holocaust,”
“gangs” of Hollywood Jews, and her taunt
88

VA N I T Y FA I R

that the Daily Wire’s Jewish cofounder Ben
Shapiro couldn’t “serve both God and
money”—didn’t help her insistence that
she was just making a statement of faith.
In late March, the company announced it
had parted ways with Owens, with one former colleague, Andrew Klavan, a Jewish
convert to Christianity, suggesting she’d
been fired for antisemitism, including her
“Christ is King” tweets. (The Daily Wire
did not respond to a request for comment.)
But, Owens told her fans in Scottsdale
(and more than 200,000 others who
would watch online), she wasn’t prepared
for how forcefully conservative Catholics rallied to her side. “The full weight
of the church came upon [Klavan],” she
said, noting that the phrase she’d made
infamous “trended for four days.”
A month later, when she posted pictures of her baptism at a Latin Mass church
in London, the outpouring was comparable. Within a day, she was announced
as a headliner for this fall’s right-wing
Catholic Identity Conference. Within
weeks, she and her husband, George
Farmer—former CEO of the failed farright social media platform Parler and
a convert himself—were photographed
with a Catholic right podcaster at a gala
fundraiser in Nashville, then later on the
60-mile Chartres Pilgrimage in France,
alongside 18,000 Latin Mass devotees
(including, this year, French nationalist
politician Marion Maréchal).
Catholic Twitter hummed with excitement. Owens wasn’t the only recent
prominent convert, or even Catholics
for Catholics’ first.
When CFC hosted
SALVATION
ARMY
a prayer dinner for
Previous spread:
former president
Shia LaBeouf,
Donald Trump in
Candace Owens,
Russell Brand,
March, founder
Steve Bannon, and
and CEO John Yep
JD Vance are
just a few of the
announced that one
powerful players
speaker, embattled
within the
Mormon activist
movement.

Tim Ballard, whose questionable claims
of fighting child sex trafficking inspired
the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, was
considering converting too. Then there
was actor Shia LaBeouf, comedian Rob
Schneider, Dutch pundit Eva Vlaardingerbroek, and of course Ohio senator JD
Vance, who converted in 2019, five years
before he’d be named the Republicans’
2024 vice presidential nominee. Not to
mention the maybes: British actor Russell
Brand, who’d begun hawking a Christian
prayer app (partly funded by Vance and
his Silicon Valley mentor Peter Thiel)
and making videos about the rosary, and
psychologist turned guru Jordan Peterson, whose wife converted on Easter and
who’d been on an international speaking
tour called “We Who Wrestle With God.”
A bonanza of speculation arose about
who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker
Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself? By
early spring, antiabortion outlet LifeSiteNews was publishing articles on “why
‘culture warriors’ should convert to Catholicism.” “Can you feel the energy shifting?”
the conservative political advocacy group
CatholicVote tweeted repeatedly. “Continue praying for conversions.”
The excitement also sparked hopes that
influencers might help reform a Church
gone astray, since their subjects were clearly not just joining Catholicism but a highly
specific version of it: one that’s spent the
last decade in rebellion against a pope
they disdain; one so consumed by culture
war that their electoral and ecclesiastical
politics can’t be teased apart; but also one
that, increasingly, suspects it will win.

time for the US Catholic Church. Since his election
in 2013, Pope Francis—the first
non-European pope in more than
1,200 years—has faced bitter opposition.
His early calls for Catholics to lessen their
“obsessive” focus on sexual issues marked

I

T’S AN ODD

him as a liberal to conservative critics; his
emphasis on poverty and the environment
proved him a “Marxist globalist” for the
same crowd. Cardinals issued formal dubia
(demands for clarification); clergy called
for his resignation; some declared him an
“antipope”; some prayed for his death.
As the divisions reached a fever pitch in
2020, they mapped neatly onto American
politics, pitting “bad Catholics” Joe Biden
and Pope Francis against Trump (the
non-Catholic) and the faithful remnant.
Trump’s campaign recognized as much,
bypassing Church bishops to court Catholics through non-establishment leaders,
including many on the “radical traditionalist” fringe. Podcaster Taylor Marshall,
whose 2019 book charged the pope was
part of a 100-year Masonic plot to “infiltrate” the Church, was named a campaign
adviser. Trump retweeted missives from
the florid Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
who in 2018 had staged an unsuccessful
papal coup—the closest the church came
to schism in 500 years, says Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli—and
who now wrote long open letters about the
machinations of the “deep church.”
When Trump lost, the Catholic right
was a core part of efforts to overturn the
election. Former campaign strategist
and right-wing Catholic Steve Bannon
transformed his War Room podcast into a
“stop the steal” machine. Catholic groups
normally focused on abortion or religious
liberty joined lawsuits to block Biden’s
certification. Fuentes led his groypers
in that November’s “Million MAGA

Bishops (USCCB) tried to pass a measure
denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians—effectively excommunicating Biden—the Vatican blocked their
plans. Pope Francis began speaking more
openly, and derisively, about his American critics, calling them rigid, reactionary, backward, suicidal. He issued new
restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass,
the dominant form of liturgy before the
mid-1960s Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) introduced various modernizing
reforms. And the Church hierarchy neutralized some of the loudest voices of clerical dissent. The Wisconsin priest behind
a viral video claiming Catholic Democrats
would go to hell was removed from his
church. Another priest, who’d once delivered a pro-Trump speech with an aborted
fetus on his altar, was defrocked. Leading
Pope Francis opponent Cardinal Raymond Burke was stripped of his monthly
stipend and lavish Vatican City apartment.
Strickland, who’d begun claiming that
the pope supported an “attack on the
sacred,” lost his diocese. In July, the
Vatican excommunicated Viganò for
fomenting schism by refusing to recognize
the authority of the pope and Vatican II.
None of this endeared the pope to his
critics or ended the division. In February
an anonymous cardinal issued a memo,
styled as a job description for the next
pope, accusing Francis of fracturing the
Church. In May a group of lay Catholics
and one priest released another document, “The Crimes and Heresies of
Pope Francis,” demanding he resign or

In a widely read article in May, Associated Press reporter Tim Sullivan diagnosed a
Church-wide shift: Catholics were returning to “the old ways,” with Latin Mass, lace
mantillas, and medieval music replacing
signifiers of modernism in parishes across
the country and a uniformly conservative
crop of new priests supplanting older clergy once inspired by Vatican II.
Two weeks later one of the traditionalist
communities Sullivan profiled—Kansas’s
small Benedictine College—seemed to
prove his thesis, when Catholic NFL player
Harrison Butker delivered the most controversial commencement address of the
year. In his speech Butker advised female
graduates to care more about homemaking and motherhood than careers and
promotions, called Pride Month a “deadly
sin,” and exhorted Catholics to abandon
the “Church of Nice”—a popular epithet
on the Catholic right—for the Latin Mass.
Soon after, LifeSiteNews announced an
October conference on the theme of “putting ‘Boomer Catholicism’ out to pasture.”

neat overlay of
US Church and electoral politics was becoming harder
to maintain, even with the
same candidates initially on the ballot.
There were multiple reasons why: partly
the subtle but clear differences between
Biden and Pope Francis on issues from
immigration to Israel; partly the pope’s
refusal to increase women’s leadership
in the Church; partly Trump’s strategic

B

Y 2024, THE

A b o n a n z a o f s p e c u l at i o n a r o s e a b o u t w h o m i g h t b e n e x t :
Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself?

March,” shouting “Christ is king.” Texas
bishop Joseph Strickland addressed the
carnivalesque December 2020 “Jericho
March” rally—widely seen as a test run
for January 6—while January 6 organizer
Ali Alexander announced he too was converting (to “fight the evils in Christ’s own
Church”). On the day itself, a Nebraska
priest exorcised the Capitol.
But then their momentum seemed to
falter. In mid-2021, when conservative
members of the US Conference of Catholic

be fired. A now suspended Texas ministry
announced it had received a divine prophecy: A “usurper” sat on the papal throne.
Yet the sense of impending apocalyptic schism seemed to have receded as
conservatives looked ahead to an eventual post-Francis era. Across both Catholic
and mainstream media, consensus grew
that “the liberalizing energy” Francis
had brought was dissipating, and boomers’ progressive Catholicism was facing
its “last gasps.”

equivocation on abortion; and partly,
said Faggioli, because some bishops were
becoming anxious about the Church’s
association with Trumpism’s cultish
third wave.
There were certainly still Catholics
making a strident case for Trump. On
March 19, Catholics for Catholics hosted
a $1,000-a-plate rosary prayer dinner at
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, invoking the
liturgical feast day of St. Joseph—patron
saint against “atheistic communism”—to
OCTOBER 2024

89

“make the overdue bold proclamation
that [Trump] is the only Catholic option
for 2024.” Roger Stone spoke, calling
himself “a Joseph R. McCarthy Catholic,”
as did former lieutenant general turned
QAnon hero Michael Flynn. Passion of the
Christ star (and fellow QAnon booster)
Jim Caviezel said, between impressions
of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan,
“If Trump is our Moses,” Catholics must
“be the tip of his spear.”
There was also Trump’s drumbeat
message that the Biden administration
was persecuting Catholics—a claim
centered on a 2023 regional FBI office
memo discussing ties between “rad
trad” Catholics and white nationalist extremists. The memo was written
after a young, self-described “radical
traditional Catholic Clerical Fascist” in
Virginia was caught amassing an arsenal of homemade bombs while writing
detailed threats to kill Jews. But when it
was leaked, it became the subject of endless Republican charges that Biden had
labeled his fellow Catholics terrorists
and sent feds to infiltrate their churches.
Trump whooped it up, releasing “Make
America Pray Again” merch and vowing
to create a task force to “fight anti-Christian bias.” Bannon’s podcast set became
cluttered with Catholic iconography as
he promised a coming retribution.
Trump’s messianic mythos was only
reinforced when he survived an assassination attempt at one of his rallies this
July. Some Catholic supporters dipped
into numerology, noting that the time
Trump was shot corresponded to a
scripture verse about putting on “the
full armor of God.” Memes about divine
intervention flooded Catholic Twitter—a blue-eyed Virgin Mary flicking the
shooter’s bullet off its course. Catholics
for Catholics declared that a campaign
they’d launched in June—to have 2,024
Masses said for Trump before Election
Day—could be the reason the shooter

failed, and commissioned a billboard
near the site of the Pennsylvania rally,
bearing images of both a bloodied Trump
and St. Michael the Archangel, beseeching the angel to “defend us in battle!”
A week later, after Biden announced
he was suspending his campaign and
Vice President Kamala Harris became
Democrats’ nominee instead, the Catholic right doubled down on its claims of
persecution. CatholicVote launched a
multimillion-dollar ad campaign in swing
states to “expose Kamala’s vile hatred
of Catholics”—she once challenged a
Trump judicial appointee over his membership in the antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ+
Knights of Columbus—and Trump called
her “the most Anti-Catholic person to
ever run for high office.”
But there was scant perspective on the
election from the actual Church. Where
bishops once weighed in on elections,
said Faggioli, now it was “only the most
extreme, ideological, beyond-the-fringes
voices.” CFC echoed the charge: They’d
stepped in because bishops were failing
to steer Catholics to Trump. The USCCB
no longer even released new voter guides,
as it had done every four years since
1976, observed theologian Steve Millies,
because they could no longer agree on
enough to do so. (In June, CFC issued its
own guide instead.)
For Millies, a professor at Chicago’s
Catholic Theological Union, all of this
amounted to the Church’s “retreat from
[the] public square”—a surprising claim
at a time when Catholicism’s influence
on US politics seems more apparent than
ever. The Supreme Court that overturned
Roe is dominated by conservative Catholics. The radical Project 2025 “readiness
plan” for a second Trump administration
was created under the Heritage Foundation’s “cowboy Catholic” president,
Kevin Roberts. As the National Catholic
Reporter’s Heidi Schlumpf reported last
winter, right-wing strategist Leonard

Leo—the devout Catholic credited with
orchestrating the takeover of the federal judiciary—has declared his intent to
use the same Federalist Society model
to reshape American culture.
Then there’s JD Vance, the onetime
Never Trumper and “angry atheist” who,
in the years since Trump’s first campaign,
had undergone political and religious
conversions—becoming both a vitriolic
MAGA advocate and, in 2019, a Catholic
(a decision Vance described as “join[ing]
the resistance”). Vance’s nomination
was greeted as the ascendancy of several overlapping reactionary movements:
Silicon Valley’s tech right; the postliberal
integralists who seek to re-found America as a Catholic confessional state; the
New Right’s anti-administrative-state
wonks; and the far right’s seamy online
fringe, where bodybuilding “masculinists” meet groypers and eugenicists. This
year Vance wrote a foreword for Kevin
Roberts’s forthcoming book, which calls
for a “Second American Revolution,”
and a blurb for far-right Catholic pundit
Jack Posobiec, whose new book declares
liberals and leftists “unhumans” and
praises dictators like Francisco Franco
and Augusto Pinochet.
The Catholic right was elated by the
news. Bannon had already described
Vance as a St. Paul figure: in Politico’s
paraphrase, “the zealous convert who
spreads the gospel of Trumpism further
than Trump himself.” CFC summoned
the Batman franchise to drive home the
point: “Trump merely adopted MAGA.
Vance was born into it.” The only thing
that “could make it better,” CFC wrote,
was if Trump converted too.
But both in politics and the ways Catholics self-identify, subtler changes were
taking place. For one, the storied “Catholic vote”—long viewed as a stand-in
for the swinging center and thus a bellwether of national elections—was losing
its predictive power. After an April poll

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brought

progressive
90

VA N I T Y FA I R

“the

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anti-globalism,

found Trump leading Biden among
Catholics by 12 percent, a shocking jump
from his 1 percent margin in 2020, Millies
saw proof that Catholicism was following
evangelicalism into nearly automatic identification with the GOP—not
because liberal Catholics were warming
to Trump, but because they were withdrawing from a church associated with
Trumpism. (“It’s a circular thing,” said
Schlumpf. “As the church becomes more
conservative, it becomes less attractive to
young progressives. And as more young
progressives disaffiliate, what’s left is
more conservative Catholics.”)
To many on the Catholic right, that’s
just prophecy fulfilled. For decades,
conservative Catholics have predicted
a winnowing of the church down to a
“smaller, purer” core, as liberal clergy
and laity die off or drop out. The corollary
to that vision—the reason Catholic-right
groups are talking about “energy
shifting”—is the promise the Church
won’t remain small but, once purged of
internal conflict, will spark a virtuous revolution and exponential growth.
But it wouldn’t be the bishops leading
that revolution, since, as Millies argues,
they’re no longer the ones determining
“the narrative of the Church in the United
States.” Instead, it’s increasingly a mix of
lay movements, lay money, and the lay
leaders those powers choose. When Butker’s commencement address went viral,
for example, conservative Catholic media
heralded him as embodying a “DIY traditionalism” with “little direct connection
to Church authorities.”
To the extent bishops still mattered at
all, agreed Faggioli, it wasn’t because
Catholics obey them, but because they’d
become a sort of weather vane, reflecting changes in the culture or the influence of “Big Catholic Laymen.” Now
when Church authorities weigh in on

and

public debates—as many did to defend
Butker’s speech—it’s they who are “playing catch-up.”
These lay institutions, most of which
are conservative, have “inverted the
authority structure of the Church,” Millies said, noting that Catholic parishes and
schools are closing nationwide for lack of
funds while influential Catholic outlets,
like Eternal World Television Network
(EWTN) or Bishop Robert Barron’s hugely popular media ministry Word on Fire,
draw more donations every year. “We
have become a celebrity-driven church,
where the lines between entertainment
and celebrity, and pastoral ministry and
formation, have become as meaningless
as the line between entertainment and
governing in our politics.”
The result was a chasm between
Catholicism the Church and “Catholicism the brand,” he continued. “And what
brands need are celebrity endorsers.”

T’S BAD FORM in the Church to
question the sincerity of someone’s conversion. After all, said
David Lafferty, an independent
scholar who has written for the website
Where Peter Is, which covers the Catholic right, pivotal Church leaders like
St. Paul and St. Augustine started off as
“great sinners.”
And yet, said Lafferty, “when it comes
to all the influencers circling around the
Church”—many of whom “make their
living having opinions online” and seem
more attracted to “external displays of
piety” than grappling with core tenets of
the faith—“it’s important to ask: What are
they really converting to? Is it belief in what
the Church teaches and the fundamental
principles of Christianity? Or are they
converting to anti-LGBTQ sentiment,
anti-globalism, and anti-communism?”

I

anti-communism?”

As 2024’s springtime of conversions
became more obvious, Church officials
weighed in, advising Catholics not to
greet the trend with suspicion.
But it’s hard not to note some
similarities.
Take Brand—once so synonymous with
flaky religious syncretism that one of his
own movies made it a punch line—who
emerged as a spokesperson for the Catholic prayer app Hallow in the months after
he was accused of sexual assault, abuse,
or harassment by more than 10 women.
Or LaBeouf, who received the sacrament
of confirmation from Barron in January
and who admits his road to conversion
began with a lawsuit alleging he’d abused
two ex-girlfriends and shot stray dogs as
a Method acting exercise. Or Ballard,
whose reinvention as a proto-Catholic
celebrity followed detailed refutations of
his claimed heroics, expulsion from the
organization he founded, at least six sexual assault lawsuits, and what one lawsuit
claimed was his reported excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. (Both Brand and Ballard have denied the allegations against
them. One lawsuit against Ballard was
dismissed this July.)
Converting, in these cases, offers some
benefits, whether proof of redemption
or a new army of defenders. After Brand
began displaying Catholic icons in his
Instagram videos and saying, on Good
Friday, that he could “relate” to Jesus’s
“persecution and humiliation,” traditionalist Catholics began referring to
the allegations against him as “historic”
and non-credible. It can also represent
another form of rebranding for influencers courting new fans.
As the once-liberal Brand grew an
audience among the “conspiratorial
right,” his “New Age beliefs only took him
so far,” said C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 0 8
OCTOBER 2024

91

U Y
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO,
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
LAUNCHED A
REVOLUTION THAT
CHANGED COMEDY,
TELEVISION, AND
THE MOVIES.
NOW DIRECTOR
JASON REITMAN HAS
RE-CREATED THE
CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE
SNL’S FIRST EPISODE.
LIVE FROM NEW YORK,
IT’S 1975!

BY
ANTHONY
BREZNICAN

S ES
92

VA N I T Y FA I R

OCTOBER 2024

The doppelgängers of Saturday Night,
clockwise from top left: Cory Michael Smith
as Chevy Chase, Matt Wood as John Belushi,
Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Dylan O’Brien
as Dan Aykroyd, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin,
Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman,
and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris.
Opposite: the original 1975 cast.

T
director Jason Reitman
wants people to know about Saturday Night is that it may be about funny
people—writers and performers who
unquestionably redefined comedy—but
it’s not intended to be a laugh riot. The
movie plays out in real time over the
course of about 90 minutes, and there
are certainly uproarious moments, but
even more tense and fraught ones. The
story starts at 30 Rockefeller Center at 10
p.m. on October 11, 1975, and culminates
with the first-ever broadcast of Saturday
Night Live. What unfolds is a ticking-clock
suspense movie. “It’s a thriller-comedy,
if you can call that a genre,” Reitman says
THE FIRST THING

of the film, which arrives in theaters on
October 11. “I always describe this movie
as a shuttle launch, and the question was,
‘Would they break orbit?’ ”
Nearly 50 years later, we know that the
show will go on, of course, but watching
the desperate scramble is unnerving
nonetheless. Chaos reigns, egos clash,
drugs flow, passions erupt, and pressure
builds until everyone involved seems
ready to feed one another’s fingertips to
the wolverines. (Google that classic SNL
joke if you don’t know it.) At the center
of this maelstrom is the young producer Lorne Michaels, played by Gabriel
LaBelle. The actor, who was 21 when he
filmed it, was nine years younger than
Michaels was when SNL started, which
adds to the sense that the character is in
over his head. “We meet Lorne as he’s still
forming. He is a genius, and he has a vision
beyond anyone else there—and anyone
his age. It’s a lot for an actor to carry,” Reitman says. “In this movie, everyone gets
to kind of screw around except for Gabe,
who has to be the metronome.”
This movie’s version of Michaels is
not the dapper, seemingly unflappable
TV maestro viewers have come to know.
Reitman consulted with Michaels during
preproduction but dissuaded LaBelle
from trying to talk to him beforehand.

LaBelle latched on to other details
instead. He credits a piece of arcane
Bill Murray lore for reconciling his own
unraveling version of Michaels with
the smooth operator he later became.
“Everyone sees him as this fearless leader, this captain who’s steering the ship in
the fog,” LaBelle says. “Bill Murray, when
he came back to host the show 15 or 20
years after he left, said to Lorne, ‘Wow,
you really figured out how to do this.’ ”
(Murray is not depicted in the film, since
he joined SNL in its second season, after
Chevy Chase departed and started making movies.) For LaBelle, that remark
underscored the fact that it took time
for the SNL producer to settle into his
steadiness: “He started it when he was
30. He’s now 80 and has been doing it
for 50 years. Nobody knows what to do
when they first start.”
ATURDAY NIGHT TELLS not just
Michaels’s story, but virtually
everyone’s from that opening night
cast and crew. “This is about not only the
first seven actors, but the writers, the art
department, and everybody who came

S

Aykroyd restrains an irate Belushi while
Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle),
Radner, and an alarmed crew look on.

Radner takes a ride on the lap of a
camera operator to get a bird’s-eye
view of Studio 8H before broadcast.

interviewed Reitman for almost
20 years, I’ve noticed that
one constant in his life and
career is a fascination with the
mechanics of comedy. He’s the
son of the late Ivan Reitman, who
produced Animal House, directed Stripes and Ghostbusters, and
helped bring the wild vibes of Saturday Night Live’s stars to movie
screens. Jason grew up around
Aykroyd, Murray, Crystal, and
Chase. He’s best known for his
feature films—among them Juno,
Up in the Air, and Young Adult—but that
fascination with dissecting humor also
inspired him to direct the 2016 short
Roast Battle about the brutal camaraderie
of insult comics. Reitman’s first production company was even called Hard C,
based on the linguistic comedy theory
that k sounds make the best punch lines.
(“I don’t know if you can print this, but
my example was always: ‘Punched in the
dick’ is nowhere near as funny as ‘kicked

H

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : © N B C / E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N . A L L O T H E R S : H O P P E R S T O N E / S O N Y P I C T U R E S E N T E R TA I N M E N T.

“This is a movie where the villain
is time. It’s like our Sauron.
Our Darth Vader is a clock, and you
feel its presence at all times.”
together at the last second to change
television,” Reitman says. “What was
so unusual about this show was not only
that it was live, but the format was unlike
anything anyone had ever seen before.
You had sketch comedy, you had two
musical guests, you had a live band, you
had stand-up comedians, you had Andy
Kaufman, you had the Muppets, you had
a film by Albert Brooks….”
Many of the movie’s central characters were unknowns who became
household names: Matt Wood plays the
human hurricane that was John Belushi,
Dylan O’Brien is a pertinacious (look that
word up while you’re at it) Dan Aykroyd,
Ella Hunt is the fairy-like Gilda Radner, and Cory Michael Smith achieves
armor-piercing levels of sarcasm as
Chase. Meanwhile, Emily Fairn’s Laraine Newman layers costumes atop each
other so she can hop within seconds into
the next sketch, and Kim Matula’s Jane
Curtin and Lamorne Morris’s Garrett
Morris bond over their shared uncertainty about what this show could be and
whether they belong.
Each of the Not Ready for Prime
Time Players has a different arc in Saturday Night, but they end up at the same
destination—together. “The whole movie is the story of people trying to figure
VA N I T Y FA I R

out what their identity is on the show,”
Reitman says. “The story we tell is the
moment each of these comedians find the way they coalesce as
a group, which I think is the reason the show eventually was the
success that it is.” The movie also
delves into the behind-the-scenes
wrangling of the NBC team that
brought SNL into America’s living
rooms, including Willem Dafoe as
imperious NBC executive David
Tebet, who must decide whether the show is fit to air live. And
Nicholas Podany plays aspiring
comic Billy Crystal, who’s heartsick at being cut from the first
show just before it aired. “The
way it’s always told is that he took
the train back home and got there
just in time to tell his family not
to watch,” Reitman says. “This is
a movie where the villain is time.
It’s like our Sauron. Our Darth
Vader is a clock, and you feel its
presence at all times. And Billy
loses to the clock.”

AVING KNOWN AND

Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun)
rehearses his Mighty Mouse number;
Michaels huddles with Chase and
his girlfriend (Kaia Gerber).
OCTOBER 2024

95

Morris showcases his pipes by
singing a number with musical guest
Billy Preston’s band.

in the cock.’ ”) Saturday Night originated in the same lifelong curiosity. “Anyone
who is a self-described comedy nerd—
you’re interested in the weird chemistry
of what makes something funny,” he says.
An endless number of books and articles have been written about SNL, but
Saturday Night is not based on any of
them. Reitman and cowriter Gil Kenan
researched their script by picking the
brains of more than 30 original sources. “We interviewed everyone we could
find that was alive from opening night,”
Reitman says. “Every living cast member,
every living writer, people from the art
department, costumes, hair and makeup,
NBC pages, members of Billy Preston’s
band—I mean, anyone we could find.”
Newman recalls sharing her memories
with Reitman and Kenan in a video chat
during the pandemic. She thinks the prospect of the movie is thrilling, even if she
feels uneasy about the idea of watching
“herself ” onscreen. “It’s an honor in a lot
of ways, and I hope it’s well received,” she
says. “I still can’t believe that anybody
would be interested in us old codgers at
this point, when there’s been so many
great casts since then. But I understand
the genesis of this thing that’s lasted for
50 years could be interesting.”

Newman’s anecdote about guest host
George Carlin (who’s played by Matthew
Rhys) objecting to a sketch about Alexander the Great’s high school reunion
became a key part of the film, and she’s
grateful that Reitman focused on the
strange mix of stakes they faced that
night. “We were led to believe that nobody
was watching—11:30 p.m. was considered
just a dead time,” she says. “There was no
expectation that the show would last. So
really, it was like we were doing the show
for ourselves. That’s what it felt like.”
She answered questions not just
from Reitman but also from the actor
playing her, as did some of her former
castmates. Garrett Morris bonded with
Lamorne Morris, who’d actually been
claiming to know Garrett since he was a
kid. “Obviously we had the same
last name, so I used to tell people
that he was my dad, as a joke,”
says the actor, who’s best known
for Fargo and New Girl. Now that
they’re friends, the 87-year-old
Garrett is running with the gag.
“He called me and said something about owing my mom a
call because he’s not convinced
that he’s not my dad,” Lamorne
says. He feels there’s a genuine

“Anyone who is a self-described
comedy nerd—you’re interested in
the weird chemistry of what makes
something funny.”
96

VA N I T Y FA I R

connection creatively: “Subconsciously, you are picking up cues
from those before you. No matter what I do, at some point, it
probably came from Flip Wilson,
Garrett Morris, Richard Pryor,
Eddie Murphy.”
In the movie, Morris feels adrift
and uncertain about this new
endeavor. “Obviously, race plays
a little bit of a factor in it, especially during those times when folks
didn’t necessarily know if this was
Lorne just trying to fill a quota,”
Lamorne says. Also, Garrett was
about a decade older than his
costars, so there was a distance there as
well. Lamorne notes that his predecessor
was a Broadway singer and a playwright,
among other talents: “His journey is,
‘Hey man, I got all these skills. I’ve been
a part of the Civil Rights Movement. I’ve
helped desegregate the acting unions. All
of these things have happened to me,
and here I am with all these kids telling
dick and fart jokes.’ It’s like, ‘What am
I doing here?’ ”
Ultimately the character comes to see
this strange show as ideal for his offbeat
versatility. As Lamorne puts it, “He finally
goes, ‘Hold on. There are a lot of things I
can do, and I think this is the place where I
can do all of them.’ ” He adds that Garrett
made a simple request of him. “He said,
‘Tell the story as it happened. Be honest

about it. I just want the audience to know
that I did not quit. I never gave up.’ ”

the SNL tales that the
screenwriters gathered took place
in the countdown to showtime on
October 11, but Reitman and Kenan
took some artistic license to merge the

N

OT ALL OF

most compelling stories into one night.
That included hints of now beloved
sketches yet to come, Michaels giving the Weekend Update job to Chase
instead of performing it himself, and a
demoralizing encounter some of the cast
had with Milton Berle (played by Reitman stalwart J.K. Simmons) when the
hopelessly old-school yuckster
hosted the show a few years later.
Some of their research took place
just in time. “Three people that
we interviewed have now passed
away,” Reitman says, including
writer Anne Beatts, costume
designer Franne Lee, and production designer Eugene Lee,
who also gave the filmmakers
original schematics that allowed
them to re-create Studio 8H in
its entirety inside a soundstage
in Georgia.
Those designs turned out to
be so accurate that when LaBelle

Milton Berle (played by J.K. Simmons)
rehearses a corny showgirl bit for
another NBC special, leading to a
clash with the brash SNL cast.

Michaels and SNL writer Rosie Shuster
(Rachel Sennott) attempt to coax Belushi
into finally signing his contract.

finally did get to meet Michaels in person, he felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu.
It was in March, when Josh Brolin hosted the show and the movie production
had shifted from Georgia to New York
to shoot outside of 30 Rock. “We were
invited to watch an SNL live,” LaBelle
says. “Someone was like, ‘We’ll take you
to Lorne’s office because people hang
out there to watch the show.’ I remember
following this person on our way there
but knowing how to get there already.
It was a weirdly familiar environment.
You’re like, ‘I’ve been here.’ ”
Seeing the real Michaels in person
was a bit unreal, but it didn’t spook him.
“I didn’t need to ask him anything. I
didn’t need to try to hack him,” says
LaBelle, whose breakthrough role came
playing a variation on a young Steven
Spielberg in the director’s own movie The Fabelmans. “I think it was more
weird for Lorne than it was for me. I
was used to that kind of weirdness of:
I’m here to be you.” 
OCTOBER 2024

97

LAND OF THE FREE

The main residence,
dubbed the Brick
House, on Paul
and Rachel “Bunny”
Mellon’s former
Virginia estate,
Oak Spring.
98

VA N I T Y FA I R

A House
Divided
By J AMES REGINATO

The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and
discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump’s biggest donor, many
members of the family were mystified—and not afraid to talk about it
OCTOBER 2024

99

“THINK OF THE BRADY BUNCH,” A MEMBER OF THE
MELLON DYNASTY RECENTLY TOLD ME AS HE TRIED
TO EXPLAIN SOME FAMILY DYNAMICS.
stepson Tim, now 82, seemed to live by.
Little ever appeared in the press about
him except for a wedding announcement
in 1963 and occasional articles revolving
around his interests in trains and planes.
Unlike other elites with access to the
levers of power, he barely engaged in
politics, making only roughly $350,000
in political donations between 1996 and
2017, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Then in 2018 he sent $10 million to the
Congressional Leadership Fund, the super
PAC that runs ads on behalf of House
GOP candidates. In the 2020 cycle his
contributions to conservative candidates
and causes totaled $70 million (including
$20 million to Donald Trump). And since
the start of 2022, he has poured in more
than $125 million to Make America Great
Again, the Trump-affiliated super PAC,
and $25 million to American Values 2024,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s super PAC.
Tim Mellon is the most consequential
mega-donor of this contentious election,
and the least known.

reached out to
MAGA world to offer his largesse, they had to research
him. Reportedly, he has little interest in
meeting candidates or attending events,
and he communicates with some by fax.
Some information came to light in 2020,
when The Washington Post first reported on
an e-book Tim had self-published in 2015.
With the oddly punctuated and cased title
panam.captain, it was an autobiography
as well as something of a manifesto. In
it, he wrote that Black people “became
even more belligerent and unwilling to
pitch in to improve their own situations”
after the expansion of social programs in
the 1960s, and that Americans who relied
on “the government teat” were “slaves of
a new master, Uncle Sam.”
After inquiries by the Post, the e-book
was withdrawn. On July 23 a book with
the same title was released by Skyhorse,
whose founder, Tony Lyons, is also a
cofounder of American Values 2024, the
super PAC backing Kennedy (Lyons is
also Kennedy’s publisher).
Apart from some reminiscences of
his school days, Tim writes little about
his family or his personal life. His efforts
to build a railroad company and learning
to fly take up most of the 171 pages. Aside
from a photo of Tim as a small boy with
his maternal grandparents, there are no
pictures of the author. In an appendix he
reveals the itinerary of a trip in which he
flew around the world, his medical history (“2008–Prostate removed”), and
his 20 favorite movies (number one is
Casablanca; My Cousin Vinny is sixth).
Via his publisher, Skyhorse, Tim Mellon
declined to be interviewed for this story.
But a number of Mellon family members
and confidants agreed to speak.
“I’m just as surprised as you are about
my uncle coming out. I couldn’t believe
he was mentioned in the press. He’s the

W

HEN TIM FIRST

PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES

Timothy Mellon in 1981 as he was expanding his
railroad empire.

T I M M E L LO N : A P P H O T O . L A DY B I R D J O H N S O N , B U N N Y M E L LO N , A N D PA U L M E L LO N : T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S / R E D U X . P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : N O E D E W I T T/ O T T O .

Though ’70s kitsch could hardly be further from the great banking and industrial
fortune, the relative was referring to Paul
Mellon and his blended family.
But instead of Alice the housekeeper,
more than a hundred staff members were
on duty at Oak Spring, a 4,500-acre estate
where the walls were adorned with masterpieces by Van Gogh, Degas, and Manet.
Houseguests included the likes of John
and Jackie Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth
and Prince Philip, and Charles and Diana.
Paul’s wife Mary had died in 1946,
leaving him with their nine-year-old
daughter, Catherine, and four-year-old
son, Timothy. Two years later, when
he married Rachel Lambert Lloyd, she
moved into Oak Spring with her two
children, Eliza and Stacy III, from her
marriage to Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr.
Bunny, as Rachel was called, became
known as a paragon of refinement,
understatement, and discretion. “Nothing
should be noticed,” she famously declared.
It was an old money credo that her

most private Mellon there is. He’s been
very quiet up until now,” his nephew, John
W. Warner IV, told me during a phone call
from his home in Virginia. One of the
three children Tim’s sister Cathy had
with Senator John Warner, to whom she
was married from 1957 to 1973, Warner
IV is a military historian and former race
car driver.
“My generation, and the younger generation, is unhappy about his very public
support of what we think of as antidemocratic causes and candidates,” says a
cousin of Warner IV. “Again and again
I’ve heard dismay about him going in this
direction. One of the cousins said it just
makes her sick.”
A highly private individual, according to some who know him, Tim Mellon
divides his time between his vast properties in Wyoming and Connecticut. He’s
had three wives (and four weddings) but
no children. He’s “socially awkward,”
and “wears old aviator glasses with tape
on the bridge.” He is apparently fond
of Patsy Cline, has a fascination with
Amelia Earhart, and an obsession with
a medieval Norwegian church. His early philanthropic giving suggests that he
once had some liberal impulses.
Unlike many other old money clans,
the Mellons are still loaded. “175 Years
Later, the Mellons Have Never Been
Richer,” read a headline in Forbes, which
estimates that the family is currently worth
more than $14 billion. They’ve got staying
power. Of America’s billionaire dynasties,
only the Du Ponts have had a longer run.
The family fortune originated with
Paul’s grandfather, Tim’s great-grandfather, Thomas Mellon, who arrived in
western Pennsylvania from Ireland at
age five in 1818. After studying law in
Pittsburgh, he invested in real estate and
opened a bank. With his wife, Sarah Jane
Negley, “The Judge,” as he became known,
produced six sons and two daughters.
Thus, the Mellon family tree has many
branches. But Thomas and Sarah’s sixthborn, Andrew William, Paul’s father, was
the real empire builder. “A.W.,” as he was
known, built a colossal fortune from banking to oil to aluminum before he became
secretary of the Treasury under presidents
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
In a recent Substack essay, Robert Reich,
who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, asserted that policies

SILVER CIRCLE

Lady Bird Johnson with Paul and Bunny Mellon at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

“I’m just as
surprised as
you are about
my uncle
coming out.
I couldn’t
believe he was
mentioned
in the press.
He’s the most
private Mellon
there is. He’s
been very quiet
up until now.”

pushed through by A.W. in the 1920s—cutting the estate tax by half, whittling down
the top income tax rate from 73 percent
to 25 percent—allowed him to shift much
of his fortune to his heirs tax-free, setting
the stage for immense wealth and more
specifically enabling his grandson Tim
to bankroll the Trump campaign today.
“Timothy Mellon…is the product of a
tax system pioneered by his grandfather
that allows the perpetuation of dynastic
wealth and the maintenance of its political power,” wrote Reich. “[Yet] Timothy
Mellon rages against only handouts that
go to those born without silver spoons.”
Echoing A.W.’s discernible politics,
to his family he was domineering, cold,
and distant. Paul and his sister, Ailsa, did
not have a happy childhood. After their
parents’ rancorous divorce in 1912, they
were shuttled from one cheerless Pittsburgh mansion to another. With his first
marriage to Mary Conover Brown, who
graduated from Vassar and studied at the
Sorbonne and Columbia, Paul was finally able to pursue his interests in art and
psychology—and break away from Pennsylvania. After traveling to Switzerland to
undergo analysis with Carl Jung, the couple settled at Oak Spring, an idyllic estate
in the hunt country of Virginia, where

OCTOBER 2024

101

Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy visits Paris
with Bunny in the late 1960s.

they began to bring up Cathy and Tim.
(Ailsa, who had only one child, a daughter named Audrey, with David K.E. Bruce,
also became a resident of Virginia as well
as New York.) But tragedy struck in 1946
when Mary, 41, died of an asthma attack.
“The trauma of Mary’s death overshadowed my life for some time,” Paul
wrote in his 1992 memoir, Reflections in
a Silver Spoon. “I remained in a state of
shock.” “Tim and Catherine adored their
mother. He never got over losing her,” a
cousin told me.
Uniting his family with Bunny’s at Oak
Spring proved difficult. Neither Paul nor
Bunny were skilled parents, and the four
children had very different personalities. Dinners were strained. A number
of sources recall a precious 18th-century
porcelain cabbage that sat in the middle
of the table. Tim, they said, would often
reach over it to grab something, leading
an irritated Bunny to snap at him for fear
he would break the cabbage.
“As a little boy he was very gregarious.
In time he became brilliantly mathematically minded,” Bunny observed, adding,
“He has confidence, but not curiosity to
branch out,” according to Burton Hersh
in The Mellon Family (1978). In the same
book, she noted that “Tim’s political and
social mind-set, so different from Paul’s,
started emerging during adolescence,” to
the alarm of his father. “If Tim had [a radical idea], Paul pounced on it—‘Oh, you’ll
learn better, you’d better change,’ ” Bunny recalled to the historian. The problem

102

VA N I T Y FA I R

“Again and
again I’ve
heard dismay
about him
going in this
direction. One
of the cousins
said it just
makes her sick.”

J A C Q U E L I N E K E N N E DY A N D B U N N Y M E L LO N I N PA R I S : M I C H A E L O C H S A R C H I V E S / G E T T Y I M A G E S .

PARISIAN PERSUASION

was Tim was already rich, being the beneficiary of “hundred-million-dollar trust
instruments” and other bequests from his
grandfather, according to Hersh’s book.
“It’s hard with children who are on the
same economic level. They simply don’t
have to listen,” Bunny lamented.
Tim made his feelings about his stepmother plain when he declined to discuss
her with Hersh. “I hope you don’t want to
open that can of worms,” he said.
According to I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold’s recent biography
of Bunny, “Paul agreed with Bunny that
Tim was a very difficult child.” Boarding
school offered one solution. At age 10
Tim was enrolled at Fenn, near Boston,
then continued his education at Milton
Academy and Yale.
Before his freshman year of college,
he proposed to his girlfriend, Susan Tracy. Though “Sue” had good credentials,
being a Bryn Mawr girl and the daughter
of the president of Esso Standard Oil, Bunny tried to nix the wedding. According to
Hersh’s book, Sue wasn’t very deferential to Bunny. At the end of Tim’s junior
year, the couple won out and got married.
After graduation they moved into a simple
house in Guilford, Connecticut.
In the early 1970s she helped him
determine where his foundation, the
Sachem Fund, should make donations.
Recipients included the ACLU and a feminist law firm; they also helped finance
an inquiry into poor housing conditions
on Navajo reservations and a campaign
to rebuild a hospital in North Vietnam.
For three years Tim worked at the Yale
computer center before he opened a business that developed systems programs for
small computers for educational institutions. “He’s a quant introvert with a very
smart analytical mind,” according to one
of his relatives.
In the early 1980s a company he founded, Guilford Transportation Industries,
began buying up rail lines from Maine
to Maryland, building a 3,900-mile railroad empire that would dominate New
England freight traffic.
In the years to come, Tim maintained
limited contact with family. In the penultimate paragraph of Hersh’s book, a quote
from Tim is portentous and rather chilling: “My view of families is that they’re
an anachronism. The family unit is not a
functioning entity anymore. It no longer

serves an economic need. I suppose it’s
interesting as a social phenomenon.”
the first far-right
moneybag in the family. In the
1990s Richard Mellon Scaife
became the principal funder of “the
vast right-wing conspiracy” against Bill
Clinton. Scaife was a grandson of A.W.’s
younger brother, Dick.
The lion’s share of Mellons still lives in
Pennsylvania; many of them are Republicans, according to Warner IV, as was Paul
during his lifetime (he died in 1999) even
as Bunny, a fervent Democrat, became
intimate with the Kennedys. “You want to
know where the Mellon enclave is? It’s in
Ligonier,” says Warner IV, referring to the
lush rolling hills about an hour southeast
of Pittsburgh. “The Ligonier crowd,” as he
calls them, “[is] a mixture of conservative
and liberal and everything in between.”
One of those is Christopher Mellon,
who is descended from The Judge’s second son, James. Christopher served as a
deputy assistant secretary of defense for
intelligence in the Clinton and George W.
Bush administrations. Recently he made
headlines when he joined a small group of
former officials with security clearances
who came forward to reveal secret government studies of UFOs and to sound
the alarm about the security threat they
pose. “He and I share the UFO extraterrestrial involvement issue,” Warner
IV says about his third cousin. “He’s on
the ultraconservative side, and I take the
moderate side.… You know, we’re not
alone. Big deal. The big deal is that the
military-industrial corporate intelligence
complex has been hiding the possibilities
of what’s going on out there.”
Most members of the A.W. branch
are based in the Virginia-DC area, and
almost all of them are Democrats. They
also seem to think of themselves as “the
true royalty” of the clan, as one member
phrased it to me. This branch includes
Ailsa’s grandchildren—the children of her
only child, Audrey, and Audrey’s husband,
Stephen Currier, himself related by marriage to the immensely wealthy Warburg
family. In 1967, the couple, both civil rights
activists, disappeared in a mysterious private plane crash (the wreckage was never
found), orphaning Andrea, 10, Lavinia,
9, and Michael, 5. With their inheritances
from Ailsa, who died in 1969 (“Mrs. Ailsa

T

IM IS NOT

Mellon Bruce Dead; Called Richest Woman in the U.S.” read the headline of her
obituary in The New York Times), and the
Warburgs, the Currier children became
possibly the wealthiest of the Mellon
scions. Harvard-educated Lavinia, an
environmentalist and filmmaker, is very
involved with Tibet issues and has a close
relationship with the Dalai Lama. When I
interviewed her about one of her films in
the late 1990s, she expressed horror over
the activities of Richard Mellon Scaife:
“For a liberal Democrat like myself, I’m
embarrassed to be a Mellon right now,
with this fellow running around.…”
The Pennsylvanians and the Virginians rarely meet. Matthew Mellon, a
younger brother of Christopher, was until
recently the highest-profile Mellon, given
his flashy lifestyle with his first wife, Jimmy Choo cofounder Tamara Yeardye, his
cryptocurrency advocacy, and his battles
with drug use. Nobody recognized him
when he appeared at the funeral service
for Eliza, Tim’s stepsister, in 2008. “He
just showed up. He wasn’t invited,” a Virginia Mellon recounts. “He comes up to
me, ‘Hey! It’s so great to be here for the
family.’ I’m like, ‘Who are you?’ ” Matthew died in Cancún in 2018.
1980s, following his
divorce from Sue, Tim married Louise Whitney, an Upperville, Virginia,
native who had been a childhood friend.
After she and Tim divorced in the early 1990s, Tim married Patricia Trenary
Freeman, who was recently divorced from
Charles “Chas” Freeman Jr., a classmate
of Tim’s at Milton and Yale as well as best
man at his first wedding. Chas, a diplomat,
gave an interview around 1995 in which
he said, “I had quite a happy marriage of
30 years with her, which broke up in the
summer of 1992, in a very nasty way.” Tim
and Patricia (who had three children with
Chas), later divorced and then remarried.
In an email to me, Ambassador Freeman
commented, “Tim Mellon’s callous
betrayal of our friendship was almost as
hurtful as my then wife’s abandonment of
me for reasons she declined to explain.”
In 1998 Tim purchased brand rights to
Pan Am Airways after it filed for bankruptcy; he rebranded his rail company Pan Am
Railways. In June 2022 CSX announced
it had completed the acquisition of Pan
Am Railways. Terms were not disclosed.

I

N THE EARLY

While the London Times has reported
that Tim has a net worth of $1 billion,
Warner IV says, “I’ve read that he’s
worth $4.2 billion.” He further says the
combined worth of the Mellon clan today
is more like $25 billion. “[These families] don’t want the public to know what
they’re worth.”
Given his uncle’s wealth, his political donations are not huge outlays. “It’s
pocket change for him,” says Warner IV.
He must have spent a bundle on a
most unusual project on his estate in
Lyme, Connecticut, a bucolic area where
Colonial-era saltbox houses are the norm.
Tim’s property encompasses hundreds of
acres, but passersby on a small road have
been astonished to see an exact replica of
a Norwegian stave church dating to the
12th or 13th century.
Toward the end of the Viking period,
when Norway became a Christian country, numerous stave churches were built.
The wooden structures feature a series
of roofs, each one offset and becoming
smaller as the church reaches toward the
sky. Marvels of engineering, they require
an intricate system of beams and pillars.
Tim decided he wanted a full-scale
replica of the stave church in Borgund,
Norway—which is considered the finest
of the genre—erected on his property.
After many reconnaissance trips to Norway, a team of skilled workmen spent
years painstakingly re-creating it in Lyme.
“It was an obsession of his. It’s the
most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I
was told by one of the apparently very
few people who has seen it up close. “He
doesn’t want anyone to see it.”
“I know people who have gone down
that road to look at it and he’s chased
them out of there,” a local told me.
In the majestic but sparsely populated
south of Wyoming, where Tim bought a
vast ranch in 2005, he suffers no interlopers. “I can think of no place on earth
more quiet and peaceful and conducive
to easy concentration,” he writes in panam.captain.
In his golden years Tim has the wherewithal to finance passion projects. In 2012
he donated stock valued at more than
$1 million to the International Group
for Historic Aircraft Recovery, to help
finance their search for the remains of
Amelia Earhart’s plane. After the expedition failed C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 0 7

OCTOBER 2024

103

The General

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 8 5 kind of background—like work in the White House or
other high-profile political appointments—
to serve as her calling card. Donald
Verrilli, who served as Obama’s second
solicitor general and hired her in 2014, is
said to have inspired her to work for the
new administration.
Some six-plus years later, according to
people familiar with this period, Prelogar
threw her hat in the ring and submitted
her résumé to the Biden-Harris transition
team, hoping for the best. She didn’t hear
back from the transition team until before
the holidays, when a person interviewed
her for possible service. With less than a
week before the start of the new administration, Prelogar was offered the job of
principal deputy solicitor general. A source
familiar with the DOJ transition told me
that a number of people “who are extraordinarily well respected were pushing for
Elizabeth” to land in this position on day
one of the Biden years.
As Prelogar was divesting from all her
cases and preparing to fly back to Washington to start her biggest job yet, Strangio
was among those she called to break the
news. He recalls a previous conversation
in which she said, “There’s only one or two
jobs in government that I would leave for.”
Defending the government’s interests in
the Supreme Court was one of them.

day of the Biden presidency, before she had fully moved into her
office at the Justice Department, Prelogar
received an urgent call from one of her deputies. He told her that a federal agency was
interested in greenlighting an important
action at the start of the new administration. There was one wrinkle: The proposed
action could have ramifications for a pending Supreme Court matter—one in which
the Office of the Solicitor General had
already staked out a position. The deputy’s advice to his new boss: Call the acting
general counsel for the agency and advise
ON THE FIRST

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VA N I T Y FA I R

that they not take the action. “I hung up
the phone with him and admittedly had a
little bit of a freak-out moment,” Prelogar
recalled during a lecture in Idaho. “Was I
really going to call the general counsel of
an agency on my first day on the job and
urge them not to take a significant federal
action because of its possible impact on a
pending Supreme Court case?”
Yes, indeed, that’s exactly what she
did. She took a few deep breaths, read all
the relevant materials, wrapped her head
around the problem, consulted with her
deputy, and then called the agency counsel, who agreed with her solution: delay
the action until they could figure out how
to implement it without messing up the
pending litigation. Crisis averted.
The principal deputy solicitor general
serves at the pleasure of the president and
can fill in as acting solicitor general in the
event of a vacancy or if the solicitor general is recused for any reason. That was
Prelogar’s role on January 20, 2021, the day
she had to put out a small fire between her
office and another agency. According to
people familiar with this early tenure, she
was happy to remain in this acting role
until the new administration put forth a
name; it never crossed her mind at the
time that she’d be the nominee one day.
As twists of fate go, Prelogar was not
initially the Biden administration’s top
choice for the nomination—Leondra
Kruger, a California Supreme Court justice who served as assistant and acting
principal deputy solicitor general during
the Obama years, was said to be a candidate. But she reportedly declined the
job—more than once. Two federal appeals
judges, Sri Srinivasan and Diane Wood,
and Washington litigators Andrew Pincus
and David Frederick, were also floated as
possible candidates. For nine months, the
Biden Justice Department did not have a
Senate-confirmed solicitor general, one
of the longest stretches in modern history a new administration has gone without
one. A White House official told me in
an email that Dana Remus, Biden’s first
White House counsel, and her deputy, Stuart Delery, were two of Prelogar’s biggest
backers for the job besides the president—
and that they were focused on getting
hundreds of other nominees confirmed
at the DOJ and elsewhere. “Our goal was
to make sure Prelogar was officially confirmed before the Supreme Court term
started—and she was,” the official said.
(The term had started weeks earlier.)

The position of solicitor general is as
old as the Justice Department itself, created after the Civil War to bring order and
stability to how the federal government
litigates cases, especially those enforcing
Black civil rights, throughout the United
States. Supreme Court justice Thurgood
Marshall often described his job as solicitor
general as the best he’d ever had. Heller,
Prelogar’s high school friend, echoed Marshall’s sentiment. “My sense is that this is
as hard as she’s ever worked, and it’s the
best job she’s ever had,” she tells me.
Prelogar, in public remarks, has likened
her role to that of “a traffic cop, trying to
get all the pieces of the federal government moving in the same direction at the
same time.” Her office signs off on every
appeal where the government loses a
case in the lower courts. That prerogative
runs from the technical and the mundane
to the controversial—like appealing the
Florida judge’s dismissal of Jack Smith’s
prosecution of Trump over his retention of
classified documents. Peter Carr, Smith’s
spokesperson, confirmed the solicitor general greenlit that appeal. Prelogar was also
present in the courtroom when the Trump
immunity case was argued, and Smith’s
counselor, Michael Dreeben, told the
justices that “the solicitor general of the
United States” had been consulted on the
work of the special counsel.
It also falls to Prelogar to notify Congress
when the government won’t be appealing
a major adverse ruling—which she did
in June when she sent a letter to House
Speaker Mike Johnson saying that the
department wouldn’t appeal a Trump-appointed judge’s ruling undermining the
little-known Minority Business Development Agency. The agency, which dates
back to the Nixon years, could continue its
mission, Prelogar reasoned, and the ruling
was narrow enough that it wasn’t “in the
best interests of the United States” to seek
further review. As Seth Waxman, one of her
predecessors, once said, “On appeal, things
can always get worse.” With the current
Supreme Court, that’s an understatement.

Prelogar and a group of lawyers from her office in Washington boarded
a pair of vans at the Justice Department
and took a ride to the Supreme Court—a
minutes-long drive toward the east end of
Capitol Hill. By long-standing tradition,
on days the justices are expected to issue
decisions, the solicitor general and her
team attend the day’s session and get the
IN LATE JUNE

best seats in the house—the eight chairs
at counsel table, only a few feet from the
bench where the nine justices preside.
On this particular day this section of the
courtroom, reserved for members of the
Supreme Court bar, sat almost empty.
The Supreme Court doesn’t announce
which opinions are due on any given day.
And like any other court watcher, Prelogar
was expecting any of the still-outstanding
decisions of the term—a number of which
would once again upend American law
and society, disturbing decades’ worth
of precedent, governance, and people’s
settled expectations. At the top of the list
was a landmark where the six conservatives, led by Roberts, ignored her calls to
avoid “an unwarranted shock to the legal
system” by overruling the foundational
Chevron doctrine—which for generations
had guided how Congress delegated
power to federal agencies to make rules
to safeguard workers, our health, the environment, financial institutions, and other
areas of American life. And despite her
Herculean efforts, she could not convince
a majority, again led by Roberts, to sustain
a charge against a Capitol rioter federal
prosecutors had accused of obstructing
the joint session of Congress on January 6.
Yet on Prelogar’s mind the morning of
June 27, just one day before that pair of
stinging losses, one case stood out: a relatively small but consequential dispute that
could mean life, death, or near-certain
harm to the health of pregnant patients in
her home state of Idaho. She had good reason to be thinking about it: A day earlier,
the Supreme Court accidentally posted the
outcome of the ruling to its website before
quickly taking it down.
Moyle v. United States, which Prelogar
argued in April, is the inevitable fallout of
the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022—one of the
many abortion-related controversies that
have arrived, and are expected to arrive,
before the same Supreme Court that
decreed that the issue of when or whether
someone may terminate their pregnancy
belonged to people and their elected representatives, not federal judges.
In the wake of Dobbs, the Justice Department formed a task force charged with
protecting reproductive rights in those
discrete areas where the federal government still can. Vanita Gupta, who led the
task force until she left the department in
February, tells me that Prelogar plays a key
role in those discussions and is unafraid to
speak truth around the table—especially

when it comes to litigation and appellate
strategy, or when her analysis may differ
from colleagues. Yet she added that Prelogar is “so down-to-earth” and otherwise
brilliant that her insights, even on finer
points of law, are well received. “She has
a lot of fanboys and fangirls in the department,” Gupta adds.
The attorney general is one of them.
“She is one of the most exceptional legal
minds in this country, and I think all of us
should be grateful to have her representing us,” Garland said during a recent Idaho
event with Prelogar by his side.
It is through this task force that the Justice Department has been defending the
Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and
efforts to make it more accessible; despite
a track record of safety and effectiveness,
the drug has been under siege by antiabortion groups. Likewise, shortly after Dobbs
the department sued the state of Idaho
under the Emergency Medical Treatment
and Labor Act, also known as EMTALA,
which—the government argued—protects
pregnant patients’ access to critical stabilizing care, up to and including an abortion,
even in states with strict antiabortion laws.
As expected, both issues made their way to
the Supreme Court. And in both, the solicitor general’s advocacy made a difference.
Jessica Huber, a friend of Prelogar who
has known her since their early days in
Washington, tells me that on the day she
argued the mifepristone case, Prelogar volunteered to pick her kids up from soccer
practice. “She’s a full human outside of that
world,” says Huber. Another friend had a
different take. “Elizabeth makes what she
does look pretty easy because she doesn’t
melt down. But she is juggling a load that
would cause most people to melt down,”
Singh, her close friend from law school,
tells me. “I think for her to maintain her
life and her family and do her job taxes
even her superhuman level of stamina
sometimes.” Then he adds: “What people
ought to know is just how much she shoulders by herself. It’s kind of crazy.”
Prelogar’s ability to remain composed
under the glare of the likes of Justice Samuel Alito is what has gained her so many
admirers. An extended exchange she had
with him during the EMTALA argument
went viral on X, in part because one could
sense her infinite patience wearing thin.
In so many words, Alito suggested that the
phrase “unborn child” in a different section
of the law trumped the need to stabilize the

health of pregnant women at risk. That
seemed to set her off. And over his attempts
to interrupt her, she didn’t let him: “I think
the premise of the question would be that
the state of Idaho can declare that she
cannot get the stabilizing treatment even
if she’s about to die. That is their theory of
this case and this statute, and it’s wrong.”
By happenstance, the EMTALA case
touches on a number of strands of Prelogar’s personal life: St. Luke’s, the health
system at the center of the case, has had to
airlift pregnant patients out of the state as a
result of Idaho’s extreme abortion ban. She
was born there and spent a good portion
of her teenage years at its main hospital
as a young volunteer. And her mother’s
own experiences with difficult pregnancies, and the life-altering risks inherent to
them, underscores how personal standing
up for those patients must have felt. “We
were very fortunate to have her in her
position at this point in time to make those
arguments and couldn’t be prouder as an
Idahoan to be in that position today,” Peg
Dougherty, a deputy general counsel at St.
Luke’s Health System, says of Prelogar at a
briefing on the day the case was decided.
With an election around the corner,
no one knows what the future holds
for the solicitor general and the Justice
Department’s litigating positions in this
and many other areas. On this score, the
Biden administration and what remains of
our constitutional order face an uncertain
future. Case in point: On the day Prelogar attended the court session to learn of
the ruling in Moyle v. United States—as the
EMTALA case is known—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in open court
that the outcome only offered a temporary reprieve. “Today’s decision is not a
victory for pregnant patients in Idaho,”
Jackson said. “It is delay. While this court
dawdles and the country waits, pregnant
people experiencing emergency medical
conditions remain in a precarious position.
This court had a chance to bring clarity and
certainty to this tragic situation, and we
have squandered it.”
Like Prelogar, Wayne Kidwell, the old
family friend who hired her father to work
in government, has experienced the changing world of law and politics, including as a
Justice Department official during the Reagan revolution and a justice on the highest
court in Idaho. He thinks we haven’t yet
seen all that Prelogar can shoulder: “I hope
that I can live long enough that I can see her
nominated to the US Supreme Court.” 
OCTOBER 2024

105

The Billionaire’s Secret

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 7 9 archive contain no mention of the furniture operation.
After the war, Kuehne + Nagel fronted a
CIA-backed precursor of West Germany’s
foreign intelligence agency, the German
newspaper Welt reported in 2015. The
German spy agency used some of the
transport firm’s offices as cover for key
operatives. Alfred Kuehne’s denazification file includes a letter, marked “top
secret” and dated February 17, 1948,
from British intelligence to the American
denazification committee in Bremen. “It
is considered vital for operations which are
already in hand that Mr. Alfred Kuehne be
denazified in such a category so that he is
able to retain his business,” wrote a chief
of British intelligence, who provided his
rank, major-general, in the letter, but not
his name. “We would be very grateful to
you if you could aid us in this matter since
it concerns the security of the British and
American zones.”
Soon after the letter was sent, the
Kuehnes’ businesses and other assets,
which had been frozen as part of their
denazification proceedings, were returned
to them and they were reinstated in their
executive positions at Kuehne + Nagel.
Alfred became the company’s major
shareholder in 1952 after Werner, a
lifelong bachelor, moved to South Africa, where he died in the mid-1950s.
Klaus-Michael, Alfred’s only child and
anointed successor, began working at the
firm in 1958, when he was 21, and took the
helm eight years later.

I V. K U E H N E ’ S B R A Z E N R E Q U E S T
KLAUS-MICHAEL HAS BUILT Kuehne +
Nagel into a global logistics behemoth
in the six decades since, relocating the
company seat and headquarters to Switzerland, selling a stake to shore up liquidity
and save the firm before buying back the
shares to retake control. In 2023 the firm
had about $30 billion in revenue, more

106

VA N I T Y FA I R

than 80,000 employees, and 1,300 offices across about 100 countries. “I have
worked far too much in my life,” the billionaire told Swiss magazine Bilanz. He
has also spoken about neglecting his private life, including not having any children
with Christine. That they have remained
childless is “sad of course,” Kuehne told
SonntagsZeitung. “The third generation is
the last in the family. As a family entrepreneur, I think it’s a shame that I can’t pass
on the business personally.”
Perhaps because of that, the octogenarian is busy focusing on his legacy—in
particular how he will be remembered in
Hamburg, the country’s largest port and
main gateway to the world.
Through 2023, Kuehne was the main
sponsor of Hamburg’s Harbour Front
Literature Festival. The main literature
prize, endowed with 10,000 euros,
even bore his name, the Klaus-Michael
Kuehne Prize. That was until 2022, when
two nominees for the prize withdrew
because of Kuehne’s refusal to deal with
his firm and family’s Nazi past, and the
prize was renamed. Kuehne’s foundation
felt it was “treated extremely unfairly in
the matter,” a spokesperson told the German newspaper Taz at the time. It soon
stopped sponsoring the festival. It didn’t
take place this year because the festival
wasn’t able to find a major sponsor to
replace the foundation.
Author Sven Pfizenmaier was the first
of the two nominees to withdraw from
the prize. “I’m no fan of billionaires in
general and billionaires who profited from
Nazism, deny it, and whitewash themselves by funding art seems very bad, so
that’s why I did it,” Pfizenmaier says by
phone from Berlin.
“We believe that being open, honest,
and transparent in everything we do will
build trust with our stakeholders,” reads
the opening sentence on Kuehne + Nagel’s
investor relations page. When it comes to
the company’s dark history, Kuehne is anything but open and transparent. In April
2015 a regional TV channel in Germany
broadcast a short documentary about
Kuehne + Nagel’s role in the furniture
operation. Shortly before the film aired,
Kuehne wrote to the channel director, asking that the outlet reconsider broadcasting
the 22-minute documentary, because “old
wounds are being reopened.”
Kuehne’s brazen request, which was
declined, came only months after he had
shelved the Handelsblatt Research Institute

study sources say he had commissioned
for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniversary.
In the run-up to the broadcast, the
transportation firm published a defensive statement on its website. “Like other
companies that already existed before
1945, Kuehne + Nagel was involved in
the war economy and had to maintain
its existence in dark and difficult times,”
wrote the company in the German-only
statement. “Kuehne + Nagel is aware of
the shameful events during the Third
Reich and deeply regrets that it carried out
some of its activities on behalf of the Nazi
regime. The conditions under the dictatorship at the time and the fact that Kuehne
+ Nagel survived the turmoil of war with
all its strength and secured the company’s
existence must be taken into account.” It
remains the sole acknowledgment to date
by the firm about its Nazi activities. Other
than the statement, Kuehne + Nagel’s website doesn’t mention the past, as it doesn’t
have a history section.
While the firm has stayed silent on its
past since 2015, Kuehne has since responded to the criticism that he and his company
have not sufficiently addressed the company’s past involvement in Nazi crimes.
“I would have understood if people had
questioned these things 10 or 20 years
after the war. Everything was still fresh
in people’s minds then. The people who
were responsible at the time were still
alive. But to come back to it 70 years later. I find that strange,” Kuehne said in the
SonntagsZeitung interview from January
2022. “At some point, one has to let the
dust settle on things. That’s my basic attitude. It’s important to learn lessons from
what happened back then.”
V. T H E T R U T H N E E D S T O
BE TOLD

Sunday morning in
early September 2023, about 300 people
gathered on the waterfront in Bremen’s
historical city center. The crowd was
there for the inauguration of a monument
commemorating the systematic looting of
European Jews by Nazi Germany through
the practice of Aryanization. The memorial’s chosen location was no accident.
High above the waterfront, overlooking
the monument, towered the German
headquarters of Kuehne + Nagel.
Down below, Barbara Maass sat near
the front row. The granddaughter of Adolf
and Käthe Maass had come from Montreal
ON A SWELTERING

for the memorial’s inauguration. After
Adolf Maass was ousted from Kuehne
+ Nagel in 1933, the couple sent their
three children abroad: their eldest son to
England, their daughter to the US, Barbara’s father to Canada. Adolf and Käthe
weren’t able to escape Nazi Germany in
time. They were murdered in Auschwitz in
May 1944. Leo Lewitus, who also lost his
firm to the Kuehne brothers, did survive
the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel.
Barbara Maass disagrees with KlausMichael Kuehne’s notion that it’s time to
move on. “I believe perhaps naively that
we can learn from the past, but to do so
means knowing what actually happened
in the past,” Maass said in an interview at
her home in Montreal. “Crimes against
humanity are always relevant. There are
moral decisions to be made today, much
as there were in the past. I’m profoundly
convinced that the truth needs to be told.”
Henning Bleyl, who leads the Böll
Foundation, spent eight years persuading
the city of Bremen to get the Aryanization monument built. It’s important that
Kuehne reckons with his firm and family’s
Nazi past before he dies, according to Bleyl.
“At this fraught time in Germany, Kuehne,
as the country’s richest individual, would
set a strong example by coming clean about
the past,” said Bleyl in Bremen. “Through
his charity, he has built a public position.
He can use that for the good and gain inner
peace by freeing himself from a sense of
obligation to his firm and family.”
Thomas Sorg worked at Kuehne + Nagel
Germany for 45 years and spent years battling with the billionaire as chairman of
the firm’s workers council. Sorg doesn’t
believe Kuehne will reckon with his firm’s
Nazi past before he dies. “If Klaus-Michael
Kuehne doesn’t want to do something,
then he doesn’t do it. Period,” said Sorg
at a reception in Bremen after the ceremony. “Kuehne will do everything he can to
protect the memory of his father, whom
he revered beyond all measure.”
When Kuehne dies, he’ll leave his
holding company, which controls his $44
billion fortune, including the majority
of Kuehne + Nagel shares, to his family
foundation. The Kuehne foundation will
become one of the world’s largest private
charities by endowment size, focusing on
logistics, medicine, climate, and culture.
When he dies, Kuehne knows where
he’ll be buried, he told a German magazine. He has reserved a place at Hamburg’s
Ohlsdorf cemetery, next to his father. 

A House Divided

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 0 3 to find the
wreckage, Tim located video footage that
he said revealed the debris. Claiming
that the organization did not act on this
evidence, he sued it for fraud and other
claims. The suit, which dragged on for two
years, was eventually dismissed.
A happier outcome seems to be on the
horizon in Winchester, Virginia, where in
2016 Tim donated property to develop a
park adjacent to the home of Patsy Cline,
now a museum. The project is slated for
completion this year.

family friends I
spoke to are puzzled as well as disturbed
by how far to the right Tim has lurched.
“He’s always been a contrarian—that’s the
only thing I can think of that might have
gotten him in this direction, [which] does
not reflect our values,” says a cousin.
“He’s always just been one of those guys
who’s gone to the beat of his own drum and
operated very quietly,” says a member of
the younger generation. Paul, this person
said, would be aghast at the Trumpification of the Republican Party and his son’s
support for it: “He’d be appalled. I think
Paul would be vocally upset at Tim.”
“I remember him being a lovely, nice
man,” a friend of Bunny’s says about Tim.
“I just don’t know how he got involved with
such kooky extremism, because he wasn’t
brought up in that kind of environment.… I
don’t know who he listens to, but he should
be smarter. Even for him, this is outrageous. Bunny would be very appalled.”
“He was into Rush Limbaugh,” says
Warner IV. “My mother told me she was
furious about that. She told him, ‘You idiot,
why are you listening to that idiot?’ Tim’s
like, ‘I like it.’
“I’m the only libertarian and Tim is the
only Republican,” Warner IV continues.
Tim and Cathy “aren’t particularly close,”
he says. “They talk maybe twice a year, but
they’re friendly.… She was a hippie type.
She still is, at 87. They’re polar opposites.”
RELATIVES AND MELLON

Warner IV’s comments speak to a time
when people on different sides of the aisle
engaged—before the right went so far to
the right. “It killed my dad at the end of
his life. He was just so sad about what
happened to the Senate. He had a lot of
Democratic friends. He was a middle-ofthe-road, moderate Republican.”
“Parts of me are conflicted because he’s
been very nice to me, but I’d love to sort of
dig through his mind to figure out how he
is supporting these people and disrupting
the system,” says a younger member of the
family. “I honestly think a lot of it has to do
with how Trump brought down the barriers
of decency. It got to the point where these
people are like, if we don’t support him,
there’s nobody else we can support at this
stage. We can’t support a Democrat.
“In his mind, and [with] others like him…
they have lived very much independently of the government system. They don’t
really need to have a relationship with most
Americans. The way I see it, Tim is just not
a very social person. He’s not integrated
himself with a lot of community.… I guarantee you, he’s not one of those people who
likes Trump’s character. He probably thinks
he’s an asshole. I think what it comes down
to is he wants to be left alone, and he wants
no one to tax him. It’s that libertarian viewpoint that’s become radicalized. There are
a lot of really rich people out there who just
don’t need to think about what’s best for
America anymore.… It’s just setting aside
the interests of a lot of people for yourself.”
“Why is he doing this?” Bunny’s friend
exclaims. “People say, ‘Oh, you know—
taxes.’ Well, what does he care? He doesn’t
have any children. He could never spend all
the money he has. It’s just crazy.” (Tim is a
stepfather to Pat Freeman’s three children.)
In the end, Tim remains inscrutable
to many. “He doesn’t communicate with
us. Last time I saw him was at Bunny’s
funeral,” says Warner IV. Bunny did leave
a bequest to her stepson. Just one thing:
the porcelain cabbage. “It was her way of
saying, Here’s your porcelain cabbage,”
says a relative. “Now don’t break it.”
Given Tim’s political donations, the
younger Mellons I spoke to fear not just for
American democracy but for their family
legacy. As one of them put it, “We generally come to our politics and philanthropy
with a sense of compassion for other people. The MAGA folks and the causes that
Tim is supporting are completely lacking
in compassion.… That’s not the way [we]
want to be remembered.” 
OCTOBER 2024

107

Bad Faith

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 9 1 Mike Lewis,
founder of Where Peter Is. “To ingratiate
himself into that crowd, he needs to move
away from New Age and embrace some
form of Christianity. That’s where the
growth is for him.” Likewise, Lewis continued, after Jordan Peterson’s academic
career foundered, he became a conservative self-help guru, and now “the Catholic
market seems to be eating this stuff up.”
Skeptics acknowledge it’s impossible to
divine others’ true motivations, and even
cynical conversions could prove transformative. God works in mysterious ways. But
what’s driving the Catholic groups eagerly
welcoming celebrity converts seems less
opaque. “It’s like the vice presidential
nominee,” said Lewis. “They’re from this
swing state or represent this demographic the candidate doesn’t already have. It
speaks to a much larger goal.”
And in service of that goal, sincerity, or
even actual belief, doesn’t matter much.
Peterson has made lectures on Christianity a cornerstone of his career—a book with
the same title as his speaking series is due
out this fall, and he’s acquired a wardrobe
of Bible-themed blazers—even as he’s
been notoriously evasive when it comes to
affirming the most basic tenets of the faith:
Was Jesus resurrected? Does God exist?
Peterson’s answers to these questions have
ranged from outraged (“It’s none of your
damn business”) to poetic (“God is the call
to adventure”), legalistic (“It would take
me 40 hours to answer the question”) to
Clinton-esque (“I’ve never made the claim
that what I’m talking about is like what
other people are talking about”).
As Brand’s and Peterson’s potential
conversions became a potent will-they-orwon’t-they-drama—with EWTN cameras
documenting Tammy Peterson’s confirmation and abundant coverage of Brand’s
unorthodox April baptism in the River
Thames—some conservatives’ patience
wore thin. The Federalist published a
long takedown of Peterson’s approach as

108

VA N I T Y FA I R

fundamentally a branding exercise, offering a vision of Christianity “so cut-rate”
that it made “cheap grace” look expensive.
But in an era of strange culture-war bedfellows, the dabblers were doing their part.
Soon after gaining a Catholic audience,
Peterson launched into criticism of Pope
Francis, suggesting Church membership
had declined because modern Catholicism
was too much about “guitars,” “hippies,”
and “worshiping Gaia”—or Baal. In this
context, even celebrities’ failure to convert
becomes a form of ammunition, as multiple Catholic-right outlets concluded that
the true obstacle to Peterson’s conversion
was “Pope Francis himself.”
Even without conversion, the phenomenon of Peterson-like appeals
to faith—what The Federalist called
“post-atheist” but not quite Christian—
offered something for conservatives to
appreciate. Last fall, UK Christian journalist Justin Brierley released a book and
ongoing podcast series, both entitled The
Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, arguing that the mid-2000s “New Atheist”
movement was being replaced by both a
renaissance of actual belief and a secular
religiosity, wherein former atheists find
common cause with conservative believers over their shared opposition to “cancel
culture” and “where the West is heading in
the absence of the Christian story.”
It was something akin to the 2021 Pew
finding that nonreligious Trump supporters had begun calling themselves
evangelicals as a political, rather than
religious, identification. A prime example
came in April, when Richard Dawkins, one
of the “four horsemen” of New Atheism,
declared himself a “cultural Christian”
because he’d rather see churches around
London than mosques. By July, Elon
Musk had concurred, telling Peterson
that, although not a believer, he, too, “is
probably a cultural Christian.” (For his
part, Bishop Barron wrote a May op-ed for
CNN, declaring that Bill Maher—whom
he’d once considered a nemesis for his
mockery of religion—was now an ally in
the shared fight against “wokeism.”)
Influencers themselves made the case
for a cultural, if not personal, conversion.
Over several weeks last spring, Joe Rogan
delighted Christians by saying, “As time
rolls on, people are going to understand the
need to have some sort of divine structure
to things”; Brand said “the return to God”
was an obvious response to crumbling institutions; and Peterson recited to Barron a

list of prominent former atheists who had
come to see that the “humanist enterprise”
was unsustainable without being “embedded” in a “metaphysical space.”
Or, as Catholic-right podcaster Timothy Gordon put it in an interview with
Candace Owens’s husband in May, people
online were deciding that “secularism is
fake and gay.”
Of particular note to Brierley was the
fact that many of these new seekers, or
strategic allies, have “large platforms” with
“huge influence on a younger generation.”
He’s not the only one to notice. Peterson’s evolving, if ever-squishy, approach
to religion has inspired a cottage industry of clergy tracking his appeal. Five
years after Barron first praised the “Jordan Peterson phenomenon,” Word on
Fire now has a dedicated page for all its
Peterson content. Calvinist pastor and
podcaster Paul VanderKlay has made
some 750 videos about Peterson after
realizing his Bible talks were selling out
auditoriums while the churches he knew
were empty. Another pastor, Paul Anleitner, noted that while clergy sat through
endless “church growth” consultations,
Peterson had become a far more effective “gateway drug,” “reversing the flow
of traffic” out of the church. That Peterson tended to reduce the gospel to Jungian
archetypes was regrettable, they agreed,
but certainly not a deal-breaker.
In “the strategy of winning back culture,” said Faggioli, “it’s not that important
how genuine these voices are.” The point
isn’t “having Jordan Peterson be ordained
as a priest,” but all the young people—
especially young men—he brings along.
Church is going to stop
the bleeding, it needs to win over not
just men, but real men,” declared Zach
Costello, another Christian influencer,
last spring in his own rumination on the
Peterson phenomenon. As it was, Costello
continued, Catholicism was too “embarrassing for men to associate themselves
with.” Women dominated Bible studies,
he said, and the priesthood was “infested
with either homosexual men or men who
can’t get women.” But the good news was
that, as at other points in history, a “generation of men” was being “called to reform
the Church when it has drifted off course.
That time is now, and Jordan Peterson will
play a very important role.”
Peterson agreed. In a 2022 video entitled
“A Message to the Christian Churches,” he
“IF THE CATHOLIC

demanded that Church leaders make great
efforts, rent billboards, to welcome young
men demoralized by the culture’s “assault”
on the “masculine spirit.” “Do it now,”
Peterson warned, “before it’s too late.”
Concerns about a “feminized” Church
aren’t new, said Alyssa MaldonadoEstrada, a religious studies professor at
Kalamazoo College who’s written extensively on Catholic masculinity. Such
panics have arisen cyclically for centuries, in tandem with social change; in the
mid-1800s, they came amid waves of mass
migration, urbanization, and a supposed
epidemic of male neurasthenia, as men
who’d left farms for cities were said to be
afflicted with depression, fatigue, and terminal indecisiveness.
“There was this idea that unless we get
American men back in touch with their
bodies, the land, and a different vision
of the Church, the nation would be in
decline,” said Maldonado-Estrada. “Nothing consolidates masculinity like anxiety
that something is being lost.”
Today’s fretting over feminized churches overlaps with a culture, particularly for
young people, where most identity building happens online, Maldonado-Estrada
continued. And as signs accrue that
young men are moving rightward—Gen
Z support for LGBTQ+ rights dropped by
double digits in the last two years, thanks
primarily to Zoomer men, a majority of
whom now support Trump—some Catholic leaders are following along in weird
and dangerous ways.
When Barron interviewed LaBeouf
about his pending conversion two years
ago, they discussed how Christianity wasn’t
just about a soft, near-Buddhist Jesus, but
an “Old Testament Christ on a horse, cape
dipped in blood, [with a] sword.” Butker’s
infamous advice to women was paired with
a call for men to fight “cultural emasculation.” In June, a Missouri Catholic church

ran an ad in its bulletin calling on young
men to join a newly formed militia that
would combine “combat training” with
church service; its recruits would wear
white military-style uniforms with gold
epaulets and crosses on the shoulders.
Also last spring, Matt Fradd, host of one of
the most popular Catholic podcasts online,
conducted a two-and-a-half-hour interview
with 20-something Catholic livestreamer
John Doyle about his ardent following
among young men, who could be led from
Peterson-esque advice—“Stop watching
porn, go to the gym, pick up the Bible”—
into “intelligent Christian commentary”
and eventual conversion.
There were a number of things about
the interview that might have given Fradd
pause: Doyle’s self-description as “an
internet bigot”; his fury at women who
showed up at his events wearing “little
trad wife dresses” and distracting from
what should be “a male environment” of
young men “changing history”; his hope
that Republicans will govern “like it’s The
Handmaid’s Tale”; his claim that interracial pornography is a plot to convince
white Christian boys they’re “being bred
out of existence.”
Another thing that might have given
Fradd pause is the findable fact that Doyle
has complicated but deep connections to
Nick Fuentes’s groyper movement. For
several years, Doyle—who’s led protests
with Fuentes and spoken at his annual conference—has profited from his
status as a Fuentes-lite figure, passing
in more mainstream right-wing spaces
where Fuentes’s racial slurs, Holocaust
denial, and calls to burn women alive
are a step too far. When the now defunct
Catholic-right outlet Church Militant
began overtly recruiting followers from
the broader groyper community, as Ben
Lorber, a Political Research Associates
analyst who tracks the white nationalist

right, and I reported in 2022, Doyle was
among the voices they platformed.
At the time, a Catholic media outlet
courting Fuentes’s audience was a scandal. Now it just looks ahead of its time.
When right-wing youth organization
TurningPoint USA held its annual student conference in June—drawing 8,000
attendees to hear Trump and other Republicans speak—Jack Posobiec tossed hats
reading “White Boy Summer,” another
co-opted groyper slogan, into an eager
crowd. Fuentes was blocked from entering the conference and had to lead his
followers in chants of “Christ is king” (and
“Fuck off Jew”) from the street outside.
But inside, the same message reigned.
When Candace Owens spoke, the audience gave her a standing ovation, chanting
“Christ is king.”
In March, Owens denied knowing
Fuentes or what his movement meant by
that phrase. By June, when she relaunched
her podcast—which immediately hit the
top 10—Owens was tweeting at him publicly, asking to get in touch. By July, she
was speculating on air that various Nazi
atrocities were “propaganda” and dedicating multiple episodes to convoluted
theories linking “crypto-Jews” to “occult
history,” “ritualistic murder,” and the
satanic infiltration of all the world’s major
religions—interrupting herself to read an
ad from Hallow, “the number one prayer
app in the world.”
Call it a form of audience capture. Or
a feedback loop, says Lorber. One wherein “influencers shape the attitudes” of
their young male audiences and then are
influenced in turn. A race for followers
becomes a race to the bottom, as the merely right wing move further right, and the
far right goes further still. All the while, a
Church stares into the void of the internet,
unaware or unconcerned that the internet
stares right back. 

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OCTOBER 2024

109

Proust Questionnaire

STANLEY TUCCI
The actor and author of What I Ate in
One Year on face cream, Harry Styles,
and why temperance is overrated

What is your idea of perfect
happiness? A meal alfresco
with people I love. Which
historical figure do you
most identify with? I would
never presume to identify
myself with any historical
figure. Okay, Michelangelo.
I could only ever hope to
be like that person.
What do you dislike most about your appearance? How
much time do you have? In short, I would like to be younger,
taller, and have my hair back. What is your greatest
extravagance? Face cream. I love La Mer. Which living
person do you most admire? President Zelenskyy. What is
the trait you most deplore in others? Cruelty. I don’t
see the point. What is your greatest fear? Losing one of my
children, as there is no greater loss. What is your favorite
journey? To the River Cafe. I love to walk to that restaurant
along the Thames any time of year in any weather. It is
London at its best. On what occasion do you lie? To make a
child feel secure. Which living person do you most despise?
Trump. Need I say more? Which words or phrases do
you most overuse? “My instinct tells me….” My wife and my
business partner, Lottie, always laugh when I say it. Not sure
why. Seems perfectly reasonable. What is your greatest
regret? Not being able to save my late wife, and not being the
best I can be at all times. What or who is the greatest love
of your life? My children. Art. Food. Which talent would
you most like to have? To be able to play the piano like Diana
Krall and sing like Harry Styles. What is your current state
of mind? Occluded and exhausted from working too much.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would
it be? I’d like to be more patient. If you could change one
thing about your family, what would it be? I would make

my parents younger. I want us all to have many more years with
110

VA N I T Y FA I R

them. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
That I’ve taught my children right from wrong, and that my
work seems to have made a lot of people happy. If you were
to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you
think it would be? A jazz musician or a sculptor. Making art
is time well spent. Where would you like to live? The Alps,
because they never change but are different every day. What
is your favorite occupation? I’ve pretended to have many

occupations, and hopefully I will pretend to have many more.
What are your favorite names? Alba, Rose, Nina, Oliver,
Nicolo, Emilia, Isabel, Camilla, Matteo, Felicity, Kate. Who is
your favorite hero of fiction? Captain America. What do
you most value in your friends? Kindness and humor. Who
are your favorite writers? Philip Roth, Dorothy Parker,
Jon Fosse, Robert Harris, Claire Keegan, S.J. Perelman. How
would you like to die? Quickly, quietly in my sleep after
a great meal with friends and family. Who are your heroes
in real life? My parents, people who run NGOs, single
mothers. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Temperance. Just enjoy good food and drink in moderation.
Life is meant to be tasted. 

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