A look behind-the-scenes at the alleged 2004 search by the Church of Scientology for the next Mrs. Tom Cruise:
“Nazanin Boniadi, 25, who had not yet become the human-rights activist for Amnesty International and the actor she is today, was summoned in October 2004 to meet an important church official at the Celebrity Centre International, in Hollywood. She arrived to find the high-ranking Greg Wilhere, who, according to a knowledgeable source, told her she had been selected for a very hush-hush mission that would entail meeting dignitaries around the world. He added that if she succeeded she would be helping to make the world a better place. Thus began a month-long preparation process that entailed her getting audited every day and telling Wilhere her innermost secrets, including every detail of her sex life. Nobody who had been in a threesome, for example, would be considered—a rule that apparently eliminated one candidate. Since Boniadi was a gung-ho Scientologist who had already attained a level of O.T. V—beyond the Wall of Fire—she embraced the church’s motto ‘Think for Yourself’ and threw herself into every task she was assigned. Wilhere, meanwhile, had frequent whispered phone conversations with the person he called ‘the project director,’ says the source. Early on, he sent Boniadi to a photo shoot, which revealed that she wore braces and that her naturally black hair had red highlights. She was told that she had to lose the braces and make her hair one color to emphasize her ethnicity. It didn’t matter that she still had a good six months to wear the braces; they had to go. So did her boyfriend.”
In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone:
They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—
‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’
Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then disappears inside the building.
[Fiction] A widow settles into her new life, which includes bird-watching in Central Park:
“After her husband died, Marjorie took up hobbies, lots of them, just to see what stuck. She went on a cruise for widows and widowers, which was awful for everyone except the people who hadn’t really loved their spouses to begin with. She took up knitting, which made her fingers hurt, and modern dance for seniors, which made the rest of her body hurt, too. Most of all, Marjorie enjoyed birding, which didn’t seem like a hobby at all, but like agreeing to be more observant. She’d always been good at paying attention.”
[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past:
At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.
Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.
[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past:
“At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.
“Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.”
A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”:
Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.
Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west – and the ‘third world’ which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.
A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”:
“Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.
“Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west – and the ‘third world’ which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.
From A.N. Devers’ ‘Top Bathtub Longreads of 2011’: Rob Lowe on his audition for The Outsiders:
I start talking to the kid from back East. He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before. His name is Tom Cruise.
It will be survival of the fittest for all of us. We will need to intimidate, dominate, and crush our competitors for these roles of a lifetime. But there’s no reason we can’t try to stay friends while we do it.
“What part are you reading for?” I ask Tom.
“Christ, up until today, it was Sodapop, but Francis has everyone switching parts, and bringing us all in and out while everyone watches everyone else! I just got done reading Darrel.”
This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear about it because the cruise lines keep it quiet. Ronson goes deep into the bizarre cruise culture as he tries to figure out what happened to Rebecca Coriam, who vanished from the Disney Wonder last March.
This story accomplished what seemed almost impossible, at least from an editor’s perspective: it made a compelling narrative out of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan. Even though OWS was being covered to death, this story—along with Bloomberg Businessweek’s own fine contribution, Drake Bennett’s profile of David Graeber—found a new angle on it and made it fresh and compelling.
His piece about Iceland (“Wall Street on the Tundra”) is my favorite one he’s done about the global financial crisis, but Michael Lewis’s breakdown of the fiscal disaster that is California was his best in 2011. It really makes you think about the scary place we might be headed as a country, and the scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger is priceless.
This is a parody, and it isn’t terribly long, so I’m not sure that it qualifies. But it is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates much of what is wrong with the publishing business.
When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from the past year, I found that many of them fell into certain categories. And so, here they are. (There are more than five stories, just because.)
TRUE CRIME
One of the best true crime pieces of the past year was that David Grann lawyer-in-Guatemala story, but everyone has already said that, so I am going to go with Robert Kolker’s “A Serial Killer in Common,” which is the devastating, horrifying story about the Long Island serial killer and the families of the women who were killed. Also, it’s not exactly true crime in the traditional sense of the term, but Kathy Dobie’s GQ story, “The Girl from Trails End,” about the 11-year-old girl in Texas who was gang-raped, repeatedly, was another really excellent crime-related story. Also, I would like someone to write a longer story about Aaron Bassler, the guy who killed two people in California and then went on the run in Mendocino County for a month before he was killed by police.
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
I didn’t make a “trend piece” category because, ugh, but two stories from the past year that I thought really captured Our Moment were Molly Lambert’s “In Which We Teach You How to Be a Woman in a Boys’ Club” and Caroline Bankoff’s “On GChat”. Molly’s piece was so, so smart, and very true, and had lots of good advice, including to only apologize if you truly fucked up, and then only apologize once. Also, this part: “The only men who are turned off by ambition and success are men that are insecure about their own talents and success or lack thereof. You don’t really want to know those guys anyway, because they suck and they will constantly attempt to undermine you, and even if you are secure enough in yourself not to care it’s still really fucking annoying.” And technically, I first encountered Caroline’s piece at a reading in 2010, but since it wasn’t published for public consumption until 2011 (on Thought Catalog) I am counting it. It is a wonderful encapsulation of the ways technology has changed the ways that we interact with each other.
ADVICE
The Ask a Dude column in the Hairpin is the best advice column ever to exist in the world, if you are a woman in your 20s or 30s who is trying to navigate THIS THING CALLED LIFE, which, yes! It was really hard to pick a favorite, because they are all cocktails of good, which is how I once heard an editor at the magazine I work for describe a story. But I think perhaps “Questionably Tattooed Manchildren and Uses for Old Jars” is one of the Dude’s best, because it offers advice like this to a woman who is worried she is a drunken slut: “If all was right, there’d be a country & western singer named Tammy with a hit named ‘A Whiskey Dick or Two,’ but here we are, in a world where a woman calls herself a slut for sleeping with a number of partners that she’s not ashamed of and then apologizes for it to feminists. I don’t think I even understand where that puts us. Somewhere not good, I believe.”
THE CELEBRITY PROFILE
A bunch of people who’ve submitted these Longreads things have said that they deliberately didn’t put any of their friends on their lists, but I am going to break that non-rule because fuck it, my friends are good writers! Take, for example, this profile of Channing Tatum—“The Full Tatum”—that Jessica Pressler wrote for GQ. It is a really good celebrity profile. It is even a narrative, which most celebrity profiles are not, they are just, like, “It is 87 degrees in Los Angeles and Kim Kardashian is lying on a chaise longue by the pool at the Chateau Marmont, her white string bikini showing off her perfectly tanned, perfectly toned, perfectly I-survived-Kris-Humphries body, and she is very deliberately not eating the house salad that she so carefully ordered—’No olives, two tablespoons of walnuts and the dressing on the side’—20 minutes before,” and you’re like, TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW. (That lede could also work with Denise Richards/Charlie Sheen, or Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher, or Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise in 3 years. It’s all yours!) My other favorite celebrity profile from the past year was Lizzie Widdicombe’s “You Belong With Me,” a profile of Taylor Swift. She had so many great little details in there, including that Taylor’s father Scott wears tasseled loafers.
THE PERSONAL ESSAY
Pressler snaked me by choosing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Peyton’s Place,” which is this amazing piece about living in the house where they filmed One Tree Hill, so I am going to choose this weird, wonderful three-part thing that Clancy Martin wrote for the Paris Review about trying to get to New York to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock exhibit. It contains this paragraph:
“It’s starting to rain, I’m ten miles from home and I already recognize how eccentric, how unstable, how woebegone, how doomed this plan is; the roar of the highway is an echo of my sure failure, and I’m thinking about the trucker who’s too wise to take the little baby in Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when I hear, incredibly, like a promise from God—there will be many of these in the next twenty-four hours, but I don’t know it yet—the elongated throaty syllables of Lou Reed coming from an amiable-looking white truck with wide mirrors coming off its nose and bumpers that give it a kind of Disney Cars effect. In the movie, the trucks are always the good guys. And, better still, a middle-aged black man with a potbelly is pumping diesel into it, listening to one of the most white-boy songs of all time.”
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