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Ex-NFLer no prostitute advice most damning critique of all

A Texas man who wanted to become an astronaut sued NASA for $10
million, claiming employment opportunity discrimination. The suit accused
NASA of engaging in a biased job interview, which it prematurely
terminated.
According to court records, that interview ended after the first question: Do
you like to travel? to which the applicant answered, No, not really.
Nah. Not true; not yet, anyway. But made ya look! Given that absurd is the
new normal and that common sense is no longer admissible, why not?
This week, with straight, even somber and soulful faces and words, and a
tone resonating strong, useful and noble social activism, the sports media
reported what should have instead grabbed all of them and all of us as
an advanced case of institutionalized insanity.
Eugene Robinson, in 1999 a defensive back for the Falcons, who lost Super
Bowl XXXIII, and now a Panthers radio analyst, revealed that before
Carolina departed for this Super Bowl, he addressed the team to caution it
not to make the same mistake or kind of mistake he made. Robinson
was arrested the night before that 1999 Super Bowl in Miami for soliciting a
prostitute while his wife and children also were in town.
We get it. Sorta. With 51 other weeks to be arrested, dont let it happen
Super Bowl Week. Good advice. Save it for after the game, the offseason,
the regular season; just dont risk being arrested right before youre
scheduled to play in the Super Bowl. You cant go a week without a
prostitute?
The sick part isnt Robinsons message, its the need to deliver it!
Robinson, after all, was addressing roughly 50 players who mostly all
attended college on full scholarships.
Why would college men in their 20s and 30s and approaching the most
important day in their professional careers need to be told, let alone
reminded, to do their best not to be arrested, not to commit a crime? Thats
crazy, no?

Is Robinsons message in line with the one left with NFL rookies by former
NFL star and current ESPN voice Cris Carter about how to beat the rap
when youre arrested? After football, is the common denominator among
NFL players crime?
Might these players have been delivered to the NFL as by-products of a
totally corrupt educational system? Silly question. Of course, they have!
That is the system, thus such a speech was well worth Robinsons time,
courage and humility. He borrowed from his own stunning recklessness to
deliver such a cautionary tale. His speech to college men was needed!
If ever there was an indictment of the condition of college football and the
NFL, Robinson provided it.
Now, over to this years Super Bowl network, CBS, which last week proudly
announced that veteran star wide receiver Steve Smith (formerly Panthers,
now Ravens) has been hired to be a Super Bowl pregame analyst. Of course,
he has. Hes TVs ideal of a pro football star.
In 2002, Smith had a fistfight with a teammate in training camp. During that
regular season, he was suspended for another fight with a teammate.
In 2008, during training camp he clocked teammate Ken Lucas, breaking his
nose, and closing one of his eyes. Although the NFL regularly tells us
Football is family! Smith was suspended for two regular-season games.
While suspended, he was available to tape an ESPN promo: TVs kind of
guy!
This past preseason, Smith was ejected from a game for fighting.
Just last month, CBS televised what only marginally appeared to be a
playoff football game, that gang war won by the Steelers only because the
Bengals were a bit deeper into self-absorbed violence and self-destruction.
So, with no better ideas, Steve Smith makes for a standard choice as a voice
of pro football on Super Bowl Sunday.
Keys To The Game: Limit turnovers, penalties, arrests, assaults of
teammates and opponents

Mike is always the last to know

Mike Francesa, short description: Just a bad guy.
A gentle-sounding soul who gave his name as Bob called Francesas show,
Monday, to talk about the live golf he was watching the final, weatherdelayed round of the PGA Farmers Insurance Open.
Francesa, a self-admitted pro golf expert in addition to everything else,
berated the man; he rudely, impatiently told him he must be watching tape of
something or a Pro-Am prior to the next PGA event.
Clearly, Francesa, as has been one of his transparent tells for 25 years,
didnt know nearly as much as the caller he was ridiculing for not knowing
what he was talking about.
Later, after finding out that he was wrong, Francesa quickly explained as
if it were no big deal that the final round of the Farmers was being played
as he spoke.
But did he apologize to that nice, polite man he trashed and didnt
deserve a trashing even had he been wrong? Did he say to his audience,
Sorry, I was completely wrong? Fat chance. With countless opportunities,
he never has and never will.
Such steady, rotten-faith dealings with his audience added to his selfdeluded ability to think no one can see and hear right through him is just one
of many reasons Francesa qualifies as an unmitigated, indefatigable bad guy.
Super Bowl? His authoritative late November claim that the Panthers are
just not that good has been purged as he now authoritatively points to the
Panthers strong two-way game prior to playing a Super Bowl in which
theyre favored. And he speaks it as if he knew it all along, as opposed to
being among the last to know.
This TV team dishes out assists to viewers
FOX Sports 1s team of Tim Brando and Jim Spanarkel on the MarquetteSeton Hall game Wednesday made for good, three-way them and us
basketball companionship. They paid attention to the game and each heeded
what the other said, they swapped applicable logistical thoughts (a Spanarkel

specialty) and they didnt try to dazzle us with faux-hip nonsense, as they
might not know any.
The telecast also included a scrolling graphic showing that UMass-Lowell
had defeated Hartford, 85-83, despite 37 points from Pancake Thomas.
(Pancakes real first name is Cleveland. Hes from Baton Rogue, La., and
transferred to Hartford from New Mexico.)
As for Marquette, the Milwaukee school is a modern Division I oddity:
Eight among its 14-man roster are from Wisconsin, none of the other six
were recruited from outside the U.S.
On the flip side, New Mexico State may as well be in Trinidad and/or
Tobago. It has no player from New Mexico, but five from Canada, three
from France, and one each from Cameroon, Mexico and Colombia.
Cespedes is final piece to Aldersons masterful Mets turnaround
Meet the new floor. Same as the old floor.
Or, as a smirking Sandy Alderson put it Wednesday at Citi Field, You
mean is 140 the new 85?
We are talking naturally about the Mets payroll, and the fact that the resigning of Yoenis Cespedes gets that number to the level about $140
million where Alderson inherited it five-plus years ago and then took it
on a southern expedition, with $85 million constituting the nadir back in
2014.
Well, look, we could be somewhat below 140 going into the regular season.
There are a couple of marginal situations on our roster where things could
change a little bit, Alderson said at the news conference welcoming back
Cespedes to the Mets. So I dont think were going to be as mindful of the
140 number as most of you in the media. But in a sense, in terms of order of
magnitude and assuming we continue to play well, we dont anticipate going
back to those prior levels.
Not going back there means Alderson, as his battle with cancer continues,
can move forward in his mission. No longer will his actions and words be
viewed through the prism of Bernard Madoffs 2008 arrest. No longer will
he have to carry the weight of his boss past burdens.

He can focus wholly about building the Mets into World Series champions.
He has a $140 million team again, and this time, its the team he put
together. You could say it marks the completion of a cycle.
I think the way we looked at it was it wasnt so much the payroll as it was a
recycle of the roster, Alderson said. One of the things we did early on was
clear some contracts. But also we spent a lot of time evaluating players we
had in the system. Trying players in the system. Maybe theyd work out,
maybe they wouldnt. And also recognize that at some point, we were going
to have to outperform the payroll to get people back in the ballpark. Thats, I
think, finally happened.
Is this a completion? Nothings complete until you win the World Series.
We didnt do that. But were happy the franchise is reasonably healthy and
that were able to make some of these moves that we havent been able to
make for a few years.
Jeff Wilpon, the Mets COO, said Wednesday of Alderson: When we
interviewed him, he had a plan. It takes great fortitude to stick with a plan
when you have to go through some ups and downs that come with anything
like that. Its a great credit to him. We got what we asked for in terms of a
steady hand.
Never steadier, arguably, than with the entire Cespedes saga, from the July
31, 2015 trade to acquire him from Detroit to the Jan. 22 agreement to a
three-year, $75-million contract with an opt-out after the first year. Alderson
recognized the urgency of the moment at last years non-waivers trading
deadline and traded promising young pitcher Michael Fulmer as the headline
piece to Detroit for the rental Cespedes. In the offseason, conversely and
appropriately, he blocked out much of the noise surrounding Cespedes and
made a series of other acquisitions even as he underwent treatment at
Memorial Sloan Kettering while leaving a roster spot open just in case
Cespedes actually was willing to come back for the short term.
Now he wears the heros crown, although he knows how quickly that can
tumble off and break into little pieces. Its already time to think about
extending long-term contracts to some of their young pitchers; Alderson said
its possible all the arms can stay beyond their free agencies, yet Matt
Harvey currently seems determined to head elsewhere after 2018.

I asked Alderson if hed miss answering questions about payroll.

Im getting different questions about payroll now, he said. Of course, if it
slides below 140, youll be back, I know.
Count Alderson as one more person whose Mets identity has been
transformed by Cespedes. Since hes the person who brought Cespedes here
in the first place, it seems only right.
Should You Tip Your Uber Driver?
I spend a fair amount of time in Los Angeles, and when I'm there I rely
heavily on Uber, as I'm usually without a car and that city isn't exactly
known for its public transportation. A year ago, I was in Venice and an Uber
driver told me I had a low rating of 4.8 (out of 5!)he explained that if I got
down to a 4.5, that Uber would delete my account. Well, that sure didn't
seem accurate! And it wasn't. This was simply his way of steering the
conversation towards tipping, and how tips would help me get a higher
rating, and to tip him, please, "$2 would be fine," he said.
At the time, Uber had just started giving passengers the ability to find out
their rating. Just as you rate your driver (1 to 5 stars), s/he rates you.
Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin argues this is a system of oppressive
control (in Soviet Russia, cabs rate you! Etc.). But it's really just
meaningless, like playing a game of Candy Crush on your phone, pressing a
star isn't really doing anything. Because unless you're a total dick giving out
1-star ratings for no real reason, your rating is probably in the 4s, and it
won't have any effect on your using Uber. (If your rating is significantly low,
however, this can effect how many drivers will actually pick you up.)
My 4.8 rating last year has since gone down, a couple of times. This seems
to happen after every trip to Los Angeles, where I have now learned that
tipping is more standard. At first I went down to a 4.6, and the last time I
requested my rating (which you can do via the app), I was told by a cheery
Uber rep name Roderick that: "It is 4.4. Great!" Is that really "great,"
Roderick? Even though it doesn't really mean anything in relation to using
the service, the 4.4 Uber rating was making me feel guilty for not tipping.
That's probably a good thing.

I reached out to Uber to make sure their most current tipping policy
hadn't changed, and to find out how much drivers got of the final fare. I
was told that drivers are encouraged to remind passengers that tipping
isn't necessary, however, if a passenger insists on tipping, the driver is
free to accept it. The Uber spokesperson also told me that they try to
make their experience "a cashless and seamless experience." Drivers, I
was told, take home 75 to 80% of the fare.
But with fares being lowered, Uber drivers are taking a hitat a recent
protest, driver Dwayne Andrews explained, It was good at the beginning,
there was a base fare, not as many drivers. You were able to make a living
and truly work at your own time. But now you have to do more trips for less
money and every month they're putting out more and more drivers, further
diluting the market. And now theyre dropping the prices?"
Uber needs to explicitly change their tipping policywhereas Lyft
encourages tipping, currently Uber still tells passengers not to tip... but why?
When the service was first introduced it was more expensive, and offered up
mostly black carsat that time there was a pretty firm "no tipping" policy,
and it made sense. The problem is this no tipping policy seems to have stuck
even though the service has come more in line with the common cab. But
you are tipping your cab driver, so why wouldn't you tip your Uber driver?
In fact, Uber has hidden away a feature where you can automatically tip
your Uber Taxi driver. You can only activate the feature via signing up on
your desktop, not on the app itself. Here's what to look for under the
payment option online:
This is sort of pointless since with Uber Taxi you need to swipe your card at
the end of the ride anyway (the Uber part comes in through a $2 fee for
using the app to hail the cab). This feature would be helpful with the other
Uber services, however, since the appeal is that you don't have to swipe
anything or have cash on hand, since you pay directly via your app... but
until this is introduced for those options, it's on you to do the right thing.
Here are some simple rules I've created that everyone on earth should now
follow:

If you are taking an Uber for a longer drive, say to the airport, then
you should tip 20%.

If you are being complicated and ask to make stops, then you
should tip 20%.
If you are taking an Uber for a shorter drive, say under five
minutes, then you should tip around $1-2.

Does Anybody Still Loathe Phil Collins? (Even In the Air Tonight?)
For many who were blessed to enter adulthood during the 1980s, it seems as
if that decade will hover over us forever, its synth-pop bleats and recycled
doomsday sound bites accompanying us into the twilight. Today, that feels
truer than ever, as we all welcome back a familiar face: Phil Collins, the
amiable sprite of pre-Internet pop. (Both the fairy-tale and computergraphics definitions of sprite apply.) Emerging from semiretirement,
Collins is launching a multimonth campaign of remembrance. Hes reissuing
eight of his solo albums, including the four blockbusters Face Value;
Hello, I Must Be Going!; No Jacket Required; and But Seriously
that blanketed the 1980s, selling a combined 24 million copies in the
United States alone and generating seven No. 1 singles. He has announced
that hell record new music and launch a tour. Come October, hell publish
his autobiography.
Its good timing. For many, many years, Collins was pegged as the
embodiment of bloated, Boomer dad-rock, with waning album sales, a jazz
big band and weak covers of Cyndi Lauper and Leo Sayer songs. Lately,
though, hes been the subject of countless revisionist think pieces in which
writers valorize his technical gifts as a drummer for the prog-rock pilgrims
Genesis, emphasize his collaborations with Brian Eno, identify him as the
secret patriarch of hip modern trends or express their incredulity that older
generations ever denigrated the mans output in the first place. How did this
successful, gifted musician ever become such a whipping boy? Why were
his treacly ballads and mild toe-tappers picked out as the ultimate symbols
of consumerist vapidity? Was it just the cheap envy of older critics so
unlike todays enlightened listeners, with our democratic embrace of pop
that surgically strikes the pleasure centers of the masses? These windmilltilting arguments have been trickling out steadily in recent years, following
the lead of hip-hop tastemakers and Collins fanboys like Questlove and
Kanye West. These days, you speak ill of Phil at your own risk.
Of course, there are specks of truth and falsehood on all sides of the
argument. The image of Collins as an innocuous Everyman a modest,

even self-deprecating sort is an especially interesting myth; the fact is

that Collins has been, and continues to be, a combative, attention-seeking
dude with an A-list ego. After earning an Oscar nomination for the title song
from the 1984 film Against All Odds, he complained loudly that he wasnt
asked to perform during the awards ceremony, and told a Rolling Stone
reporter that Stevie Wonder, the eventual winner, received positive
consideration because hes blind, black, lives in L.A. and does a lot for
human rights. (Collins went on to compare himself favorably to Bruce
Springsteen, saying that everything Springsteen does is typical of him.
But I think I have too many styles to single one out.) And during the Live
Aid benefit concerts in 1985, he managed to pull the most privilegedcelebrity move in a field crowded with them, crossing the Atlantic by
Concorde so he could perform twice as well as duet with Sting, sit in with
Eric Clapton and play drums for a reunited Led Zeppelin. After the Zeppelin
show, which everyone involved seemed to consider a disaster, the guitarist
Jimmy Page trashed Collins for being unprepared while Collins implied that
Page was drunk and that Robert Plant wasnt able to sing his parts.
Plenty of stars make such petty, indulgent displays, though. The bigger
problem, for Collins, was an undercurrent of sentiment that began to grow
during the 80s: the perception that Collins was a rock star who couldnt
rock, and a pop star who was far too happy idling in the middle of the road.
Catchy but contained, his music was beloved by people who didnt actually
listen to much music. And as a result, his songs were everywhere along
with close-up photos of his expressionless mug, which featured prominently
on all his albums, posters and ads. It was hard to avoid hits like I Missed
Again, which made feeble use of the legendary horn section from Earth,
Wind & Fire. Or Collinss slickly goofy version of the Supremes You
Cant Hurry Love, which came off like well-intentioned glee-club karaoke.
Even during the 90s, his 80s tracks remained a constant radio presence.
Some Collins-loathing went beyond the pale. The punk-era critic Julie
Burchill is alleged to have called him the ugliest man since George Orwell
and suggested that he looked like he had a stocking mask permanently
pulled over his head. (Unfair though it is notable that a balding,
unfashionable chap with character-actor looks rode a music-industry push to
stardom in the video era.) After Collins won an Academy Award for best
original song for his work on the 1999 Disney film Tarzan, South
Parks Trey Parker and Matt Stone aired a rudely hilarious spoof of the
singer. (It may have been relevant that his song beat out Blame Canada,

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from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.) And when Collins moved to
Switzerland in the late 1990s ostensibly to live with his Swiss-born wife
the Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher criticized him as a tax exile.
Thats where a 2011 Rolling Stone article found him: depressed, divorced
and alone in Switzerland, his wife and kids having left him for Florida. He
showed off a vast collection of memorabilia from the Alamo while
ruminating on absentee fatherhood, alcohol abuse and his three failed
marriages. (A report that he had ditched his first wife via fax, which he has
strongly denied, still gnawed at him.) I sometimes think Im going to write
this Phil Collins character out of the story, he told the magazine. Phil
Collins will just disappear or be murdered in some hotel bedroom, and
people will say, What happened to Phil? And the answer will be, He got
murdered, but, yeah, anyway, lets carry on. He added: Ive had enough
of being me. I distinctly remember paging through the story one night while
taking a late-night subway home from work, and thinking: Man, this is one
of the most pathetic things Ive ever read. Poor guy, maybe he did deserve
better.
Afterward, though, Collins decamped to Florida to be near his kids, moving
into Jennifer Lopezs old mansion and, eventually, reconciling with his exwife. These days, hes even feeling spry enough to include new artwork with
his album reissues: Each one features him recreating his cover pose from the
original. What happened to the Ive had enough of me bloke? Despite the
ongoing debates among music geeks Is he an adroit drummer but banal
songwriter? A puny singer but master melodicist? the truth, as usual, lies
between the extremes. And though it may get lost in the chatter, theres one
very good reason we care in the first place.
Ba DA ba DUM ba DOM ba DOM BOOM BOOM thats why. Track 1,
first solo album: In the Air Tonight, and the drum fill that spilled through
arenas for decades with its 21-gun salute of despair and defiance. The songs
cavernous, brooding atmospherics somehow encapsulated and suffused the
80s: druggy mania and comedown; sex laced with fear and death;
capitalism tickling your fancy and burying you up to your neck; the almost
cartoonish specter of global annihilation; technological unease; white suits;
fluorescent everything; and an unquenchable, cinematic emptiness that either
evoked the end of history or a dodgy batch of cocaine. It was sublimely
disorienting, a mirror image of the times.

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Virtually everything you need to know about Phil Collinss importance and
his persistence within pop culture how he managed to influence music
from M83 to Kanye Wests 808s & Heartbreak to chillwave to tropical
house to Rihannas Anti can be found within In the Air Tonight. The
man nailed a moment precisely: the 70s transmogrification into the 80s,
and the bewilderment that ensued. And he teased us with something more,
somewhere in the murk.
The sound is ingenious, nodding to Collinss work with Brian Eno. A
Roland CR-78 drum machine burbles out a pillowy, plip-plop rhythm under
an ominous wash of analog synth chords. We wander through a blighted
dreadscape with the singer, a man bitterly betrayed by loves pack of lies
in this case, Collins is writing about first wife, Andrea, who left him in
1979. He glares into the void, chanting I can feel it coming in the air
tonight, oh Lord sounding both adrift and methodical, and nearly
possessed. But whats coming? He says that he has been waiting for this
moment for all his life, but what moment is he talking about? Is he seeking
revenge, or just to be released from the spiritual anguish of abandonment? It
all remains elusive.
That showstopping tom-tom detonation now known as the magic break
derives its impact not just from brute force, but also, like most pop-music
revolutions, from a mistake. When Collins accidentally played his reverbed
drums through the microphone that producers use to talk back to musicians
in a studio, the result was a startling ka-pow, which the producer Hugh
Padgham heightened by suddenly gating (cutting off) the sound to achieve
a dizzying effect; its like being rocked by a jab that flicks out of nowhere
and disappears just as quickly. Theres technological invention all over the
track: Collinss voice was run through a gizmo called a limiter, its
parameters carefully set so his words seemed to slide in and out of focus. He
also used a vocoder, at times, to sound even more like an unearthly soul.
Just as crucial, the magic break gets its power from arriving more than three
minutes into the song right around the point when we would typically be
subjected to a clichd sax-solo lap dance. Seemingly out of nowhere, the
drums hit like a hail of plastic bullets, and the chorus is cut free to ascend to
yet another stage of emotionally wrecked spectacle. Considering the era, its
hard not to imagine millions of wayward wastrels inhaling their last bits of
powdery lint in an attempt to join the swelling wave. In the video, Collinss
face distorts into glowing, jagged yellow, pink and green shapes on a teal

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background, as if passing through a hazy neon portal; its no surprise that the
song has played over more than one film scene set in the decadent ooze of a
strip club or the queasy blur of streetlights at night.
In the Air Tonight was a power ballad in a fresh and different sense.
There were no screaming guitars or baroque piano or swooning strings, like
in Lynyrd Skynyrds Free Bird or Aerosmiths Dream On. Instead, the
song sneaks up and overwhelms you with a rippling emotional force guided
by synthesized, alien sounds. Perhaps people make fun of it reflexively so
they dont have to endure that process see, for instance, the air-drumming
shtick so often adopted by fans, and memorably spoofed by a guy in a gorilla
suit for a 2007 Cadbury ad.
Granted, Collins dined out on this creative breakthrough for the rest of the
decade, occasionally recapturing the same bleakly dramatic magic. There
was the desolate stadium cry of Against All Odds. The mournful,
pulsating resignation of Take Me Home. The dark, soul-pounding
empathy of Man on the Corner (with Genesis), or the twinkling, almost
baleful meditation Long Long Way to Go (featuring Sting). His pop hits
could contain hints of the same cleverness as on Sussudio, when he
remade a sharp, up-tempo Prince groove with his own dorky bravado. But
none of it makes a case for his career like that single track, or even that
single drum fill.
Collins clearly went after stardom full-bore, but even he could tell when he
had become overexposed his management eventually asked MTV to play
his videos less. Still, this guy who couldve passed for a pleasant-enough
cabdriver infiltrated our mass consciousness forever, as the unlikely 80s
reference point for decadent temptation and gnawing regret. Maybe he didnt
find that feeling hed been waiting for all his life, but its still lingering in
the air, 35 years later.

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Behind Barneys Cutting-Edge Return to Its Old Neighborhood

When you think of Barneys, Fred Pressman once said, you think of
Seventh Avenue at 17th Street. Pressman was the son of the stores
founder, Barney himself, who first opened for business on that Lower
Manhattan corner in 1923, using cash hed raised by pawning the
engagement ring of his wife, Bertha. By the time the younger Pressman
made his declaration, in the early 1980s, Barneys had long since lost its
apostrophe and glammed up its image. Ivan Chermayeffs iconic BARNEYS
NEW YORK logo, familiar from the stores awnings and handsome, heavystock shopping bags, signaled how far the specialty shop had come from its
haimish origins as a pipe-rack mens-wear store selling brand-name suits for
lessor, to use Pressman pres forceful garmento catchphrase, No bunk,
no junk, no imitations.
Still, further big changes lay ahead: a Manifest Destiny expansion that saw
the store take over the entire Seventh Avenue side of its Chelsea block; the
construction of a multi-story womens department, renowned for its Andre
Putman-designed spiral staircase and its many, many pairs of shoes; and,
finally, a move so upmarket that it involved literally moving up. In 1993, an
all-new Barneys, on Madison Avenue between 60th and 61st Streets,
replaced the downtown store as the flagship. Four years later, the original
store was shuttereda necessary efficiency for the company, perhaps, but a
sad moment for downtown, a little bit of the citys soul extinguished.

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Which is why, in an era that has witnessed too much New York City
churnwith mom-and-pop shops and F. A. O. Schwarz alike getting the
boot from landlordsit is heartening to see some of that soul reanimated.
This month, a new Barneys New York will open where the old Barneys
was. The footprint isnt quite the samethe new store, though it has major
Seventh Avenue frontage and wraps around the corner of 16th Street,
doesnt extend all the way up to 17thbut a neighborhood anchor is back.
Mark Lee, the current C.E.O. of Barneys, will tell you that his companys
latest store is a modern Barneys for a modern downtown New York, a
strategic embrace of a location that is a hop, skip, and an Uber from all
manner of booming, demographically attractive neighborhoods: West
Chelsea; the High Line area; the Meatpacking District; Greenwich Village;
NoMad; Flatiron. Hell cite the presence of companies nearby, such as
Google and Twitter, whose young employees have disposable income but no
memory of the old-skool shop. In other words, This Barneys is in no way an
exercise in nostalgia.
But cmon: not for nothing does a retailer return to the very block it grew up
on. And Lee, with some nudging, granted in an interview in his Fifth
Avenue office that it is a rare and profound opportunity for Barneys to
return to its geographic rootsand that he himself is a prime example of a
person for whom the original location has emotional resonance. In 1980,
when he was a student at New York University, he regularly journeyed to
Barneys, nose pressed to the glass, before he finally spent a wad of his
student-loan money on something he coveted: a reversible purple-and-red
Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coat. He offset its cost, he said, by living on
yogurt and bananas for the rest of the semester.
The Greater New York metro area abounds with deeply personal
Barneys/Barneys vignettes. Many a former suburban boy, this writer
included, remembers being driven by his father into Chelsea to procure his
rite-of-passage first suit; among its other unique amenities, the old store,
situated as it was in a then unfashionable, relatively untrafficked part of
town, offered valet parking to its customers, an anomaly in Manhattan
haberdashery.

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Fred Pressmans second-generation rethink of the store in the 70s and 80s
more upscale, whimsical, and international, with Barneys becoming the first
place in America to carry the mens line of an Italian designer named
Giorgio Armanibrought a new clientele and energy: a cognoscenti
grooviness, to use the words of Simon Doonan, who came aboard in 1986
as a mischief-minded window dresser and now serves as the companys
creative ambassador-at-large. Andy Warhol modeled clothes in Barneys
print ads. Armani appeared in a 1976 TV spot for the store, silently
sketching at his desk in his high-ceilinged atelier while an announcer
intoned, You see, even though Barneys may not understand his Italian, they
fully understand his fashion.
Tom Kalenderian, a Barneys lifer who started out in 1979 as a temp and is
now the companys mens-wear chief and an executive vice president,
recalls the sales floor in his early years as having the excitement of a club
like Studio 54.
You wouldnt be surprised to see the same kind of electric crowd, of
newcomers and old-timers, he said. It was just very uniquely New York.
Nell Campbell, whose echt-80s-downtown club, Nells, was in the same
neck of the woods, on a then barren stretch of 14th Street between Seventh
and Eighth Avenues, remembers shopping for very expensive clothes by
very foreign designers to wear to my nightclub. It was in Barneys, she said,
that she encountered Cher the day after the New York Posts Page Six
column had run an item reporting that the star had been denied entry into
Nells. The doorman saw only fringed white leather in a cowgirl hat and
not the person inside it, Campbell said. I groveled as best I could.
Perhaps no event better captured Barneys at its cognoscenti-grooviness
apogee than its Decorated Denim fund-raiser for AIDS research in
November 1986, in which such figures as Campbell, Madonna, Iman, Andie
MacDowell, and the singer Peter Allen descended Putmans staircase while
modeling one-off Levis jean jacketseach up for auctionthat had been
painted, graffitied, or otherwise messed with by such artists and designers as
Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paloma Picasso, and Jean Paul Gaultier.
The new, Steven Harris-designed downtown store, at four stories and 58,000
square feet, will not be as big as the old one, and will complement rather
than replace the 260,000-square-foot Madison Avenue location. Downtown

18

will be unique, in the sense that it wont necessarily be a cookie-cutter copy

of what we do uptown, said Lee, who has run the company since 2010.
(The Pressman family is no longer involved in the business.) The store will
launch with special capsule collections unavailable at any other Barneys,
from such designers and brands as Alexander Wang and Proenza Schouler
(for women) and Vtements and Y-3 Sport (for men). The third floors
southwest-facing corner will be the home of a smaller, sunnier, and, in all
likelihood, younger-skewing version of the restaurant Freds at Barneys,
whose uptown location is a lunchtime canteen for Loews Regency powerbreakfasters and slim women in leather pants. The basement will offer a
beauty shop, an apothecary, and an outpost of Blind Barber, the full-service
salon-cum-mens club whose other New York locations are in Williamsburg
and the East Village.
For all the emphasis on differentiation and modernitythe street-level
entrance is visually defined by a sculptural stainless-steel canopy rather than
the familiar awnings of yorethe Barneys team has built into the new
stores narrative some callbacks to the old days. There is, once again, a
spiral staircase (which coexists, funnily enough, with the Putman original,
still in use at the Rubin Museum of Art, the tenant of the former womensshop space on the north end of the block). The hiring of Harris, a celebrated
residential architect making his first foray into retail design, is itself a
conscious evocation of how the Pressmans, in their day, engaged the
services of Peter Marino, himself a strictly residential architect until Barneys
came calling.
And the downtown store is planning an event for this spring that will
deliberately echo Decorated Denima pageant of one-of-a-kind
motorcycle jackets, decorated by such artists as Ugo Rondinone, Kim
Gordon, Anicka Yi, Lisa Yuskavage, and Glenn Ligon, the sale of which
(via Christies) will benefit two downtown institutions: White Columns,
New Yorks oldest nonprofit art space, founded in 1970 by the artists Jeffrey
Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Center, the venerable L.G.B.T.
community center three blocks to the stores south, on West 13th Street.
The relaunched stores inaugural window displays will be given over to
portraiture by the photographer Bruce Weber, who spent several months in
2015 shooting in and around New York Citys streetsa departure from his
usual bucolic canvases. Among his subjects: Cyndi Lauper; the father-son
actors Bobby and Jake Cannavale; Mya Taylor, the trans actress and star of

19

Sean Bakers indie feature Tangerine; Ganga Stone, the founder of Gods
Love We Deliver; Rocky Jones, the New York City Fire Departments first
female battalion chief; Frank Pellegrino, the proprietor of Raos, the nearly
impenetrable Italian restaurant in East Harlem; and four of the six Angulo
boys, the home-schooled Lower East Side brothers from last years
documentary The Wolfpack.
Its celebrating the New York City we love, said Dennis Freedman, the
companys creative director, who added that the windows will be a multimedia bouillabaisse of Bruce, featuring installations of motion-picture
footage that Weber captured along the way (including Pellegrino singing
inside of Raos) and older Weber photos of, among others, Patti Smith, Lady
Gaga, and Richard Avedon.
These days, you have to dig deeper and harder, into archives, subcultures,
and obscure alleyways, to find traces of the characterful New York that
progress, bank branches, and bro culture have left behind. How novel, then,
to see the city get a happy jolt of character rejuvenation from, of all places, a
posh retailer that decided to reconnect with its past.
Mike Piazzas uncomfortable role after post-9/11 home run
Here is what being a Hall of Fame player is all about.
These are the human qualities that make a difference.
This was a day of reflection for Mike Piazza as he officially was introduced
as a Hall of Famer at the New York Athletic Club on Thursday, along with
Ken Griffey Jr. as both men commanded the day.
When Piazza, 47, talked about his home run against the Braves that first
game at Shea Stadium after 9/11, his soul shined through. That homer will
hold a special place in the hearts of Mets fans and New Yorkers forever, and
for those whose hearts bled for New York at that terrible time.
Its tough, I get emotional thinking back to that moment, Piazza began,
his eyes beginning to glisten. Its something you cant define.
This is what 9/11 did.

20

Its something that changed all of our lives, Piazza said. Not at a baseball
level, but at a personal level for me. It really put my life in perspective and
focused what the important things in life are, and thats family and friends
and relationships.
To have that ripped away from so many of us was tough. We talked about
the frustration of not knowing when to come back after a tragedy like that
and all the feelings going into that game were something you cant describe.
For me to be at the right place and the right time and to come through I can
only think it comes from above and a lot of people that put wind under my
wings, Piazza said, words flowing like the emotion of the time.
Its uncomfortable, at times, when people put me as, for lack of a better
word, a hero.
I said, No I am not a hero. The people that went to work that day were
heroes. The people who tried to save them were heroes and the families that
had to move on without a mother or a father or a sister or brother or an uncle
are heroes.
As much as I feel blessed that people remember that, its tough for me.
He stopped. His story told.
The moment on Sept. 21, 2001, when that ball cleared the center-field fence
will live forever. It is part of Piazzas legacy, one magical home run of 427.
His words give you a greater understanding of Mike Piazza the person and
why this ride to Cooperstown will be different than so many other journeys.
The Mets are proud he is wearing their cap into the Hall. These are great
days for the Mets. You can be sure this summer Piazza will have his No. 31
retired by the ballclub.
This day belonged to the Hall of Fame. The Mets smartly did not want to
take away from that.
What about all those other long shots out there in life like Piazza, who made
it to the Hall of Fame despite being the 1,390th pick of the 1988 draft?
Piazza put that in perspective too.

21

Never give up, he said. Just believe in yourself. Trust the people that
love you and want you to excel. Understand that for me, its a true American
success story. Its what our country is all about and what baseball is all
about.
I think in this day and age, because its so digital and everyones attention
span is a little shorter, you need to put the time in on things.
You have to refine your craft. Things arent always going to come
instantaneously. Dont be afraid of change. Sometimes you think you are
going to do something and you end up doing something else completely
opposite.
Kind of trust that life is a journey. Its not a destination. Theres going to be
ups and downs but always be positive.
This is why Piazza chose to wear a Mets cap into the Hall.
Nothing negative with the Dodgers, he said, but your heart can only be
in one place. For me, its with the New York fans.
Mike Piazzas heart and soul belong to Cooperstown now.
Mets fans, be proud.
New Yorkers, be proud.
Bushwick Gentrification Flame War: "This Is The Face Of Hipster
Racism"
A Bushwick-based gallery announced Thursday that it had canceled its plans
to generate and promote a list of the 200 most "innovative" residents of the
neighborhood, after several long-time residents and activists criticized the
list for its perceived racial bias and indifference towards the impacts of
gentrification.
While all of the comments have since been deleted from the event's
Facebook page, longtime Bushwick resident and local activist Will Giron
has posted a series of screenshots documenting controversial comments
made by Park Slope gallery owner Ethan Pettit. Many of Pettit's comments

22

were directed at Anthony Rosado, a lifelong Bushwick resident and activist,

and one of the most vocal commenters on the thread.
Described in a Ted Talk bio as a "writer, performer, and cheerleader" in the
early Williamsburg art scene in the 1980s, Pettit gave a talk at
TedXBushwick in March 2015 entitled "Art Causes Gentrification." In the
talk he posits that, "Artists seed in the neighborhood all of the essential
elements we need to get the neighborhood going."
In numerous posts since deleted from the event page for the "Bushwick
200," Pettit came to the defense of Rafael Fuchs of Fuchs Projects, a gallery
at 56 Bogart Street where the event was planned, as first reported by
DNAInfo.
Pettit referred to Bushwick as a "blighted and crime-ridden community" and
added later that "artists were the first wave of gentrifiers who turned this
mess around."
On Thursday afternoon, Fuchs publicly distanced himself from Pettit on
Facebook, stating:
Ethan, you are not a part of my group, neither you are representing
me.... my intentions are to have understanding and real communication
and dialogue with many other tenants in Bushwick, including ones that
are labeling me as a racist !!! ... I believe you have good intentions, but
step aside, speak for yourself. As a matter of fact, your contribution to
the whole deterioration of a dialogue, and you are one of the reasons
that it went completely wrong.
Fuchs initially advertised an event that would honor locals in categories
from art to restaurants and real estate.
"Lighten up y'all. In the real world out there beyond the borders of
ethnocentric barrio you seek to preserve, these kinds of '200' lists are routine,
healthy and illuminating," Pettit wrote.
"Just because some white guy concocts some app, or some white girl
vandalizes homes with crochet, does not mean they transform the
conventional," Rosada argued.

23

In another comment, Pettit responded to accusations that he is a "white

racist" and "white colonizer." To Rosado he wrote, "Just because I don't
have some breeder family that talks in tongues on Sundays, does not mean I
am not rock solid with my bohemian peeps in the hood."
Expounding on churches he added, "You'd rather have those noxious houses
of superstition in your neighborhood, than a place like TEDx where you
might actually learn something?"
In response to a comment from Giron challenging the "Bushwick 200"
event's inclusion of real estate as a category in light of "the endemic
harassment and displacement of working class Black and Latino families
from the neighborhood," Pettit wrote: "Your neighborhoods were in bad
shape dude. It was not some magisterial Inca civilization I assure you."
"This is the face of hipster racism. The ugly side of what many gentrifier
artists who open up studios in Brooklyn really feel about the communities
they displace," Giron wrote on Facebook. "All of us united in calling Ethan
out on his racism and the problamatic nature of this event. Expecting that
these comments would be deleted by Fuchs and the narrative distorted, I
took these snapshots as proof of the conversation."
Explaining his decision to cancel the event, Fuchs wrote, "For the sake of
peace in the community, we are canceling the event. We dont wish to cause
any trauma to anyone and any grief to the community, neither to create a
platform that will ignite unnecessary violence."
He added, "We cannot tolerate any racial and hate notions and comments
from anyone. Fuchs Projects is an art gallery, not a social organization."
Asked to speak with Gothamist, Pettit declined to comment. In what may or
may not be his last Facebook comment on the matter, he wrote, "The
protesters have been victorious, they have succeeded, and they should be
commended. I congratulate all of them on a fight well fought. It does not
matter if this outcome has been the will of the many or the will of the few."
Heres what Sean Penn agreed to do to party with El Chapo
El Chapo, meet El Jerko.

24

Hollywood blowhard Sean Penn secretly met, interviewed, and posed for
grip-and-smirk selfies with murderous druglord Joaquin Guzman Loera
even as the worlds most-wanted fugitive continued to elude authorities in
the months after tunneling out of a Mexican prison.
I dont want to be portrayed as a nun, El Chapo says in the interview.
Nevertheless, to gain access to the kingpins secret jungle hideout, Penn
agreed that Guzman would have the final edit of the resulting story.
Penn also agreed not to alert authorities to the killers whereabouts. Still,
Guzmans capture in a dramatic police shootout Friday came as a direct
result of Mexican officials tracking their contacts, authorities there said.
And Mexican officials now are investigating Penn and actress Kate del
Castillo, who traveled with the actor to visit the vile drug lord, ABC News
reported.
Penn interviewed Guzman whose nickname means Shorty in person
and via cautiously encrypted e-mail and video messages for Rolling Stone
magazine.
He asks me if many people in the United States know about him, Penn
writes of the celebrity-obsessed narcotics magnate.
Oh yeah, I say ... He seems to delight in the absurdity of this ... We eat,
drink and talk for hours, he said of their jungle tte-a-tte.
At one point, the tequila flowing, El Chapo jokes of Donald Trump, Ah! Mi
amigo!
The clandestine contacts were brokered by del Castillo, whod struck up a
correspondence with Guzman after tweeting her support of him four years
ago, the mag said.
The resulting account, published online Saturday night, shows the killer
kingpin described variously as serene, and a simple man in a simple
place, and a businessman first in an almost worshipful light.
In breathless, first-person prose, Penn marvels over El Chapos humble,
hardscrabble childhood spent harvesting in the drug fields of Sinaloa state.

25

Scant mention is made of the river of blood in El Chapos wake, and none at
all of his alleged assassinations of Mexican officials and police. Guzman is
credited with responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths of rivals,
informants and officials in Mexico and the US, his biggest market.
A 2014 indictment by the US Attorneys office in Brooklyn charges him
with 12 counts of murder among other charges; Mexico officials said
Saturday they will cooperate with US efforts to extradite him.
Instead, Penn seems to swoon over the breadth of the fugitives deadly drug
empire.
While I was surfing the waves of Malibu at age 9, he was already working
in the marijuana and poppy fields of the remote mountains of Sinaloa, Penn
says of Guzman, who, like the actor, is in his early 50s.
Today he runs the biggest international drug cartel the world has ever
known, exceeding even that of Pablo Escobar, Penn says.
He shops and ships by some estimates more than half of all the cocaine,
heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana that come into the United States.
Penn concedes in the piece that he may be perceived as protecting
criminals.
The actor also wants readers to know that in meeting with El Chapo who
was known to dispatch those who disappoint him with a bullet to the head
he is doing something really, really risky.
The trust that El Chapo had extended to us was not to be fked with, Penn
writes.
This will be the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an
interrogation room, leaving me no precedent by which to measure the
hazards, Penn writes.
Id seen plenty of video and graphic photography of those beheaded,
exploded, dismembered or bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous
journalists and cartel enemies alike.
But Penn was not afraid.

26

Id offered myself to experiences beyond my control in numerous countries

of war, terror, corruption and disaster, he assures the reader.
Guzman may be a billionaire murderer and peddler of poison, but what of
our own guilt, as customers of his wares, Penn muses.
We are the consumers, Penn says, and as such, we are complicit in every
murder, and in every corruption of an institutions ability to protect the
quality of life for citizens of Mexico and the United States that comes as a
result of our insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics.
Penn adds, As much as anything, its a question of relative morality.
Besides, the War on Drugs has failed, he announces, decrying the tunnel
vision of our puritanical and prosecutorial culture.
Penn and del Castillo visited El Chapo in early October, a trip involving a
flight to an undisclosed Mexican city and a 90-minute drive across
farmlands in a convoy of armored SUVs to a dirt airfield.
Their escort on a subsequent, two-hour flight in El Chapos six-seat, singleengine prop plane is the drug lords 29-year-old son, Alfredo, Penn writes.
The plane has a scrambler that blocks ground radar, Alfredo boasts. After a
few fortifying in-flight swigs of tequila, they land, somewhere, in a patch of
dirt surrounded by jungle, and scramble into two waiting SUVs.
Nine bumpy hours later after a drive that included their convoy being
waved through a Mexican military checkpoint there he is, standing
beside a few weathered bungalows, Penn writes.
Hes wearing a casual patterned silk shirt, pressed black jeans, and he
appears remarkably well-groomed and healthy for a man on the run, Penn
notes.
He pulls me into a compadre hug, looks me in the eyes and speaks a
lengthy greeting in Spanish too fast for my ears, Penn says.
About 100 of his soldiers stand guard as El Chapo hobnobs with the two
celebrities, del Castillo translating for Penn over tacos, rice and beans.

27

Penn is allowed no note-taking, so hes unable to quote El Chapo at length.

Did you know Pablo Escobar? the actor asks. Yes, I met him. Big house,
is the answer remembered by Penn.
What was to be a series of in-person interviews was scuttled, though, when
El Chapos security caught wind of a looming military siege.
A later, written interview consists of softball questions, including, Do you
consider yourself a violent person?
The kingpin responds, No, sir.
Penn asks, Are you prone to violence, or do you use it as a last resort?
Look, El Chapo answers. All I do is defend myself, nothing more. But do
I start trouble? Never.
Penn is no stranger to self-aggrandizement.
In the 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he was pictured patrolling the
streets of New Orleans brandishing a shotgun.
Sandy Alderson, Mets content with not over-spending for Denard Span
or Yoenis Cespedes
The Giants are taking a three-year, $31 million gamble on Denard Span, one
that seems reasonable, based on the price, for what the free-agent center
fielder can provide if he returns to form after last summers hip surgery.
The Mets werent willing to take that risk, and its possible theyll be proven
smart for passing. But their underwhelming off-season leaves such decisions
open to harsh interpretation.
Indeed, by choosing to sign Alejandro De Aza to a one-year, $5.75 million
deal last month rather than take a chance on Span, never mind Yoenis
Cespedes, the Mets added to the perception that their decision-making this
winter is being driven by ongoing payroll concerns.
However, GM Sandy Alderson insists thats not the case.

28

The biggest issue for us (regarding Span) was the injury, Alderson said by
phone on Friday. It wasnt payroll.
Its a frustrating subject for the GM because he knows fans are skeptical
understandably so, after years of post-Madoff budget-crunching. But the
way Alderson explains it, a free-agent market that didnt match up well with
the Mets needs in center field and shortstop dictated the low-profile moves
this winter.
I feel good about what weve done, he said. Youd always like to have a
little more sizzle, but that was more about the market. The players werent
there. Thats why we were all-in on (Ben) Zobrist.
The Mets lost out to the Cubs, of course, but they recovered nicely there by
trading for Neil Walker. And after adding Asdrubal Cabrera and De Aza,
Alderson seems to feel the Mets have created enough depth and versatility to
be solid offensively, in part by taking advantage of platoon possibilities at
second base, center field and perhaps first base.
In addition, the Mets believe De Aza will be productive against righthanded
pitching he had an .800 OPS vs. righties last season and they seem
convinced he can still play an adequate center field, even though hes played
there sparingly the last two seasons.
They also feel strongly that Juan Lagares will return to Gold Glove
defensive form in center, figuring hell replace De Aza in late innings
against righthanded pitching, and they have high hopes he will still blossom
offensively.
Alderson also made it clear he preferred a short-team deal for De Aza, as
opposed to multi-year deals for Span or Gerardo Parra, to maintain financial
flexibility in case an attractive free agents price drops dramatically.
Like Cespedes, for example?
Alderson wouldnt discuss such a possibility, and its highly unlikely
Cespedes market would fall to that level, but with the Giants signing Span
and the Nationals trading for Ben Revere on Friday, the landing spots for
Cespedes and Justin Upton are dwindling.

29

Still, teams such as the Tigers, Angels and perhaps the Orioles seem far
more likely to jump in before the Mets would. In fact, the sense you get from
talking to others in the Mets hierarchy is that they would only sign
Cespedes if he decided to take a one-year deal, with the idea that hed be
more in demand as free agent next year in a thin outfield market.
If that is indeed the case, its fair to ask why the Mets are so firm in their
stance.
However, Alderson wasnt biting on Cespedes questions, and other Mets
people tread carefully on the subject. But one executive from another team
said he believes the Mets, and perhaps other teams as well, worry that
Cespedes reputation as a diva is deserved and fear that his effort level will
waver if he gets a long-term deal.
So chances are the 2016 roster is set offensively, other than the Mets adding
a righthanded-hitting backup outfielder. Is it good enough? Alderson was
emphatic in saying he feels it is, though he also indicated hell have money
to make moves at the trading deadline as he did last year.
By then well also have a better idea if the Mets were wise to pass on Span,
and Cespedes too.
NATIONAL MOVES
The Nationals made a solid move on Friday, trading for Revere as a
replacement of sorts in center field for Span. By adding two lefthanded
hitters, Revere and Daniel Murphy, the Nats are more balanced offensively
than last season.
To get Revere they gave up reliever Drew Storen, who was never the same
after being demoted from closer to setup man when Washington dealt for
Jonathan Papelbon last summer.
The problem, of course, is that this move indicates Papelbon is staying. No
team has been willing to take his $11 million contract for next season in a
trade, and on Saturday Nats GM Mike Rizzo told reporters that he expects
Papelbon will be one of our late-inning relievers next season.
Bryce Harper has to be thrilled.

30

HALL MUSINGS
Some takeaways from last weeks Hall of Fame vote:
-Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens arent ever getting to Cooperstown.
Neither of baseballs most notorious steroids users received the expected big
jumps in voting percentage in a year when they were supposed to benefit
greatly from the BBWAAs reduction of the voting body 109 fewer
voters.
The old guys anyone who hadnt covered baseball in the past 10 years
were out, and the assumption was that they were mostly hard-liners on
steroids, theoretically opening a door of sorts for Bonds and Clemens.
Furthermore, some of the early public ballots, including some from national
writers who changed their previous positions, indicated a possible
widespread shift in thinking about steroid users.
Instead, the two tainted stars made only small gains, as Bonds went from
37% to 44% and Clemens 38% to 45%. Though each has six years
remaining on the ballot, more than half of the remaining no voters would
have to change their minds for Bonds and Clemens to reach the 75%
threshold.
-How is Trevor Hoffman miles ahead of Billy Wagner?
Im all for relievers getting their due in the Hall of Fame, and it looks like
Hoffman is a lock after he received 67.3% in his first year on the ballot. Yet
Wagner received only 10.5% of the vote, which is hard to believe.
Hoffman has the higher save total, yet Wagner was more dominant in
practically every significant pitching category, which is why I voted for him.
I expect to vote for Hoffman next year, when the ballot will be a bit less
crowded, but Wagner deserves more support.
-Shortstops dont get enough respect.
Alan Trammell is off the ballot after failing to get in on his 15th and final
try, and thats too bad because the former Detroit Tiger was one of the top

31

10 shortstops of all time, factoring in his offense and defense, and deserved
better.
Derek Jeter is a shoo-in, of course, in four years, but more intriguing to me
will be Omar Vizquel, who is two years away. He didnt do backflips while
taking the field, like Ozzie Smith, but Vizquel was every bit the same wizard
with the glove, winning 11 Gold Gloves along the way. He didnt hit much,
but his defense should make him a slam dunk.
-Does Mike Piazzas election bode well for Ivan Rodriguez next season?
Piazza got in on his fourth try because enough voters, including myself,
decided that its not fair to deny a player a Hall of Fame vote based strictly
on suspicion of steroids, no matter how strong, and Jeff Bagwell is headed in
that direction.
So Pudge will be an interesting case next year. Manny Ramirez is also on the
ballot, but as great a hitter as he was, he figures to have no shot because he
has two failed drug tests.
Rodriguez, meanwhile, who won 13 Gold Gloves, falls more in the Piazza
category: tons of suspicion, and a dramatic weight-loss late in his career too,
but no hard evidence. That is, unless you count Jose Cansecos claim in his
book that he injected Pudge with steroids while they were teammates with
the Rangers.
Piazza didnt have to deal with anything that messy.
EXCLUSIVE: NYC high school teacher claims she was fired for
Central Park Five lessons that administrators feared would create
'riots'
A teacher at an Upper West Side high school was fired for creating a
curriculum with lessons about the Central Park Five that administrators
feared would rile up black students, according to a new federal lawsuit.
English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker said her bosses at the High School for
Arts, Imagination and Inquiry urged her in November 2013 to be more
balanced in her approach to the racially charged Central Park jogger case
that ended with five black and Latino teens being exonerated after spending
several years in prison for the attack.

32

They told her the lessons could create little riots, according to court
papers.
I was stunned, she told the Daily News. I was kind of like, the facts are
the facts. This is what happened. These boys went to jail and lost 14, 18
years of their lives. How can you say that in a more balanced way?
Although Lee-Walker, 37, agreed to soften her approach, she argued that
students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up.
I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over, she said.
I thought that this material was not only engaging but important.
Lee-Walker said her Central Park Five program captivated her students,
many of whom came from the same neighborhood as the young men.
It was awesome they were so engaged, she said. They were really
moved by the documentary and rightly so. They really identified with the
teenagers.
But after several tense exchanges with supervisors, Lee-Walker received a
series of bad performance reviews over the next 18 months that ultimately
led to her dismissal, the suit said.
Lee-Walker said she was accused of insubordination and given poor
evaluations not just because of the material, but because she pushed back.
She was fired in May, roughly two years after joining the High School for
the Arts and six years after she began teaching in city public schools.
I felt abandoned and mistreated, Lee-Walker said of the ordeal. I think a
lot of teachers in the system feel the same way.
Lee-Walker said retaliation against her violated her First Amendment right
to discuss the Central Park Five case, and that the firing violated the citys
contract with the teachers union because she was not given a required 60
days notice.
She filed suit in Manhattan Federal Court, and named the Department of
Education and several school administrators as defendants.

33

Lee-Walker, who graduated from Barnard and has post-grad degrees from
Harvard and Fordham, did not specify damages in her suit.
The city law department declined to comment on the litigation.
Ms. Lee-Walker is the type of teacher we want in a classroom, her lawyer,
Ambrose Wotorson, told The News.
Were not looking to turn our students into automatons. Were looking to
turn out independent thinkers and she got fired for that, and that's just
wrong, Wotorson said.
Its a shame when our sports stars get caught up in stain of change
Change, were told, is an essential good because its married to progress.
Imagine the ABC Barbara Walters prime-time exclusive with the first Salem
witch to beat the heat.
Sports? Different story. Change often becomes a matter of increasing
compromises. If theres anything left beneath your dignity (or in your
wallet), be prepared to remove it or get out.
Last week two large local sports figures underwent change.
Tom Coughlin, 20 years an NFL head coach, the past 12 with the Giants,
wasnt exactly fired, didnt exactly resign. The ambiguity was intentional as
if a tenants decision not to renew his lease coincided with the owners
decision not to renew it. We get it. No hard feelings.
Next, a Met, Mike Piazza, slugger in the sudden-slugger steroid era, was
elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In Coughlins case, his choices seemed limited to those voices demanding
that he change with the game, a practical-sounding suggestion that roughly
meant he learn to indulge the increasing unprofessionalism of professionals
and defend or ignore their illogical behavior even if such pandering and
neglect cost his team wins.
In other words, unless Coughlin had lost his senses, 50 years in the forming,
to the forces of pop culture, we knew that his defense of Odell Beckham Jr.
after Beckham decided he was the only man who mattered during that

34

cataclysmic loss to Carolina an obscenity topped Saturday night before,

then throughout Steelers versus Bengals (FOXs Joe Buck, during Sundays
Packers-Redskins, briefly but wisely tethered both significant games, 21
days apart, as outstandingly senseless) was hollow and pathetic. Coughlin
had to have been sickened by Beckhams behavior as both defended teamdefeating behavior with the illogical rationalizations of modernity.
Wonder what might have happened had Coughlin not changed to meet the
growing needs of players, most, likely as a matter of fraud, college men.
What if Coughlin, backed by Giants ownership, had insisted that no player
moved to lose 15 yards, let alone a game, to misconduct, was welcomed to
become a Giant? What if the Giants had been the one team that demanded its
players celebrate TDs only as a team the scorer, perhaps, pointing to the
offensive line, as opposed to himself and TV-taught acts of rank
immodesty such as dancing and chest-pounding, be banned as anathema to a
team game and goal?
What if the Giants, under Coughlin, had not compromised; had become the
one team that would never lose a game as per Dec. 20s to the Panthers or as
the Bengals did, two nights ago?
In response, how many players would declare, I could never play for the
Giants; Im too selfish. Or, I play too dirty; Im too undisciplined for
them. Wouldnt it be better to know before than too late?
Imagine, in this wincingly compromised age, being able to root for a team
without compromise, without loss of dignity. Shucks, such a team might
even lead the NFL in jerseys sold. (Money!) Is it not crazy that a frequently
asked question among fans Why do coaches allow their players to act
like that? has no good answer, has become rhetorical?
In Piazzas case, a steroid shadow must exist because sluggers of his era are
as they should be: Guilty until proven innocent. Thats not our fault; thats
MLBs fault starting with Bottom Line Bud Selig, the anything-for-a-buck
team owners from whom he exchanged winks, nods and revenue, and their
equally greed-driven, adversaries (mutually silent partners), Donald Fehrs
MLBPA.
That they bartered their foresight none of these bean-counting geniuses
could see it coming; the lid would remain sealed? until legions of

35

sensational sluggers inevitably faced deserved revelations and suspicions of

steroid and HGH dependence.
Given the visceral, to stake our lives on whether Piazza became a Hall-ofFame slugger while playing clean in a steroid-saturated era, which button
would you push?
And if we were right, then shame on Piazza. And if we were wrong, then
shame on Selig and his Shut Up And Count The Money Club.
Change is good for some. Every nickel and dime of it.
CBS silence adds to insulting Bengals debacle
As the NFL grows impossible to endure as a sport its now more in line
with 18th Century Paris, which held public executions on holidays to draw
and please the masses those who long ago should have seized their power
bases to demand it reverse itself or at least stop, continue to take dives.
Instead, were consistently treated as if were too dim to see or know better.
An added alarming element to Saturdays Steelers-Bengals prison gang war
was CBSs lead team of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, which should have felt
no constraints in letting us know they also were watching what we could
scarcely believe we were watching. They soft-shoed it from above and
beyond, no big deal.
Consider that even before kickoff as seen on tape a security detail
separated the warring tribes during warm-ups/prison yard rec-time.
Yet, not until a few seconds were left in the game game? It resembled an
elimination round among Cossacks did Simms, just above a whisper, say
we were witnessing a disgrace. Moments earlier, after dehumanized
Vontaze Burficts late, near-criminal head-shot to Antonio Brown was
shown in a replay, Nantz managed a soft, Oh, my goodness.
For crying out loud, where had they been? In the second quarter, Bengals
DT Domata Peko, conspicuous in his hooded rain parka, left the sideline to
shove an on-field Steeler. Sure, he was penalized, he should have been
ejected.

36

But in a playoff game, the best Simms could muster about this was, Thats
a bad play. A bad play? Peko wasnt even in the game to make any kind of
play! It was insane!
And so was everything and everyone else. Yet Nantz and Simms were
careful not to insult any of the offending, game-destroying players or
coaches, not even career miscreant Pacman Jones, now respectfully
addressed as Adam Jones in line with his new persona, which still
impersonates a creep.
This was a game a brutalized, blooded spectacle of profane selfindulgence interrupted by warm, tragi-comedic Football Is Family NFL
image ads in which the Bengals barely defeated the Steelers in doing their
uncivilized best to lose.
And if that wasnt enough to move two decent men on solid network footing
to issue, early and often, their condemnations while holding the worst,
coaches included, in contempt that neither Nantz nor Simms stated their
sense of sport and humanity wasnt fully assaulted and insulted, thus
pandering to it only added to the insult, the disgust and the sustaining
destruction.
Sandy Aldersons trolling of Mets fans isnt earning him any points
Great to hear Sandy Alderson looked healthy Thursday at a Manhattan news
conference honoring new Hall of Famers Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey Jr.
Although I suspected the feistily erudite Aldersons energy to be at a high
level when I read he dropped the word populism in a session with
reporters.
The idea were not investing in the team, I think, is really misplaced and
sort of tied up in the populism involving [Yoenis] Cespedes, the Mets
general manager said.
That sentiment perfectly captures the Mets approach this offseason as they
work to defend the National League crown. It ties into another term, a more
modern one, which could be just as apt:
Trolling.

37

Brilliantly, inadvertently, the Mets have trolled a vocal segment of their fan
base this offseason with their acquisitions of modest upgrades. Now, trolls
are often correct. The imperative that the Mets wind up correct with their
hot-stove approach is heightened by the reality that they are scoring few
publicity points with their process.
The populism tied into Cespedes concerns more than just the skills of the
free-agent outfielder himself. Cespedes, the face of Aldersons late July
2015 makeover, predictably has become a litmus test for the Mets fiscal
flexibility. Their World Series appearance notwithstanding, the Mets still
face a considerable trust deficit with their fan base in the wake of everything
that has transpired since Bernard Madoffs December 2008 arrest.
So when Alderson pointed out Thursday that the Mets payroll stood at $85
million at the end of 2014 and could shoot up to the $115 million-to-$120
million range by Opening Day, that didnt land smoothly in the hearts or
brains of longtime fans who could counter that Aldersons first Mets team,
in 2011, carried a payroll surpassing $140 million. And these Mets, by virtue
of the revenues generated by their deep postseason run, not to mention
Michael Cuddyers retirement, should have been able to increase their
expenditures significantly from the $110 million neighborhood where they
concluded last year.
As The Posts Joel Sherman noted recently, if the Mets had succeeded in
their aggressive bid to sign free agent Ben Zobrist for four years and $60
million, a higher offer than the four-year, $56 million package Zobrist
accepted from the Cubs, then at least some of the clamor would have
vanished. Because the Mets didnt target any other high-end free agents,
however, they find themselves on the defensive once again.
You can see the logic behind the Mets thinking. They want to avoid fielding
the sort of Quadruple-A lineups that became commonplace during the first
four months of last season. If they wont have anyone as dangerous as
Cespedes, they at least want to put forward a respectable lineup each day.
Hence the arrival of Neil Walker to replace Daniel Murphy, and Asdrubal
Cabrera to relegate Wilmer Flores to a super-sub role, and Alejandro De Aza
to complement Juan Lagares without making him a strict platoon player.
Beloved veteran Bartolo Colon returned once Jon Niese departed to
Pittsburgh as the price for Walker, and lefty reliever Jerry Blevins will
attempt to avoid crazy mishaps and last past April this time.

38

All the moves make some sense and none moves the needle, nor does any
cost anything approaching Zobrists price tag. Most baseball fans love when
their team captures the biggest fish. No matter that many of those big fish
wind up rotting and stinking at the fishermens expense.
Not often do you see a club score quick points with both its offseason
process and its in-season results. The Yankees pulled it off with their
spending spree after the 2008 campaign and their 2009 championship. The
Mets drummed up excitement with big pickups in the 2004-05 and 2005-06
winters and, as you might remember, fell just short of the 2006 World
Series.
The Mets clearly do not deem Cespedes, or anyone else remaining on the
market, worthy of a long-term commitment. They very well might be right.
And their hot-stove strategy could work, especially in the still-weak National
League East.
Nevertheless, for now, the Mets move forward without the populist vote
and with the appreciation of trolls everywhere.
The Golden Globes were an absolute joke
Sunday nights Golden Globes were an exercise in show-biz futility.
So what else is new?
If anyone thought the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would shake
things up in terms of rewarding fresh faces in television, fuggedaboutit. But
I will say this: at least the Golden Globes lived up to its hard-earned
reputation as a joke-of-an-awards show never to be taken seriously.
There were few surprises Sunday night, save for Rachel Bloom (good),
Mozart in the Jungle (two awards, both bad), Mr. Robot (nice) and
Taraji P. Henson (Empire) overcoming her unjust Emmys snub to win as
Best Dramatic Actress.
Bloom was an unexpected pick for her little-watched CW series Crazy ExGirlfriend. Her victory recalled fellow CW stablemate Gina Rodriguez,
who came out of nowhere in 2014 to win a Golden Globe for Jane the
Virgin. Good for her and for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend which, despite its win,
probably wont get much of a ratings or pop-culture bump. (Jane the

39

Virgin didnt benefit from its victory in terms of viewers and its buzziness
has been reduced to a whisper.)
As for Amazons Mozart in the Jungle: WTF? Best Comedy Series? Best
Comedy Actor for star Garcia Gael Bernal? This show was so boring I
couldnt get past four episodes last season. I did write in The Post last Friday
that I was haunted by the specter of Bernal somehow winning a Golden
Globe, even though I picked Jeffrey Tambor, last years winner, to repeat
Sunday night. So at least I was right about something. And, lets face it,
Bernal is not I repeat, is not funny. Perhaps Amazon did a nice job
schmoozing the HFPA voters (all 80-something of them). I cant figure out
any other reason for rewarding Mozart in the Jungle with anything.
As for Mr. Robot, which won two major awards, good for it, and for star
Christian Slater. The USA series won a lot of loyal fans after premiering as a
surprise hit last summer. And Slater, whose TV past was checkered at best,
has now vanquished his show killer status once and for all (he won for
Best Dramatic Actor). I picked Narcos to win that category, and thought
that Game of Thrones should win as one of TVs biggest shows. But what
do I know?
And while I didnt officially pick a winner for the Best TV
Movie/Anthology category, the fact that wooden, vamping amateur Lady
Gaga won for American Horror Story: Hotel, speaks volumes about the
artistic hollowness of these awards. Theyre a joke.
I thought Wagner Moura (Narcos) deserved to win for Best Dramatic
Actor; that award went to Jon Hamm (Mad Men), the sentimental choice
now that AMCs long-running series, always a critics darling, has left its
thousands of fans bereft after concluding last spring. Get a life and move on.
It was nice to see TV veteran Maura Tierney win for The Affair (I picked
Joanne Froggatt as the sentimental favorite for the final season of Downton
Abbey), and at least Henson snubbed for an Emmy last fall won a
much-deserved Golden Globe for her electritying work as Cookie Lyon on
Empire. I thought she deserved to win, though I picked Robin Wright
(House of Cards) as the favorite.
Im glad I was wrong.

40

'Making a Murderer' Star Reporter: This Case Should've Been Famous

Years Ago
In addition to the widespread attention the 10-part Making a
Murderer documentary has brought to the cases of Steven Avery and
Brendan Dassey, and the broader problems with America's criminal justice
system, an interesting phenomenon has emerged: Several of the show's more
tertiary characters have become mini-celebrities online. Women in particular
seem to love Steven Avery's defense attorneys ("Dean Strang is the Coach
Taylor of the Wisconsin legal community," one Twitter user writes; "If I had
one of those lists of celebrities you're allowed to bone with impunity, I
would put heartthrob Dean Strang on it," writes another). And then there are
the two breakout reporters from the press room scenes in the documentary:
"silver fox" Aaron Keller, and Angenette Levy, the bespectacled, nononsense local journalist with a knack for asking tough questions of both the
prosecution and the defense.

Levy, who now lives and works in Ohio, recently chatted with Rolling Stone
about evidence that was left out of the show, why she's surprised it took so
long for the case to become a national story, and what it's been like getting
all this attention from random people on the Internet.
What's it been like watching this case unfold on-screen several years
after the fact?
It's strange for me to watch it. I feel like I'm watching it from a completely
different perspective than someone who's seeing all of this for the first
time. It's interesting to see it all consolidated and condensed into ten, onehour episodes.
Do you feel like the show presents the cases fairly? Did it track with
your experience of actually being there?
[The filmmakers] had such incredible access to the Avery family, and they
had tremendous access to the defense attorneys, with all of the behind-thescenes footage. And, you know, they're using Steven Avery as their main
"character," so I think you're going to see more of the case through their
eyes.

41

I read an article with the filmmakers where they said they included the
state's best evidence, and I think I've heard the defense attorney say the same
thing. I did notice there were some parts of the state's theory, and some other
things that weren't discussed in the documentary. I'm not sure why those
items were left out.
Yeah, there's been some grumbling online about that: that Making a
Murderer viewers weren't presented with some of the evidence in the
case. Did you find any of that problematic?
Well, I was surprised that there were some things that weren't in there. For
instance, there were some things that weren't in there about Steven Avery
requesting Teresa Halbach that day
You mean that Avery requested Halbach, specifically, to come out to the
Avery car lot, right?
That's correct. There was testimony to that effect during the trial, that he had
specifically requested her, and that she had been there many times before,
photographing the vehicles. I don't want to go back and forth about whether
or not it was fair. I feel like that's best left to the attorneys. There were
certainly some things that I didn't see in there that were presented during the
trial. But it was a six-week trial. There was a lot that went on during that
trial.
I mean, it's pretty riveting. I've talked to people who watched one episode,
and they can't stop. It's definitely binge-worthy, and certainly appears to be
very entertaining.
How do you feel about that the fact that people are so entertained by
this true-crime story, sort of like they were with the Serial podcast?
People are just eating it up, and some of them are even trying to
investigate the case themselves.
I was always shocked that there wasn't more interest in the case when it was
going on, because it was such an interesting story. It was a very sad story, it
was very compelling, it had all of the elements of a whodunit. You had a
sympathetic victim, but you also, in a lot of ways, had a sympathetic person
being accused of the crime, because [Steven Avery] had been wrongly
imprisoned.
[Now], it's huge, and that doesn't surprise me, because it has all these crazy
things that happened in it, these twists and turns. You have this guy being

42

arrested for this crime, and then people wondering, "Did he really do it?"
and then you bring in the nephew, who his case in particular has always
saddened me.
I don't know about all of this online sleuthing. I can see why people are
chatting about it. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad, because you're not
going to have all of the information in front of you.
You told Jim Romenesko recently that this case "is a tragedy on so
many levels." What most disturbed you about it?
The fact that the Halbach family was only left with bone fragments to bury
from their daughter. I thought that was just absolutely horrendous. It's just so
sad to me.
It's also sad to me that a 16-year-old boy became involved in this, in
whatever way he was. I know he maintains that he was innocent, and I know
Steven Avery maintains that he was innocent. But I think it's a tragedy what
happened in the beginning, in 1985, when he was wrongfully convicted. I
think it's clear that what happened in that situation was wrong, and the fact
that he went to prison for 18 years for something he didn't do, that was
wrong. And then he gets out and it seems like he was having some trouble
adjusting to the outside world, as I would imagine anyone would after
spending time in prison, and then he's charged with this crime. I find that to
be very tragic, if he did indeed do it, as he was convicted of doing it. And I
think the situation with Brendan Dassey, the fact that he's not eligible for
parole until he's, what, 56 years old I think that's very, very sad.
Having actually been at the trial as opposed to the rest of us, watching
this on Netflix did you come away with a strong sense of whether the
police planted evidence in Avery's home, or Dassey's confession was
coerced?
No, I didn't come away with a sense about whether or not the evidence was
planted. I think people are always going to have questions about things like
the key that was found in Avery's bedroom. People are always going to
wonder about that. I don't know.
Brendan Dassey's confession It's three or four hours long. It's a pretty long
tape, and I don't think the actual confessing starts until you get maybe a half
hour or 40 minutes in. You didn't see all of that in the movie. I don't know if

43

that statement was coerced or not. I just don't know. There were a lot of
weird things in it, but the jury believed it.
Now that the documentary is out, people on the Internet are kind of
obsessed with you. I saw a headline this morning that says "The
Reporter In 'Making A Murderer' May Be The Hardest Crush I've
Ever Had In My Life," and this blogger goes on to say, "Making a
Murderer is a true crime tale about a brutal and horrific killing
followed by the very fishy court case, but the moment Angenette Levy
came on screen the main crime became theft of my heart." That's pretty
weird! What's that been like?
I'm very shocked when I read these things. It's kind of amusing, kind of
weird. It's certainly been really surprising. I had no idea I was going to be in
this documentary, so it's taken me by surprise quite a bit.
There have been a lot of nice people who have tweeted me and messaged
me. People have been really nice to me, which is refreshing, and then you
have people who ask, "Why didn't you ask this? Why didn't you ask that?"
and I'm thinking to myself, "We asked a lot of questions back then." I mean,
we really did.
I think that comes through. It seems like part of what people are
responding to is the fact you came off as very no-BS.
Well, I try, and I tried to ask tough questions of both sides. This was a very
serious case. I mean, this was literally life-and-death. It may come across as
entertaining in the documentary, but this was serious. These are people's
lives at stake.
Has anyone recognized you?
Last night I was out reporting a story, and I was interviewing a woman, and
she said, "Oh my gosh, is that you in Making a Murderer?" and I said, "Yes,
it is," and she said, "I knew that was you!" So that was kind of weird, and
I've been getting people tweeting me who I went to high school with who
said, "I thought that was your voice, and then I saw your face!" So it's been
kind of strange. I mean, it's been kind of interesting, but it will fade.
No one cares about Making a Murderer anymore
Sorry, Steven Avery: Your 15 minutes of fame/infamy has expired.

44

No one cares anymore about you or about Making a Murderer. That

was, like, so 2015. Weve moved on to mourning David Bowie ... at least
for now.
Check back with us in a few days.
Doesnt it seem like just yesterday when all anyone could talk about was
whether Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey were railroaded by those
sketchy Manitowoc cops? About all those peculiar Fargo-like accents?
When Nancy Grace, Investigation Discovery and Fox News Channel rushed
specials onto the air to blather about Avery et al. and Seth Meyers aired a
(very funny) Making a Murderer parody on Late Night?
When both the documentary and its creators dominated the morning-show
cycle (and appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert), spurring
online petitions (Free Steven Avery!) and even forcing the White House
THE WHITE HOUSE to weigh in by issuing a statement that it didnt
have the authority to reverse Averys conviction?
When it even got to the point that Averys so-called hot defense attorneys
had their 15 minutes? (Thanks, Internet, for that exercise in absurdity. Did
everyone forget that this case revolves around the murder of a young
woman?)
But MAM has vanished off the pop-culture radar screen quicker than
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 (still missing but did you remember
that?). Sure, the series is still being written about Avery filed yet another
appeal (this time to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals), and People magazine
ran an interview with Averys bizarre on-again/off-again girlfriend but
both of these went virtually unnoticed in the wake of the Golden Globes,
Bowies death, the NFL playoffs, Billions on Showtime ... well, you get
the picture.
Thats just the way it goes in America, where were fed a steady diet of
round-the-clock cable news which, in turn, feeds into our addiction to social
media (or is it the other way around?) both of which contribute to turning
interesting stories into national obsessions. Thats our culture. Remember
the blue-and-black dress that wasnt (or was it?), or even the days-old GIF of
Lady Gaga brushing past Leonardo DiCaprio during the Golden Globes
(OMG!)? Didnt think so.

45

And its not necessarily a bad thing that weve moved on from the allaround-creepy Making a Murderer scenario, which came thisclose to
turning a convicted murderer (Avery), and his convicted accomplice
(Dassey), into wounded folk heroes inherently wrong on so many levels,
whatever you think of the case.
So thanks, America, for having the attention span of a flea.
Sometimes thats a good thing.
For Victims, an Overloaded Court
System Brings Pain and Delays
It had gone on for almost four years, Maxima Allen said as she sat on a hard
bench in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn over the summer.
She did not need notes to remember the date Dec. 20, 2011 that her
son Alfredo was stabbed with scissors on the basketball court of Erasmus
Hall High School, causing irreversible brain damage.
Ms. Allen just wanted the case to end. Once the criminal case against
Chevoy Nelson, the boy accused of stabbing her son, was over, she could
sue the city and the Department of Education for money to help pay for
Alfredos care, which comes to roughly $1,000 a day.
But the case, like so many others, had been delayed.
It is not news that cases can take a long time to wind their way through the
court system in New York, or that lawyers use delay tactics. But to look
closely at the Nelson case is to see this phenomenon played out to an
extreme, and to understand the pain it can cause to a victims family.
This is a story of an overloaded system, where the schedules of judges and
lawyers, records requests, medical examinations and simple errors can
stretch cases out over years.
For victims, family members and defendants, the obligatory court
appearances and inevitable postponements create incredible pressure, said
Jocelyn Simonson, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and a
former public defender in Brooklyn.

46

She ticked off a list of how multiple court dates can affect those involved:
lost wages, lost jobs, losing a place in drug-treatment programs because of
missed sessions, child care issues. For defendants, open cases can cause
problems with housing, child custody and professional licenses. And for
defendants in jail, a postponement is devastating, Ms. Simonson said.
In Brooklyn, where Alfredo was assaulted, the State Supreme Court is trying
new ways to address the backlog. It took an average of 307 days in Brooklyn
last year from the time a felony indictment was handed up to the end of the
case, up 26 percent from 243 days in 2012.
In Brooklyn and the other boroughs, once there is an indictment, a case
requires an average of 11 court appearances to come to a close, according to
the states Office of Court Administration.
Mr. Nelsons case, which required 41 court dates, provides an up-close look
at what goes wrong why delays stretch from weeks to years, and how
little delays can build to big ones.
A History of Violence
Ms. Allen, now 55, was at work as a home health aide the day of the attack.
When she heard that Alfredo, who was then 15, had been stabbed, she
assumed it was in his arm.
I never thought, for a moment, that it wouldve caused so much damage,
because it happened in a school, she said, speaking through a Spanish
interpreter. But when she arrived at Erasmus, police officers and the
principal walked toward her. I became aware of just how bad the situation
was, she said.
Alfredo had already been sent to Kings County Hospital Center. He had
multiple fractures, he was hemorrhaging and his brain, according to medical
records, was actively oozing out from his skull.
She said doctors told her Alfredo would have a 50-50 chance of life or
death. He would require six brain surgeries.
Before the attack, Alfredo, the baby of six siblings, was mischievous and
physically confident. He started playing football at 6 and, after his mother

47

became worried about gangs at his school, he transferred to Erasmus for its
football program.
Photo
He was always up to something: He would buy sneakers at flea markets and
resell them online at a premium. Once, when his mother was visiting
Honduras, he begged her over the phone for a dog. She said no way. When
I came home the next morning, he said, Mommy, Ive got a surprise for
you, she said, and there was a Yorkie mix, Siki, that he paid for by selling
an Xbox online.
That December day at Erasmus, everything changed.
Mr. Nelson, who was 16, said he had been called into the deans office that
day and reprimanded for play-fighting, according to police reports and
court filings. He headed to the gym, where Alfredo and some other boys
were playing basketball.
According to the Allens lawyer, Laura Gentile, Mr. Nelson, a specialeducation student in the 10th grade, was assigned to a different section of
Erasmus and was not supposed to be in Alfredos area. While he had an aide
assigned to him during classroom hours, he did not have one during the
lunch break.
He had a history of violent and aggressive behavior, Ms. Gentile wrote in a
lawsuit, including writing Kill Them All on his hand in September of that
year and fighting. He was barred from a social studies class earlier in
December because the teacher felt intimidated, according to the lawsuit.
In the gym, the boys would not let Mr. Nelson join their game, and Mr.
Nelson said he and one of the boys apparently Alfredo pushed each
other.
I said iz does not end here in my mind, Mr. Nelson wrote in a statement to
the police, titled My story, which was full of grammatical and spelling
errors. So I went into the hall way and saw some guys I ask them If they
had any wepon they said No so I went in the science lab and asked for some
acid the teacher said he did not have any.

48

The teacher did not ask why Mr. Nelson wanted acid, and no staff members
or teachers appear to have asked what Mr. Nelson was doing in the wrong
part of Erasmus, which would become a key point in the civil case. Mr.
Nelson wrote that while the teacher was distracted, he took a pair of scissors.
He went back to the gim and I wated unt the boy was two feet away from
me and then I stab him repeatedly, he wrote.
It was a quick case for the police. Mr. Nelson was pulled away by onlookers,
confessed immediately to school safety officers, and gave videotaped and
written statements at the Police Departments 70th Precinct station house.
He was arraigned the next day on charges of second-degree attempted
murder and first-degree assault, and indicted two days later.
Then everything slowed down.
Mounting Costs
Ms. Allen and her husband, also named Alfredo Allen, slept on a hospital
conference room floor for three months. You do everything for your kids,
she said, crying, and paused. This is not comprehensible. He was attacked
from behind.
After a few months, the hospital, saying it could do nothing more for him,
discharged the young Alfredo to a nursing home in Queens. One of the
nurses told me they basically sent him there to die, Ms. Allen said. After
three months, he was sent to a Camden County, N.J., nursing home that
specialized in children.
For the Allens, who live in East New York, Brooklyn, it was about a twohour drive each way to the nursing home in New Jersey, which meant Ms.
Allen could work only part time as a home health aide. Because she had
taken six months off from work to care for Alfredo, her employer required
that she start as a new employee when she returned and attend unpaid
training again. She earned about $250 a week working three 10-hour shifts.
The nursing home cost about $825 a day.
In March 2012, the Allens filed a lawsuit against the city and the
Department of Education, alleging negligence, among other claims.
However, the Brooklyn district attorneys office asked the civil court to
postpone adjudicating the suit until the criminal case was finished, saying a

49

parallel civil investigation by the Allens lawyer could interfere with the
prosecution.
The Allens costs kept rising and their income kept declining. (Alfredo Allen
Sr., who is 79, is retired from the United States merchant marine.) The
Allens, who could not pay rent for five months, were taken to court by their
landlord and had to borrow $5,000 to stop an eviction lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the criminal case meandered on.
The delays were partly logistical. Mr. Nelsons lawyer, Frank Paone, wanted
to put on a defense arguing mental illness, which takes more time because it
requires records and examinations by both sides. Mr. Paone did not respond
to multiple requests for comment. It took almost a year to get Mr. Nelsons
medical records from Jamaica, where he had lived until mid-2011. And Mr.
Nelson sometimes refused to go to court.
Other delays were because of errors or minor scheduling issues. One hearing
was rescheduled because Mr. Paone had a doctors appointment. Another
was postponed when prosecutors announced that the detective on the case,
who was supposed to testify, was not available. At a third, a psychiatric
report that was sent was for an entirely different client.
On some dates, the lawyers would appear in court simply to pick a date for
the next hearing. Or they would appear in court to say they were still waiting
for reports. Or they would show up to say they were not ready. Some court
records offered no explanation and simply noted another date for everyone
to appear.
In October 2014, Ms. Allen got Alfredo moved to a nursing home in
Harlem. The daily cost increased to $992, but the shorter distance meant she
could return to working seven days a week, doubling her weekly take-home
pay to $530. (She since has scaled back to five days a week.)
After she finishes work at 5 p.m., she takes the train to Harlem to see
Alfredo, before returning home to Brooklyn around midnight. She spends
her little spare time arguing with insurance companies it took seven
months to get a helmet for Alfredo, which Medicaid would not cover. He
still does not have a wheelchair that fits him, and Medicaid covers only two
hours of physical therapy a week when he needs two hours a day, according
to Ms. Gentile, the lawyer.

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In an interview, Ms. Allen showed photos and videos of Alfredo today, a

beefy 19-year-old with vacant eyes, his tongue between his lips, his mouth
moving but no sound coming out. He is on a ventilator for most of the time
and does not move from his bed on most days.
He knows that Im there because sometimes Ill drop something and hell
respond, she said. Some days hes laid back and some days hes very
agitated.
The wait, Ms. Gentile, said, had been burdensome on the family.
We were ready to try this case a long time ago, but it was unduly delayed
because the defense had to gather medical records and evaluate the
defendants competency, among other issues, said Charisma L. Troiano, a
spokeswoman for the Brooklyn district attorney, Ken Thompson. Despite
the delays, justice was done in this case.
Matthew J. DEmic, the administrative judge for criminal matters in State
Supreme Court in Brooklyn, said he recently began addressing court delays
himself in all of the cases older than a year in which defendants were at the
Rikers Island jail complex.
He quizzes defense lawyers and prosecutors in his chambers about moving
the case to a trial or a plea. Everybody deserves their day in court at the
earliest possible time, and in some ways the system got away from that, he
said.
By January 2015, more than three years after the attack, Mr. Nelsons case
was approaching trial. Records were gathered, motions decided and a judge
set a trial date. On May 21, Mr. Nelson pleaded guilty to first-degree assault,
agreeing to a sentence of 17 and a half years.
Mr. Paone picked a sentencing date about a month away. Too long, Justice
Neil Jon Firetog responded, and scheduled an earlier date. But on June 11,
the day of the scheduled sentencing, the sentencing reports were not in. On
July 7, the reports again were not in. On July 31, Mr. Nelson was sentenced
and the case was closed.
Now, legally, the Allens could pursue the civil case. The city made a
settlement offer that was made final in September. The Allens accepted.

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Ms. Allen hopes to bring her son home someday, with all the medical
equipment and the costs that would require. While Medicaid will cover a
portion of his care, the Allens will need to pay for much of it. If there were
only some way, some treatment, to someday help the young man have a
life, she said.
The Allens will receive $9 million, according to court documents. A life
planner the Allens hired to review their sons medical records estimated it
will cost $16.7 million to $33.3 million to care for Alfredo for the rest of his
life.
A Guardian Is Accused of Holding 2 Teenagers Captive in Queens for
Years
She was regularly missing from her classes at Francis Lewis High School in
Queens, and when she was there, teachers would catch the girl, a 16-year-old
from South Korea, nodding off during lessons.
But it was not until last week, when an assistant principal noticed her
bruises, that the school and law enforcement officials discovered why.
Prosecutors in Queens said on Tuesday that the girl and her 14-year-old
brother, who had been sent to the United States to attend school, had been
held captive for six years.
The woman who had been their guardian, Sook Yeong Park, forced the
siblings to work both in and outside the home, cut off their contact with their
parents and had them sleep on the floor, officials said.
She was charged with labor trafficking, third-degree assault and endangering
the welfare of a child. Ms. Park, 42, was arraigned on Saturday and released
on $10,000 bond.
Last Thursday, after the girls bruises were noticed, the siblings told school
officials about the abuse, and the police were alerted. The assistant principal,
who was not named, went to Ms. Parks home in Flushing to demand that
she return the childrens passports.
On Saturday the assistant principal went to the grocery store where they
worked to collect their pay. Ms. Park is accused of keeping their previous
earnings.

52

Dennis J. Ring, Ms. Parks lawyer, said the authorities were rushing to
pursue criminal charges against Ms. Park, even though significant cultural
barriers complicated the case. He said in a statement that prosecutors opted
to rely on the uncorroborated statement of a 16-year-old who doesnt like
the parenting choices of her legally adoptive mother.
That does not add up to a crime, he said.
Prosecutors said the children had gone years without speaking to their family
members in South Korea.
The girl slept in a small closet, with just a blanket, and the boy slept on a
bathroom floor, prosecutors said. Ms. Park is accused of hitting and slapping
the children, and stepping on their legs and kicking them when they did not
obey her orders.
The girl worked for several hours after school almost every day, sometimes
laboring away on household chores until 2 a.m., prosecutors said. The girl
had to give Ms. Park manicures and pedicures and massage her back and
feet; prosecutors said she recalled once massaging Ms. Park for five hours
while Ms. Park watched television.
On the street in Flushing where Ms. Park lived in a small brick house,
neighbors recalled seeing the children walking to school or doing their
chores. There were unusual signs: They would see a child rummaging
through neighbors trash cans searching for recyclables, out in the cold
without warm clothes.
Dimitria Ayfantis, a neighbor, said the boy once asked her if she needed help
around the house. She paid him $10 to shovel snow in the driveway.
Ms. Ayfantis also remembered one episode in which Ms. Park got into a
dispute with a neighbor over a parking spot and she could hear Ms. Park
yelling and kicking the neighbors car.
This lady, you could see it in her face that she wasnt good, Ms. Ayfantis,
56, said. She was ready to fight.
Last month, another neighbor, Ria Pallas, said her husband ran into the girl,
who had dyed her hair a shade of orange, on the street after midnight while

53

he walked the dog. The girl, not wearing a coat, stopped to pet the puppy
and told him she was 18 and working in New Jersey, Ms. Pallas said.
As unusual as the run-in was, Ms. Pallas said, she never suspected the kind
of abuse described by the authorities. They were never dirty, or
disheveled, Ms. Pallas, 45, said. She paused, adding, But there was always
just something off.
Two-faced Boomer Esiason, tone-deaf Goodell in NFL embarrassment
While awaiting the Please stay on the line for the next available
representative, we often reach the point when we consider hanging up (or
hanging down; hanging up is anti-gravitational, no?). Thats when we
hear, Your call is important to us. Who doesnt like a recording with a
sense of humor?
Suffering institutionalized, programmed baloney has become such a part of
our routines that to expect better is to await the Christmas With the
Cromarties TV special.
The latest NFL calamity Saturdays Steelers-Bengals, which should have
swapped the coin toss for a pat-down has made for some dark laughs,
while temporarily muzzling the pandering hip who encourage No Fun
League teams to play with swagger.
So many to choose from, but lets start with Boomer Esiason, who on CBS
postgame, did what Jim Nantz and Phil Simms should have throughout a
playoff game determined by which team committed the last foul for gross
misconduct: Esiason condemned the dreck he spoke the Yiddish word
for garbage he had just witnessed. Good!
Yet Esiasons frequent and admirable weekend advocacy for NFL civility is
contrary to his weekdays co-hosting a national CBS TV/radio show heavily
reliant on incivility; a show that, by design and purpose in catering to a
certain male demographic, often targets listeners hearts and minds by
aiming for their crotches.
The same Esiason who cant suffer the incivilities he saw from pro athletes
and their coaches in a playoff game on Saturday spends weekdays advancing
social coarsening. He obligatorily trash-talks and deals in simple put-down
artistry while purposefully speaking go-low words and idioms including

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ass, piss and sucks not the worst of pop-cultural choices, but words
Weekend Boomer assiduously avoids, especially when expressing procivility sentiments in response to NFL malfeasance.
Weekday Boomer joins the legions that ratchet up the incivility while
Weekend Boomer gnashes his teeth and wonders how we arrived in such a
low place.
Then theres Roger PSLs Are Good Investments Goodell, who this week,
as per team owners money-first terms of his engagement, escorted the Rams
from St. Louis to Los Angeles, the nations second-largest TV (money)
market.
Goodells richly rewarded assistance in such matters the not-for-profit
NFL has paid him well over $100 million over the past five years would
be easier to indulge had he not been given to declarations such as, Its all
about the fans, and that fantasy league gambling sucker-bet operations
the NFL and its teams have thrown millions into for its cut of fans losses
is not gambling.
If ever there was a week when the NFL commissioner should have been
front, center and loud to make clear that never again will a game, on his
watch, resemble Saturday nights. But Goodell was tied up trying to
make team owners even more money.
As the NFL has become an alert-the-riot-squad sport disorderly
participants now include coaches in addition to players and patrons only
the finances of team owners and the TV-contracted are serviced. As the
product is vandalized and burns, the Nero Fiddles League plays Whos
Sorry Now?
Next, Mike Dewey Wins! Francesa, who provided his latest best-in-show
character: Sunday, the day after that playoff apocalypse, he said, If Im the
Bengals, Id fire Marvin Lewis. Why? He cant control his team.
Monday, after a caller revisited his words, Francesa insisted, I never once
said Marvin Lewis should be fired. No, never. Never, ever called for the
Bengals to fire Marvin Lewis.
Apologize? Correction? Francesa? Not a chance, though a stop at Francesa
lost tapes chronicler RNs Funhouse is recommended for full evidence

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and enjoyment. (Also, the teams Francesa resolutely counted out of the NFL
playoffs following poor starts Steelers and Seahawks will play their
second playoff games.)
As for Bengals coach Lewis, hes a peach, too. Perhaps to deflect from his
significant accountability for annually fielding a team that, short of Tasers
and pepper spray, would be eager to turn a playoff game into a losing gang
war, he defended his team, thus himself, from charges of neglect.
Yep, what we could see coming even before kickoff security was
dispatched to keep the teams apart took Lewis by surprise. What we
knew based on past performances that Adam Pacman Jones and
Vontaze Burfict were reliable bad risks (seems Cincinnati defensive tackle
Domata Peko didnt know it was illegal to leave the sideline to shove an onfield opponent) was something Lewis never considered as a matter of
precaution and preparation.
Even with 22 seconds left, Steelers up two and kicking off perhaps Cincy
could get a shot at a field goal Lewis team remained in rampage mode; a
Bengal, on the kickoff, threw a punch.
But Lewis seemed unsure, defensive, as to why he was being asked about his
accountability. Accountability? For what?
Your call is important to us. Laugh riot.
Irvin was N.J. legend
All the obits I read merely mentioned Monte Irvin, dead at 96, was born in
Alabama. But he was a just-across-the-Hudson Jersey guy, and, though
modesty prevented him, he had outlived his legendary status as a four-sport
man 16 varsity letters at Orange High School.
Had his and our world not taken so long, Irvin and the Giants might have
preceded Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers in breaching the color line. Irvin
didnt play in the bigs until he was 30.
Marty Appel, who has held many baseball jobs Ch. 11s executive
producer of Yankees telecasts, Yanks PR director, author, included years
ago shared an office with Irvin in the commissioners office.

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He was warm, educated, refined and, certainly to me, fatherly, said Appel.
Hed scold me for not wearing a hat on cold days. To this day, as I put on a
hat, I hear Monte Irvin.
Appel once asked whom, had Irvin been allowed a full major league career,
Irvin would bring to mind among notable white players of his day. I
mentioned a few examples for him to draw on. He said, Joe DiMaggio. I
believe it; Monte Irvin was a modest man.
Terrible title telecast
Mondays Clemson-Alabama title telecast was what weve come to expect
from ESPN: dreadful, start to finish.
After the kickoff, ESPN couldnt wait to bolt to show a reel of Bama QB
Jake Coker highlights. Hype for a game we were in place to watch!
On the first play from scrimmage, a Clemson defensive back risked a 15yard penalty by tackling, then excessively taunting, nearly igniting a fight,
yet Kirk Herbstreit ignored that to speak his usual nonsense the DB had
made a play and in space.
Throughout and before, we were told the head coaches are tight. So, did
ESPN bother to show them as (or if) they met at games end? Ix-nay.


Olivia Munns Valuable Advice from Jon Stewart
The former Daily Show correspondent and Newsroom star dishes on
her new film Ride Along 2, upcoming role as Psylocke in X-Men:
Apocalypse, and much more.
Hollywood starlets take a multitude of routes to fame and stardom; Olivia
Munn pretty much took them all. TV host. Nerd crush. Hot chick in a string
of thankless movie roles, including a brief appearance in Iron Man 2
destined for the cutting room floorthankless still, even opposite Robert
Downey Jr. Fast forward through a decade of hustle and Munns become one
of the few in Tinseltown unafraid to throw shade right back at her haters. In

57

2016 shes got roles to match, playing women who, in their own ways, also
DGAF.
In this weekends Ride Along 2, the sequel to 2014s Ice Cube-Kevin Hart
buddy cop hit, Munn plays a no-nonsense Miami detective who teams up
with Cube and Hart to collar a Florida drug lord (Benjamin Bratt) with the
help of his for-hire hacker (Ken Jeong). Of course shes hot. (And Latina
meet Det. Maya Cruz.) As the cool and humorless lady cop equivalent to
Cubes cool and humorless Atlanta cop, Munn spends the film surprisingly
straight-faced, packing heat and staring down Harts manic energy while
managing not to crack a single smile.
The films got the requisite car chases, shoot-outs, playful banter, sexy
tangos with bad guys. The most diverse mainstream release of the New Year
also has zero white leads, and is expected to knock Star Wars: The Force
Awakens off its box office throne. As Munn put it on Twitter, stumping for
Ride Along 2 to her 734,000 followers: More laughs, more action, more
Asians.
From what I see and from knowing [the producers], they were just picking
people based on chemistry and talent and what worked best for the movie,
said Munn, who was born in Oklahoma to a Chinese mom and an American
dad and grew up on a military base in Japan. It just so happened that we all
are minorities.
Thats a really cool thing, she continued. Ken [Jeong] and I were talking
about how when youre a minority you just hope to be a working actor. You
try to just get some jobs, whenever you can. Its fun to see a movie where all
the leads are minorities. Its hopefully the beginning of a change.
Geek culture may have given Munn her first big break, but some of
comedys biggest names have been her biggest boosters. It was Tina Fey
who recommended she be cast for a lead role in NBCs half-hour comedy
Perfect Couples back in 2010and Fey who, that same year, came to
Munns defense when Jezebel et al fired pointed shots when Munn was hired
as The Daily Shows Senior Asian Correspondent.
Jon Stewart had supposedly never seen Munns work on G4s Attack of the
Show, or caught the viral stuntschomping wieners, diving into giant pies
in French maid cosplay, making nerds drool in a slave Leia getup at Comic-

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Conthat defined her tenure in nerd bait television. Years before Amy
Schumer would own the cultural debate on women being allowed to be sexy,
funny, and utterly themselves, Munn was an easy target. Couldnt she be hot
and hilarious without being threatening?
Munn quieted her haters when she landed another plum job playing Sloan
Sabbith, an economist with two Ph.D.s and limited social skills, on Aaron
Sorkins The Newsroom. Shes also since worked with Steven Soderbergh
on Magic Mike, filmed a cameo in the upcoming Zoolander 2, and is
producing, but not starring in, a 1970s-set female sportscaster drama for the
production company she has set up at CBS.
Attack of the Show was a big one for me and gave me a lot of
opportunities, but Jon Stewart bringing me on to The Daily Show was the
biggest thing for me in my career, she said, appreciative. Then, Aaron
Sorkinno one to this day has given me the opportunities that Aaron Sorkin
has given me.
Those two projects come closest to connecting any dots in Munns career so
far, she notes. On The Daily Show I was pretending to be a fake reporter,
and on The Newsroom I was pretending to be a real reporter, and in real life I
majored in journalism. Thats the one through line in my career.
Maybe thats whats allowed Munn to hit back at the critics where more
conflict-averse celebrities might cower and no-comment. When the Jezebel
kerfuffle hit, she replied by telling her haters to just walk it off, bitch. In a
blog post thats since disappeared from the Internet, she preempted judgy
critiques of her Maxim photo shoot with a warning: [If] you have any
problems with me in this spread, I have two things to say to you: 1. Just
dont look. And 2. You sound like you just need a good fuck.
Recently, when an ESPN.com reporter suggested her relationship with
Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was to blame for him
underperforming on the field, Munn shut him down on Twitter. Playing it
fast & loose w/the journalism @RobDemovsky, she tweeted. Your
professional skills are lacking... you must be having personal problems at
home.
Not that Munn hasnt embraced the value of being famous, particularly in
the age of social media when realness can range from shutting down

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reporters who cross the line to posting behind the scenes snaps of life in the
spotlight. Flying across the country to Ride Along 2s Miami premiere, she
Instagrammed her workout from the middle of the aisle on a private plane
that earned their own breathless celeb mag headlines. Munns charmed the
infotainment world and the late-night set with texts and impersonations of
her mother Kim, who even Stephen Colbert couldnt resist punking on air.
You just try to do your best with the opportunities youre given, said
Munn. I love journalism, and I always had a dream of being an actor. So
opportunities came up and I started taking them to see how far it will go,
never thinking Id be able to make a career out of it.
Munn still calls Stewart her mentor and went to him for advice when,
during filming on the last season of The Newsroom, she wasnt sure if she
should take the Ride Along 2 gig.
All the hustle was to get to a place where I could take my time, and not just
do everything, she said. But that meant every choice was weightier, every
project more strategic. I wasnt really sure if it was the next thing I wanted
to doto go from working with Aaron Sorkin to Ride Along 2 I wasnt
sure if it was the right project for me to do right after an intense season of
doing Sorkin material.

Stewarts advice? He said, First of all, Kevin Hart is an amazing human
being. And second of all, Just go have fun! You dont always have to do
Sorkin and Soderbergh. Just go have a fun time making a fun movie.
I think its the opportunities that come around that you dont take that can
define your career more, she contemplated. By the way, I dont know if
thats the right thing. I may be like, That was a dumb decision! I dont
know how its going to work out, but this is a little bit in my plan.
Another big opportunity arose when Munn met with producers to join the
cast of X-Men: Apocalypse playing mutant Psylocke, a fan favorite telepathtelekinetic Englishwoman whose consciousness is transferred into the body
of a lady ninja.
Munn, a longtime X-Men fan, knew the role wouldnt be huge. And it would
require her donning a revealing outfit that itself has been the subject of many

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a fanboy blog entry. Before taking the part, she says she made a deal with
producer Simon Kinberg.
I said, First of all, I love Psylocke and I love X-Men. So if you guys are
doing it, I know that youre just introducing the character and there are a lot
of other elements going on with other people and other storylines, Munn
recalled. Its the introduction of Psylocke, so its cool if I dont have a lot
of dialogue or theres not a lot for her to doas long as she has a badass
fight scene. He was like, Okay!
I love Psylocke, she said of the character who, in the May blockbuster, is
one of disillusioned supervillain Apocalypses mutant-powered warriors.
Psylocke is awesome. Shes really strong and powerful, and in a superhero
world where so many people have to think before they kill and they dont
always want to, shes never had a problem doing that. To me, thats a very
badass quality in a villain.
Just be lethal and be extremely dangerous and make your opponents fear
you. As a kid I always thought it was really cool to see a female like that,
she said, even though she has this really interesting costume that she has
to wear.
Even training just changed my life in a different way, to want to work out
and be healthy and keep that going. And now I have a sword closet, so thats
cool, she laughed. Dont come knocking unless youve been invited. If
anyone startles me, Ive got a sword closet.
With the 2016 presidential election approaching, now would be a pretty fun
time to be a Daily Show correspondent, Munn admits. Ive been meaning to
reach out to Jon Stewart because I just want to hear his breakdown of [the
election], she said. I miss his take on it.
Giving props to new Daily Show host Trevor Noah (Hes so bright and so
funny), Munn says she still watches every episode. But it would be fun to
go back, she said, mulling it over. I should let Trevor know: Hey, if you
ever need a Senior Asian Correspondent... Im available, and I will travel.
The Stacks: Eddie Murphys Gilded Road to Ruin

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In the 80s the Beverly Hills Cop star was as hot as it got in Hollywood, and
somehow everything went sour. Peter Richmond caught up with him in
comeback mode.
For a few years there in the early 80s, few performersnever mind
comicshad the kind of duende that Eddie Murphy radiated. He was bigger
than TV, more than just a comedianattractive, charming, bright,
arroganthe was a star. Before a lot of us kids at the time wanted to be like
Mike, we dreamed of being Eddie. Murphy didnt have Richard Pryors rage
or tendernesshes never delivered a performance like Pryor did in Blue
Collarbut he was a crack mimic, and he invited us to join him, even the
white audience he was teasing. Above all, Murphy was in control.
With magnificent fame, Murphys stand-up curdled into something meanspirited and forgettable, and soon his winning streak at the box office came
to an end, too. Thats when Peter Richmond caught up with himduring the
filming of the romantic comedy Boomerang. Richmonds profile was
originally published in the July 1992 issue of GQ and is reprinted here with
the authors permission. Check out this intimate look at a mid-career Eddie
Murphy and find out why fame, for him, had become a drag.
Alex Belth
The lights are rheostated low inside a customized bus parked on Tenth
Avenue in Manhattan at nine oclock on a winterdark evening. Two candle
flames dance on a table. Eddie Murphy stares at them, without speaking.
Hammer just dropped by, all leathered up, to hear Eddies new album, but
now hes vanished into the snow patting West 42nd Street, and the tape deck
is silent, and Eddie is silent, and inside this cocoon shut up tight against the
chaos of the city its warm and still.
For two days, the synapses in Eddie Murphys brain have been firing like
gunshotsEddie waxing philosophic, Eddie waning comedic, Eddie singing
along with all of his songs: all this Eddie Murphy-ness filling the veloured
cave of the ridiculous mobile dressing room theyve rented for him.
Now Eddies at rest. He was up until three the night before, working on his
album. Hes just been called on the set again, and theres no telling how late
the shoots going to last, which means that he wont be seeing Nicole and
Bria up in Jersey for several more hours. The thought of more filming has

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ground all of his filters away, so that whatever words he has left are coming
from the core. These are the final moments of three days of conversations,
but this is the first glimpse, after all those hours, of a tired part of his soul.
I was the best five years ago, Eddie Murphy says. And it was a drag.
His words are so soft, and the moment is so dead-quiet serious, that the
candles on the table do not even flicker in his breath.
Now I just want to be good, and stay good. I want to do good stuff. And if I
cant do good stuff, Ill just chill.
Because being the best, Eddie Murphy says, is a fucking drag.
He smiles. As if he means it.
When Eddie Murphy rises and disappears into the back of the bus to change
clothes for the next scene, he moves slowly, comfortably. He is carrying the
sense of a man who has decided, only recently, that life rewards you just for
living it.
He was the best. And he turned it into a drag. Wed never seen anything like
him, this grinning wise-ass kid who ruled Saturday Night Live, lathered in
charm-chiding the honkies, but not braying; winking and goofing, laughing
with us, and at us. We had to smile. He took a couple of he darker
stereotypesthe con man passing himself off as a legless vet, in Trading
Places; the cocky jailbird, in 48 Hrsand turned the upside down, so he had
the morals and taught us the lessons.
But mostly we laughed. He was the alchemist of the early 80s, turning
vaguely entertaining scripts into ingots piled to the sky. No one begrudged
him a penny, he was that good.

Then Eddie Murphy began to mistake a billion dollar gross for a billion
dollars worth of brilliance and rode a billion-dollar ego into critical
oblivion. In the past five years, he made a bristly concert film that seared the
cerebellum with its misogyny and homophobia, followed a successful debut
album with one that vanished into the abyss and filmed a couple of actioncomedies that left as much impression on a cinematic legend as a Chuck

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Norris retrospectivethe result being that Eddie Murphy, in this new era of
black filmic consciousness, has been plunged into that most terrifyingly
infernal circle of movieland hell: irrelevancy.
In 1991, a year that saw 19 black men direct films, Eddie Murphy turned 30
and played Ramses II in a Michael Jackson video. Premiere magazine
pronounced him only the twenty-fourth-most-powerful person in the
business Twenty-fourth! And Ah-nuld, the Joe Frazier to Eddies
Muhammad AliAh-nuld is all the way up there at tenth!
The more his peers began gamering Oscar recognitionRobin Williams,
Whoopi Goldbergthe more Eddies name began to show up in the gossip
columns, until one day this past January, the New York Postss Page Six ran
adjacent, telling items: Spike Lee is warmly welcomed in Soweto. Eddie
Murphy is warmly welcomed in the Manhattan nightspot Tatou by a couple
of dancers from a topless club
And last spring, the Lost Angeles Times delivered the unkindest cut of all in
the pensee on the black-film phenomenon: Although the rebirth of interest
in black films can be traced partly to the success of [Spike] Lee, [Robert]
Townsend, and the Hudlins, Hollywood studio executives also were inspired
by Cosby Arsenio Hall and the Wayans Brothers.
Not a mention of the man whose first seven films grossed an astounding one
billion dollars for Paramount. And Murphys diminishing box-office appeal
wasnt sufficient cause for real panicafter all, Another 48 Hrs did gross
$140 million worldwide, and despite the critical carnage of Harlem Nights,
the movie brought in $70 million domestically after costing $38 million to
make. But his latest numbers represented something of a drop-off from the
$234 million that made Beverly Hills Cop the seventh-highest grossing film
of all time.
So when Brandon Tartikoff came on as Paramount chief last summer and
found Murphy languishing and inactive, he says, he decided his first bit of
business was to reposition Eddie in the studios pantheon: Summer [is] the
Super Bowl season for movies. At Championship time you put your best
team on the field. But theres Eddie Murphy on the sidelines, because
Paramount hadnt developed a movie for him. Well, Eddie Murphy should
have been then, and will be now, priority number one at Paramount.

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With its inaugural effort since Tartikoffs arrival, the studio has decided to
lower Eddies octane a bit in Boomerang, a romantic comedy costarring
Robin Givens. Hell follow that with a comedy tentatively titled The
Distinguished Gentleman, for Disneyhis first non-Paramount effort,
ostensibly with Paramounts blessingand then, for Paramount, Cop III.
And his company, Eddie Murphy Productions, owns the rights to August
Wilsons Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play Fences.
But its clear that Tartikoffs hopes are riding, heavily, on Boomerang.
Whatever negative view that people came away from Raw with will be
erased by this movie, Tartikoff says. Its a true leading-man role. A
comedy with a classic form. The kind of movie Cary Grant would have
made.
By surrounding its star with an intriguingly upscale supporting cast
Geoffrey Holder, Halle Berry, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and David Alan
Grierand enlisting the director-producer team of Reginald and Warrington
Hudlin (makers of House Party), Paramount obviously hopes Boomerang
will restore a little of the luster.
Literally.
I have totally changed the texture of his hair, Scott Julion is saying during
a break in the filming one night. We have totally revised his hair. Scott
Julions business card says HAIR ARTIST. The i in his last name is dotted
with a star. Scott did Arsenios new hair. Scott tells me hes in on
discussions about redoing Michael Jacksons hair, and we agree its about
time. Scotts own hair is perfect. We are standing on the balcony of a
cavernous atrium of a Manhattan office building. Down below, director
Reginald Hudlin is arranging a scene in which Grace Joness chariot, pulled
by four white men in leather codpieces and little else, is parting a sea of 800
extras at a cocktail party.
I achieve a soft, natural look, Scott Julion confides, without being
overpowering.
Any particular reason?
The people at Paramount said he had a common, street look, Scott says.
Now he looks like more of a gentleman. Now he has the well-groomed
look. And he does. Standing to the side, straightening his cuffs, Eddie

65

Murphy is sleekhes lost pounds since Another 48 Hrsand crisp at the

edges. The elegance is fairly puddling at his feet.
Over in his canvas chair, a dinner-jacketed Holder enthusiastically compares
Murphy to Cagney and Olivier before adding I think of Cary Grant. I think
of the Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby and Arsenic and Old Lace. And a
moment later, this comes from Warrington Hudlin, in a separate
conversation: After this movie, people are going to see Eddie Murphy as
Cary Grantall of which constitutes either a stunning coincidence or the
direct result of a spin-control campaign of some proficiency.
Either way, it seems to come as a surprise to Eddie, who arches an eyebrow
back in his bus.
They said that? Jesus, I hope not. Cary Grant did the Cary Grant thing
already. Im new shit. Dont color me Cary. Not to piss on Cary. But this is a
new shade of Eddie.
On this afternoon, the blinds are drawn against the daytime, but the Weather
Watch mounted into the paneling of Eddies bus says its cold out. In front
of this bus is parked another bus, in which sit the people who watch Eddie.
They cannot see into this bus, but they watch the door of it from the window
of their bus. All the time. Several times the door of Murphys bus opens and
someone asks if Eddie is alright. He always says he is.
This movie, in tonejust so you have something to go withis Big Chill
and Annie Hall, and fix it up and make it black and make it really hip, really
smart, Eddie says. The onus isnt on me to deliver the comedy and the
exposition. This is the first movie Ive worked on thats an ensemble piece
and has a tremendously strong supporting cast.
This is not entirely true. There was Harlem Nights, an astoundingly misexecuted fable conceived, written, directed, and catered by Eddie himself.
Harlem Nights cast had some distinctionRichard Pryor, Redd Foxx,
Arsenio Hall, Della Reese. But the director failed to direct his actors, the
writers fed them idiotic lines, and the star got away with murder.
Hey! he says with an easy smile. We fucked up!
Its slightly disarming, this forthrightness, not at all what was expected,
which was an Eddie Murphy whod lost all perspective, gone completely

66

weird, drunk on himself. In fact, nothing about this Eddie Murphy seems to
be what youd expect. He is calm and measured and unspontaneous. You
would not be surprised, honestly, to find this man as your dentist or your
accountant. Or your psychotherapist. He is all there. Hears every word you
say, ponders it. His memory is uncannily accurate.
He is, of course, a very funny name, with a fine talent for mimicry, often
peeling off into various voices, and various routines, but there is nothing
frivolous at work in this brain.
[The reaction to] Harlem Nights was like having a mortar shell go off in
your front yard, he says. I had never had a flop picture before. And all of a
sudden there was a flop. It was like, Oh, shit. The script was shitty. I wrote
it in two weeks. And it shows. But I had to direct to see if I was going to dig
directing. And I didnt dig it.
Then, Another 48 Hrs was reactive. I got fucked up on Harlem Nights so it
was, like, Okay, lets do something thats a sure hit. Is Cop III ready?
Coming to America Again? The idea was contrived and we threw it
together, and they wrote these big checks out, and we did it.
Why do movies that are obviously bad?
[My] popularity after Beverly Hills Copall that Hes so hot shit
everything was going out of control. Everything came too easy And when
the laughs come too easy, you start doing things like walking through
movies. You get too comfortable. You start getting out of control. You start
tripping. You argue. You get the big head. You wear a leather suit and a
glove with a ring on the outside.
And I let myself get fat. Theres nothing like going into a movie theater and
looking up on screen and youre a fat guy in a bad movie.
Here he laughs. Not the Eh! Eh! Eh! laugh, thoughhe never laughed that
laugh in his customized bus.
But I came out of that head Now Im as happy as Ive ever been. Ive
got a beautiful chick, a beautiful daughter [Bria, age 3], a great record, a
great movie. But it was a long time coming.

67

The record will be his third. He doesnt have a label yet: Im in the middle
of shopping [it]. Whoever is most excited about getting it gets it.
Its a far cry from Party All the Time. The songs on the new album are full
of intriguing chord progressions and surprisingly evocative effects; more
than one recalls the psychedelicized Beatles, and one single,
Whatzupwitu?which features Michael Jacksonhas a pleasant
tendency to stick in your head. The song certain to get the most attention,
Yeah, features the voices of Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Hammer,
Stevie Wonder, Julio Iglesias, Patti LaBelle, Luther Vandross, Garth Brooks,
Janet Jackson, and Jon Bon Jovi. Profits from the single, Murphy says, will
go to a foundation hes starting to help people in the need from all walks of
lifethe Yeah Foundation.
One of the reasons I enjoy music [is] I can be totally, totally free. If its not
good, so what? Ive got a good job already. Movies.
Eddie admits hes never made a great movie. 48 Hrs and Trading Places, he
says, were good movies. Beverly Hills Cop, he says, was an entertaining
movie. Coming to America, he insists, was also a good movie. He doesnt
say much about the others. But he seems genuinely intrigued with
Boomerang, in which he plays a Warren Beatty-type womanizer who has
mistreated women for years, until he falls in love with one whos as cavalier
with her men as he is with his women, and he grows up.
The screenplay is from a story by Eddie Murphy.
I have been through some of the things, he says, that he has been
through.
Eddie was ready for the premiere at the age of 14, says Arsenio Hall one
afternoon at the conference table in his television-production offices on the
Paramount lot. Hall is tremendously charming when he talks about Eddie,
because he isnt trying to sell someone he doesnt believe in.
Eddie took Arsenio back to his hometown, on Long Island, once. Hall talked
to Murphys parents and friends and schoolmates about Murphy. Arsenio
delights in the details of Eddies life.

68

He wanted to be a star, Hall says. he knew he would be. Hed go to

school carrying a briefcase with nothing in it. But he knew that at one point
thered be Paramount contracts in it.
In high school, he had the ascot, the scarf. He used to wear his coat over his
shoulders, without his arms in the sleeves, as if it were a capea Clark
Gable kind of vibe, a Dark Gable kind of thing. He told people Im going to
be a millionaire by this age.
It was a beige coat, says Murphy. Topped with a white fedora: I had to go
to summer school every year and I was the best-dressed guy in summer
school.
The briefcase held a joke book and a couple of eight-track cassettes: the
Beatles, Elvis. He still carries Beatles tapes.
I knew what I wanted to do with my life, Eddie says, and it was show
business to its fullest potential. I still want to be everything in show business
that I can possibly be.
The first paychecks from the comedy clubs, earned when Eddie was 15,
went for junk food. No beer. No dope. Cake. Candy.
I experimented with pot, he says, like everybody when they were kids.
Thats it. Ive never, ever, ever, ever, ever, even like, held cocaine. Or been
anyone around me doing it. Im a pretty drug-free cat. The only drug that has
been around me, because people know Im not into drugs, is pot, because if
someone lights up a joint or something, I dont think, Oh, get away! People
do that every now and then, But Im no advocate of drug use, and I dont
fuck around with anything. No drinking. I hate it.
Its easy to believe. There are no lines in Murphys face. His expression
most of the time is as if no one has hit the on switch. And then of course,
suddenly, hell grin. And everyone in the immediate vicinity will sort of just
melt away.
He has natural charm and black good looks, says Hall. Eddie has this thing
women likethis sexy thing, this charm. [White] America had Rob Lowe.
But the girls in the hood didnt have their Rob Lowe. All of a sudden, here
comes a classically handsome black man without white features, with a

69

black mans nose, with a black mans lips, and giving you himself, totally
just putting himself out there saying Im not buying the bullshit, here I am.
Everyone finds Eddie attractive. You know why? Because Eddie finds
himself attractive. He has tremendous self-esteem.
Hall thought of himself as above-average, swaggeringly confident when he
fled Cleveland to fight the stand-up wars. But when he met Eddie Murphy,
twelve years ago, Hall met a man so self-assured that, to Hall, Murphys
success was as much a result of will as of talent. If there is an unofficial
biographer of Eddie Murphy, he is Arsenio. Arsenio is Eddies Boswell.
They have been linked in other ways. Conventional wisdom has presented
Eddie and Arsenio as the Directors of Heterosexuality in Americas black
Cabinet. In the Sports Illustrated story about his HIV infection, Earvin
Johnson said, There were just some bachelors almost every woman in L.A.
wanted to be with. Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, and Magic Johnson.
In fact, according to both Murphy and Hall, Eddie has met Magic Johnson
only twice, both times at Lakers games. Magic and Eddie have never hung
out, Hall says. They have never partied. I am a friend of Magics and of
Eddies, and thats the link between the two.
I havent fucked any more women than anyone else, says Murphy. Im
real prudish and real straight. I could never go to a disco and meet a chick
and take her home and fuck her. If youre going to go home with me and
fuck me tonight, I know youve done this before. And if its just a question
of getting off, hey, I got someone I can get off with that I care about. Why
go fuck some strumpet in a disco?
Im not saying I havent had times when I wasnt tempted. But I cant recall
the last time I met a chick in a disco. I got to go back ten years.
Did Magics being HIV-positive scare him? No, Murphy says. The
Magic situation depressed me. But I know how I live my life. How Ive
lived my life. It didnt scare me.
For the past several years, Murphy has lived his life in an outsize and
opulent New Jersey domicile named Bubble Hillbubble being street
slang for party. With a rain-mist machine for the dance floor and a pool

70

house the size of San Simeon. And a big wall around the property. It feels
like a small-scale model of a walled city.
Weve had parties, Hall says, but theyre strictly what Id call ego-fests
its not sex. We never kicked it like that, man. It was never, like, Lets go
out and get some girls, come back and fuck em If it wasnt true, I just
wouldnt say anything. But Eddie always kicked it different.
Hey, man, Murphy says, I have a beautiful woman. Things are changing,
and love is all right. The last thing I need to do is fuck some bimbo . Ive
been with Nicole [Mitchell] for about three years now. Do I have a
monogamous relationship? Yeah.
Nicole is expecting in November. Little Edward on the way. Im about to
take my whole family to this European Disney thing. My daughters going to
meet Mickey Mouse.
This, then, must be the true American odyssey: from the baying, barking
white-hot stage of Raw to a life in Frank Capras living roomin five quick
years.
The Eddie Murphy who was in Raw does not exist anymore, he says.
Its not like I experienced some epiphany or some shit like that. I just
got older. Im 31 years old.
At this, he shakes his head and smiles.
I couldnt even picture myself being 30. Thirty was a major trauma for me.
I had always been the young guy. For years, it was, like, Hes only what?
That was part of my stuffThats right, just 19, ladies and gentlemen.
Now Im just a 31 year old motherfucker.
Eddie did go on to visit EuroMickey, it was reported in a New York gossip
column with an entourage of 40. Eddie is often said to be accompanied by
an entourage. On the set of Boomerang Eddies security is just one guy. He
only seems like an entourage because hes so bignot vertically, hes not
tall; hes just packed in, like a jack-in-the-box. While Eddies filming, the
man practices martial arts.

71

Whos he think he is, with all those security people, that entourage?
Murphy says one afternoon. We are discussing what he refers to as the
Things White America Wants to know: I drive a Range Rover. I got a lot of
ugly cars; when I was a young guy, I had shit like Excaliburs, Slappy White
cars. I have 15 hats. My favorite color is black. And all those guys arent my
bodyguards.
Most are friends, he says. Some are family; a few are security. Whoever they
are, Murphy believes hes justified in packing some human protection.
Im supposed to be walking down the street [alone]? In a recession? If you
saw Donald Trump walking down the street by himself, wouldnt you think
he was an ass? I would think he was an ass. Somebody would say, I know
he has crazy money and go put a gun in his back and take him somewhere.
Its a reality. All it takes is one incident. One asshole. This country loved
John Lennon. And they killed him. Arsenio says that hes seen Eddie stop
his car and give all of the money in his wallet to a homeless man on the
street. So its not that Eddie doesnt want to meet the people. Its that he
prefers to do it on his own terms.
Seven years ago, at a club in Los Angeles, a man punched Murphy because
his girl was looking at Eddie, and Eddie hit back. After the resulting melee,
Murphy says, he was sued by most of the people in the club, and he settled
with all of them. Now, he says, he prefers a buffer between him and the
people with the fists.
But whoever Im with, whoever I have on staff, however I travel, is how I
feel comfortable. Nobody should trip on it.
His voice has acquired an edge; if you could touch it, it might draw blood.
Cause if something goes down, everybodys getting fucked up. Not just
me. Everybodys getting fucked up. If it comes down to it, show business is
over and Eddies crew fucked up somebody really badto the point where
theyre dead as a mother .
All I want to do is my gig, go home to my family and be a nice cat. But you
try to fuck my shit up, a bunch of people gettin fucked up.
Eddies pop boxed pro. And while he is not much of an athlete in those
games that involve balls, Eddie is a very good fighter. This side of him is,

72

apparently, never too far from the ready. On the set of Coming to America,
Murphy took director John Landis down after a dispute over advice Landis
reportedly gave to some of Eddies television-production people.
In fact, at one point during our second afternoon together, across the bus
table, after Eddied begun to wonder if this interview wasnt going to come
out as pleasantly as hed thought it would and hed decided he didnt like my
attitude, he said, without any discernible emotion, very matter-of-factly, I
could lean over and blast you in the face, and you know you cant [fight me]
cause Ill fuck you up.
But it was a fleeting thing. He immediately backed off and picked up his
guitar and that night, he sent word through his publicist that hed be glad to
meet at his house.
Eddies mother answers the door and says hell be a few minutes. His
mother is holding the hand of his daughter, who looks like a jewel of some
kind. She wears a very serious expression.
Eddies mother leads me up a corridor to the attached pool house. In the
main room of the pool house there is a bar. There is a white grand piano. I sit
down to play.
There is a large plant in one corner of the room. On the wall are pictures of
Eddie with other famous people. If Id been somewhere elseat the bar,
sayId never have noticed the camera at all, the security camera up in the
corner, scanning the room.
Footsteps in the darkened hallway. Eddies publicist and Eddies manager.
Eddie is too tired to talk. No big deal.
His manager leads me into the large foyer to the large front door with the
stained glass in it. But he cant open the door to let me out. Cant work the
lock. He has to escort me through the kitchen. In the kitchen are three
television monitors for the security cameras. At the kitchen counter sit three
women, all of whom may or may not have spent the past thirty minutes
watching the mute image of me playing the piano: Eddies mother, Eddies
daughter, and Nicole, a former model whose beauty is so extreme that it
doesnt really register; her looks belong to an otherworldly aesthetic. If this
had been a cartoon, my body would have continued walking through the
kitchen while my eyeballs stayed behind, on springs, riveted to her. She

73

regards me the way she might a broken refrigerator being wheeled out the
back door, which is where Eddies manager is steering me. Into the
driveway. With all of Eddies black cars.
We were talking about what kind of TV he watched as a kid when Eddie
says, If Bugs Bunny were a human, can you imagine how rich hed be?
Hed be so fucking rich.
He isnt laughing. He might be doing the figures in his head. Arsenio says
Murphy is good with figures. Arsenio says they sometimes talk about things
like income averaging.
Still, Murphy says that we are the ones who think about money all the time,
specifically about his money, and this is quite understandable in light of
no, in the shadow ofthe interminable litigation surrounding Coming to
America. Eddie found it unseemly that, after Paramount had said that the
movie hadnt made any profit despite a gross that could have armed several
small African nations, reporters blamed him.
I saw on the television news a list of my employees and what [they] make,
and Heres a picture of the car that Murphy comes to the set in, and heres a
bus he uses on the set Like Im the only person in Hollywood with a
trailer and a trainer? Get the fuck out of here! I read a Time cover about Tom
Cruise, and not one mention was made of his money. Hes a young man just
like me, a bachelor at the time, he makes as much money as me, and it never
said, Tom Cruises money. It talked about ecology. Cruise flushes his
toilet every certain amount of days to conserve water.
But with me, its, He makes all this. A rich black person is an oddity in
society. Thats what they want to look at: Howd you happen to get this
money, nigger? Cause niggers dont usually have money . I did David
Letterman, and that was his whole thing: So, Eddie, you got all this money
now! What the fuck? Ive never, ever heard him say that to anybody before.
But with me, Ive read to the time how much I made.
But then, ask Eddie how he feels about Robin Williamss going from manic
comic to Oscar nominee, about Nick Noltes going from Eddies valet,
carrying the straight lines in 48 Hrs, to Oscar nominee, and his response is,
I make more money than Robin Williams. Thats the reality of it. If you ask

74

Nick Nolte or Robin Williams if theyd rather have an Oscar or what I get a
picture, theyd take the salary. Or theyre nuts.
Eddie was not at the Oscars this year. He didnt even watch the show. He
was in his basement, mixing his album. When he asks me how the show
went, I tell him that Spike Lee and John Singleton got up and presented
some documentary awards and acted bored. I figured hed want to know,
because it was Spike who said, three years ago, Eddie needs to flex his
muscles that can help black people get into this industry. Clout isnt just
getting the best table at Spago, and publicly implored Murphy to persuade
Paramount to hire more black people.
And here was Spike at the podium, giving out Oscars at the big party for the
Spago People.
Spikes publicist says that Spike doesnt want to talk about Eddie. Eddie is
careful when he talks about Spike and what he said.
I had to take the show-business positionHes new in the business, he
doesnt know any better, they probably made him say it, Murphy says. I
would see Spike and say Whyd you say that? and hed say I didnt say
thatthey changed my words around. And because its show business and
you smile when youre low and all that bullshit, you got to forget about it
and let it slide under the bridge.
Matty Rich, the young director of Straight Out of Brooklyn, is willing to
address the issue.
It was a silly statement Spike made. He should be ashamed, he says.
What is Spike doing? Is he giving a percentage to the community? Is a
percentage of Mo Better Blues going to the inner city? Come onblack
men, white women, all that, thats garbage. If you really want to do
something, start in the community.
Eddies energy is rubbing off on a lot of young comedians and
filmmakersto not be just black.
On the set of Boomerang one day, Robin Givens agrees: People look at him
and say Hes not doing anything. But hes doing so much. This is a man
who can relate to everybody. And everybody can relate to [him]. Its not
necessarily the struggle to get out of the hood for all of us. There are other

75

types of people in America, too. Hes a brother, too. But its good for black
people in America and around the world to see that there are different types
of black and different types of experiences.
Effecting change has never been high on Murphys list of priorities. He has
never registered to vote. He believes in numerology and has a bowling ball
named Pure Motherfucker. Spike puts his rage into movies. Eddie puts his
on his bowling ball. But Paramount funded ten behind-the-camera positions
for African-Americans for the shooting of Boomerang.
I believe in making my life work within this system, Eddie says without
even smiling, completely earnest in this. Cant beat the system, so you have
to work along with it. Thats what Im doing. Im a decent, law-abiding
citizen and I aint turning over no applecarts.
Im a comedian, Eddie Murphy says.
He is needed on the set. A cluster of people wait on the sidewalk. He rises
and walks to the back of the bus, and the candles flicker. In his dressing
room, he takes off his shirt and picks up the sweater he has to wear. His bare
torso is solid, its muscles well-defined.
As he walks to the front of the bus, Murphy puts his arms through the
sleeves of the sweater, starts to pull it on, then stops. He does not want to
muss his hair. So he turns his back to me and says Can you pull this down
and over?
Hes standing with his billion-dollar back to me, completely vulnerable, the
man who, a couple days earlier, contemplated blasting my facehis head
buried inside a sweater, waitingand the moment freezes. I pull it down.
Thanks, Eddie says.
He pulls on a trench coat and opens the door of the bus. It is snowing out on
Tenth Avenue. The security man whos built like a fire hydrant is holding an
umbrella.
Peace, he says, and then turns and walks up the sidewalkEddie Murphy,
31 year-old motherfucker, at rest.

76

DC Movie Universe Creator: There Are Too Many White Male

Directors
David S. Goyer, the acclaimed writer behind Christopher Nolans Batman
trilogy, Man of Steel, and the Starz series Da Vincis Demons, opens up
about sexism and superheroes.
David S. Goyer and his Da Vincis Demons crew were putting the finishing
touches on their third season when they got the news that Starz was
sounding the death knell: Season 3 would be the last for dashing young
Renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci, played with aplomb by Brit star
Tom Riley.
We knew it was in the cards, Goyer shrugged on a recent afternoon in Los
Angeles, days before the historical fantasy premiered the first episode of its
final season. Da Vincis Demons was one of the more successful television
shows of Goyers career, a superhero-heavy arsenal that includes Dark City,
the Blade trilogy, Christopher Nolans Batman films, Man of Steel, and the
upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Goyer, who helped change superhero movies by giving Hollywood its most
brooding Batman, created his fictionalized take on Italys most famous
genius as a sexy Middle Ages MacGyver battling secret conspiracies for
Starz and the BBC back in 2013. Fans and industry-watchers alike were
taken by surprise when the network announced its sudden cancellation
months before the Season 3 premiere.
The heads-up nonetheless allowed Goyer & Co. to end Demons on their own
terms in an arc set during the bloody 15th-century Ottoman siege of Otranto,
he says. But it also pre-empted a hypothetical fourth season that would have
seen the cable series finally dive into the most salacious and controversial
persisting element of the Da Vinci legend: his bisexuality.
The shows producers and star have been deflecting criticisms of straightwashing since they briefly addressed Da Vincis long-rumored love for
men in a first season episode depicting his 1476 trial for sodomy. Ratings
were strong. For the rest of that season and the next, however, Da Vincis
Demons backed away from the topic while emphasizing Da Vincis romantic
relationship with Lucrezia Donati (Laura Haddock).

77

In Season 4 he was going to have a homosexual relationship for the

majority of the season, said Goyer, who added that he considers Da Vinci
to be bisexual. Theres an interesting scene toward the end of the third
season between Lucrezia and Leonardo, that if people listen closely shes
providing certain commentary on that.
The problem with Season 3 is that because it all takes place during the
Siege of Otranto, in war, and for a certain portion of it Leonardo is himself a
prisoner, there wasnt a lot of emphasis on his sexuality, period, he
lamented, choosing his words carefully. There just wasnt time. But for the
fans, it doesnt end on a cliffhanger, and a couple of the characters
absolutely end in appropriate ways.
Da Vincis Demons fans may yet see him explore his sexuality, Goyer
teases. The end may not really be the end. Had we continued, we had an
idea for Season 4 that would have taken place during the Bonfire of the
Vanities, which was about 14 years later, so we would have leapt forward
quite a bit. And the door is still open. I suppose we could always do a
limited series or something like that.
In the last year, Goyer backed away from Da Vincis Demons to turn his
attentions on a bustling slate of film and television projects, handing the
showrunner reins to John Shiban. Rather than dive all the way into the
superhero game hes best known for, Goyer says hes making an effort to
branch out beyond spandex blockbusters.
I spend about 50 percent of my time in TV, said Goyer, who is prepping to
shoot the pilot for USA Networks J.T. Petty comic book adaptation
Brooklyn Animal Control and is developing Superman prequel Krypton for
SyFy, which follows the Man of Steels grandfather and takes place 200
years before baby Kal-El is jettisoned off his home planet.
On the big screen, hes executive-producing James Camerons Fantastic
Voyage remake and has the thriller The Forest premiering in January starring
Game of Thrones Natalie Dormer. Goyer and producing partner Kevin
Turen (99 Homes) are executive producers on Nate Parkers Nat Turner
slave rebellion drama The Birth of A Nation, an example of the kind of
grown-up movies Goyers hoping to make more of. That was one that
was good for the soul, and were developing quite a few of those now.

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There was a time when Goyer was the guy with the keys to the DC movie
kingdom. Hed already scored with Marvel before Marvel Studios became
Marvel Studios, bringing the black superhero Blade to life with a timely
undercurrent, he says: vampirism as AIDS metaphor.
He directed the trilogy-ending Blade: Trinity in 2004 and the following year
joined forces with Nolan to breathe new life into the Batman mythology
with a dark take on the Caped Crusader. These iterations of these characters
are a reflection of their time, he said. That was happening in a post-9/11
world, and society really had changed. So it was appropriate then to a certain
extent for those films to reflect the anxieties of the time period.
Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises took in over
$2.4 billion worldwide for Warner Bros. Goyer had been additionally
developing several DC universe properties before an executive regime
change deemphasized the studios focus on flagship characters Batman and
Superman. We had an early version of Suicide Squad that didnt end up
happening, said Goyer. It was smaller in some ways and it was kind of
ahead of its time.
Meanwhile, rival company Marvel burst out of the gate with Iron Man in
2008, creating their profitable and sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe
from increasingly esoteric properties. DC and Warner Bros. had to play
catch up, and Zack Snyder stepped in to guide the future of their connected
superhero films.
I didnt want to be an architect of [the DC movies], Goyer said. I love it,
but Ive done a lot of comic book stuff and I want to do some non-comic
book stuff. Between the Dark Knight films, Man of Steel, and Batman v.
Superman thats five, and there are a couple others Im involved in that
havent been announced. Its a lot. You dont want to keep repeating
yourself over and over again.
Not that Goyers leaving the comic book world he loves altogether. Hes
also producing a high-profile adaptation of Neil Gaimans Sandman for
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which he optimistically thinks will begin shooting
next year.
Sandmans different. Hes not a superhero, hes a god. I hope people are
ready for that, Goyer said. Its about creation and its about the

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relationship between the creator and the creation, between the people who
pray to their gods and the gods themselves.
Its very meta, and its challenging, he smiled. Theres a reason why
people have been trying to develop it for 18 years. Were not there yet, but I
think weve cracked it. I dont know that I could have prior to adapting
Batman v. Superman. I think I was able to step back and identify the key
elements that made Sandman Sandman, and through a series of
conversations with Neil [Gaiman] asked, Do you think this is true? Does
this feel like Sandman to you?
Forecasting the future of superhero movies is Goyers niche, after all. He
teases his involvement in another shared cinematic universe (I cant talk
about it) and predicts that within a few decades the studios will cycle back
to the campier tone that marked 1960s-era superheroes, a la Adam Wests
Batman.
By nature Hollywood is a very slow-moving beast, so they tend to do
something and then lean into the curve, try to keep doing it over and over
and over again, and were constantly saying, You dont want to kill the
golden goose, youve got to keep changing it, he said. Do something
different. Theres always that constant tension.
Goyers still sheepish about controversial comments he made a year ago
about Marvel superheroine She-Hulk, in which he called the character a
giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck.
It was part of a very off-the-cuff evening, and if people listen to the whole
stream there was no one on that panel who was being remotely serious the
entire night, he explained. My comment was one of a bunch of off-the
cuff-comments. What I was trying to say, and I realize people took offense
to it, was that when I was a kid people were saying this was a sort of a model
character but there were nuances that were lost to me when I was a 13-yearold.
Goyer wasnt alone in pissing off geeks on the subject of She-Hulk
podcast host Craig Mazin started the topic by referring to her as Slut-Hulk,
and both were joined on the panel by co-host John August, Andrea Berloff,
and Captain America scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
but Goyer bore the brunt of the blowback. He says the point they were trying

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to make was that female characters have long been objectified by reductive
creators and fans alike.
If you listen to the whole stream, that was the point that all of us were
saying, he said. We were saying it in a joking way, but thats what
everyone was saying. I think that as a kid, as a prepubescent boy, I said even
in my quote that something like 90 percent of the creators were male, as
were the readers. So its a very biased view of the world.
For many comic book fans, Goyers comments were symptomatic of a
larger, more urgent and persistent problem. Namely, if the shepherds of the
Marvel and DC movie universes were so cavalier about sexism in comics,
who could they trust to shape the inclusive future of superhero culture?
I think the world would be a better place if more filmmakers were either
female or came from more diverse backgrounds, because there are too many
white male directors, Goyer said. I was on the board of the Writers Guild
and that was a big issue for us, sort of the chicken-and-the-egg thing: How
do we add more diverse voices, especially when the audience is so diverse?
On the last show I was on, Constantine, I was very happy that close to half
of our writing staff was either female or not white. That was something that
we tried really hard to do. But females and minorities, theyre not
represented in terms of the aggregate pot of writers and directors. Its not
50/50 in terms of females. Its a real problem.
Both Disney and Warner Bros. have struggled to prioritize women and
minority characters, from Marvels Black Widow problem to its Avengers
merchandising, its highly publicized search for a Black Panther director, and
the release date delay of Captain Marvel, the first and only female-led
superhero movie in the foreseeable MCU future. DC, meanwhile, saw
Michelle McLaren exit the Wonder Woman directing gig before they inked
Patty Jenkins to replace her and have yet to add more prominent female-led
stand-alones to their long-term big screen road map.
I asked Goyer what efforts are underway behind the scenes to make the
superhero world more inclusive. I do [see it happening], he said, avoiding
specifics. Everyone is aware of the problem and wants to amend it... Nicole
Perlman worked on Guardians of the Galaxy Look, at least theres a
Wonder Woman movie going into production. Theres a Black Panther

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movie thats coming. At least theres a Captain Marvel. That is some form
of progress. Its not enough progress, but its something.
Zack Snyder: Sorry Marvel, Batman v. Superman Transcends
Superhero Movies
Zack Snyder, the architect of DCs movie universe, talks about the Crash
the Super Bowl contest and how Batman and Superman transcend the
superhero genreunlike Ant-Man.
Between his upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and his plum
gig shepherding the foreseeable future of the DC cinematic universe, Man of
Steel director Zack Snyder has superheroes on the braineven on a rare day
off spent promoting Doritos final, high-stakes Super Bowl filmmaking
contest.
Im going to leave here today and go see [DC Comics CCO] Geoff Johns
and well hang out and talk about Aquaman or something like that, he
laughs as we sit in a theater, on the Warner Bros. lot he calls his studio
home.
Snyder first launched his career with a successful run in commercials before
making his feature debut with the 2004 zombie remake Dawn of the Dead.
His 300 and Watchmen scored over half a billion dollars combined for
Warner Bros. and made him a star filmmaker for the studio. About a decade
after launching his Hollywood career, he inherited the reins to WBs DC
Comics superhero universe.
Now hes embracing his ad roots as part of the last-ever Crash the Super
Bowl contest, which will award one fan-filmmaker a broadcast debut on
Super Bowl Sunday, a cool million dollars in cash, and a gig working with
Snyder and Warner Bros. on the DC franchise films.
Snyders serious about giving the winner their chance to launch a bona fide
career under his wing. Hes been working with some of the same folks since
his film school days spent with Michael Bay and Tarsem and future
collaborators like Sucker Punch co-writer Steve Shibuya and frequent DP
Larry Fong.
I mean it in good faith: Tell me what you really want and well see what we
can do, he said. People get off their sofas, get a camera, get their friends,

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shoot a spot, and literally it gets shown to 150 million people. And by the
way, you can win a million bucks. Thats not a small amount of money! And
Ill be standing there going, OK! Now, what do you want to do?
That Cinderella shot could lead to a gig on, say, 2017s Justice League: Part
One. Snyders already preparing to direct the first of two Justice League
films while simultaneously finishing next summers Batman v. Superman
after an epic 140-day shoot in Detroit with stars Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill,
and Gal Gadot.
Chris Terrio and I worked on the [Batman v. Superman] script, and he did
an amazing job, Snyder said of the March 25, 2016, blockbuster, which pits
Afflecks Batfleck against Cavills Man of Steel and will lead off 10 more
planned DC superhero flicks. Its great fun, but it also has an eye toward
the futureits going toward Justice League. Early on, once we decided that
we were going to put Batman in the movie, then I was like, OK, good!
Because you know what that means? It means the floodgates can open!
He considered the obvious comparisons between DC and its ambitious slate
of superhero team-ups and standalones to the Marvel Cinematic Universe
anchored by the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Avengers films. The
key difference between DCs Shakespearean superheroes and Marvels, he
says, is that DCs are more epic.
Its a tricky process, setting up the DC universe, or Justice League, Snyder
said. The credit goes to [Batman Begins director] Chris Nolan because he
set the die for the DC Universe in a great way that I tried to emulate. I look
at it as more being mythological than, say, bubblegum. And I think that
thats appropriate for Batman and Superman because theyre the most
mythological of our superheroes.
Steven Spielbergs recent doomsday prediction that there will be a time
when the superhero movie goes the way of the Western got many a
fanboys spandex in a bunch. Ahead of our chat, in an interview earlier in
the day, Snyder responded to Spielbergs commentsand when I brought it
up, he was flabbergasted that the Internet had already jumped all over the
brewing debate. That was this morning! he exclaimed, before jovially
admitting that Spielberg might be right while throwing some playful shade at
the competition.

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It goes to the mythological nature of the movies that were making, he

said. I feel like hes right. But I feel like Batman and Superman are
transcendent of superhero movies in a way, because theyre Batman and
Superman. Theyre not just, like, the flavor of the week Ant-Mannot to be
mean, but whatever it is. What is the next Blank-Man?
Besides, even if the Western cycled out of fashion, the genre had a pretty
fantastic run, Snyder pointed out: Didnt he say it was kind of like the
Westerns? But there are still great Westerns. I think its whenever anything
becomes a genre, you have to sort of look at it and try to understand it.
He also addressed recent rumors that the focus of Batman v. Superman is
skewing more Batman than Superman with six months left to go before it
hits theaters.
Only in that because its a different Batman than the Batman that was in the
Chris Nolan movies, so we have a little bit more explaining to doand you
just had a whole Superman movie, he smiled. But I think only in that way,
because you need to understand where Batman is with everything. And
thats more toward the beginning, but it evens back out as it goes on.
Snyder described how he views the personal and philosophical conflict that
pits Gotham Citys vigilante Dark Knight against its godlike Kryptonian
savior, whose costly victory over Zod in Man of Steel left a swath of death
and destruction in its wake.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Theyre actually opposite sides of the same coin, said Snyder. Its
interesting because Batmans a man and Supermans a god, if you think
about it in those terms. So their relationship is very contentious. What
Superman sees as Batmans limits, Batman sees as Superman trying to
control him, acting like an absolute dictator.
What we went after was the humanity of each character, he continued.
We tried to say, What would Batman have to do to unravel Superman, and
what would Superman have to do to unravel Batman? Their conflict is
based on each others understanding of the others weakness. The fun of that
is when youre dealing with these mythological creaturesto make them
human again, bring them back to earth. And to do that you have to know the

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rules before you can break them. They have to go all the way to the
stratosphere before you can bring them back down.
Speaking of cyclical mythological moviemaking: I asked Snyder about a
rumor thats been floating around for years that hed pitched Lucasfilm on a
Star Wars standalone film inspired by Akira Kurosawas Seven Samuraia
classic that also inspired one of historys great Westerns, The Magnificent
Seven.
Whered you hear that from? He laughed. Again, the Internet. He played
coy and downplayed the likelihood, now that Disneys already charted its
Star Wars course. Its possible. It was before the saleand they kind of
have their own direction now, I think.
Maybe after he maps out the known DC cinematic universe Snyder can
revisit the galaxy far, far, away, I suggested. He laughed again at the
thought. Well, as they saywell see!
The Michelangelo of Superheroes
Few comic book artists are as influential as Alex Ross, who not only
created concept art for the first two Spider-Man films, but also
reimagined Superman for a new generation.
In his 20-plus-year career as a comic book artist, Alex Ross has become one
of the elite painters within the realm of superheroes and supervillains. His
realistic portrayals of iconic saviors like Superman, Batman, and SpiderMan have dazzled fans, and his gouache paintings lend great depth and
humanity to the otherworldly figures he brings to thrilling life.
Some of Rosss most famous contributions to the medium include the 1994
mini-series Marvels for Marvel Comics, where, along with Kurt Busiek, he
captured the world of superheroes from an everyday point of view. He
worked on the iconic Astro City series, also by Busiek, and produced a
plethora of cover art projects for both DC and Marvel Comics. He even
created concept art for Sam Raimis first two Spider-Man films.
Most recently, Ross lent his talents to Marvels Secret Wars event. In this
series, the Marvel Multiverse as we know it has been dismantled and put
back together by none other than Doctor Doom. It is up to Reed Richards

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(Mr. Fantastic), Miles Morales (Spider-Man), and the remaining heroes to

team up and save the planet.
The Daily Beast caught up with Ross to talk about his spectacular career as a
painter/comic book artist, the future of the Marvel Comic Book Universe,
and his myriad upcoming projects.
Unlike most comic book artists, your style has a very high-end art feel to
it. How did you manage to break into the comic book industry?
Really, where I come in is at the tail end of the painted comics experiment of
guys trying to do it between the 70s and the 80speople like Richard
Corben, Jon Muth, and so many others. No one had really gotten through to
the mainstream. And even when the mainstream publishers did do a series,
they still kept it outside of the genre that they mainly published. It was more
experimental. It was stories that were less the traditional fare, like
Moonshadow. You have these things that were on the periphery. Even Neil
Gaiman and Dave McKeans Black Orchid series just barely shows you a
glimpse of elements of the DC Universelike Batman or Swamp Thing
that are colorful. Somebody like me had the basic illustration background,
your middle-of-the-road American illustration, and the hunger as a fan to
want to see the basics be represented. Im reading these superhero characters
anyway, why cant they be the subjects of these paintings? Then, of course,
the initial graphic novels based around Batman started to open those doors
and I wanted to be one of the guys to push open those doors.
Comics today seem to be overtaken by dark, noirish themes, as opposed
to the more colorful comics of the 80s and 90s.
These days virtually all the books being published take those tones. Too
many, frankly. Weve actually moved away from the bright color fun that
comic books used to be. Now its all post-Watchmen. Everybodys trying to
make their stuff seem as serious as something like that. It was thought that
after Watchmen came out in the 80s we entered this dark comic spirit. Well,
if you compare whats being going on in the last 15 years of publishing
versus the 90s, we didnt even know about dark back then.
It could also be a byproduct of people reading all those dark, postapocalyptic stories. Do you think this trend is what led Marvel to reset
their entire comic book universe with Secret Wars?

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I dont know how much of that resetting their universe is true. Im on the
other side of working on stuff post-reset and as far as I can tell, it looks
exactly as it was just before the Secret Wars event. They are not doing a
New 52, I can tell you that.
From the cover work you are doing with Marvel, in the current Secret
Wars event and the upcoming All-New Avengers, Squadron Supreme and
the Amazing Spider-Man series, what can you tell us about what has or
hasnt changed in the new Marvel Universe?
What I know is what Ive been limited to doing, which is the cover
illustration. This is still the Peter Parker who is picking up after he had the
year or two that Doctor Octopus had stolen his bodythat story is still
canon. Nothing has rebooted about him. As far as I understand, the biggest
change is that now you have Miles Morales in the regular Marvel Universe.
Look at the Avengers lineup: Falcon is still Captain America, we still have a
female Thor. Everything is still where our storylines last led up to. Im not
aware of any other major thing. Im just a fan doing his part.
And what was the process like then to come up with the covers for each
of the new issues? Did you get to be in the writers room and pick a
particular scene or character that you wanted to showcase on the cover?
Not at this stage of my career. Ive had that before in various projects over
the yearsstarting 20 years ago when I was doing covers for Astro City.
Ive had experience being so heavily involved with shaping the story that go
under the covers I do, and its much of what I did at the beginning of my
career. Now, with the stuff I do with Marvel, Im largely getting directions
handed over to me. OK, this is what we think would make a great cover
and aside from a few things that are stand-alone shots of characters, Im
taking their directions. These are not necessarily my versions of these things.
If Im going to be doing The Avengers as I know them, theyre going to
have the look and feel of the characters as they were designed in the 60s, or
something that regards that continuity from 40 to 60 years ago. Im far less a
contributing part of all of this, which in a way is a break because Ive had so
much to do with the other things Ive worked on throughout my career. Its a
relief [Laughs]. Im trying to learn to not care.
What was the process like when you worked with the video game
industry?

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In a few cases, they did not put me through the mill. In others they did.
When I was working on the Watchdogs posters, they wanted to see a bunch
of different options, multiple views, and pick their favorites. With something
I was far less familiar with like that job, I did do all the alternative sketches.
In the case of Call of Duty, which had a ton of elements requested within the
piece, they wanted a color rough. And even within the color rough they
made me do revision after revision after revision. When I do revisions Im
not working in watercolor; each time I take a Xerox of my pencil sketch and
go over it with color markers to achieve the basic color hue that will be in
the final painting. Sometimes its very easy and other times its extremely
difficult. But I dont do that in most jobs. Thats what makes comics jobs my
most enjoyable kind of work because they dont expect those things or
demand them. In comics there is generally the sense of, We just have to get
this out here and get going. I will find out after the fact with the comic
books Ive done covers for whether there is something wrong with the way
my cover jibes with the interior.

Can you name a situation when that's happened?
In the case of Secret Wars #4, nobody told me they were making Doctor
Doom wear white throughout the whole story. So, the cover I did with Doom
at the center of it, I had to petition them to get my friend that does my
scanning and swap it out with a white cloak to get rid of the green. They
were like, You sure you want to do that? Well, I would have gotten it
right if you had told me in the first place! Lets get it right. [Laughs] And
we got it done. Id rather the stuff be correct than be weirdly egocentric to
my own interests or tastes. There is no reason for the cover to not match the
content of the comic book. Another example of this is Secret Wars #3, with
the two Reeds on the cover. I did him with the contemporary costume with
the square 4 on his chest. I was not told that the character would have a
beard in the storyline. I had been reading the New Avengers book where he
did have a beard, but I did not assume that that would remain the case
throughout the new series. So, when I see the final comic books and hes got
a beard, part of me is just like, Ugh, whatever. They dont care, I guess I
shouldnt either. I could have put a beard on him if it was important to link
it up.

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Speaking of contemporary versions of heroes, can you talk about the

upcoming Amazing Spider-Man that you will be doing covers for? His
costume is now slightly different and more high-tech.
To beg the forgiveness of the fans, who are often not happy with changes,
this is the best I could conceive to do with the costume design that was a
little change to what I want to see about it. I wanted to adhere to my
idealized depiction of what John Romita Sr.s artwork was with his character
design. This whole look of the metallic shiny finish was actually taken from
what the second Amazing Spider-Man movie costume looked like: a
metallic-finished spandex. I thought it looked spectacular. I hoped I could
paint something that had that kind of aesthetic to it, which is very hard to
paint. The whole idea that Peter Parker now has some money and this
corporation to run will be reflected in his new look. If you just do the tiny
add-ons with the eyes that light up and the glow behind the spider symbol on
his chest, thats about as weak a tweak as I could imagine. Mostly what I
feel was the dramatic work was the lines on the bodythey have the
straight-line effect, no longer the old school curved lines. It is now closer to
what the costume of The Shocker is. Weirdly enough, that is, to me, a
graphic representation of what I used to see happening in Romitas art style.
And you can even say I took it from the first Amazing Spider-Man movie
costume, which was graphically very aggressive. They did these lines that
had no curves to them. And mostly, I wanted the face to look like classic old
Spider-Man.
So you got to have full control on this costume design for the upcoming
Amazing Spider-Man?
Yes, and ultimately if the editors didnt care for what I came up with, I dont
think I wouldve been on the job. I didnt want to work on something that
would have taken too much of an aggressive take in removing him from his
roots. It wouldnt have been a satisfying gig to me then. Whereas with the
covers for the new lineup of The Avengers, almost nobody is recognizable to
what you classically think of them, so I accept it in a way of, Oh well, I like
all these designs. Its not technically The Avengers to me but I can enjoy
myself working on this.
Do you think that ability to let loose frees you more creatively? For
example, in Secret Wars you are juggling so many different pieces on the
page.

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Well, since there was a lot of directive in the Secret Wars covers and each
was built on what I was told by the editor, there was a lot of room to expand
upon. In the case of issue #8 with Mister Fantastic and Doctor Doom, they
requested just a big bang exploding outwards from the silhouette of a human
figure, and within that put the battle between Reed and Doom. Thats all that
was requested. The part that I expanded upon was, instead of just the
explosion thing with stars and galaxies exploding and whatnot, how cool
would it be to show fragments and moments from Marvel history that
established what is happening now. For me, that was a way of expressing
that the history of Marvel still stands. It was important for me to draw the
Caucasian Nick Fury with the Howling Commandos because that was a part
of history that should not be rewritten. It was cool. Why say that that is no
longer there? To me, the fact that those little moments are in there meant that
my collection as a longtime fan isnt declared unimportant.
With the high level of detail in the covers, did you draw all of them by
hand first and then add them into the computer?
I dont know how to use a computer. Ive never typed a single sentence or
sent a single email by myself. Generally, I try to keep all my efforts to
working on paper. Everything is gouache and watercolor. Then, I pack up
the paintings to get scanned and send them to a fellow that does that for me.
I used to send them to the publishers, and these days they dont even have
people there that know what to do if you send original artwork.
Youve also done some concept art for the previous Sam Raimi SpiderMan movies, right? Can you tell us about your experience on the
project(s)?
[Laughs] That was not really petitioned from me. Basically, before they
were making the movies, I waslike any other fanhoping that it was
going to look as much like the comic book version as possible. For me, that
meant it should look like John Romita drew it. In the case of the movie, in
its development stage, there had been so many wild extrapolations of
costume. Think of the X-Men movie, where no one is really wearing the
traditional superhero costume. You figure with Spider-Man, it has to be
closer but still reinvent things. So, this artist I knew called David Williams
had done a color sketch of it that I saw in his office and it bowled me over. It
was this wild graphic design with Spider-Man in red and black, with black
lenses for his typically white eyepiecescurved bug-eye lenses that held the

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same shape. I thought it was astounding in its graphic simplicity. It

connected with the bug theme, and it was a good graphical stand-in for the
classic eyepieces. So, with his agreement, I said I would try to represent this
design to the moviemakers if I ever got an audience with them.
And you did?
Weirdly enough, they reached out to menot about Spider-Man, but for the
original Fantastic Four movie, which was years away from being done at
that time. So, I never wound up doing any designs for the Fantastic Four,
but I immediately petitioned them to consider this graphic design for SpiderMan. I sent the designs and got zero reply. Beyond the initial conversation
with the producers, I never got a follow-up. Nobody said a word. So, the
movie got made, they took a design that was certainly not mine or my
friends. The one they went with in the film was actually taken from the
Marvel Card series painted by the Hildebrandt Brothers, which was the first
time ever that an artist had drawn the webs on the suit as if they were raised,
as far as Im aware, and that was what influenced the look of the film. With
the other design approach that David Williams had done, all I did was reillustrate new shots of that figure and put our names on it. We learned well
after the film had come out that they actually ran a prototype costume of
Williamss design that was made in fabric to test out how it looked. They
translated it into red and blue instead of red and black, but they obviously
decided not to go with it and that was that.
Thats a crazy story. Well, would you ever be open to doing concept art
for any of the upcoming Marvel films?
I dont know if they would ever perceive me as having anything to really
offer. The level of detail that comes from Ryan Meinerdingwho has done
work for all the Avengers movies, Iron Man and whatnotAdi Granov and
Phil Sanders and what they do digitally is stuff that my work cant compete
with in terms of complexity and graphic detail. Im not sure if I would have
what they are looking for. I have more of a bold and simple palette. So much
of what gives life to my interpretation of these characters has to do with
casting, and who the person is versus the costume. At this point, I just want
to see a character wear a simple outfita shirt or even bare skin. These
rubber costumes with armor are impressive but theres a sense of graphic
fatigue that comes from getting the same thing film after film, interpretation

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after interpretation. Im not sure I would fit with the kind of aesthetic that
seems to run the most dominant in that world.
As a fan, which of the superheroes that have been represented in the
Marvel Cinematic Universe are you the most satisfied by?
Well, I love Chris Evans so much in his portrayal of Steve Rogers. I dont
love any of the costumes they put him in, but I can still enjoy the movies
hes made. I also would be one of the people who said that if they didnt get
Benedict Cumberbatch to play Doctor Strange in the upcoming movie they
would have lost everything. That would have been the biggest screw-up on
Marvels part if they didnt nail him down.
Christian Bales Batman Advice For Ben Affleck: Make Sure You Can
Piss in That Suit'
Ben Affleck made his way to Comic-Con Saturday, braving the geek hordes
a week after splitting very publicly from Jennifer Garner, who played his
leading lady the last time he donned superhero spandex. He revealed how he
got the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice gig after director Zack Snyder
told him he was perfect for the role: He said, Hes at the end of his rope,
hes older, hes like a burnout.
Enter Batfleck.
The Dark Knight is a family man out for blood in the upcoming superheroon-superhero action pic, which pits Afflecks grumbling Batman against the
Superman actor Henry Cavill introduced in Snyders Man of Steel.
Warner Bros. unveiled its most revealing look yet at the March 25, 2016
blockbuster in Hall H as the centerpiece to its DC slate, sneaking in a logo
for an unannounced new Green Lantern reboot.
Suicide Squad helmer David Ayer and his cast flew down from the Toronto
set of their antihero team-up to smile and wave at the 6,000-plus fans at
Comic-Con, dropping a grimy, moody teaser of their own that ends with a
demented look at Jared Letos new Joker.
All this good vs. evil shits kind of played out right now, said Ayer. Its
time for bad vs. evil. And whos got the best bad guys out there? DC

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Comics. Im not trying to start no East coast-West coast feud with Marvel,
but hey, somebodys got to say the truth.
On the flip side of Suicide Squad, then, is Batman v Superman: Good vs.
Good. After the events of Man of Steel, Supes has become persona non grata
to the fractured public he lives to serve, and the government wants him shut
down. So does the mecha-suit wearing Batfleck, who blames Superman for
the tragic 9/11-esque toppling of Wayne Tower.
The film sets Warner Bros. DC slate on course by introducing Gal Gadot as
Wonder Woman and Jesse Eisenberg in a nightmare-inducing wig as Lex
Luthor (WBs Comic-Con trailer also teased a shot of a dead General Zod
being unzipped from a body bag.)
According to Affleck, Batmans bat-rage also plays out as a superhero class
war. There are some really interesting ideas of Metropolis being a big,
successful city and Gotham being a place where a lot more downtrodden
people live, he said. Theres a ferry people take across who work in
Gotham City there were a lot of ideas that were a little bit too smart for
me to understand that the movie was trafficking in, and I thought made it
feel real to me, and smart.
Snyder put the beef in simpler real-world terms: Metropolis is the San
Francisco to Gotham Citys Oakland. The big rule we broke was we put
Gotham and Metropolis right next to each other, said Snyder, who came up
with the original idea with Argo scribe Chris Terrio. If you dig deep enough
you can find a justification for just about anything.
Affleck also came to Comic-Con equipped with a nerdy anecdote for the
comic book crowd. Shopping for Halloween costumes with his son after
signing on to play Batman, he ran into The Dark Knights Christian Bale in a
costume store. What friendly advice did Bale have for donning Batmans
duds?
Make sure you can piss in that suit.
How The Justice League Saved Mad Max: Fury Road
In our story on the making of the mesmerizing Mad Max: Fury Road, we
chronicled the films 17-year journey from director George Millers
epiphany at an L.A crosswalk to the big screen. Everythingand I do mean

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everythingseemed to get in its path, including 9/11, Mel Gibsons antiSemitic meltdown, the passing of Heath Ledger (who was being courted for
Max), the first rains in 15 years to hit Broken Hill, Australia, forcing
production to move to Namibia, and an on-set feud between co-stars Tom
Hardy and Charlize Theron.
Well, Mad Max: Fury Road is finally here and it was definitely worth the
wait. But it probably wouldnt have happened if Millers Justice League
superhero team-up had come to fruition.
If you recall, back in 2007, Warner Bros. announced it was ready to roll on
Justice League: Mortal, a $220 million blockbuster superhero film on The
Justice Leagueessentially DC Comics version of The Avengersthat
was set to hit theaters in July 2009. The script was locked, the costumes and
concept art were conceived, and the entire film was cast.
Its cast included: Armie Hammer as Batman, DJ Cotrona as Superman,
Adam Brody as The Flash, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Common as
Green Lantern, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, Teresa Palmer as Talia Al
Ghul, Zoe Kazan as Iris Allen, Mad Max: Fury Road villain Hugh KeaysByrne as Martian Manhunter, and Jay Baruchel as the main villain, Maxwell
Lord.
Heres a photo of most of the castalong with Millerhanging out. And
heres a link to the Justice League: Mortal screenplay that later leaked
online.
If the film merited a sequel (or sequels)which, with the visionary Miller at
the helm, odds are it would havethen its safe to say production on Mad
Max: Fury Road, which began in 2011, would have been further delayed,
and may have been scrapped entirely.
Of course, it didnt. And a new Justice League film, directed by Zack
Snyder, is set to hit theaters in 2018. Heres why Justice League: Mortal fell
apart:
Everyone was very keen to do it, but there was a writers strike, so there was
a deadline, Miller told The Daily Beast. In order to do it in Australia, there
was a new government with new rebate legislation, and this was the first
film to come up, so we had to get in that window before the writers strike
and get it approved for the rebate, which is quite significant. Even the board

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that they put together wasnt very experienced, and they thought that it had
to be only Australian content, so much like how the Supreme Court ruled 54 in the Florida recount, there was a 4-3 overruling in the tribunal. We lost
Justice League by one vote! So they turned down the film, and before we
could appeal, the writers strike happened.
Well, there you have it. Miller could have supplanted Zack Snyder as one of
the architectsalong with Christopher Nolanof the DC film universe, but
it wasnt meant to be.
During our chat, I asked Miller about whether the success of the Fast and
the Furious franchise helped Mad Max: Fury Road get made, reigniting our
love for not only car films but non-CG action.
I never thought about that! he replied. But yeah, I think so. CG allows
you to do anythingyou can defy the laws of physics, make people fly,
have spacecraftsand they can do that relatively easy with green screen.
The cars themselves are real world, and we wanted to do it old school with
real cars, real people, real desert, and no green screenand do it
chronologically, so when there are attritions in the cars and the people, you
can see it in the movie. Even though the movie happens over three days, to
shoot it over 130 days was a slow-motion version of the physical experience.
Most of the cast was able to do really scary stunts, relatively-speaking.
Millers The Road Warrior, the second installment in the Mad Max
franchise, set the blueprint for all future post-apocalyptic landscapes on film.
But the most blatant ripoff was Kevin Costners 1995 movie Waterworld,
which cost a then-record $172 million to make. Believe it or not, gentle
George not only has no qualms with Waterworld, but gave the movie his
blessing.
I got to know Dennis Gassner, the wonderful designer, and Dean Semler,
the cameraman who shot the last two Mad Maxs and Waterworld, and I
went to visit the set of Waterworld, and there were people saying, You
should sue, but it wasnt the thing to do, Miller recalls. It was great that
they were doing it, and I thought the set was fantastic.
One set he didnt visit, however, is California Love. Tupacs classic rap
song, featuring Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman, had its music video directed by
Hype Williams, and it was heavily inspired by Millers third Mad Max

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movie, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. In fact, Williams, Tupac, and Dre
never reached out to Miller before filming the music videohe only caught
wind of it after it had premiered on MTV.
Nerd-vana: How Nolan and Snyder Ruined Superhero Movies
The other week, thanks to a particularly enterprising bootlegger, Warner
Bros. was forced into an early reveal of the first trailer for Batman v
Superman: Dawn of Justicefilmmaker Zack Snyders $200 million+
mega-blockbuster that pits Henry Cavills Superman against Ben Afflecks
cleft-chinned Batman.
But the early footagethe film isnt due in theaters until March 25, 2016
served as yet another example of where DC Comics cinematic universe
went wrong.
Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyders formula of dark hues, baritone voices,
and humorless, stoic heroes is no longer as innovative as it was way back in
2005 when Nolans Batman Begins hit theaters. At the time, the Batman
franchise had been hijacked by Joel Schumacher, whose gaudy,
oversaturated monstrosity Batman & Robin led star George Clooney to issue
an apology to fans at last years Comic-Con: I just met Adam West and I
apologized to him. Sorry for the nipples on the suit. Furthermore, the
Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) hadnt been established, leading to
misguided efforts like the stinker Daredevil, Ang Lees over-edited Hulk,
and the cartoonish Fantastic Four. Nolans dark, realistic take on Batman
served as a welcome respite from the superhero frayan iconic hero facing
bullets, knives, and real-world situations.
Things changed with 2008s Iron Man, the first film in the canonized MCU.
Filmmaker Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr.s spin on Tony
Stark/Iron Man elegantly combined real-world commentary, huge action set
pieces, and a wink-and-smile playfulness that set the template for future
MCU entries, from Captain America: The First Avenger and Guardians of
the Galaxy to this weekends Avengers: Age of Ultron. It struck just the right
balance of seriousness and silliness, retaining that lighthearted comic book
tone and allowing it to appeal to comic-consuming and superhero-loving
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The Batman v Superman trailer, however, exhibits that same gritty texture
that is sure to envelope all current (and future) DC movies, and its more of
a distraction. Its an odd mlange of Nolans moody realness and Snyders
wonky CGIas exhibited in his Superman origin tale Man of Steel,
featuring Russell Crowes Jor-El riding a dragonwith a huge heaping of
self-seriousness. These films are devoid of any humanity and humor, the
latter of which is typically supplied by helping hands like Michael Caines
Alfred, Morgan Freemans Lucius Fox, or Laurence Fishburnes Perry
White. We dont get the small, inward-looking moments. Whats it like, say,
for Batman to patrol Gotham when there are no baddies around? How will
Superman function in an office? Can he operate a Keurig, or will the
machine just explode into a million pieces? Does he even have a job?
Look at the content of that Batman v Superman trailer. Everyone is so
enshrouded in darkness you can barely see them. The characters look pained
and miserable. Theres something to do with Superman being worshipped as
a false idol, Bane-esque chanting, and melancholy to spare. Fun is
probably the last word youd use to describe this atmosphere.
The comic book world wasnt amazing just because it gave us larger than
life characters that saved the damsel in distress from planet-destroying
villains at the end of every arc. Comic book superheroes are outsiders
blending into and learning to protect and love a world that doesnt
understand them. So we need to know why theyve fallen in love with this
world in the first place.
Its most evident in Joss Whedons Avengers. Each hero is presented with
different internal issues and emotions. We have Iron Man, all ego and genius
coated with a dense layer of loneliness and abandonment. Thor, daddy issues
mixed with family drama and a lack of understanding concerning local
culture that leads to many endearing moments of comic relief. Captain
America, a man from a different time trying desperately to fit in while
leading a team of equally dysfunctional people. These are just a few of the
examples of flawed characters that Marvel has developed in ways DC could
only dream of.
Marvel just gets it. They remember this key aspect of what makes
superheroes special. In fact, they understand it so well that theyre willing to
invest in extra scenes and Easter eggs that reinforce the gleeful humanity of
their characters. Examples [spoilers, of course] abound, from the shawarma-

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eating after the intergalactic pow-wow in the first Avengers to Howard the
Duck popping up in Guardians of the Galaxy. Hell, Marvel was able to
make a dancing baby tree creature more charming and hilarious to the public
in one minute than any Nolan or Snyder character.
All this is not to say that Nolans recent Batman trilogy was a failure. It was
anything but, and made DC and Warner Bros. a ton of dough. But it
shouldve acted as a standalone franchisenot the blueprint for an entire
movie universe. The cloud of success that surrounded Batman Begins and its
bat brethren convinced the DC/WB powers that be that the same formula
would apply to Superman, or Green Lantern, orjudging by the latest
marketing materialsAquaman and Wonder Woman (and presumably the
rest of the Justice League), who all resemble extras from Sucker Punch.
Why not try different things? Instead of making all the different members of
the Justice League come off as dark, depressed sociopaths, why not add
some zest, color, and humor to them? Some life?
Theres also the issue of behind the scenes talent. Thanks to the grand vision
of honcho Kevin Feige, Marvels cultivated a rich network of filmmakers
from the world of indie cinema and televisionpeople who are more
concerned with story over spectacle. Joss Whedon (The Avengers), the
Russo brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), James Gunn
(Guardians of the Galaxy), the list goes on. DC, on the other hand, opted for
Snyder, whod already struck out with what many consider the greatest
graphic novel of all time, Watchmen. More importantly, the bulk of the
superhero curation seems to be governed by the studio (Warner Bros.)
instead of the comic book entity (DC)unlike Disney subsidiary Marvel,
who exercise a great deal more control over the way their valuable
properties are cultivated.
And according to a report this week in The Hollywood Reporter, Warner
Bros. is struggling to iron out the rest of their movie universe. The piece
claims that Warner Bros. hired five writers to compete for a job on 2017s
Wonder Woman, and that scripts from three writers were commissioned for
2018s Aquaman, one of whom followed the studios direction only to be
told the rules governing the universe had changed and his work no longer
was usable. Meanwhile, the story says that Wonder Woman director
Michelle MacLaren was forced to leave the project when her vision
contrasted sharply with that of the films screenwriter, Kelly Marcel (Fifty
Shades of Grey).

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They just haven't been thorough about their whole world and how each
character fits and how to get the most out of each writer's time by giving
them direction, a rep with knowledge of the process told THR. Obviously,
Marvel's very good at that.

The jury, however, is still out. Warner Bros. is planning no less than 10
movies based on its stable of DC comic book characters through 2020, and
theres no doubting the richness of the source material, from Frank Millers
classic series The Dark Knight Returns to All-Star Superman. All of these
DC titles are imbued with a humanity and heart to them that makes you want
to relate to their heroes myriad struggles. Why isnt DC using this source
material more effectively? Who knows. Maybe theyre buckling under the
pressure. Or maybe they just don't feel they can due the characters justice.
Or, and this is my favorite one, they simply dont care enough about the
characters and just see them as valuable commodities, and a way to replicate
the over $7 billion in worldwide box office that Marvels reaped since Iron
Man. Either way, Warner Bros. and DC need to churn out more layered,
complex heroes fast. Otherwise, they risk being the punchline to a very
costly joke.
Why Applebee's Is My Favorite Happy Hour In NYC
Moving away from Spanish Harlemmy home for seven years, the longest
amount of time spent in one apartment in NYCwas difficult for a lot of
reasons. It was home to one of my favorite restaurants, it sheltered a super
dive bar responsible for many stumbles home down 2nd Avenue, and it had
an Applebee's, one of the most unexpected places to get a generous buzz and
a full belly for $20if that.
One year, I even spent New Year's Eve at Applebee's drinking head-sized
Long Island Iced Teas and loving every minute of itbut not so much the
ensuing hangover and stomach ache the next day.
Where I grew up in Connecticut, chain restaurants existed but weren't part of
the regular dinner routine in my family. Sure, there was the occasional trip to
Bertucci'swhere they'd give kids raw dough to fling aroundor even a
stop by California Pizza Kitchen when we were at the mall. But by and
large, I wasn't exposed to the joy of sticky franchise chicken wings and

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overly salted industrial french fries until I lived in Spanish Harlem and the
city's super eco-friendly Applebee's opened in the newish shopping
development on 1st Avenue. It was there that chalices of sugary cocktails,
foot-tall glasses of ice cold Bud Light and gloppy, oddly-flavorless spinachartichoke dip became something of a revelation in my life.
And with good reason. During Happy Hour at the bar, by far the best (and
only, reallyI am not endorsing a dinner here) time to visit, drinks and
appetizers are half off and domestic draft beers are $3. Droopy chicken
quesadillas, oddly dense mozzarella sticks and the restaurant's signature
pretzelbutter-slicked and accompanied by beige beer cheese and bland
mustard saucesare finally worth their price, averaging around $5 over
their typical double-digit (and therefore ludicrously expensive) price tags.
Show me a regular bar that's serving the same portions for the same prices
and...I'll probably be really excitedso do share!
So yes, the food kinda sucks, but you're getting an America-sized portion of
it. Sometimes quantity trumps qualityespecially if it's on the cheap.
Maybe my shitty taste in happy hours comes from a perceived childhood
trauma. For someone whose parents wouldn't even let her eat the organic,
hippy fruit leather at the local health food storelet alone the Fruit By The
Foot enjoyed by my classmatesthe options at Applebee's were somewhat
revelatory. How are the mad scientist chefs able to imbue the gift of 1,060
calories to one order of pretzels? The mystery might never be solved and
after a few rounds of drinks, I don't even care.
Inexpensive comfort food is one thing, but it's the cheap drinks that seal the
deal. Aside from the $3 beers20-ounce glasses wonderfully named
"Brewtus" (I was somebody's dad in a past life)their potent margaritas,
Bahama Mama's and Long Island Iced Tea goblets are all half off, as are
wine and well drinks. But if you're not guzzling all the liquors
simultaneously, you aren't really doing it right.
Applebee's won't be achieving Michelin-status (ever) and yes, I appreciate
that there are more "quality" options to be found both in Spanish Harlem and
beyond. But it deserves a tip of the hat for feeding and beer'ing locals on
prices many people can afford and giving them ample opportunity to
actually experience said deals. Happy Hour at my once-local Harlem
location runs from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. daily (yes, daily) and that's true of many

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NYC Applebee's locations, making it one of the more generous offerings in

the city. Their commitment to getting customers drunk is truly unparalleled.
What Making a Murderer Leaves Out, According to a Reporter Who
Covered the Case
"This was an important story, people's lives and liberties were at stakeYou
wanted to make sure you were getting it right and asking the tough
questions," says Making A Murderer's breakout journalist, Angenette Levy,
who, at the time of Steven Avery's trial, was a reporter for WFRV-TV in
Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Now reporting for WKRC-TV Cincinnati's 11 p.m. news, Levy says she is
surprisedif not a little disconcertedto find herself in the national
spotlight after Netflix released the 10-part documentary last month. The
bespectacled, no-nonsense journalist had "no idea" she would be in the
series, and says the attention lavished on her appearance (she has been
labeled "sexy" by sports sites and has stolen the hearts of many Twitter
followers) is a "little creepy." "I hope people realize appearance isn't
everything," she says. "Asking questions and trying to do a good job is much
more important than how attractive a person might be."
Though Levy won't comment on whether she believes Avery is innocent, the
star reporter takes us through her experience covering the case, revealing the
biggest challenges she faced, and her thoughts on the documentary:
Below is an interview Levy recently gave to Elle.com.
In 'Making a Murderer' you stand out as someone asking the tough
questionsof both the defense and the prosecutionduring press
conferences. People have certainly responded positively to your
skepticism during those scenes. What was it like to cover the case as it
was happening?
When evidence started to come in, particularly with that bullet fragment and
contamination of control samplesWe had heard about the bullet in a prior
court hearing the summer beforethe prosecutor had discussed it in a
motion hearing, the fact that there was Teresa Halbach's DNA found on the
bullet fragmentand once the trial started, you know, we had never heard
there was an issue of contamination of control samples in the crime lab. So I
was really shocked to hear about that, that it was allowed into evidence after

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the typical protocol of the lab was that it should be ruled inconclusive. That
surprised me quite a bit, so I had a lot of questions about that. I just always
have a lot of questions. I always wanted to know as much information as I
could, just because I wanted to know what really happened that day. What
was the evidence that pointed to Steven Avery? The bones that were found
in the burn pit, because it wasn't photographed when it was first discovered,
they couldn't definitively say that it was the primary burn site. Those are
things you didn't know about prior to the trial, and you kind of think to
yourself, 'Wow, what's going on here?' It's our job to ask tough questions of
both sides and get the answers and you want to make sure you're reporting
everything properly.
What were some challenges you came up against when covering the
trials of both Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey?
The whole thing was challenging. Everyone was scrambling to get every
little story and every interview they could, and you couldn't get people to
talk to you a lot of the time. Information came through court documents.
There was always a challenge in just getting interviews, finding out
information. They're not going to show you all the evidence that they have
right up front. It was an important case, you wanted to make sure you were
getting it right, exploring all the avenues and things that were being brought
up. Steven Avery kept claiming he was being framed, so obviously you have
to look into that and ask questions to figure it out. Not that it's our job to
determine that, because it's not, but you have to keep that in mind. So we
reported his claims that he was being framed, which he said from day one.
How do you think the media in generalespecially prime time
television newscovered the case? The documentary uses news clips
that seem to say both Avery and Dassey were guilty before their trials
even began...
There was a lot of coverage. It seemed like you couldn't turn on the
television or read a newspaper without seeing something about the case.
Even the most insignificant pre-trial motions would be reported on by the
media. In the very beginning, when they charged Steven Avery, I think
everyone was like, Whoa, this is crazy. This seems insane that somebody
who was going to potentially be awarded millions of dollars would murder
someone. Why would that happen?

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So I always wanted to know from the very beginning, what really happened?
It was just so weird, the fact that his blood was in her vehicle. It boggles
your mind that a person, who's probably going to get all this money from a
lawsuit, and then you just kill somebody? You always think about these
thingsDid someone else do it on the property and he helped clean up?
Who knows. Steven knew how to do time in prison, he'd been there for 18
years, so was he taking the fall for somebody else? All these things kind of
go through your mind. I think what changed was when Brendan Dassey was
arrested. The press conference that the prosecutor held, that changed
everything. We were all sitting there absolutely stunned. You can imagine
what it was like sitting in a room listening to this story that he told, a horror
story, it was really shocking. That really changed everything in the case. A
lot of people in the general public then thought he was guilty.
The audience is left frustrated because the documentary makes clear
Brendan Dassey has a learning disability, and portrays just how easily
the criminal justice system can take advantage of young, uneducated
people. Do you think the media did a good job of getting this point
across during the trials?
We did report at the time that Brendan had a learning disability. I
interviewed his mother the night he was arrested. I kind of stumbled upon
her; I was knocking on doors and she granted me an interview. I felt very
badly for her. She had told me Brendan had a learning disability, saying
things like, 'He just does what he's told.' I know we reported it in the media,
I just don't know how much weight people gave to that. I always felt very,
very sad about Brendan Dassey's fate. It wasn't fair. He didn't have the
money, and neither did his mother to get a really high-powered defense
attorney like Steven Avery had. And I think you see that inequity in the
documentary. I've never heard of a defense investigator coercing a client like
that. You see how disturbing it was, what happened to him through this
process.
How do you think national news media coverage can improve when it
comes to criminal cases?
They need to not focus on the sensational. Instead, focus on trying to get the
facts, the truth. You have to be circumspect and you have to show restraint
sometimes in what you report. I don't think that every little tidbit has to be
out there. You have to try and be fair. You have to be responsible in the

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information you disseminate, but at the same time you want to have an
informed public. You want to do your job, but you have to balance that with
not being prejudicial. It's a balancing act for sure.
Do you feel like the documentary presents is balanced and fair? Does
what we experience, as an audience, reflect your experience of actually
being there?
I think it's very clear that the documentarians had a lot of access to the
Avery family. We didn't have that access. I wish we had had access to them,
because I always wanted to talk to them more, but they typically didn't want
anything to do with us. So I enjoyed seeing that part. We obviously didn't
have access to the defense team during the trial, either. Their main character
in the story is Steven Avery, so I think you're going to see more of that side
of it than you will the other side. [Avery] is the character through which you
are looking at the criminal justice system, you're going to see more of that,
and that's natural. There are some things [in the documentary] that weren't
included, but you can't fit everything from an eight-week trial into a 10-hour
documentary. There were some things in the trail, for example, that did point
to Steven Avery. There was some evidence about the garage floor lit up with
luminol. [Editor's note: Forensic investigators use luminol, which reacts
with the iron in hemoglobin, to detect trace amounts of blood at crime
scenes.] But there was never any blood found in the garage, either. So I
guess there are other substances that react with luminol and light up
underneath it. [Editor's note: Luminol can also be triggered by copper,
excessive cigarette smoke, horseradish sauce, fecal matter, and certain
bleaches.] Steven Avery had requested Teresa Halbach that day. I know that
really intrigued a lot of people during the trial, that he specifically requested
her and that he had a *67 feature on his phone to hide his number. So, I think
that interested people.
How do you feel about the attention you've received since the release of
Making a Murderer?
It's kind of strange. I had no idea I was going to be in this
documentary...People ask, Why didn't you ask this or why didn't you ask
that? And I just think to myself, I probably did. It's not like they're going to
put every question in the documentary. But, then sometimes I think, Maybe
we didn't ask enough questions. Maybe we needed to ask more. But it's hard.
Sometimes you do ask the question, but you don't get an answer.

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El Chapo Speaks
A secret visit with the most wanted man in the world
Disclosure: Some names have had to be changed, locations not named, and
an understanding was brokered with the subject that this piece would be
submitted for the subjects approval before publication. The subject did not
ask for any changes.
"The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature,
proceed from custom." Montaigne
It's September 28th, 2015. My head is swimming, labeling TracPhones
(burners), one per contact, one per day, destroy, burn, buy, balancing levels
of encryption, mirroring through Blackphones, anonymous e-mail addresses,
unsent messages accessed in draft form. It's a clandestine horror show for
the single most technologically illiterate man left standing. At 55 years old,
I've never learned to use a laptop. Do they still make laptops? No fucking
idea! It's 4:00 in the afternoon. Another gorgeous fall day in New York City.
The streets are abuzz with the lights and sirens of diplomatic movement,
heads of state, U.N. officials, Secret Service details, the NYPD. It's the week
of the U.N. General Assembly. Pope Francis blazed a trail and left town two
days before. I'm sitting in my room at the St. Regis Hotel with my colleague
and brother in arms, Espinoza.
Espinoza and I have traveled many roads together, but none as unpredictable
as the one we are now approaching. Espinoza is the owl who flies among
falcons. Whether he's standing in the midst of a slum, a jungle or a
battlefield, his idiosyncratic elegance, mischievous smile and self-effacing
charm have a way of defusing threat. His bald head demands your attention
to his twinkling eyes. He's a man fascinated and engaged. We whisper to
each other in code. Finally a respite from the cyber technology that's been
sizzling my brain and soul. We sit within quietude of fortified walls that are
old New York hotel construction, when walls were walls, and telephones
were usable without a Ph.D. We quietly make our plans, sensitive to the
paradox that also in our hotel is President Enrique Pea Nieto of Mexico.
Espinoza and I leave the room to get outside the hotel, breathe in the fall air
and walk the five blocks to a Japanese restaurant, where we'll meet up with
our colleague El Alto Garcia. As we exit onto 55th Street, the sidewalk is
lined with the armored SUVs that will transport the president of Mexico to

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the General Assembly. Paradoxical indeed, as one among his detail asks if I
will take a selfie with him. Flash frame: myself and a six-foot, ear-pieced
Mexican security operator.
Flash frame: Why is this a paradox? It's paradoxical because today's Mexico
has, in effect, two presidents. And among those two presidents, it is not Pea
Nieto who Espinoza and I were planning to see as we'd spoken in whispered
code upstairs. It is not he who necessitated weeks of clandestine planning.
Instead, it's a man of about my age, though absent any human calculus that
may provide us a sense of anchored commonality. At four years old, in '64, I
was digging for imaginary treasures, unneeded, in my parents' middleclass
American backyard while he was hand-drawing fantasy pesos that, if real,
might be the only path for he and his family to dream beyond peasant
farming. And while I was surfing the waves of Malibu at age nine, he was
already working in the marijuana and poppy fields of the remote mountains
of Sinaloa, Mexico. Today, he runs the biggest international drug cartel the
world has ever known, exceeding even that of Pablo Escobar. He shops and
ships by some estimates more than half of all the cocaine, heroin,
methamphetamine and marijuana that come into the United States.
They call him El Chapo. Or "Shorty." Joaqun Archivaldo Guzmn Loera.
The same El Chapo Guzman who only two months earlier had humiliated
the Pea Nieto government and stunned the world with his extraordinary
escape from Altiplano maximum-security prison through an impeccably
engineered mile-long tunnel.
Watch two minutes of El Chapo's exclusive first-ever interview below.
This would be the second prison escape of the world's most notorious drug
lord, the first being 13 years earlier, from Puente Grande prison, where he
was smuggled out under the sheets of a laundry cart. Since he joined the
drug trade as a teenager, Chapo swiftly rose through the ranks, building an
almost mythic reputation: First, as a cold pragmatist known to deliver a
single shot to the head for any mistakes made in a shipment, and later, as he
began to establish the Sinaloa cartel, as a Robin Hood-like figure who
provided much-needed services in the Sinaloa mountains, funding
everything from food and roads to medical relief. By the time of his second
escape from federal prison, he had become a figure entrenched in Mexican
folklore.

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In 1989, El Chapo dug the first subterranean passage beneath the border
from Tijuana to San Diego, and pioneered the use of tunnels to transport his
products and to evade capture. I will discover that his already accomplished
engineers had been flown to Germany last year for three months of extensive
additional training necessary to deal with the low-lying water table beneath
the prison. A tunnel equipped with a pipe-track-guided motorcycle with an
engine modified to function in the minimally oxygenized space, allowing El
Chapo to drop through a hole in his cell's shower floor, into its saddle and
ride to freedom. It was this president of Mexico who had agreed to see us.
I take no pride in keeping secrets that may be perceived as protecting
criminals, nor do I have any gloating arrogance at posing for selfies with
unknowing security men. But I'm in my rhythm. Everything I say to
everyone must be true. As true as it is compartmentalized. The trust that El
Chapo had extended to us was not to be fucked with. This will be the first
interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room, leaving
me no precedent by which to measure the hazards. I'd seen plenty of video
and graphic photography of those beheaded, exploded, dismembered or
bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous journalists and cartel enemies
alike. I was highly aware of committed DEA and other law-enforcement
officers and soldiers, both Mexican and American, who had lost their lives
executing the policies of the War on Drugs. The families decimated, and
institutions corrupted.
I took some comfort in a unique aspect of El Chapo's reputation among the
heads of drug cartels in Mexico: that, unlike many of his counterparts who
engage in gratuitous kidnapping and murder, El Chapo is a businessman
first, and only resorts to violence when he deems it advantageous to himself
or his business interests. It was on the strength of the Sinaloa cartel's
seemingly more calculated strategies (a cartel whose famous face is El
Chapo, but also includes the co-leadership of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada)
that Sinaloa had become dominant among Mexico's criminal syndicates,
extending far beyond the rural northwestern state, with significant inroads to
all principal border areas between the United States and Mexico Juarez,
Mexicali, Tijuana, and reaching as far as Los Cabos.
As an American citizen, I'm drawn to explore what may be inconsistent with
the portrayals our government and media brand upon their declared enemies.
Not since Osama bin Laden has the pursuit of a fugitive so occupied the
public imagination. But unlike bin Laden, who had posed the ludicrous

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premise that a country's entire population is defined by and therefore

complicit in its leadership's policies, with the world's most wanted drug
lord, are we, the American public, not indeed complicit in what we
demonize? We are the consumers, and as such, we are complicit in every
murder, and in every corruption of an institution's ability to protect the
quality of life for citizens of Mexico and the United States that comes as a
result of our insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics.
As much as anything, it's a question of relative morality. What of the tens of
thousands of sick and suffering chemically addicted Americans, barbarically
imprisoned for the crime of their illness? Locked down in facilities where
unspeakable acts of dehumanization and violence are inescapable, and
murder a looming threat. Are we saying that what's systemic in our culture,
and out of our direct hands and view, shares no moral equivalency to those
abominations that may rival narco assassinations in Juarez? Or, is that a
distinction for the passive self-righteous?
There is little dispute that the War on Drugs has failed: as many as 27,000
drug-related homicides in Mexico alone in a single year, and opiate
addiction on the rise in the U.S. Working in the emergency and development
field in Haiti, I have countless times been proposed theoretical solutions to
that country's ailments by bureaucratic agencies unfamiliar with the culture
and incongruities on the ground. Perhaps in the tunnel vision of our
puritanical and prosecutorial culture that has designed the War on Drugs, we
have similarly lost sight of practice, and given over our souls to theory. At
an American taxpayer cost of $25 billion per year, this war's policies have
significantly served to kill our children, drain our economies, overwhelm our
cops and courts, pick our pockets, crowd our prisons and punch the clock.
Another day's fight is lost. And lost with it, any possible vision of reform, or
recognition of the proven benefits in so many other countries achieved
through the regulated legalization of recreational drugs.
Now on 50th Street, Espinoza and I enter the Japanese restaurant. El Alto
sits alone in a quiet corner, beneath a slow-turning ceiling fan that circulates
the scent of raw fish. He's a big man, quiet and graceful, rarely speaking
above a whisper. He'd been helpful to me on many previous excursions. He's
worldly, well connected and liked. Espinoza, speaking in Spanish, fills him
in on our plans and itinerary. El Alto listens intently, squeezing edamame
beans one at a time between his teeth. We considered this meeting our point
of no return. We were either all in, or we would abandon the journey. We

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had weighed the risks, but I felt confident and said so. I'd offered myself to
experiences beyond my control in numerous countries of war, terror,
corruption and disaster. Places where what can go wrong will go wrong, had
gone wrong, and yet in the end, had delivered me in one piece with a
deepening situational awareness (though not a perfect science) of available
cautions within the design in chaos.
It was agreed that I would go to L.A. the next day to coordinate with our
principal point of contact to El Chapo. We ordered sake and indulged the
kind of operating-room humor that might displace our imperfectly scientific
concerns. Outside the restaurant windows, a chanting march of MexicanAmericans flowed by in protest against the Pea Nieto government's
asserted violations of human rights, having allowed their country of origin to
fall prey to a narco regime.
In January 2012, the Mexican film and television star Kate del Castillo, who
famously played a drug lordess in Mexico's popular soap opera La Reina del
Sur, used Twitter to express her mistrust of the Mexican government. She
stated that in a question of trust between governments and cartels, hers
would go to El Chapo. And in that tweet, she expressed a dream, perhaps an
encouragement to El Chapo himself: "Mr. Chapo, wouldn't it be cool that
you started trafficking with love? With cures for diseases, with food for the
homeless children, with alcohol for the retirement homes that don't let the
elderly spend the rest of the days doing whatever the fuck they want.
Imagine trafficking with corrupt politicians instead of women and children
who end up as slaves. Why don't you burn all those whorehouses where
women are worth less than a pack of cigarettes. Without offer, there's no
demand. Come on, Don! You would be the hero of heroes. Let's traffic with
love. You know how to. Life is a business and the only thing that changes is
the merchandise. Don't you agree?" While she was ostracized by many,
Kate's sentiment is widely shared in Mexico. It can be heard in the narco
corrido ballads so popular throughout the country. But her views, unlike
those folkloric lionizations, are rather a continuity of her history of brave
expression and optimistic dreams for her homeland. She had been outspoken
on politics, sex and religion and is among the courageous independent spirits
that democracies are built to protect and cannot exist without.
Her courage is further demonstrated in her willingness to be named in this
article. There are both brutal and corrupt forces within the Mexican
government who oppose her (and indeed, according to Kate, high-ranking

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officials have responded to her public statement with private intimidations),

and hence, a responsibility of the greater public to shepherd those who make
their voices heard.
It perhaps should have come as no surprise that this homegrown icon of
entertainment would catch the interest of a singular fan and fugitive from
Sinaloa. After reading Kate's statement on Twitter, a lawyer representing El
Chapo Guzmn contacted Kate. He said El Seor wanted to send her flowers
in gratitude. She nervously offered her address, but with the gypsy
movements of an actress, the flowers did not find her.
Two years later, in February 2014, a detachment of Mexican marines
captured El Chapo in a Mazatln hotel following a 13-year manhunt. The
images of that arrest were flashed across the world's televisions. While he
was incarcerated at Altiplano prison, El Chapo's attorneys were flooded with
overtures from Hollywood studios. With his dramatic capture, and, perhaps,
the illusion of safe dealings now that El Chapo was locked up, the gringos
were scrambling to tell his story. The seed was planted, and El Chapo,
awakened to the prospect, made plans of his own. He was interested in
seeing the story of his life told on film, but would entrust its telling only to
Kate. The same lawyer again tracked her down, this time through the
Mexican equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, and the imprisoned drug
lord and the actress began to correspond in handwritten letters and BBM
messages.
It was at a social event in Los Angeles when Kate met Espinoza. She learned
he was well connected to financial sources, including those that funded film
projects, and she proposed a partnership to make a film about El Chapo. This
was when Espinoza included our mutual colleague and friend El Alto. I
learned of their intention to make the film, but I did not know Kate or have
any involvement with the project. The three of them met with El Chapo's
lawyer to explore their approach, but it was ultimately determined that direct
access to El Chapo would still be too restricted for their authorized pursuit to
rise above competitive "Chapo" projects that Hollywood would pursue with
or without his participation.
Then came July 2015. El Chapo's prison break. The world, and particularly
Mexico and the United States, was up in arms. How could this happen?! The
DEA and the Justice Department were furious. The fact that Mexican
Interior Secretary Miguel ngel Osorio Chong had refused El Chapo's

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extradition to the United States, then allowed his escape, positioned Chong
and the Pea Nieto administration as global pariahs.
I followed the news of El Chapo's escape and reached out to Espinoza. We
met in the courtyard of a boutique hotel in Paris in late August. He told me
about Kate and that she had been intermittently receiving contact from
Chapo even after the escape. It was then that I posed the idea of a magazine
story. Espinoza's smile of mischief arose, indicating he would arrange for
me to meet Kate back in Los Angeles. At a Santa Monica restaurant, I made
my case, and Kate agreed to make the bridge, sending our names for vetting
across the border. When word came back a week or so later that Chapo had
indeed agreed to meet with us, I called Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone.
Myself, Espinoza and El Alto were given the assignment. And with a letter
from Jann officiating it, we would join Kate, who was our ticket to El
Chapo's trust, then put ourselves in the hands of representatives of the
Sinaloa cartel to coordinate our journey. It had been a month in the planning
by the time Espinoza and I were breathing the New York air that lateSeptember day on 55th Street.
See footage from El Chapo's July prison escape below:
Four days later, on October 2nd, El Alto, Espinoza, Kate and I board a selffinanced charter flight from a Los Angeles-area airport to a city in midMexico. Upon landing, a hotel driver takes us by minivan to the hotel we
had been instructed to book. Suspicious of every living or inanimate thing, I
scan cars and drivers, mothers papoosing infants, grandmothers, peasants on
the street, building tops, curtained windows. I search the skies for
helicopters. There is no question in my mind but that the DEA and the
Mexican government are tracking our movements. From the moment Kate
had gone out on a limb with her tweet of January 2012 through the
beginning of our encrypted negotiations to meet El Chapo, I had been
bewildered by his willingness to risk our visit. If Kate was being surveilled,
so must those named on any shared flight manifest. I see no spying eyes, but
I assume they are there.
Through the windshield as we approach the hotel, I see a casually dressed
man in his forties appear on the sidewalk, simultaneously directing our
driver to the entryway while dialing a number on his cellphone. This is
Alonzo, who, I'm about to learn, is an associate of El Chapo. We grab our
bags and exit the minivan. Almost immediately, the traffic around the

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designated pickup point diminishes. Out of my view, someone is blocking

the neighboring streets. Then, a lone convoy of "up-armor" SUVs appears in
front of our hotel. Alonzo asks us to surrender our electronics and leave
them behind cellphones, computers, etc. I had left mine in Los Angeles,
anticipating this requirement. My colleagues surrender theirs to the hotel
desk. We are whisked into the vehicles. Alonzo rides shotgun, my
colleagues and I in the back. Alonzo and the driver are speaking quick and
quiet Spanish. My own Spanish is weak at best. By day, and put on the spot,
I'm pretty restricted to hola and adios. By night, with perhaps a few beers, I
can get by, speaking and listening slowly. The conversation in the front seat
seems unthreatening, just a cooperative exchange of logistics in the
facilitation of our journey. Throughout the hour-and-a-half drive away from
the city and across farmlands, both men receive frequent BBM messages
perhaps updates on our route to keep our convoy safe. With each message
received, the needle on the speedometer rises; we are cruising at well over
100 miles per hour. I like speed. But not without my own hands on the
wheel. To calm myself, I pretend I have any reason to memorize the route of
our journey. It's that upon which I concentrate, and not the exchanges
between the two strangers leading our pursuit.
We arrive at a dirt airfield. Security men in tailored suits stand beside two
six-seat single-engine prop planes. It isn't until boarding one of the two
planes that I realize that our driver had been the 29-yearold son of El Chapo,
Alfredo Guzmn. He boards beside me, designated among our personal
escorts to see his father. He's handsome, lean and smartly dressed, with a
wristwatch that might be of more value than the money housed by the
central banks of most nation-states. He's got one hell of a wristwatch.
The planes take off, and we travel a couple of hours. Two bouncing birds
side by side through the thermals over the mountainous jungle. It once again
occurs to me all the risks that are being taken by El Chapo in receiving us.
We had not been blindfolded, and any experienced traveler might have been
able to collect a series of triangulated landmarks to re-navigate the journey.
But through his faith in Kate, whom he'd only ever known through letters or
BBM, are we enjoying an unusual trust. I ask Alfredo how he can be sure we
are not being followed or surveilled. He smiles (I note he doesn't blink
much) and points out a red scrambler switch below the cockpit controls.
"That switch blocks ground radar," he says. He adds that they have an inside
man who provides notification when the military's high-altitude surveillance
plane has been deployed. He has great confidence that there are no unwanted

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eyes on us. With Kate helping along in translations, we chat throughout the
flight. I'm mindful not to say anything that may alienate his father's welcome
before we've even arrived.
It's been about two hours of flight, when we descend from above the lush
peaks to ward a sea-level field. The pilot, using his encrypted cellphone,
talks to the ground. I sense that the military is beefing up operations in its
search area. Our original landing zone has suddenly been deemed insecure.
After quite a bit of chatter from ground to air, and some unnervingly low
altitude circling, we find an alternate dirt patch where two SUVs wait in the
shade of an adjacent tree line, and land. The flight had been just bumpy
enough that each of us had taken a few swigs off a bottle of Honor tequila, a
new brand that Kate is marketing. I step from plane to earth, ever so slightly
sobering my bearings, and move toward the beckoning waves of waiting
drivers. I throw my satchel into the open back of one of the SUVs, and
lumber over to the tree line to take a piss. Dick in hand, I do consider it
among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and
take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.
Espinoza had recently undergone back surgery. He stretched, readjusted his
surgical corset, exposing it. It dawns on me that one of our greeters might
mistake the corset for a device that contains a wire, a chip, a tracker. With
all their eyes on him, Espinoza methodically adjusts the Velcro toward his
belly, slowly looks up, sharing his trademark smile with the suspicious eyes
around him. Then, "Cirugia de espalda [back surgery]," he says. Situation
defused.
We embark into the dense, mountainous jungle in a two-truck convoy,
crossing through river after river for seven long hours. Espinoza and El Alto,
with a driver in the front vehicle, myself and Kate with Alonzo and Alfredo
in the rear. At times the jungle opens up to farmland, then closes again into
forest. As the elevation begins to climb, road signage announces
approaching townships. And then, as it seems we are at the entrance of Oz,
the highest peak visibly within reach, we arrive at a military checkpoint.
Two uniformed government soldiers, weapons at the ready, approach our
vehicle. Alfredo lowers his passenger window; the soldiers back away,
looking embarrassed, and wave us through. Wow. So it is, the power of a
Guzman face. And the corruption of an institution. Did this mean we were
nearing the man?

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It was still several hours into the jungle before any sign we were getting
closer. Then, strangers appear as if from nowhere, onto the dirt track,
checking in with our drivers and exchanging hand radios. We move on.
Small villages materialize from the jungle; protective peasant eyes relax at
the wave of a familiar driver. Cellphones are of no use here, so I imagine
there are radio repeaters on topographical high points facilitating their
internal communications.
We'd left Los Angeles at 7 a.m. By 9 p.m. on the dash clock we arrive at a
clearing where several SUVs are parked. A small crew of men hover. On a
knoll above, I see a few weathered bungalows. I get out of the truck, search
the faces of the crew for approval that I may walk to the trunk to secure my
bag. Nods follow. I move. And, when I do...there he is. Right beside the
truck. The world's most famous fugitive: El Chapo. My mind is an instant
flip book to the hundreds of pictures and news reports I had scoured. There
is no doubt this is the real deal. He's wearing a casual patterned silk shirt,
pressed black jeans, and he appears remarkably well-groomed and healthy
for a man on the run. He opens Kate's door and greets her like a daughter
returning from college. It seems important to him to express the warm
affection in person that, until now, he'd only had occasion to communicate
from afar. After greeting her, he turns to me with a hospitable smile, putting
out his outstretched hand. I take it. He pulls me into a "compadre" hug, looks
me in the eyes and speaks a lengthy greeting in Spanish too fast for my ears.
I gather up the presence of mind to explain to him in broken Spanish that I
would depend on Kate to translate as the night went on. Only then does he
realize his greeting had not been understood. He jokes to his crew, laughing
at his own assumption that I speak Spanish and at my momentary
disorientation that I've let him go on at such length in his greeting.
We are brought up some steps to a flat area on the knoll beside the
bungalows. A local family caters a buffet of tacos, enchiladas, chicken, rice,
beans, fresh salsa and . . . carne asada. "Carne Asada," an oft-used cartel
term describing the decimated bodies in cities like Juarez after mass narco
executions. Hence, I go for the tacos. He walks us to a picnic table; we are
offered drinks. We sit in the low illumination of some string lights, but the
perimeter falls into abrupt darkness. I see no more than 30 or 35 people. (El
Chapo later confided to El Alto that, out of sight, another hundred of his
soldiers were present in the immediate area.) There are no long-barrel
weapons in sight. No Danny Trejo types. My impression of his crew is more
in sync with what one would imagine of students at a Mexico City

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university. Clean-cut, well-dressed and mannered. Not a smoker in the

bunch. Only two or three of the guys wear small shoulder bags that hang low
beside their waists, where I assume small arms are carried. Our host, it
seems to me, is concerned that Kate, as the lone female among us, not face
intimidating visions of force. This assumption would be borne out several
hours later.
As we sit at the picnic table, introductions are made. To my left, Alonzo.
Alonzo is, as it turns out, one among El Chapo's lawyers. When speaking of
El Chapo's lawyers, it gets a little murky. During his imprisonment, the only
visits allowed were with "lawyers." Evidently, some who would be more
accurately described as lieutenants had been dubbed or perhaps certified by
the expedition of power as part of his legal team. Alonzo visited El Chapo at
Altiplano just two hours before his audacious escape. According to Alonzo,
he was unaware of the escape plan. But he notes that did not spare him a
brutal beating by interrogators afterward.
To my right, Rodrigo. Rodrigo is godfather to Chapo's twin four-year-old
girls by his 26-year-old beauty-queen wife, Emma Coronel. Rodrigo is the
one who has me concerned. The look in his eye is far away, but locked dead
on me. My speculation goes audio. I hear chain saws. I feel splatter. I am
Sean's dubitable paranoia. My eyes are compelled to drift to Rodrigo's right.
There is Ivan, Chapo's eldest son. At 32, he is considered the heir to the
Sinaloa cartel. He's attentive with a calm maturity. Like his brother, he
boasts a fabulous wristwatch. And directly across from me, our host, with
Kate to his right. Beside Alonzo, Alfredo. El Alto sits at the end of the table.
Espinoza, still standing, apologizes to Chapo and asks if he may lay down
for an hour to rest his back. Espinoza's funny this way. It's as if we had spent
these endless grueling hours hiking a vertical volcanic summit to the cone,
and now, just three steps from viewing the ring fault of the caldera, he says,
"I'm gonna take a nap. I'll look into the hole later."
With Kate translating, I begin to explain my intentions. I felt increasingly
that I had arrived as a curiosity to him. The lone gringo among my
colleagues, who'd ridden on the coattails of El Chapo's faith in Kate. I felt
his amusement as I put my cards on the table. He asks about my relationship
with the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez with what seems to be a
probing of my willingness to be vilified through associations.

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I speak to our friendship in a way that seems to pass an intuitive litmus test
measuring the independence of my perspective. I tell him, up front, that I
had a family member who worked with the Drug Enforcement Agency, that
through my work in Haiti (I'm CEO of J/P HRO, a nongovernmental
organization based in Port-au-Prince) I had many relationships inside the
United States government. I assure him that those relationships were by no
means related to my interest in him. My only interest was to ask questions
and deliver his responses, to be weighed by readers, whether in balance or
contempt.
I tell him that I understood that in the mainstream narrative of narcos, the
undersung hypocrisy is in the complicity of buyers. I could not sell him on a
bait-and-switch, and I knew that in the writing of any piece, my only
genuine cards to play were to expose myself as one fascinated and willing to
suspend judgment. I understood that whatever else might be said of him, it
was clear to me he was not a tourist in our big world.
Throughout my introduction, Chapo smiles a warm smile. In fact, in what
would be a seven-hour sit-down, I saw him without that smile only in brief
flashes. As has been said of many notorious men, he has an indisputable
charisma. When I ask about his dynamic with the Mexican government, he
pauses. "Talking about politicians, I keep my opinion to myself. They go do
their thing and I do mine."
See footage of El Chapo after his recapture below:
Beneath his smile, there is a doubtlessness to his facial expression. A
question comes to mind as I observe his face. Both as he speaks as while he
listens. What is it that removes all doubt from a man's eyes? Is it power?
Admirable clarity? Or soullessness? Soullessness...wasn't it that that my
moral conditioning was obliged to recognize in him? Wasn't it soullessness
that I must perceive in him for myself to be perceived here as other than a
Pollyanna? An apologist? I tried hard, folks. I really did. And reminded
myself over and over of the incredible life loss, the devastation existing in
all corners of the narco world. "I don't want to be portrayed as a nun," El
Chapo says. Though this portrayal had not occurred to me. This simple man
from a simple place, surrounded by the simple affections of his sons to their
father, and his toward them, does not initially strike me as the big bad wolf
of lore. His presence conjures questions of cultural complexity and context,

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of survivalists and capitalists, farmers and technocrats, clever entrepreneurs

of every ilk, some say silver, and others lead.
A server delivers a bottle of tequila. El Chapo pours each of us three fingers.
In toast, he looks to Kate. "I don't usually drink," he says, "but I want to
drink with you." After a raise of the glass, I take a polite sip. He asks me if
many people in the United States know about him. "Oh, yeah," I say, and
inform him that the night before leaving for Mexico, I had seen that the
Fusion Channel was repeating its special-edition Chasing El Chapo. He
seems to delight in the absurdity of this, and as he and his cohorts share a
chuckle, I look to the sky and wonder how funny it would be if there were a
weaponized drone above us. We are in a clearing, sitting right out in the
open. I down the tequila, and the drone goes away.
I give in to the sense of security offered by the calm of Chapo and his men.
There is the pervasive feeling that if there were a threat, they would know it.
We eat, drink, and talk for hours. He is interested in the movie business and
how it works. He's unimpressed with its financial yield. The P&L high side
doesn't add up to the downside risk for him. He suggests to us that we
consider switching our career paths to the oil business. He says he would
aspire to the energy sector, but that his funds, being illicit, restrict his
investment opportunities. He cites (but asks me not to name in print) a host
of corrupt major corporations, both within Mexico and abroad. He notes
with delighted disdain several through which his money has been laundered,
and who take their own cynical slice of the narco pie.
"How much money will you make writing this article?" he asks. I answer
that when I do journalism, I take no payment. I could see that, to him, the
idea of doing any kind of work without payment is a fool's game. Unlike the
gangsters we're used to, the John Gotti's who claimed to be simple
businessmen hiding behind numerous international front companies, El
Chapo sticks to an illicit game, proudly volunteering, "I supply more heroin,
methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I
have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats."
He is entirely unapologetic. Against the challenges of doing business in such
a clandestine industry he has built an empire. I am reminded of press
accounts alleging a hundred-million-dollar bounty the man across from me
is said to have put on Donald Trump's life. I mention Trump. El Chapo
smiles, ironically saying, "Ah! Mi amigo!" His unguarded will to speak

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freely, his comfort with his station in life and ownership of extraordinary
justifications, conjure Tony Montana in Oliver Stone's Scarface. It's the
dinner scene where Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, walks out on Al
Pacino's Tony Montana, loudly assailing him in a public place. The patrons
at the restaurant stare at him, but rather than hide in humiliation, he stands
and lectures them. "You're all a bunch of fucking assholes. You know why?
You don't have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me.
You need people like me. So you can point your fucking fingers and say,
'That's the bad guy.' So what's that make you? Good? You're not good. You
just know how to hide...how to lie. Me? I don't have that problem. Me?! I
always tell the truth even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy.
C'mon. Last time you're gonna see a bad guy like this again, lemme tell ya!"
I'm curious, in the current pandemonium of the Middle East, what impact
those frenzied opiate economies may have on his business. I ask him, "Of all
the countries and cultures with whom you do business, which is the most
difficult?" Smiling, he shakes his head and says an unequivocal "None."
There is no politician who could answer the same question so clearly or
successfully, but then again, the challenges are quite different for a global
power broker who simply removes any obstacle to "difficulties."
Having explained my intention, I ask if he would grant two days for a formal
interview. My colleagues would be leaving in the morning but I offer to stay
behind to record our conversations. He pauses before responding. He says, "I
just met you. I will do it in eight days. Can you come back in eight days?" I
say I can. I ask to take a photograph together so that I could verify to my
editors at Rolling Stone that the planned meeting had taken place.
"Adelante," he says. We all rise from the table as a group and follow Chapo
into one of the bungalows. Once inside, we see the first sign of heavy arms.
An M16 lies on a couch opposite the neutral white wall against which we
would take the photograph. I explain that, for authentication purposes, it
would be best if we are shaking hands, looking into the camera, but not
smiling. He obliges. The picture is taken on Alfredo's cellphone. It would be
sent to me at a later date.
When we return to the picnic table, it seems to me that we accomplished
what we came to do. We had come to agreement that he would submit to a
two-day interview upon my return. As thoughts of surveillance drones and
military raids come back into my head, I re-engage the tequila and scan 360
degrees for where I and my colleagues may lay flat and find cover should we

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have been followed and a raid initiated. In the darkness, it was difficult to
imagine a safe place, and El Chapo's world is anything but.
As Espinoza returns from his slumber, Kate, succumbing to the exhausting
day's journey and the solace of a few tequilas, accepts the escort of El Chapo
to her sleeping quarters. As he walks her alone toward the dimly lit
bungalow, I can't help but have a primal moment of concern. I consider
offering to accompany them, though the circumstances would certainly
prove any protective action futile. Before my adrenal rush of paranoia can
inspire insult or injury, Chapo has returned.
But there is a change. With Kate tucked cozily into bed, his crew and he are
fast and furious into body armor, strapping long-barrel weapons and hipclipped grenades. The battle-ready army of jungle guerrillas who had been
standing down earlier in the night on her behalf are now returning to what I
assume is a more typical posture. El Chapo, too, is strapped and ready to
command.
Following this Clark Kent-into-Superman extravaganza, Chapo returns to
the table. His demeanor, casual. His battle gear, anything but. Espinoza and
El Alto share translation duties. We compare notes on cultures. We ask
lighthearted questions, though the environment has gotten far less
lighthearted. Despite that, I'm feeling frustrated at having to wait eight days
to get him in a corner to ask everything I think the world wants to know. I
feel naked without pen and paper. So I only ask questions one couldn't forget
the answers to. Did you know Pablo Escobar? Chapo answers, "Yes, I met
him once at his house. Big house." He smiles. See your mother much? "All
the time. I hoped we would meet at my ranch and you could meet my
mother. She knows me better than I do. But something came up and we had
to change the plan." I assume he was insinuating inside information that the
ranch had again come under observation by authorities.
It has been several hours, and El Alto and I share a nod indicating our
mutual sense: the core of soldiers around El Chapo are getting fidgety. A
clock of some kind is ticking in them. It must have been about four a.m. by
this time. El Chapo stands, concluding the night, thanking us for our visit.
We follow him to where the family who had cooked our dinner stands
dutifully behind a serving table. He takes each of them by the hand
graciously; giving them thanks, and with a look, he invites us to do the same.
He walks us back toward the same bungalow where he had earlier escorted

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Kate. In a narrow, dark passage between ours and an adjacent bungalow,

Chapo puts his arm over my shoulder and renews his request that I see him
in eight days. "I'll be saying goodbye now," he says. At this moment, I expel
a minor traveler's flatulence (sorry), and with it, I experience the same
chivalry he'd offered when putting Kate to bed, as he pretends not to notice.
We escape its subtle brume, and I join my colleagues inside the bungalow.
There are two beds and one couch a short distance from where Kate can be
seen sleeping on a third bed behind a privacy divider. Espinoza returns to the
bed he'd claimed upon our arrival.
Now it is down to El Alto and I looking at each other. His six-foot-three
frame towers above me, knowing he is inadvertently caught with proximity
to the five-foot-three couch, and that I, at five feet nine, am left standing
only inches from a king-size bed. It's a Mexican standoff. We'd both traveled
hard that day, both slightly medicated by tequila through the night. I only
know that if I was going to take the short couch, it would be at gunpoint. I
negotiate. "Listen, man. You don't have to sleep on that couch. The bed's
big. We can talk and cuddle." With this prospect, I win the negotiation. In
his grace and discretion, El Alto makes his choice: "I'll go with the couch."
As I collapse onto the bed, I hear El Chapo's convoy drive away into the
night jungle.
Not two hours later, we are abruptly awakened by Alonzo. "A storm is
coming!" he says. "We have to move!" The dirt tracks of the jungle are
difficult to navigate when monsoon rains saturate them. We'd have to beat
the rain to the tarmac road. At daybreak, we just make it to pavement as the
ocean falls from the sky and great bolts of lightning illuminate the inside of
our vehicle like flash-bang grenades. Alonzo asks Kate to drive. She jumps
at the chance to break the monotony, and takes the wheel like a trouper.
Meanwhile, El Alto hops into the open flatbed, his sleep-starved brain so
hungry for oxygen that he's oblivious to the pouring rain. In the backseat,
Alonzo whispers to me that there are multiple military checkpoints along
these roads, and they tend to wave by vehicles driven by women. In this
case, the rain falls hard enough that soldiers have abandoned their posts for
cover. Mercifully, we are stopped by no one. Rather than risk being
vaporized in a small aircraft by a lightning storm, we opted for the eighthour drive back to the city where we'd started. Espinoza reclines in the
passenger seat to rest his back.

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By the time we hit the city, the weather has cleared. We shower in the rooms
we'd booked. Twenty minutes later, Kate, Espinoza and I, along with
Alonzo, get into two taxicabs and head to the airport. El Alto, who'd spent
his two hours' sleep the night before on a firm couch a full foot shorter than
he, then waterlogged himself in the flatbed, elects to stay behind in the
comfort of the hotel bed for the night and leave the following day. Alonzo
heads to Mexico City. Espinoza to Europe. So Kate and I board the charter
back to Los Angeles. Our heads are spinning. Had we really just been where
we were? With whom we'd been? It seemed such a strange dream.
Somehow, with all the planning and the travel, I still hadn't believed that
we'd actually gotten to El Chapo. I'd imagined us arriving to a gentle
apology, that for some unexplained security reason the visit could not take
place, and we'd be going home to Los Angeles empty-handed. But that's not
what happened.
When we land back on home turf, Kate and I part ways. I am picked up by a
car service. In the backseat, my L.A.-based assistant had left a manila
envelope with my cellphone in it. I turn on the phone to the explosion of a
two-day backlog of e-mails and text messages. Ignoring them, I hit my
browser for updates. What I didn't know, and what was not yet being
reported, was that from the time the weather cleared, a military siege on
Sinaloa was imminent. Evidently, El Chapo and his men, after leaving us the
night before, had skirted through the jungle back to a ranch property.
According to media reports that didn't come until days later, a cellphone
among his crew had been tracked. From the time the military and the DEA
moved in on them, the reports of what happened are conflicted. A source
familiar with the cartel informed me on October 3rd that the initial siege had
begun. That source and another on the ground in Sinaloa reported that over
the next several days, two military helicopters were shot down and Mexican
marine ground troops laid siege to several ranch properties. There were
additional reports that 13 Sinaloa communities had been ravaged with
gunfire during simultaneous raids. La Comision Nacional de los Derechos
Humanos (the National Commission for Human Rights) struggled to enter
the area but were prohibited. Villagers protested their treatment by the
military. By the time news agencies broadcast the story in the United States,
the mayhem throughout Sinaloa in those days had been essentially reduced
to a nearly successful raid that had surgically targeted only Chapo and his
men, and claimed he had been injured in flight with face and leg wounds.

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El Chapo's own account would later be shared with me, through a BBM
exchange he had with Kate. "On October 6th, there was an operation....Two
helicopters and 6 BlackHawks began a confrontation upon their arrival. The
marines dispersed throughout the farms. The families had to escape and
abandon their homes with the fear of being killed. We still don't know how
many dead in total." When asked about the reports of his own injuries,
Chapo responded, "Not like they said. I only hurt my leg a little bit."
Four days later, I fly from Los Angeles to Lima, Peru, to participate in a
World Bank panel discussion. After a few days in Lima, and an overnight in
Managua, Nicaragua, to visit an old friend, it's October 11th the day El
Chapo and I had agreed to meet. Understandably, he and his crew had gone
dark during the raids. Nonetheless, I board an available flight to a nearby
Mexican city, and leave a message for Alonzo that I would wait in that
Mexican airport for several hours, to make sure they know that I had
honored my commitment to return on the eighth day. I land in the late
afternoon, then sit around the airport until the evening hours, hoping a
stranger will tap me on the shoulder and tell me he is a friend of Alonzo's
and that I should leave with him. It also occurs to me, once again, that I
might be under the eyes of Mexican intelligence or the DEA. In either case,
no contact is made. So I board a flight later that evening on my own, and
return to Los Angeles.
In the weeks that follow, I continue to make attempts to contact El Chapo. In
that time, massive sweeps by military and law enforcement lead to hundreds
of arrests, seizures and several extraditions of cartel personnel to the United
States. Reports that a rising drug gang, the CJNG (Jalisco New Generation
Cartel), may have been involved with El Chapo's prison escape and that
CJNG may become, in effect, the paramilitary wing of the Sinaloa cartel,
have added to governmental concerns. In other words, with the water
boiling, our cartel intermediaries had gone principally off radar, or possibly
been arrested, or killed.
Finally, Kate is able to re-establish contact through a web of BBM devices.
But the heat of enforcement and surveillance had become extreme. I even
received a credible tip that the DEA had indeed become aware of our
journey to Mexico. Booking any flight to Mexico now would surely raise red
flags. I make a plan to hide myself in the trunk of a friend's car and be driven
to a waiting rental vehicle. I would then drive the rental from L.A. to Yuma,
Arizona, then cross the border at Algodones. I'm familiar with this crossing

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papers are not checked, and vehicles are waved through without scrutiny.
I'd then drive the 80-some-odd miles from the border to the Grande Desierto,
and the village of El Golfo de Santa Clara, rendezvousing with a cartel plane
that could take me to El Chapo. But Kate is insistent that if I am to make that
journey, she would have to come with me. The route is relatively safe, but
there are some narco-controlled areas, including a few that are not friendly
to the Sinaloa cartel. There were also two military checkpoints the last time I
had driven that route. The idea of a gringo driving with a Mexican film star
would likely draw too much attention, but Kate would have it no other way.
It becomes apparent that the risks outweigh the benefits on all sides, and we
decide that, instead, I will send my questions to El Chapo by BBM. He
agrees that he will record his responses on videotape. Without being present,
I could neither control the questioning nor prod for elaborations to his
responses. In addition, every question sent first had to be translated into
Spanish. Remarkably, while Chapo has access to hundreds of soldiers and
associates at all times, apparently not one speaks English.
At the end of each day that passed without receipt of the video, Kate would
reassure me that it was only one more day away. But each night, El Chapo
contacted her with more delays and apparent doubts. Not about my inquiries,
but seemingly about how to make a tape of himself. "Kate, let me get this
straight. The guy runs a multibillion-dollar business with a network of at
least 50 countries, and there's not one fucker down there in the jungle with
him who speaks a word of friggin' English? Now tonight, you're telling me
his BBM went on the blink, that he's got hardly any access to a goddamn
computer?! Are you saying he doesn't have the technical capability to make
a self-video and smuggle it into the United States?"
I ask myself, How in the fuck does anyone run a business that way?! I go
Full-Trump-Gringo on Kate, battering her daily by phone, text and
encrypted email. In the end, the delay had nothing to do with technical
incompetence. Big surprise. Whatever villainy is attributable to this man,
and his indisputable street genius, he is also a humble, rural Mexican, whose
perception of his place in the world offers a window into an extraordinary
riddle of cultural disparity. It became evident that the peasant-farmer-turnedbillionaire-drug-lord seemed to be overwhelmed and somewhat bewildered
at the notion that he may be of interest to the world beyond the mountains.
And the day-after-day delays might reveal an insecurity in him, like an
awkward teenager bashful to go unguided before the camera. Or had all of
this been an orchestrated performance?

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When those hoops had finally been jumped through, mostly by Kate but at
my relentless direction, the only retaliation I was left fearing during my
engagement with El Chapo Guzmn and the Sinaloa cartel was the potential
wrath of a Mexican actress toward an American actor who had singlemindedly abused his friendship with her to retrieve the needed video. And
then an encrypted message came from Kate: "Got it!" I nearly hit the ceiling
with excitement as Kate's follow-up dinged on my phone, "...you pushy
motherfucker." I'd earned that. Evidently, a courier for El Chapo had
delivered her the video. Kate and I met up, I made my apologies, and she
transferred the video from her device to mine. At home, I turned down the
lights, sat with an English transcription provided by Kate, which began with
her note: "The video runs for 17 minutes. Press play."
He sits in a turquoise-and-navy paisley long-sleeve button-down shirt and
clean black slacks on a randomly placed stool. The signature mustache that
he wore in our last meeting, now gone. His trademark black trucker's hat,
absent. His hair combed, or perhaps cap-matted, conjuring the vision of a
wide-eyed schoolboy unsure of his teacher's summons. His hands folded
across each other, a self-soothing thumb crossing the knuckle of the other.
Beside him, a short white brick wall topped by a chain-link fence. Behind
that, a white 4x4 pickup truck. The location appears as a large, ranch-like
property with low-lying mountains far in the distance and the intermittent
cockadoodledoo of farm roosters serving as the Greek chorus to the
interview. Throughout the video, we see farm workers and paramilitaries
crossing behind him. A German shepherd sniffs the dirt and wanders out of
frame.
He begins: "I want to make clear that this interview is for the exclusive use
of Miss Kate del Castillo and Mister Sean Penn." The image goes black.
When it returns, so has he to the comfort of his trucker hat.
Of the many questions I'd sent El Chapo, a cameraman out of frame asks a
few of them directly, paraphrases others, softens many and skips some
altogether.
How was your childhood?
I remember from the time I was six until now, my parents, a very humble
family, very poor, I remember how my mom made bread to support the
family. I would sell it, I sold oranges, I sold soft drinks, I sold candy. My

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mom, she was a hard worker, she worked a lot. We grew corn, beans. I took
care of my grandmother's cattle and chopped wood.
And how did you get involved in the drug business?
Well, from the time I was 15 and after, where I come from, which is the
municipality of Badiraguato, I was raised in a ranch named La Tuna, in that
area, and up until today, there are no job opportunities. The only way to have
money to buy food, to survive, is to grow poppy, marijuana, and at that age,
I began to grow it, to cultivate it and to sell it. That is what I can tell you.
How did you leave there? How did it all expand?
From there, from my ranch, I started to leave at 18 and went to Culiacan,
then after to Guadalajara, but never without visiting my ranch, even up until
today, because my mom, thanks to God, is still alive, out there in our ranch,
which is La Tuna, and so, that is how things have been.
How has your family life changed from then to now?
Very good my children, my brothers, my nephews. We all get along well,
very normal. Very good.
And now that you are free, how has it affected you?
Well, as for being free happy, because freedom is really nice, and pressure,
well, for me it's normal, because I've had to be careful for a few years now in
certain cities, and, no, I don't feel anything that hurts my health or my mind.
I feel good.
Is it true what they say that drugs destroy humanity and bring harm?
Well, it's a reality that drugs destroy. Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew
up there was no other way and there still isn't a way to survive, no way to
work in our economy to be able to make a living.
Do you think it is true you are responsible for the high level of drug
addiction in the world?
No, that is false, because the day I don't exist, it's not going to decrease in
any way at all. Drug trafficking? That's false.
Did your drug business grow and expand when you were in jail?
From what I can tell, and what I know, everything is the same. Nothing has
decreased. Nothing has increased.

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What about the violence attached to this type of activity?

In part, it is because already some people already grow up with problems,
and there is some envy and they have information against someone else.
That is what creates violence.
Do you consider yourself a violent person?
No, sir.
Are you prone to violence, or do you use it as a last resort?
Look, all I do is defend myself, nothing more. But do I start trouble? Never.
What is your opinion about the situation in Mexico, what is the outlook
for Mexico?
Well, drug trafficking is already part of a culture that originated from the
ancestors. And not only in Mexico. This is worldwide.
Do you consider your activity, your organization, a cartel?
No, sir, not at all. Because people who dedicate their lives to this activity do
not depend on me.
How has this business evolved from the time you started up until today?
Big difference. Today there are lots of drugs, and back then, the only ones
we knew were marijuana and poppy.
What is the difference in people now compared to back then?
Big difference, because now, day after day, villages are getting bigger, and
there's more of us, and lots of different ways of thinking.
What is the outlook for the business? Do you think it will disappear?
Will it grow instead?
No, it will not end because as time goes by, we are more people, and this
will never end.
Do you think terrorism activities in the Middle East will, in any way,
impact the future of drug trafficking?
No, sir. It doesn't make a difference at all.
You saw how the final days of Escobar were. How do you see your final
days with respect to this business?
I know one day I will die. I hope it's of natural causes.

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The U.S. government thinks that the Mexican government does not
want to arrest you. What they want to do is to kill you. What do you
think?
No, I think that if they find me, they'll arrest me, of course.
With respect to your activities, what do you think the impact on Mexico
is? Do you think there is a substantial impact?
Not at all. Not at all.
Why?
Because drug trafficking does not depend on just one person. It depends on a
lot of people.
What is your opinion about who is to blame here, those who sell drugs,
or the people who use drugs and create a demand for them? What is the
relationship between production, sale and consumption?
If there was no consumption, there would be no sales. It is true that
consumption, day after day, becomes bigger and bigger. So it sells and sells.
We hear avocado is good for you, lime is good for you, guanabana is
good for you. But we never hear anyone doing any publicity with
respect to drugs. Have you done anything to induce the public to
consume more drugs?
Not at all. That attracts attention. People, in a way, want to know how it
feels or how it tastes. And then the addiction gets bigger.
Do you have any dreams? Do you dream?
Whatever is normal. But dreaming daily? No.
But you must have some dreams, some hopes for your life?
I want to live with my family the days God gives me.
If you could change the world, would you?
For me, the way things are, I'm happy.
How is your relationship with your mom?
My relationship? Perfect. Very well.
Is it one of respect?
Yes, sir, respect, affection and love.

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How do you see the future for your sons and daughters?
Very well. They get along right. The family is tight.
How about your life? How has your life changed, how have you lived it
since you escaped?
Lots of happiness because of my freedom.
Did you ever use drugs?
No, sir. Many years ago, yes, I did try them. But an addict? No.
How long ago?
I haven't done any drugs in the last 20 years.
Did it not worry you that you might be putting your family at risk with
your escape?
Yes, sir.
For your recent escape, did you pursue your freedom at any cost, at the
expense of anybody?
I never thought of hurting anyone. All I did was ask God, and things worked
out. Everything was perfect. I am here, thank God.
The two times you escaped, it is worth mentioning, there was no
violence.
With me, it did not come to that. In other situations, what's been seen, things
occur differently, but here, we did not use any violence.
Bearing in mind what has been written about you, what one can see on
TV, things are said about you in Mexico, what kind of message would
you like to convey to the people of Mexico?
Well, I can say it's normal that people have mixed feelings because some
people know me and others don't. That is the reason I say it is normal.
Because those who do not know me can have their doubts about saying if, in
this case, I'm a good person or not.
If I ask you to define yourself as a person, if I ask you to pretend you
are not Joaqun, instead you are the person who knows him better than
anybody else in the world, how would you define yourself?
Well, if I knew him with respect, and from my point of view, it's a person
who's not looking for problems in any way. In any way.

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Since our late-night visit in the Mexican mountains, raids on ranches there
have been relentless. A war zone. Navy helicopters waging air assaults and
inserting troops. Helos shot down by Sinaloa cartel gunmen. Marines killed.
Cartel fighters killed. Campasinos killed or displaced. Rumors spread that El
Chapo escaped to Guatemala, or even further, into South America. But no.
He was right there where he was born and raised. On Friday, January 8th,
2016, it happened. El Chapo was captured and arrested alive.
I think of that night, of that calm before the storm, and the otherworldly
experience of sitting with a man so seemingly serene, despite his living a
reality so surreal. I had not gotten the kind of in-depth interview I'd hoped to
achieve. Not challenged checkers with chess, nor vice versa. But perhaps, at
least, retrieved a glimpse from the other side, and what is for me an
affirmation of the dumb-show of demonization that has demanded such an
extraordinary focus of assets toward the capture or killing of any one
individual black hat.
Still, today, there are little boys in Sinaloa who draw play-money pesos,
whose fathers and grandfathers before them harvested the only product
they'd ever known to morph those play pesos into real dollars. They wonder
at our outrage as we, our children, friends, neighbors, bosses, banks, brothers
and sisters finance the whole damn thing. Without a paradigm shift,
understanding the economics and illness of addiction, parents in Mexico and
the U.S. will increasingly risk replacing that standard parting question to
their teens off for a social evening from "Where are you going tonight?" to
"Where are you dying tonight?"
El Chapo? It won't be long, I'm sure, before the Sinaloa cartel's next
shipment into the United States is the man himself.
How the Cartels Work
One of the strangest things about the drug war that is tearing Mexico apart is
how little of the bloodshed has spilled over the border. On one side of the
Rio Grande is Ciudad Jurez, one of the most violent cities on the planet,
with 1,600 drug-related murders last year. On the other side is El Paso,
Texas, the third-safest city in America, with only 18 killings. The 100-to-1
disparity in murders underscores a little-understood reality in the War on
Drugs: The current crop of Mexican drug lords is not a bunch of Scarfacestyle lunatics high on coke and hellbent on violence. Instead, they are highly

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sophisticated executives, pursuing profit by the cheapest and most efficient

means possible.
Torturing rivals and beheading victims serves a purpose in Mexico, where
drug-related violence has killed 12,000 people in the past three years;
narcotraficantes routinely use brutality to subdue competitors, eliminate
witnesses and frighten off police recruits. But north of the border, the drug
lords are as corporate and hyperorganized as Walmart, replacing the topdown approach of their Colombian predecessors with a new business model
one that outsources the street-level grunt work to an army of illegal
immigrants. With business booming prices are steady and demand
remains high unleashing a Mexican-style rampage in this country would
only risk riling up U.S. law enforcement. The Mexican cartels aren't fighting
the War on Drugs in the United States for a very simple reason: They've
already won.
As the violence in Mexico has escalated, federal officials have stepped up
major busts against the cartels in the U.S. Earlier this year, in Operation
Xcellerator, the Drug Enforcement Administration made 750 arrests from
California to Maryland, seizing $59 million in cash and 23 tons of narcotics
including 12,000 kilos of coke, 1,200 pounds of meth and 1.3 million hits
of Ecstasy. The operations employ the same law-enforcement tactics used to
disrupt the Mafia in the 1980s, busting low-level flunkies and turning them
into informants. So far, though, the DEA's widely publicized campaign has
been a total bust when it comes to nailing top narcos. The target of
Operation Xcellerator a drug lord from the Sinaloan cartels remains a
fugitive, as do four Mexican drug traffickers designated as "narcotics
kingpins" in July. According to the DEA, the men operate out of Mexico,
overseeing a sophisticated organization in the U.S. that sets prices, tracks
shipments, manages employment and handles payoffs. The group has
divided the border into "plazas," each under the control of a specific
manager. The name of the outfit, appropriately enough, is the Company.
The failure of the DEA raids underscores the fundamental difference
between Italian-American mobsters in Brooklyn and the much more brutal
and ruthless Mexicans. The supposed Mafia "code of silence," called
omert, proved to be little more than a joke as hundreds of wiseguys flipped
to save their own skins, generating a steady stream of convictions. But the
Mexicans have more than a fictional code of conduct: They have hostages.
Every low-level narco busted in the U.S. has family and friends back in

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Mexico who, they know, will be killed by the cartels if they cooperate with
the gringos. Senior DEA agents acknowledge privately that they have yet to
flip a single significant snitch from the cartels. The matrix of punishments
and incentives that destroyed the Mafia racketeering laws, witnessprotection programs, supermax prisons have little relevance to the
Mexican drug lords, who are essentially holding an entire nation at gunpoint.
"Mexicans don't flip," says an undercover DEA agent who participated in
Operation Pocono Powder, a major case against the cartels in New York.
"Part of the way the cartels retain control is through fear. Mexicans will
cooperate to a certain level, but they won't talk about Sinaloa. They know
their family back home will be killed."
The DEA insists that its high-profile busts are having an effect. "In Project
Reckoning, we had 64 cities involved," says Carl Pike of the DEA's Special
Operations Division, citing a bust against the Gulf cartels that resulted in
507 arrests by last year. "We were after their distribution capability. It was
like taking out 64 Walmarts all at once. The Mexicans have to regroup from
ground zero, and it's time-consuming and expensive to do that."
But the Walmart analogy offers a larger insight into how the Mexican cartels
have transformed the drug business in America and why the DEA has
been unable to stop them. In the 1980s, the Colombians tried to directly
control the distribution of their product through a network of low-level
dealers a group prone to stealing, fucking up, getting caught or trying to
take over themselves. Like any good manager, however, the Mexicans
learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Instead of maintaining their
own labor force of dealers a risky and costly proposition at best the
drug lords came up with the same solution as Walmart and countless other
multinational corporations: outsourcing.
To sell their product in America, the Mexicans contract with existing
criminal operations, relying mainly on Hispanic gangs like MS-13 and the
Mexican Mafia. But they also sell to Crips, Bloods, Hells Angels, Puerto
Ricans or Dominicans whoever can move weight reliably. This keeps
their overhead low and reduces potentially risky connections to top
management. It also makes all of the headaches of running the business
wages, benefits, overseeing an untrained and unruly workforce someone
else's problem. "American gangs are not integrated into the Mexican drugtrafficking organizations," says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the

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Violence Policy Center and the author of No Boundaries: Transnational

Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement. "The gangs are wild cards;
their behavior is unpredictable. There's no advantage to the Mexican cartels
to bring them into their structure. The Mexicans are happy to sell them
drugs, but they keep them at arm's length. They use them sometimes as
muscle or disciplinarians, but only on a contract basis."
Street-level dealers, mostly drawn from the pool of millions of Mexican
immigrants stuck in menial jobs in the U.S., effectively become what
Amway calls "IBOs," or Independent Business Owners. They sell all the
crank and crack they can, hoping to boost their sales status from an Amwaylike Silver to Gold to Platinum, providing them with ever-larger supplies of
product to move. "The low-level guys are working menial jobs as they
establish themselves as a drug dealer," says Greg Borland, the DEA assistant
special agent in charge of Alabama. "They are the ones who are like Tony
Montana in Scarface. They start small and try to make something of
themselves."
Higher-level dealers are required to keep a low profile and live modestly, as
if they were regional managers for a chain of fast-food restaurants. If one
gets busted, there's rarely a link that can be traced back to the cartels and
even if there is, the dealer knows that his family back in Mexico is certain to
be executed if he talks to the feds. "The structure is designed to minimize the
risk by minimizing the number of sales or 'touches' that have to be made,"
says Borland. "The guys at the highest corporate level the cartel guys
only make one sale. It's very low-risk."
Stripped to its essence, what the Mexican cartels sell is not drugs so much as
access to the world's biggest and most lucrative market for drugs. And
thanks to U.S. policy, the Mexicans enjoy a virtual monopoly on the
American market. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan largely closed off the
Caribbean as a passage for narcotics, forcing the Colombians to turn to the
Mexicans for an overland route. In the mid-1990s, after NAFTA made it
easier to ship goods of all kinds across the border, Mexicans became the goto distributors for Afghans, South Asians, Middle Easterners and anyone
else looking to sell illegal substances to Americans.
The result has been the creation of one of the most successful criminal
enterprises in human history. In Sinaloa, money brought back from U.S.
drug deals was long known as "dirt," because of the smell it got from being

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hidden in suitcases underground. But today, the cartels launder Yankee

dollars through a network of global banks, using the same secure electronic
transfers as any self-respecting international business. According to the
government's own estimates, the Mexican cartels generate as much as $38
billion in gross proceeds at the wholesale level every year a sum that
surpasses Dupont and Coca-Cola.
Alabama offers an especially illuminating microcosm of the way the drug
cartels operate in America. The state has been cut up into territories, with no
sign of the violent turf wars over markets that plague Mexico. Distribution in
the north of the state is handled largely by established black drug dealers; the
rural areas are increasingly handled by Mexican migrant workers looking to
supplement their income from day labor. Even if the feds manage to bust a
dealer, it's almost impossible to connect such a low-level flunky to a drug
kingpin in Mexico. "The problem is how smart they are," says Borland. "The
dealers are illegals, so they're not documented. There's no credit cards, no
driver's licenses. They're ghosts. All the dealer is, is a face and a name
which is probably not his real name. One false move and he disappears into
thin air."
Alabama is crisscrossed with interstate highways, making it an excellent site
for transshipment. Police routinely set up roadblocks to catch narcotics on
the highways, but the drug couriers have developed highly sophisticated
evasion techniques. A three-car structure is used. First comes a sweeper car
going 80 or 90 miles per hour, to flush out any law enforcement with a
speeding violation. Next comes a station wagon laden with coke or cash,
often driven by an unthreatening-looking elderly couple. Behind is a chase
car, charged with crashing into the police if a pursuit begins. Even if the
cops do manage to stop the car with the drugs, the courier's higher-ups know
instantly that the shipment has gone off track: The drugs are embedded with
GPS tracking devices.
In a recent bust called Operation Rico Suave, the DEA set up on a drug cell
that was dealing coke in the affluent area of Huntsville, Alabama. According
to agents, the regional manager of the operation was a Mexican named
Galdino Zamora, who oversaw a trucking operation that was secretly
shipping 50 kilos of high-quality cocaine into Alabama each month from
Brownsville, Texas. Unlike Mafia wiseguys, Zamora didn't even bother to
erect a legitimate front operation to fool law enforcement. Instead, he just
hid in plain sight, living inconspicuously in a modest home and spending his

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days taking care of his lawn. From the cartel's perspective, there was no
reason for Zamora to hide: He had contact with only one dealer, a local coke
slinger named Reco Willingham. The DEA made 33 arrests in the case
but the bust didn't make a dent in the flow of drugs. "Only three of those
guys mattered to us," says Borland. "The big guys in Brownsville fled back
to Mexico. They get one glimpse of us, and they're gone. We never see them
again. By now there will be a new Galdino Zamora in Huntsville. We just
don't know who he is. He'll have a different cover. He'll work in a taco
stand."
Perhaps the biggest tool the cartels rely on is the ignorance of their
opponents. In places like Alabama, few cops or federal agents speak Spanish
let alone know the code words and secret signals used by couriers. DEA
agents recount horror stories of local sheriffs who stumble onto a cache of
drugs and then try to run their own case, ordering the courier to get on the
phone and call his contact. "Mexicans are calm, educated, trained," says
Borland. "They don't shit the bed like a high school kid when they're
arrested. They will agree to cooperate and give names and addresses to
appear like they're furthering the investigation. But when they make a phone
call, they will use code words like 'I'm sick' to signal that they've been
busted. The contact walks away from the deal instantly. If it's 10 kilos of
coke, it's nothing to them."
Borland recalls asking one sheriff how he knew that a courier had said what
he was ordered to say when he was forced to call his boss and set up a
meeting to trade the drugs. "That's what I told him to say," replied the
sheriff, who spoke no Spanish. Borland shakes his head in amazement. "I
pointed out to him the fact that the courier is a criminal, and he might be
lying."
The cluelessness of local law enforcement was on conspicuous display last
August, when deputies in Shelby County discovered five bodies splayed on
the floor of an apartment outside Birmingham. To the local cops, it looked
like a classic slaying by the Mexican cartels. The five dead men had all been
systematically tortured before they were killed. Jumper cables, modified to
fit a household outlet, had been attached to their ears to administer electric
shocks. There were traces of duct tape on their mouths and noses, bruises on
their arms and wrists, and burn marks on their ears and necks. Even death
hadn't been the end of their ordeal: The necks of the victims had been
slashed postmortem a signature common to narco murders in Mexico.

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The press went into overdrive: "Cartels Unleash Violence in Region,"

reported The Birmingham News. "Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over from
Mexico," trumpeted The New York Times. The murders in Birmingham,
asserted Newsweek, were "believed to be a hit ordered by Mexican
narcotraffickers."
But the official line was dead wrong. Through an anonymous tip, police
eventually arrested a local drug dealer named Juan Castaneda who had
apparently been carjacked a few weeks earlier carrying nearly $500,000 in
cash he owed his suppliers in Mexico. Castaneda had to get the money back
before it was spent, or he would become the equivalent of a narco
sharecropper, forced to work off the debt by selling drugs for free until the
half million was repaid. (The cartels rarely kill members of their sales force,
preferring to keep them working.) So Castaneda had hired a local hoodlum
known as CJ to find the stickup crew responsible for the carjacking. Police
say CJ and another thug named Train lured four of the victims to a meeting;
the other dead man just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The jumper cables were the ones CJ used to kill his pit bulls when they
became too old to fight. What made national news as evidence of the reach
of the Mexican drug cartels was, it appears, a dope-dealer rip-off gone
haywire.
To anyone who knows how the narcos operate, the murders looked pretty
half-assed by Mexican standards. "The Mexicans don't leave scars," says
Borland. "Some of those neck wounds didn't even lacerate the esophagus.
Down in Mexico they decapitate people and line the heads up like they're
bowling balls. If old CJ wanted to convince us that it was the Mexicans, he
would have to bear down a lot harder."
But the lack of any evidence linking Mexican drug lords to the homicides
did nothing to dissuade Robert Owens, the district attorney in Shelby
County, from treating the murders as part of a broader conflict between rival
cartels. Owens freely admits that his office is unprepared to make sense of
such killings. "Our problem with dealing with cartel-level offenses is that
none of us have the training, background or experience to accurately know
what is going on," Owens says. "I don't know anything about drug cartels."
Chris Curry, the sheriff for Shelby County, is equally blunt. "I'm in the same
situation as police chiefs in little towns all across the country," says Curry,

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who has only two Spanish-speakers on his entire force. "We don't have the
operational intelligence to know what is going on right in front of our eyes."
For now, violence stemming directly from the cartels has been largely
confined to U.S. towns along the Mexican border. In Phoenix, where the
number of kidnappings has tripled since 2000, police have created a special
unit to deal with the wave of abductions. Most of the victims are low-level
couriers who are held for ransom when drug deals go bad: In Georgia, one of
the newest distribution routes for Mexican drugs, a dealer was kidnapped
last year in a dispute over a $300,000 drug debt and held hostage for a week.
Federal officials, however, continue to insist that the drug lords are
personally ordering assaults within the United States. According to the
National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican cartels now operate in 230 cities
across the country. "Their violence is not contained at the border," declared
Michele Leonhart, acting chief of the DEA. "It has reached as far as Chicago
and Detroit, and even into small-town America." In March, according to the
agency, the drug lord known as El Chapo traveled to the Mexican town of
Sonoyta, a few miles south of the Arizona border. There, he reportedly
ordered his men to "use their weapons to defend their loads at all costs"
even if it meant killing American cops. On August 20th, the Justice
Department indicted El Chapo and nine other top drug lords on charges of
criminal conspiracy. Leonhart accused the Mexicans of "calling the shots" in
"street operations in U.S. communities like Chicago and New York."
So far, though, there's little evidence that El Chapo or his rivals want to
wage war in the U.S. To do so would endanger their business and
business is good. As they say in the Sierra Madres, where El Chapo is based,
No mates la gallina de los huevos de oro. "Don't kill the goose that lays the
golden eggs." But if El Chapo should step up the violence, U.S. agencies are
ill-prepared for the fight. In Operation Pocono Powder, for example, the
DEA wasn't able to bust anyone close to the cartels. "The main guy running
the deal was from Sinaloa," says the undercover agent who handled contact
with the man. "He knew how to play the game. We never got a wire on him.
Once the load got taken, he disappeared. The last we heard, an informant
saw him back in Mexico working out at a gym with two security guys
guarding him. All we got was the local guys doing the monkey work."
Although DEA officials still present the bust as an example of a "great
case," it actually underscores how the cartels run rings around the agency,

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even on its home turf. The bust began with an informant in federal prison,
who told the DEA that El Chapo was importing 1,000 kilos of coke a year
into New York through a trucking company in California. The source
enabled undercover agents to make contact with El Chapo's connection in
California and to offer to buy 100 kilos. But the entire investigation was
based on a ruse. The prison "informant," it turned out, had stolen 150 kilos
from the cartels he was simply using the DEA to take out his U.S.
suppliers so he could explain the missing coke to his bosses back in Mexico.
"The guy was full of shit," says the undercover DEA agent. "He orchestrated
it all. He actually fooled the Mexicans." Not to mention America's top
enforcement agency in the War on Drugs.

"The Best TV Show That's Ever Been"

So says Amy Poehler, and she isn't alone in thinking Cheers is pretty much
perfect. On the thirtieth anniversary of the show's premiere, GQ sat down
with just about everyone who made it and asked them about creating Sam
and Diane, the birth of Norm!, Woody Harrelson's one-night stands, and
many other secrets of what became TV's funniest guy show of all time
On September 30, 1982, NBC premiered a new sitcom called Cheers, a
smartly written show about a bar owned by a retired relief pitcher named
Sam Malone. Created by director James Burrows and writer-producers Glen
and Les Charles, Cheers would become the last blast of pre-irony primetime. There was no callous snark, no deconstructive riffs, and only a handful
of time-stamped pop-culture references. For the most part, people sat around
a bar and talked. But despite its elemental simplicity, the show sparked a
quiet revolution in the way TV comedy was produced, with each half-hour
episode playing into a soap-style arc of love, death, and bar-bets that would
go on for eleven seasons. "It was something bigger than a sitcom," says early
Cheers writer-producer Sam Simon, who'd later help develop The Simpsons.
"It was a sweeping narrative. [Nowadays], producers sit down with the
network at the beginning of the year and talk about the arc of the show.
That's because of Glen and Les and Jimmy."

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After an initial season of low ratings, Cheers would grow into a Nielsensclimbing, Emmy-gobbling cultural smash, thanks in large part to the show's
central relationship, between Sam and his "aspiring poet" waitress, Diane
Chambers, who drove each other crazy via a series of hook-ups, break-ups,
and occasional slap-fests. At a time when just a few million viewers can
make a TV hit, it's hard to understate just how mega Cheers was. By 1993,
at the end of its eleven-season run, it was earning a now unheard-of 26
million viewers per week. (The top network sitcom today, The Big Bang
Theory, averages 18 million; cable sitcoms get by on a few million.) It was
that rare pop-culture phenomenon that seemed to appeal to everyone, from
the guy who recognized himself in Norm, to one of the America's greatest
novelists, Kurt Vonnegut. The author was a fan and so was Prince and so
were politicians Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, who both made cameos.
The Bull Finch, the Boston bar shown at the beginning of each episode,
racked up millions of dollars in tie-in and tourism money. "And they're still
pouring in there," says Dukakis. "With all due respect to Bunker Hill and
Faneuil Hall, I think it continues to be the most popular attraction in
Boston."
Even if you've never seen Cheers (and, by the way, all 275 episodes are now
streaming on Netflix) you've seen its lineage. Amy Poehler and Mike Schur
(creators of Parks Recreation), Bill Lawrence (Scrubs), Dan Harmon
(Community), and Shawn Ryan (The Shield) are all fans, if not downright
scholars, of Cheers. "I hope and assume that every good comedy writer, no
matter the age, has a moment where they discover how great Cheers is,"
says Poehler, who regularly watches Cheers episodes in her Parks
Recreation trailer. "And I would encourage any young person getting into
comedy to sit down and watch it."
Three decades after the show's premiere, nearly 40 Cheers cast members,
writers, and producers talked to GQ about what might just be the greatest
sitcom of all time (no offense, Seinfeld and The Simpsons). Here's the story
of how three guys walked into a bar and created a classic.
In the late '70s, budding TV director James Burrows and Glen and Les
Charles, two English-major brothers from Nevada, were working on the
sitcom Taxi. Toward the end of its run, their agent suggested the three stop
working for others and create a show of their own.

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Glen Charles (co-creator): Taxi was very difficult, because we were serving
the ecutive producers, and we were trying to serve our own idea of what was
funny and what was a good story. It kind of splits your focus. Jimmy was an
in-house director, and we were producers, and we had a lot of
communication together.
Les Charles (co-creator): We'd always gotten along extremely well. I think
we felt like contemporarieslike we were in the same college class, and
suffered a lot of the same injuries and blows to our egos.
Glen Charles: We were a Jew and two Mormons, so we kind of banded
together. We felt persecuted [laughs].
Jimmy Burrows (co-creator/director): We wanted to call our company that:
"A Jew and two Mormons." But unfortunately, it was taken [laughs].
Glen Charles: Fawlty Towers was a favorite at that time, and so we started
talking about hotel stories, and we found that a lot of the action was
happening in the hotel bar. We actually thought of that while we were in a
bar: "Why would anyone ever leave here?"
Burrows: We also knew that we wanted to have a Tracy-Hepburn
relationship.
Les Charles: We talked about putting this bar out in the desert somewhere,
or in a small town, but once we were looking at a city, we immediately went
to Boston. It hadn't been used very much on television, and we wanted a city
with some charma city that would have that English-style sort of pub in it.
[Plus], it was a sports-crazy city. Everything seemed right about it.
When we went in to sell the show, we had to give some prototype the
network could latch onto. [We mentioned] those light-beer commercials,
where they used to show a bunch of athletes hanging around in a bar. That
wasn't what we had in mind at all, but we thought that would get the thing
rolling.
Michael Zinberg (development ecutive, NBC): When they came in and
[pitched the show], you could feel the room shudder. "What kind of show
would be in a bar? How do we handle all the alcohol?" But the Charles
brothers very clearly said, "This isn't about the place. This is about a family;
it just happens not to be a group of brothers and sisters."

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Warren Littlefield (vice president, NBC): The network was really hungry.
CBS was in a renaissance of comedy, with _MAS*H, One Day at a Time,
and The Jeffersons. ABC had Mork Mindy, Barney Miller, and Taxi_. So
the desire to work with Burrows-Charles was really to change NBC's
identity, to say, "We want to be in the sophisticated-adult-comedy business."
Burrows: When I got the first draft of the pilot from Les and Glen, I said to
my wife, "Oh, my God, these guys have brought radio back to television."
They had written this smart, intellectual story. I'd never seen anything like
that on TV beforejust guys sitting around, talking.
The first parts to be cast were reformed alcoholic and unrepentant babe
hound Sam Malonewho was originally conceived as a "Stanley Kowalski
type"and Diane Chambers, the newly dumped know-it-all who, in the
pilot, is reduced to waiting tables at Cheers. Burrows and the Charles'
brothers subjected the finalistsShelley Long, Ted Danson, former football
player Fred Dryer (Hunter), William Devane (Knots Landing), Julia Duffy
(Newhart) and film actress Lisa Eichhornto a grueling month of audtions,
with Long and Danson the ultimate winners.
Glen Charles: We wanted to introduce the bar and the people in it through
Diane's eyes. She was the audience's guide.
Shelley Long (Diane Chambers): I was doing the movie Night Shift when I
read Cheers. I was not looking for a sitcom, because the philosophy at that
point was that you had to make a choice: Were you going to do movies or
TV? You couldn't cross over. Then this script came along, and it was the
best TV script I'd ever read.
Ted Danson (Sam Malone): I was actively looking for work. I got called in
at the last second to do a guest spot onTaxi, and Jimmy, Les, and Glen were
on the Paramount lot, putting together Cheers. I ran over and met them. It
was one of the few times that I didn't doubt myselfeven though it took a
month to get the part.
Long: Before the audition, I grabbed the dress I'd been planning to wear,
only to realize that the waistband had been stretched to double it's normal
size. But I didn't have an alternative and I was running late, so I just put a
belt on and hoped it would be okay. When I met Ted, I realized too late that

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it was so blousy that I was giving him quite the view. I think it got us off to a
really great start.
Danson: I was too terrified to notice she had breasts. I do remember that I
was eating a sandwich.
Burrows: Usually, [actors] went into the casting office of the network,
which was death. We literally did a stage presentation: We used the Bosom
Buddies set, because they had a bar, put chairs in front, and had it catered.
That was [our agent] Bob Broder's idea: Give them a little free wine and
food, and they'll respond to it.
Glen Charles: Shelley was everybody's choice right away, but there was
controversy about Ted. He was clearly not a football player, and not only
physically. He didn't bring that attitude, that mentality. At the time, there
was a [Red Sox] relief pitcher named Bill Lee, the "Spaceman." He was kind
of nuts, as we found out a lot of relievers are. So [changing Sam's
profession] gave us a very offbeat athleteone with a lot of intelligence. He
wasn't the sloth that scratches his armpits, which had been our original
impulse. It made his treatment of Diane early on kind of intentional: He was
trying to bug the hell out of her.
Sam Simon (writer-producer): In television, and especially in a situation
comedy, you kind of play yourself, or at least the essence of yourself. And
Ted isn't Sam Malone at all. He was a little bit insecurenot in a bad way,
but not a jock. That was a challenge for him.
Danson: It took me at least two years to feel, "Oh. I know how to play this
now. I get it." Because there was an ease and an arrogance to Sam, and I was
not a womanizer; I didn't date a lot. If I kissed somebody, I was basically
married from that point on. [But] I maintain that I got Sam because I was
teamed with Shelley. She was really unique. You can't imagine anyone else
playing Diane. She was Diane.
Long: I thought Diane was kind of tough in the pilot's script, so I made an
effort in that first episode to soften my delivery and make her as feminine as
possible. That came up for [a few] episodes, and then, I think, everybody
agreed that Diane could still be smart without being tough.
Les Charles (co-creator): Shelley knew who her character was and had a
much surer idea of herself than the rest of the cast. She was able to carry the

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show in the beginning while the others were finding their way. That's the
way it worked: The actors got closer and closer to their characters. Or maybe
their characters got closer to the people.
Glen Charles: I don't think George Wendt had that far to travel.
Rounding out the Cheers cast were Everyman barfly Norm Peterson (George
Wendt), brutally honest waitress Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman), unreliable
know-it-all mail carrier Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger), and child-like
elder statesman and bartender Coach (Nicholas Colastanto).
George Wendt: My agent said, "It's a small role, honey. It's one line.
Actually, it's one word." The word was "beer." I was having a hard time
believing I was right for the role of "the guy who looked like he wanted a
beer." [laughs] So I went in, and they said, "It's too small a role. Why don't
you read this other one?" And it was a guy who never left the bar.
Les Charles: I worked at a bar after college, and we had a guy who came in
every night. He wasn't named Norm, [but he] was always going to have just
one beer, and then he'd say, "Maybe I'll just have one more." We had to help
him out of the bar every night. His wife would call, and he'd always say,
"Tell her I'm not here." I think that was the closest we had to a character
based on one guy.
John Ratzenberger (Cliff Clavin): I'd spent ten years in London, writing
and performing my own comedy shows. They gave me the Cheers [scenes],
and I thought it was the springboard for chatting about the show, because in
England, that's what you do. So I walk in, and I'm looking around, and
Jimmy Burrows said, "What are you looking at? You're not here to have a
conversation; you're here to audition." At that second, I felt all the blood
rush out of my body. I did a horrible job. As I was leaving, the casting
director says, "Thank you, John," and my eight-by-ten was already in a
wastebasket. But the writer part of me turned around and said, "Do you have
a bar know-it-all?" Because in the bars in my neighborhood where my father
hung out, there was always a bar know-it-all. Glen said, "What are you
talking about?" I just launched into an improvisation of what [became Cliff].
Rhea Perlman: I had done Taxi, and I did a little one-act play in New York
that the Charles brothers came to see. In Taxi, I was a nice girl, and in the

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play I was tougher, like a tomboy. That's when they started thinking of me
for Carla, even though I had to go through all the horrible auditioning.
I can't say I based [Carla] on anybody I knew. She was so foulmouthed and
mean, just said what was on her mind. So I guess Carla is somebody I
always wished I could be at the right moment, the one who always has the
perfect comeback.
Wendt: Nick Colasanto [Coach] was nearly 60 years old and had a long
career as an actor and TV director. One day when we were workshopping
with Jim about the characters' possible backstories, Nick [who was sober]
said that when he had been drinking, every time one of the regulars walked
into his favorite New York spot, everyone would yell out his name. So it
stuck for Norm.
Ratzenberger: [Once] I said, "Nick, how do you do what you do?" He says,
"Ratz, every day, when I pull in the parking lot and I get out of the car, I'm
12 years old." If you see Nick's episodes now, think of that: Whatever the
line or situation is, he'd react like a 12-year-old. Perfect, but so simple.
Cheers premiered on September 30, 1982, at 9 p.m., finished last in its time
slot, and spent the first season in the ratings basement. NBC president
Brandon Tartikoff championed the show, as did Emmy voters, who named it
Outstanding Comedy Series in its first season.
Rhea Perlman: We all trusted that we were in a show that was going to go
on at least as long as Taxi. We were just oblivious, like kids at a camp.
We didn't know that we were riding on thin ice the whole time. Maybe Ted
and Shelley did, but they didn't act like it.
Long: When the ratings weren't going up, it drew my attention, but it didn't
worry me. Today, I think it probably would, because you don't have
Brandon Tartikoff rallying the troops and saying, "This is a great show. This
show has to stay." [So] I didn't feel like the rug was going to be pulled out
from under us. The rug seemed to be in pretty firm condition.
Thomas Lofaro (assistant director): There was a lot riding on a network
half-hour in 1982; ratings numbers and revenue streams were different then.
But you could see the audience building. On the mornings when we'd get the

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ratings, they'd be on the table with the newspapers. It was very theatrical.
Jimmy would say, "Don't worry, they're going up."
Les Charles: We started to get mail from people who would say things like,
"If you break up [Sam and Diane], I'll never watch this show again." They
were intensely interested in Sam and Diane's relationship, as if it were two
real people.
David Isaacs (writer/producer): Maybe two weeks into the regular
production, Jim came up to eat lunch with us and said, "Sam and Diane is
our money. We have to go back to them, regardless of what the story is,
[every] episode."
Simon: It happened by accident, and those three guys were smart enough to
see it and make the show about them. If they had set out to make a show
about a man and woman with amazing chemistry, it'd be like, "Well, good
luck. If it doesn't work the first episode, you're screwed."
Cheri Steinkellner (writer-ecutive producer, credited as Cheri Eichen on
the show) It was a really fair fight between those two characters. Look at the
way the credits were placed: Upper and lower, right and left, so that neither
was first, and neither was last. That was all by design.
Heide Perlman (writer-producer; sister of Rhea): I don't think any sitcom
had done that. It wasn't quite Tracy-Hepburn, because she was a tight-ass,
and he was a hound.
Les Charles: I don't mean to get psychoanalytic here, but there is a
similarity in the Sam and Diane relationship to the relationship of our
parents. Our mother was prim and proper, a voracious reader who was
always trying to improve her mind. Our father liked to hang out at the bar
and watch sports. I don't think he ever read a book.
Burrows: Half the people wanted to go to bed with Diane, and half the
people wanted to kill her, including Sam.
Danson: You could identify with Sam and Diane on so many levels.
Women's libbers loved to hate Sam, but he was so transparently, painfully
who he was that you could still laugh at him, even if you were a feminist.
People who were bamboozled by women totally associated with Sam, [as

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did] people who thought they were God's gift to women. It brought different
crowds in.
Long: Our audience was so tuned in to every move, because the flirting
between Sam and Diane during the first season was totally outrageous.
There was talk about "Would it be right to advance the relationship, or could
that condemn the relationship?" I put my two cents inbig surpriseand
said, "In a real relationship, you take two steps forward, one step back. So
just because we take two steps forward and get all the benefit from that
doesn't mean we can't go back or to the side." Ultimately, that's what
worked.
Heide Perlman: Some of the tension went out of it when they were
together. It's harder to write two people happy and in love than two people
fighting and driving each other crazy. Moonlighting had the same problem:
Everyone wants the two characters to be together, but then once they are, it's
not that much fun.
Ken Levine (writer/producer): The final two episodes of the first season
were shot in one night and build to that scene where Sam and Diane are
fighting"Are you as turned on as I am?" "More"and they kiss. The
audience went absolutely crazy nuts. I turned to David Isaacs and said,
"We've peaked. There's nothing we can do with these two that is going to
evoke that much of a reaction."
Burrows: If Sam couldn't bed a woman in a year, then he was not the
cocksman we wanted him to be. So he had to do that.
Burrows: When the summer reruns happened, people who had already seen
Simon Simon and Magnum, P.I. started to watch our show. We had a big
party in our office, because we got to ninth place.
Danson: I remember this one news clip of a small station somewhere. They
decided to put something else in Cheers's lot, and there were demonstrations
outside the station. It was like, "Oh. That's pretty cool." And then the show
just kind of exploded.
From its first season, Cheers' writing staff was one of the most decorated
and enviedcreative teams in television. Over the years, its line-up included
vets like David Lloyd (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Jerry Belson (The

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Dick Van Dyke Show), and upstarts like David Angell, Peter Casey, and
David Lee, who'd later go on to create Frasier.
Ratzenberger: It was the last generation of writers that had grown up
reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that
was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real
characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or
somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of
literature.
Isaacs: We worked in Glen's office, which was set up like a sitting room.
There was a desk that only Glen sat behind, and Les sat in a chair by the
window, and he always had one of those plastic coffee stirrers that he
chewed on.
Simon: There could be chaos going on, people pitching jokes, and Les
would be picking what he wanted and whispering it into the writers'
assistant's ear. And at the end of the night, the script was put together. I
learned how to run a room by watching him.
David Lee (writer-ecutive producer): On some shows, [the producers] say,
"Oh, you gotta have 10 jokes per page." Glen and Les would go, "You
know, it's better to get rid of the 'Fifty percenters,'the jokes that are just
chucklesand be satisfied with the hundred percenters." If you have enough
lesser jokes in the way, you actually start diminishing the value of the really
good ones.
Tim Berry (producer-director): They threw out more great material than
you'll ever know, because every day, they'd be rewriting and honing and
polishing. Some things that would get a huge laugh at the table were gone by
day three or four.
Phoef Sutton (writer-producer): It was a very tough room. If you pitched
bad stuff, they'd lacerate you. There were long silences. I didn't speak for the
first three months on staff, because I was so in awe of everybody.
Dan Staley (writer-producer): David Lloyd would write a whole script off
the top of his head. He'd sit there and say, "Diane enters, and then Diane and
Sam, bum bum bum, and then something else happens..." He'd pitch out a
bunch of jokes rapid-fire, and occasionally point to someone and demand a
joke, and then just move on. His whole thing was always to get out [early].

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Bill Steinkellner (writer-ecutive producer): The goal was excellence. And,

if possible, to go home with the lights still off.
Heide Perlman: I don't remember what script it was, but at the Monday
table read, the [opening] teaser didn't work. We went back and had to think
of a new teaser, and [after] four hours, five hours, we weren't landing on
anything. People were saying, "Maybe we should come back to it." And it
was probably Glen who said, "What are we, cowards?" You had to do it, no
matter how long it took.
Lee: On The Jeffersons, you would give your notes to the director, and he'd
go, "Right, right," and then turn around and go to the actors and say, "Oh,
those fucking writers. They want to change this." And then the director
would come back [to the writers] and go, "Oh, those actors. They won't do a
thing I ask them." You get this weird us-against-them [mentality].
And when we got to Cheers, everybody could talk to everybody. Now,
granted, if you were smart you had a sense of where you were on the totem
pole, you watched your comments and obviously deferred to the bosses. But
if I saw something that Shelley had done that I thought was particularly
good, or if a writer had a suggestion for a way she might be able to do it
better, you got to tell her that. The only rule was you had to do it so
everybody could hear; there were no private conversations. It had to be open
with everybody. It really fostered this feeling that we were all in it together.
Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield): Cheers was one of the first shows
where I paid attention to the writers because their [work] was better than
everything else I was watching. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall
slightly flat if it advanced the characters.
Glen Charles: For better or for worse, I see more of Seinfeld's influence
now [on comedies]not joke-jokes, but people airing very personal,
subjective issues, and sometimes things close without even a joke. We never
would have done that. We'd be there until two in the morning, making sure it
had a button on the act. I'm not making a value judgment. It just seems to be
more of a trend now.
Christopher Lloyd (co-creator, Modern Family; son of David Lloyd) The
writers had to tell stories that didn't make the audience ask, "How do these
people have so much time to be in a bar all the time?" I think that was the

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genius of that showthat you loved being in their company, and you never
asked those questions. You never asked why nobody ever paid for a beer.
You went with it, because the spirit of the show was so great.
Simon: In the opening of season three, when Sam comes in drunk [after a
breakup with Diane], that's when Cheers became a saga.
Les Charles: Back in the old days, there was a rule that every TV episode
had to be complete in itself, so you could tune into a television show for the
first time and be able to enjoy that show and know where you were. And we
started doing continuing stories and cliffhangers and evolving relationships
and so on, and we may have been partly responsible for what's going on
now, where if you miss the first episode or two, you are lost. You have to
wait until you can get the whole thing on DVD and catch up with it. If that
blood is on our hands, I feel kind of badly about it. It can be very frustrating.
Kurt Vonnegut (from a 1991 interview): I would rather have written Cheers
than anything I've written.
Steinkellner: We thought, "Let's get [Vonnegut] to write an episode!" Then
the whole discussion came up: "But what if it sucks? We can't re-write it!"
Cheers got a big ratings boost when The Cosby Show debuted just before it
in the fall of 1984. Ratings continued to grow, and the show was thriving
until, on February 12, 1985, the cast arrived for a taping to learn that the
61-year-old Colasanto had died of a heart attack.
Burrows: Nick was sick when he was cast.
Wendt: He'd been getting kind of thin. [Earlier in the season], they called us
all into Glen and Les' office, and they told us his heart muscle was sort of
dying, but they said he had been cleared to come back to work. They said,
"Well, it could mean six weeks, could mean six years." So we were all like,
"Oh. Well, that's a drag, but it seems like he's ready to come back to work."
We were [hoping for] six years. It turned out it was six weeks.
Danson: When Nick had heart disease, he was getting less and less oxygen.
There wasn't a surface on that set that didn't have his lines written down.
There was one episode where a friend of Coach dies, and he says, "It's as if
he's still with us now." Nick had written the line on the wood slats by the
stairs the actors would use to enter the studio. Nicky dies, and the next year,

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we're all devastated, and the first night we come down the stairs, right there
was his line: "It's as if he were with us now." And so every episode, we'd go
by it and pat it as we'd come down to be introduced to the audience.
And then, one year, they repainted the sets and they painted over the line.
People almost quit. Seriously. They were so emotionally infuriated that that
had been taken away from them.
The producers had to quickly come up with a replacement character: Woody
Boyd, an Indiana farm boy who'd just moved to the big city.
Woody Harrelson (Woody Boyd): I was 23, and I was in L.A. while on
hiatus [as an understudy] from Biloxi Blues on Broadway. The guy that I'd
been studying with had been fired for horsing around on stage with Matthew
Broderick, and they were really anxious to get me back into the play. So I
was in a great situation, and at the time, I definitely wasn't thinking about
television. I had heard about Cheers, of course, but I never watched it. So I
watched two episodes, and I was like, "Oh my God. This is really good."
Lori Openden (casting director): They wanted the replacement to play
21just of drinking age. But more than anything, they wanted him to be
sweet and doltish. I saw hundreds of actors. But I went back through my
notes, and when I met Woody [Harrelson], before I brought him to the
producers, I wrote, "My work is done." At the time I met him, he was an
innocent in the big worldjust a different kind of a guy. And that was very
much who Woody Boyd was.
Harrelson: At the audition, I didn't know I was going into a room with [all
the producers], so I was blowing my nose when I walked in. The room
erupted in laughter, and somebody said, "This is Woody." And of course, the
part was named Woody. So that put me in a good position.
Casey: __Harrelson comes in to read looking like he just came off a
basketball court. He had on athletic shorts and unlaced high-tops, and I'm
going, "This is so not the character." And then he read, and he brought this
beautiful innocence to the whole thing, and when [his character] heard the
news that Coach had died, he cried a little. No actor had done that.
Harrelson: I was going with the flow, being in the moment. Most of all, I
was unconcerned, because I knew I was going back to do Broadway, and

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that was my dream. That's the best way to audition for anything: When your
back-up plan is your dream, you know?
Burrows: In the first episode, [Woody Boyd] leaps over the bar, and that
pissed Teddy off: "This young whippersnapper..." Teddy started going to the
gym.
Danson: I don't know if I went to the gym, [but] Woody is 24, and at that
point I was like 37, which is when you realize you're no longer 24. So in
walked Woody, who was instantly great, but offstage, it was [all]
testosterone. There was a half-court [on the lot], and the guys used to play
basketball right before the show. We took him out to give him a lesson, and
he kicked our asses. All right, we'll arm-wrestle. I still have, like, tendinitis
in my elbow. He was just wiping the floor with me. John, who has good,
strong legs, leg-wrestled him. Woody cleaned everybody's clock in
everything. Then we got less physical and went to chess, and he whipped our
asses with chess.
I didn't have a brother, so Woody became my brother. And brothers can be
incredibly competitive and knock the shit out of each other, but they know
they won't cross a line. I loved him.
Jackie Swanson (Kelly "Kelly Kelly Kelly" Gaines, Woody Boyd's equally
simple love interest): Women were in pursuit of Woody. It seems like he
always had a new girl visiting the set. I remember seeing, at different times,
Moon Zappa, Ally Sheedy, Penelope Ann Miller, and Glenn Close. I don't
know that he was dating all of them. I did have a crush on him. Who didn't?
Even Jimmy did.
Harrelson: I was very excited by this newfound ability to hang out with gals
who probably wouldn't have hung out with me before. I became a party
animal. You couldn't do what I did now because of all the tweeting and
Facebooking. All the shit I did back then, I'd be hung from the rafters.
Wendt: Woody brought this impishness. He brought it out in Ted,
especially.
Danson: I'll tell you about the worst day of my life. Shelley and Rhea were
carrying that week's episode, and the guys were just, "Let's play hooky."
We'd never done anything wrong before. John had a boat, so we met at
Marina del Rey at 8 a.m. We all called in sick, and Jimmy caught on and

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was so pissed. Woody and I were already stoned, and Woody said, "You
want to try some mushrooms?" I'd never had them, so I'm handed this bag
and I took a fistful. On our way to Catalina, we hit the tail end of a
hurricane, and even people who were sober were getting sick. Woody and I
thought we were going to die for three hours. I sat next to George, and every
sixty seconds or so he'd poke me and go, "Breathe." [gasp] And I'd come
back to life.
Harrelson: I was a little worried about him. It looked like his face was
melting. I think I may have been freaking a little myself, but I had to be cool
about it.
Wendt: We got into serious trouble for that. I think we thought Jimmy and
Les and Glen would have more of a sense of humor about it. We did it
because Ted was doing it. He's sort of a reluctant leader. He didn't try to flex
his influence. He's just eminently followable.
Danson: My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my
bar full of people. And that informed my life. I mean, we're so different [in
the cast], some of us. Miles apart. [But] when I see anyone from those days,
I tap into that instant love for them. I don't care what they do, what they say,
how different we are: I love them, because it was eight hours a day, eleven
years, making each other giggle and laugh and being a team. There was no
weak link.
In the third-season premiere in September 1984, a distraught Dianewho'd
been driven to a mental institutionreturned to the bar with cocky, uptight
psychiatrist Frasier Crane. Fans were wary at first, but in future seasons, he
and his equally repressed wife, Dr. Lilith Sternin (who would arrive two
years later as a series regular) would become hugely popular.
Burrows: We'd get Sam and Diane into some predicament, and then over
the summer, when the boys would start writing, we thought, "How do we get
them back together?" That's how Frasier evolved.
Les Charles: We'd never had a real threat to Sam and Diane's relationship. I
think our inspiration [for Frasier] was the role Ralph Bellamy used to play in
Cary Grant moviesthe guy the lady falls in love with but it isn't real. You
just know he doesn't have the sexual dynamism Grant does.

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Kelsey Grammer (Dr. Frasier Crane): The first thing I thought [when I
read the script] was that Frasier was an intellectual at some points but also
an Everymanflawed and very insecure. The other thing I thought was that
when he decided to love, he was completelywhat is it Othello says?
"perpled in the extreme." What made him endearing in the end was that his
love for Diane was without question.
[But] when I auditioned for the twenty people that were in the room, I didn't
get a single laugh. I thought, "Holy shit. I'm done. I blew this completely." I
put the script down, thanked everybody, and said, "I'm going to go and see if
I can get some laughs out on the street." But then they sent me a bottle of
champagne and said, "Welcome to Cheers."
Long: There were two actors [they liked], and Ted and I read with them, and
it was so obvious that it was Kelsey
Glen Charles: Kelsey told me one time [that] after his first season, he was
in a bar, and this guy walks up and says, "Are you that pin dick that plays
Frasier?" He was actually upset that Frasier was coming between Sam and
Diane.
Les Charles: That was a really common reaction to Kelsey. We'd get
horrible fan mail, or anti-fan mail, about Kelsey breaking up Sam and Diane
or coming between them.
Grammer: I was not really privy to it, and I'm glad they kept it from me.
Staley: __My biggest shock, when I first showed up at the show, was the
disconnect between Frasier and Kelsey. Because Kelsey was just this lovely,
friendly beach guy who would [say], "Yeah, I'm in Hermosa this weekend.
Come on down, hang out with Kels."
Jay Thomas (who played Carla's husband, Eddie LeBec): I would see
Kelsey sometimes at 5 o'clock in the morning with no shoes on, pushing a
sports car down the street with a half [passed-out] woman in the passenger
seat. I'm pulling in to get gas, and I go, "Hey Kelsey! What are you doing?"
And he goes, "Well hey, how are you?"
Long: In the third year, right before we started the season, I told them I was
pregnant. And they were saying, "Oh, well, we could do this, and we could
do that, and Frasier could be the father." And I said, "No, I don't think that's

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right. You said Hepburn and Tracy to us when we started, and I think this
should be Tracy's baby." I guess Kelsey had been told that, and he was really
upset about it. I talked to him on the phone once and I said, "You know, this
was not about you, the actor; this was about Sam and Diane."
Grammer (from his 1996 autobiography, So Far...): Shelley was convinced
that Diane and Sam should be together, that it was a terrible mistake to break
them up...Shelly's efforts to get me off the show were relentless. I learned
after read-throughs she would insist the writers took out every laugh I had.
Long: Oh, that's so wrong. He's a brilliant talent, and he was so wonderfully
funny on the show. I even watched Frasier, you know? I have no idea how
he got that idea other than me speaking up one time and saying, "No, I really
don't think it should be Frasier's baby."
It's just a crime that people don't take the time and make the effort to have a
conversation if it's bothering them that much. I wish he had said something,
but he never did. You know, it's too bad.
Grammer: Who knows? Maybe it was all my problem! I don't know.
Maybe none of that was really true. But, early on, I did have a feeling that
she would've been happier if I hadn't been on the show. Once Frasier was no
longer a threat to what I think she felt was her arc for Ted, it was great.
[Shelley and I] made up sometime after.
Bill Steinkellner: [Cheri and I] wrote the first script that Lilith was in. . She
was in a little bit of the first scene, and then she left. The next year came,
they said, "Let's get a girlfriend for Frasier."
Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith Sternin): In 1985, I was doing a pre-Broadway run of
Sweet Charity [that] started in LA and had four months off before opening
on Broadway. So I stayed and tried to rustle up whatever work I could while
I was waiting. The first job was on Simon Simon, and the second was
Cheers. I don't know that I had seen it. But my parents, who are very smart,
very sophisticated, they loved Cheers.
In New York, in musicals, I was playing parts that would never have been
described the way Lilith was in the breakdown. [I thought], "What do you
mean, 'not so good-looking?'" [laughs] She was kind of drabhair straight
back in a bun, uptight, no sense of humor. The musical stuff I'd go up for
was always funny, sexy, tough-as-nails, heart-of-gold characters. So when I

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first auditioned for Lilith, I really struggled. Then her voice occurred to me
in my head, and I started reading it out loud to myself, and it made me laugh.
That was her.
Thomas: I'm doing Cheers, having the greatest time of my life, and one day
I get a phone call from Jimmy. I knew they were deciding [about] whether to
add me or Bebe to the cast full-time, and I thought he was calling with good
news. He said, like in a movie, "Are you sitting down?" And he goes, "Look,
we're not going to have you back on the show. And it has nothing to do with
Rhea."
Levine: Jay did a morning radio show, and somebody said [on the air], "It
must be great being on Cheers," and Jay said something like, "Yeah, it's not
so great," and he mentioned having to kiss Rhea Perlman.
Thomas: [Listeners] would go, "What's it like to kiss Carla?" Not Rhea
they were talking about Carla. And my joke what that I got combat's pay to
kiss her.
Levine: Rhea came up to my office and she was furiousI'd never seen her
like this. She said, "I want him off the show."
Rhea Perlman: That's not true. I loved Jay Thomas as Eddie LeBec. But
there was a point where they [thought] maybe we would live together, and I
didn't like the idea of Carla being with somebody because that would make
you feel like [you're] not part of the people in the bar.
Thomas: Look, I made jokes about kissing Murphy Brown [too]. But if
that's what cost me my job, my wife will probably say, "Hey asshole, I told
you so." [Eddie exits in "Death Takes a Holidy on Ice," when he's run over
by a Zamboni.]
Grammer's partying was getting out of control; there were a couple of
arrestsone of which ended with Grammer pleading no contest to cocaine
possesionin 1988 and 1990. An unsuccessful on-set intervention was held
by the show's producers and cast.
Glen Charles: Kelsey was going through a divorce and child-custody
issues. He had some problems.

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Dan O'Shannon (writer/producer; ecutive producer on Modern Family):

He would ooze into the studio, his life all out of sorts. Jimmy would say
"Action," and he would snap into Frasier and expound in this very erudite
dialogue and be pitch-perfect. And Jimmy would yell "Cut!" and he would
ooze back into Kelseyglazed-over eyes, half asleep, going through
whatever he was going through. It was the most amazing transformation I'd
ever seen.
Bebe Neuwirth (Dr. Lilith Sternin): I really loved Kelsey. It wasn't a
romantic love, but there was something about him. It's very difficult to see
someone you care about having a hard time. Some days were better than
others. One time they had to shut down for the day. I can only wing it after I
know what I'm doing, and there was a complicated scene with lots of props,
and during rehearsal nothing was happening. I thought, Jesus, you have to be
like this today?
Levine: The only time I felt affected [by his behavior] was when an episode
we wrote where Kelsey was really erratic all week, and it was a really tough
filming night, because he didn't remember his lines. We cobbled a
performance [from the footage], but it was difficult.
Lee: The [effects of the] first intervention lasted for a while, but then it
didn't take. And in retrospect, the guy on the second intervention [during the
spin-off series Frasier] said, "The problem with the first one was that Kelsey
walked into the room [and] the interventionist said, These are your friends.
I think you need to go off to get some help.' and Kelsey just said, Okay.'"
No one in the room got to air their grievances or let him know how serious it
was, or be specific about what problems they were experiencing in their
relationships with him.
Grammer: I went and did some things [rehab], and then of course my life
didn't change that much [for a while], but I never missed work. One time I
went out for a few cocktails before we shot, and my words were slurred a
bit. I feel forever apologetic about that.
In the summer of 1986, Cheers began work on a fifth season, without
knowing if Long would renew her contract.
Long: I'd gotten into a routine of going into my dressing room and
meditating at lunch. I needed to rest, just let go of all of it. Because I really

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felt sometimes like I was physically pulling the plot, and it was heavy. I'm
sure it didn't look great that I was going into my dressing room at lunch. I
wish I could've hung out with the cast and got lunch. But it's not restful for
me to be in a public dining room and eat. It's just not. And I was exhausted
by the end of the morning because I tried to deliver as much of a
performance as I could for each run-through.
Lofaro: The fifth season was when things started to get a bit rough, in terms
of managing the show. Shelley believed that she was the new Lucille Ball,
and she would spend hours after the run-through talking with the writers
about her character and the story, just talking it to death. They would indulge
her, but they indulged her to a point where they couldn't stand it anymore.
Glen Charles: Shelley liked to discuss things. It was never a tantrum. But it
did take a lot of talking, and I think the biggest problem was with the rest of
the cast, because we'd have a reading at the table, and immediately she'd
want to talk about it. The normal procedure was for Jimmy to take the cast
down and start blocking it, so we could see it on its feet. So that indulgence
on our part, I think, created a schism between Shelley and the rest of the
cast.
Rhea Perlman: It's not really something I can talk about, to tell you the
truth. I can't go there. I don't think it's worth it, at this point in life.
Long: There was scuttlebutt about me talking too much and being
passionate about Diane. But I thought, "That's my job. That's what I'm
supposed to do.... Don't tell me not to get involved in the discussion."
Danson: Shelley's process would have infuriated you if it had been mean or
if it hadn't been purposeful. But it was purposefulit was her way of being
Dianeand there's not a mean bone in Shelley's body. I had trouble hanging
around her until we stood onstage together, and then I was in heaven.
On December 16, 1986, Long announced she was leaving the show. The
show was so popular and the announcement so shocking that it became
national news.
Les Charles: Diane was not a lovable character, and I think people
transposed that onto Shelley and blamed her for breaking up a show they
really loved.

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Long: The Cheers writers were the finest in television. But I felt like I was
repeating myself; it bothered me a little bit. And I was getting movie offers,
which made people think, "Oh, she's so snooty. She thinks she's going to do
movies." I did an interview with a woman writer, and she had this abrasive
attitude. I had spoken with her over the five years that we'd done Cheers, so
I said, "Are you upset that I'm leaving the show?" And there was a long
pause, and she said, "Yes, I guess I am."
But most people tended to understand, because I had a two-year-old baby,
and I wanted to spend more time with my family, which was the other
reason I left the show. And I did spend more time with my family. It was a
good decision. It was really good.
Levine: There was a lot of concern that Shelley leaving would cause the
show's downfall, so everyone's livelihood was at stake. It's funny, there were
actors who said that she drove them nuts, yet they were also mad that she
was leaving. It's like the restaurant where the food is so bad and the portions
are so small.
Lee: Our jaws dropped when we found out she was leaving. From a writing
standpoint, you would look at [Sam and Diane's] scenes and go, "That's the
glue that's holding everything together."
Danson: I was scared. Could I be any good? Would people want to watch
one-half of the relationship? She put Cheers on the map. Was she the entire
show?
Sutton: I believe we wrote two endings to her finale, and there were dummy
scripts handed out that had the ending where they stayed together. It was
probably the first time a show did what they now on shows like Lost, where
they try to keep it secret, because we wanted to surprise people. [And] it was
a possibility that maybe, at the last minute, Shelley would decide to stay.
Casey: We shot an ending where they got married. Then we released the
audience, and shot the actual ending of her leaving. So anybody who was at
the last show was probably out there saying, "Hey, they got married!"
Les Charles: I remember one critic saying, when Shelley walked out that
door, "There goes Cheers." And for all we knew, they might have been right.
But we said to ourselves, "We're not going to do another romance. We're
going to find something different."

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The writers came up with Sam selling Cheers to a megaconglomerate, and

introduced meltdown-prone striver Rebecca Howe, who would briefly
manage the bar. Any concern about ratings dropping after Long left soon
dissolved: They got even bigger.
Jeff Greenberg (casting director): The producers wanted the opposite of
Diane, someone who was grounded and not flighty. And they didn't want
another blonde. The first thought I had was, believe it or not, Kirstie Alley,
who I'd seen do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was great and sultry, and she
had those eyes. But she also found a lot of subtle humor in the play that I
had not seen before.
Kirstie Alley (Rebecca Howe): I had seen Cheers twice, I think. Ted had so
much hair in his widow's peak that I remember thinking, "That dude looks
like Eddie Munster." When I got the heads-up that they wanted to see me, I
was doing a movie with Sidney Poitier, and I was all full of myself: "I'm a
movie star! They'd be lucky to have me." If I'd been watching the show, I'd
probably have been nervous.
Greenberg: We wanted to keep [her auditions] secret, because we didn't
want to shove it in Shelley's face; it was only November, and she was going
to be there until March. So we had all these secret meetings. My own
assistants didn't even know it was happening. We had her come to the studio
on a Saturday, when no one was on the Cheers set, and she did two scenes,
one with Ted, and one with Rhea.
Jimmy, Les and Glen loved her, but the network, who gets final word on
these things, did not. They didn't see the audition, and didn't consider Kirstie
a comic actress. So we had to go through the process of looking at every
other actress, [like] Sharon Stone, Kim Cattrall, Marg Helgenberger. And
after this long process, NBC finally said, "Well, if they are that passionate
about her, how can we deny [them]?"
Glen Charles: We wanted her to be the Joan Collins [character], the
gorgeous woman who's the boss, and everybody thinks of ways to
circumvent her and foul her up.
Burrows: When they wrote the character, Rebecca was a real bitch. Then
we had the first run-through, and it was not funny. It wasn't funny until
Rebecca had to go to her office, and [Kirstie] couldn't get into the door. She

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kept turning it and it wouldn't turn, and she got frustrated, and I remember us
going, "Oh, my God, this is what this character is: a woman of the '80s,
during the feminist movement, who thinks she has control of everything, and
she can't open a freaking door."
Alley: They started writing Rebecca more like I ama little klutzy and selfdeprecating. That's why it worked; I fit in with the rest of the losers.
Brian Ellis (assistant director) Kirstie showed up for the first script reading
dressed as Shelley, with a blonde wig on. And it was so funny, that kind of
she can make fun of herself. This is going to be interesting to see." She fit
right in.
Ratzenberger: We gave Kirstie a shotgun. I own shotguns, so it's not
foreign to me. George came up with the note on a card: "You're going to
have to shoot your way out of here." So, basically saying welcome.
Alley: It was a boys' club, and I do well in boys' clubs. Woody and I
instantly hit it off. I was married, but he would show up at my house
sometimes and stay over. One night he brought this girl to bang, and then in
the middle of the night he decided he didn't want to, so he was knocking on
my bedroom door: "Kirs? Kirs? Can you talk to me a minute? I'm just not
into this chick." I said, "Woody, you have to take responsibility. I can't
coach you into sleeping with her, but you need to go back there, dude." I
think she was in the bedroom crying while we were chatting about this.
I had the halfway house. I can't tell you how many nights I spent around my
kitchen table, soothing broken hearts.
Neuwirth: Kirstie saved me, in a way. [At the time], I had a terrible
marriage, and I stayed at her house. She was wonderfuljust a kind, bighearted, filthy girl. Somehow she could be vulgar without being vulgar.
Alley: Upstairs, everyone had dressing rooms, and there were bathrooms
where you'd take showers before the show. So the big game became getting
the door open, so that you could take pictures of nude people. I have the
greatest picture of Ted. That was a big caper: There was one person
[opening] the door with a butter knife and another person kicking the door in
so I could get a photo. He's decapitated, but totally nude. And he's really
well-endowed.

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Though Sam pursued Rebecca with typical zeal, she preferred wealthy
schemers like Robin Colcord, a Trump-like millionaire played by British
actor Roger Rees. A Tony-winner, Rees was one of many high-profile guest
stars to visit the bar, which became a temporary home to a motley mix of
politicians, athletes, and Broadway performers.
Roger Rees (Robin Colcord): I was in a play in the West End of London
called Hapgood, by Tom Stoppard. I played a Russian particle physicist. So
I came over to do the play [in L.A.] and I imagined I would be going straight
back to Britain afterwards.
I believe the people from Cheers saw that production, and they [asked if I'd]
like to come in and see them. It was probably the hottest day of my lifebut
being from Britain, I put my suit on with my tie, drove down Melrose to
Paramount Studios, and was taken to the writers' room. There were about
twenty writers in there, and they were all dressed for the beach. Some were
just in shorts. The scales dropped from my eyes: "Oh, I see. This is what
goes on in America." I'm very formal, but I think they thought, "Oh, we got
the right person."
They said, "Do you like Cheers?" I'd never really seen it. All I knew was
that it was a dark brown program on late at night. But I said, "It is
indisputably my most favorite program I've ever seen."
Bill Steinkellner: That was the aura of Cheers: It was special. It was more
than TV; you could get people to guest on the show you couldn't normally
get.
Cheri Steinkellner: Somebody would let us know they were a fan, and we'd
say, "Let's put him on."
Levine: We heard the first year that Lucille Ball loved Cheers, and we all
thought she should play Diane's mom. We thought that would really boost
the show. Somehow, the Charles brothers and Jimmy got a meeting with her.
Glen Charles: That was really a treat. But she backed out.
Les Charles: She said everybody tuning in would expect to see Lucy, and
for her to play something so completely differenteven a little bit
differentwould be disappointing to her fans.

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Burrows: Our first guest star of any notability was [Speaker of the House]
Tip O'Neill, followed by Dick Cavett, Those were our major cameos. Gary
Hart, Wade Boggs...
Levine: Here's what happened with Wade Boggs : At the end of the [sixth
season], NBC asked for another episode, and we needed to slam it together.
We thought it would be kind of fun to have a Boston athlete come into the
bar, and thought, "Who's the biggest Boston athlete we can get?" And we
said, "Wade Boggs." This was March, he was in spring training, but our
casting director put in a call to try. If he turns us down, we go on our way.
[Boggs] calls back, like, an hour later, and says he got permission from the
manager to miss a couple of days.
So he does it, and about a year later, there's a big magazine article about his
mistress, who lived out in Anaheim. She talks about how he called her and
said, "Good news: I got a free trip to L.A., I'm going to do this Cheers show.
And they're going to pay me." So that's why he did it. Then he said,
apparently, "Can I borrow a pair of your panties?" and she said, "Why?"
And he said, "I promised the guys on the team I could bring back Kirstie
Alley's panties."
Andy Ackerman (editor-director): The city held a big parade for us for our
200th-episode anniversary [in 1990]. We were treated like royalty. The
governor, Michael Dukakis, was there. They named an alley after Kirstie,
and gave us the keys to the city. Everywhere we went: Free food, free
drinks. I remember going out to this nightclub and dancing with all the
Boston Massachusetts luminaries and having a drink with Ethel Kennedy. It
was wild.
Alley: One time, I brought Prince to the set. He's a friend of mine, and he
asked to come. There were VIP rooms behind the audience, where a lot of
the ecs would sit, so I had Prince sitting up there. Everyone wanted to meet
him, but he's a little shy. I think Woody went in and shook hands with him,
and came down and said, "He isn't even talking to me!" But Jackie
Swansonshe had a relationship with Prince, too.
Swanson: I've known Prince for many yearsI worked on the "Raspberry
Beret" videoand Kirstie and I used to fight about him. He once sent a card
[saying] he had penned a song about me, called "Palomino Pleasure Ride." I
remember bringing this card to work one time and showing Kirstie and

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saying: "See? Now who's the better friend?" It was so ridiculous. But Prince
thought the writing on Cheers was smart. And he loved Kelly's headbands.
Harrelson: The thing I remember most was, after taping, we'd all head
upstairs, and me, Kelsey, Teddy and George would play foosball. We got
into tournaments. It was mind-blowing how aggressive and loud it wasit
was foosball, you know? But God, it was fun.
Grammer: That all ended as soon as Frasier began. No one from that
crowd was really interested. I finally moved the table out to my house, and it
ended up being sold with the house. So it's now in the hands of somebody
who may not know its intrinsic value.

By the time Cheers headed into the '90s, the challenge for everyone was how
do you keep the show fresh?
Danson: The first few years, the adrenaline pump is: "Can I do this? Will I
be good? Will they love us? Did we rehearse enough?" You know, from
about eight years on, that adrenaline pump is gone, but you need adrenaline
to perform or you're fucked. So the way people at Cheers got pumped was to
rehearse less and less, to be less certain.
As the years went on, it got crazier and crazier: "Where's Woody?" "Oh, he
called this morning; he's in Berlin because the Wall's coming down." Well,
that would piss off John, who would then fly to Seattle to harvest his
applesliterally.
Harrelson: I did have a problem with tardiness. Me and John Ratznenberger
butted heads a few times, and I think me and Bebe Neuwirth [clashed] a
couple of times.
Isaacs: [By the last few seasons] they'd do a reading, and at the end, you'd
go around the table, and George would say, "I'll miss Friday and Monday.
I'm on SNL this weekend." And Kirstie would say, "I'll miss Friday, I'm
going to look at some property in Oregon." So when you [later] did a runthrough, you'd have Ted as Sam, you'd have the first A.D. [assistant director]
as Norm, the second A.D. as Woody, and you'd have the script girl as
Rebecca. If you went behind the bar after the show was over, you'd find all
the lines were taped [up everywhere]; they were more interested in the

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foosball tournament upstairs. But you knew what they could do, and you
knew that if something wasn't working, you could fix it during the dress
[rehearsal]. Any show is like that. They say the first year they work for you;
the second year you work together, and then you work for them.
Wendt: People used to admire the loosey-goosey quality we brought to it.
We used to chuckle to ourselves and say, "That's because we just learned it
five minutes ago."
Sutton: Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized
Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.
Cheri Steinkellner: You had all of this history. Everything had been done.
And the cast was growing: You kept adding great characters that you wanted
to service, and it was really hard to pack everybody in. And all of the regular
cast was so loved, you had to give everybody significant moments in every
episode and tell a story. So that working the puzzle became really
challenging in the later years.
Casey: By the tenth season, we knew Sam had to change, to become more
self-aware. It's one thing for a 25-year-old guy to talk about all his
conquests; you just sort of go, "Oh, he's a young stud sowing his oats." It's
another thing for a 40-year-old to be doing that. That becomes pathetic.

In 1992, Dansonwho was on the brink of divorce thanks to a public affair

with Whoopi Goldbergsolved the problem of Sam's lack of evolution by
announcing that he was leaving the show.
Wendt: At the end of season whatever, seven, eight, nine, 10, everyone
would go, "What's the deal. How do we all feel about this?" Pretty much
everyone said, "I'll do it if you do it." It was always on Ted, ultimately.
Danson: For a couple of years, we were all saying, "Are we going to do this
forever?" We were looking for an exit. And then we'd change our minds. For
me, I was going through so many changes in my lifeseparation with my
wife, having an affairthat was all very messy and public. It felt like if I
really wanted to rock my boat and make changes in my life and who I am
and how I am, that would also mean moving on from Cheers.

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I don't think it was an emotionally mature decision. I brought the house

down around my ears, lit it on fire, and then went "I have to go."
Glen Charles: We had a very long meeting with him, and we knew it was
coming. And we totally understood. Eleven years is a long time for a
television series, even with a couple of major cast changes, to rejuvenate it,
and I think we were feeling what he was feeling: That we'd pretty much
gotten everything out of this concept that we could.
Swanson: Jimmy Burrows called me at home and said, "Have you heard?" I
could hear the emotion in his voice. It was really bittersweet.
Harrelson: After it became clear Teddy wasn't going to do the show
anymore, [a network ec] took me to dinner and said, "We can keep the show
going, and you'll be the guy who owns the bar." We hadn't even had our
appetizers yet! I said, "Ted Danson's the star, and I can promise people will
not want to see it without him." I didn't want to do it without him. Dinner
was awkward after that.
On May 20th, 1993, a staggering 40 million people watched the Cheers
finale,__in which Sam ditches the bar and takes off with Dianeonly to
return alone, having realized they can never be together. The series ends
with Sam and the gang hanging out in the bar before he closes up for the
night.
Long: I was disappointed that Sam and Diane didn't get together in the very
last episode. I had no input whatsoever. I expressed my opinion, but just in
passing. It didn't change.
Les Charles: I don't think we ever entertained that idea of Sam and Diane
going off together. It seemed like [we'd be] going backwards a little. I'm not
sure if that big of a portion of our audience would have been happy with it,
because there were people who loved Shelley, but a lot of people liked
Rebecca better, or thought Diane was bad for Sam, and so on.
Danson: At the time, my 6-year-old kept thinking my character's name was
"Sam Alone," which is kind of brilliant. The funny came out of Sam's sad
core: the alcoholic, the sex addict, the person who thinks he's God's gift.
Amy Poehler (comedian): I could watch the series finale every day. When
Danson turns the bar's lights out, it's that rare moment in TV where it feels

164

incredibly real and earned and sweet. And that episode's still packed with
jokes, you know? I remember watching that [finale], and being so crushed
that I wasn't going to see that family again.
Shawn Ryan: I don't get a sense that Cheers is revered the way it should be
by [younger viewers]. Seinfeld andFriends and The Simpsons are probably
that generation's touchstones. In my mind, it's a show that should always,
always, always be in the pantheon. But can it ever mean to future
generations what it meant to us? When something changes TV, it's hard to
look back on it, decades later, and appreciate that change.
Casey: David [Isaacs] teaches a writing class down at USC, and I speak at
his class each semester. For a lot of kids, Cheers isn't even on their radar.
Staley: I have a son who's almost 19, and I don't think he's ever seen an
episode. He asked me recently if it was in black and white. It was like,
"Jesus Christ."
Ackerman: When you think of all the great screwball comedies like Capra
and Preston SturgesJimmy and the Charles brothers did the television
version of it. There's nothing like it since. I'd love to have that style come
back.
Alley: I didn't care about the show ending at first, because I was doing
movies. But when [fall] rolled around, it was "What the fuck is this?" I had
nowhere to go. I think it would be great to have a reunion with everybody
now, as long as it's just another stupid day at the bar: Rebecca's divorced,
Sam's still not married. They're all in the exact same situation.
Glen Charles: We never even considered doing any kind of reunion show.
Sam alone at the bar was the last image we wanted. That's where the show
started and where it ended. It let people think that there's still a bar in Boston
where you can walk in and see this aging baseball player.
Danson: I let my [past] life in peripherally, because I'm interested in what's
over there; I want to keep going forward. But there's not anything I do in my
life that doesn't go back to Cheers. I get to walk around and have people say
"Hey" and smile and laugh. I get bathed in this kind of after-Cheers glow as
a direct result of Jimmy, Les, and Glen. I got to play Sam Malone. How cool
is that?

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Why the Beatles Broke Up

It was a cold January in 1969, and the Beatles were seated on a vast, even
colder, soundstage at London's Twickenham Film Studios, in the company
of the last people in the world they wanted to be with: the Beatles. They had
been trying for days to write and rehearse new material for a scheduled
upcoming live show their first since August 1966 but the task wasn't
going well. The only one among them who had any sense of urgency was
Paul McCartney. "I don't see why any of you, if you're not interested, got
yourselves into this," he said to the other Beatles. "What's it for? It can't be
for the money. Why are you here? I'm here because I want to do a show, but
I don't see an awful lot of support."
Paul looked at his bandmates, his friends of many years John Lennon,
George Harrison and Ringo Starr and they looked back at him with no
expression. Moments later he said, "There's only two choices: We're gonna
do it or we're not gonna do it, and I want a decision. Because I'm not
interested in spending my fucking days farting around here, while everyone
makes up their mind whether they want to do it or not."
Paul waited, but he got no response. Again, the other Beatles just stared
back.
It was far from the worst moment they would go through in those days. The
Beatles in their death throes were one of the most mysterious and
complicated end-of-romance tales of the 20th century, as well as the most
dispiriting. The Beatles hadn't just made music they had made their times,
as surely as any political force, and more beneficently than most. Why, then,
did the Beatles walk away? There were many who blamed the Beatles' end
on the machinations of Yoko Ono, the legendary love of John Lennon's life,
and on the deviousness of Allen Klein, the band's new manager who was
also a favorite of Lennon's, but whom McCartney could not abide. But it
wasn't that simple.
"I don't think you could have broken up four very strong people like them,"
Ono said later, "even if you tried. So there must have been something that
happened within them not an outside force at all." Indeed, the true causes
were much closer at hand. They had been there for a long time, in a history
as full of hurts as it was of transcendence.

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These sessions, for what would become both the film and album Let It Be,
had started from an inspired place, but there was too much going wrong by
the time McCartney issued his plea. For the last year, the Beatles'
partnership had been fraying. The long friendship of John and Paul, in
particular, was undergoing volatile change. Lennon, the band's founder, had
in some ways acquiesced leadership of the band; more important, he was
beginning to feel he no longer wanted to be confined by the Beatles, whereas
McCartney loved the group profoundly it was what he lived for. These two
men had been the band's central force theirs was the richest songwriting
collaboration in all of popular music but at heart, the adventure of the
Beatles was forged by John Lennon's temperament and needs: He had
formed the band as a way to lessen his sense of anxiety and separation, after
his mother, Julia, gave up custody of him to her sister, and his father walked
out of his life altogether.
The 16-year-old Lennon first met the 15-year-old McCartney in the summer
of 1957 while playing with his band the Quarry Men at a parish church near
Liverpool, and was impressed with Paul's facility for playing the music of
Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Just as important, the two were also
bonded by deep loss: McCartney's mother, Mary, died of breast cancer in
October 1956, and Lennon's mother was killed when she was struck by a car
in July 1958. Working together, John and Paul found a new mooring in the
world. For a long time, they wrote songs together, trading melodic and
lyrical ideas, and even after they began writing separately, each still counted
on the other to help finish or improve a song. They were, however, men with
strikingly different approaches to making music. McCartney was orderly and
meticulous, and placed a high premium on craft; Lennon was unruly, less
prone to lingering over a song, and despite his cocky front, less secure in his
work than his writing partner. The contrasts grew even more stark as the
years went on. McCartney increasingly composed everyman narratives and
celebratory calls; Lennon was writing from what he saw as a more authentic
and troubled personal viewpoint. "Paul said, 'Come and see the show,'"
Lennon said later. "I said, 'I read the news today, oh boy.'"
Because Lennon and McCartney dominated the Beatles' songwriting and
singing, they, in effect, led the band, though Lennon had always enjoyed an
implicit seniority. Even so, the Beatles abided by a guiding policy of oneman, one-vote, which figured significantly when, in 1966, after years of
touring, John, George and Ringo persuaded Paul that they should stop
performing their music live. For about three months, all four went their

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separate ways, and as they did, John Lennon felt sharp apprehensions: "I was
thinking, 'Well, this is the end, really. There's no more touring. That means
there's going to be a blank space in the future' That's when I really started
considering life without the Beatles what would it be? And that's when the
seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of [the Beatles] without
being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace
because it was too frightening."
Shortly afterward, the band reassembled for its most eventful work, Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band but that was also when the Beatles'
inner workings turned strangely complex, even subterranean. The album's
concept had been McCartney's idea, and though Lennon was primarily
responsible for Sgt. Pepper's best song, "A Day in the Life," he later said he
saw his contributions to the album as veiled reflections of despair: "I was
still in a real big depression in Pepper, and I know Paul wasn't at that time.
He was feeling full of confidence I was going through murder." In part,
this is how Lennon worked he either rose or sank by way of crises but he
was truly at a turning point. He believed himself trapped in a loveless and
staid domestic life loveless on his part, that is, because his wife, Cynthia,
loved him deeply and was feeling outdistanced by McCartney, who was an
unconstrained and famous man living in London, attending the city's cuttingedge cultural events and exposing himself to a wide range of avant-garde
music and arts. If Lennon didn't pursue that outer life, he certainly pursued
an inner one, taking LSD frequently, to the point that some worried he was
erasing his identity. George Harrison later said, "In a way, like psychiatry,
acid could undo a lot it was so powerful you could just see. But I think we
didn't really realize the extent to which John was screwed up ."
In August 1967, leadership in and around the Beatles shifted more decidedly
after their manager, Brian Epstein, was found dead in his London town
house from an unintentional overdose of drugs. Epstein had been depressed
for some time, but he'd remained utterly devoted to the band, and many of
the group's insiders felt that it was Epstein who kept the Beatles grounded
and protected. "I knew that we were in trouble then," Lennon later said. "I
didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other
than play music, and I was scared. I thought, 'We've fuckin' had it.'"
McCartney, though, didn't see it that way. Five days after Epstein's death,
Paul convinced the others to undertake a film and music fantasia, Magical
Mystery Tour. The band spent the late summer into early winter filming odd

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reveries and recording music to accompany those scenes, and while it was
ostensibly a free-form collaborative project by all four Beatles, there was no
mistaking that, in the end, Magical Mystery Tour had been primarily
McCartney's invention. The film debuted on the BBC the day after
Christmas in 1967, and the next day it was savaged by critics. ("Blatant
rubbish," wrote London's Daily Express.) Lennon was reportedly somewhat
pleased to see McCartney stumble for once.
In February 1968, the Beatles went to study Transcendental Meditation at
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, India. The sojourn was in
part the result of Harrison's effort to gain more influence on the band's
direction he was the first among the Beatles to gain an interest in Indian
music and philosophies though at first all the Beatles felt the need to
reappraise the purposes of their success. "I think we were all a bit exhausted,
spiritually," McCartney said later. "We'd been the Beatles, which was
marvelous but I think generally there was a feeling of 'Yeah, well, it's
great to be famous, it's great to be rich but what's it all for?'" However,
unease soon set in. When Harrison suspected that Lennon and McCartney
might be using the retreat as a haven for songwriting, he grew displeased.
"We're not here to talk music," he complained. "We're here to meditate!"
Paul's reply was "Oh, yeah, all right, Georgie boy. Calm down, man." Ringo
Starr and his wife, Maureen, left two weeks after arriving (Starr, who had
stomach troubles, couldn't handle the Indian cuisine), and McCartney and
his girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, followed two weeks later. McCartney
found the setting too much like school. Harrison and Lennon stayed until
Lennon realized he wasn't any closer to solving the troubles he felt in his
heart: the need to renew both his marriage and his artistic purposes. After
hearing a rumor that the Maharishi had made sexual advances toward a
young woman at the ashram, Lennon became incensed, and demanded that
he and Harrison leave immediately.
Something about the whole venture seemed to transform Lennon in ways
that nobody readily understood; after that, according to insiders, he always
seemed angry. The truth is, he was in great despair; all he had to save him
was his art, and even that wasn't relief. "Although I was meditating about
eight hours a day," he later said, "I was writing the most miserable songs on
Earth."
Back in London, Lennon soon abandoned Cynthia to begin a serious
relationship and artistic collaboration with Yoko Ono, whom he'd met in

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November 1966. Though Ono has been characterized as an ambitious

woman who pursued Lennon indomitably, she went through her own hurt
and disappointment in the upheaval that followed, losing access to her
daughter, Kyoko, and sidelining her promising art career at Lennon's behest.
As she later said, "We sacrificed everything." The press and the fans treated
her with derision: She was called "Jap," "Chink" and 'Yellow" in public, and
Lennon sometimes had to shield her from physical harm.
All of this judgment certainly fed into Lennon's rage, but it paled in
comparison to what developed when Lennon brought Ono directly into the
Beatles' world. The group had rarely allowed guests into the studio, and
never tolerated anyone other than producer George Martin or perhaps a
recording engineer, such as Geoff Emerick, to offer input about a work in
progress. (The one time Brian Epstein offered a suggestion during a
recording session, John Lennon humiliated the manager in front of
everybody.) But Lennon didn't bring Ono into the Beatles as a guest; he
brought her in as a full-fledged collaborator. When the Beatles began work
in May 1968 on their first new LP since Sgt. Pepper, Yoko sat with John on
the studio floor; she conversed with him continually in a low voice, and
accompanied him every time he left the room. The first time she spoke in the
studio, offering John advice on a vocal, the room fell silent. Then Paul said,
"Fuck me! Did somebody speak? Who the fuck was that? Did you say
something, George? Your lips didn't move!"
Lennon wasn't somebody who would back off. "He wanted me to be part of
the group," Ono later said. "He created the group, so he thought the others
should accept that. I didn't particularly want to be part of them." Instead,
Ono made her own recordings with Lennon, such as the notorious Two
Virgins an album of experimental electronic music that bore nude photos
of the couple. If some found Lennon and Ono's collaborations indulgent or
farcical, McCartney realized that Ono emboldened Lennon. "In fact, she
wanted more," he said. "Do it more, do it double, be more daring, take all
your clothes off. She always pushed him, which he liked. Nobody had ever
pushed him like that." But McCartney probably also understood the true
meaning of a record like Two Virgins: That John Lennon had an unstoppable
will that, unchecked, could redeem or destroy his life, or could undo the
Beatles. When the group learned that Lennon and Ono had started using
heroin, the Beatles didn't know what to do about it. "This was a fairly big
shocker for us," McCartney said, "because we all thought we were far-out
boys, but we kind of understood that we'd never get quite that far-out."

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Lennon's new partnership with Ono meant that he and McCartney would
rarely collaborate as composers again. Even so, as the band began work on
its only double album, The Beatles (better known as the White Album), the
uncommon writing and singing skills of both men had never been stronger
or more diverse. In contrast to what he viewed as his own sporadic and
inconsistent work during 1967, Lennon was now writing at full force, his
creativity apparently revivified by the relationship with Ono. (Such songs as
"Dear Prudence," "Julia," "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "Revolution"
were clearly among his best work.) Harrison, too, had flowered even
Ringo was writing songs but none of these men was now willing to allow
the others to overshadow or direct his work. They had so much material to
record, and so much distaste for each other, that they were recording in three
studios, sometimes 12 hours a day. Each of the Beatles treated the others as
his supporting musicians which made for some spectacular performances
and some explosive studio moments: Lennon storming out on the tedium of
recording McCartney's "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"; Ringo quitting the group for
almost two weeks after Paul berated his drumming on "Back in the
U.S.S.R."; Harrison bringing in his friend, guitarist Eric Clapton, just to win
rightful consideration for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; McCartney, in
a shocking display, telling off George Martin in front of the band; and Geoff
Emerick finally walking out, quitting his work with the Beatles over their
turbulent and nasty behavior. When it was finished, The Beatles was
regarded as a disjointed masterpiece, the sound of a band in top form that
nonetheless no longer had hope. In later years, McCartney would refer to it
as "the Tension Album."
In the meantime, the Beatles pushed ahead with launching their new record
label, Apple. In truth, Apple had started as an investment shelter, but it
quickly became something else. Many other things, in fact: an umbrella
corporation with film, electronics, real estate, educational, publishing and
music divisions and, most interestingly, an experiment in socialism.
"We're in the happy position of not needing any more money," McCartney
said in May 1968, "so for the first time the bosses aren't in it for a profit a
kind of Western communism." In practice, the company's chief directive
became to cultivate new talent. Apple indeed discovered or helped to
develop some worthy music artists including James Taylor, Badfinger,
Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax, Billy Preston and Doris Troy (the label also
considered signing the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Chicago,
Queen, and Delaney and Bonnie), but since the Beatles themselves weren't
truly Apple artists, the label didn't reap the full benefits of their income.

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They set August 11th, 1968, as the debut of Apple Records, with four
singles to be released that day, including Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the
Days" and the Beatles' own "Hey Jude." McCartney had written "Hey Jude"
as a paean to Lennon's son, Julian, as his parents divorced, but it took on
other meanings as well. McCartney had recently separated from his
girlfriend of several years, Jane Asher, after she caught him with another
woman, and he was now entering a serious relationship with photographer
Linda Eastman, whom he had known since 1967; for Paul, the song came to
stand as an anthem of faith in love, of taking risks. When Lennon heard
"Hey Jude," though, he received it as a benediction from his songwriting
partner: "The words 'go out and get her' subconsciously [Paul] was
saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.' On a conscious level, he didn't want me to go
ahead," he told Playboy near the end of his life. "The angel in him was
saying, 'Bless you.' The devil in him didn't like it at all, because he didn't
want to lose his partner." Then, the Beatles played "Hey Jude" on David
Frost's television show in early September 1968 their first performance
before an audience in more than two years. As the audience joined in on the
extended singalong ending, "Hey Jude" became an expression of something
bigger, of the sort of possibilities of community that the band, at its best,
signified to the world outside.
Inspired by that moment, the Beatles realized they had a hunger to play
before a live audience again Lennon especially seemed excited about the
prospects and they arranged for a January date at London's Roundhouse,
the site of several of the city's famous underground rock & roll
extravaganzas in the summer of 1967. They also decided to film the
concert's rehearsals for TV broadcast, and they invited Michael LindsayHogg, who had made promos for "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" with the
band years before, to direct the filming.
There was something else at work in the idea as well: The Beatles saw this
as an opportunity to discard the image that they had epitomized in
Sgt.Pepper (Lennon had been looking for a way to disavow the album ever
since its success, seeing Pepper as an empty show masterminded by
McCartney). This new music would herald their return to the simpler
formations that had inspired their love of rock & roll in the first place, back
in the 1950s.
The new music being made by Bob Dylan's sometime backing group, the
Band, had special bearing on what the Beatles were now after. Harrison had

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recently spent time with the group and with Dylan in Woodstock, New
York, and he came back smitten by the collective spontaneous spirit they
achieved in the recordings known as The Basement Tapes. Seeking that sort
of feeling, Lennon told George Martin, "I don't want any of your production
shit. We want this to be an honest album ... I don't want any editing
overdubbing. We just record the song and that's it." Years later, Lennon's
implicit repudiation still stung Martin. "I assumed all their albums had been
honest," Martin commented in The Beatles, by Bob Spitz. McCartney
brought in a second producer, Glyn Johns, which proved something of a
relief to Martin: To get the "inartificial" performances the Beatles were now
after would require endless rehearsals for an acceptable single-take
recording, and Martin found it so tedious that he rarely attended these
rehearsals.
From the outset, problems plagued the project. Because the Beatles intended
to film the rehearsal sessions, which became known as the "Get Back"
sessions after the original title of the album that was finally released as Let It
Be, they set up at Twickenham Film Studios, which meant conforming to
union filming hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. hardly the Beatles' hours. None of
this would have been so bad if they had retained enthusiasm for the idea, but
by the morning of January 2nd, 1969, when rehearsals began, nobody but
McCartney seemed to remember why they were there. Though the sessions
would be uncommonly productive in one sense the Beatles played 52
original songs in that month of January 1969, several of which would soon
make up Abbey Road and would also appear as some of the best material on
the group members' early solo albums all the bad feelings that had been
festering for some time would come to the fore. McCartney tried to keep the
others on track, but it was a thankless task. The others found his cajoling
noxious and condescending. To them, it had become another Paul
McCartney affair, with him telling everybody what notes and tempo to play,
even telling the film director how to direct. "Paul would want us to work all
the time," Ringo said, "because he was the workaholic." George Martin felt
McCartney had little other choice. "Paul would be rather overbossy, which
the other boys would dislike," he said. "But it was the only way of getting
together ... It was just a general disintegration."
There is a famous scene in the Let It Be film in which McCartney worries
that his musical guidelines are irritating Harrison too much, and Harrison
replies that he'll play whatever Paul wants from him, even if it means
playing nothing. "You're not annoying me anymore," Harrison says, with

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palpable annoyance. The scene has been taken to represent the crux of the
sessions' problem: that McCartney was pushy and insensitive, and that
Harrison got fed up with it all. To be sure, Harrison had legitimate
grievances. He had long been relegated to the role of sideman by Lennon
and McCartney. But Harrison was troubled by other matters. He had come to
dislike intensely the idea of a live show and as the time grew closer, his
protests grew bolder. By then, the Roundhouse date had fallen through, and
when Lindsay-Hogg suggested a bigger or more exotic setting, such as a
show in a Roman amphitheater, Harrison was sickened. "It would be just our
luck to get a load of cunts in there," he said.
The most dangerous tensions during January, though, passed between
Harrison and Lennon. After being sidelined for years, Harrison now found
that Yoko Ono sometimes had a voice in band matters that equaled or even
bested his. Worse, though, Lennon and Ono were now practicing what was
known as "heightened awareness" based on a belief that verbal
communication was unnecessary between people "tuned in" to larger truths.
Its real effect, however, was to shut down any meaningful or helpful
interactions. When crucial issues came up, Lennon would say nothing,
deferring to whatever Ono thought which drove his bandmates crazy.
McCartney had developed an equanimity about it all. There were only two
options, "to oppose Yoko and get the Beatles back to four or to put up with
her." He opted for the latter, because he didn't want to lose John. In addition,
he said, he felt he had no place in telling John to leave Yoko at home. It did,
however, always rankle McCartney when Ono would refer to the Beatles
without "the" as in, "Beatles will do this, Beatles will do that." Paul tried to
correct her "Actually, it's the Beatles, luv" to no avail.
Finally, Harrison reached a breaking point. Early in the afternoon of January
10th, Harrison and Lennon got into a fight that they had to later deny came
to blows (though George Martin would tell Lennon biographer Philip
Norman that the argument indeed became physical, but "was hushed up
afterwards"). The moments of that confrontation are among the few that
Lindsay-Hogg was unable to capture for posterity. He did, however, manage
to film Harrison apparently quitting the Beatles. "I'm out of here," he said,
packing up his guitar. "Put an ad in [the papers] and get a few people in. See
you 'round the clubs."
McCartney and Starr seemed shocked, but Lennon was unruffled, launching
into a version of the Who's "A Quick One, While He's Away," essentially

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mocking Harrison's anguish. Later that day, Ono took George's place, picked
up a microphone and launched into a wordless blues, as the remaining
Beatles joined in, not sure what else to do if they wanted to keep Lennon
from bolting as well. (It is, in fact, a fairly remarkable performance.)
Later that afternoon, Lennon suggested recruiting Eric Clapton to replace
Harrison: "The point is, George leaves, and do we want to carry on as the
Beatles? I certainly do."
On Sunday, January 12th, all four Beatles met at Starr's house to try to
resolve their differences, but when Ono persisted in speaking out on
Lennon's behalf, Harrison walked out. The Beatles finally reached an accord
days later, but Harrison imposed stiff terms: No more talk about any major
live concerts, and no more work at Twickenham studios. Ono, however,
would remain in attendance at all sessions, alongside John. "Yoko only
wants to be accepted," Lennon said. "She wants to be one of us." When Starr
replied, "She's not a Beatle, John, and she never will be," Lennon dug in his
heels. "Yoko is part of me now. We're John and Yoko, we're together."
Almost two weeks after George's walkout, the Beatles resumed playing, this
time in a studio in the basement of the Beatles' Apple headquarters on Savile
Row. That same day, Harrison brought in organist Billy Preston, whom the
Beatles had met in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962, and who later played with
Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. Preston played on the remaining sessions, and
his improvisational and professional skills brought a new and badly needed
dignity to the final rehearsal days. Lennon found Preston so vitalizing that he
wanted to add him immediately as a bona fide, permanent member of the
group, a fifth Beatle. McCartney's response was adamant. "It's bad enough
with four," he said.
Time was running out on the project. Starr was obliged to begin filming The
Magic Christian within days, and it was plain by the end of January that
there was no longer time to plan a concert anywhere. Still, the Beatles and
Lindsay-Hogg wanted an ending for the film they had begun, and on January
29th, somebody some say Ringo, others claim it was Paul or even
Lindsay-Hogg suggested staging a concert the next afternoon on the
rooftop of Apple's offices. The following afternoon, waiting in the stairwell
just below the roof, Harrison and Starr suddenly weren't sure they wanted to
go through with the venture, but at the last instant, Lennon said, "Oh, fuck,
let's do it," and he and the others, accompanied by Preston, stepped onto

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their makeshift stage, overlooking London's tailoring district. This was the
Beatles' only concert-style performance since August 1966, and it would be
their last. That it was also the finest of their live shows says much about the
collective power of the musicianship and charisma that they had nurtured
over the years, and that even mutual recriminations couldn't nullify. As they
played for that near-hour in the bitter cold, triumphing by way of matchless
instincts, Lennon and McCartney trading smiles at every keen or botched
moment, their best truth became plain: The Beatles were a true kinship a
family with a shared history that spoke a language they would never forget.
Those moments, though, weren't enough to redeem what was about to
happen.
Reportedly, the earlier fight between Harrison and Lennon started with a
remark Lennon had made in an early-January newspaper article, in which he
said that if Apple kept losing money at its present rate, he and therefore the
Beatles would be bankrupt by midyear. It was perhaps an overstatement,
but Apple was in fact running out of control, and neither Harrison nor
McCartney appreciated Lennon spreading that news.
As a result of all the artist signings, and the price of buying the Savile Row
building plus paying high salaries to friends and executives, Apple's
expenses soared. Like all the Beatles, McCartney was an Apple director, but
in the company's crucial first year, he was the only one who took a daily
interest in the business. (Harrison, always the first to sour on anything, told
confidants he hated Apple and its "rooms full of lunatics and all kinds of
hangers-on.") In those first months, McCartney tried to curb the company's
outlay, but he was met with the other Beatles' resistance; they had no real
conception of economic realities, since they simply spent what they needed
or desired, and had Apple pick up the bills. When Paul warned them of the
financial problems, he was confronted with the view that worry over money
matters was an outmoded mind-set. "It was like a traitorous utterance," he
said. "It was a rather un-communist thing to do and anything I said
seemed to come out wrong." McCartney recalled trying to alert Lennon that
he in particular was spending far too much. "I said, 'Look, John. I'm right.'
And he said, 'You fucking would be, wouldn't you? You're always right,
aren't you?'"
Matters finally hit a critical point when an accountant quit, leaving behind a
blunt memo: "Your personal finances are in a mess." Both McCartney and
Lennon now felt that Apple needed a firm hand that perhaps it was time

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for the Beatles to acquire a new manager. They approached various

financiers and consultants, and McCartney soon believed he had found the
ideal solution close at hand: Linda Eastman's father, Lee, and her brother,
John, were New York attorneys specializing in artist representation.
McCartney believed that the Eastmans could manage Apple and save the
band's fortunes, but the other Beatles were leery. All three felt that
McCartney already exercised enough sway over the band's fate, and they did
not want his potential in-laws also overseeing their business. John, in
particular, thought he couldn't allow his partner such an upper hand.
For years, New York accountant Allen Klein had been looking for an entree
with the Beatles. A brusque and tenacious man, Klein was known for
uncovering lost royalties for music artists, and he had managed singer Sam
Cooke before his death. More recently, he had been the business manager
for such English acts as Herman's Hermits, Donovan and the Rolling Stones.
However, Klein also had a reputation for questionable ethics and was under
investigation by U.S. financial authorities. Even so, more than anything, he
wanted the Beatles. He had once offered to help Brian Epstein make the
band bigger fortunes, but Epstein had declined even to shake Klein's hand.
After reading Lennon's comments about the Beatles running the risk of
going broke, Klein managed to inveigle a reluctant Peter Brown, a director
of Apple, into arranging a formal introduction to Lennon. On January 28th,
1969, two days before the Beatles' Apple rooftop performance, Klein met
Lennon and Ono at a London hotel, and charmed both. He knew the Beatles'
music inside out and he knew how to get on Lennon's good side: lauding
Lennon's particular contributions to various songs, and vouchsafing to
Lennon Ono's validity as an artist in her own right. Just as important, Klein
convinced Lennon that they shared a similar sensibility both were
streetwise men who had made their own way in a hard world. By the
evening's end, John and Yoko were won over: Lennon and Klein signed a
letter of agreement, and Lennon informed EMI and the Beatles the next day.
"I don't give a bugger who anybody else wants," Lennon said. "But I'm
having Allen Klein for me."
This set off the conflagration that killed the Beatles. McCartney still tried to
advance Lee and John Eastman to represent the group's interests, and
arranged a meeting for all the central players. But Allen Klein turned the
encounter into a trap, baiting Lee Eastman, accusing him essentially of being
a secretive Jew (Eastman had abandoned the family surname Epstein years

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before), and Lennon joined in. finally, Eastman exploded in fury, calling
Klein "a rodent." then he and McCartney left the meeting. "I wouldn't let
[Eastman] near me," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "I wouldn't let a
fuckin' animal like that near me who has a mind like that." The worse Klein
behaved and the more that Eastman impugned his character, the more
Lennon and Ono championed him as the Beatles' rescuer, and Harrison and
Starr soon agreed. "Because we were all from Liverpool," Harrison said in
the mid-1990s, "we favored people who were street people. Lee Eastman
was more of a class-conscious type of person. As John was going with
Klein, it was much easier if we went with him too." Though Mick Jagger,
who no longer trusted Klein at all, tried to dissuade the Beatles "Don't go
near him," he wrote in a note to McCartney it was no use.
This disagreement came at the worst possible time for the Beatles, when
everything was happening too fast. In a matter of months, the Beatles lost
their chance to commandeer Brian Epstein's former management firm,
NEMS (costing them a fortune), and, more crucially, Lennon and
McCartney lost the rights to Northern Songs, their music publisher. In the
course of it all, McCartney married Linda Eastman on March 12th, 1969.
and Lennon and Ono married on March 20th, in Gibraltar. In addition, on
the same day as McCartney's wedding, Harrison and his wife, Pattie, were
arrested for marijuana possession (Lennon and Ono had been arrested on a
similar charge by the same police officer months before, and the disposition
of that case affected Lennon's life for years). Klein had been of no benefit in
any of the business debacles, despite his assurances, and yet Lennon,
Harrison and Starr remained supportive of him.
On the evening of May 9th, 1969, at a recording session at Olympic Sound
Studios, Allen Klein waited outside while Lennon, Harrison and Starr, at his
behest, demanded that McCartney sign a three-year management deal with
Klein immediately. McCartney wouldn't do it. He told the others that Klein's
20 percent fee was too high, but in truth he simply couldn't reconcile himself
to the reality of Allen Klein as the Beatles' manager. The others grew
furious, but McCartney held his ground. "The way I saw it, I had to save the
Beatles' fortunes," he said. "They said, 'Oh, fuck off!' and they all stormed
off, leaving me with the session at Olympic."
This was essentially a battle between Lennon and McCartney; these were
men fated to prevail, and neither could afford to lose. McCartney eventually
succumbed, though with a fine subterfuge: When the Beatles signed their

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contract with Klein, McCartney refused to put his signature on the

document. Neither Klein nor the others believed this mattered the Beatles
had a majority-rule understanding. But in that moment of dissent, Paul
McCartney pulled off the only brilliant maneuver that anybody
accomplished during the Beatles' whole sorry endgame: By withholding his
signature, McCartney would later convince a court that he was no longer
contractually bound to remain with the Beatles and had never been bound to
Klein.
By this time, McCartney had lost his heart for Apple, the company that had
resulted largely from his vision. In fact, he now hated the place, and stopped
visiting the Savile Row offices. When McCartney would try to reach Klein,
the Beatles' nominal manager would sometimes refuse the call."Tell him to
call back Monday," Klein told his receptionist.
Despite the travail of the "Get Back" sessions, the Beatles reconvened to
make another album. Myth later had it that the Beatles knew they were
ending and wanted to make a final record worthy of their reputation, but the
truth is, no matter their troubles, the Beatles still liked the music they made
together, even if they didn't like one another. They had already been
recording intermittently since the January sessions, and had produced "The
Ballad of John and Yoko" (with just Lennon and McCartney) and Harrison's
"Old Brown Shoe" (with the full band). McCartney persuaded George
Martin to return to the production helm and also brought back Geoff
Emerick, under assurances that the Beatles would work on their best
behavior. Lennon had to delay his arrival at the sessions after wrecking a car
that he, Ono, Julian and Kyoko were riding in, on July 1st, 1969. When
Lennon arrived at Abbey Road, he had a bed installed on the studio floor, so
his wife could rest and offer commentary. None of the other Beatles dared
protest. "The three of them were a little bit scared of him," recalled EMI
engineer Phil McDonald. "John was a powerful figure, especially with Yoko
a double strength."
There were still disagreements, including Lennon barging into McCartney's
house one day when Paul had missed a session, and in a shouting rage,
breaking a painting he'd given McCartney. At another point, John wanted his
and Paul's songs relegated to separate sides of the vinyl album. In the end, a
compromise was reached most of the stand-alone songs on one side, and
the suite (known as "The Huge") on the other. Just as important, Harrison
finally enjoyed some long-overdue prominence when his two contributions,

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"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," were recognized as among the best
work the Beatles recorded during the summer of 1969. The resulting album,
Abbey Road, provided a sweeping display of the band's mature strengths and
a perspective on its history, whether the Beatles intended it that way or not.
Lennon would later renounce Abbey Road as "something slick" that
McCartney fashioned "to preserve the myth," but Lennon had the habit of
not appreciating anybody's depths but his own. McCartney had been
watching the Beatles come apart, and he was grieving over it. Talking about
the closing segments of Abbey Road's suite with Barry Miles, in Paul
McCartney: Many Years From Now, McCartney said, "I'm generally quite
upbeat but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can't be
upbeat anymore and that was one of the times ... Carry that weight a long
time: like forever! That's what I meant."
By the time Abbey Road was released on September 26th, the Beatles'
fellowship had effectively ended. On September 13th, John Lennon and
Yoko Ono performed at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival, with a makeshift
group that included Eric Clapton, and the experience convinced Lennon that
he could no longer withstand the confines of his old band. A week later,
during a meeting at Apple with Klein, the Beatles and Ono in attendance
McCartney tried once more to persuade his bandmates to undertake a tour
and return to the stage. "Let's get back to square one and remember what
we're all about," he told them. Lennon responded, "I think you're daft. I
wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels
like a divorce."
The people in the room didn't know whether to be shocked or to take the
claim as another show of bravado on Lennon's part. Nobody including
Ono knew this would happen on this day. "Our jaws dropped," McCartney
said. For once, McCartney and Klein were in agreement: They persuaded
Lennon to hold off on any announcement for at least a couple of months.
Klein had just finished a new deal that won the Beatles a substantial increase
in royalty rates, and he didn't want to spook EMI with the knowledge that
the band was breaking up. Plus, both Klein and McCartney believed that
Lennon might reconsider; it wasn't uncommon for him to swing between
extremes. But Ono knew better, and she was as unhappy as anybody else in
that moment.
"We went off in the car," she later told Philip Norman, "and he turned to me
and said, 'That's it with the Beatles. From now on, it's just you OK?' I

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thought, 'My God, those three guys were the ones entertaining him for so
long. Now I have to be the one to take the load.'"
Lennon would in fact send mixed signals in the months that followed. In
comments to Rolling Stone and New Musical Express in early 1970, Lennon
said the Beatles might record again and might play at a summer peace
festival in Canada. Harrison, too, had been talking about a possible new
Beatles tour. "It'll probably be a rebirth, you know, for all of us," Lennon
said. But McCartney now felt shattered; the band the life he had been a
part of since he was 15 had been cut off from him. "John's in love with
Yoko," he told London's Evening Standard, "and he's no longer in love with
the other three of us." Paul stayed at home with Linda, her daughter Heather,
and their infant, Mary, and began drinking in evenings and mornings alike.
He stopped writing music altogether, and his temper flared easily. He'd
fallen into a paralyzing depression, until Linda could take no more. "Here I
am ... married to a drunk who won't take a bath," she told a friend, according
to Peter Carlin's Paul McCartney: A Life. "You don't have to take this crap,"
she finally told Paul. "You're a grown man." During Christmas week 1969,
McCartney took his wife's advice and started work on his first album as an
independent artist. He called Lennon in March 1970 and informed him that
he too was now leaving the Beatles. "Good," his longtime partner replied.
"That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally."
Any lingering chance of reconciliation was cut short by a series of blunders
that Lennon, Klein and Harrison committed in the early months of 1970. By
then, the January 1969 rehearsal and recording sessions had been edited, and
Klein wanted an album to accompany the film, which was now called Let It
Be, after a song by McCartney. (Though Abbey Road was recorded later than
Let It Be, it had already been released in September 1969.) Glyn Johns had
tried to assemble an album in 1969; Paul indicated he was OK with it, but
John hated what he heard. Ironically, the results were too close to the roughand-raw recording aesthetic that Lennon had originally insisted on, and by
early 1970 Klein wanted something more commercially appealing. In
March, Lennon turned over the January 1969 tapes which he described as
"the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever" to
legendary "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector, who had produced
Lennon's "Instant Karma!" single in January 1970. (Neither Klein nor
Spector wanted George Martin involved. "I don't consider him in my
league," Spector said. "He's an arranger, that's all.") The changes that
Spector brought to Let It Be were, at best, for the worse, stifling both

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McCartney's title song and his heartfelt ballad, "The Long and Winding
Road," with overlayers of orchestration. (Spector's modifications of "The
Long and Winding Road" seemed so perverse at one point that Starr, who
attended the overdubbing session, dragged the producer from the studio by
the arm and reprimanded him.) During this time, Spector never consulted
McCartney about the changes he was making, which may have been Klein
and Lennon's intention. After finally hearing Spector's new mixes,
McCartney requested changes, but Klein told him it was too late. (In late
2003, McCartney and Starr would issue a new version of Let It Be called Let
It BeNaked, free of Spector's arrangements and the jokey asides that
Lennon had pushed for.)
The final affront came when Klein, Harrison and Lennon determined that
McCartney couldn't release his debut solo album on April 17th, 1970, as
originally planned, but had to push back the date to June 4th to allow room
for Let It Be, which was now set for April 24th. When Lennon and Harrison
sent Starr as an emissary to McCartney's home to deliver a letter to that
effect, McCartney reacted with uncharacteristic vehemence; just as the
argument might have turned physical, he tossed Ringo from his house. When
Starr returned, he felt bad for what they were doing to Paul and asked that
they let McCartney keep his album's original release date. Harrison and
Lennon consented, pushing Let It Be to May, but they resented McCartney.
The feeling had turned mutual. "We're all talking about peace and love,"
McCartney told a newspaper at the time, "but really we're not feeling
peaceful at all." None of them, though, anticipated what McCartney ended
up doing. "I couldn't just let John control the situation," he later said. In
April, when Paul released his first solo work, McCartney, he also issued a
self-interview, in which he made some matters plain:
Q: Did you miss the Beatles ?
A: No.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No.
Long before John Lennon told the world, "The dream is over," Paul
McCartney had already delivered the news. Lennon took his partner's
statement as an unacceptable usurpation. "I wanted to do it and I should have

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done it," Lennon said. "I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did,
which was use it to sell a record." But the resentment went deeper than that.
The Beatles had originally been John Lennon's band, and in his heart its fate
depended on him. "I started the band, I disbanded it. It's as simple as that,"
he said. Lennon, it seemed, was upset that it was McCartney who had been
seen as leaving him, and not the other way around. "I think it was just
straightforward jealousy," Paul told Barry Miles. At the time, McCartney
told a newspaper, "Ringo left first, then George, then John. I was the last to
leave! It wasn't me!"
The end of the Beatles, however, had only entered a new and strange phase
that would go on for years. McCartney wanted out of Apple altogether he
didn't want Allen Klein to have anything to say about his music or to share
in his profits but when he called Harrison, seeking consent to be released
from his arrangement, George said, "You'll stay on the fucking label. Hare
Krishna." McCartney wrote Lennon long letters, begging to leave the
Beatles' organization, but Lennon fired back one- or two-line noncommittal
replies. McCartney threatened to sue, and Klein laughed at him. On
December 31st, 1970, McCartney sued to dissolve the Beatles. (Klein later
admitted that he was caught completely off guard.) The other three Beatles
were unified in their response to the court: There was no need to end the
group things weren't that bad, they could still make music together. The
only problem was Paul and his domineering ways.
The judge decided that McCartney's request for dissolution was proper, and
consigned the Beatles' considerable earnings to a receivership until the
varying details of separation the divorce that Lennon had wanted could
be worked out. In 1973, the remaining Beatles' contract with Klein ended,
and they did not renew it; they had grown tired of him. Soon, Harrison,
Lennon and Starr would sue their former manager (Lennon admitted to an
interviewer that McCartney perhaps had been right all along about Klein),
and in a separate, Apple-related matter, Klein would be sentenced to two
months in a U.S. prison for fraud. When the Klein debacle was over,
Harrison said he wouldn't mind re-forming the Beatles. When the time came
for the Beatles to gather and sign the final dissolution to the old partnership,
Lennon refused to appear. He was worried that the other Beatles would end
up with more money than he would, and somebody close to him at the time
said that he panicked, because this meant that the Beatles were truly over
with. Maybe he had never really meant to disband the group after all.

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Certainly, though, his caprices and rage had destroyed the band. In the same
meeting in which he said he was leaving the Beatles, Lennon had also
vented years worth of self-doubt and discontent, and placed it all at
McCartney's feet. Paul, he felt, had always eclipsed him, taking more time to
realize the sounds he wanted in the studio, winning more approval from
George Martin for his easy melodicism. Plus, Paul had simply written too
damn much, in John's estimation. By the time they got to the Magical
Mystery Tour sessions, Lennon said, "You'd already have five or six songs,
so I'd think, 'Fuck it, I can't keep up with that.' So I didn't bother, you know,
and I thought, 'I don't really care whether I was on or not.' I convinced
myself it didn't matter, and so for a period if you didn't invite me to be on an
album personally, if you three didn't say, 'Write some more songs 'cause we
like your work,' I wasn't going to fight." But, Lennon added, "There was no
point in turning 'em out I didn't have the energy to turn 'em out and get 'em
on [an album] as well."
It was a remarkable confession. John Lennon who until Abbey Road and
Let It Be had written most of the Beatles' masterpieces and defined their
greatest depths could no longer bear to divide up his brilliance with Paul
McCartney. The Beatles could withstand whatever tensions Yoko Ono
brought them. They might have endured Allen Klein. But the Beatles could
not survive John Lennon. His anxiety was simply too vast.
So the Beatles ended, never to gather again in the lifetimes of these men.
Lennon, Harrison and Starr played together in various configurations over
the years, though only rarely did they record with McCartney; once, when
Eric Clapton married Harrison's former wife, Pattie Boyd, Paul, George and
Ringo played live for a few impromptu minutes. Also, once, John and Paul
played music together at somebody's Los Angeles studio in 1974, and Paul
took a significant role in reuniting John and Yoko when they were separated
during that same period. Lennon and McCartney, the most important
songwriting team in history, repaired their friendship somewhat over the
years, though they stayed distant and circumspect, and never wrote together
again.
Lennon was murdered in 1980. McCartney, Harrison and Starr reunited
again as the Beatles in the mid-1990s to play on some unfinished John
Lennon tracks for The Beatles Anthology. Harrison died of lung cancer in
2001. Paul McCartney, with the help of Lee and John Eastman, went on to

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become the richest man in show business, and Linda McCartney died of
breast cancer in 1998.
Does this feel like a love story? Does love lose all validity for how it ends?
It might, of course, though endings don't easily erase history; rather, they
seal it.
The story of the Beatles was always in some ways bigger than the Beatles,
both the band and its individuals: It was the story of a time, of a generation
reaching for new possibilities. It was the story of what happens when you
reach those possibilities, and what happens when your best hopes come
apart. Yes, it was a love story and love is almost never a simple blessing.
Because as much as the Beatles may have loved their communion, the world
around them loved it even more. That was the love that, more than anything,
exalted the Beatles but also hemmed them in with one another, and they
could not withstand it. John Lennon, in particular, felt he had to break that
love, and Paul McCartney hated to see it torn asunder. Once it was done,
though, it was done. Everything it made every wonder still resonates, but
the hearts that made it happen also unmade it, and never truly recovered
from the experience. "It was all such a long time ago," George Harrison said
years later. "Sometimes I ask myself if I was really there or whether it was
all a dream."
J.P. Morgan Chase's Ugly Family Secrets Revealed
In a story that should be getting lots of attention, American Banker has
released an excellent and disturbing expos of J.P. Morgan Chase's credit
card services division, relying on multiple current and former Chase
employees. One of them, Linda Almonte, is a whistleblower whom I've
known since last September; I'm working on a recount of her story for my
next book.
One of the things we were promised by the lawmakers who passed the
Dodd-Frank reform bill a few years back is that this would be a new era for
whistleblowers who come forward to tell the world about problems in our
financial infrastructure. This story now looms as a test case for that
proposition. American Banker reporter Jeff Horwitz did an outstanding job
in this story detailing the sweeping irregularities in-house at Chase, but his
very thoroughness means the news may have ramifications for Linda, which

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is why I'm urging people to pay attention to this story in the upcoming
weeks.
The Cliff's Notes version of the story goes something like this: Late in 2009,
Chase's credit card services division sold a parcel of nearly $200 million
worth of credit card judgments to a debt collector at a discount. This
common practice in the credit-card industry is a little like a bookie selling
the outstanding debts of his delinquent gamblers to a leg-breaker for 25
cents on the dollar. If the leg-breaker gets half the delinquents to pay, the
deal works out for both sides -- the bookie gets 25 percent of money he
wasn't going to collect, and the leg-breaker makes a 100 percent profit.
In the case of credit cards, of course, you're selling the debts to collection
agents, not leg-breakers, but aside from that unpleasantly minor distinction
the process is the same. The most valuable kinds of sales in this world are
sales of credit card judgments, in other words accounts in which the debtor
has already been successfully brought to court. That, ostensibly, is what this
bloc of accounts Chase sold in 2009 involved.
Almonte came to Chase in the summer of 2009 as a mid-level executive in
the credit card services division's offices in San Antonio, and was quickly
put in charge of preparing the documentation for this enormous sale of credit
card judgments. When Chase regional offices from places like southern
California and Illinois began sending in the papers for these "judgments,"
Almonte very soon found out that something was seriously wrong. From
Horwitz's piece:
Nearly half of the files [Linda's] team sampled were missing proofs of
judgment or other essential information, she wrote to colleagues. Even more
worrisome, she alleged in her wrongful-termination suit, nearly a quarter of
the files misstated how much the borrower owed.
In the "vast majority" of those instances, the actual debt was "lower that
what Chase was representing," her suit stated.
Linda subsequently found an enormous range of errors. Some judgments,
she told me, were not judgments at all. In some cases, she said, Chase
actually owed the customer money.
When she brought these concerns to her superiors, what do you think their
response was? They told her and others to shut up and just sell the stuff

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anyway. Her boss, Jason Lazinbat, allegedly told her "she had better go
along with the plan to sell the misrepresented asset."
Think of the consequences of this: because Chase was so anxious to make
money off this debt sale, countless credit card borrowers would now have
collection agents chasing them for money they did not owe. The debt-buyer,
too, was victimized by being sold accounts it could not collect on. It is
almost impossible to estimate how many man-hours of pointless court
proceedings would be lost because of this decision.
Anyway, when Linda refused to go along with the sale, she was fired. This
was in November of 2009. She then went through a post-firing odyssey that
is an epic tale in itself: her many attempts to get any of the major bank
regulators interested in this case were disturbingly fruitless for a long time
(although the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is apparently
looking into it now), and she struggled to find work in the industry.
She has been repeatedly harassed and has gone through all sorts of personal
hardship as a result of this incident. She filed a whistleblower claim with the
SEC as part of the new whistleblower program created by Dodd-Frank, but
so far there's been no progress there.
When I met Linda last year, my first reaction to her story was that I was
skeptical. The tale she told went far beyond the bank knowingly selling
millions of dollars worth of errors into the financial system. She also
recounted, firsthand, the bank's elaborate robosigning operation, which
Horvitz, talking to other Chase employees, also discussed:
"We did not verify a single one" of the affidavits attesting to the amounts
Chase was seeking to collect, says Howard Hardin, who oversaw a team
handling tens of thousands of Chase debt files in San Antonio. "We were
told [by superiors] 'We're in a hurry. Go ahead and sign them.'"
And there were other stories...suffice to say that the picture Linda painted of
life inside Chase reminded me a little of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: they
were putting just about everything into those sausages. When I was writing it
all up for my book I went through a period where I was waking up nights,
seized with the urge to close every credit account I had her story makes
you think that most credit card companies are essentially indistinguishable
from giant identity theft operations.

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Again, though, when I first heard the story, I was skeptical until I found
other people in the company who verified Almonte's account, all the way
down the line. Horvitz, too, found numerous employees in Chase's credit
card services division who confirmed the story of the company knowingly
selling a mountain of errors into the market, and manufacturing robo-signed
documents to the tune of thousands per week.
The financial crash wouldn't have happened if even a slim plurality of
financial executives had done what Linda Almonte did, i.e. simply refuse to
sign off on a bogus transaction. If companies had merely upheld their own
stated policies and stayed within the ballpark of the law, none of these
messes could have accumulated: fraudulent mortgages wouldn't have been
sold, families wouldn't have been foreclosed upon based on robo-signed
documentation, investors wouldn't have been duped into buying huge
packets of "misrepresented assets."
But most executives didn't refuse to go along, precisely because powerful
companies make it so hard on people who come forward. Almonte, after
being fired, entered into a modest settlement with Chase that prohibited her
from coming forward publicly. At the time she entered into the settlement
she was in an extremely desperate state, and she made a bad decision, taking
a very bad deal.
Still, like Jeffery Wygand, the tobacco scientist from the movie The Insider,
she was sitting on top of a story that, morally speaking, should not ever be
protected by a confidentiality agreement -- and the subsequent lack of
regulatory action eventually moved her to speak out to people like Horvitz
and me. Of course, now that her story is out there in public, the concern is
that the bank will move swiftly to take her to court.
This person does not have any money, so an action by Chase at this point
would be purely punitive, to send a message to future whistleblowers.
They'll be more likely to do it if they think no one is paying attention. I'll
keep you posted on that score.
In the meantime, please check out Horvitz's piece. It should give everyone
who has a credit card pause.
The Last Rock Star

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There are many things to admire about David Lee Roths home. Theres the
lushly landscaped property, three football fields worth by his estimation,
hidden behind a 9-foot ivy-covered wall on an otherwise undistinguished
suburban Pasadena block. Theres the house itself, which hes had for 25
years, a sprawling 1920s Spanish-style mansion with 13 rooms in the
basement alone. Theres the tennis court in back, filled with a foot and a half
of sand to accommodate beach barbecues he doesnt play tennis. But
Roths favorite thing about his home might be the floors. They are
important.
Feel this? He stamps his foot a few times. That transfer of shock? The
floor has to have some give to it. Its why you dont do ballet on concrete.
The effect is much like the inch-thick wooden plank, maybe 15 feet by 15
feet, that comprises the center of Van Halens stage, where he plies a very
specific trade. Acrobatic high-kicks and shimmies. Martial-arts maneuvers
and sashays. I have moves onstage it took me two years to learn.
There is nothing actually on most of the floors in the house. The living room
is bare, save for a few framed photos from the cover shoot of the first Van
Halen album hanging crooked in one corner. (Im not much of a furniture
collector, and Im not much of an interior decorator.) A ceiling-high builtin china cabinet is empty. Half a bottle of Jamaican rum rests on the mantle,
and on the far wall is a rack of Japanese katana swords.
The real deal, he says, unsheathing one. Razor sharp. The first time I held
one of these swords, I was maybe 9 years old. He demonstrates a few
moves, alternately fluid and severe. Everything has to be internalized or
youll look stiff. Once you can do it physically, it becomes your
personality. Hes decked out in the now standard offstage getup of mustardcolored overalls he started wearing three years ago while building stage
props around the house a samurai Mario brother.
I just had my sword teacher here from Tokyo, he says, rat-a-tat, as he says
nearly everything. Buddhist monk, about my age. He loves two things
about Southern California: the chopped liver from the Jewish delicatessen
and these floors. Mojo Dojo. You ever hold one of these? I have not.
He places the sword in my hands and I instantly feel dumb. Theres a weight
to it that only expensive things have, and Im not quite sure what to do.
Have you ever cut anything with these? I ask dumbly. He has not; maybe

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an apple on a string once. I start to swing it tentatively and I can see him
wincing out of the corner of my eye. I hand the sword back to him more
carefully than Ive ever done anything.
There is a not insignificant population for whom David Lee Roth is the urrock star, the embodiment of everything splendorous and stupid about that
term, as responsible as anyone for establishing, defining, and cementing the
debauched libertine, hotel room-trashing, groupie-defiling caricature that is
clich and pass and lionized. Roth is a little less famous for having parlayed
that caricature into a life thats rich and weird and singular and driven by
very particular and exotic enthusiasms ranging from mountain climbing to
martial arts to tending to gunshot victims in the Bronx. But this is something
hes actively trying to change. He owes this movable feast to leaving
quitting, getting kicked out of: pick your version of the legend what was,
at the time of his messy exit, the biggest, most over-the-top band in the
world. If not for that, he might not be someone who, at 57, would train to be
a master swordsman or to speak fluent Japanese.
I wonder who I might have been had I stayed in the band, he says. Not as
interesting, not as involved. I probably would have followed the more
traditional, long, slow climb to the middle. Enjoying my accomplishments,
living off my residuals. I wouldnt have half the stories to tell.
And if not for the fact that Roth rejoined Van Halen in 2007, thus ending
rocks most enduring will-they-or-wont-they soap opera, he wouldnt be in
the position to try to channel that experience into a sprawling one-man video
series and podcast that aspires to do nothing less than tell the history of
modern culture through the eyes of someone who has been everywhere,
done everything, met everyone, and hired a couple of midgets to be his
security detail along the way. Hes going to use the internet to save us from
the internet. He does not harbor any illusion that his life is easily replicated
celebrities, they arent just like us but he would like to, as humbly as
one can do such a thing, offer it as an example of what a life can be.
I know what compels me, I know what Im made of culturally, he says.
Its a variety of neighborhoods. Its Spanish speaking. Its jock. Its graphic
arts. Its surfing. Its Hells Angels. Its Groucho Marx, its Kurosawa.
Throw in some Kenny Chesney. Hey, are you speaking Creole? Great, throw
that in too. And not all neighborhoods compel me, Im not one world, one
love. He places the sword back on the wall.

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Im an eye and an ear into a world and a wealth of experience that were all
part of simply by virtue of watching television, he says. If indeed we live
in a Beyonc world, then this is a view into aspects of that that are rarely
discussed and rarely explained. This is of infinite interest to a lot of my
colleagues in the fine arts, well and beyond any specific kind of music or
part of show business. The stars I see in a lot of peoples eyes are because of
the uniform, not because of the pilot inside.
David Lee Roth has seen some shit and he has to tell you about it. All of it.
The hot for teacher has become the teacher.
The house is sparse and drafty Roth leaves all the windows open at all
times, regardless of weather, to help remain in tune with nature. He lives
here alone with Russ, his 7-year-old Australian cattle dog, currently at his
side; when there is band business to attend to, its attended to here by
production staffers and assistants, and his sister lives in the suite above the
garage. He still has a place in New York City and has spent much of the past
year at his new apartment in Tokyo. This house is the only real tangible
thing I ever bought, and I only paid it off, like, two years ago. Beyond that, I
own three black pickup trucks of varying sizes, depending on the livestock
were moving.
Early on a Saturday night in March, the house is empty and quiet. The
overall effect is more Sunset Boulevard than Citizen Kane or Grey Gardens,
although his kerchief game is legendary. At the bottom of the grand
staircase, in the dark foyer with black-and-white marble floors, Roth instead
offers, unprovoked, Its very end of There Will Be Blood.
Maybe hes heard every question. Maybe hes had the time to anticipate
every question. The only thing missing is the log cabin: Howdy, yall
lost? We gotta have company more often, whaddya think, Russ?
The solitude is by careful design, as is nearly everything else about Roths
existence. Before his family wound up in Pasadena, they moved around a lot
Indiana, Massachusetts and hes said in the past that he decided by a
young age that he would never have a steady group of friends. I was clearly
mopey as a kid, he says. But feeling sorry for yourself is a great motivator.
I have a handful of very good friends, and Im lucky enough to have them in
different locales. The closest I have to a show business friend is Konishiki, a
600-pound ex-sumo wrestler in Tokyo. Hes my language mentor.

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Seeing his parents split up in high school didnt really endear Roth to the
notion of the nuclear family as an aspiration. (Google david lee roth +
married and the first result is a rumor buried in some metal message board
that he married his male chef in a civil ceremony a decade ago; this elicits a
proper guffaw, hes never heard this one.) Ive lived alone my whole adult
life. Ive had girlfriends, Ive had love affairs. Never longer than a year and
a half. Im the drunk who won the lottery, Im going to be very difficult to
convince of a lot of traditional things. I put off getting married when I found
out, oh, you dont really have to. I just saw somebody discussing this
recently, I think Gloria Steinem same thing as her life story. Theres a lot
of us out there.
The centerpiece of the downstairs hallway is a relic from a louder time: the
front grill of the rickety Opel Kadett station wagon Roth drove when Van
Halen were just starting out in the mid-70s playing bars and parties around
L.A., bolted to the wall with the back half of a stuffed deer rammed through
the windshield. Alex and Eddie Van Halen were acquaintances then
never quite friends, exactly also from Pasadena, classically trained
prodigies who needed Roths innate showmanship as much as he needed
their chops. By the time Van Halens debut went gold in 1978, Roth was
squiring himself around Hollywood in a pearlescent black Mercedes SEL
adorned with a giant skull and crossbones on the hood, complete with flames
and a 24-karat gold-leaf tooth. It was a statement of some sort, he says. I
was a favorite of parking attendants all over town.
Van Halen released six albums in six years, the last of which, 1984, was
their breakthrough. In 1983, they headlined Steve Wozniaks US Festival in
California to 350,000 people and were paid a million dollars, more than any
band ever for a single show. Not much more than a year later, they were in
shambles, rocks most dramatic divorce. Years of continued commercial
success without Roth in the band through the 80s diluted the brand,
replacing Roths wink and a nudge with a sledgehammer.
We lived our lives like roughnecks, he says. Roustabouts, circus carnies.
I wonder if its still a dream to live the way we lived. I know the success part
of it is. Not just the partying, but the travel, the late nights, not just with
groupies, but with all kinds of colleagues in a variety of other pursuits. I
wonder if I even see that in peoples eyes.

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There is no point in pretending that I didnt have the Van Halen poster over
my bed with this guy frozen in an eternal mid-air split, or that I didnt hurt
myself repeatedly trying to strike that pose while jumping off swings: face
forward, mouth in an o, hands pointing down and center. The point is not
that an 11-year-old tried to impersonate him, its that he was someone an 11year-old would try to impersonate. He was rock star as superhero, a human
cartoon Diamond Dave. It was impossible to imagine having a normal
conversation with him, and once that becomes your working definition of a
rock star, it is a difficult thing to shake.
The Fabulous Picasso Recording Brothers sign from the beginning of 1986s
Goin Crazy video hangs by the Opal Kadett sculpture, alongside some
framed movie posters stacked and leaning against the wall. On the other side
of the hall is giant framed print of the cover of Eat Em and Smile, while a
life-size shot of the photo from the cover of 1987s Skyscraper, which shows
Roth scaling the side of a mountain, hangs by the stairs, in case you just
came to and are wondering whose house youre in.
It was the immediate post-Van Halen stretch in the mid-80s that Roth
considers his most decadent he calls it his F. Scott Fitzgerald period
because of the increasingly elaborate parties and groupie-wrangling
protocols free of even the pretense of band diplomacy, pushing the
cartoon to its logical extreme, playing up the old-soul vaudeville act that was
always on the fringes of Van Halen and the strutting id that was always at its
center. Just a Gigolo and California Girls were pop-friendly MTV
staples and made Roth seem like something much bigger than the singer in
the worlds biggest rock band. A movie deal fell through, and, maybe
surprisingly for such an obvious ham, Roth never felt compelled to further
pursue the Hollywood route. Between Van Halen and his 80s solo albums,
hes sold 42 million records worldwide; this is a metric thats lost meaning
over the past decade, but by any measure, its a lot. Its no-ones-ever-goingto-do-that-again a lot.
Diamond Dave is somewhere between Spider-Man and Spanky from Our
Gang, he says, popping open a beer. Hes never made a point of
apologizing or renouncing past clownishness, never showed regret or
embarrassment, never worried about those who didnt get the joke, never
ODd or got sober, never got busted for anything more than a dime bag. I
went through a wild phase where I was that person, and perhaps one hurdle
is allowing yourself to develop. Everybody goes through the Harley-

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Davidson phase, the leather days thats a great merit badge, and the
hardest phase to live through.
A close second, though, is a familiar bugaboo to anyone who went platinum
in the go-go 80s and found their teased hair and casual hedonism mocked
and dwarfed by a dressed-down, purposefully glum zeitgeist. Two words:
Kurt Cobain. I went from playing to 12,000 people to 1,200. From arenas to
casinos and state fairs and the local House of Blues. That will cause you to
reflect a lot more clearly on your values. Fun wasnt seen as fun anymore.
Rather than fight the turn toward cultural irrelevance, he steered into it,
especially after a prospective and much ballyhooed 1996 Van Halen reunion
imploded before it began. Settling down was no more appealing an option
than it had ever been (Im 35 and gotta start over, maybe not the best time
to start a family, but if you dont want to start a family, then any time is not
a good time to start a family). He eventually became a certified EMT in
New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in
Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square
Garden, plenty famous enough to stand out in a tactical medicine training
program.
The altitude drop is when somebody realizes who you are and they take you
to task. Now youre the guy who gets to do garbage five days in a row
instead of one, and doing ambulance-garage garbage is different from I-justfinished-dinner-and-now-I-have-to-dump-the-garbage-darling garbage. That
will test you. But I was old enough and smart enough to know what Id
signed up for. These tactics are of value, theyre a contribution.
For years he went on ambulance calls all over New York City, and found
that a life in the music business was good preparation for rushing to the aid
of grievously injured people in the less picturesque corners of the city. My
skills were serious, he says. Verbal judo, staying calm in the face of
hyper-accelerated emotion. Same bizarre hours. Same keening velocity.
Roth is clearly proud of how hes handled 35 years navigating himself in and
out of some very bright spotlights and doesnt begrudge those who may have
been less adept. Up until the past few years, I dont know that Edward was
someone who enjoyed any of his celebrity, he says of his once and future
costar and frenemy, who married One Day at a Times Valerie Bertinelli and
basically became the Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel of the 80s. His
last name right away is a trumpet. I knew how to use my name to get a good

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table at a restaurant but also how to use it so you wont recognize me when
Im there. Nine times out of ten Im sitting next to you and you have no idea.
People are surprised by the degree to which Ive relinquished the attention,
but I was taught this. You gotta learn to exist in both worlds. Uncle Manny
taught me this.
Manny Roth is to Diamond Dave as Alfred is to Batman. The brother of
Roths late ophthalmologist father Nate, Manny owned jazz club Caf Wha?
in Greenwich Village in the early 60s and booked some of the first shows
for up-and-comers Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Woody Allen. He gave
Richard Pryor his first shot and became his first manager.
Davids father would bring him down when he was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old,
and I would give him the royal treatment, says Manny, now 93, on the
phone from his home in Ojai, California. I used to fix him up with ice
cream, whatever he wanted. I didnt try to turn him onto anything, but
maybe it was osmosis. I was in the center of the scene there all you had to
do was carry an empty guitar case and the girls would follow you. I did my
share of drugs. I had my long hair and all that crap. Every day was an
adventure.
By 1974, Manny was divorced with three kids and strung out and in debt,
which is about as boilerplate a rock n roll narrative as they come, then
pulled himself together and ran another nearby club, the Village Gate. He
takes pains to credit Roths parents for being the type of people who
encouraged the pursuit of any interest but osmosis is a powerful thing to
an impressionable child bearing ice cream. By and large, Davids stories
are the same stories I tell, he says. From day to day, his life is a new
adventure, hes a superstar. Hes in Japan learning the language and the
jujitsu. He doesnt sit on his ass. I asked him how are the Japanese ladies
over there and he said hed send me one. I love him dearly. I know he can be
a little quirky.
How so?
Being a rock star is being a rock star, I dont need to go into the details.
What would you do if you were a rock star?
Roth opens the door to the downstairs study, filled with rows and rows of
wardrobe racks and lorded over by an 8-foot statue that hes decorated with

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Japanese tattoos, another interest hes engaged with characteristic vigor. If

youre in need of a yellow embroidered matador jacket but arent sure what
kind of yellow embroidered matador jacket, have we got a room for you.
Road cases are scattered on the patio outside the study after nearly a year
of unplanned dormancy owing to Eddie Van Halens bout with diverticulitis
that scrapped what had been one of the most successful tours of last year, the
machine is cranking up again. Theres a one-off show in Australia in April,
Japan in May, and a festival in Wisconsin in July.
Ive read all these, he says, gesturing to the swollen bookshelves. The
most important one hes read recently is Christopher Hitchens memoir
Hitch-22. He refers to the art books regularly, overseeing design needs for
Van Halen. I look forward to the longer flights because Im actually able to
read a full paperback uninterrupted. Here theres a barrage of stimuli: the
phone, email. Books shaped who I am early on Jack London, Mark
Twain. All those adventure magazines, like Argosy. Guys who went out into
the territory and became merchant marines or opened up a bar somewhere in
the South Pacific but then somehow came to own banana fields in Ecuador
and then and then and then. And now Im writing The Innocents Abroad in
cyberspace.
When Howard Stern left for satellite radio in 2006, Roth took over his time
slot his first guest was Uncle Manny but almost immediately bristled
against what he thought was a restrictive format. The idea of parlaying his
loquaciousness into something approaching a day job isnt anything new.
Hes excited by the prospect of no one telling him what can or cant work.
Just as reading Jack London books as a child fueled his wanderlust, hes
trying to pass this tradition on, using his own war stories to educate a
generation driven to complacency. A generation that may not necessarily
know who he is. He wants to be stopped by fans who tell him he inspired
them to go to Borneo as much as hes stopped by fans who tell him he
inspired them to start a band.
The upstairs hallway is lined with platinum records and platinum
cassettes, god bless monuments to the kind of career a rock band would
barely think to aspire to today. At a moment when Mumford and Sons can
fairly be called one of the biggest bands in the world, its hard to understate
the relative ubiquity and range Van Halen possessed highbrow and
lowbrow, butch and flamboyant, appealing to stoners and jocks, men and

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women, boys and girls. Who else would Jeff Spicoli hire to play his birthday
party?
Sitting in the upstairs office, Roth fishes a Marlboro Light out of a pack and
tosses it back onto a small wooden school desk theyre good for what he
calls his rusty pipe of a voice. Lolita Holloway plays on a loop from a
stereo in another room. CDs and DVDs line the bookshelves in woozy,
haphazard stacks, Russ crate sits next to a bowl of water and an exercise
bike. On the wall by the bathroom door are scribbles that look from a
distance like height markings for a growing child, but theyre actually ideas
and song titles, chicken scratch. The windows open out onto the vast
backyard as the sun goes down. Its the last refuge of the great outdoors
without having to leave the city. Youre not going to find this in Beverly
Hills.
In December 2011, Roth posted an eight-minute black-and-white video
scrapbook, compiled with the help of editor Shelly Toscano, that served as a
de facto (re-)introduction to Roth and his interests. Another, showing Roth
herding dogs, was shown during breathers on last years Van Halen tour.
Toscano came on to work for Roth full-time, primarily editing Van Halen
promo materials, but his inherent hamminess had discovered a new outlet
and a new purpose.
Last October, The Roth Show launched: Its a YouTube series shot at the
house or on the road, with an audio version available as a podcast, and its
nothing more or less than David Lee Roth speaking for a half hour on, more
or less, a single topic. Tattoos. FM and underground radio. The history and
semiotics of pop videos by way of Picasso. A long-ago trip to New Guinea.
His personal history with drinking and smoking. Slideshows from an
unending vacation. The episodes are monologues, history lessons, personal
taxonomy, but really, mostly just talking and more talking, social-studies
lectures by way of rock n roll Babylon, at carnival-barker cadence. He
speaks in dog years. He is the Ken Burns of David Lee Roth.
The effect is overwhelming. The show has already amassed hours of Roth
unpacking himself, and its hard to think of any figure of his status, in any
field, who has put himself or herself out there to this degree, unfiltered and
unabridged, exhaustive and exhausting. His 1997 memoir, Crazy from the
Heat, is a jewel of the trashy-bio genre most of the book is the stuff youd
dog-ear in other trashy bios but that will soon be a cocktail-napkin

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scribble by comparison. At a half hour, guest-free, every three weeks, his

pace is ferocious. The shows do fine; the podcast is regularly in the iTunes
top 200, and each episode has around 20,000 views on YouTube.
But Roth is envisioning bigger things. He is only starting to sift through and
digitize and catalogue a dozen or so hours of no doubt incriminating video
and Super 8 footage he shot backstage and on the road during Van Halens
bacchanalian prime that can serve as the springboard for future episodes.
(There has never been an authorized Van Halen documentary; hes taken it
upon himself to be the bands de facto archivist.) He seems no less
consumed with chronicling himself than a teenage livestreamer, and not just
for the benefit of fans he has in the bag.
If I narrate this appropriately, I can illuminate, he says. Partying means
something very different now than it did back then, and there are relatively
few individuals in my position who are both willing to discuss it and
articulate enough to make it accessible. Do you want a Victorian-style
painting with your foot up on the buffalo and a teak wood settee in front of a
tent Yes, wonderful hunting foray, cant wait to return home, cheeksie
or do you want a no-holds-barred truth-told-at-every-juncture reiteration
that compels questions? If your only question as a 20-year-old is, How did
you become a success? a fair amount of explanation is in The Roth Show.
Beyond it being an erudite scrapbook of bad behavior, he wants the show to
be a travelogue. He wants guests. He wants sponsors.
You cant just go into a sumo stable and get an interview, he says hes
in pitch mode now, which does not sound markedly different than any of his
other modes save for a slight uptick in urgency. We have an opportunity to
talk to a marvelous group of people that few others have access to. Im
pretty conversant on a lot of subjects, and Im good at asking the questions.
It doesnt even matter much whether the stories are apocryphal. The legend
that Van Halen wouldnt play if they found brown M&Ms in their backstage
jar is cited as a prime example of the eras excess and hubris; the reality is
that the request was buried in their contract rider as a test to see whether
venues were abiding by the intricate technical specifications for the stage
and sound at first blush, thats more boring, but as a whole, its a proper
snapshot of frontier life. By now these legends add up to a bigger story that
is true, even if its not all, you know, true.

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There are no lights, not in here, not in many of the rooms; at night in the
office, Roth uses the TV for illumination, and beyond that, hes got 25 years
of walking in the dark here, he knows every corner, theres not much to
bump into. When it gets too dark to see across the desk, he calls downstairs
to Mark Rojas, who was a kid when his mother worked for Roth and now
shoots The Roth Show. Rojas enters wearing a wool overcoat its
downright cold now and holding a flashlight and a floor lamp. He plugs
in the lamp, turns it on, and exits.
Even a casual music fan might feel intimately familiar with Eddie Van
Halens recent medical chart: oral cancer, hip replacement. Meanwhile,
David Lee Roth has been quietly paying the price for a lifetime of hard
landings. Hes undergone two major lower back surgeries in recent years.
The office chair is missing its right armrest Roth also had his shoulder
reattached in four places and needed to be able to sleep in the chair when it
was too uncomfortable to lie on his back. See that? He points to a framed
picture of Elvis Presley mounted on the wall just a foot or two off the floor,
between two open French windows. I had to move that down because I
slept with my head against that wall. Dog is here, dog watches door.
But Roth doesnt seem fragile he barely has crows-feet and hes
inspired and challenged by technology and youth culture in ways that he
thinks a lot of his peers arent, downloading house mixes from Beatport,
hailing David Guetta and Skrillex and Deadmau5 (Im always curious as to
whos got the biggest boom in the room), marveling at the stagecraft of Jpop boy-band Exile. He can barely name a younger rock band that interests
him or that he thinks may bear traces of Van Halens spiritual DNA. Maybe
Kings of Leon.
And hes not afraid of the contentiousness of the internet, built to destroy, or
at least to embarrass very different from the unconditional adoration from
a hockey arena full of paying fans shouting along to Panama in unison. A
few years ago, someone posted an isolated vocal track of Roth singing
Dance the Night Away in the studio, maybe not quite pitch-perfect.
People like to feel superior to someone whos famous, he says with a
shrug. If that had happened in the 80s and was sent out to radio, that would
have been a problem. But taken in the main, one lousy vocal take on the
internet next to hundreds of non-lousy ones, that just describes a human
being. One of the most basic definitions of art is something that compels
commentary.

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Even if that commentary is cruel and unbecoming and coming from entitled
peanut gallerists who havent done a fraction of what hes done in his life?
Sure, he says. I enjoy the entitlement.
If ever there was any question that David Lee Roth was the odd man out in
Van Halen, there certainly isnt now hes the only person in Van Halen
whose last name is not Van Halen. They are a band of brothers in that two of
its members are brothers; in reality, though, they are partners in a highly
successful corporation that operates under specific and doctrinaire bylaws,
which may not be wholly satisfactory to any of the individual parties but are
necessary for the continued liquidity of the firm.
Roth had never met Van Halens current bassist Wolfgang, Eddies 22-yearold son, until they were bandmates; they have yet to so much as step out for
a coffee together, which is understandable given that he grew up knowing
Roth only as that guy Daddy fucking hates. Roth fully admits that
Wolfgangs involvement was never negotiable and that he hasnt spoken to
original bassist and odd man out Michael Anthony in years. I had no
choice, it was Edwards decision, but luckily for all of us, the kid is very
good, he says. If there were a lacking in the program, I wouldnt
participate; I have very high standards of musical excellence. But I do feel a
little like Sammy Davis Jr. in the Rat Pack.
This lack of warm fuzzies isnt scandalous, theres no friction, its not
fodder for whatever would now pass for a rock gossip mill. Roth travels
alone on his own bus with Russ, the same bus that housed 13 people on his
last solo tour in 2006. He sees his bandmates at the venue a little while
before showtime. After the show, he goes out to a dance club or a strip club;
they do not. The most shocking secret about Van Halen in 2013 is that
theyre not volatile or liable to collapse from the weight of interpersonal
strife. The machine is built to sustain that and in fact is fueled by the
suspicion that this may not be the case.
We dont really do anything else for a livelihood, he says, lighting another
cigarette. But what we also do is create the aura that it may never happen.
Has this served us well? Its served us superbly. Were Friday Night Lights
the kid who breaks his knee and his career is ruined, the father whos
drunk and doesnt show up for the important game. It may be painful, but
its better than just winning and winning. Weve become one of the great
American stories.

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And whats more American than the institutionalization of something that

once felt untamable? Van Halens seventh album with Roth, A Different
Kind of Truth, their first with him in 29 years, came out last spring. It sold
around a half a million copies, which is certainly respectable by any 21stcentury math. But given the tortuous backstory and the fact that the album is
actually really good, or at least as good as anyone could have the nerve to
hope for from a Van Halen album in 2012, the response felt fairly muted.
The band didnt help matters by swearing off promotional press of course
that was interpreted as a sign of trouble, or that maybe they didnt want to
talk about the fact that the album comprised reworked versions of songs that
had been languishing in the vaults for as long as Van Halen has existed.
(Theres so many people on television telling you why you should buy
something, he says. We felt we were making a sterling statement by not
doing that.) Van Halen are playing the long con.
What people dont suspect is that were rehearsing, individually and as an
ensemble, constantly, he says. Year-round, stopping only for personal
injury, and right now the band is doing phenomenally. But its not like were
the Stones, living and jamming together in the South of France and getting
drunk and sharing dames after we practice. It was never like that.
Barring further personal injury, Van Halen will continue as it is now: a
massive box-office draw that will put out albums every few years, quite
possibly featuring songs that werent conceived in the Carter administration.
There will be rumors that the band members arent all best pals; these will
be too true and too mundane to necessitate refuting, but the refuting is part
of the deal, as much a part of the bands mystique as any song. What was
once the Platonic ideal of rock n roll indulgence is now structured around,
literally, family values; for true adventure, Roth looks elsewhere. This is not
a complaint, its a fact. Without the clout and imprimatur of Van Halen, The
Roth Show loses a little luster, a little marketability. Predictability is a punch
worth rolling with.
The creative process for Van Halen could be more Technicolor, he says.
Lets go somewhere French, Tahiti or the West Indies, woodshed in a
studio thats on a boat, travel to little islands, and play the local bar on
Wednesday and Friday nights. Somewhere that has international influence to
alternately complain about and celebrate and adds more to the emotional
menu than, We went up to Eds place. That mantra hasnt changed in 20
years and isnt going to. Everyone else has very real families, very real tent

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stakes. To me, travel is still exciting, but for others, it can smack of
alienation or disenfranchisement. There are no surprises here at all. Were on
that James Bond schedule, every three years.
Just as Van Halens debut appeared smack between disco and punk, theyve
never been part of any movement or moment that could be considered in
vogue culturally, and there isnt much thats popular now that owes them
any evident stylistic debt. The Van Halen brothers had musical skills any
wonky prog band would have envied, but they were more concerned with
getting laid than impressing the conservatory. The played Kinks songs, but
in ways that were impossible to replicate at home. They talked about chicks
and cars and chicks in cars, but slyly, and with the occasional touch of Tin
Pan Alley to boot. They predated presaged, really hair metal, yet this
iteration of the band was gone by the time their blunter, glossier spawn
passed for mainstream pop.
But its difficult to parse what Van Halen means today to a generation that
didnt have the poster, whose musical heroes are an @ reply away. Even
with a wholly respectable new album, they exist as the cultural equivalent of
a broken-in pair of jeans. Or, as Roth says, an action figure, G.I. Joe with the
kung-fu grip, not meant to be updated or improved upon.
Ask Roth about his, and the bands legacy, and hell give a good answer, as
he always does, about how the bands intricate musicianship makes them
impossible to imitate, by design, and how people can ape his moves or his
drinking or his shirtlessness without hinting at any of his charisma, and this
is all still true watching them now. But the notion of them as roughnecks or
roustabouts or circus carnies is frozen in amber. If they have to be a museum
piece, hed at least like to be the tour guide.
In January of last year, Van Halen played a surprise show to announce the
new album at Caf Wha?, easily the smallest venue theyd graced since
the mid-70s. David called me and said, Ive got great news. Its taken me
50 years, but Ive finally made it, says Manny. He said he wanted to pay
for my trip out there, but I wouldnt let him.
Between songs, Roth did his familiar ringmaster spiel but took an especially
long moment to point out Manny, front and center and beaming in this club
the size of the Gardens security barrier. He reminisced about watching his
uncle lay down the clubs marble floor, about how being in this room made

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him the kind of person who could front a band way too big to be playing this
room. From someone once considered to be the poster boy for rock artifice,
it was about as human a moment as youd ever need to see onstage.
Im ready to do it all over again, Manny tells me 15 months later. Roth is
worried about his uncle hes been having respiratory problems, but he
sounds strong now, he is in pitch mode. I have TV connections, I have
friends in New York Ive stayed in touch with. It would be much bigger than
opening a club. Im back in the game now. He is a lifer, and lifers dont
retire. It seems safe to say that this, too, has been learned by osmosis.
Its nearly midnight. Roth and I walk to the top of the stairs and Russ
saunters over, tail wagging. He asks me if I want to hear Russ sing. I do, of
course, because Russ is a dog. How about some Motown? Roth inhales
deeply and lets loose in a familiar rasp. Daaaaaancing in the streeeee
and then Russ joins in with, Awooooooooooo!
Roth cracks up like theyve never done this before, but of course they have.
Just because theyve done it before doesnt mean its not entertaining.
The true story of life at Marvel Comics in the glory days of Jack Kirby
and Stan Lee
In 1966, Martin Goodman moved his expanding comic-book operations out
of the cramped offices at 625 Madison, just down the block to 635.
Goodman stayed behind with his magazines; from now on, Stan Lee would
have a little more room to breathe, a little less attention from the boss.
Marvel's old address continued to run in the letter columns, to confuse the
overzealous kids who'd started showing up and trying to sneak by Flo
Steinberg to meet their heroes. (Lee stopped taking the elevator, where he
might be stuck with nutty fans; now he bounded his lean frame up the stairs
every day.) They wouldn't have been treated to much of a spectacle anyway,
certainly nothing like the madcap Bullpen that Lee had planted in their
imaginations, but there was, at last, a real staff. John "the Mountain"
Verpoorten, a pipe-smoking, art-school-educated, six-foot-six bear of a man
who collected 16 mm films, and Morrie Kuramoto, a Japanese- American,
chain-smoking health-food advocate who'd been one of the 1957 layoff
casualties, were hired to help with production.

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But even as Marvel was growing bigger, and ever more popular, DC Comics
was still on top. The writing was consistently professional, and the artworkGil Kane on Green Lantern, Carmine Infantino on The Flash and Batman,
Timely alumnus Mike Sekowsky on the Justice League of America, Curt
Swan on Superman-was polished and elegant. But to Marvel readers, the
personalities of the DC characters were interchangeable, their lives static and
flat. Neither charge was entirely true: Aquaman and the Flash both got
married, and Superman's lachrymose longings for Krypton carried a real
weight. Still, most of the DC world seemed earnestly homogeneous,
rendered with polite draftsmanship that radiated a kind of complacency.
Although they were, in truth, charming and inventive in their own right, they
couldn't hold a candle to the blend of humor and pathos and grandeur that
Lee, Kirby, and Ditko had concocted.
The suit-wearing editors at DC discussed Marvel in their meetings, and
finally decided that it must be the crude artwork, and the bad puns, that the
kids liked. There's no accounting for taste, they grumbled, and tried to get
hip by pasting so-called go-go checkerboard patterns at the tops of each
comic. Instead of Lee's snappy "Bullpen Bulletins," DC instituted a news
update page called "Direct Currents" that might as well have been written by
accountants. They introduced a "New Look" version of the dying-on-thevine Batman, replacing horrendous alien-invader stories with horrendous
self-parody that Susan Sontag, in The New York Times, singled out as a
textbook example of "low camp." It was Marvel gone wrong, with only Stan
Lee's puns and none of his heart: Spider-Man had Aunt May, and so now
Batman got an Aunt Harriet, but instead of familial drama there was only
arch, idiot-savant modishness.
Marvel was still scrappier, with a faster-growing fan base. Marvel was more
Mets than Yankees, more Rolling Stones than Pat Boone (whom, in fact, DC
had immortalized in a comic book); it was the Pepsi Generation challenger
to DC's Coca-Cola giant. Where Marvel had the interest of Fellini and the
editor of Existential Psychiatry, DC had the songwriters of Bye Bye Birdie
staging It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman! on Broadway.
But DC also had Batman. More specifically, they had Batman, star of ABCTV, an instant Top 10 Nielsen hit, which caused the sales of the comic book
to suddenly increase multifold, the first comic book in years to break the
one-million-copies mark. New episodes of the show ran an unprecedented

204

twice a week and precipitated a merchandising bonanza, a windfall in junky

plastic tie-ins.
The new, campy version of the Batman comic had attracted Hollywood's
attention; DC's very failure to re-create the Marvel style resulted in its
biggest hit. Martin Goodman might have wished he'd waited a little longer to
sell the rights to his own characters-but for a magazine publisher whose
comic books were a fraction of the business, it was all gravy anyway.
Marvel's own success had already catalyzed other publishers to trot out
superheroes, and now Batman translated into a popularity surge for
everybody in the again-growing field.
Much of the new competition employed exiles from Marvel itself: in
addition to the Tower Comics books edited by the disgruntled Wally Wood,
by 1965 the field also included Archie Comics' imitatively titled "Mighty
Comics Group" line, created by Superman co-creator (and former Strange
Tales writer) Jerry Siegel, and Paul Reinman, the Timely artist who'd inked
much of Kirby's early 1960s Marvel work. Mighty Comics tried to have it
both ways, with covers that were actionable mimicries of Marvel and a tone
as groan-inducingly dopey as Batman's. "Dig their crazy costumes-marvel at
their stupor deeds!" read the cover copy on a paperback collection of Mighty
stories, titled High Camp Superheroes. "Some will say this book is so bad
it's GREAT." Charlton Comics' more straight-faced new "Action Heroes"
line was home to Steve Ditko, who eventually used the platform to introduce
the Question, a right-wing vigilante unfettered by Stan Lee's pesky moral
relativism.[1] And Harvey Comics hired Jack Kirby's old partner, Joe
Simon.
With news of Simon's "Harvey Thriller" line in the works, Martin Goodman
told Lee to leap into action. "I came in one day," said Kirby, "and Stan said,
Martin says we have to add more books.' They were afraid Al Harvey, who
had pretty good distribution, was going to crowd them off the stands." In the
space of a week, Lee and Kirby came up with a misfit group of heroes called
the Inhumans and a handsome black hero called the Coal Tiger. But it turned
out that DC, which still controlled Marvel's distribution, wouldn't allow
Goodman to publish the extra titles anyway. So the new characters were set
aside until they could be worked into the Fantastic Four, as players in what
would be the most adventurous stories that Marvel had ever attempted.

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The Marvel heroes populated every corner of the world. The Fantastic Four,
Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Avengers were based in New York City; the
X-Men made their home in nearby Westchester County. The Hulk wandered
the southwestern United States; Iron Man went to Ire- land, battled a
Norwegian menace, and visited Vietnam. There was a cavalcade of alien
visitations, and Doctor Strange could always be counted on to visit the astral
plane. But now Lee and Kirby would really push the boundaries, revving up
the mythological grandeur of the Marvel Universe. Kirby freed his inner
Edith Hamilton by supplementing Thor's modern-day adventures in Journey
into Mystery with "Tales of Asgard," in which Norse gods vied for power
among themselves. It wasn't just the awe-striking powers that made these
stories operatic. There was also the classicism of the narratives-quests for
mystical objects, preparations for battle-and themes of duty, heritage, and
mortality that seemed wholly unrelated to the alien-punching stories from
the newsstand competition. Before now, superhero comics weren't about
approval from your king father-that was strictly Shakespeare. Now, in the
Marvel version of things, Thor always had to answer to angry dad Odin, and
his chief nemesis, Loki, was also his half brother-an enemy-sibling dynamic
that would be repeated with characters in The X-Men and the Fantastic Four.
Journey into Mystery may have been the most explicitly mythological of the
Lee and Kirby books, but the stories in Fantastic Four were becoming more
philosophical, and more ceremonious, with every issue. In the mid 1960s,
the psychodrama of the First Family of Marvel Comics reached new levels.
For more than six months, Ben Grimm, the Thing, stalked around in a
sustained rage, still unable to accept the permanence of his mutated state.
Reed and Sue Richards, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl, followed their
nuptials with icy tension, as Reed became more and more withdrawn,
obsessed with his scientific pursuits. And everything converged when
Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, fell under the spell of doomed love for a
doe-eyed beauty named Crystal. It turned out she was a member of the
Inhumans, the strange-powered family of exiled royalty who lived hidden in
the Swiss Alps but had come to New York City pur- suing one of their own,
a runaway.
The Inhumans were like nothing that had come before. Their intentions were
ambiguous, and their bodies-one had earthquake-inducing hooves, another
tentacle-like hair, another gills and fins-verged on the grotesque. Black Bolt,
their leader, had a voice that literally shattered the earth around him-and so

206

he remained mute. Lockjaw, the family pet, was a massive mustachioed dog
with antennae.
With the introduction of the Inhumans, it was suddenly apparent that the
Marvel Universe was infinite, that there could be whole civilizations in
every corner of the entire cosmos: as each issue tumbled into the next,
picking up momentum, expanding the cast, the grand space opera absorbed
forgotten characters and established the relationships between them all.
Overlapping with the Inhumans adventure was the threat of Galactus, a
twenty-foot-tall humanoid alien who wore purple headgear and drained life
from entire planets for sustenance, his arrival heralded by a sterling,
speechless being on a flying surfboard-the Silver Surfer- who scouted ahead
like an angel of death. The Fantastic Four returned from their latest
adventure to find a red-skied New York City in flames, its screaming
citizens dropping belongings and falling on one another as they wandered
through empty intersections. Even the FF's old enemies, the shape-shifting
alien Skrulls, were shown panicking in their space- ships far away. The
Watcher, a cosmic deity sworn to observe the galaxies but never interfere,
was dusted off from early issues; understanding the threat of Galactus, he
broke his oath and offered assistance to the heroes. There was the sense that
something big was coming, something scary, something secret-something
that didn't belong in comic books.
Kirby, no longer satisfied with air-cars and gamma rays, introduced AtmoGuns and Matter Mobilizers and Elemental Converters. The Watcher sent
the Human Torch into the Negative Zone, an unexplored realm of antimatter,
to retrieve a weapon called the Ultimate Nullifier. Lee and Kirby knew
better than to explain these concepts in great detail. Readers couldn't
possibly understand; even the heroes themselves couldn't process what was
going on. The Silver Surfer, the Watcher, Galactus- they were all bigger than
the helpless Fantastic Four, who were relegated to sitting on the sidelines.
The Watcher commanded them to show humility: "Stand and observe! Try
to fathom the cataclysmic forces which have been unleashed!" Two years
before 2001: A Space Odyssey, before the cinema could hope to approach
the psychedelic imagination, the Human Torch emerged from an epiphanic
trip in the laser-light show that was the Negative Zone, the Ultimate
Nullifier finally in hand, but stricken with something like cosmic trauma,
stammering in shock: "I traveled through worlds . . . so big . . . so big . . .
there . . . there aren't words! We're like ants . . . just ants . . . ants!!!"

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The Fantastic Four nervously brandished the exotic weapon, and the
conscience-stricken Silver Surfer turned against his master, but Galactus was
more annoyed than intimidated. He agreed to spare the planet in exchange
for the surrender of the Ultimate Nullifier and casually sentenced his former
messenger to imprisonment on Earth. ("I remove your space-time powers!
Henceforth, the Silver Surfer shall roam the galaxies no more!") The
devourer of planets finally departed, but it didn't feel like a clean triumph for
the heroes, just a loss of innocence. Letter-writers wiped their brows, caught
their breath, tried to reason it out: clearly the Galactus saga was a
justification for Vietnam, with Galactus as the Viet Cong, the Fantastic Four
as South Vietnam, and the Silver Surfer as America . . . right? Lee
responded with wry, expert deflection: "Two'll getcha ten that our next mail
contains a whole kaboodle of letters from equally imaginative fans who are
utterly convinced that Galactus represented Robert McNamara, while the
Silver Surfer was Wayne Morse- with Alicia symbolizing Lady Bird!"
He had a point: it was beyond metaphor. And it wasn't just Fantastic Four
that could no longer be reduced to Joseph Campbell schematics or English
Lit 101 symbolisms. Suddenly almost everything in the Marvel Universe
was reaching some kind of critical juncture, a point of no return. Nick Fury's
modern-day S.H.I.E.L.D. adventures in Strange Tales merged with Captain
America's missions in Tales of Suspense as the he- roes teamed against hightech organizations like A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) and HYDRA[2]
for a kind of sci-fi paramilitary feedback loop. Here, too, science bounded
forward at a dizzying, almost alarming rate-even the flurry of good-guy
gadgets like Life Model Decoys carried dis- concerting post-atomic
associations of that which humanity is not ready to harness. A.I.M.-which
consisted of shady industrialists outfitted like futuristic beekeepers-created
the Super-Adaptoid and brandished a talisman known as the Cosmic Cube
("The ultimate weapon! The ultimate source of power! The only such
artifact known to man-which can convert thought waves-into material
action!"), which fell into the hands of the Red Skull, who'd just reemerged
from the rubble of the Fhrerbunker after two decades. All you could pray
for was to have the Orion Missile, or the Matter Transmitter, on your side.
Thor encountered a simultaneous crisis. The thunder god's own name finally
replaced Journey into Mystery as the title of his comic, but-as if in ironic
commemoration-the "Tales of Asgard" story tucked in the back of the latest
issue featured a nightmare vision of Ragnarok, the end of the world.
Ragnarok was presented in a sort of premonition-daydream sequence, but it

208

was assuredly an outcome that could not be avoided, a fait accompli: "As
chaos and carnage envelop the realm; as a fury akin to madness sweeps the
very soul of Asgard; there are those who crumble beneath the strain-who
join the ranks of the forces of evil. . . ." Fire and devastation unfolded over
two issues, depopulated panels given over to fallen swords, steel-beam
crosses, and smoking debris. The prophecy was staved off, but there was the
nagging knowledge that this was only a temporary stall from "that which no
force in all the universe can prevent." Galactus, the Cosmic Cube, and
Ragnarok were all closing in on the skies, a conspiracy of doom.
Armageddon was nigh.
It was at this eschatological juncture that Steve Ditko's last Amazing SpiderMan and "Doctor Strange" stories were finally published, months after
Ditko's actual departure and thus carrying the import of a last will and
testament. A conflict between Strange and his rival Dormammu, which had
extended over an unprecedented seventeen issues, came to an apocalyptic
climax of its own, as Dormammu held hostage a cosmic entity known as . . .
Eternity. Once again, planets shook, stars screamed, and our hero narrowly
avoided insanity. "No human mind can retain the things I have seen!"
Strange proclaimed. "Already, the memories begin to fade. . . ." In the final
panel, the Sorcerer Supreme turns his back and takes leave of the
extradimensional battle site to return home, "his greatest battle won." With
that, Ditko was gone from Marvel.
Carl Burgos and Joe Simon, now in their fifties, watched from the sidelines.
As the initial twenty-eight-year terms of Marvel's initial copyrights on the
Human Torch and Captain America approached expiration, creators Burgos
and Simon consulted lawyers and prepared to wrest back ownership of the
heroes upon which Marvel had built its comics empire.[3] While the
paperwork was completed, they also saw another way to stick it to
Goodman: they'd roll out pointedly competing comic books.
Burgos teamed up with Myron Fass, who'd drawn stories for Timely in the
early 1950s and was now a publisher of sleazy magazines, in a gambit to
snatch the Captain Marvel trademark. To Goodman's chagrin, the name
Captain Marvel had never been his property-it had belonged to Fawcett in
the 1940s and 1950s, until the settlement of a DC Comics suit that claimed
that the caped and flying character of Captain Marvel infringed on its
Superman. The Captain Marvel name had been abandoned along with the
character, and now Fass pounced, knowing he'd get a reaction from

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Goodman. Burgos's new version of Captain Marvel was, like his old creation
the Human Torch, a red-costumed android; if Marvel didn't get the message,
Burgos also soon introduced a villain named Dr. Doom. The comic,
launched in early 1966, bombed, but when an irritated Goodman offered six
thousand dollars for the copyright in July, Fass refused.
Burgos was also at that time pursuing legal action against Marvel Comics
over the Human Torch copyright. Then, one day in the summer of 1966, his
daughter, Susan, watched as he destroyed every trace of his Marvel Comics
career-which had to that point been hidden away from her. "I never saw his
collection until the day he threw it all out. I just happened to be in the
backyard this summer day and there was a whole pile of stuff in the yard. I
took as many of the comics as I could carry back to my room, like they were
some treasure. He came in and demanded that I give him my comics. . . . I
got the impression that he either lost the case or something else had
happened pertaining to it." Again Burgos withheld details from his daughter,
but over the years she learned the source of his ire. "I grew up believing that
he came up with this fabulous idea," she said, "and that Stan Lee took it
from him."
In fact, Burgos's claims may have never made it to court; his dark ritual on
that summer day may have instead been reaction to a new Marvel comic
book. In early August, Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four Annual #4 featured
Burgos's original Human Torch, battling the new teenage Human Torch and
the rest of the Fantastic Four. Cover-dated October 1968, it appeared exactly
twenty-eight years after Marvel Comics #1-in other words, exactly as the
initial twenty-eight-year copyright was expiring. The original Torch had
been revived just long enough to ensure their copyright claim-only to be
killed again, pages later. "Well, let's face it," mused the Thing when
Burgos's creation had been extinguished, "ya win a few . . .'n ya lose a few!"
Lee had Johnny Storm, the last Human Torch standing, eulogizing his fallen
predecessor this way: "He tried to defeat me . . . and yet, I can't find it in my
heart to hate him!"
Burgos quietly registered some copyright claims in 1967 that went nowhere,
and then disappeared from Marvel's radar entirely. In the early 1970s, artist
Batton Lash tracked down Burgos and asked the veteran for advice. But
Burgos had left comics behind for good, and advised Lash to stay away from
that "terrible field" as well, citing his own disappointment over the Human

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Torch. "If I'd known how much trouble and heartbreak the Torch would
bring me," he told the young artist, "I would never have created him."
Joe Simon, meanwhile, was about to pursue a copyright claim of his own, on
Captain America. Captain America had been-along with Iron Man, Thor,
Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk-one of five characters announced for the Marvel
Super Heroes animated show.[4] By the spring of 1966, as the series began
production, there was already a bonanza of licensing in place: paperbacks,
LPs, model kits, costumes, buttons, pins, trading cards, board games, Tshirts and sweatshirts, toys, and stickers. "We've had movie offers for just
about all our characters," Lee bragged. Simon would file suit against not
only Goodman's Magazine Management, but also Krantz Films (distributor
of the cartoon show) and Weston Merchandising (which had developed
Captain Action, a figure that included Captain America paraphernalia).[5]
Simon, a businessman as well as an artist, was a greater legal threat than
Burgos. He'd kept extensive records-including the original sketches he'd
done of Captain America in 1940.
As he had with the Human Torch, Goodman took measures to reestablish
Marvel's ownership of Captain America. Fantasy Masterpieces, a doublesized title that had run reprints of 1950s Atlas stories, suddenly shifted gears
and re-presented Golden Age Captain America. But the credits-"art and
editorial by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby"-were removed.
Kirby protested, but he was in a tough spot. "Simon said he created Captain
America," Goodman told him. "He wants the copyright and it looks like
you're out." Goodman offered a deal: if Kirby would side with Marvel in the
dispute, the company would pay him an amount to match any future
settlement with Simon. On July 12, 1966, Kirby signed a deposition
describing the creation of Captain America. "I felt that whatever I did for
Timely belonged to Timely as was the practice in those days. When I left
Timely, all of my work was left with them."
As Simon plotted his next legal move, he continued editing superhero books
for Harvey Comics, best known for such little-kid fare as Casper the
Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich. Happy to poach from Martin Good- man,
he commissioned work from Marvel artists Dick Ayers and George Tuska;
he also hired Wally Wood.[6] He recruited newer talent as well: at a
Manhattan comic convention, he approached an artist with James Dean hair

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and a million-dollar smile and invited him to Long Island to help create
characters. I want to compete with Marvel, Simon told the artist.
The artist's name was Jim Steranko, and he was the twenty-seven-year- old
art director at a Shillington, Pennsylvania, ad agency. If there weren't a trail
of newspaper clippings to confirm it, one would never believe what Steranko
had packed into his early years. He was born into poverty, with a father who
struggled to support his family by gathering bootleg coal, digging
homemade mines, and taking serious risks in unsafe, rickety shafts. The
young Steranko, obsessed with the danger and claustrophobia of his father's
daily routine, dedicated himself to the art of escape. By the age of sixteen, he
was putting on Houdini-like public performances, showing off to local
police that he could escape from their jails. He also slipped out of
straitjackets, leg irons, handcuffs, safes, and vaults.
Other performances were less thrilling to the local authorities: The teenaged
Steranko began stealing an arsenal's worth of guns and a small parking lot's
worth of motor vehicles. In February 1956, Steranko and a partner were
arrested for the thefts, committed throughout eastern Pennsylvania, of
twenty-five cars and two trucks. (He was careful to avoid criminal activity in
his hometown. "None of the things we did were done in Reading, maybe one
or two. I stole a submachine gun in Reading, but that was all.") They
burglarized gas stations, but a sole, thwarted attempt at armed robbery-the
victim sized up Steranko, realized he wouldn't shoot the gun, and refused to
hand over any money-showed the limits of his transgressive inclinations. By
the early 1960s, Steranko had moved on to playing rock-and-roll guitar (his
band shared bills with Bill Haley and His Comets), card tricks (he was
nationally ranked and published a book), and fire-eating, before he finally
settled into advertising.
Through it all, Steranko found constant inspiration in comic books. But for
once, it seemed like instant mastery of a craft was beyond his grasp. He'd
been turned away by Marvel in the summer of 1965, and now he regaled
Simon with silly-named heroes like Spyman and Magicmaster. Steranko not
only wrote the scripts and designed the characters; he also included elaborate
diagrams that delineated the heroes' powers. But Simon told him that he
didn't have the proper artistic skills to draw the stories. And so the prodigy
went across town, to the very company that Simon had hired him to
challenge.

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When Steranko entered the Marvel offices in the summer of 1966, he'd just
sold a pitch that very day for an animated series to Paramount Pictures, and
had even more swagger than usual. He needed that swagger to get through
all the proper channels: he didn't have an appointment. Flo Steinberg called
back to Sol Brodsky, who in turn sent Roy Thomas out to the reception area
for the formality of humoring yet another amateur comic-book artist. The
expected brush-off never happened. Thomas, im- pressed with what he saw,
sent Steranko into Lee's office. Lee was in his usual high-octane mode-as
Steranko described it, "equal parts actor, editor, charmer, and showman."
The samples, he said, were crude. But there was something he liked about
them.
"What's that?" asked Steranko.
"Raw energy!" Lee practically shouted. He pointed to a rack of comics.
"What would you like to do for us?" he said. "Pick one!"
Steranko walked out with an art assignment on "Nick Fury." After a few
months of drawing over Kirby's layouts, Steranko was handed the reinssolely generating not just the art, but the scripts as well. For the first time
since Wally Wood's Daredevil #10 fiasco, Lee allowed someone else to
write and draw everything in a comic. Jack Kirby, unsatisfied with his own
lack of writing credits, took notice.
Stan Lee's mind was elsewhere that summer. The Marvel Super Heroes
cartoon was getting ready to air on dozens of television stations across the
country, five nights a week, and so the show's producer, Robert Lawrence,
put Lee up in a midtown penthouse apartment, where after hours he
scribbled extensive notes in blue pencil: We've got to let viewer know who
Bucky IS! . . . Shapanka is a scientist-doesn't use slang! . . . The final frame
is weak! It was Lee's first taste of showbiz, and he wasn't going to let it slide.
When the show began airing, Lawrence accompanied Lee on a tour of
college campuses. "The kids were unbelievable," Lawrence marveled. "I
think we spent three days at Chapel Hill with them. They'd stay up all night
drinking beers, speaking to Stan Lee." Esquire's annual college issue
featured the Marvel characters in a full-color, six-page spread, and reported
that the company had already "sold 50,000 printed t-shirts and 30,000 sweat
shirts, and it has run out of adult sizes of both." College student fans
weighed in for the magazine, proving they were digging what Lee and Co.

213

were laying down: "Marvel often stretches the pseudo- scientific

imagination far into the phantasmagoria of other dimensions, problems of
time and space, and even the semi-technological concept of creation. They
are brilliantly illustrated, to a nearly hallucinogenic extent." Before long,
Marvel Comics was selling ads for shaving cream and cars. Lee had even
earned the respect of Goodman's magazine editors. "For Stan Lee," Mario
Puzo inscribed in a copy of his latest novel, "Whose imagination I cannot
hope to equal."
Even as he was tending to the animated show, visiting campuses, and
scripting a big chunk of the comics line, Lee was also, with Sol Brodsky,
spending a lot of his energy shifting writers and artists around-this was the
biggest stable of talent they'd had since the 1950s. (A nice side effect of the
competition from Tower, Harvey, and Archie superhero lines was that Lee
convinced Goodman that Marvel needed to raise page rates to keep their
creative edge.) Roy Thomas-goateed now, with a Russian hat, alligator
shoes, and a Nehru jacket-offered more writer recommendations, helping to
relieve some of Lee's burden. Thomas's high school pal Gary Friedrich
scripted westerns and war titles, and bumped the quality level of Sgt. Fury
above anything Lee had done on the title. It quickly became, ironically, the
book with the most explicit criticism of foreign wars, at a time when Lee's
characters were occasionally still spouting exclamations like "No one has the
right to defy the wishes of his government! Not even Iron Man!"
Before long, Lee handed "Iron Man" over to another Thomas
recommendation. Archie Goodwin, a bespectacled EC Comics fan, had
graduated from cartooning school just in time for the collapsed comic-book
economy of the late 1950s. He'd toiled in the art department of Redbook
(where he'd rejected Andy Warhol's portfolio, and then lectured Warhol
about tracing other people's work), and edited EC-like black-and-white
horror publications for the infamously cheap and hot-tempered publisher Jim
Warren. At Marvel, Goodwin scaled back the hawkishness of "Iron Man,"
moving Tony Stark further away from Cold War antagonism and into the
spy/technology milieu that had come to define Captain America and Nick
Fury.
Thomas's nose for talent helped enormously. But Lee remained the de facto
art director, and maintaining the look of Marvel comics fell on his shoulders
alone. Near the end of 1965, Lee had asked John Romita to feature SpiderMan in a two-part Daredevil story. Romita didn't realize it at the time, but it

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was an audition to replace Steve Ditko on Amazing Spider-Man. When

Ditko's inevitable departure finally happened, the new team hit the ground
running. Their very first issue together featured the shocking revelation that
the Green Goblin's secret identity was Nor- man Osborn, the wealthy
industrialist father of Peter Parker's classmate Harry Osborn. (Rumors
circulated that Ditko's refusal to go along with this dramatic plot twist had
been the final point of contention between Lee and Ditko.)
Romita had preferred working on Daredevil. But he was a team player, a
consummate professional happily wearing a crisp white shirt and tie every
time he stepped into the office, and anyway he figured the stint was
temporary. "I couldn't believe that a guy would walk away from a successful book that was the second-highest seller at Marvel," Romita explained to
Thomas years later. "I didn't know Ditko. I assumed he'd do what I would
have done-he'd think about how he had given up a top character, and he'd be
back. And I was sort of counting the days until I could get back on
Daredevil." Romita was conscientious about making it a smooth transition,
copying Ditko's style as best he could, even using a technical pen for the
most faithful mimicry possible.
He failed at his Ditko impression. But Romita's experience with romance
comics had advantages. Peter Parker's jaw strengthened, his hair moved into
place, and he bulked up slightly. His next-door neighbor, Mary Jane
Watson-whom Lee and Ditko had been coyly hiding in shadows for a year
and a half-finally showed her face, and she was a gorgeous, sassy, ravenhaired party girl. Gwen Stacy got even prettier; she and Mary Jane began
competing for Peter's attentions like they were go-go versions of Betty and
Veronica. And everyone, even Flash Thompson, started smiling more.
According to Romita, at first Lee admonished him for his glamorouslooking characters, for extinguishing Ditko's moodiness. But before long,
Lee himself was asking for changes to soften Peter Parker: longer hair, less
of a square, jeans, boots, miniskirted girls all around him. He began
dropping copies of Women's Wear Daily on Romita's drawing table,
instructing him to incorporate the latest fashions. Any temporary concerns
he had must have been assuaged by the sales figures-Spider- Man was
selling better than ever.
Daredevil now belonged to Atlas alumnus Gene Colan, an anxious blond
movie buff whom Lee lured back from a soul-crushing job making
educational filmstrips. Colan's moody chiaroscuro renderings gave the

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character a weight that hadn't existed with Wood or Romita, and, more
important, finally differentiated him from Spider-Man. Pacing wasn't Colan's
strong suit-he had a dangerous habit of drawing breathtaking large-panel
scenes, only to realize that he needed to cram the second half of the story
into the final few pages-but for Lee, the gain in dramatic range outweighed
the logistical headaches. In Tales of Suspense, Colan even managed to lend
emotional heft to Iron Man, subtly changing the angles of the metal helmet's
eye and mouth openings into something resembling facial expressions.
Another Atlas veteran rejoining Marvel was John Buscema, who was gruff,
fortyish, with a Robert Mitchum vibe. Like Colan and Romita, Buscema had
thoroughly hated the Madison Avenue job he'd had in recent years. But he
couldn't help expressing, to almost comic effect, his indifference toward
superheroes. He was more concerned with the human form and open
landscapes than with colored costumes and gadgetry. He wanted to channel
the ancient and fantastic, and hated "goddamn automobiles and
skyscrapers"-fixtures, of course, in Marvel Comics.
Roy Thomas, who collaborated with him on The Avengers, was so taken
with Buscema's richly illustrative style that he tailored his scripts
accordingly, resulting in a succession of mythological adventures for the
Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Hawkeye, and Goliath.
Unfortunately, Colan's "Iron Man" assignment and Buscema's Avengers had
once belonged to Don Heck, one of the core artists of the early superhero
titles. Heck was slowly eased from both, and shifted over to the mediocreselling X-Men. Work was work, and he didn't have strong feelings about
which character he was drawing, but he could sense that something was
changing. Heck, a longtime pro and illustrator of the prettiest women of
anyone at Marvel, now sheepishly visited Jack Kirby at home and asked for
drawing advice.[7] It was becoming clear that Marvel Comics could move
ahead with or without any one individual.
Meanwhile, Jim Steranko enjoyed a luxury that Heck (and Kirby, and Ditko,
and Wood, and everyone else at Marvel, for that matter) never did: he was
already pulling down a lucrative full-time job outside of comics. Making
comics essentially as a hobby meant that the financial compensation didn't
loom as large. He had no family to support, no children to spend time with.
The work, and his romantic notions of the artist's life, were everything. "I
believe that happiness is nothing," he told an interviewer. "I don't think

216

people were put here to be happy. I think if you decide to be an artist or a

writer, you automatically accept the responsibility of being alone. However,
after your 50 or 60 years are up you'll be able to look back and see this
output that you've done that will endure long after you're gone, and will
continue to fill the minds of millions of people."
So he threw himself into experimenting with the form-slowly, at first, and
then relentlessly. He followed Kirby's lead with collage work, which he
supplemented with the strobing and shimmying effects of cutting-edge Op
Art. He approached his pages more like a designer than an illustrator, paying
special attention to the functions of the panel grids and spatial shifts.
Concentric circles, perspective-plane diagrams, and other geometric trickery
conspired to make Nick Fury Marvel's most psychedelic comic since Ditko's
Doctor Strange. Steranko reached back to Will Eisner's Spirit and Johnny
Craig's EC horror comics for inspiration, and the futurist bent of the series
allowed for high-tech toys on every page, rendered in the intensively
elaborate Kirby style. But where Kirby had full-page drawings, Steranko had
double-page spreads-and then quadruple-page spreads, for which you'd have
to buy two copies and lay them together if you wanted to take in the full
vista. There were nods to Salvador Dali, Eadweard Muybridge, Richard
Avedon, and the films of Robert Siodmak and Michael Curtiz, and
contemporary commercial artists like Richard M. Powers and Bob Peak. It
was Positively Postmodern- ism, in the Merry Marvel Way.
The combination of knowing winks and dazzling, nearly mathematically
perfect artwork betrayed a certain emotional distance, but Steranko's work
never devolved into camp. Nor did it sell tremendously. To a dedicated
readership of gearheads, pot smokers, and art students, "Nick Fury, Agent of
S.H.I.E.L.D." was the apex of an art form. But despite a few token guest
appearances from Captain America early on, Steranko's world existed
mostly on the side, sealed away from everything else.
Increasingly, that was how Jack Kirby felt he existed, too-"a lonely sort of
guy." No one would suspect this, of course. Every week he'd come into the
office, enjoy a hero's welcome, and chat up the newer Bullpen employeesHerb Trimpe, Stu Schwartzberg, Linda Fite-who gushed with admiration. He
told the Merry Marvel Messenger that he and that "rascal" Stan Lee liked to
"share ideas, laughs, and stubby cigars." "Marvel's been very kind to me and
I like the people," he told an audience at the 1966 New York comics
convention. "I've been working there seven years and I've been very happy

217

at it." But privately, he was growing irritated that Lee was spending so much
time on the college circuit while he was spending seven days a week at the
desk in the one-window basement of his home, which he'd taken to calling
"the Dungeon." When new artists came to Marvel, they were handed a stack
of Kirby's books or, better yet, a stack of Kirby's rough layouts over which
to draw. He was, in effect, training others to keep him from becoming too
valuable to the company. Kirby waited for Goodman to give him a piece of
the earnings that his creations were generating. Lee threw up his hands and
said that he couldn't make those decisions. Goodman stalled.
"In the minds and hearts of those of us who have come of age intellectually
in the psychedelic sixties," William David Sherman and Leon Lewis
rhapsodized in their 1967 survey Landscape of Contemporary Cinema,
"SNCC supersedes the NAACP, Ramparts supersedes The New Republic,
Sun Ra supersedes Duke Ellington, and all forms of expression from a comic
book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to a performance by the Fugs become
accessible as works of art." Lee and Kirby continued turning out
breathtakingly imaginative work, expanding the scope of the Marvel
Universe and resonating with the zeitgeist via a menu of token liberal
signifiers and general trippiness. Shortly before Fantastic Four #52 went into
production, The New York Times ran an article about the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization, a political party that had formed in Alabama under
the leadership of Stokely Carmichael and the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee. The LCFO's logo, a black panther, was so striking
that reports began calling the group the Black Panther party. When Fantastic
Four #52 hit the stands, the Coal Tiger-the African adventurer whom Lee
and Kirby had kept in cold storage for months-had a new name.8 Even with
the delay, the Black Panther still managed to make history as the first black
superhero to reach a wide audience.
As with so many other totems of the late 1960s counterculture, Marvel
trafficked in mind-bending sci-fi grandiosity. Out of costume, the Black
Panther was an African prince named T'Challa who led the fictional country
of Wakanda, not a Dark Continent noble savage but a scientific genius who
impressed even the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards. Forget gamma blasts
and radioactive spiders; Marvel's creations now reflected a growing interest
in the collision of ancient civilizations and futuristic technologies. "As a
preliminary to understanding the present, one must be capable of projecting
one's intelligence far into the past and far into the future," Jacques Bergier
wrote in The Morning of the Magicians, a million-selling volume of

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pseudoscience that kicked off a 1960s fascination with the idea that aliens
had visited our planet and bestowed advanced technology. Given Kirby's
later dedication to exploring this idea, it's likely that he was the one most
responsible for threading it through Marvel's adventures in the mid- and late
1960s. Thor arrived in the old-fashioned Eastern European country of
Wundagore and met the High Evolutionary, a genetic scientist with a Faust
complex who'd tried to create his own race (later, he'd clone life on a larger
scale, fabricating an entire planet in the image of Earth). The Fantastic Four
discovered an alien warrior race known as the Kree-who'd communed with
the Incas in Peru, just like the ancient astronauts in The Morning of the
Magicians-and confronted a golden Golem-like being named Him,
artificially created by the mysterious enclave at the Citadel of Science. The
Negative Zone kept opening up to reveal new psychedelic horrors, rendered
by Kirby with rainbow prisms, hectagonal globes, and masses of black dots,
sometimes accompanied by his increasingly experimental collage work.
Every time a Marvel hero turned over a stone, it seemed, a new, energycrackling mythology awaited.
NOTES
[1] Ditko now had a free hand to insert Randian platitudes in his comics
without Good- man and Lee's interference. A sample, from Mysterious
Suspense #1: "The greatest battle a person must constantly fight is to uphold
proper principles, known truths, against everyone he deals with! A truth
cannot be defeated!"
[2] "Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place" was HYDRA's pledge,
a concise summary of guerrilla terrorism's chilling power.
[3] In 1966 Bill Everett, who hadn't worked for Marvel since the Daredevil
#1 fiasco, was suddenly flush with work from Martin Goodman. He was first
sated with a regular assignment on the Hulk (in Tales to Astonish); when
Ditko departed Marvel, Everett was immediately offered work on Dr.
Strange (in Strange Tales) and received a loan from Goodman that,
according to Roy Thomas, "wasn't going to have to be paid back, so he
wouldn't sue."
[4] The rights to the Fantastic Four had been otherwise secured. Spider-Man
was originally going to be a part of Marvel Super Heroes, but apparently

219

Marvel and Grantay- Lawrence decided to save him for bigger things-after
storyboards were drawn up, he was replaced by the Sub-Mariner.
[5] The side-by-side pictures of Sgt. Fury and Captain America on the back
of Captain Action's toy packaging were soon appropriated as anti-imperialist
images in Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film, La Chinoise.
[6] Wally Wood, reportedly, was still stinging from his Marvel experience.
He told stories-somewhat unlikely stories-about Stan Lee sitting on a file
cabinet and lord- ing above freelancers while he threw their checks down to
them.
[7] Syd Shores, the onetime Captain America artist, was supposed to relieve
Kirby on the title in 1967, after a brief period of inking over Kirby's pencils.
But Lee was unsatis- fied with Shores's Marvel Method attempts, and Kirby
was once again put in the role of pep talker and mentor to his own peers.
[8] There may have been some internal hand-wringing about the Black
Panther. The first version of the cover had shown the Panther's black skin;
the published version did not. Previews in other titles that month suggest
Marvel couldn't decide how much of him to show-or how to characterize
him. "Don't miss the mystery villain of the month!" read the ads, which
blocked out the cover art. (Once Marvel committed to a policy of
representing black characters, however, change came quickly. The cover of
the following month's romance comic Modeling with Millie proudly
introduced a black British model named Jill Jerold to its cast.)
The Mostly True Adventures Of Standup Comedys Legendary
Frat House
One grand old house overlooking the Sunset Strip played host to a
generation of comics including Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, and
Robin Williams launching dozens of careers and about as many drug
problems. The crash pad of a comedy revolution, remembered, kinda, by the
people who survived it.
The house juts its chest out of the Hollywood Hills, flexing more bravado
than actual confidence, looking a little unsteady as if one more misstep, one
more bad night, could send it tumbling onto Sunset Boulevard. Sure, its got
flair the Spanish tile roof, the massive double balconies lording over

220

West Hollywood but, really, this house is peacocking, begging you to pay
attention to it.
Stand on one of those back balconies, look down on the Comedy Store, the
Sunset Strip, the Los Angeles Basin, and, on a clear day, maybe even out to
the Pacific, and youll succumb to the illusion that this town is just out there
waiting for you, that it wants you, even needs you. But this house was built
on the hopes and dreams of the people who forgot that. It nurtured them
with shelter, camaraderie, laughs, sex, drugs until it didnt.
Stand-up comedy has been born and died a thousand times within a few
hundred yards of 8420 Cresthill Road. Some of these deaths have been
literal: In 1979, Steve Lubetkin, a struggling stand-up, dove off the roof of
the Continental Hyatt House hotel and landed in the Comedy Store parking
lot. Three years later, John Belushi died in Bungalow 3 of the Chateau
Marmont, just up the road, after capping off a night of partying with a toxic
speedball. Many more births and deaths have been figurative, onstage at the
Store: Comics like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice
Clay, Jim Carrey, Roseanne Barr, and Marc Maron found their voices here;
many more, whose names have been mostly lost to history, shouted into the
darkness of the Original Room and heard no reply.
In 1976, when Mitzi Shore, the Comedy Stores owner and enigmatic doyen
(and mother of Pauly), bought the club, Cresthill, as it came to be known,
was rolled into the deal. From the front, the house looks kind of small,
almost humble. The two largest bedrooms are on the street level, and it isnt
until you descend the staircase and walk toward the back of the house that
the three-story, nearly 5,000-square-foot abode begins to reveal itself. The
space widens and draws you toward its oddly placed alcoves, its nooks and
crannies, toward those sweeping balconies, toward its secrets. Built in the
1920s, the place has a shadowy history dating to the days when the mob and
the Rat Pack prowled the Strip. At the time when Mitzi bought it, the house
which sits on a cul-de-sac of pretty, older homes elbowing each other for
space was vacant, and at first, Mitzi did little with it. Then, around the
time of Lubetkins suicide, she essentially gave the place over to the
comedians who worked at the Store.
For about a decade, comics inhabited Cresthill. Inhabit is the best way to put
it, really: Some had their own rooms, some of those actually paid some
token rent, but many, many more were just kind of there to hang out, to

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drink, to do drugs, to talk shit, to crash on a couch, or a floor, wherever.

There were three bedrooms, maybe four, depending on what youd call a
bedroom, but that had little relation to how many people might be sleeping
there at any given moment. No one can remember ever signing a lease.
The catalog of names is impressive: Dice, Kinison, Carrey, Maron, Robin
Williams, Richard Pryor, Yakov Smirnoff, and Bill Hicks all either lived
there or hung out there between 1979 and 1989. Some like Dice and
Kinison were around for more of those years than they werent. Allan
Stephan, a comic who was part of Kinisons Outlaws of Comedy crew and
later the showrunner for Roseanne, never lived in Cresthill but spent
countless hours there in the late 70s and early 80s. Comics were all of a
sudden getting respect, so we could get away with murder, Stephan says.
And we did. Mitzi saw the Store as a place for comics to work out and
improve, essentially comedy college. Cresthill, Stephan says, was the frat
house.
The place is more than an interesting footnote in comedy history: Cresthills
glory years coincided with a massive stand-up boom across the country. In
the mid-70s, you could count the number of comedy clubs nationwide on
one hand; by the late 80s, there were hundreds. This group of comics,
haunting Cresthill, working the Store, helped to create the stand-up business
as we know it. In that house, these comics forged a style and, more
important, a bold, anarchic attitude that still pervades comedy today. But this
came at a cost: Maron, who showed up around 1987 and lasted eight months
living in a small room Dice had recently vacated, described his time there to
me as a big, dark baptism.
Unsurprisingly, specifics can be a bit murky when it comes to piecing
together Cresthills history. Want to know how long Bill Hicks crashed there
or whether Eric Clapton really jammed up there one night? Ask five comics
and youll likely get five different answers. Its not that people are lying
though, sure, some may be so much as time and the fog of booze and
drugs tends to obscure some details. Still, that haze a hybrid of truths,
best guesses, misremembered recollections, and outright tall tales adds up
to a stew of memory and myth thats no less real than a notarized legal
document.
In the early 70s, what little stand-up business there was revolved around
two cities: Las Vegas and New York. But in April 1972, an old-school

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comic named Sammy Shore opened the Comedy Store in a 99-seat room in a
building on Sunset Boulevard that had once housed the venerable
Hollywood nightclub Ciros. In May, Johnny Carson decided to move The
Tonight Show from New York to Burbank, California.
In its early days, the Comedy Store was more a clubhouse for Sammy and
fellow comics like Shecky Greene and Jackie Vernon. But The Tonight
Shows move west brought in a newer generation Robert Klein, George
Carlin, David Brenner. When, in 1973, a set at the Store by young thenunknown Freddie Prinze won him a spot on The Tonight Show, it was a
signal of comedys tectonic shift from New York to L.A. and of the
beginning of the Stores rise.
The Store earned cachet on Sammys watch, but he was a comic with little
interest in running a business. There were no set schedules; he and his
friends got stage time whenever they wanted. He was frequently on the road,
and when he was, his wife Mitzi took over. She wrote out a lineup every
night. She instituted an open-mic night for amateurs looking to take their
shot. She rebuilt the room to focus everyones attention on the stage, took
out the bar, and made customers order drinks from the waitresses,
establishing the two-drink minimum that became de rigeur in clubs
nationwide. Essentially, she invented the modern comedy club.
When she and Sammy divorced in 1974, he gave her the club to lower his
alimony payments; two years later, after being briefly evicted (and opening a
new Comedy Store location in Westwood), she negotiated a deal to buy the
entire building plus Cresthill. In her words, Mitzi grew up as, the only
Jew in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Nobody who knows her, it seems, can talk
about her without lapsing into an impression of her thin, perpetually
unimpressed, nasally whine of a voice. (Shore, 85, has Parkinsons disease
and other neurological issues and was unavailable to be interviewed.)
Somehow, running the Comedy Store suited Mitzis oddball personality.
The club became ground zero for stand-up in the late 70s: Leno, Letterman,
Pryor, Williams, Michael Keaton, Jimmie Walker, Richard Lewis, Richard
Belzer, Elayne Boosler, Paul Mooney, Garry Shandling, and Marsha
Warfield all considered the place something of a home base, and others like
Carlin, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, and Gabe Kaplan were consistent
visitors. Hollywood talent scouts lurked: The prizes werent only shots on
Carson; networks were signing comics to develop sitcoms.

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Mitzi saw herself as the scenes munificent den mother. She made calls on
behalf of comedians she thought deserved a look. She loaned them money.
She took some on vacations with her. One person I spoke to who worked at
the Store during this era tells me he was ferrying $20,000 in cash back to her
house to put in her safe every night.
But if theres one truism about Hollywood, its that behind every big success
are dozens of people feeling aggrieved about it. Which isnt to say that the
comics who went on strike at the Store in 1979 didnt have a legitimate
gripe. Mitzi was making money by the satchel, and the regulars who
performed at the Store werent getting paid. She considered the club a
showcase room, an opportunity for comics to develop their acts and get
discovered. Thats the way it worked. This wasnt totally self-serving:
Prinze got Chico and the Man. Walker got Good Times. Williams got Mork
and Mindy. But it was a little self-serving: Paying customers would hardly
be lining the sidewalks waiting to get in without comics onstage.
Nobody, least of all Mitzi, figured the rabble of comedians could organize a
real work stoppage, but for about six weeks in the spring of 1979, they did.
Guys like Letterman and Leno, already flush with their first successes,
picketed alongside their less well-known colleagues. Mitzi felt betrayed. A
handful of comics crossed the picket lines, simultaneously earning her
enduring affection and the barbed scorn of their fellow comics.
The strike would be settled by June. Mitzi caved a little setting up a
payment scheme so performers would get 50% of the door in the Main
Room or $25 a set in the smaller Original Room. Some bad vibes certainly
endured, but for most of the comics, there seemed to be palpable relief that
the strike was over. The change in payment policy, however, was not the
only by-product of the conflict.
A long time ago, Argus Hamilton was the future of stand-up comedy. Some
including Hamilton himself thought the former University of
Oklahoma frat boy was going to be the next Carson, and he appeared on The
Tonight Show more than 20 times before his career was derailed in the 80s
by a crippling fondness for cocaine and booze.
Hamilton was the first comic to move into Cresthill in the summer of 1979,
along with a young comedian from Detroit named Mike Binder, whom
everyone called Kid Comedy, and John Medley, an actor and bartender

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Hamilton knew from Oklahoma. Hamilton lived there until 1982 and then
returned for a few months in 1986. Much of the time he wasnt at Cresthill
he was either in rehab or staying with Mitzi, who was his on-again, off-again
girlfriend for many years and with whom hes still close. Hes seen among
the former Cresthill gang as the unofficial keeper of the flame. In interview
after interview, whenever the thread of a story got lost, I was advised to ask
Argus.
I meet him on a Sunday afternoon in the parking lot behind the Comedy
Store, where Hamilton, who has been sober for 29 years, still performs
regularly. Wed planned to talk inside the club, but after banging on the
doors and getting no reply, we cross the parking lot and sit in the lobby of
the Andaz West Hollywood, the hotel formerly known as the infamous Hyatt
House. Cresthill, says Hamilton, wasnt a reaction to Lubetkins suicide; it
was a physical manifestation of the postwar relief that Mitzi and Store
regulars felt after the strike. Mitzi wanted to do something to help the
comics, particularly those like Hamilton and Binder, whod crossed the
picket lines. She suggested that a few comics could live up there but she
didnt want it to turn into a flophouse, Hamilton tells me.
The comedy landscape was changing then. All these comedy clubs are
popping up all over the country, says Hamilton. Theyre paying Comedy
Store guys $5,000 a week to go to Atlanta, to Houston. When rent is $200 a
month, the phone bill is $15 a month, gas is 78 cents a gallon, and you make
over $100,000 a year, youve got a lot of disposable income. Much of
which started going up peoples noses.
Binder, who later became best known as a writer/director/actor of films like
The Upside of Anger and HBOs The Mind of the Married Man, says that
while he lived there, the house and the Store felt like the center of the
entertainment universe. Robin had Mork and Mindy, Letterman started
[guest-]hosting the Tonight Show, Michael Keaton and David were on Mary
Tyler Moores variety show, Jimmie Walker had a series, I got this Norman
Lear show called Apple Pie, he says. People magazine did a story, Whats
Going on at the Comedy Store? So people started to come down. After wed
shut the club down, wed be hanging with Willie Nelson, Burt Reynolds,
Ringo Starr, Sugar Ray Leonard and partying. We couldnt believe it. A lot
of it took place after-hours in the Main Room, but most of the time, wed
shift it all up to Cresthill.

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Future Full House star Dave Coulier moved in for a few months in late 1979
or early 1980, and also recalls a somewhat mysterious housemate named
Jack Leonpacher, who worked as a runner for Mitzi. Jack stole all my
clothes while I was on the road one week, says Coulier. He denied it and
then showed up at the Westwood Comedy Store one night wearing one of
my shirts.
The next arrival at Cresthill was Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff. In the 80s,
at the height of Cold War paranoia, Smirnoffs aw-shucks, America, what a
country! shtick reassured a nation that its Reaganite vision of itself was
righteous and deflated the mighty Evil Empire of the Soviets into a
laughable facade. He had his own TV show (What a Country), starred in
films (Moscow on the Hudson, Brewsters Millions, Heartburn) and was one
of the countrys biggest stand-ups. But when he first showed up at the Store,
he was just an migr from the Ukraine with a shaky command of English.
Mitzi liked him though and offered him spots onstage, work as a handyman,
and a tiny room upstairs at Cresthill.
Yakov was a master carpenter and plumber, says Jimmie Walker, who
didnt really hang out at Cresthill but knew about it from performing at the
Store. Yakov fixed a lot of shit around the house. He did all the building
around there.
A few weeks after Smirnoffs arrival, the house got another new initiate, a
brash Brooklynite who performed as Andrew Clay. Smirnoff had met him
already theyd each done their first paid gig the same night at Rodney
Dangerfields club in New York.
He scared the shit out of me in Dangerfields, Smirnoff tells me. His
persona was so big. Shortly after, I went to L.A. thinking Ill never see him
again. I was fine with that. Then, all of a sudden, I opened the door and
with this Smirnoff slips into a pretty solid Dice impression, albeit still with
traces of his Russian accent My man! Come ere! Gimme a hug! Im
gonna be yer roommate!
Dice moved into the maids quarters, a small room off the kitchen with fireengine red walls, red carpet, red furniture, and a window with bars on it that
he once got a blow job through. Also crashing at Cresthill though likely
not paying rent was Ollie Joe Prater, a 300-plus-pound, bearded

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Midwesterner whom Dice describes in his memoir, The Filthy Truth, as both
a party animal and one of the great comics you never heard of.
At the time, despite his larger-than-life attitude, Dice onstage wasnt quite
yet Dice. He mostly did impressions of guys like John Travolta, Sylvester
Stallone, and Elvis. We all thought he was an idiot, says Binder. I mean,
he was a sweet guy but he was just kind of a big doofus. We thought his act
was like a fuckin circus act. Dice was just one of the characters he did.
The houses gravitational center and late-night gathering spot of choice was
the massive oak table in the dining room. Two different comics compared it
to the famed Algonquin Round Table, albeit with slightly more emphasis on
strippers, drugs, and dick jokes. Wed snort, smoke pot, drink beer, and talk
comedy, says Hamilton. It was early enough in our disease where we
shared our coke. Dice never drank or did drugs but loved to stay up and
talk.
One comic told me about a night, hanging out at the table, listening to
Richard Pryor and Robin Williams trade stories and jabs. Stephan says that
even though Pryor was already a huge star, he wasnt above getting feedback
and ideas from lowly Store comics. Hed sit there and go, What do you got
for me? says Stephan. We helped him with his specials. He had his clique
but when blow was involved, hed be around.
Smirnoff wasnt a partier. Hed go onstage early at the Store, then come
home and go to bed. Every morning, Id get up early and theyd just
finished partying, he says. And every morning there would be a mirror on
the table. I didnt know why. Why would somebody take the mirror off the
wall and eat powdered doughnuts off the mirror? What a crazy American
tradition! It was like a secret I wasnt privy to because I didnt stay up late.
Williams was already a star but would frequently turn up to do impromptu
sets, then hit Cresthill afterward. When we were there, Robin was there,
partying a lot, Binder recalls. Hed really light it up. When hed say, Im
coming up to party tonight, hed get even more girls and more people.
Celebrities would come.
Lue Deck, who like many Store comics also worked as a doorman at
the club, had moved into a space in the basement of Cresthill by this time,
and recalls that Williams, Andy Kaufman, and Rod Stewart used to come by

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the house to score coke. Simply being around stars helped younger guys like
Smirnoff, who got a big break when Williams convinced director Paul
Mazursky to come see him perform, leading to the part in Moscow on the
Hudson.
When youre in proximity to the Store, in proximity to other comedians,
right at the center of it, you cant help but get better, says Smirnoff. If
there was a casting call, you knew before anybody. You were next to
whoever is doing something important. Its the power of proximity.
In 1979, Hamilton, Prater and another Store comic named Jim Varney
indelible to those who lived through the 80s as the yokel Ernest Know
what I mean, Vern? Worrell in a gaggle of dopey films and commercials
took a road trip to Houston to compete in a comedy competition.
Were backstage at this party afterwards and theres a Houston real estate
agent with this softball-sized rock of pure cocaine, Hamilton says. Im
sitting there looking at this massive rock and on the other side is this other
face looking at it the same way. Thats Sam Kinison. First time we ever
met. Hamilton spent six days blowing it out in Houston with Kinison and a
crew of other comics that included a young Bill Hicks. Bill was very
unhappy because his father didnt want him to do stand-up. Somehow we
worked it out he was going to run away from home.
Before returning to L.A., Hamilton told his new friends to find him at the
Comedy Store if they ever made it out that way. Over the next year or so, a
gaggle of Houston comics moved West: Kinison, Hicks, Dan Barton, Jimmy
Pineapple, Carl LaBove, Riley Barber, Steve Epstein. Hicks, whod evolve
into a biting, sociopolitical monologist in the Lenny Bruce mold before
dying of pancreatic cancer in 1994, was 18 at the time. Hamilton says he got
Hicks a job as a doorman at the Store and agreed to stash him in Cresthill.
He hid from his parents. They didnt know where he was.
Binders drinking and drugging was already so bad that he decided to move
out. He and Coulier got an apartment together. When I left, Bill took my
bedroom, Binder says. Hicks, a relative teetotaler, never really became part
of Cresthills hedonistic culture and soon found his own apartment.
Kinison, however, would come to define that culture. He was already an
outsize personality when he arrived in L.A., but his act was a work in

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progress. Hed only recently given up his previous life as an evangelical

preacher and brought that same stage presence to stand-up, although he
didnt always know what to do with it. But Mitzi hired him as a doorman
and gave him keys to the Westwood location, where he frequently slept. He
also began spending time at Cresthill, where he bonded with another
charismatic character still honing his comedic chops: Dice.
As Dice put it in his book, When we were still struggling comics, Sam and
I had our own little two-man support group. Many were the nights when
wed go to Ralphs grocery store, steal a bunch of pork chops, and head back
to Cresthill, where wed cook em on the grill. After dinner wed do routines
for each other. We wouldnt mince words. When I thought he should push it
further, I said so. And the same for Sam.
According to Dice, one night at Cresthill he demonstrated for Kinison how
to build slowly to his trademark scream. I helped Sam get his timing
down, he has said. Kinison had a great opening line but didnt know how
to set it up. I showed him I said, You gotta put more theater into it
suck the audience in before you blow your stack It was a killer opening
that Sam used for most of his career. In Dices telling, the night ended with
both of them practicing Kinisons scream back and forth over the kitchen
table, waking Smirnoff in process.
Smirnoff recalls the events differently. He says Dice and Kinison were
staging a fake fight that everyone at Cresthill thought was so funny that
Smirnoff suggested Kinison try it onstage. So we all walked down to the
Comedy Store. Its 1 in the morning and theres a few people there, and hes
just in their face screaming, red in the face. The crowd is cracking up. That
was a key turning point in his career.
Its worth noting that Kinisons brother and then-manager, Bill, calls Dices
claims bullshit, but regardless of the discrepancies over exactly what kind
of impact Dice mightve had on Kinison and vice versa Cresthill had
become a kind of comedy laboratory. Bits were born from late-night bullshit
sessions, jokes were tested and honed, and brutally honest criticism was the
norm.
You couldnt have the ego and sensitivity, says Stephan. I remember at
the time, I was very funny when I wasnt onstage. I was sitting on the couch,
holding court, and Argus went, If you can do what youre doing now

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onstage, nothing will stop you. It took me about three years to learn this
lesson.
But the drugs were starting to exact a toll. Binder had already bottomed out,
and Hamilton seemed on track for an even uglier fate. Mitzi was worried
about him. Dan Frischman, a comic who moved in around 1981 and later
starred in Head of the Class, recalls, Shed sometimes call me and ask if
any nefarious looking people showed up, possibly to sell Argus drugs.
Jackson Perdue, a young comic from Southern California, had taken to
staying in Hamiltons room when Hamilton was staying with Mitzi which
was 9 out of 10 nights on average, according to Perdue and had been put
in charge of babysitting two of Mitzis kids, Pauly and Peter, whom hed
occasionally bring to the house. Wherever they wanted to go, whatever they
wanted to do, my job was to take them there, he says. I was the one who
named Pauly The Weasel. He was 11. And he was a little fucking weasel.
The houses roster was shuffling. Prater was on the outs with Mitzi and got
booted. In came Frischman, and later, Jimmy Pineapple, a New Yorker
named Andy Lederer, and Mark King, a sketch performer. In 1982,
Hamilton went to rehab and Tom Wilson then a young comic, now an
actor best known for playing Biff in the Back to the Future films moved
into Hamiltons old bedroom.
Before talk show appearances, Yakov would have me act as Carson or
Merv Griffin so he could practice his panel banter, Wilson says. I also
helped Yakov carry an eight-foot-tall painting of himself into the entryway
and hang it over the main staircase.
Frischman says Dice was a good housemate, but hed get angry because
most of the comics wouldnt wash their dishes. Theyd leave the kitchen a
mess. When hed bring women home, hed have to go through the kitchen.
One morning, he starts screaming, The dishes go out the window in five
minutes! Right outside the kitchen was an open-air atrium, and sure enough,
all of a sudden, you hear crashing. He threw all the plates and pans out the
window!
Considering all the insanity in the house, its residents had surprisingly little
trouble from the neighbors. The houses werent far apart, but because of the
steep slope and the way Cresthill was built into it, much of the noise wafted

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down toward the Store, the Strip, and the city at large. For a while, the
supermodel Twiggy lived across the street and would occasionally accept
comics invitations to show up to the Store. Wilson recalls meeting a very
old man who lived farther up the hill and relayed Cresthills preComedy
Store history.
Even in the 40s and 50s, the house was full of gambling and debauchery,
Wilson says the man told him. The house was owned by Ciros, and Ciros
paid him to let a guy sit at his house and watch Sunset Boulevard and
Queens Road for cops. If a raid was coming, hed call Cresthill and the
poker game would vanish.
This is one point where the facts get slippery. Several comics I interviewed
passed on stories of Cresthills early days. Pineapple tells me he got a huge
kick out of the fact that guys like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Jerry
Lewis used to party there during the Ciros era. Other rumors had it that
Milton Berle and Redd Foxx were frequent guests. One comic told me the
place had been a mob house, where the mob took people and gave them a
little bit of an education. Supposedly, there was even a secret tunnel
connecting the basement with the Comedy Stores basement.
Few people from the 40s and 50s are still around, but George Schlatter, the
general manager of Ciros from 1950 to 1957, had no memory of the house
whatsoever. Neither did Sheila Weller, who wrote a memoir about her time
as a child growing up around the club, which was owned by her uncle
Herman Hover from 1942 to 1957. The few surviving performers from that
era I was able to track down Kim Novak, Rose Marie, Jerry Lewis,
Debbie Reynolds either didnt recall the house or chose not to comment.
But Ciros was a prime Hollywood hangout back then Sinatra was
famously arrested for punching a reporter there so it doesnt seem like a
stretch that these same stars couldve shifted the festivities to the owners
house after-hours.
Frank Sennes, who revived the club in 1960, had previously been the
entertainment director for several Las Vegas casinos and was wellacquainted with many of the Hollywood stars who frequented Ciros. He
was also friendly with well-known gangster Moe Dalitz. The notorious L.A.
mob figure Mickey Cohen was shot in front of Ciros in 1949, hung out at
the club through the 1950s, and supposedly used its basement for all sorts of

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nefarious deeds. But it seems far-fetched that this couldve ever been
connected to Cresthill.
When I visit the house and head down to the basement, lo and behold,
theres a prominent trapdoor in the hardwood floor. Pulling it open, a
wooden stepladder descends into a dark, dank cellar. Could this actually be
the remnants of an old tunnel? I poke my head down but cant see a thing. A
few weeks later, I coax a local real estate agent to go down the ladder with a
flashlight. He reports back no evidence of a tunnel, just a dirty crawl space
filled with cobwebs. But is it possible there was once one there? Its
unlikely, he tells me, but who knows?
The truth behind these tales wasnt the point for those who later lived in
Cresthill. They felt true and enhanced the houses mystique. As Carl
LaBove, who moved in there in 1984, put it, There was a feeling there that
it had always been that kind of house. You didnt feel like you were doing
something new. Thats what it was built for.
Its hard to pinpoint the moment when Cresthill really became Sam
Kinisons fiefdom. Even before his career took flight in the mid-80s,
Kinisons charisma drew people to him, but LaBove was Kinisons best
friend. Theyd moved to L.A. together and actively stoked a kind of mystical
aura around themselves and whatever comics were in Kinisons inner circle
at a given moment. Rumors swirled that the two always carried guns. Mitzi
had a rule that the house was for single comics no girlfriends or wives
allowed but once LaBove moved in, his fianc, Christy, and Kinison both
surreptitiously followed.
Not everyone was thrilled with this arrangement. Wilson and, in particular,
Dice, quickly grew weary of the drug-fueled, late-night, rock n roll circus
soap opera that trailed Kinison wherever he went. Sam was someone whose
natural state was chaos, says Dan Barton, one of the Houston comics. Dice
was more orderly.
By 1985, Kinisons career was in the ascendency his breakout
performance on HBOs Young Comedians Special had led to Carson and
Letterman bookings, theater tours, and eventually a spot hosting Saturday
Night Live the following year but the rest of his life was a mess. His daily
routine was to stay up all night, then sneak into LaBoves room during the
day to crash. (This unusual arrangement was even more unusual than it

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sounds: The year after Kinisons death in 1992, LaBove discovered his and
Christys daughter had actually been fathered by Kinison.)
After LaBove and Christy got married in 1985, they celebrated at Cresthill.
We had one of those blowouts that went to the following day, says
LaBove. Everybody came: C.C. DeVille from Poison, Tommy Lee, all
these guys. Dice wasnt into drugs. Dice wanted to sleep. He just got tired of
it. He got tired of the fact that we kind of controlled the house.
Shortly after, LaBove got word that Mitzi wanted to see him. Shed heard
Christy and Kinison were living in his room. All three would have to move
out. Today. LaBove knew immediately whod told her. I was walking back
up the hill. Id made up my mind that I was going to kill Dice.
While storming back toward Cresthill, he ran into Kinison, who talked him
down. He had his own plan to get even. Sam went to Dice and said, I want
you to know that we know it was you, and if I make it, Im going to make
sure I stick it up your ass every opportunity I get, he says. This is the
story that started the whole argument between Sam and Dice.
Dice declined repeated entreaties to tell his side of it. But Jimmy Shubert, a
comic who was tight with both Kinison and Dice, told me a version that
mostly squares with LaBoves. Dice ratted Sam out, says Shubert.
It can be hard to remember exactly how huge Dice and Kinison became in
the late 80s and early 90s, and how much their feud defined stand-up
during those years. Kinison broke first, scoring a memorable part in Rodney
Dangerfields hit 1986 film, Back to School, making music videos and
palling around with a debauched troupe of rock stars, porn stars, actors,
comics, and whoever youd consider Jessica Hahn to be. Dice became even
bigger, appearing as a version of himself in a series of films (Making the
Grade, Casual Sex?, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane) and selling out
arenas. Their respective acts heavy on testosterone-fueled bravado and
ample doses of homophobia and misogyny engendered controversy
wherever they went.
Their bad blood spilled publicly. Theyd badmouth each other on talk shows.
Kinison would devote stage time to running Dice down. The adult film star
Ron Jeremy was part of Kinisons crew of misfits around this time and had
known Dice from back in New York. Right in the midst of their animosity,

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Sam comes up to me and says, I just found out Dice is Jewish, says
Jeremy. Im not going to call him Dice any longer. Im going to call him
Dreidel. So Sam called him Dreidel, and Dice told him to go fuck himself.
In his book, Dice writes, Sam was fixated on telling the world that I wasnt
shit. He went on [Howard] Stern and couldnt stop ripping me. He started
calling me Andrew Jew Silverstein, like I ever hid the fact that I was Jewish.
He told a couple of audiences that he was hoping I died of inside-out
stomach cancer.
But the rivalry was somewhat one-sided. Sam had a jealousy, says
Stephan. He was a very insecure man with a lot of problems. He liked to
fight and stir shit. He was a bully.
Even Kinisons brother Bill wanted to quash it. I told him one time, Why
dont you just shut up about Dice? Youre making the guy bigger. Bill
tried to arrange for the rivals to tour together years later, but it only led to
more animosity, and the two former friends were still estranged when
Kinison was killed by a drunk driver on a highway outside Las Vegas in
1992.
LaBove, however, made amends with Dice years ago and now sees the
whole episode differently. Dice had every right in the world to complain,
he says. Who can sleep when youve got a party going on downstairs every
single night and its your house, too?
Ironically, shortly after Kinison and LaBove were tossed from Cresthill,
Dice moved out, and it wasnt long before Kinison had worked himself back
into Mitzis good graces and was again lording over the place. Kinisons
newfound stature attracted guys like Billy Idol, Ted Nugent, and Corey
Feldman to the nightly ragers. Others, including Eric Clapton whom Bill
Kinison describes as Sams best friend made appearances as well. A
comic named Brian Seff, who performed as Rick Right, remembers seeing
the famed guitarist jamming with Kinison and others at the house. The cops
came to complain about the noise and they didnt recognize Clapton but
recognized Sam, says Seff.
As Feldman recalled in his memoir, On any given night you might find as
many as 10 or 12 comedians at Cresthill, crowded around the massive oak
table, in the center of which was a mountain of cocaine. This was my

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introduction to the bacchanalian nature of Hollywood nightlife half-naked

women draped over fat, out-of-shape funnymen, booze and drugs flowing
freely.
And then there was Jim Carrey another Kinison buddy who floated in and
out of Cresthill but was never part of its debauched core. Back then, Carrey
was an offbeat impressionist whod already scored a Tonight Show spot and
a short-lived network series, but his career was stalled. Jims up partying
with Sam and Carl, just being himself, being hilarious, recalls Hamilton,
whod recently moved back into Cresthill at this time. Hes at the table,
complaining about his act hes stuck in, and Sam says, Well, drop that
fucking act and be yourself. No matter how long it takes, you drop it right
now. Jim goes to Mitzi and says, Im going to break out and be myself.
He also met Damon Wayans around then, another late-night Store regular
who would later recommend Carrey for his breakout gig on In Living Color.
Carrey is currently circling back near this time in his life for his latest
project: executive-producing a Showtime original series based on William
Knoedelseders history of the early L.A. comedy scene, Im Dying Up Here,
starring Melissa Leo as a Mitzi-like matriarch. The pilot is being shot this
fall.
I walked into a lot of ongoing stories, Marc Maron tells me from his
home itself now a prestigious destination for comics in Highland Park,
California. Maron moved into Cresthill in 1987, dragging with him little
more than a futon, a framed poster of the Tod Browning film Freaks, and a
burgeoning cocaine habit. He fit right in.
Maron was working as a doorman, and his housemates included Shubert;
another doorman named Todd Lemisch; Tamayo Otsuki, a Japanese comic
whod dated Kinison for a while; and a diminutive New Yorker named
Nancy Redman. But it was still Kinisons house.
There was a night early on when I went one-on-one with Sam, doing blow
and burning money, Maron says. I was being initiated into what would
turn out to be the most disturbing and mentally destructive eight months of
my life. When the coke ran out, he drove Kinison to a dealers apartment,
where Kinison downed several airplane bottles of Smirnoff before passing
out. The dealer insisted Maron drag Kinison home. Hes like, I dont want
him to pull a Belushi on me. I get Sam in my car and bring him back to

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Cresthill, where he just lays face down on the living room floor and sleeps.
He did that a lot.
Maron quickly became, as he puts it, the guy who hosted the parties Sam
wanted to have. Monday nights, everyone would come from all over the
dark crevices of Hollywood to see Sam. These soirees sometimes lasted
days. For Redman, one of the few women who ever lived at Cresthill, this
sort of behavior quickly grew tedious.
I didnt do drugs, she says. I did decaf. When the parties were going on,
I generally stayed in my room because I was trying to get to sleep. Redman
stopped short of calling Cresthill a boys club, but Sabrina Souiri, who
worked for Kinison in the late 80s and was later married to Stephan,
describes it very much in those terms.
It just seemed like a big frat house with a bunch of morons, Souiri says. I
walked in one time and saw a bunch of comics doing blow and acting like
idiots. It wasnt a place I yearned to spend time.
At this point, the house itself was starting to resemble its inhabitants: kind of
haggard. Although Mitzi occasionally put money into it, collectively the
comics took Cresthill for granted.
Alan Bursky, a longtime Store fixture who spent much time at Cresthill in
the mid-80s, recalls the house being destroyed. The fireplace was gas
and that pipe with the pilot-light flame was sticking straight out, he says.
The oven looked like itd been in a car accident. Guys were living in every
nook and cranny. You went into the basement, in the corner, someone had a
mattress or sleeping bag.
It was like the place was straining to live up to its legend. Each new wave of
comics was passing down the war stories and attempting to outdo them.
Mitzi generally kept her distance, but she was aware of the houses
reputation. For some time, shed been trying to cash in on it by producing a
sitcom about Cresthill. Barton was one of many who took a pass at writing a
script in return for paying spots at the Store. Around 1987, a 12-minute pilot
was actually shot in Cresthill that starred, among others, Otsuki and
Redman.
Having managed to track down a copy, I can say without qualification that
its pretty awful and fails to capture the spirit of the place, the same kind

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of spirit that had been luring the talented, the desperate, and the slightly
unhinged to California for decades. Even listening to comics talk about
Cresthill 30 years later, I can hear them grasping to squeeze that magic
between their fingers.
That balcony was where dreams were made, LaBove tells me. Id leave
during the day, work as a doorman all night, do my spots, then come back
and have a big party. Wed talk comedy until 4 in the morning on that
balcony and look at the stars of the city. It was just a phenomenal way to
celebrate your starving, celebrate what youd given up for your dream.
As Shubert puts it, You only go through that once in your life. You only
struggle like that once, when you give up everything to commit to your craft.
Youre in this house, around all these great comedians, just immersing
yourself in it.
But for Maron, the dream was beginning to curdle. I was sleep-deprived
and starting to lose my mind, he says. I started to hear voices in my head,
to see the Store as this vast, weird part of some dark, mystical conspiracy.
Kinison was out of control, frequently rampaging through Cresthill and the
Store in a cocaine-fueled frenzy. He was prone to violent outbursts against
pretty much anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. At one party,
Kinison smacked around the Stores booker then kissed him on the mouth.
At another, a girl passed out on a bed and Kinison pissed on her. It was
fucked-up shit, says Maron.
One evening, Kinison put his guitar and amps into Marons room for
safekeeping. A little later, a guy named Dave, who was known as a Satanworshipping heroin addict, got into an argument with Kinison. Kinison
threw a drink in his face, hit him a few times, and ripped Daves shirt off.
Shubert recalls Dave being dangled off the back balcony by his ankles.
Despite the obvious bad vibes, Dave refused to leave. Maron tried to manage
the situation and told him to go hang out in his room and lock the door.
After that, Maron himself left to go pick up his friend Bill at the airport and
didnt return until the following morning. I walk in with Bill, who Ive told
all about this amazing place and the time Im having with Sam and
everybody, he says. I go to my room and see the doors been kicked off
the hinges. The guitars are gone. At the dining room table, still at it from
the night before, are Kinison, LaBove, and one or two others. Sam goes, I

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pissed on your bed, Maron. Wanna know why? Because you let that moron
sleep with my guitars. I turned to my friend Bill and said, I told you I knew
him.
The incident marked the end for Maron. By that point, I was sleeping in my
closet anyway, he says. I was in mental trouble. I started realizing
someones going to die, someones going to go down for real, and it could
be me. A few days later he had a breakdown in the Store parking lot. The
guy he usually bought coke from suggested Maron get out of town. If the
drug dealer is telling you to leave, its time to leave.
Cresthill was on a similar trajectory. Mitzi was increasingly fed up with the
comics behavior. Drug use that couldve once been chalked up to youthful
exuberance now had the markings of full-blown addiction. Its not totally
clear what the final straw was one comic says it was a particularly
raucous party during which Kinison led revelers in tossing expensive pieces
of furniture off the back deck but by 1988, Mitzi decided enough was
enough. The comics were told to get the hell out. The party was over.
What happened next was almost more bizarre than all that had happened
before it. NBC had paid Mitzi a $400,000 advance for a Comedy Store 15thanniversary special that would feature performances by Pryor, Williams,
Letterman, Smirnoff, Shandling, and others. With that money, she paid what
she must have considered penance for her years of enabling various comics
drug problems: She turned Cresthill into a halfway house for comedians
trying to get sober.
Mitzi had already paid for Hamilton and others to go to short-term treatment
centers, but the results werent always encouraging. Hamilton, who was then
sober, says that in late 1987, Mitzi accompanied him to an AA meeting to
see him get his one-year sobriety cake: I told her how much the threemonth halfway house experience after my 28-day stay at Betty Ford helped
to fortify my own sobriety. Mitzi teamed with an accountant, a doctor, and
Hamilton himself to form a foundation for comedians in recovery.
Steve Kravitz, a comic who was tight with both Williams and Kinison but
was in the throes of a debilitating heroin addiction, was one of the first to
move in. When I went back to Cresthill, it was like a dorm, twin beds, three
or four to a room, he says. A counselor with a medical license is on duty

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all day, a guy stayed there at night to make sure nobody hurts themselves.
There was group therapy, everything youd have in that environment.
Eventually, the houses residents included a poet, writers, dancers, and other
performers. Kravitz credits the place with starting his recovery, but this
incarnation of Cresthill was short-lived: Kravitz stayed six months and says
the halfway house lasted only a few more past that. Others, including
Hamilton, recall it continuing for a couple years.
Regardless, Mitzi pulled the plug because depending on which theory
you want to believe either they ran out of comics to treat, the house had
strayed from its initial mission by letting in non-comedians, she had
financial problems, or some combination of the above. By the early 90s,
Cresthill had a new occupant: Mitzis son, Pauly.
I meet Pauly Shore on a warm Saturday afternoon at Cresthill. He doesnt
live here anymore he moved out in the late 90s and his family sold the
place, but as it happens, the houses current owner, music producer Josh
Abraham, recently listed it for sale with a price tag of just less than $3
million.
We meet at an open house. Were the only two there, save for a tall,
exceedingly helpful realtor named Steve. Pauly says he was hardly ever here
during the wild 80s he was a teenager then but made the place his
own for about seven years in the 90s, remodeling it and redecorating.
Wearing a red L.A. Clippers T-shirt, blue sweatpants, and Adidas flip-flops,
Pauly sinks into a couch in an oak-paneled room that was once his
assistants office. I used to go out with a porno star named Savannah that
killed herself, he says. We got that information in this room, actually. That
was heavy shit.
Paulys time at Cresthill was, as he puts it, the heyday of [his] career. He
was on MTV, starring in movies it was full-on Weasel-mania. Episodes
of his show Totally Pauly were filmed here. His only consistent housemate
was Bobby Luddington, a friend who also worked for him, though Brett
Ratner had a room for several months during the year or so before Rush
Hour made him an in-demand director. There was also a constant parade of
guests, the recitation of which feels like its own time warp: Andy Dick,
Stephen Baldwin, Anna Nicole Smith, late Alice in Chains lead singer Layne

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Staley, Joey Lauren Adams, Playboy Playmates the Barbie Twins. I think
there was even a point when Robert Downey Jr. stayed in the basement for a
little during his drug time, says Pauly. (Downey Jr., through his agent,
declined to be interviewed.)
Pauly is understandably nostalgic for Cresthill, and after a while he talks to
Steve with some degree of seriousness about buying it back. Its been
completely redone since his time here and would be almost unrecognizable
to the comics who lived here in the 80s. Walls have been knocked down;
theres a gym in the basement; Abraham flattened the steep hill behind the
house to create a grassy backyard.
But hints of Cresthills history, its myths, still poke through. The room off
the kitchen where Dice and Maron lived retains some seedy charm. Upstairs,
a huge full-length mirror leans against a bedroom wall. It cant be the same
one comics used to pull down to snort blow off, can it? Surely the grand
wooden dining room table hasnt been there this long and that trapdoor in
the basement leads nowhere other than to a damp crawl space. Or does it?
Maron says that Cresthill taught him just how far a comedian could go,
onstage and off. If you want to push the limits and the boundaries, theres
no real edge to it. Theres a freedom, but also a price to pay, in your personal
life and otherwise. If youre a searcher, youre going to go to the dark side.
You can go there if you can salvage some comedy out of it.
The years have been hard for many Cresthill alums. The smart ones Dice,
Smirnoff, Carrey kept their noses pretty clean from the beginning. The
lucky ones Hamilton, Maron, Binder, LaBove got sober. Many more
simply didnt make it. Some, like Kinison, Pryor, Hicks, and Williams, died
before their time. Others disappeared quietly, most of their names barely
registering, even here: Prater, Sandy Baron, Adam Leslie, Fred Asparagus,
Larry Beezer, Jesse Aragon, Danny Stone. Is comedy different today
because of these people and this place? If Cresthill is to be feted for the
careers it helped make, must it not also bear responsibility for the price it
exacted?
As Pauly and Steve talk real estate, I wander out onto one of the sweeping
balconies, lean against the edge, and look down toward the Sunset Strip and
into L.A. Its June and the leaves on the trees almost completely obscure the
view of the Comedy Store, just a hundred or so yards down the hill.

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Construction cranes dot the horizon. This city will be remade over and over;
Cresthill will be remodeled, again and again. What happened here the
good, the bad, the very ugly will be forgotten and then remembered,
retold as truth and fiction, until one day when the house is leveled entirely,
and its stories, hopes, and dreams are ground up into a fine powder that will
waft down the hill, over the Store, across the Strip, and settle over this
strange, horrible, beautiful city like fairy dust.
The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed
Superheroes Forever
A reboot is a delicate thing. When a once-profitable franchise of characters
becomes stale, outdated, or overly complex, there will always be voices
calling for the slate to be wiped clean: to take the characters back to their
basics, retell their origin stories, make them contemporary. But all too often,
those rebooting efforts are laughable, pandering failures. Ultimate Marvel
was the rare exception. It was a compendium of stories that saved the
company that launched it, revolutionized the comics medium, and became
the foundation of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel cinematic empire.
It began as a Hail Mary maneuver. Ultimate Marvel was a publishing
experiment launched by Marvel Comics the superhero-comics company
that had invented the Avengers, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and countless other
icons during its darkest hour. The idea was simple: Launch various
comics series where all the famous Marvel characters are young again and
just starting their superhero careers in the modern day. Give the series flashy
titles like Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men and make sure no
reader will have to go back and read decades worth of comics to understand
whats going on. Return to core principles. Make these icons fresh again.
There were many reasons the initiative could have failed, but it instead
succeeded beyond its creators' wildest dreams. Indeed, the world of Marvel
movie adaptations including this summer's megahit Avengers sequel and
upcoming Fantastic Four owe more to the Ultimate imprint than any
other single Marvel Comics initiative. And yet, 15 years after the Ultimate
lines birth, Marvel just killed it. Last week, a five-issue miniseries called
Ultimate End debuted, and when it's done, there will be no more Ultimate
Marvel. There is little mourning, even among die-hard comics fans who
once loved the imprint.

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What happened? Why dispose of something so successful? To find the

answers, we must look at the secret history of Ultimate Marvel. It's a story of
desperate ambition, shocking triumph, and fevered imagination. But it's also
a cautionary tale: one about pushing limits too far, holding on too long, and
learning to accept the forces of entropy. Here, then, is the tale of Ultimate
Marvel, one of entertainment's greatest reboots but also living proof that
all reboots can become victims of their own success.
*****
When I got hired, I literally thought I was going to be writing one of the
last if not the last Marvel comics, says now-legendary comics
writer Brian Michael Bendis, who wrote the first comic of the Ultimate line
and will be writing the final one, too. When he wrote that first issue in 2000,
the once-venerable Marvel was in chaos. It's so the opposite now, that
people don't even know.
Heres some context to understand the red-alert disaster the comics industry
had become by the eve of the Ultimate experiment. In 1993, annual
combined comics sales across all publishers had been close to a billion
dollars; in 1999, that same number was a microscopic $270 million. In 1989,
Batman was the most-talked-about movie in America; by 1999, the
disastrous Batman & Robin had squirted a stink on the very idea of a
cinematic comic-book adaptation. Marvel especially was feeling the burn: It
went through a humiliating Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the late '90s, saw wave
after wave of layoffs, and executive leadership was shuffled every few
weeks. In 1999, after years of comics-publishing dominance, the company
lost its top spot in industry market share and watched its rival, DC Comics,
take the throne.
There was a wide array of causes for Marvels woes the collapse of a
comics-as-collectible-items bubble and multiple defections by top artists, for
example. But one ailment was obvious to any brand-new reader who bought
a Marvel comic for the first time: There was so much backstory that the
stories were almost incomprehensible.
Ever since Marvels first comic in 1939, nearly every superhero story it
published had to fit into a shared, ongoing universe of characters and events.
There was some fudging of time frames (Spider-Man was introduced as a
teenager in 1962, and by 1999, he was only in his 30s or so), but every story

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was built on the back of every previous story, and all stories were
interconnected: Iron Man might talk about some battle that had occurred in
X-Men, Mr. Fantastic would remember things that happened in comics
published 20 years prior, and there were regular companywide crossover
events, where all the heroes would fight the same evil at the same time.
If youre confused by that description, dont worry so was everyone else.
Sixty years of continuity had set an insanely high bar for understanding what
was happening in a Marvel comic, even if you were a die-hard fan. (To be
fair: DC also had this problem.) What's more, everything in Marvel looked
and sounded behind-the-times. In a world where geek audiences were
flocking to watch the sleek, leather-clad, hip (by 1999 standards) action of
The Matrix, Marvels stories were alienatingly ridiculous. In the pages of
Marvels flailing comics series, you might see the Avengers wearing
uniforms of clownish purple or baby-blue fighting wooden-dialogued
villains with names like Kang the Conqueror and Lord Templar. Spider-Man
was a married stiff who spent years trying to solve the mystery of whether or
not he was a clone. And the characters were all so old: The phenomenon of
ongoing continuity meant the original X-Men hadnt been teenagers for
decades. A pop-culture empire lives and dies on young-adult interest, and
Marvels was fast receding.
Enter Bill Jemas. He was a relative outsider to the comics world (hed gotten
his law degree from Harvard before spending most of his career in the
collectible-trading-card industry) who was put in charge of Marvels
editorial direction in 2000. He hated what Marvel had become: a place that
was publishing stories that were all but impossible for teens to read and
unaffordable, to boot, as he put it to me. But Jemas had an idea, born of a
suggestion he says the CEO of Wizard, a comics-industry magazine, gave to
him: turn our middle-aging heroes back into teens. In other words, he
wanted to launch a reboot.
Of course, that could have been a suicidally horrible idea if executed poorly.
(Imagine some 55-year-old veteran comics writer penning a Spider-Man title
where Peter Parker wears a backwards baseball cap and yells Bodacious!
after hitting Green Goblin with a skateboard.) The company needed fresh
and relatively young talent writing such stories. Luckily, Marvel had a
charming, freshly minted editor-in-chief with great respect in the indiecomics world: Joe Quesada, who quickly sought out writers from outside the
Marvel family. Quesada (who could not be reached for an interview) also

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had the virtue of being a devoted company man: Jemas recalled that
Quesada wouldve preferred to tell stories about new heroes, e.g., Peter
Parkers nephew, rather than do a reboot, but went along with the Jemas
plan nonetheless.
While Quesada was headhunting, Jemas struggled to find the right way to
conceptualize his new initiative (at that time tentatively titled Ground
Zero, a name that fortuitously was abandoned). Comics companies had
tried to jettison decades of storytelling before, and it usually ended in failure.
Do you create a story where some cosmic event resets the clock on 60 years
of continuity? DC had done that with its Zero Hour event in 1994, and it
only ended up making everything more confusing for readers. Would you
send your best heroes into another dimension, where they were somehow
rejuvenated? Marvel did that with its Heroes Reborn event in 1996, which
drained the company's finances, received abysmal reviews, and soured
relations between editors and creators.
Jemas opted for an extremely simple premise: There would be a new SpiderMan series and a new X-Men series, in which all the characters were still
young. Thats it: No explanations about why, no complicated in-continuity
sci-fi justifications about interdimensional travel, nothing. Just stories where
the most basic archetypes were in place Peter Parker getting spiderlike
powers after a spider bites him, the X-Men being superpowered mutants in a
world that fears and hates them, Wolverine being grumpy, and so on but
where the characters were all starting out in the world of 2000, beginning a
new continuity.
And Jemas had a firewall against failure, too: Marvel would continue to
publish the existing Spider-Man and X-Men series, the ones with hundreds
of issues of complicated, old continuity. They the so-called mainstream
Marvel series would be unaffected. The rebooted tales would simply exist
in another fictional universe and if those stories didnt sell, Marvel could
just cancel them without affecting existing mainstream continuity. There
was no reason not to give it a try. Jemas and Quesada dont recall how they
hit upon the name Ultimate for the branding, but it came up at some point
and stuck in their minds. They aimed to launch Ultimate Spider-Man and
Ultimate X-Men by years end. But as the months wore on, the talent hunt
was getting dire. Honestly, I kissed a lot of frogs, Jemas recalled.

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Thats when Quesada made a fateful phone call to Brian Michael Bendis. At
the time, Bendis was a struggling freelance indie-comics writer/artist whose
biggest claim to fame was a mediocre-selling historical drama about a serial
killer from the 1930s. My normal was, Ill sell 2,000 copies of a comic, get
a check for $400, and then hustle to do caricatures all weekend to make
some real money, Bendis recalled with a laugh. So he was shocked when
Quesada got in touch and told Bendis to pitch a back-to-basics Spidey story
where Peter Parker was a teen and everything was a blank slate. Apparently,
one of the previous auditionees had written a word-for-word adaptation of
Spider-Mans 1962 first appearance, but with modern dcor. Bendis knew he
had to avoid that approach: When you do that, it just dries it up. Youre
basically a cover band, at best.
Instead, he won the gig by writing an elegant script that read more like a TV
pilot than a '90s superhero comic: There were no thought bubbles of internal
monologue, no rushed exposition, not even a costume in the first issue. And
it didnt feel self-consciously modernized: There was no shock-value
violence, and the 30-something Bendis wisely went easy on teen slang
(though there are some snippets that havent aged well, e.g., See you on the
flipmode). The first issue was 45 pages long more than twice the length
of an average comic which allowed for realistic pacing and Mamet-esque
conversational dialogue. Peter is 15 and speaks in the awkward tones of a
bullied child. His Aunt May and Uncle Ben are kind, aging hippies who
charm the reader by calmly joking with each other. Peters bitten by a
genetically modified spider (in the mainstream version, the spider had been
radioactive, but Bendis knew genetic tinkering would resonate more in
2000), and is genuinely confused and remorseful when he hits a bully and
knocks the boy out with his strange new powers. None of it felt cartoonish
and overwrought like mainstream Spidey. The now-famous final page is a
single panel of Peter realizing he can stick to his own ceiling. He dangles
upside-down, face forward, and mumbles, Whoa cool. In the context of
the whole issue, its a moment of earned, simple wonder.
Jemas was overjoyed with the issue, but retailers were skeptical. I publicly
said, If Ultimate Spider-Man made it to 100 issues, I would eat a bug, San
Franciscobased comics-shop owner Brian Hibbs told me. The first issue
debuted at No. 15 on the monthly sales charts for September of 2000, selling
a modest 54,407 copies. But Jemas had a wild, risky scheme: He distributed
millions of copies at chain stores like Payless Shoes and Walmart. Major
media outlets picked up on Jemass publicity push, leading to glowing

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reviews (One of the most emotionally resonant depictions of teendom in

comics, Entertainment Weekly wrote of the series). That all added up to
overwhelmingly positive and widespread word-of-mouth praise. Sales
steadily rose.
Finally, in December, the buzz paid off and Ultimate Marvel hit the top of
the comics sales charts. But it wasnt with Ultimate Spider-Man. The first
megahit Ultimate comic was the first issue of Ultimate X-Men, which sold a
staggering 117,085 copies that month. It was set in the same universe as
Ultimate Spider-Man, and had been long delayed because Jemas and
Quesada couldnt decide on a writer. They tore their hair out during the
search, even rejecting their beloved Bendiss spec script for the series. The
person they finally picked was a newcomer to Marvel with an extremely
controversial reputation for his work at other publishers. He was a Scotsman
named Mark Millar, and the work he created at Ultimate Marvel changed
superhero fiction forever for better or worse.
*****
The history of Ultimate Marvel is, in a way, a story about warring
approaches to a reboot: Bendiss and Millars. Bendis wanted to polish the
old archetypes; Millar wanted to aggressively critique them. Bendis sought
timeless stories; Millar craved biting contemporary political critique. Bendis
was looking to inspire; Millar aimed to disquiet. As Bendis put it: Im
writing about hope and hes writing about nihilism, and I know he doesnt
always think he is, but he is. Constantly.
Millar is one of the most divisive and successful names in the history
of comics, and he had already begun his meteoric ascent when Quesada and
Jemas snatched him up. At DC, hed written jaw-droppingly violent and
provocative stories on a series called The Authority. One Authority story was
even about the titular superteam fighting an army of horrific pastiches of
Marvel superheroes, including a rapist Captain America, a baby-murdering
Iron Man, and white-supremacist X-Men. But hed gone too far and left DC
after they told him he couldnt enact some of his more wild ideas (including
George W. Bush authorizing the deployment of a government-created
pedophile supervillain). As envelope-pushing as he was, Millar was also a
brilliant crafter of action-story structure and perhaps to a fault knew
how to grab attention unlike anyone else in the business. Jemas never
shirked from controversy, and relished making this high-profile hire.

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Millars initial stories for Ultimate X-Men may have sold like gangbusters in
2001, but they werent especially groundbreaking (other than the awful
goatees that artist Adam Kubert gave to Wolverine and Cyclops). His
greatest achievement was brewing in the background. Jemas and Quesada
had asked him to team up with superstar artist Bryan Hitch for the launch of
Ultimate Marvels take on Marvel Comics premier superteam, the
Avengers. Hitch had drawn for The Authority (though his run didnt overlap
with Millars), where he earned a reputation for drawing comics that looked
like movies: full of photorealistic figures and enormous action sequences.
The Ultimate-universe Avengers series would be called The Ultimates, and
Marvel wanted it to be the imprints biggest series yet.
The tout of actually being able to make an Avengers film wasnt on
anybodys radar, Hitch told me. So thats what we said, that this was
Avengers: The Movie. They couldnt have known how true that cheeky
philosophy would turn out to be. In a scant few months, the pair unwittingly
concocted ideas that formed the foundation of the worldwide-hit Marvel
Cinematic Universe. As Joss Whedon, writer/director of The Avengers and
its sequel, put it: It's my feeling that Ultimates brought Marvel into the
modern age in a way no other book did.
The Avengers that hundreds of millions of people see on the silver screen
are, for the most part, the Ultimates. The classic Avengers were a private
club that hung out in a mansion with a wacky butler; the Ultimates were a
military operation assembled by superspy Nick Fury to combat extinctionlevel threats. Classic Hawkeye was a wisecracking reformed criminal who
wore a ridiculous purple mask; Ultimate Hawkeye was a hardened black-ops
soldier in dark leather who was best buddies with Black Widow. Classic Iron
Man was a wealthy-but-sweet ladies man with a firm code of ethics;
Ultimate Iron Man was a cynical, charismatic, womanizing alcoholic.
Classic Nick Fury was white; Ultimate Nick Fury was African-American
and explicitly drawn to look like Samuel L. Jackson (Millar had the idea to
change Furys ethnicity, but Hitch was the one who modeled him off of
Jackson, just because he thought the actors look fit their reimagined
characters attitude). Which of those setups sounds more familiar?
The reliably high quality and ever-increasing sales of the existing Ultimate
Marvel series had built a fever pitch of buzz, so when The Ultimates No. 1
hit stands in January 2002, it flew off shelves and became the single bestselling comic of the year. It wasnt until The Ultimates came out that we

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recognized there was something legitimately big-time here with Ultimate,

retailer Hibbs recalled. And what made that success all the more remarkable
was how outspokenly political and deconstructionist Millars story was. He
knew there were unhealthy ideas at the core of the Avengers' archetypes, and
he was unafraid to prove it.
All of these Ultimate versions of the Avengers were, to put it bluntly,
complete assholes. They were also all very specifically post-9/11 characters.
Hawkeye and Black Widow were unfeeling government murderers, Iron
Man was a gleeful war profiteer, and Captain America well, Ultimate
Captain America was just about the most blunt satire of War on Terror
neoconservatism that popular culture had seen up until that point. He was a
cold, stern prick in World War II, and when he was reawakened in 2002, he
immediately felt an affinity for President Bushs crusaderlike worldview.
Indeed, the third issue literally concluded with Cap saluting President Bush.
Later, in one of modern superhero comics' most infamous moments, an alien
invader tells Cap to surrender and he responds,
Surrender? SURRENDER??!! and, pointing to his helmet's giant A, You
think this letter on my head stands for France?
If you were a comics fan in 2002 and 2003, The Ultimates was all you and
your friends could talk about. It was a panoramic action story that was
thrilling in a way nothing else in comics was. And in retrospect, its
astounding how leftist The Ultimates was, during a period when American
action movies were either pro-war or purely escapist. Millar declined to be
interviewed for this article, but I spoke with him at length two years ago for
a profile I wrote at The New Republic, and he outlined his philosophy there.
Europeans tend to be pretty left-wing, and Scotland's always been a leftwing country, so I'm always suspicious of uniforms, the Scotsman said. But
you didnt have to be a liberal to love The Ultimates: It was a rip-roaring
action story with luscious artwork, and even though Ultimate Cap wasnt
intended as a role model, many took him as such. People would say, 'I
joined the army after reading The Ultimates because I wanted to make a
difference in the Middle East,' and I was like, 'Well, I kinda meant the
opposite of that, Millar recalled with a laugh.
By the middle of the decade, the Ultimate Marvel line was a wild success,
regularly dominating best-seller charts. Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate XMen, The Ultimates, and the newly launched Ultimate Fantastic Four all
existed in the same universe, meaning the sleek, Ultimate versions of

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Marvels characters were all hanging out with one another in their own little
pocket of fiction. Every week, readers would pick up issues of the Ultimate
titles to see how the Ultimized versions of long-standing characters would
fit into the Ultimate universe a universe you could plausibly catch up on
with just a few days of backissue reading. Marvel continued to publish
dozens of series set in the old, mainstream universe but the Ultimate
universe was what fans and critics buzzed about.
It really saved the industry at that time, longtime comics journalist Heidi
MacDonald said. Ultimate [Marvel] reignited interest among Marvel fans
and got new readers. To bring some shine and excitement to its nonUltimate universe, Marvel put Bendis and Millar in charge of mainstream
Marvel titles like The Avengers and Wolverine as well. Marvel regained the
top spot in market share, and Ultimate Marvel was the engine that drove it
there. As Ultimate Fantastic Four writer Mike Carey put it, if you were an
Ultimate writer, artist, or editor, you were in the cool kids club.
But there were cracks in the foundation, and they were widening. Jemas was
ousted in 2004 after a string of high-publicity publishing flops some
related to Ultimate Marvel, some tied to mainstream Marvel. The second
volume of The Ultimates began in 2005 and was perpetually delayed due to
Hitchs agonizingly slow artistic process, infuriating fans and retailers.
Aging sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card wrote a reviled Ultimate Iron
Man miniseries. On top of all that, Marvel was simply running out of
characters to Ultimize. To keep this massive reboot effort relevant, Quesada
needed something big to get readers excited again, so he and longtime
superhero writer Jeph Loeb concocted a major story to shake up the Ultimate
line. What they created was one of the biggest creative disasters in comics
history, one from which Ultimate Marvel never quite recovered.
****
Millar left the Ultimate line after Ultimates 2, but Quesada and Loeb
opted to take Millars sexed-up, ultraviolent, transgressive techniques and
amplify them. Loeb launched Ultimates 3 in 2007, and in the very first
panel, the Ultimates are watching a sex tape of Iron Man and Black Widow.
A few pages later, brother-and-sister heroes Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch
are caught in an incestuous tryst and just a few pages after that, Scarlet
Witch is brutally murdered in broad daylight. That kind of random sex and
violence was rampant throughout the third Ultimates outing, without the

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political relevance or epic pacing of the first two volumes. Sales were good,
but reviews were terrible.
As it turned out, it was all just a prologue for Ultimatum, a 2008 miniseries
that would irreparably damage the Ultimate universe. When artist David
Finch was recruited to draw for it, Marvel gave him a very simple
description of the storys mission. I was told it was a way to basically kill
everyone in the Ultimate universe, Finch told me. And thats pretty much
what it turned out to be.
Thats a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Loeb later told
Newsarama.com that Ultimatum was always intended to be a big,
blockbuster-y kind of thing, a big, noisy, disaster story about a massive
change in the Ultimate Universe, and very much a Michael Bay movie.
Indeed, in the Michael Bay tradition, the story begins with Magneto using a
tidal wave to kill nearly everyone in Manhattan. But even Bay might have
blushed at Ultimatums subsequent violence. Over the course of just five
issues, 34 different heroes and villains were murdered, often by gruesome
means: Doctor Strange was squeezed until his head exploded; Magneto was
decapitated; the Blob ate the Wasp and, while holding her half-devoured
corpse, belched out, Tastes like chicken; and so on. It was an abattoir
masquerading as a comics series, filled with anatomically improbable
breasts and laughable dialogue. (I reached out to Loeb for an interview but
was told he would only speak with me if we didnt discuss Ultimates 3 or
Ultimatum.)
Fans and retailers were furious. It was fucking terrible, retailer Hibbs
recalled, adding that he was only able to sell about half of the copies he
ordered for his store. Ultimatum is a base and insulting comic book, read a
review at comics site Let's Be Friends Again. Ultimatum #5 could quite
possibly be the single worst piece of writing in recorded history, wrote
critic Jason Kerouac. But Jesse Schedeen of IGN most succinctly summed
up the damage Loeb and Quesada had done to the Ultimate Marvel
experiment: I sincerely hope the Ultimate line is able to return to its roots
and offer readers clean, accessible, and unique takes on these iconic heroes
again, he wrote. It had better, because I'm growing dangerously close to
wiping my hands of the whole enterprise. He wasnt alone in his disdain:
Overall sales for the Ultimate line never returned to their pre-Ultimatum
levels.

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But just as the Ultimate comics reboot was faltering, the ideas it had
spawned in the pre-Ultimatum years were succeeding elsewhere
specifically, on the big screen. In 2005, Marvel announced plans to start
producing its own movies (hits like Spider-Man and X-Men had been
produced by Sony and Fox, respectively), and its first offering was going to
be an Iron Man film. Millar and Bendis were brought on as consultants, but
even without their help, the filmmakers had decided to have Robert Downey,
Jr. play the Ultimate take on Tony Stark: a skeezy, boozed-up prick whom
you still couldnt help rooting for. But the coup de grce was the muchtalked-about post-credits scene, co-written by Bendis, in which Tony meets
Nick Fury as played by Samuel L. Jackson. It wasnt even Bendis or
Millars idea to bring Jackson-as-Fury to the big screen producer Kevin
Feige had loved Ultimate Nick Fury so much that he had reached out to
Bendis. The movie was a smash, and a major vindication for the Ultimate
Marvel experiment.
As Marvels movie empire grew, the Ultimate vision became a deeper and
deeper influence. When Hawkeye showed up in Thor, he was a dead ringer
for Ultimate Hawkeye. When Captain America debuted, he wasnt a jerk
like Ultimate Cap, but his costume was almost 100 percent lifted from
Hitchs Ultimate redesign. And when Ultimates superfan Joss Whedon
crafted The Avengers (released in 2012), the whole endeavor ended up
feeling like an Ultimate production epic action sequences, militarysponsored missions, naturalistic dialogue and almost nothing like the
Avengers of old.
And in the world of comics, even though Ultimate sales were
dropping throughout the late '00s, Marvels mainstream titles were doing
quite well largely because they had adopted many of the hallmarks of the
Ultimate brand: a more realistic tone (well, as realistic as you can get in a
world with telepaths and gods), sleek visual modernism, and a willingness to
shake the status quo with operatic action. Mainstream Marvel heroes rarely
pranced around in pastel leotards anymore, and they certainly didnt have
clunky internal monologues in thought bubbles: They looked and sounded
more and more like their Ultimate-universe counterparts from the preUltimatum years.
As an imprint, however, Ultimate Marvel simply couldnt get back on track.
Millar was brought back for a long run on Ultimates, but readers found the
stories half-baked and dull. Up-and-coming writer Jonathan Hickman

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penned a major story about Ultimate Mr. Fantastic turning evil and
destroying half of Europe but simultaneously, DC Comics did a linewide
relaunch that was, in essence, its own attempt to Ultimize its characters.
(The DC push was an initiative called The New 52, in which the publisher
canceled all its existing comics titles and rebooted its characters in stories
where they were younger and freed from old continuity.) DC's reboot (which
is still ongoing) was a smash hit and drew attention away from Marvels
Ultimate tales. Sales simply couldnt perk up. Whats more, Millar became a
reviled figure among progressive comics fans, known for his creator-owned
Millarworld comics, in which grisly murder and obscene rape were regularly
on tap. Superhero fans would joke about classic Ultimates scenes like Cap's
anti-France rant, dismissing them as cynical relics of a bygone era.
There was only one saving grace for the Ultimate universe and the promise it
had once held: Bendiss Ultimate Spider-Man stories. Bendis was Marvels
golden boy, and although his stories acknowledged that Ultimatum
happened, Quesada never forced him to change the optimistic tone of his
beloved series. Sales were never spectacular, but they were solid and
dependable. Indeed, Bendis and series artist Mark Bagley broke the record
for longest-running unchanged creative team on a comic and when
Bagley left after issue No. 111, Bendis kept plugging along. But the series
greatest achievement came in 2011, when Bendis introduced a new
character, one who represented the triumph of the Bendis approach to a
reboot: finding hope and light in Marvel's core principles. The characters
name was Miles Morales, he was Afro-Latino, and he will almost certainly
be Ultimate Marvels most lasting legacy in the world of superhero comics.
****
Bendis wasnt blind. He knew that by 2011, the decade-long Ultimate
experiment had lost much of its luster. He was constantly talking to
colleagues about how to fix the world hed launched. I would say, Hey,
what did we do right? What did we do wrong? What would I have done
differently? he recalled. In those conversations of what we did right or
wrong, wed come about the idea of Peter Parker being of a different race.
That if you really look at the origin, theres no reason that character
wouldnt be of color. In fact, maybe it makes more sense.
He soon became fixated on the racial questions posed by the Spider-Man
archetype. If a middle-class teenager was growing up deep in Queens in

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1962, sure, hed be white. But in the New York of 2011s profoundly
multiethnic outer boroughs? Statistically, hed almost certainly be a person
of color. But if Bendis was going to introduce a nonwhite Spider-Man, what
would he do with the existing Spider-Man? Thats where the magic of the
anything-is-possible Ultimate Marvel approach paid off.
We started thinking about who ended up being Miles, and it became
obvious that the only way Miles works is if Peter isnt there, Bendis said.
Then you realize that the trigger has to be pulled. Bendis wrote a story in
which Ultimate Peter dies a heros death. Around the same time, shy
teenager Miles Morales gains similar abilities to Peters and tentatively starts
fighting crime in his stead. The ensuing story lines were classic Bendis:
tender, streamlined, and optimistic. Miles wasnt just an Afro-Latino Peter
Parker. He was his own person, kind and quiet, reluctant to stand out and
perpetually struggling with self-doubt in many ways, an even more
believable teenager than Ultimate Peter had been.
Miles was also an enormous hit immediately after his August 2011
debut. Sales for the series spiked, but more important, Miles was a publicity
sensation, drawing attention in mainstream media outlets and among fans
who had long ago grown bored with Spider-Man. Just a few months into his
existence, long before Marvel had made any Miles merchandise, fans were
constructing their own Miles costumes (his uniform has a slightly different
color scheme than Peters) and wearing them to conventions. Marvel knew it
had a hit on its hands, and has recently started cranking out Miles costumes,
Miles toys, and a version of Miles in the hit Saturday-morning Spider-Man
cartoon. When Sony announced it was rebooting its Spider-Man movie
franchise yet again, there were cries across the internet for the new Spidey to
be Miles. Miles was something that was vital and important, and he sold,
Hibbs said. It brought a lot of attention back to that book. But it didnt help
the entire line.
Nothing could save the rest of the Ultimate line, which had larger problems
than just the fallout from Ultimatum. More than a decade into the Ultimate
project, Marvel had learned a harsh lesson about the concept of a franchise
reboot: It tends toward chaos. If a new reader tried to digest an issue of an
Ultimate comic in 2011, shed run into the exact problem Ultimate Marvel
was designed to combat: confusing continuity. Wait, why was Mr. Fantastic
evil? What had happened four years ago in Ultimatum? Remind me how Dr.
Doom died? As Hickman put it: I think maybe the lesson might be that

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continuity eventually swallows everything. (Incidentally, now that the

Marvel Cinematic Universe is 11 movies deep, this is becoming a concern
for Marvel Studios. It remains to be seen how Marvel's movie producers
might learn from the pitfalls of the Ultimate world.)
Creators and editors I spoke to said the decision to kill the Ultimate brand
came sometime in 2013. There was a last-ditch Ultimate story that year,
entitled Cataclysm, where a cosmic entity came to devour the Earth. Thenwriter of Ultimates Joshua Hale Fialkov told me the writing was on the wall:
The way it was put to me was, we need to do something gigantic, he said,
but if it didnt raise the profile of the universe, then theyd end it. It was a
sales failure. The trigger had to be pulled.
****
To Marvels credit, the Ultimate universe is getting a Viking funeral.
There has been a years-long story line in the mainstream Marvel universe,
written by Hickman, which has climaxed in a massive crossover event called
Secret Wars. The catalyst, seen in this months Secret Wars No. 1, is an
interdimensional apocalypse in which the Ultimate universe and the
mainstream Marvel universe literally collide, destroying each other. At the
end of the issue, a sparse page features text reading THE MARVEL
UNIVERSE 1961 - 2015 and THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE 2000 2015. This is, however, a bit of a misdirect: Marvel has already announced
plans for its postSecret Wars status quo, which appears mostly to be a
reconstruction of mainstream Marvel (it remains to be seen how much of
this new status quo will be a reboot of its own). The only real death here is
an Ultimate death.
All is not lost. Marvel has also made it clear that the new status quo will
feature some as-yet-unspecified synthesis of the two universes. We do have
confirmation that Miles Morales will join the Avengers, which is a huge
victory both for diversity and for the legacy of the Ultimate experiment. And
in the world of the movies, African-American Nick Fury isnt going
anywhere, nor is asshole Tony Stark or leather-loving Hawkeye. Plus, this
summers Fantastic Four movie is explicitly an homage to Ultimate
Fantastic Four: Its titular heroes will all be youngsters, an innovation
concocted in the Ultimate universe.

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And that gets at the other big lesson of the Ultimate experiment: If a reboot
succeeds, it bleeds into the world around it often to its own detriment.
The biggest frustration with me was that the things that made the Ultimate
universe so special were applied to the regular Marvel universe, making the
Ultimate universe less special, Bendis said. In other words: Ultimate
Marvel was so successful that it made itself unnecessary. As long as Miles is
saved (and, perhaps, Ultimate Nick Fury), nothing very beloved will be lost
in the death of the once-sensational Ultimate universe. All the themes and
motifs have, thankfully, sprouted across the superhero genre and brought it
to unheard-of heights of success.
Theres one final lesson. According to Bendis the alpha and omega of
Ultimate Marvel storytelling the key to the reboot was understanding
what made the old Marvel archetypes worth rebooting in the first place.
The transition that we made was based on the fact that the concept of
Spider-Man wasn't broken, he told me. The Spider-Man origin and its
themes are pretty much perfect. So adaptations are much like a Shakespeare
play: The trick isn't to fix it and say you know better than Shakespeare. It's
to find the truth of it and keep the truth going for a new audience.
How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans Into Suckers
Full disclosure: I am a 36-year-old dude who bores easily, drinks I.P.A.s and
wears sports-themed T-shirts, especially ones with faded, nostalgic logos
that suggest better times. In my early 20s, I developed a gambling problem
that Ive since learned to spread out over a variety of low-stakes games
Scrabble, pitch-and-putt golf, my stock profile on ETrade. I watch
somewhere between six and 20 hours of basketball per week. I try to keep up
with the usual cultural things documentaries about conflict in South
Sudan, Netflix binge shows, memes but whenever I find myself awake in
the early morning and there is no email to answer and no news to track, I
watch SportsCenter, or I scan the previous nights N.B.A. box scores to
check up on Porzingis, or I read some dissertation on Johnny Cuetos
unusual ability to hold runners on first base. Its not the most glamorous way
to spend my time, but what can I do? My mind, at its most aimless,
obsessively seeks out sports information. I am, in other words, the target
demographic for the daily fantasy sports industry.
Since the start of this N.F.L. season, I have lost roughly $1,900 on
DraftKings and FanDuel, the two main proprietors of daily fantasy sports

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(D.F.S.). I play pretty much every night. This requires me to pick a team of
players whether baseball, basketball, football, hockey or soccer each
of whom have been assigned a dollar amount, and fit them all under a salary
cap. I base these lineups on reasonably educated hunches, something to the
effect of: Ill play the Indiana Pacers point guard George Hill tonight,
because hes going up against the New Orleans Pelicans, who have been a
defensive train wreck this season, especially on the perimeter. Also, Monta
Ellis, Hills back-court partner, is sitting out, which means more of the usage
load should fall to Hill. Sometimes, usually while walking the dog, Ill even
sit down on a park bench and check to make sure that at least some of those
facts are real. My bets range anywhere from $3 to $100. My losses in D.F.S.
are not financially crippling, nor are they happening at a rate that should be
cause for concern. But every gambler, whatever the size of the problem,
wants to know that he or she has some chance of winning.
The ads, I admit, are what got me. For the first 10 months of 2015,
DraftKings and FanDuel spent more than a combined $200 million on
advertising, a surge that peaked at the start of the football season, when a
DraftKings ad ran seemingly every couple of minutes on television. In
addition to the ads, many of which showed regular guys like me who had
won, in the DraftKings parlance, a shipload of money, there were
DraftKings lounges in N.F.L. stadiums, FanDuel sidelines in N.B.A. arenas
and daily fantasy advice segments in the sports sections of newspapers and
all over ESPN, which, during the first weeks of the N.F.L. season, felt as if it
had been converted into a nonstop publicity machine for DraftKings. As of
August, both companies had billion-dollar valuations and promised weekly
competitions with huge payouts and fast and easy withdrawals.
Initially, D.F.S. seemed harmless enough on Sunday mornings, I would
challenge a couple of my friends in California to head-to-head match-ups for
$50 and put a few $20 entries into the million-dollar fantasy-football contest.
Then, on Sunday, Sept. 27, Ethan Haskell, an employee at DraftKings,
inadvertently published information that could have given him an edge over
his competitors. That day, Haskell won $350,000 in prizes on FanDuel.
(DraftKings later concluded, in an internal review conducted by a former
United States attorney, that Haskell obtained the information after the
deadline for submitting his lineup in the contest and couldnt use it for
profit.) Haskells accidental disclosure and subsequent bonanza caught the
attention of several media outlets, including The Times, leading to a volley

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of articles and columns that placed the operations of daily fantasy sports
under close scrutiny.
The idea that these sites
exist so that regular guys
can make a lot of money
playing daily fantasy sports
is a lie, Harber told me.
In the three months that have passed since Haskells post, DraftKings and
FanDuel have been reeling. In October, Nevada joined Arizona, Iowa,
Louisiana, Montana and Washington on the list of states where DraftKings
and FanDuel cannot be played. On Nov. 10, Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman of New York issued cease-and-desist letters to the two
companies, ordering them to stop accepting bets in the state. (The order has
now been stayed, and both companies continue to do business in New York.
Last week, Schneiderman asked a judge to order DraftKings and FanDuel to
reimburse the money New York State residents have lost on the site.) On
Dec. 23, Lisa Madigan, attorney general for the state of Illinois, released an
opinion stating that daily fantasy games clearly constitutes gambling. (The
two companies have argued that D.F.S. is a game of skill.) A chill has hit the
D.F.S. industry. Prize pools have been steadily declining, and in the eyes of
the public and much of the media, D.F.S. has become synonymous with
online poker or offshore sports gambling an industry, in other words, that
deserves neither protection nor sympathy.
Since the scandal broke, I have traveled to D.F.S. events, spent dozens of
hours playing on DraftKings and FanDuel and talked to players and industry
media figures. I initially intended to write an article about the bro culture
that had sprouted up around D.F.S., which, from a distance, reminded me of
the sweaty, sardonic camaraderie you typically see at high-stakes poker
events. At the time, the crusade against D.F.S. felt a few degrees too hot
DraftKings and FanDuel struck me as obviously gambling sites, but the
game itself felt sort of like homework. You research players. You build a
spreadsheet. You project data and enter a team. You watch the team either
fulfill or fall short of your projections. The next day, you start over again.
The ruinous thrill of other forms of gambling sports betting, blackjack,
poker just wasnt there.

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Instead, I came across a different sort of problem: a rapacious ecosystem in

which high-volume gamblers, often aided by computer scripts and
optimization software that allow players to submit hundreds or even
thousands of lineups at a time, repeatedly take advantage of new players,
who, after watching an ad, deposit some money on DraftKings and FanDuel
and start betting. Both companies mostly looked the other way. And, when
evidence of the competitive advantages enjoyed by these high-volume
players became too overwhelming for the companies to ignore, DraftKings
and FanDuel enacted rules that in the end are likely to protect the highvolume players rather than regulate them. In any case, a stricter ban on
computer scripting would have been functionally impossible because, as
a representative of FanDuel told me, D.F.S. companies cannot reliably detect
it on their sites.
Each company took advantage of language in a federal law that allowed
them to plug directly into two huge, overlapping populations fantasy
sports players and gamblers. Each company was able to raise hundreds of
millions of dollars in venture capital funding and sponsorships, all of which
created pressure to increase user bases, which, in turn, led to an advertising
deluge this past fall. It takes years of testing, regulation and outside
oversight to create a reliable betting market. But DraftKings and FanDuel
rose to prominence and now, seemingly, have become derailed in the
course of a single N.F.L. regular season.
The betting economy that has been created is highly unstable and corrupt.
One critic I spoke to was Gabriel Harber, a well-known D.F.S. podcaster and
writer who has worked in the D.F.S. industry since its inception and goes by
the handle CrazyGabey. He has come forward to discuss the rampant
exploitation in D.F.S.s betting economy.
The idea that these sites exist so that regular guys can make a lot of money
playing daily fantasy sports is a lie, Harber told me. FanDuel and
DraftKings are optimized for power players to rape and pillage regular
players over and over again.
The daily fantasy industry grew out of the rubble of online poker, which,
like D.F.S., offered easy sign-ups, huge payouts and the allure of life
without a 9-to-5. Then, in 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet
Gambling Enforcement Act (U.I.G.E.A.). Several large online poker sites,
most notably Party Poker, closed their American operations, and although it

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was still possible to play online poker, the whole industry had been pushed
to the peripheries of legality. When the United States attorneys office
effectively shut down Internet poker on April 15, 2011, a day known in
gambling circles as Black Friday, nobody was all that surprised. Online
poker, everyone reasoned, had it coming. Curiously, the bill included an
exception for fantasy sports.
About a year after the passage of the U.I.G.E.A., Chris Fargis, a poker pro,
wrote a post on his personal blog that explained a new business venture he
had started called Instant Fantasy Sports. The idea, Fargis wrote, was to
take the time frame of season-long fantasy sports leagues and shrink it.
The site will look familiar to many of you who are reading this blog because
its set up a lot like an online poker site.
Given the current state of online gaming, the next logical question is, Is
this site legal? Fargis continued. Happily, Im able to tell you that fantasy
sports games are explicitly protected by the U.I.G.E.A. (the same law that
has given online poker so much trouble in the U.S.A.). Instant Fantasy
Sports is 100 percent legal in the U.S.A. and Canada.
The D.F.S. industry is still inextricably tied up in those poker roots. Players
talk about tilting because of variance, especially when a fish puts in a
donkey lineup that ends up going crazy. (In regular American English, this
translates roughly to I am really mad because some idiot punched in some
random lineup that ended up catching every conceivable break and beating
me.) And its not only the former poker players who talk like this when I
first spoke to Nigel Eccles, the C.E.O. and founder of FanDuel, he referred
to the different denominations of D.F.S. games as tables, in the same way
a pit boss at a casino might point you to the $10 blackjack or the $25
baccarat tables. Rotogrinders, by far the biggest site for D.F.S. discussion,
commentary and content, was founded in part by Cal Spears, a former poker
player from Tennessee who used to run an online forum for poker strategy
called PocketFives. Jonathan Aguiar, DraftKings director of V.I.P. services,
is also a former poker player known as FatalError. Fargis, too, now works at
DraftKings.
Over the next few years, dozens of other gaming entrepreneurs started their
own daily fantasy companies. There were DraftDay and DraftStreet, along
with pretty much every possible portmanteau of draft, fan and fantasy.
The sites made no attempts to hide their connection to poker. They werent

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big enough to warrant attention from law enforcement or regulators. Many

of the contestants were career game players who all knew one another from
the poker circuit. Prize pools rarely rose much higher than $10,000. The
companies failed for all the obvious reasons that companies run by gamblers
usually fail.
Then, in March 2009, Nigel Eccles, a wiry, youthful entrepreneur from
Northern Ireland and an alumnus of the management consulting firm
McKinsey, started FanDuel. He had never played fantasy sports before. In
Britain, Eccles, who holds an advanced degree in statistics, had started a
company called Hubdub that hosted prediction markets on news stories.
Readers who had just finished an article on, say, Hillary Clintons chances in
the New Hampshire primary could then put a wager on it using virtual
currency. According to Eccles, Hubdub failed because it didnt have a
business model.
But in the burgeoning D.F.S. scene, Eccles saw a completely legal
opportunity to make a huge amount of money. Initially, his investors werent
so sure. They believed D.F.S. was a niche product that would appeal only to
a hard-core audience. But at FanDuels first live final in December 2010,
where all the qualifying players met up in Las Vegas, Eccles realized that
the investors were wrong. The players who had qualified werent all oddball
quants and gamblers. They were all mainstream sports fans, Eccles said.
That was the point where I was like, O.K., this is not niche. If we can
convert a couple hundred, even a few thousand players, then we can
probably convert millions of players. Theres no difference between these
players and the tens of millions of fantasy sports fans out there.
Eccles often talks about how FanDuel cultivates a sense of community
among fans. Theres some truth to what he says. D.F.S. can be a way to
connect with people who live far away (I certainly used it that way), and,
like Words with Friends or any card game, it can be a fun, low-investment
excuse to talk smack with your friends. But on the whole, Fargis, in his
introductory blog post, had it spot on: D.F.S. is the bastard child of online
poker, with its dizzying prize pools, fast action and, perhaps most important,
the dream of an easy living. The only difference is that poker, despite its
seedy glamour, is associated with casinos and shady underground games.
Fantasy sports, by contrast, evokes visions of dads sitting in basements with
their college friends, yelling out the names of their favorite athletes.

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As the horde of D.F.S. start-ups clawed their way out of the muck of online
poker, only the sites with the biggest prize pools could survive. A new
player choosing between a site promising a $500,000 first prize and one
promising $100,000 will naturally pick the bigger number. Until recently,
FanDuel offered the biggest payouts in the industry, including the first $1
million prize, in December 2013. DraftKings, which made its debut in 2012,
tried to outdo FanDuel, ramping up its prizes.
Heres how it works: Lets say you run D.F.S. Site A, and D.F.S Site B has
just announced a weekly megacontest in which first place will take home $1
million. Now you have to find a way to host a comparable contest, or all
your customers will flee to Site B to chase that seven-figure jackpot. The
problem is that you have only 25,000 users, and the most you can charge
them to enter is $20 per game (anything higher is prohibitively expensive).
And youll need $2 million or even $3 million in a prize pool if first prize is
valued at $1 million (remember, you still have to pay second place, third
place and beyond). So you need to somehow quadruple the number of
entries. But how? Youre already paying high cost-per-acquisition fees to
sites like RotoGrinders, which charge, according to Harber, anywhere
between $100 and $200 per person they refer to your site, and youve
already put your logo on every bus, trash can and ESPN screaming-heads
show out there. Youve also kicked in some of your own money (known as
overlay) to spice up the pot.
The solution is simple: You let each contestant enter hundreds of times. But
even given this freedom, a majority of people will enter only a few more
times, which will help but probably wont get you all you need. If, however,
you can attract a few high rollers who are willing to book several hundred or
even several thousand entries apiece, the path to the $1 million first prize
becomes a lot more manageable. And as long as you can make sure those
players keep pouring in their thousands of entries, you can keep posting the
$1 million first prize all over your ads. (Each company has instituted caps on
the number of entries per player, but more enterprising high rollers have
found ways around this.)
Now, however, you have an even bigger problem: You need the high roller
more than he needs you. You need his entry fees to gas up your prize pools,
and you also need the roughly 10 percent service fee he pays for the
hundreds of thousands of dollars he bets on the site. In big casinos, high
rollers have been known to negotiate rules with the house. If, for example, a

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whale from China wants to play a variant of blackjack in which the dealer
has to hit on soft 17, the casino, especially if it is struggling, will sometimes
adjust to please the whale.
D.F.S. high rollers similarly come with demands, and because theres no
powerful regulatory body involved, DraftKings and FanDuel have been
mostly free to set the parameters of play, which, as it turns out, is near
anarchy, especially for the D.F.S. elite. High rollers want to be able to use
third-party computer scripts that will allow them to enter thousands of
lineups at once, something that your average player cannot do. High rollers
can gain access into D.F.S.s inner circle, in which they get to be on firstname, texting basis with executives and employees at DraftKings and
FanDuel. They can operate under the cover of plausible deniability if
other players complain that the high roller has been using tools that destroy
competitive balance, he might expect the sites to stick up for him.
The difference between the D.F.S. high roller and the blackjack whale, of
course, is that the whale is trying to take millions from a multinational
casino corporation and not from the honeymooners from Fresno who are
betting away at the $5 tables.
Bumhunting is a word that comes from the poker world. It means
seeking out an inexperienced player and mercilessly exploiting him for all
hes worth. Bumhunters are pariahs because they turn what can be a
cerebral, competitive game into its most cynical iteration, and, in the
process, discourage that new player from ever coming back. But poker has
built-in safeguards against rampant bumhunting new players tend to play
at lower limits, which make it harder for bumhunters to take in huge profits.
The bumhunters dream is to play thousands of games of poker a day against
a never-ending line of fresh, inexperienced newbies. He falls short of that
lofty goal because he has to actually bet, raise or fold his hands he can play
multiple tables at once, but he cannot fully automate his bumhunting.
In the game lobbies of DraftKings and FanDuel, however, sharks are free to
flood the marketplace with thousands of entries every day, luring
inexperienced, bad players into games in which they are at a sizable
disadvantage. The imbalanced winnings in D.F.S. have been an open secret
since this past September, when Bloomberg Businessweek published an
expos on the habits of high-volume players. The numbers are damning.
According to DraftKings data obtained by the New York State attorney

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generals office, between 2013 and 2014, 89.3 percent of players had a
negative return on investment. A recent McKinsey study showed that in the
first half of the 2015 Major League Baseball season, 91 percent of the prize
money was won by a mere 1.3 percent of the players.
In their escalating legal battles, DraftKings and FanDuel have used these
statistics to bolster their argument that D.F.S. is a game of skill, not of
chance: How could a contest in which the same people win nearly all the
time not be the ultimate test of skill? DraftKings and FanDuel have each
tried to prove that the act of projecting player performance and selecting a
lineup takes more thought and expertise than, say, playing a poker hand. In
paperwork filed on Dec. 24 in Illinois, the latest state to question the legality
of D.F.S. lawyers wrote that D.F.S. is like chess, Scrabble or crosswordpuzzle tournaments in that they do not test athletic skill, but instead mental
prowess. They went on to argue that the success of a contest is not a
matter of luck any more than was the success of the architects of the 1985
Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears.
While its true that some of the skill required to win in DraftKings and
FanDuel lies in statistical modeling, general sports knowledge and due
diligence, its also true that its nearly impossible to make a net positive
return on investment without bumhunting. You have to win roughly 53
percent of your bets to beat the rake, another poker term for the roughly 10
percent service fee DraftKings and FanDuel take out of each wager. The
most efficient way to hit that number is to play as many bad opponents as
possible.
For the 17 weeks I played D.F.S., whether at a $5 entry fee or for $100, I
routinely was matched up against top players. But unless I examined win
rates and researched the strengths and weaknesses of my opponents, I would
never have known that I was being repeatedly bumhunted by high-volume
players.
On Dec. 16, for example, I entered three $20 N.B.A. head-to-head contests
on DraftKings. My opponents were gunz4hire, Dinkpiece and
Nadia4Fashion. Gunz4hire was then ranked 47th on the Rotogrinders
players ranking and is generally considered one of the better players in the
world. Dinkpiece, who was 20th on that same list, is the alias for Drew
Dinkmeyer, a former stock trader whose winnings in D.F.S. have been so
well publicized that he has his own Wall Street Journal stipple drawing.

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On Christmas, the biggest day in the N.B.A.s regular season, I entered 17

head-to-head contests on DraftKings for prices between $1 and $20. Once
again, I was matched up against Dinkpiece and gunz4hire, along with a
handful of other professionals.
The next day, I entered three more $20 N.B.A. contests. I was able to avoid
Dinkpiece and gunz4hire, but found myself in a $20 head-to-head against
Birdwings, the 2nd-ranked player in the Rotogrinders rankings.
In three days, I played three of the best D.F.S. players in the world.
In December, I traveled to the FanDuel World Fantasy Football
Championships in San Diego. The festivities, which would end with one
player winning a staggering $3 million first prize, included an obstacle
course in which Joe Montana and Dan Marino threw footballs at the
qualifiers, as well as an extremely drunken couple in Patriots jerseys (those
of Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, of course) who kept screaming, Were
[expletive] rich! While the championships raged on, I asked Eccles about
the gross imbalance of winners detailed in the McKinsey report. He said that
baseball was not an accurate marker for how the site worked. The majority
of D.F.S. novices only come to play football, and their sheer numbers and
the natural variance in fantasy football distributes the money more equally.
He admitted the Sunday Million, FanDuels most-hyped N.F.L. tournament,
was extremely difficult for the average player to win. He suggested, instead,
that new players enroll in beginner leagues, which are open exclusively to
players who have entered only a few contests, and in 50/50s, where several,
even thousands of players pool their money together and reward the money
to the players who finish in the top half, and head-to-head competitions, in
which two players play one another, winner-take-all.
On Sunday, Dec. 27, I took Eccless advice and entered myself into 20
separate N.F.L. head-to-head contests with buy-ins ranging from $2 to $20.
This time, I drew Mtom347, a high-volume player ranked 42 on the
Rotogrinders leader board; David Potts, winner of the 2014 FanDuel Daily
Fantasy Baseball Championship; and TwoSHAE, one of the 25 top ranked
daily fantasy football players in the world.
On Dec. 28, I had a phone conversation with Justine Sacco, FanDuels
director of communications. She told me that I must have misunderstood
Eccles and that he was probably referring only to 50-50 match-ups, in which

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a large group of people enter a pool and roughly the top half wins the bottom
halfs money, and not head to heads, which were admittedly tough to beat.
The next day, I entered an N.B.A. 50-50, once again for $20.
There were 3,638 total entries in the 50-50 that day. Roughly two-thirds of
these came from players who entered multiple lineups. Here is a small
selection of those players and the number of lineups they entered:
Maxdalury, generally considered the top player in the world: 100 lineups.
Birdwings, the No. 2-rated player on the RotoGrinders rankings: 22 lineups.
rayofhope, the screen name for Cory Albertson, a former poker pro, widely
regarded as one of the best: 40 lineups.
Kobe4MVP, the screen name for Eytan Jankowitz, also one of the best
players in the world: 100 lineups.
Youdacao, the No. 6 player on the RotoGrinders rankings: 100 lineups.
Notorious, a regular contributor to the Rotogrinders site and the No. 24
player on their rankings: 40 lineups.
Dinkpiece, my nemesis from the last two times: five lineups
If we are going to talk about games of skill and the legal protection they
deserve, we should acknowledge that much of the skill in D.F.S. lies in
bumhunting. Its why maxdalury and Birdwings are slumming it in a $20
50-50 competition with me. Its how the top players ensure their
profitability. In D.F.S., as in poker, the easiest way to win money is to turn a
sucker into an A.T.M.
Gabe Harber is an energetic, generously bearded basketball enthusiast from
Columbus, Ohio. He started writing fantasy-sports advice columns in 2010,
shortly after the creation of FanDuel. His professional life grew alongside
the D.F.S. industry, which, as of today, has dozens of well-trafficked
websites that produce a nonstop stream of content. Harber, like so many
other D.F.S. experts, ultimately found himself at Rotogrinders the ESPN
of D.F.S. where he became one of the sites staples, hosting a regular
podcast and a daily livestream show. In the small and tightly knit D.F.S.
community, nearly every big-name player has a content site, which

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provides D.F.S. advice and analytics, or contributes to sites like

Rotogrinders. Those sites generally have cost-per-acquisition agreements
with DraftKings and FanDuel. Power players, broadcasters, content
providers and DraftKings and FanDuel employees all overlap and for the
last five years, Harber has been close to the center of it all.
Over the course of extensive phone conversations and correspondence this
fall and winter, Harber explained that he had begun to turn against
DraftKings and FanDuel when the companies were unresponsive to
complaints from the D.F.S. community about the prevalence of scripting.
Last March, when maxdalury, a player named Saahil Sud, used a script that
enabled him to adjust most of his 400 lineups in less than an hour, the
community took notice. Sud was reacting to the breaking news that
Channing Frye, usually a reserve forward for the Orlando Magic, would be
starting in place of the injured Nikola Vucevic. Sud won first, third, fourth
and seventh place in a big DraftKings competition that night and took home
hundreds of thousands of dollars. The speed with which he made the
adjustments caused many within the D.F.S. community to protest. How
could they be reasonably expected to compete if one of the players was
using a tool that allowed him to both blanket the field with entries and avoid
the work and hassle of manually adjusting his lineups to reflect late-breaking
news? Whats worse, these scripts were not supposed to be used under
DraftKings terms of service.
In July, after months of review, instead of banning scripting, or at least
forcefully regulating it, as the D.F.S. community would have liked, both
DraftKings and FanDuel announced that they would change their policies to
permit some scripting. The founder of DraftKings, Matt Kalish, who
declined to comment for this article, told ESPNs David Purdum in July that
the decision had been made to increase and improve the experience for a
couple of users, who I think were experiencing a very poor usability of the
site. In other words, DraftKings had decided to accommodate players who
wanted to modify the site to their own specifications. FanDuel, for its part,
clarified its position on the practice and asked players to send in their scripts
for approval. This, by definition, is a game played by different rules.
Harber explained how his frustration with DraftKings and FanDuel reached
a breaking point. People may wonder why Im coming forward now, and
its a good question, Harber wrote in one of two emailed statements to me.
My focus as a broadcaster in this industry for the last four years has been

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primarily as an ambassador to the community. The daily fantasy community

has had very real concerns about competitive imbalances at FanDuel and
DraftKings for quite some time now. I have publicly submitted simple
questions in writing to both companies on numerous occasions, and both
companies have completely ignored the communitys concerns about the use
of automated processes, sniping, multiaccounting and their own terms of
service.
Your average Joe sees a commercial for daily fantasy sports, signs up,
plays and loses, Harber wrote. He has no idea his games are being sniped
by professional power users with access to automated processes and
optimization software. He has no idea that the large-field tournament hes
playing in features power users with hundreds of unique lineups, all
optimized using third-party software. In truth, D.F.S. is more like the stock
market, with athletes instead of commodities. No new player attempting to
trade stocks has any shot at success without a sizable amount of training.
Harber continued: I believe the major sites are fully aware of these
competitive issues, yet they continue to do nothing about them because of
the high amount of rake the power users are bringing in for them. As long as
they can spend advertising money to bring fresh meat to the table, the power
users will eat up the new players extremely fast by using their competitive
advantages. No one is saying that better players should not win money off
worse players, but it should not be at this rate and it should not be with
misleading advertisements that prey on consumer confidence. Everyone does
not have an equal chance, and everyone is not playing on the same field.
The major daily fantasy sites do not want attention drawn to these
competitive issues because they are also afraid that doing so will increase
the likelihood of negative legal consequences for them. Their rationale is
that if the various attorneys general and prosecutors were to become
knowledgeable about these competitive issues, they would be much more
likely to outright ban daily fantasy.
DraftKings and FanDuel have instituted rules to address some of these
problems each site has sections dedicated to new players, and FanDuel, at
least, says that all scripts must be approved by the company. (DraftKings
terms of use permits limited use of scripts and prompts users to email
them for details.) But those measures only protect players from the worst
excesses of bumhunting behavior.

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I asked Justine Sacco why FanDuel allowed scripting at all. She told me:
You want to allow people on the site to make their experience meaningfully
better. So the idea that big players cant bring in features to improve their
time, honestly it feels a bit Orwellian.
Sacco emphasized that any script that was deemed anticompetitive would
immediately be banned, and that the company had caught and banned
players for using scripts in the past, but she declined to release any specific
names. She also estimated that FanDuel had approved approximately 30
scripts over all and that some of these were benign, voluntary devices used
by sites like Rotogrinders to track the wins of their players. When asked if
part of FanDuels decision to allow scripts was based on a desire to keep
players from taking more of their business to DraftKings, Sacco said, You
do have to take that into account if someone is playing hundreds of
thousands of dollars and comes and says, I have some ideas that would help
me keep doing what Im doing, only a bad business would not take that into
consideration.
Sacco also said that one reason FanDuel allowed some scripting was that the
company could not completely stop it. This confirms the suspicions of many
in the D.F.S. community who believe that DraftKings and FanDuel do not
regulate scripts because they have become so sophisticated that the
companies simply dont know how to detect or disable all of them.
(DraftKings, when asked for comment, said these assumptions were
inaccurate.) When I asked Justin Park, maxdalurys business partner at
RotoQL, a site that provides third-party tools, including a scripting program
that plugs straight into the DraftKings interface, if he had asked DraftKings
for permission to alter their site, he said he didnt know. He later
remembered an email exchange with DraftKings. DraftKings could not
confirm this.
This amounts to gaming chaos nobody really knows what the next guy
might be doing, and everyone who should be making decisions that ensure
fairness is afraid to punish power players for their indiscretions. There is no
gambling hole in America, whether Atlantic City or Las Vegas or a riverboat
in the Mississippi, that could put out a game like DraftKings or FanDuel
without running straight into the state gaming commission.
D.F.S., the game itself, is not inherently crooked. Most of the benefits
praised by its enthusiasts the ease of play, the camaraderie among fans,

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the challenge of solving what amounts to a math puzzle are real. It does
take skill to parse game film, diligently follow the news and interpret the
thousands of bits of sports information that are generated each night. If a
problem gambler at the poker rooms I frequent in New York City were to
hire a programmer and flood the D.F.S. market with his lineups, he would
almost certainly hemorrhage money.
Knowledge about sports will always be the main sorting mechanism for the
types of dudes (FanDuel reports that 95 percent of its contestants are male)
who play games like D.F.S., and theres certainly nothing wrong
especially morally wrong with putting some money on it, but there is a
point where rampant bumhunting turns a gambling economy into a predatory
market.
There is, in theory, a version of D.F.S. that could work. All thats required is
a transparent marketplace in which a player can reasonably expect to enter a
head-to-head or 50-50 or even one of the big-money tournaments without
going up against hundreds of lineups generated by professional gamblers
who have been lying in wait for him.
During my many conversations with Harber, we would often find ourselves
talking about my D.F.S. match-ups for the night. Both of us love the N.B.A.
above all things, and we would invariably start talking about DeMarcus
Cousins and his sad six years in the N.B.A., or Gerald Greens shot volume,
or whether we could trust Tony Parker to put up fantasy points anymore.
These, I believe, are the sorts of moments the best of the D.F.S. community
wants to promote fantasy sports is essentially a way to turn the usual
sports arguments into a game.
At the start of the N.B.A. season, a couple of friends and I started a friendly
league on DraftKings. Every night, we draft teams, watch the points
accumulate and make fun of one another for our picks. On the first of each
month, we pay one another what we owe. One of these friends creates
N.B.A. player performance models. They help him escape the cynical
demands of his job as a corporate lawyer. To date, I am down $350 to him.
Yes, yes, yes, Harber said when I told him about this league. Thats how
its supposed to be.

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