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@ -1558,9 +1428,6 @@ function popperGenerator(generatorOptions) {
California sheriff’s deputies search the back of the Brink’s truck where millions in jewelry were stolen last year. Photo: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
Jean Malki was carefully wrapping up a necklace containing more than 25 carats of fancy yellow diamonds, a rare Australian-mined Lightning Ridge black opal, and a deep-magenta Burmese ruby after a long day of sales at the International Gem & Jewelry Show when a bewildering announcement came over the loudspeaker.
Strange and suspicious individuals have been seen hanging around the expo, the show organizer warned, urging people to leave with extreme caution.
Up until then, July 10, 2022, had been a normal day for Malki, a veteran jeweler for 40 years who sold most of his estate collection at shows like this one in San Mateo, California, just south of San Francisco. Malki, who got his first taste of the industry by moving diamonds for Zales, is a traveling salesman who continually packs and unpacks items that are sometimes worth millions apiece. These shows feature dozens of jewelers from all over the country selling everything from decorative beads to rare Rolexes.
Instead of moving the merchandise himself in his car, Malki had opted for what he thought was the safest possible alternative: a Brink’s armored truck. He handed his entire collection to a Brink’s guard who packed the items into the truck and told Malki he would receive them the following day for another show five hours south in Pasadena.
Soon, Malki learned he had made the wrong decision.
Just after 2 a.m. the next day, at an unremarkable truck stop right at the Los Angeles County line, the guard driving the Brink’s truck went inside to grab a bite. His co-pilot was asleep in a berth in the cab. When the driver returned 27 minutes later, dozens of bags of precious gems and watches sent by Malki and 14 other dealers estimated to be worth up to $100 million were gone.
The heist, by some estimates, is the largest jewelry theft by value in modern U.S. history. In the ten months since, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI have announced no suspects. Even if the thieves are found, it might not help most of the jewelers whose livelihoods were effectively wiped out; they are locked in a bitter legal fight with Brink’s that has prevented them from receiving any insurance money. They say they feel robbed twice: first by the thieves, then by Brink’s refusal to pay them for what they believe is the company’s own negligence.
Founded in the 19th century, Brink’s has been transporting valuables, mostly cash, between banks for so long that its name is synonymous with high security. Its trucks, a fleet of rolling vaults, have long tempted thieves, from the [1981 heist that killed two police officers and a Brink’s guard](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/cheri-laverne-dalton-1981-brinks-robbery-suspect-wanted/) in New York to a string of [armed robberies last month in Chicago](https://abc7chicago.com/armored-truck-robbery-calumet-city-il-brinks/13127609/). In the jewelry trade, Brink’s has also become something of a monopoly, according to jewelers. It’s often the only option for shipping valuables securely at shows like the San Mateo expo. (In 2018, the company bought a major competitor, Dunbar, for [$520 million](https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-county/bs-bz-brinks-buys-dunbar-20180814-story.html).) It is so dominant that jewelers and showrunners I spoke with said they fear criticizing Brink’s will lead the company to ban them as customers, which could end their businesses.
The vehicle transporting millions of dollars in jewelry from San Mateo was not one of the company’s famous armored cars but a semitruck. While the cab was armored, according to a review of sheriff’s deputies’ body-camera footage, the trailer actually carrying the valuables was not. There were no surveillance cameras, and an incident report noted the jewelry was secured inside the trailer by a single locking device in the rear. The thieves simply cut the lock, as evidenced by the slivers of metal left behind, and appeared to have taken it with them.
That’s not the level of security the jewelers thought they had signed up for.
The truck’s lock was taken after it was cut. Photo: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
“Brink’s was supposed to use an armored truck. They didn’t use an armored truck; they used a trailer to transport our jewelry,” said Ming Cheng, a jeweler who worked the show with his wife. He lost his entire stock in the theft, mostly hundreds of pieces of pearl jewelry. “And only two armed guards — one was sleeping, and one went to get some food, and they didn’t keep an eye on the truck. How could this happen?”
The Brink’s guards seemed just as shocked.
That night, James Beaty had been sleeping in a small compartment behind the seats, taking what Brink’s says was part of the federally required ten hours off per day that limit how much time a driver can be awake on the road. Tandy Motley had been behind the wheel for hours when he pulled into the Flying J truck stop in Lebec. When he came out after his meal, he noticed the red seal wrapping the back of the truck had been torn and was lying on the ground. He called 911.
The guards determined that 24 of the 73 bags Brink’s had initially said were onboard were missing, according to the body-camera footage, though Brink’s would later put the figure at 22.
“Holy shit,” Beaty said after counting. “I’ve been here eight years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
They began piecing the night together, telling the two officers who arrived that they thought they had been followed from the show in San Mateo.
“I just had a weird feeling,” said Motley between puffs on his vape, about a figure at the show. “He was staring me right in the eye. And I looked — it’s like why is this guy dogging me? He had a beard, driving a silver SUV. And then just sitting there for like two minutes. And then I was — after that, I was kind of watching to see if anyone was following me … They had to have come in here with a fucking trailer.”
The guards and deputies agreed it appeared to be a calculated theft for another reason: The stolen items were not the most convenient to grab, as the bags from the immediate opening of the back door would have been were the thieves in a hurry to take what they could. The missing bags were stowed further back and had been seemingly handpicked even though the entire load was wrapped in identical, bright-orange heavy plastic bags that concealed what was inside.
“Well, what doesn’t make sense to me is you would think the back half of the trailer would be empty rather than leapfrogging the stuff,” said one deputy.
“As much as they took in a little amount of time — they knew what they was getting,” said Beaty.
Consequently, the guards suggested the thief could have been one of the jewelers. “It almost makes me wonder if the jeweler robbed himself, you know? Like he knew exactly what they had or something, right, for insurance,” said Motley.
Later, Motley said he was worried the suspicion might turn on him. “You know what worries me the most is they always want to blame the employee first,” he confided to one of the deputies.
Each of the 73 bags was labeled with a distinctive colored tag, but it’s in dispute whether those tags denoted value, destination, or ownership. After the deputies arrived, Beaty called the Brink’s guard who had packed up the shipments at the show, whose name was given as Nelson. Based on what Beaty claimed was their conversation, he told deputies the tags indicated value.
“He thinks that all the LAX stuff is what got stolen because it’s the highest value,” Beaty said of Nelson, referring to bags that were headed to Los Angeles International Airport instead of the Pasadena show.
“But that’s right there,” Motley said, confused. “It says LAX on it.”
“I’m just telling you what he said,” Beaty replied, and the contradiction wasn’t pursued any further.
It later was determined that the jewelry stolen was indeed among some of the most expensive pieces being shipped, according to Gerald L. Kroll, the lawyer representing the victims against Brink’s. Taken together, the ease of the theft and the weak security have left some of them believing it was an inside job.
“Reading the police report that we had, it’s just kind of hard to believe it’s just a coincidence that some people decided to rob a Brink’s truck. And they knew when they were going to leave. They knew where they’re going to stop. They knew how long they’re going to stop,” said Malki.
Sergeant Michael Mileski confirmed that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Major Crimes Bureau and the FBI were looking into that angle. He said authorities have so far served several warrants at various residences and businesses for records and to search property but have no updates to announce. The lack of answers has allowed rumors to swirl about where the gemstones and watches went, including that some of the pieces ended up in Israel. Others believe the thieves are playing it smart by holding on to the jewelry and will likely do so for years until the spotlight fades.
Bags were stolen from deep inside the truck, suggesting the thieves knew what they were looking for. Photo: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
Some of the jewelers learned their collections had been stolen not through Brink’s but through word of mouth. Cheng found out something was wrong when his items didn’t arrive at the Pasadena show and he went to the Brink’s office in downtown L.A. for answers. Even then, he couldn’t get any information. Not until two days after the heist did Brink’s send letters to each jeweler alerting them of a “loss incident.” The company said it couldn’t comment on an active investigation but promised that it “strives to implement the best security practices to protect our customers’ assets.”
Cheng said his takeaway from Brink’s handling of the situation was “they’re hiding something, that’s for sure.”
Brink’s eventually returned with an offer: They would pay the jewelers back the amount they had bought in insurance for the theft but no more. The total the jewelers had purchased from Brink’s, in addition to their own insurance they had elsewhere, was just under $10 million. The majority of the jewelers, who argue that their collections totalled a true value nearly ten times that, scoffed. So two months later, Brink’s sued them in a New York federal court, in part accusing the jewelers of breach of contract and of fraud because they had allegedly undervalued their items. “Brink’s believes that each Defendant seeks to recover more from Brink’s than is permitted under the Contract,” the company wrote in its suit. (Brink’s did not respond to requests for comment.)
The lawyer defending the jewelers sees it differently. “We feel confident that we have enough evidence to prove the purported contract is unconscionable. The clients were told to write down how much insurance they wanted,” Kroll said, not the value of their goods. “The example would be like fire insurance on your home. Who insures 100 percent of their house? Your house might be worth many millions of dollars, but you get to decide how much insurance you want for an event of a fire.”
“Our contracts are clear, easy to read, and, except to Mr. Kroll, uncontroversial,” Brink’s shot back. “The contracts clearly ask our customers to state the actual value of their goods, and explain that we will reimburse losses promptly up to that declared value.
Two weeks later, 14 of the 15 victims countersued Brink’s in Los Angeles County Superior Court, seeking $200 million in total damages. (Since then, three have settled for an undisclosed sum.) They accuse the company of negligence for putting their valuables in a lightly protected truck, especially after being warned of heightened security risk at the expo. The show manager, Arnold Duke, said in an interview that he had alerted the Brink’s guards.
“We say in this case that Brink’s should have paid them the insurance value on day one,” said Kroll. “That’s what the people paid for, and that’s what they expect to see. I think Brink’s is trying to hold that money as a tactic to get these people to capitulate. Most of these people have lost everything. These are mom-and-pop businesses. This is not the lifestyle of the rich and famous.”
“Our customers trust us to cover them for any losses, however unlikely,” Brink’s said. “In turn, we trust our customers to declare the full and correct value of the goods they ask us to transport. According to the information the customers provided to us before they shipped their items, the total value of the missing items is less than $10 million. In this case, we held up our end and fulfilled our contract, promptly settling a claim by one of the affected customers and subsequently settling two more. The others have chosen to litigate, admitting under oath that they undervalued their goods, and even did so regularly. While we are deeply disappointed by this breach of our trust and the plain language of our contracts, the courts have responded favorably to our position, and we remain willing to compensate these customers for the declared value of their goods.”
The lawsuits have also revealed strange inconsistencies in the theft’s timeline. First, that the truck left San Mateo at midnight and arrived 300 miles away at the Flying J truck stop in just two hours — meaning the semi would have had to be going about 150 miles per hour. But in a deposition, the driving guard said they actually left much earlier, at 8:25 p.m. Second, Beaty said in a deposition that he went to sleep at 3:39 p.m. on the day the jewelry was loaded onto the truck and wasn’t woken up until after the heist at almost 3 a.m.
Brink’s in its lawsuit argues that Beaty followed standard company practices and was “in compliance” with federal regulations that allow drivers time to sleep and take breaks. But Kroll said that by the time the truck had pulled into the rest stop just after 2 a.m., Beaty’s ten hours of mandated sleep were up. When deposed by Kroll, Beaty acknowledged that he could have been woken up and outside on guard by then.
Since the lawsuits began, Brink’s has cut off all ties with the jewelers involved and won’t allow them to use their company for security. The jewelers aren’t sure if it’s a lifetime ban. “It’s like you’re killing somebody and then on the day of their funeral, you’ll be the first one to walk in,” said Malki, who is struggling to support three young children.
With no resolution in sight, Cheng is stuck paying rent for an empty showroom because, he said, his landlord won’t let him out of the lease. After immigrating to Los Angeles from Hong Kong, he got into the jewelry business at 21 and learned English from his customers. For the past 30 years, he has flown to a show almost every week, traveling what he estimates as 3 million miles in total. Earlier this month, he started a new job: working six days a week as a sous-chef at a Chinese restaurant.
“I don’t think anybody could prepare for this. What comes worse than death? I think besides death, this is something worse to happen to you,” Cheng said through tears. “I’m 66 years old now — the only thing I know is the jewelry business, I don’t speak very good English, and I wasn’t educated too much. I have to start everything again. If I am young, I can handle it, but it’s been so hard.”
Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted the future. It was a disturbing forecast, and everybody paid attention.
People saw his book *Future Shock* everywhere. I was just a freshman in high school, but even I bought a copy (the purple version). And clearly I wasn’t alone—Clark Drugstore in my hometown had them piled high in the front of the store.
The book sold at least six million copies and maybe a lot more (Toffler’s website claims 15 million). It was reviewed, translated, and discussed endlessly. *Future Shock* turned Toffler—previously a freelance writer with an English degree from NYU—into a tech guru applauded by a devoted global audience.
Toffler showed up on the couch next to Johnny Carson on *The Tonight Show*. Other talk show hosts (Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, etc.) invited him to their couches too. CBS featured Toffler alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller as trusted guides to the future. *Playboy* magazine gave him a thousand dollar award just for being so smart.
Toffler parlayed this pop culture stardom into a wide range of follow-up projects and businesses, from consulting to professorships. When he died in 2016, at age 87, obituaries praised Alvin Toffler as “the most influential futurist of the 20th century.”
But did he deserve this notoriety and praise?
*Future Shock* is a 500 page book, but the premise is simple: Things are changing too damn fast.
Toffler opens an early chapter by telling the story of Ricky Gallant, a youngster in Eastern Canada who died of old age at just eleven. He was only a kid, but already suffered from “senility, hardened arteries, baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin. In effect, Ricky was an old man when he died.”
Toffler didn’t actually say that this was going to happen to all of us. But I’m sure more than a few readers of *Future Shock* ran to the mirror, trying to assess the tech-driven damage in their own faces.
“The future invades our lives,” he claims on page one. Our bodies and minds can’t cope with this. Future shock is a “real sickness,” he insists. “It is the disease of change.”
As if to prove this, Toffler’s publisher released the paperback edition of *Future Shock* with six different covers—each one a different color. The concept was brilliant. Not only did *Future Shock* say that things were constantly changing, but every time you saw somebody reading it, *the book itself had changed*.
Of course, if you really believed *Future Shock* was a disease, why would you aggravate it with a stunt like this? But nobody asked questions like that. Maybe they were too busy looking in the mirror for “baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin.”
Toffler worried about all kinds of change, but *technological* change was the main focus of his musings. When the *New York Times r*eviewed his book, it announced in the opening sentence that “Technology is both hero and villain of *Future Shock*.”
During his brief stint at *Fortune* magazine, Toffler often wrote about tech, and warned about “information overload.” The implication was that human beings are a kind of data storage medium—and they’re running out of disk space.
It’s not clear that Toffler invented either of those terms—“future shock” or “information overload.” Back in 1963, the former phrase had shown up in a talk delivered to a group of educators by Charles Weingartner and Neil Postman. They defined “future shock” as the “social paralysis induced by rapid technological change.” Two years later, Toffler published an article in *Horizon* magazine entitled “The Future as a Way of Life,” which showcased some of the key points.
Here Toffler announced the arrival of this new affliction. Future shock was the inevitable result of a “second industrial revolution” sweeping the world. “But it was “bigger, deeper, and more important” than the previous industrial revolution. Here, too, he looks at technology as a threat.
Toffler points out that there were now 15,000 academic journals, publishing maybe a “million significant papers in them each year.” Who could keep up with all this progress? (Of course, that assumes that the contents of 15,000 academic journals represent *progress*—but that’s a different discussion.)
I find it curious that Toffler spoke so much about technological change, and so little about *sociological* change. When he published *Future Shock* in 1970, the US had just experienced a tumultuous decade, but the disruptions weren’t coming from machines. The real sources of shock were the people themselves, the masses were unleashed.
> ### Instead of *Future Shock*, Toffler should have written a book called *Future Numbness* or *Future Couch Potato*. That would have hit the mark with a bullseye.
The real forces of change in that era were the sexual revolution, liberation from censorship, the rise of alternative lifestyles, vocal protests, and the overturning of inherited values of all sorts. But Toffler looked for disruptive change elsewhere, and pointed at “air travel and space flight, television, the development of nuclear energy, the invention of the computer, the discovery of DNA with its possibilities for the control of evolution,” and other trends of that sort.
You might think that Toffler, writing in 1965, would focus on the assassination of the President or the Civil Rights movement. But instead he devotes more attention to attempts to detect radio signals from Jupiter.
But does the existence of space travel really put us in a state of shock? Is air travel a danger to our psyches and organisms?
And what about television? I have a friend who can’t fall asleep unless the TV is on in his bedroom. To my mind, that provides a much better metaphor for consumer technology. It doesn’t shock us—not at all.
It numbs us.
As I look back on *Future Shock* with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, I see this everywhere in his book. Things turned out the exact opposite of what Toffler anticipated. Instead of *Future Shock*, he should have written a book called *Future Numbness* or *Future Couch Potato*. That would have hit the mark with a bullseye.
People today aren’t put into shock by all their tech devices. They are numbed and hypnotized. They’re addicted and won’t put them down. These folks haven’t been *invaded* by the future. If these machines are the future, they can’t get enough of it.
It’s the past that people have lost. They don’t care about it. They don’t understand it. They don’t want to understand it.
We live in cities that embody thousands of years of human labor, ingenuity, and imagination. Perhaps this might be shocking and anxiety-provoking if people thought about it—and especially if they focused on *how fragile all this is*. History tells of other cultures that created amazing technologies and then collapsed. Thinking about that might actually cause some real shock.
But that’s not how the dominant mindset right now views city life or digital devices—or any other legacy of the past. The reality is that people don’t think about much of anything at all, because technology turns them into passive receptors.
Nobody is “invaded by the future.” The citizenry is entirely absorbed by the *present moment*—to the exclusion of everything else.
Just watch them on the street or subway with their devices, and see that empty look on their faces. Like zombies in those horror films, they might have had a real life once, long ago, but they’ve forgotten what it’s like.
> ### “It’s the past that people have lost. They don’t care about it. They don’t understand it. They don’t want to understand it.”
And what about information overload? That has to be true, no?
Ah, the reality on the street is much different. As I noted in my recent article on [“The State of the Culture, 2023”](https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2023) people sip that information with a *very narrow straw*.
Your data stream is like a morphine drip at the hospital. And with the same result—you want to make sure you’re always hooked to the machine that provides the drip.
TikTok and Instagram, for example, can be described in many ways. But “information overload” or “future shock”aren’t the words I’d use. Consumers have become very skilled at blocking out information—maybe too skilled. That’s what happens when your interactions with the real world are reduced to 10 or 20 second video snippets.
Nobody is overloaded with information not in the year 2023. Not even students—or especially not students.
If we turn away from technology for a moment, and look instead at culture, we absolutely do *not* find rapid change. We see the exact opposite.
Movie studios keep releasing the same stories with the same characters. The hottest Hollywood star at the Cannes festival this year was Harrison Ford, age 80. Last year it was comparative youngster Tom Cruise, age 60. Both showed up to pitch sequels in which they played the same character they originated four decades ago.
Musical genres don’t change much from year to year, or even from decade to decade. A recent survey found that the [most popular song has been the same for three years](https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-music-business-turns-into-groundhog).
Many of the biggest names in commercial music are the same ones who were popular when Toffler peddled his *Future Shock* concept back in the 1970s. For example, here’s what a search engine told me when I asked about the bestselling rock artists in the year 2023.
So even if tech devices are evolving rapidly—and I’m not entirely convinced of that—the culture is stagnating. It needs more change, not less.
Yet Toffler was correct about one thing. People are getting sick.
Rates of depression are up. Suicide rates are up. Self-harm and eating disorders and mental illness are rising everywhere. Drugs kill millions of individuals—and it’s not always illegal drugs. Addictions of all sorts plague society, and ‘recovery’ programs of all sorts are big business. And so is ‘anger management’—a vocation that didn’t even exist in Toffler’s day. People can’t control their anger, and lash out at the slightest things. Violence is at a high point; tolerance at a low point.
Toffler saw something of this sort coming—in fact, he probably underestimated it. If you look through the index to his book, you won’t find suicide, depression, addiction, or other such topics. But you will find numerous references to the “nervous system” or “pace of life” or “adaptation.”
He clearly envisioned an anxious world on the go. People would travel in space ships. We would be operating complicated machines like Charlie Chaplin in *Modern Times*. But that’s not the world we live in now.
People aren’t flying in spaceships. (Well, a few billionaires do that, but there are no tickets for us.) In fact, people are barely interested in getting a driver’s license nowadays. Hey, there’s so much entertainment just sitting at home with that tiny screen.
That’s what Toffler missed. The future came and it didn’t shock us with its complexity. They simplified everything so we can manage by swiping left or right, or just clicking on a button.
It’s “information *underload”* nowadays—and huge corporations work to deliver it. They ensure that our digital lives have no shocks or surprises. Their algorithms are designed to deliver today something almost identical to what they gave us yesterday. And tomorrow will be no different.
As a result, the future has fallen from view, replaced by a sense of *stasis*. And so has the past, which ought to be a resource but has become so weightless that it might as well not exist at all. All this is causing real sicknesses, and we don’t need to invent new names for them. They’ve been around a while, only now they’re much worse and afflicting more people.
In a situation like this, we ought to reverse Alvin Toffler’s advice. We need more change, not less. And it ought to be centered on the areas of greatest numbness and disconnectedness. I’m talking about the *culture itself*, not the technology.
This isn’t the place to spell out the necessary agenda—that’s a huge issue beyond our scope here. But I can tell you one thing. The kind of change we need isn’t going to happen on an app.
# Kid Cop: the wild story of Chicago’s most infamous police impersonator
When Vincent Richardson was 14 years old, he wore a police uniform into Chicago’s Third District Grand Crossing police station and reported for duty. It was January 24th, 2009, and he told officers he’d been assigned by another district to work a shift there. An intake officer issued Vincent a police radio and ticket book; then, the officer assigned Vincent a partner and a police cruiser.
Over the next five hours, they drove around the South Side of Chicago monitoring hot spots and responding to calls from dispatch. Vincent helped with traffic stops. He communicated with dispatchers using specific criminal codes about activities on the beat. He even assisted in an arrest helping to [place handcuffs](https://apnews.com/article/arrests-archive-chicago-b6d836f299014d8db4a153ff11b5993f) on someone suspected of violating a protective order.
He did this as an eighth grader. His uniform was a costume. And no one realized he was just a kid pretending to be a cop.
Vincent and his partner returned to Grand Crossing station later that evening. The captain on duty noticed the small, clean-shaven officer and asked Vincent to produce a badge. He couldn’t, of course. The captain searched him and discovered Vincent’s gun holster was empty; he’d crammed a newspaper into his body armor bag to make it look full. The captain placed Vincent under arrest and charged him as a juvenile with the misdemeanor offense of impersonating a police officer.
Or at least that was the official narrative at the time: while Vincent had pulled one over on the Windy City and its police department, it was just one embarrassing police shift, five hours long. And then it was over.
So began the legend of the Kid Cop. Every newspaper and TV station in the city covered the story. It became the focus of city council hearings. “If \[police\] can’t keep a watchful eye on their own station, how in the world are they going to protect the community?” one local resident [told the *Chicago Defender*](https://chicagodefender.com/weis-cpd-to-explain-to-city-how-child-cop-breach-occurred/). Jody Weis, then Chicago’s police commissioner, went on a meeting and media tour to try and assure the public that this was a very unusual situation that wouldn’t happen again.
From all indications, Weis’ tour worked. The story turned into a joke. National late-night comedians picked it up. The Chicago news cycle rolled on. Prosecutors gave Vincent probation, a lenient sentence. The Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs bureau produced a report on the incident, and 14 officers received disciplinary action. Police brass suspended his temporary partner and the captain for a few days without pay. No one lost their job.
Vincent’s mom, Veronica, may have meted out his harshest penalty: she took away his PlayStation and grounded him. He wasn’t even allowed to go outside and play basketball for a while.
“When you train to be a cop, they train you to stand big,” he said. “You stand bigger than you stand tall.”
But things never quite got back to normal. The experience changed him. Vincent had spent almost two years in the Chicago Police Department’s Youth Explorer program before he became Kid Cop. And every day, he’d do as he was instructed, taking the job seriously. The training he got was almost identical to what police would receive, with the exception of firearms.
“There are certain types of people who do certain things, jump out of planes, join the Army. Firefighters jump into burning buildings. These are adrenaline-seeking junkies,” he said. “These are cops. That’s why they love to do the job they do. They weren’t trained for nothing else in the world.”
Vincent put every hour of his free time into being an Explorer. And he began to think of himself as part of the police brotherhood. He fucked up, he admits that. But wasn’t the point of the program to make Explorers feel like cops? So why not *be* a cop when presented with the opportunity?
After he got caught, there was no way he was going to be allowed back into the Explorer program. It was an existential crisis for young Vincent.
“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” he said. “This is all I basically did my whole time. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to be a teenager.”
But if he’d learned anything about being a cop, the job was about perception. The power of police is self-fulfilling: they have authority because people believe they have authority.
“When you train to be a cop, they train you to stand big,” he said. “You stand bigger than you stand tall.”
He’d spend the next decade and a half trying to stand big, just like how he learned in the Explorers and on patrol.
Problem was, whenever he tried to stand big, he soon found himself behind bars.
I first met Vincent about a dozen years after the media’s initial infatuation with the Kid Cop story ended. But in that time, Vincent had repeatedly tried passing himself off as a police officer. He’d been arrested just about yearly since 2009 for a number of offenses, all non-violent, some bizarrely motivated. In February 2021, he’d been arrested at his apartment complex and was, in the spring of 2022, serving prison time in Illinois’ medium-security Big Muddy River Correctional Center after pleading guilty to — you guessed it — impersonating a police officer. Vincent embodies a strange contradiction: the criminal who wants so badly to be a cop that he’s willing to go to prison for it.
At 28, he wore a prison-issue white polo shirt, dark blue knockoff Dickies, and white canvas slip-on shoes. But I really can’t stress it enough: what you notice immediately about Vincent is how much bigger he seems than he actually is. He claims he’s 5’5”, but he’s not even that tall. Still, broad chest and shoulders, he looks tough — the man understands posture and how to look strong and confident and like he belongs wherever he stands.
We shook hands and sat. With the shackles off, he asked me to buy him Doritos and a meat sandwich and a Gatorade from the commissary vending machines. After I did, he loosened up.
“I’ve wanted to be a cop since before I can remember,” he said.
His mother, Veronica, told me he’d started watching *Cops* at the age of five, and since then, “that’s all he wanted to do.” Vincent’s stepfather had been a police officer, too. Like any good parent, Veronica wanted to support her son. When Vincent was 13, she signed him up for the Chicago Police Department’s Youth Explorer program, designed to get kids from ages 10 to 15 to understand more about policing and what cops do every day.
It serves as public outreach to neighborhoods with higher crime rates and lower household incomes and is still active today. Explorers would get police-issue uniforms, including trousers and a shirt, a jersey, and a cap. They would train regularly with officers in their neighborhood, and the program even offered a stipend to kids over 14. (Today, that stipend is [$75 per week](https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/fss/supp_info/RFP/Youth/DFSS_Youth_Service_Chicagobility_RFP_FINAL_1.22.pdf).) Veronica couldn’t imagine something more perfect for Vincent.
“I felt like I was one of them. I *was* law enforcement.”
He would be an Explorer a few nights per week after school and work the events on weekends. “School was pretty easy for me,” Vincent said. He was in eighth grade. “I was bored and did my homework fast when I got home. I had time.” Vincent was in the program for nearly two years, which is how, according to the official report, he was able to impersonate a police officer for a five-hour shift.
But Vincent now claims the truth is wildly different.
“I wasn’t doing this for five hours,” he told me. “This went on for *weeks*.”
On a date that he can’t recall exactly, Vincent said he walked into the Englewood station just like he normally would as an Explorer after school. He arrived at shift change. As usual, officers and Explorers lined up for their assignments, and because it was January in Chicago, Vincent wore the Explorer uniform under a dark blue jacket and skull cap. His outfit looked like all the other cops’. The officer in charge of shift assignments was apparently new on the job and didn’t recognize Vincent as an Explorer, so instead of giving him a training assignment, he made the mistake of handing Vincent a radio and ticket book.
“I wasn’t trying to fool anyone,” Vincent said. He says he wouldn’t have impersonated a cop in eighth grade if the opportunity didn’t present itself. “I just went along with it when they messed up.”
When Vincent met up with his new partner, they threw him cruiser keys and told him to pull the car around. So he did.
Vincent says he helped with traffic stops and communicated with dispatchers and assisted in an arrest that day. But at the end of the shift, no one caught on that he wasn’t a cop. He turned in his radio and ticket book and went home. The next day after school, he went back to the station again. Same time. Same place. During shift change.
A few days every week, he’d show up and get his radio and ticket book and go on patrol. He and his partner would drive around Chicago’s South Side; they’d stop people and respond to calls. The Explorer program may have succeeded in its goal of educating Vincent about what cops do all day. You could argue it was too effective.
“I had been an Explorer for close to a year, so I felt like I was already a cop,” he said. “I felt like I was one of them. I *was* law enforcement.”
Vincent’s stories about his fake cop days are varied. In one, two drivers collided on a city street at an intersection and were in front of their cars, yelling obscenities and ready to fight. Vincent and his partner calmed them down and got them to start talking reasonably. “By the end, they’re hugging and shit,” Vincent said. “We didn’t even write a ticket.”
In another, Vincent said he and his partner got a call about an open-air drug deal. The suspect they located resisted arrest and attempted to flee. Vincent and his partner wrestled the suspect to the ground, got them into handcuffs, and brought them back to the station in the back seat of the cruiser. When they arrived, Vincent said he told his shift captain about the difficulty of the arrest. The captain, Vincent claimed, decided that the perp needed to be taught a lesson. He needed “a rough ride.”
He reveled in his new, high profile. “It was like I was a celebrity,” he said.
He said the captain then walked the handcuffed suspect by the elbow back to the cruiser, opened the trunk, and shoved the suspect inside. Then they got into the cruiser with Vincent behind the wheel. The captain directed him to a street with speed bumps.
“Hit the gas,” the captain said.
So that’s what Vincent did.
The car bounced violently along the road with the suspect bumping around in the trunk, screaming to be let out.
“When you hear about police having power, yeah, you get it,” Vincent said. “They can write tickets and have guns and can arrest people. But you don’t really understand that power until you’re there on the streets. You can get two people to listen to you and stop fighting just because you’re a cop.”
He goes on: “And then if someone pisses you off, you throw ‘em in the trunk. No one’s gonna believe ‘em anyway.”
Vincent said he didn’t necessarily want to do that to anyone himself. In fact, he wanted the opposite: To help people. To stop fights. To help victims of domestic violence. Prevent shootings.
He told a third story. A simple one.
Vincent and his partner pulled someone over. He didn’t remember details. They found a bag of weed in the car. This suspect wasn’t combative and didn’t try to run away. Instead, they shrugged and admitted the weed was theirs. So Vincent dumped it out and told them to keep driving.
“Police can look the other way,” he said. “That’s power, too.”
The thing about talking to someone who is notorious for misrepresenting themselves is that it can be extremely hard to believe anything they say.
There are no records indicating that Vincent impersonated an officer for three weeks instead of five hours. Or that he made any of the stops he described. Or that the accusation he made about his captain initiating a “rough ride” is real. Vincent had described it to me in detail from the visitation room of Big Muddy prison. Months later, speaking on the phone with a fact checker, he denied it happened. But while talking with her, he texted me: “I’m on the phone now,” he said, “uncomfortable with the trunk incident not good.” Was he afraid of the ramifications of something that happened 14 years ago? Or did he make it all up?
Even the station where he pretended to be a cop, about 13 miles northwest of the Englewood neighborhood where Vincent lived and went to school, is different in his description than the one reported in news articles and police records.
But minimizing Vincent’s fake cop stint to an afternoon wasn’t just good for Vincent. It preserved the reputation of the Chicago Police Department. Rather than having the story of a Kevin Hart-sized teenager revealing systemwide issues with the department — and perhaps the nature of policing as a whole — the incident could be written off as a misunderstanding that occurred on one weird afternoon.
After Vincent was discovered, he believed that the captain thought that many aspects of the story would look horrible for himself and the department if anyone heard. He probably didn’t need some kid going out into the world to share everything he saw as a fake cop.
“So he brings me into his office and sits me down, and I start trying to explain, and he says, ‘Shut the fuck up,’” Vincent recalled. “Then he tells me what’s gonna happen next.”
Vincent would be charged with impersonating an officer. He would stay quiet about anything he saw on shift and how long he saw it. In exchange, they would work to get the charges dropped. That was the deal.
This is why, according to Vincent, the record shows that he was only on shift for five hours and that he wasn’t in a district filled with officers he saw regularly as an Explorer. To Vincent, it was self-preservation by his captain on behalf of the Chicago Police Department.
“They were gonna cover they asses,” he said. “And I wasn’t gonna say anything.”
In February 2009, about a week after Vincent’s story hit the evening news around the country, a newspaper columnist for the *Austin Weekly News* in Chicago, Arlene Jones, [questioned why](https://www.austinweeklynews.com/2009/02/04/where-is-the-outrage-over-teens-treatment/) the name and image of a 14-year-old made its way into the media in the first place. Vincent wasn’t charged as an adult. He didn’t harm anyone. But his name had gotten out. Newspapers published photos of him. And by publishing his name and photo and all but disclosing his home address in news stories parroted all over the world, the responsibility for Vincent’s actions fell to Vincent alone.
“He used to wear CTA uniforms and get on the CTA bus and … these people let him drive.”
In the age of Google, his name would forever be associated with “Kid Cop.” If anyone — like, say, a potential employer — looked him up, they would see the back story of a criminal.
Surprisingly, Vincent told me that he saw it differently. He reveled in his new, high profile. “It was like I was a celebrity,” he said.
Both the official power he tasted as a temporary cop and the unusual notoriety he received afterward left him wanting more. Before his arrest, he felt bored. Now he was really bored. Go to school. Come home. Do homework. Eat dinner. Find something to do until bed. Sleep and repeat.
Why do that when he had a sampling of something that brought him true excitement? True infamy. All the attention he felt he deserved.
After the Kid Cop incident, Vincent laid low and got his GED. But he soon found himself on the wrong end of police handcuffs time and again. At 17 years old, in May 2011, cops [picked him up](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2011-05-22-ct-met-teen-cop-impersonator-charged-20110522-story.html) on the street in Englewood with a loaded pistol. Looking at his juvenile record, prosecutors and a judge decided to make him an adult one year early in the eyes of the law. They charged him with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and possession of ammunition without a firearm owner’s identification. He couldn’t post a $50,000 bond, so he stayed in Cook County Jail until sentencing. A judge gave him time served.
When he got out, Vincent worked at McDonald’s as a janitor. His family knew he always wanted to be in law enforcement, so they talked with people they knew and got him a job doing the next best thing: working as a security guard. Still, Vincent remained antsy. He wanted the same thrill he got back when he was 14. But he wasn’t an Explorer anymore. He needed a new uniform.
On a Tuesday afternoon, July 24th, 2013, Vincent walked into an Englewood uniform shop and told the clerk that he was a Chicago police officer. Wearing dark blue pants like an officer’s, he put his wallet on the checkout counter and gave the clerk his driver’s license. He was 19 at the time and said he wanted to try on cargo shorts and a duty belt.
The clerk later told police that Vincent made him suspicious after repeatedly saying he was an officer in the Englewood district. So the clerk Googled Vincent and discovered the obvious: this was Kid Cop. While the clerk searched the web, Vincent could sense from the shop floor that something was up. He tried to make a run for it but forgot his wallet, credit cards, and identification on the counter. The clerk phoned it in, and Vincent was arrested within the hour.
The police report from the incident reflects what Vincent has told me repeatedly and other reporters. “I know what it’s like to be one of you,” he said to the officers, according to the report. “I respect you because I did it for a day, chasing and helping people. My intentions are never to hurt people, just to help.”
It was an overture. A cry for leniency. Something to endear himself to the officers he intended to portray. He even stuck with the official narrative of only being a cop for a day.
The arresting officers were having none of it. They charged him with impersonating a police officer *again*. A felony this time, he faced three years behind bars. The officers took him to Cook County Jail. He couldn’t post bond, so he stayed there until November that year when a judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison.
You would think that the experience of being thrown into prison for trying to buy the wrong kind of cargo shorts in the wrong kind of store might’ve given Vincent pause the next time he had the urge to even think about vigilante policing. It didn’t.
Vincent got out of lockup early in December 2014. Over the next five months, he began ordering police gear — online this time. He says he purchased a bulletproof vest, a stun gun, and other tactical gear for a gig with Monterrey Security in Chicago. He says his friend Dontrell Reese worked with him at the time. (A spokesman for Monterrey Security, Steve Patterson, said Vincent worked a “probationary” period in 2014 for the security company, which provides guards and ushers for events at Soldier Field. Vincent worked as an usher, not a security guard, Patterson said. Vincent’s manager fired him for “post abandonment” after three months on the job. “He was hired as an usher to have a specific task, \[but\] his supervisor noticed right away he was wandering off, and who knows what his intentions were or plans were?” Patterson said.)
After receiving a sentence of house arrest for destroying the Lexus, Vincent popped his ankle monitor off so he could get back into the world
“We weren’t doing anything violent,” Vincent told me. “We would go and direct traffic. It needed to be done. Needed to look the part.”
After receiving a call that gunshots had been fired in Englewood, officers arrived. They’d later write in a police report that they saw Vincent “walking along the public way” wearing a bulletproof vest. They searched him and found a “partial duty belt, handcuffs, flashlight, radio, empty gun holster and black badge case” with no badge inside, in addition to a black ballistic bulletproof vest. Dontrell also wore a protective vest and carried a stun gun. Both were arrested.
Vincent tried to explain that he had all that equipment for his work as a security guard. Neither cops nor the judge bought it. Vincent would eventually plead guilty to impersonating an officer for the third time and was sentenced to another 280 days in prison.
These arrests ensured that Kid Cop wouldn’t fade into history. His story had now become part of Chicago lore.
Except now, people were rooting for Vincent. He’d become a minor icon in the city, a provocateur who, intentionally or not, might force real change in the city’s police department. “We’re not ready to crown him a folk hero quite yet,” [wrote Marcus Gilmer in the *Chicagoist* at the time](https://chicagoist.com/2009/01/28/mayor_daley_livid_over_teen_cop.php), “but it’s possible this could be the straw that breaks the police superintendent’s back.”
Will Lee, a columnist and reporter for the *Chicago Tribune*, had interviewed Vincent on a few occasions. He sympathized with Vincent’s explanations about wanting to help people, his dreams of wanting to be a part of the police brotherhood. And Vincent could succeed, Lee wrote, if he’d just stop pretending to be a cop, if he’d stop following that one dream.
Right around the time Vincent got out of prison on police impersonation charges in April 2016, Lee wrote that Vincent had potential: “Now he has another opportunity to start over if he can avoid trouble until his parole ends next March. This time, I hope it’s for real.”
I spoke with Dontrell. He and Vincent had been best friends for years, having met just after the original Kid Cop incident. Dontrell freely admitted to running with gangs, stealing cars, dealing in illegal firearms. He was a felon at an early age, too. “We was just being bad, young kids being bad,” he said.
But Vincent didn’t run with gangs, wasn’t stealing cars or actively getting involved in mayhem. Kids in the neighborhood kept him around, however, because he was cool and “knew how to look older,” Dontrell said.
I asked what he meant by that.
“He used to wear CTA uniforms and get on the CTA bus and … these people let him drive,” Dontrell said.
I thought I misheard. Vincent would go to a local bus station in a fake bus driver uniform and take a bus out to drive?
“Yeah!” he said. “They would let him drive the CTA bus!”
Sometimes, Vincent would take the bus on a joyride. He’d pull up to Dontrell’s house and blare the horn. Then they’d cruise around, just for the hell of it.
Dontrell said it was crazy times in the neighborhood, and Vincent was often the cause.
That wasn’t all. Dontrell said the public record doesn’t show half of it. “He’s pulling up in police cars, so now we ridin’ in police cars together while I’m in the streets. And, you know, in the mix of all the other chaos that’s going on, it was like, damn, this is my homie.”
Later, Dontrell doesn’t remember when exactly, he caught a charge and ended up in Cook County Jail. One day, he got a call from an officer that he had a visitor. Someone from the Army was there to see him. Dontrell went down to the visitation room and saw — who else? — Vincent.
“This motherfucker dressed up as an army \[officer\] and then got into the jail to visit me,” Dontrell said. “How the fuck did he do that? I don’t know!”
But that was just who Vincent was. “It was like every situation,” he said. “He was able to transform character. What can you do to fit in with the character? He could do it. He could be anyone he wanted to be.”
For all the times when Vincent succeeded in transforming character and avoiding punishment, there were the ones when he failed. Like, for instance, every time he attempted to be a cop.
That made five times now he’d been caught for the same crime
On August 16th, 2016, a couple of Chicago police officers were driving down the street on patrol in the city’s River North district. They noticed a short Black man with broad shoulders purposefully walking on the sidewalk toward the SAE Institute media college. The man wore an Action K9 uniform — black polo shirt, black cargo pants, duty belt with handcuffs, flashlight, radio — and, according to a police report, he told people he was an on-duty Chicago police officer.
The actual police found Vincent and arrested him. A judge sentenced him back behind bars for 18 months.
Starting over would have been difficult for Vincent in 2016, no matter what dreams he pursued. Not a year had passed since he was 14 when he didn’t catch some kind of charge or contend with parole or sit in lockup. Not great for an existence. Certainly not good for a résumé.
In the months after his release from the 2016 impersonation charge, Vincent talked his way into a security guard job with Action K9 Security, a company that works with Chicago police to monitor train lines. Action K9 soon fired him when he couldn’t get the required state clearances for the job.
But that didn’t matter to Vincent. He wanted to be a guard, even if he’d been fired. So he kept pretending.
At another point, Vincent wore a suit into a Lexus car dealership and asked a salesman if he could test drive a new ES 350. He took the car out, wrecked it, then fled the scene. After receiving a sentence of house arrest for destroying the Lexus, Vincent popped his ankle monitor off so he could get back into the world.
Despite his history with automobiles, he later charmed his way into a job as a clerk at an Alamo Rent a Car. He walked in, filled out an application, and told the hiring manager that he had no prior arrests and had a bachelor’s degree. Neither was true, obviously, but Vincent was able to work the job.
Until he got restless. One day, Vincent rented a car from the Alamo. Then he stopped showing up for work — without notice and without returning the vehicle. A week later, his bosses reported the vehicle stolen. Like most rental cars, it had a GPS. Vincent was at home when the police showed up. He was sitting on the couch; the car was sitting outside. Vincent ended up with a two-year prison sentence.
Somehow, things were looking up. In the summer of 2020, even amidst the pandemic, Vincent found himself with one of the few secure jobs at the time: managing logistics for an Amazon warehouse. He organized trucks and mailing routes, ensuring that the second-largest company in the world could deliver Crocs and kitchenware and whatever else people were buying with their stimulus checks in 2020 throughout the Chicagoland area.
By landing this job, Vincent had accomplished something extraordinarily difficult. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, only about 40 percent of formerly incarcerated people are employed within four years of being released. And that survey doesn’t account for race. On average, Black people in America are [nearly twice as likely as whites](https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2020/home.htm) to be unemployed. So, for people like Vincent, the Census Bureau numbers are probably even worse than they seem.
Sure, it’s possible that he lied about his rap sheet to get the job. (Vincent, after implying that he did in conversation, now denies it.) Regardless, he had a salary and benefits. A 401(k) plan. He even got himself a hot rod, a 2021 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. Then he found himself a girlfriend and moved into an apartment with her in a Chicago suburb close to Naperville.
“I was going to work, the same routine every day, and it was boring,” he went on. “Was it killing me inside? Yeah.”
And yet, something nagged at Vincent. As he progressed in the job and received more responsibilities, he had more free time because he was managing people rather than delivering packages on his own. “And when I started getting like a lot of time on my hands,” he said, that’s when “shit happens.”
So Vincent made moves. Getting a private security contractor license in Illinois requires a registration process, background check, and paying a $2,050 fee to a licensing agency. All of Vincent’s felonies in the last decade would have disqualified him from getting such a permit. So he ignored that requirement entirely. After all, he’d worked on and off as a security guard for most of his adult life. He could, instead, look the part.
Instead, Vincent started looking on Facebook for businesses that needed private security. He found a few. And the process for starting an LLC is fairly simple: mail a few forms and a few dollars and wait. So he founded a company called Defense Public Safety Solutions, complete with a logo, letterhead, business cards, and an ID badge he made himself.
He started bidding for security contracts. He purchased dark blue security uniforms with gold badges and hired his friends to be guards. And he did all this while working a full-time job with Gardner Synergy Logistics, the Amazon affiliate that employed him.
It was a good hustle. It kept him busy. And it got him a little closer to the kind of life he’d always wanted.
Then Vincent discovered an open contract for an apartment complex run by the Chicago Housing Authority. It was one that specifically sought out Chicago police in need of moonlight work.
Vincent, not being an actual cop, didn’t have the official documentation. Instead, he tried the next best thing: he created social media accounts that might present him as a Chicago police officer. That was the idea, anyway. To bolster his online presence, he signed up for a SWAT training academy and likely planned to film it to make the videos look legitimate.
He started accounts under the handle @vince\_CPD and began posting from his supposed job on the force. Videos and photos from a shooting range. Chicago police SUVs. Himself in a navy blue T-shirt with the Chicago Police Department insignia. On TikTok, he danced to the SpotemGottem track “BeatBox” while dressed as a Chicago police officer. The video went lightly viral, with more than 100,000 views.
Chicago detectives started tailing him. It wasn’t long before this latest attempt to impersonate a police officer would get him in trouble, and he was briskly apprehended. That made five times now he’d been caught for the same crime.
Two videos of Vincent Richardson posing as a Chicago police officer, made to post to social media as promotion for his security guard company.
Around mid-September 2022, Vincent was released from Cook County Jail. I picked him up before dawn, at 5AM. Wearing a white Haynes T-shirt, grey flowy sweat pants, white socks, and grey knockoff Adidas slides, Vincent dropped into the passenger’s seat of my rental car and said, “Get me the fuck outta here.”
Rather than an expression of joy or relief that he was finally out of state custody, Vincent understandably had the demeanor of a man who’d just wasted a lot of time doing something he’d rather not have done. Recently, he was in the prison’s rehab program, which earned him an early release.
It was strange because Vincent historically did not have issues with drugs or alcohol addiction. But you could argue that he had been addicted to something else: adrenaline.
“I had to, like, adapt to that program,” he said. “So they was always talking about drugs, but I don’t do drugs. So I had to relate as close as possible to my own situation.”
“You act presentable. Usually, that’s enough for them.”
The way Vincent described it, anyone who knew him as a police impersonator misunderstood the impulses he had. It wasn’t just that he wanted to be a cop. It was that being a cop afforded gave him that rush.
“I got an impulsive adrenaline-seeking behavior,” he said, “and being a police officer, that’s the type of job that — that’s *that* every day.” The job *requires* impulsive adrenaline-seeking behavior, he said. At the Amazon affiliate, “I was going to work, the same routine every day, and it was boring,” he went on. “Was it killing me inside? Yeah.”
As the drive progressed, Vincent was feeling reflective. There were big swaths of the journey, which lasted close to four hours, when neither of us would talk. And then he’d let something loose, like he’d been thinking about it for a long time:
“As a cop, you learn how to critique yourself, especially with dealing with people. ‘Cause the image is, it’s everything. People size you up no matter what. They say, ‘Oh, I could get one over on him,’ or ‘I could try him and beat him.’ They look for that stuff. Criminals or people that’s more advanced, they look like, ‘He’s easy,’ like a cop back there. So I learned that. It became who I am.”
On that car ride, when I asked Vincent how he’d gotten the Amazon-adjacent job, his answer wasn’t totally illuminating. In fact, it was entirely predictable, given his life story. If Vincent was cool and confident, he could stroll into any job interview and people would often take him at his word. And they usually didn’t bother to do any reference checks.
“You dress nice, suit and tie or whatever the case may be,” he said. “You act presentable. Usually, that’s enough for them.”
Which is to say that: maybe the best way to avoid the economic pitfalls of being a Black former prisoner in America is to just pretend that’s not who you are. Stand bigger than you stand tall.
When I spoke with Dontrell, I asked him: who *is* Vincent Richardson, really?
“This is a man who was tryin’ to get us behind that wall,” Dontrell said. “He was a chameleon. He could be anyone, and he was being a cop to expose how simple it was to cross over. He was showing us something about ourselves.”
# Ryan Gosling on Stepping Away From Hollywood and Playing Ken in ‘Barbie’
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*To listen to this profile, click the play button below:*
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**Ryan Gosling subscribes** to what he calls an escape-room style of being an actor. This is a little theoretical, because he’s never actually been to an escape room, and he’s not totally sure what happens inside of them. “Maybe I should do one,” he says, “to see if this really works.” But the general idea is: You’re thrown into a particular set of circumstances and you’ve got to find your way out. Maybe you show up on set one day and it’s raining when it’s not supposed to be raining, Gosling says, “or this person doesn’t want to say any of that dialogue, or the neighbor’s got a leaf blower and they’re not turning it off.” What do you do next?
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Over time, Gosling has discovered that this approach might apply to more than just acting. Maybe, for instance, you’re a kid growing up in a town you don’t want to be in and you’re trying to locate an exit. Maybe you’re looking for something you can’t put into words and you make movies to try to pin down whatever it is you’re looking for. Maybe you’re a person who never envisioned raising a family and then you meet the person who changes, in some radical way, how you see yourself and your future. Life comes at you, in all its unanticipated and startling particulars; the thing that makes you an artist is the way you respond.
And being open to the unexpected has served Gosling well. When he was young, his first real breakthrough came in a movie, 2001’s*The Believer,*about a Jewish kid from New York who becomes a neo-Nazi. Gosling was none of these things, a fact that the director, Henry Bean, turned out to like—“The fact that I wasn’t really right for it was exactly why he thought I was right for it,” Gosling says. A few years later, when Gosling was auditioning for*The Notebook,*he says, the director, Nick Cassavetes, “straight up told me: ‘The fact that you have no natural leading man qualities is why I want you to be my leading man.’ ” Gosling got the part; he’s been a leading man ever since.
In his youth, Gosling treated acting a little bit like therapy, or an opportunity “to teach myself about myself.” He was in search of experiences—films that could capture a mood, or a feeling. Sometimes what he was doing barely looked like acting at all. “Even though I think Ryan has watched a lot of movies, the way he acts is as if he hasn’t watched that many movies,” Emily Blunt, who first got to know Gosling on the set of David Leitch’s forthcoming movie*The Fall Guy,*says. For 2010’s*Blue Valentine,*Gosling lived for a time with his costar, Michelle Williams, in the house where they shot the film, playing the part of parents with the young actor who played their daughter. For 2011’s*Drive,*he and the film’s director, Nicolas Winding Refn, spent days driving across Los Angeles, listening to music, whittling away dialogue from their script until the film was purely about the unnameable sensation the two of them shared in the car. “I was trying to find a place to put all these things that were happening to me,” Gosling says. “And these films became ways to do that, like time capsules.” For*Only God Forgives,*Refn’s next film, Gosling spent months in Thailand before shooting began, training in Muay Thai camps, learning to fight. “And I don’t think I did Muay Thai once in that film,” Gosling says. Refn changed plans. Gosling was okay with it. “I didn’t do the film to do Muay Thai,” he says.
And then something interesting happened, or maybe—in the manner of life—a few things happened, and the way Gosling worked began to change. In 2014, he and his partner, Eva Mendes, with whom he starred in*The Place Beyond the Pines,*had their first kid, and then in 2016, their second, both daughters. Gosling started to act in fewer independent movies and more studio films, like*La La Land*and *Blade Runner 2049.* These were movies, as Gosling describes them to me, “for an audience.”And then, for four years, he didn’t appear in anything at all.
Gosling’s explanation for his absence from Hollywood is straightforward: He and Mendes had recently had their second kid, “and I wanted to spend as much time as I could with them.” Gosling is not one of those people who pictured himself as a parent—the moment he first imagined himself as a father, he says, was the moment immediately before he became one: “Eva said she was pregnant.” But, he adds, “I would never want to go back, you know? I’m glad I didn’t have control over my destiny in that way, because it was so much better than I ever had dreamed for myself.”
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When Gosling finally came back to work, it was for last year’s*The Gray Man*, an action spectacle directed by the Russo brothers for Netflix, and then this year’s*Barbie,*directed by Greta Gerwig. He says the time away solidified certain changes in his attitude toward his job. “I treat it more like work now, and not like it’s, you know, therapy,” he says. “It’s a job, and I think in a way that allows me to be better at it because there’s less interference.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, the projects he’s gravitating toward now, which include another giant action film,*The Fall Guy*—which Leitch describes as “a love letter to big movies,” and which Gosling just finished shooting in Australia—seem to have larger and more crowd-pleasing aspirations. “I’ve always wanted to do it,” Gosling says. “I just never really had the opportunity like this, or it never kind of worked itself out this way. It took me a long time to get into sort of bigger, more commercial films. I had to kind of take the back entrance.”
When Gosling was younger, making independent movies, it was often with the unspoken expectation that not many people would see them. “So you kinda make the movie for yourselves,” he says. Somebody had once given him the advice:*Your job is just to feel it.* “Doesn’t matter if anyone else does, you know?” Gosling says. “But I think, having done a lot of that, I realize that I kind of feel like my job is for other people to feel it. And it’s cool if I do, but that’s really not the point. The point is that other people do.”
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**From Cornwall,** Ontario, where Gosling grew up, to Toronto, where he began attending auditions as a child actor, was “like, a five-hour train ride,” Gosling says. He shares this, in part, because the two of us are on a train right now. The Pacific Surfliner, winding out of Los Angeles and along the coast. Just something he had never done and wanted to do. We’d walked through Union Station to the platform together and I’d watched a bunch of afternoon commuters, families surrounded by luggage, people with nowhere else to go just killing time, and kids in jaunty outfits like*La La Land*extras doing cartoon double takes, despite the white hat Gosling wore pulled down low.
Actually: “Let me make sure it’s five hours from Cornwall,” Gosling says, putting down the Starbucks cup that says “Freddie” on it and pulling out his phone. “Don’t wanna start self-mythologizing.*It was a hundred hours on a train*.” He puts the phone away: “Four hours and 15 minutes.” Margot Robbie, who produced and stars in*Barbie*opposite Gosling, calls him “an overthinker.” Gosling, she says, will say something, “and then 40 minutes later, he’ll come up to me and be like, ‘You know when I said that? I’m just clarifying that what I meant was,*blah blah*.’ And I’m like, ‘Why are you still thinking about that?’ ”
He’s wearing boots and a workwear jacket and, at 42, has merry little creases around the eyes. You can sort of see what Nick Cassavetes was saying when he gave him a hard time about being a leading man: His features, broad and more than a little mischievous, are just unconventional enough to remind you that the matinee idol thing wasn’t foretold. Despite having played any number of violent men in movies, in person he reads as somewhere between reserved and simply shy. “He’s very gentle,” Bluntsays.“He likes to kind of sleuth around. He’s more sleuth-y than macho, you know?” But these days people just sort of bend toward him. On the train, phones protrude from other rows at unnatural angles, and the ticket taker in our car keeps coming by to offer him snacks.
In*Barbie*—a massively ambitious summer blockbuster that attempts to both honor the generations of children who played with the doll while also introducing new and sophisticated gender politics, the concept of mortality, and an ironic opening homage to Kubrick’s*2001*—Gosling plays Ken, the adoring doll that orbits Barbie, who is played by Robbie. There was not a lot to Ken before Gosling and the filmmakers got to him. “Ken,” Gosling says, “his job is*beach.* For 60 years, his job has been beach. What the fuck does that even mean?”
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Gerwig, who also cowrote the film with her partner, Noah Baumbach, says that tonally, they were trying to strike a delicate balance with Ken, as they were with the whole film: It’s supposed to be funny, because it’s a film about dolls, but it’s also supposed to be full of suffering and pathos, because, well…it’s a film about dolls. And Ken, forever an afterthought, is perhaps the funniest and saddest of them all. Gerwig says she cast Gosling because “there is a quality to Ryan’s acting, even when he is hilarious, it’s never the actor standing outside of the role commenting on or judging this person. He doesn’t try and make you know that Ryan Gosling knows that this is silly. He does it in a way that takes on all of the potential humiliations of the character as his own.”
Some people I have spoken to, including, at times, Gosling himself, have expressed not mystification but a curiosity about how Gosling ended up in a Mattel-produced movie about a kids’ toy. (Even Robbie jokes about this when we speak: “We were like, ‘He’s just done a movie called*First Man.…*And then he’s done a movie called*The Gray Man.…*Maybe he’s ready to do*Barbie!*Maybe he wants to do the total opposite!’ ”) Part of it, Gosling says, was simply about the chance to work with a bunch of women on a project that puts the female characters forward—“I kind of respond to scripts, I guess, or characters, where there's that kind of dynamic. I recognize it.” Part of it, Gosling says, actually relates to the kids’ toy thing: His daughters play with Barbies and Ken, sort of. “I did see him, like, face down in the mud outside one day, next to a squished lemon,” Gosling says, “and it was like,*This guy’s story does need to be told,* you know?”
But another reason Gosling was drawn to the movie relates, in a way, to the four-hour-and-15-minute train ride he used to undertake, by himself, to and from auditions. Gosling returns in conversation to this particular period of his life a lot. The story, briefly: Cornwall smelled like rotten eggs, because of the paper mill there, where Gosling’s father and some of his uncles worked. His parents split up. He was raised in the Mormon church. He did not have a lot of friends, or an easy time with school; he also had an uncle who was an Elvis impersonator, and there was something about the shows he did that made Gosling want to perform as well. “Here was this kind of bedazzled door number three with question marks on it,” Gosling says, “and I went in.”
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Gosling says it was this uncle who first gave him a glimpse of how art can transform both the people who make it and the people who observe it—Gosling would help him with his shows, and then watch his uncle turn into someone else when he performed, someone different and more full of life. Gosling says this uncle also bolstered his act with talent shows, people drawn from the local community, and “everyone had this secret talent. You’d see the guy that bags groceries at the A&P, and he has some version of ‘Black Velvet’ that’ll bring the house down, you know? And then you realize that that’s really him and the performance is the guy he’s playing who packs bags at the A&P.”
Gosling started asking himself: What is my talent? He began auditioning, and the auditions he was traveling to led to him being cast, at age 12, in Disney’s*The All-New Mickey Mouse Club,*alongside Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears. Unlike his peers, he did not make much of a mark there. “Everybody was at, like, prodigy level. I certainly wasn’t a child prodigy. I didn’t know why I was there. And I think that was the consensus. It’s why I didn’t work—it was like, they dressed me up as a hamster or put me in the background of someone’s song. But it was all a great experience in a way because it helped me figure out what I wasn’t going to be good at. Which is important to learn too.”
What Gosling turned out to be good at, in the long run, was playing a certain kind of brooding, intense young man in an independent film, and so for years he did that. But inside him, always, lived the spirit of a kid dressed up like a hamster in Orlando, performing for anyone who would watch. And I share this next part of our conversation more or less verbatim, because I think there’s, well, a lot of Ryan Gosling in it—the skepticism of the ersatz therapy that a magazine interview can become; the instinct to protect himself; the heartfelt honesty, which is nevertheless his mode; and the comic timing, which is uncannily similar to that of any number of characters we’ve seen him play onscreen.
It begins, as these things often do, with a somewhat overwrought interview question:
*What do you think the young Ryan would make of where you’ve ended up?*
“Um, what would young Ryan say? First of all, I’d be like, ‘Hey, young Ryan, calm down. This dude, Zach, asked me to come back and talk to you.’ ”
*\[Helpless laughter.\]*
“‘Don’t ask how. Don’t ask why, I don’t have time. We’re on a train, and the train’s gonna end, so we only have so much time. \[*Pause.*\] You’re gonna be in a Barbie movie.’ ”
He continues, no longer playing a scene: “Look, the irony is that the movies that I’ve made so many of, I didn’t grow up watching independent films. We didn’t have an art house theater. I didn’t know anything about the kinds of films that I was in, you know? I didn’t have any real frame of reference. All I had was, like, my Blockbuster knowledge.”
In the video store he’d go to in Cornwall, “it was all bigger films, and most of them were action films or comedies,” Gosling says. “That’s why I loved movies. It’s those films that made me want to do this. Like, obviously I learned more about film, and I feel very lucky to have gotten to make the movies that I’ve made. But it’s cool to be in a phase of my life where I’m getting to make the kinds of things that inspired me to make film in general.”
So…“kid me, this kid you want me to go and talk to?” Gosling says. “He would like*Barbie* more than*The Believer,* you know?”
And as for Ken, the no-thoughts-just-vibes character he plays in the film: “There’s something about this Ken that really, I think, relates to that version of myself. Just, like, the guy that was putting on Hammer pants and dancing at the mall and smelling like Drakkar Noir and Aqua Net-ing bangs. I owe that kid a lot. I feel like I was very quick to distance myself from him when I started making more serious films. But the reality is that, like, he’s the reason I have everything I have.”
Gosling says he’s been thinking about that kid a lot recently: “He didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it, he was just doing it, and it’s like, I owe my whole life to him. And I wish I had been more grateful at the time, you know?” He says he spent a lot of time on the*Barbie*set communing with this younger version of himself, who didn’t have a clue, but who did everything in total earnestness.
“I really had to go back and touch base with that little dude,” Gosling says, “and say thank you, and ask for his help.”
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**These days Gosling** lives in a quiet town in the southern half of California. Because he brings his family to the location of each movie he shoots, he aims to do only one or so per year. Most of the time, he says, he’s simply at home. Relatives come around, Gosling says, but he and Mendes don’t have a nanny; whatever they do, they do it themselves. Gosling is frankly romantic about his life with his daughters and Mendes. He says things were one way, then they were another. “I was looking for her, you know?”
*Were you conscious of that?*
“No. But it all makes sense now.”
He says as a parent, whenever he doesn’t know what to do, which happens from time to time, “I just lean on Eva. She knows what’s important, always. She just somehow knows. So if ever I’m in my head about it, I just ask her.”
In the past, Gosling says, he sought life, and creative inspiration, in extreme places. In 2014, he wrote and directed a film,*Lost River,*that grew out of a regular trip he’d been making to Detroit with a camera, just to film decaying buildings. The movie is a fever dream: violent, paranoid, surreal. Gosling remains proud of*Lost River.*But these days, he says, “all the things that are happening right now at home I just find funnier and more inspiring than any of the stuff I came across when I was out there in abandoned buildings looking for it.”
Because Gosling hasn’t worked much since 2018, he has been mostly out of the public eye, but that will soon change with*Barbie.*Anyone who has ever seen Gosling on a talk show knows that he tends to be a charismatic, genial ambassador for whatever project he’s out there promoting. But he does not particularly enjoy talking about himself, something I know because he tells me, multiple times, as our train makes its way along the coast.
“I mean, you know how it is, you do this,” he says, when I ask him what the source of his discomfort is. “It hasn’t been useful for me personally to start self-pathologizing or, um, telling a story about why or pretending to even understand all the machinations of why. A lot of it was just operating on instinct. It was escape room, you know?”
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To that end, he deluges me with a slew of questions of his own—partly, I think, because he’s a genuinely nice guy, or at least a polite one, and somewhat interested; and a lot, I think, to avoid being asked questions himself. He asks about my 14-month-old son and how having a kid has or has not changed me. (“Do you find it’s affected your work, or way that you work, or why you’re doing it?”) For a while, he asks about my mom, because I tell him she used to play the guitar, and Gosling suddenly needs to know everything. (“Moms that play guitar, that’s so cool. Kind of like Liona Boyd, Liona Boyd style? Or like classical? Folky? That’s cool. You don’t hear a lot about a mom guitarist.”)
“I feel like he watches everyone and everyone’s nuances so acutely,” Emily Blunt says, “that at some point, I think everyone will be sucked up and put in a movie, into a character.” She also says she had the same suspicion I’m having now. “I’m sure it’s a deflection strategy,” she says, laughing. “I’m sure I told him many more intimate secrets than he told me. He’s quite gifted at that.”
It’s charming; it’s also understandable. If you are a certain age, you will well remember the frenzy in the early part of the past decade around Gosling, and particularly Gosling’s appearance, which was the subject of endless Tumblr posts and thirsty bar conversations. “I think it embarrasses him in some ways,” Blunt says, about the public perception of Gosling as some sort of cross between the perfect boyfriend and the coolest man around, “because it’s not what he feels. I got the sense it wasn’t really what he felt about himself.”
Earlier in his career, Gosling used to talk about being raised by a single mother who was attractive, and how frightening he found the predatory energy that came from the men they’d encounter, how uneasy he was made by the way people related to her. (Gosling says that*Lost River,*with its portrait of a searching boy and his struggling mother, played by Christina Hendricks, was explicitly about this feeling he had as a child.) Gosling says now, flatly, that he never made the connection between his mother and himself and the attention his own appearance began to garner as he became famous. And he did his best to depersonalize the attention he was getting. But the whole experience, Gosling admits, was “confusing.”
And now, to some extent, it seems to be happening again. After a*Barbie*trailer was released, fans on social media began debating whether or not Gosling was, in fact, too weathered and grown up now to play Ken, a debate that, in time, made its way onto the pages of the *New York Post* (“Gen Z ‘Barbie’ Fans Slammed for Calling Ryan Gosling Too ‘Old’ to Play Ken”) and a number of other tabloids. Gosling’s response to this is, at least initially, diplomatic and a little amused: “I would say, you know, if people don’t want to play with my Ken, there are many other Kens to play with.”
Later, though, he brings it up again, unprompted. “It is funny,” he says, “this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken. Like you ever thought about Ken before this?” As he said earlier, this is a guy whose job is*beach.*
“And everyone was fine with that, for him to have a job that is nothing. But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time.’ No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.”
Gosling catches himself and laughs. “I care about this dude now. I’m like his representative. ‘Ken couldn’t show up to receive this award, so I’m here to accept it for him.’ ”
Shirt, vintage, from Melet Mercantile. Pants, vintage, from Stock Vintage. Gloves, vintage, from Palace Costume. Belt, his own. Belt buckle, $795, by Boot Star.
---
**On the phone** one day, Greta Gerwig tells me a story. This takes place before*Barbie*begins shooting, when she and Robbie are hosting a sleepover for the actors who play the different Barbies in the cast. The Kens are also invited to stop by, but Gosling can’t make it. Midway through there’s a knock at the door. “And this man, this Scottish man, in a full kilt, showed up and played the bagpipes,” Gerwig says. He says that Gosling had sent him. “And then he read a speech from*Braveheart.*And then he left.”
When I ask Gosling why*Braveheart,*and specifically why the moment when Mel Gibson tells a bunch of sons of Scotland that the English may take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom, he says, “Well, sometimes, you just need to hear it.” Gerwig says that Gosling “always can sense very quickly what would be the most delightfully funny thing to do next. And then he does it.”
This is the kind of thing a director says about her actor when he’s starring in her comedy; but, for whatever it’s worth, here is a more or less total summary of what happens next. Gosling and I depart the train, talking about nothing in particular: childhood, Starter jackets, the way that playing cool can skew into a fear of playing at all. “Like, you thought you were winning by not trying,” he says. “Or at least showing that you weren’t trying. But it kind of backfires a little later, when you start actually not trying in order to win.”
And I’m nodding at the profundity of what Gosling is saying, and he keeps going: “And then you realize that that’s actually what losing is. Is just not trying.”
And I say*yes!*
And he says, because he knows he has me now, “And all you had to do was watch*Rocky* to realize that just trying is winning.”
And I start laughing, that what has gotten me so inspired is a light paraphrase of the speech that Rocky gives in more or less every*Rocky* movie. (Later, when I ask David Leitch about this impulse, to find a punch line, Leitch says, “Nine times out of 10, Ryan wants to laugh.”)
And we go into a restaurant not far from the station, with comfy booths and not a lot of people around, and split a bunch of food as the sun begins to set outside. It’s quiet, calmer than the train, and as our dishes arrive and the server comes around a few more times to check on him, Gosling talks a little more about why he’s wary of these conversations, which “can border into therapy, which is bad for obvious reasons.”
Or sometimes, he says, “it can feel like, you know, you go in wearing jeans, and you come out wearing cutoffs. And the pocket’s not the only thing that’s showing, you know what I mean?”
And I’m laughing again, and we start negotiating the length of the metaphorical jeans he’s going to leave with this time.
“What about a capri?” he proposes.
*Just the ankle?*
“Yeah. A tiny bit of ankle. Deal?”
And I laugh and say*deal,* though I don’t mean it, and excuse myself to use the restroom, and when I return, he’s already made arrangements to break free, and when I sit back down in the now empty booth, our server comes over, somewhat apologetically, with every dessert on the menu, plus a few they don’t advertise, courtesy of Gosling, placing plates of ice cream down one by one by one by one by one as I watch the actor himself escape out the front door.
Vintage t-shirt, belt, and bandanafromStock Vintage. Pants, $2,450, by Bally. Vintage belt bucklefromBoot Star.
---
**“I’m having a** little train regret,” Gosling says, a few weeks later. “I think just the nostalgic nature of it and the hypnotic rocking motion got me musing and self-mythologizing more than I intended to.”
On my computer screen, his Ken-blond hair is covered up by a hat advertising the Caterpillar construction-equipment company. There are wooden panels behind him and sunlight out in front of him coming from somewhere I can’t see. It’s Sunday, and Gosling is recovering from yesterday, the birthday of one of his daughters. A bunch of family flew in. “I think I made over 30 pizzas and over 40 espresso drinks,” Gosling says. “And since my stepdad is Roman, I think all of those things might put me aligned to apply for my Italian citizenship.”
Today, he’s about to get into a car to drive to an advance screening of*Barbie* and sneak in the back to watch the film for the first time with an audience. But first, well, he has some thoughts about his earlier thoughts.
“I think I was going on about abandoned buildings and, uh, time capsules and some bullshit like that. That is fine, I think, between two guys that are dad-ing out on a train. But if you put that stuff in quotes on top of a guy in a pink duster with, like, a ripped shirt the, uh, the needle on the bullshit meter starts to break off.”
He also wants to apologize. “Sorry about all the ice cream,” he says. “I thought it’d be stuff you could take home, you know?”
He pauses. “What else was I thinking of?” And then remembers.
“When you asked me about Eva and kids,” Gosling says, “I think I said, I didn’t think about kids until she told me she was pregnant. That’s not really true. I didn’t want to overshare, but now I also don’t want to misrepresent. I mean, it’s true that I wasn’t thinking about kids before I met her, but after I met Eva, I realized that I just didn’t want to have kids without her. And there were moments on*The Place Beyond the Pines* where we were pretending to be a family, and I didn’t really want it to be pretend anymore. I realized that this would be a life I would be really lucky to have.”
I ask Gosling why he didn’t just say that the first time, given how nice, and how genuine, the sentiment is.
“I didn’t really want to get into it,” he says. “But I realized that I was misrepresenting the reality of it.”
In the weeks since Gosling and I had last spoken, I’d spent some time on the phone with people who know him, including, memorably, Harrison Ford, who starred with Gosling in*Blade Runner 2049.*Ford, who is himself well-known in Hollywood for his no-nonsense approach to the business, described, approvingly, a man he admired but never really got to know. “I think we went out to dinner one time,” Ford says. “But on the set, he’s just a joy to work with. We both don’t like to talk about acting as much as we like to just get it done. And he’s one of those guys who just comes and does it.” They’d filmed the movie together, promoted it, and then, according to Ford, hadn’t spoken once since. Gosling now confirms this. “The last time I saw him, we were eating hamburgers in the parking lot of the Apple Pan after a screening of*Blade Runner*.”
The idea, then and now, Gosling says, is to do it and be gone and leave no record of what or why beyond that. Talk about the new movie; get in and get out. He looks at me now and sighs, like he didn’t mean for any of the rest of this to happen. “I mean, I just wanted to ride the Surfliner and talk about*Barbie*, you know?”
**Zach Baron** *is*GQ’*s senior staff writer.*
*A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2023 isue of GQ with the title “Ryan Gosling Goes Hollywood”*
---
**PRODUCTION CREDITS:**
*Photographs by **Gregory Harris***
*Styled by **George Cortina***
*Grooming by **Shane Thomas** at the Milton Agency*
*Set design by **Heath Mattioli** for Frank Reps*
*Produced by **Alicia Zumback** and **Patrick Mapel** at Camp Productions*
After a painting by the Dutch artist sold at auction, a movie producer claimed to be the owner. It later vanished from sight, with a trail leading to Caribbean tax havens and a jailed Chinese billionaire.
“Still Life, Vase with Daisies and Poppies,” was one of the last works Vincent van Gogh completed before his death in 1890.
It was also one of the artist’s only privately owned works. In 1911 it was sold to the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer.
In 1962 it was loaned to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where it remained on view for decades, before being bought by a private collector.
It reemerged in 2014 at Sotheby’s, selling for $61.8 million, and was briefly on display in Beijing.
Now its owner and whereabouts are unknown.
Published May 29, 2023Updated May 30, 2023
The [bidding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMqjEa2NvLw) for Lot 17 started at $23 million.
In the packed room at Sotheby’s in Manhattan, the price quickly climbed: $32 million, $42 million, $48 million. Then a new prospective buyer, calling from China, made it a contest between just two people.
On the block that evening in November 2014 were works by Impressionist painters and Modernist sculptors that would make the auction the mostsuccessful yet in the firm’s history. But one painting drew particular attention: “Still Life, Vase with Daisies and Poppies,” completed by Vincent van Gogh weeks before his death.
Pushing the price to almost $62 million, the Chinese caller prevailed. His offer was the highest ever for a van Gogh still life at auction.
In the discreet world of high-end art, buyers often remain anonymous. But the winning bidder, a prominent movie producer, would [proclaim](https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-movie-mogul-wang-zhongjun-buys-vincent-van-gogh-painting-for-61-8-million-1415180355) in interview after interview that he was the painting’s new owner.
The producer, Wang Zhongjun, was on a roll. His company had just helped bring “Fury,” the World War II movie starring Brad Pitt, to cinemas. He dreamed of making his business China’s version of the Walt Disney Company.
The sale, according to Chinese media, became a national “[sensation](http://finance.sina.com.cn/leadership/mroll/20141110/005920771372.shtml).” It was a sign — after the acquisition of a Picasso by a Chinese [real estate tycoon](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-abillionaire-at-the-intersection-of-business-and-power-in-china.html) the year before — that the country was becoming a force in the global art market.
“Ten years ago, I could not have imagined purchasing a van Gogh,” Mr. Wang said in a Chinese-language [interview](https://www.sothebys.com/zh-hant/%E6%96%87%E7%AB%A0/%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%AD%E8%BB%8D%E5%B0%88%E8%A8%AA-%E4%BB%96%E5%B0%87%E6%A2%B5%E8%B0%B7%E5%B8%B6%E4%BE%86%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B) with Sotheby’s. “After buying it, I loved it so much.”
Image
Kevin Ching, left, then the head of Sotheby’s in Asia, appeared at a Hong Kong ceremony in 2014 to present the van Gogh painting to Wang Zhongjun, the movie producer who claimed to have bought it.Credit...Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But Mr. Wang may not be the real owner at all. Two other men were linked to the purchase: an obscure middleman in Shanghai who paid Sotheby’s bill through a Caribbean shell company, and the person he answered to — a reclusive billionaire in Hong Kong.
The billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, was one of the most influential tycoons of China’s gilded age, creating a financial empire in recent decades by exploiting ties to the Communist Party elite and a new class of superrich businessmen. He also controlled a hidden offshore network of more than 130 companies holding over $5 billion in assets, according to corporate documents obtained by The New York Times. Among them was Sotheby’s invoice for the van Gogh.
The secrecy that pervades the art world and its dealmakers — including international auction houses like Sotheby’s — has drawn scrutiny in the years since the sale as authorities try to combat criminal activity. Large transactions often pass through murky intermediaries, and the vetting of them is opaque. Citing client confidentiality, Sotheby’s declined to comment on the purchase.
Today, Mr. Xiao is a man who has fallen far. Abducted from his luxury apartment and now imprisoned in mainland China, he was convicted of bribery and other misdeeds that prosecutors claimed had threatened the country’s financial security. Meanwhile, Mr. Wang is struggling, liquidating properties as his film studio loses money each year.
And the still life, according to several art experts, has been offered for private sale. For a century after van Gogh gathered flowers and placed them in an earthen vase to paint, the artwork’s provenance could be easily traced, and the piece was often exhibited in museums for visitors to admire. Now the painting has vanished from public view, its whereabouts unknown.
Image
The home of Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village outside Paris, where van Gogh painted the still life in 1890.Credit...Stephane de Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
## A Painting’s Many Lives
In May 1890, van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise, a rustic village outside Paris. Deeply depressed, he had cut off much of his [left ear](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/van-Gogh-ear) a year and a half earlier. His stay at an asylum had not helped.
But within hours of coming to the village, he met Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a doctor and an art enthusiast.
“I’ve found in Dr. Gachet a ready-made friend and something like a new brother,” van Gogh [wrote](https://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let879/letter.html) to his sister.
The physician encouraged van Gogh to ignore his melancholy and focus on his paintings. He completed nearly 80 of them in two months, including “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” considered a masterpiece. He produced “Vase With Daisies and Poppies” at the physician’s home and may have given it to him in exchange for treatment, biographers say.
After van Gogh’s death in July 1890, the painting passed to a [Parisian collector](http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/mwebcgi/mweb?request=record&id=74410&type=701), and then, in 1911, as the artist’s fame was rising, to a [Berlin art dealer](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cassirer-paul). A series of German collectors owned it before A. Conger Goodyear, a Buffalo industrialist and a founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bought it in 1928. His son George later granted partial ownership to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which displayed it for nearly three decades.
Image
Dr. Gachet encouraged van Gogh to focus on his art. The painter completed nearly 80 works in two months, including “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” which is considered a masterpiece.Credit...Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images
In May 1990, capping years of record-breaking prices for van Goghs, a Japanese businessman [spent](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/arts/article-985390-no-title.html) $82.5 million for “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” at Christie’s, then the highest price paid at auction for any artwork.
About that time, Mr. Goodyear wanted to sell the 26-by-20-inch still life to raise money for another museum. It failed to sell at [Christie’s](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/09/arts/auctions.html) in November 1990, where it had been expected to fetch between $12 million and $16 million. Soon after, a lower offer was accepted from a buyer who remained anonymous.
Most of the 400 or so oil paintings van Gogh produced during his last years — considered his best work — are at arts institutions [around](https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0031v1962) [the](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/portrait-de-lartiste-747) [world](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802). About 15 percent are in private hands and not regularly on loan to museums. In the past decade, just 16 have been offered at auction, according to Artnet, an industry database. Among them was “Orchard With Cypresses,” from the collection of the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which Christie’s [sold](https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6397113) last year for $117 million to an undisclosed buyer.
Image
The still life at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, about a month after the sale in 2014. Only a small number of the pieces van Gogh produced toward the end of his life have been sold at auction.Credit...Bobby Yip/Reuters
## The Producer and the Billionaire
For a year after the November 2014 auction, Mr. Wang kept the still life at his $25 million apartment in Hong Kong. In October 2015, the film producer was the guest of honor at [a five-day exhibition](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/article/1863729/van-goghs-most-expensive-still-life-set?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=1863729) in the city. An amateur artist, he had more than a dozen of his own oil paintings on display.
But the main attractions were the van Gogh and a Picasso he had recently bought, “Woman With a Hairbun on a Sofa.” Sotheby’s said Mr. Wang had [paid](https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/buyer-of-goldwyn-picasso-is-a-chinese-movie-mogul/) nearly $30 million for the work.
Until then, Japanese industrialists, followed by American hedge fund managers and Russian oligarchs, had captured headlines for record-breaking purchases. Around 2012, newly rich Chinese buyers, who had benefited from their country’s market-opening policies, came on the scene.
“All the auction houses really jumped on that,” said David Norman, who headed Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art department when the van Gogh was sold.
Image
The billionaire Xiao Jianhua in 2013. He was sentenced to prison last year for bribery and misusing funds.Credit...Next Magazine/Associated Press
Chinese billionaires were often delighted to announce their big-ticket purchases. In 2013, a retail magnate [bought](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2013-nov-06-la-et-cm-wang-jinglian-dalian-wanda-picasso-20131106-story.html) a Picasso for $28 million at Christie’s, following up with a $20 million Monet at Sotheby’s in 2015. The same year, a stock investor [spent](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/arts/international/with-modigliani-purchase-chinese-billionaire-liu-yiqian-dreams-of-bigger-canvas.html) $170 million at Christie’s for a [Modigliani](http://www.thelongmuseum.org/en/list-319/detail-1730.html).
“It is a combination of vanity, investment and building their own brand,” said Kejia Wu, who taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and is the author of a new [book](https://www.routledge.com/A-Modern-History-of-Chinas-Art-Market/Wu/p/book/9781032287973) on China’s art market.
Mr. Wang, 63, basked in the spotlight. In [interviews](https://archive.is/BuNfe), he spoke of his admiration for van Gogh and the artist’s influence on him. “Few people in the world would buy this kind of painting — there aren’t that many who love Impressionist art this much and can afford it, right?”
Days after the hammer fell at Sotheby’s, Mr. Wang had told a Chinese [publication](https://www-chinanews-com-cn.translate.goog/cul/2014/11-09/6763431.shtml?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=zh-CN&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp) that he had not bought the painting alone, though he offered no details. Later, he no longer mentioned any partner. “When I saw the painting at a preview, I just felt like owning it — it stirred my heart,” he said in an interview published on [Sotheby’s website](https://www.sothebys.com/zh-hant/%E6%96%87%E7%AB%A0/%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%AD%E8%BB%8D%E5%B0%88%E8%A8%AA-%E4%BB%96%E5%B0%87%E6%A2%B5%E8%B0%B7%E5%B8%B6%E4%BE%86%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B).
The high-profile acquisition, made through an intermediary and with the ultimate source of funds remaining a secret, is the kind of transaction governments have been trying to curb in recent years.
In one scandal, the United States charged [a Malaysian businessman](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/malaysian-financier-low-taek-jho-also-known-jho-low-and-former-banker-ng-chong-hwa-also-known) with laundering billions of dollars from a state development fund, using some of it to buy art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. In 2020, the Senate issued a [scathing report](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/arts/design/senate-report-art-market-russia-oligarchs-sanctions.html) on how auction houses and art dealershad unwittingly helped Russians evade sanctions by allowing others to buy art for them.
A spokeswoman for Sotheby’s said it vetted all buyers and, when necessary, enlisted its compliance department for “enhanced due diligence.” Sotheby’s applies worldwide a 2020 [European Union](https://itsartlaw.org/2019/08/20/recent-eu-developments-in-art-law-and-cultural-heritage/) rule that requires auction houses to verify the legitimacy of funds.
The Sotheby’s invoice names **Hailong Liu**, a man living modestly in Shanghai, as the buyer of the van Gogh painting at a price of almost **$62 million**.
While the financial documents involving the van Gogh do not show wrongdoing, the transaction was hardly routine. Soon after the auction, Sotheby’s transferred ownership of the painting to the Shanghai man, neither a known art agent nor a collector, who paid the bill. But in a public ceremony, Sotheby’s handed over the painting not to him or the billionaire who employed him but to the producer, Mr. Wang.
“There’s a connection to someone who is now incarcerated,” said Leila Amineddoleh, a New York-based art lawyer. “Something unusual is going on.”
Image
The Shanghai apartment complex that is home to Liu Hailong, the man who paid the nearly $62 million bill for the van Gogh. Credit...The New York Times
## ‘White Gloves’
The man Sotheby’s considers the owner of the van Gogh lives in a Shanghai apartment complex where gray tiles and grimy grout frame a weather-beaten door. A mat out front states nine times, in English, “I am an artist.”
The occupant, Liu Hailong, is listed as the sole owner and lone director of the shell companyin the British Virgin Islandsthat paid for the painting: Islandwide Holdings Limited. Other than his date and place of birth, little is known about Mr. Liu, 46.
When a reporter recently showed him the Sotheby’s invoice and a bank wire document and asked whether the signature was his, he said, “Please leave immediately,” and shut the door.
Image
Two wire transfers from Mr. Liu to Sotheby’s settling the bill for the van Gogh painting.
A woman living with him, Zhao Tingting, has her own connection to the jailed billionaire, Mr. Xiao. She was once a top official at a company he co-founded, which had business dealings with [relatives](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/world/asia/tiananmen-era-students-different-path-to-power-in-china.html) of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
Ms. Zhao, 43, who no longer holds that position, now teaches piano. Asked about Mr. Liu’s purchase of the van Gogh, she responded, “Do you think our house comes close to the price of that painting?”
She and Mr. Liu were “just ordinary little employees,” she said, with no connection to the Tomorrow Group, the collection of companies controlled by the billionaire. “We have no right to make any decisions and no right to know anything.”
The couple appear to have been “white gloves,” a term used in China to describe proxy shareholders meant to hide companies’ true owners. Among the thousands of pages of records providing details about the Tomorrow Groupisa spreadsheet listing dozens of such people. At least four offshore companies were registered in Mr. Liu’s name.
Those companies were part of Mr. Xiao’s vast enterprise. He had showed early promise, gaining admission to China’s prestigious Peking University at age 14 and serving as a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen protests. He sided with the government, an allegiance that would help him become one of the country’s richest men, acquiring control of banks, insurers and brokerages, as well as stakes in coal, cement and real estate.
Unlike the many brash billionaires he did business with, Mr. Xiao, now 51, preferred to operate in the shadows, [building ties](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/world/asia/tiananmen-era-students-different-path-to-power-in-china.html) to some of China’s princelings. He settled into a quiet life at the Four Seasons, where a coterie of female bodyguards attended to his needs.
Why one of his lieutenants paid for the van Gogh is not clear. Mr. Wang, the producer, was among [the ranks](https://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2013/07/31/huayis-wang-zhongjun-joins-ranks-of-china-movie-industry-billionaires/?sh=7c342b596de4) of China’s wealthiest people, though not nearly as rich as Mr. Xiao.
Mr. Xiao’s easy access to money outside China through his offshore network allowed him to bypass the country’s strict currency controls; he may have acted as a kind of banker for Mr. Wang. The documents show that the two men were drawing up art investment plans the same month as the auction, but their joint venture, based in the Seychelles, wasn’t formed until a year later. Meanwhile, the two set up another offshore company, aimed at investing in film and television projects in North America.
There could be another explanation for the payment: Mr. Xiao may have wanted to acquire an asset that could be transported across borders in a private jet, free from scrutiny by bank compliance officers and government regulators.
Image
In 2017, Mr. Xiao was abducted from his apartment at the Four Seasons in Hong Kong and later put on trial in mainland China.Credit...Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
## An Abduction, and a Vanishing Act
The fortunes of the men connected to the van Gogh purchase began to turn in 2015 with the crash of the Chinese stock market. Mr. Xi’s government blamed market manipulation by well-connected traders, and regulators wrested economic power back from the billionaires. Dozens of financiers [disappeared](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/international/xu-xiang-zexi-insider-trading-arrest-china.html), only to resurface in police custody.
Art purchases became more discreet. In 2016, Oprah Winfrey [sold](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/oprah-said-to-snag-150-million-selling-klimt-to-chinese-buyer?sref=36hylgrI) a Klimt painting to an anonymous Chinese buyer for $150 million.
By early 2017, Mr. Xiao’s life as a free man was over. One night, about a half-dozen men put him in a wheelchair — he was not known to use one — covered his face and [removed him](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/asia/xiao-jianhua-hong-kong-disappearance.html) from his Hong Kong apartment. He was taken to mainland China and eventually charged. Prosecutors claimed that his crimes dated back before 2014, the year the van Gogh was sold.
He was [sentenced](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/business/chinese-canadian-billionaire-xiao-jianhua-sentenced.html) last August to 13 years in prison for manipulating financial markets and bribing state officials. The court said Mr. Xiao and his company had misused more than $20 billion.
Government officials dismantled his companies in China. At some point, the British Virgin Islands business that bought the van Gogh changed hands and Mr. Liu was removed as its owner.
For a while, Mr. Wang, the producer, maintained a high-flying lifestyle, opening a [private museum](https://www.sothebys.com/zh-hant/museums/song-art-museum) in Beijing in 2017 that showcased the van Gogh and Picasso paintings for a few months.
But the market value of his film studio, Huayi Brothers, vaporized as it backed flops. Mr. Wang let go much of his art collection and his Hong Kong home. Last year the Beijing museum was [sold off](https://bj.bjd.com.cn/a/202204/11/AP62542324e4b0a555c6b5232b.html), along with a mansion tied to him in Beverly Hills.
Mr. Wang and a spokesman for his company did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Mr. Xiao could not be reached for comment in prison, though a family representative said the billionaire’s wife did not know of any involvement in the van Gogh purchase and was unfamiliar with Mr. Liu.
Van Gogh’s floral still life — a vibrant painting by one of the world’s most acclaimed artists — hasn’t been seen publicly for years. But there are reports that the artwork may be back on the market.
Three people, including two former Sotheby’s executives and a New York art adviser, requesting anonymity, said the painting had been offered for private sale. Last year, the adviser viewed a written proposal to buy it for about $70 million.
The art experts did not know whether the painting had sold or if concerns had been raised about the 2014 sale — a purchase by a onetime lieutenant to a now disgraced billionaire linked to a beleaguered film producer who claimsthe art belongs to him.
“Nobody needs a $62 million van Gogh, and nobody wants to buy a lawsuit,” said Thomas C. Danziger, an art lawyer. “If there’s any question about the painting’s ownership, people will buy a different artwork — or another airplane.”
Graham Bowley contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.
Produced by Rumsey Taylor. Photo editing by Stephen Reiss. Top images: “Still Life, Vase with Daisies and Poppies”: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images; Vincent Van Gogh: Imagno/Getty Images; Paul Cassirer: ullstein bild via Getty Images; Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Tom Ridout/Alamy; Sotheby’s auction: YouTube.
Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.
Michael Forsythe is a reporter on the investigations team. He was previously a correspondent in Hong Kong, covering the intersection of money and politics in China. He has also worked at Bloomberg News and is a United States Navy veteran. [@PekingMike](https://twitter.com/PekingMike)
Isabelle Qian is a video journalist covering China for The Times. [@QianIsabelle](https://twitter.com/QianIsabelle)
Muyi Xiao is reporter on the [Visual Investigations](https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/visual-investigations) team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics. She has been covering China for the past decade. [@muyixiao](https://twitter.com/muyixiao)
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country's global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people. [@vwang3](https://twitter.com/vwang3)
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Vanishing van Gogh: A $62 Million Mystery. [Order Reprints](https://www.parsintl.com/publication/the-new-york-times/) | [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) | [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)
It wasn’t the singing; it was the song. When Deanie Parker hit her last high note in the studio, and the band’s final chord faded behind her, the producer gave her a long, appraising look. She’d be great onstage, with those sugarplum features and defiant eyes, and that voice could knock down walls. “You sound good,” he said. “But if we’re going to cut a record, you’ve got to have your own song. A song that you created. We can’t introduce a new artist covering somebody else’s song.” Did she have any original material? Parker stared at him blankly for a moment, then shook her head.
No. But she could get some.
Parker was seventeen. She had moved to Memphis a year earlier, in 1961, to live with her mother and stepfather, and was itching to get out of school and start performing. She was born in Mississippi but had spent most of her childhood with her aunt and uncle in Ironton, Ohio, a small town on the Kentucky border. Her grandfather had sent her there after her parents divorced, hoping that she could get a better education up north. Her aunt Velma was a church secretary and a part-time college student; her uncle James worked for the C. & O. Railway. They gave her piano lessons at a Catholic convent and elocution lessons at home. On Sunday afternoons, her aunt would take her to church teas and teach her proper etiquette—how to fold her white gloves in her purse and set her napkin on her lap. In Ironton, the races were allowed to mix a little. Churches and most social clubs were segregated, but Parker went to school with white kids and sometimes even played in their homes. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that there was no difference between them.
Deanie Parker, shown with Al Bell, Jim Stewart, and the civil-rights leader Julian Bond, at a Stax sales conference in 1969.Photograph courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music Archive
Not in Memphis. Memphis never let you forget your place. It was the capital of the Mississippi Delta, the home of the Cotton Exchange, where plantation owners once made their wealth. Whites lived downtown and in the better houses to the east; Blacks were in the poor and working-class neighborhoods to the north and south, corralled there by redlining. Schools, bars, restaurants, buses, libraries, rest rooms, and telephone booths all had their shabbier counterparts across town, their shadow selves. (When the city parks were finally desegregated, in 1963, the public pools shut down rather than let Black people in the water.) Even Beale Street and its blues clubs kept to one side of the line: the street ran along the southern edge of downtown, where whites could step into a club without walking through a Black neighborhood—or having Black musicians walk through theirs. “Every single thing was segregated, from cradle to grave,” a local civil-rights leader later recalled. “I never really understood why the graveyards had to be segregated, because the dead get along with each other pretty well.”
On her first day at Hamilton High School, Parker wore her favorite outfit: a pleated floral skirt with a sleeveless, orange-and-fuchsia top—perfectly matched, as her aunt Velma had taught her. She might as well have had on a ballroom gown. Everywhere she went, the kids snickered and stared. Most of them were dressed in hand-me-downs or castoffs from their parents’ white employers. Who did she think she was? To survive in this two-sided city, she realized, she would have to vary her behavior to match. It didn’t take her long. “I think it’s in the DNA,” she says. “Or like this old Black lady once told me, ‘It’s in the Dana.’ ”
Singing was her secret strength. She’d been doing it since she was five years old, in the sunbeams choir at her African Methodist Episcopal church. She could read music and outline harmonies and knew most of the Wesleyan Methodist hymnal by heart. In Ironton, all you could get on the radio was country music. She lived for the moment every night, at nine o’clock, when she could catch a signal out of Nashville—WLAC playing “I Don’t Want to Cry,” by Chuck Jackson, or some other rhythm-and-blues hit. “I knew what I liked to listen to and the music that moved me,” she says. “I didn’t have that, and I wanted it so badly.”
In Memphis, it was everywhere. The city was both a foreign country and her heart’s home. By five in the morning, her grandparents were tuned in to Theo (Bless My Bones) Wade, who played spirituals on WDIA radio. Then A. C. (Moohah) Williams or Martha Jean Steinberg would come on with doo-wop and R.&B. and handy tips for homemakers, or Nat D. Williams, the city’s first Black disk jockey, would play some B. B. King or Nat King Cole. The station’s fifty-thousand-watt transmitter could blast over any color line. “I cut my teeth on that music,” Parker says. “I learned harmony and timing through the disciplined music of the church. But what I wanted to do was not about that. It was about ‘Let it go and let it flow.’ ”
Her glee-club director must have heard it in her voice. Memphis schools had long been feeders to the record industry, and the teachers knew how to foster talent. The city’s first high-school band director, Jimmie Lunceford, took his students to Harlem after they graduated, and they became the house band at the Cotton Club in 1934. By the time Parker arrived, WDIA had a rotating cast of rising stars called the Teen Town Singers. [Isaac Hayes](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-isaac-hayes-changed-soul-music) was at Manassas High, the Bar-Kays were at Booker T. Washington, and Carla Thomas, the Queen of Memphis Soul, was at Hamilton with Parker. One day after class, the glee-club director pulled Parker aside. She’d heard her sing with some boys from the school who’d started a band. You ought to sign up for the talent show at the Daisy Theatre on Beale Street, she said. First prize was an audition at Stax Records, the hottest studio in Memphis.
Winning was the easy part. For the audition at Stax, Parker sang “The One Who Really Loves You,” a jumpy [Motown](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/motown) number, written by Smokey Robinson, that was a hit for Mary Wells that year. But the producer was after something fresher. When Parker told him that she’d bring some new material next time, she was bluffing. She’d never written a song in her life. “That was the challenge,” she says. “This was the early sixties in Memphis, Tennessee. Where in America could you get that opportunity, regardless of the color of your skin? I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to become a female vocalist to rival Aretha and Gladys Knight. I wanted legs like [Tina Turner](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-untouchable-tina-turner). And I was not going to be outdone.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27720)
“We definitely weren’t that happy on our way up.”
Cartoon by Lila Ash
One afternoon, forty-four years later, Cheryl Pawelski was listening to a tape of old Stax recordings when an unfamiliar track came on. Pawelski was a producer for Concord Music Group in Los Angeles. She was putting together a fiftieth-anniversary set of Stax hits, and looking for unreleased recordings for other collections. Most of the Stax catalogue was ingrained in her memory: “Soul Man,” “Theme from Shaft,” “I’ll Take You There,” “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” It was music both blunt and seductive, plaintive and hard-hitting, driven by the world’s best house band, led by the multi-instrumentalist Booker T. Jones. The Motown sound was polished, upbeat, radio-friendly. Stax was grittier and less accommodating—in 1972, the studio threw a benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to commemorate the Watts riots, of 1965. If Motown was Hitsville, the saying went, Stax was Soulsville.
Most Stax hits were written by teams of songwriters and sung by performers like [Otis Redding](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/in-memory-of-otis-redding-and-his-revolution), Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, and the Staple Singers. But this song, written by Deanie Parker and Mack Rice, seemed to belong to an alternate history. It was a driving, full-throated duet called “Until I Lost You,” with strings and horns. It easily could have been a hit when it was written, in 1973, yet Pawelski had never heard it before. As she went through the Stax archives, she kept coming across recordings like this, marked as demos and sung by the songwriters themselves. Some were demos of songs that later became hits—raw, emphatic versions, often backed only by a guitar. Folk songs with a deeper pulse. Others, like “Until I Lost You,” had been fully fleshed out in the studio but never released. “They were cut every which way,” Pawelski said, when she told me about the demos a few years ago. “They are all fucking awesome.”
Cheryl Pawelski, the producer of the Stax collection “Written in Their Soul,” outside the Stax Museum.Photograph by Patricia Rainer
I’ve known Pawelski for more than twenty years. When we first met, she was dating my brother’s ex-wife, Audrey Bilger, an English professor and the drummer in an all-female blues band. They’re married now. Pawelski has her own label, Omnivore Recordings, and has won three Grammy Awards for Best Historical Album. Audrey is the president of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. In their house, every available storage space is stuffed with records, CDs, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes—more than seventy thousand in all. Pawelski says that she likes being a college president’s wife, sitting next to an astrophysicist one night and a rhetorician the next. But it’s hard to imagine her in the role. Her wardrobe seems to consist mostly of worn plaids and record-label T-shirts. She wears black rectangular glasses, her hair ruffled like a pile of straw, and charges around with her shoulders squared, her eyes fixed on the next thing and the next. She never seems to get enough sleep, and gives off an energy both frazzled and elated.
Music has always been a treasure hunt to her. As a thirteen-year-old in 1979, living in Milwaukee, she was already trading bootleg concert tapes with collectors across the country—“waiting for the next bag of cassettes from Omaha,” as she puts it. Her tastes were eclectic to the point of omnivory: ABBA, Ella Fitzgerald, Professor Longhair, the Clash, Krautrock, Afro pop—she loved it all. She would ride her bike to a local collector’s house, and they’d trade copies of tapes they’d bought and lists of ones they wanted. She was fascinated by outtakes—demos and discarded studio recordings that tape traders would toss in at the end of a side. “These were songs that I knew backward and forward,” she says. “But there would be a different guitar part, or lyrics that would wind up in an entirely different song. It brewed my little-kid brain. ‘That’s not the song! How did they do that?’ ”
Pawelski wanted to be part of that world, but she didn’t know how. She could sing a little and play guitar, but she knew that she wasn’t a gifted musician. She was obsessed with recordings but not that interested in making them. It was their secret history that consumed her—the story behind the story of the songs she loved. But how could you make a career out of that? “What do you do when you grow up in a sleepy Midwestern town with your ass on fire?” Pawelski says. “I was ambitious, but there is no track for doing what I do. There is no path that will take you there.”
She was on it already, as it turned out. She took a job as a temp at Capitol Records and worked her way up until she was in charge of catalogue development. When she arrived, in 1990, CDs were replacing vinyl as the dominant format, and there was great profit to be made from reissues and boxed sets. By the time she left, a decade later, CD sales had peaked. Songs could be shared online, and streaming services were on the way. Anyone could compile a greatest-hits collection now: it was just another playlist. What you couldn’t do was hear an artist’s unreleased recordings—the songs buried so deep in the vaults that even their keepers had forgotten they were there. Pawelski knew where to find them.
When Pawelski talks about vaults of recordings, I imagine vast underground facilities filled with miles of mechanized shelving. I picture endless rows of master tapes in cardboard boxes marked with barcodes and serial numbers. There are places like that. Universal Music Group keeps some of its masters at Iron Mountain, a 1.7-million-square-foot storage facility deep within an abandoned limestone mine in western Pennsylvania. But the tapes that interest Pawelski aren’t always so well preserved. Some were never logged by the studio or sent to a music publisher. Others were tossed out or misfiled. “A lot of these projects don’t exist if I don’t find them,” Pawelski says.
The Stax masters were recorded on professional audiotape, but the demos came in every condition and format: cassette tapes, studio tapes, quarter-inch home recordings. When Stax went bankrupt, in 1975, its catalogue was chopped apart. Atlantic Records owned all the master recordings made before 1968. The rest were sold to Fantasy Records and later to Concord Music Group. But the demos were scattered across the country. A few ended up in Iron Mountain and places like it. (“There are salt mines everywhere,” Pawelski says.) Some survived only on cassettes that were passed around Memphis for years. Most of the rest were owned by Rondor Music International, a publisher in L.A, but they’d been transferred to digital audiotape. Their original sources were destroyed. Worse, the digital tapes were a hodgepodge of recordings from various artists—everything from Broadway show tunes to songs by the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento. To sift out the Stax material, Pawelski would have to listen to every tape from start to finish. There were thirteen hundred tapes in all—nearly two thousand hours of music.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a23879)
“Comedy show after the beheading! Free with flyer!”
Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers
“Some projects, I just roll over and I’ve got a record,” Pawelski told me. “But the Stax one was pretty epic.” For the next fifteen years, whenever she was on a plane, train, or road trip, she would listen to a tape or two between stops. When she was home, she would play them while she was working. “It’s got to be horrible to live with me,” she says. “I’d be sitting at the dining-room table and Audrey would be grooving in the kitchen, making dinner, but she never got to hear a full song. As soon as I knew what a track was, I’d go on to the next, until I got to ‘Holy moly, listen to this!’ ”
There were a lot of those moments. By the time Pawelski listened to the last song on the thirteen hundredth tape—on a flight home from New York to Portland, as she recalls—she had found six hundred and sixty-five songs worth keeping. A buried treasure of soul. There were slinky R.&B. numbers and grinding blues, diaphanous ballads and floor-shaking shouters, backed by full horn sections. They were just demos, thrown together on the fly to convince a producer or a performer that a song was worth recording, but there was nothing tentative about them. Deanie Parker didn’t sound like an ordinary songwriter on “Until I Lost You.” She sounded like a star.
“So here’s the thing,” Pawelski says. “Everyone knows Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes. But do they know Homer Banks and Bettye Crutcher? Do they know Deanie Parker? To be able to honor some of these songwriters—it’s more than just getting a cool record out for me. This is the last Stax story. A story that hasn’t been told.”
The studio was an oasis, Parker thought. From the moment she walked in for her audition, in 1962, she could tell that Stax wasn’t like other places. Outside, on the streets of South Memphis, the cops would chase you away if you lingered too long on a corner; the shopkeepers kept an eye on your hands as you went down the aisles. Inside Stax, there was no time for all that. People were too busy making music. The studio was in a converted movie theatre, across the street from a barbershop where one of the Stax drummers used to shine shoes. Its cavernous space was subdivided by curtains and sound panels of pegboard and burlap. The men’s bathroom had been turned into an echo chamber; the concession stand was a record store. When the building was a theatre, it was for whites only, but the studio made no distinction. In every room, musicians Black and white were hashing out lyrics, honing bass lines, or bending over mixing boards, moving sliders into position. “It was magic,” Parker says.
The label had been founded four years earlier by the brother-and-sister team of Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. They started out in Stewart’s wife’s uncle’s garage, then moved to an old storeroom along a railroad track in Brunswick, twenty miles east of Memphis. To get the money for a recording console, Axton took out a second mortgage on her house. By the time Parker came for her audition, they had bought the movie theatre and christened their label Stax—short for Stewart and Axton. A series of hits had followed, including “Gee Whiz,” by Carla Thomas, and “Green Onions,” by Booker T. & the M.G.s. Atlantic Records had agreed to distribute Stax recordings nationally. (It would be years before Stewart realized that the distribution deal included ownership of the master tapes.) And in 1965 Al Bell, a former d.j. who was a natural salesman, was named the head of promotions. But it was clear to the artists by then that the real money wasn’t in selling records. It was in writing songs.
“We all realized it after we got that first royalty statement,” Parker says. “I mean, it was a no-brainer.” A recording artist made a few pennies on every record sold. But a songwriter earned royalties every time a song was covered by another musician or appeared on a recording or on sheet music. It was an endlessly branching revenue stream. Soon, the studio’s musicians were pairing off to collaborate, vying with one another to write the best tunes: William Bell and Booker T. Jones, Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper, Homer Banks and Bettye Crutcher, Isaac Hayes and David Porter, Mack Rice and Deanie Parker. They met in the Stax offices and studios and at the Four Way grill, where they liked to eat lunch. They went to the Lorraine Motel—one of the few such places in Memphis that allowed Black guests—and holed up in a room until a song was done.
The idea could come from anywhere. Bell and Jones wrote “Born Under a Bad Sign” for the blues guitarist Albert King in 1967, when astrology and mysticism were thick in the air. “I had a verse and chorus and bass line,” Bell told me. “So Booker and I went to his house and finished it that night. Albert cut it the next day. He couldn’t actually read, so I had to sing it in his ear. In a couple of takes, he had it down and put his iconic guitar on it.” Floyd and Cropper wrote “Knock on Wood” at the Lorraine, in a honeymoon suite covered in plush red velvet. A storm was blowing outside, and Floyd recalled how that used to scare him as a boy. “I told Steve that my brother and I, when it started thundering and lightning like that, we would hide under the bed,” Floyd says. Before long, another verse was done: “Our love is better than any love I know. It’s like thunder, lightnin’, the way you love me is frightenin’.”
Cropper was born on a farm in Missouri, Floyd in rural Alabama; Jones was the son of a high-school science teacher; Bell had planned to become a doctor. Yet they shared the same language. “We had the same input, heard the same radio,” Bell says. “One day gospel, the next day blues, then jazz, rhythm and blues, and country-and-Western. That was the beauty of it. We were all family.”
For the most part, at least. Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton were white, as were the members of the original house band, the Mar-Keys. The songwriters were all Black, aside from Cropper, Bobby Manuel, and a few other musicians who contributed to songs. Music was their only common ground. “I had two different childhoods,” Manuel told me. As a boy, he went to all-white schools and lived on an all-white block. Elvis Presley lived a few doors down, at 2414 Lamar Avenue; Manuel used to sneak over and hide in the bushes outside his window, just to hear him sing. But the Manuels’ house backed onto an African American neighborhood, known as Orange Mound. So Manuel would often head over there to eat fried-bologna sandwiches with his friends Butch and Donny, and to listen to their uncle, Willie Mitchell, play the blues. “Some of my white friends would say, ‘Why do you play with those guys?’ But it wasn’t such a thing to me,” Manuel says. “When Willie came to Memphis, it was just like Elvis coming.”
The other musicians had similar stories. By day, they lived separate lives in a segregated city. By night, they met onstage at the Flamingo Room or the Plantation Inn, or traded solos in jam sessions at the Thunderbird or Hernando’s Hideaway. It was only at Stax that their two worlds came together—that they could work as closely, and equally, as they played. They just had to be good enough. “It was hard to get in there, man. I felt fortunate,” Manuel told me. “That was the beginning.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a25658)
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
For Deanie Parker, music meant a different sort of double life. After her audition at Stax, she went home, sat at the white piano that her mother had bought her—“It was the biggest damn thing you’ve ever seen”—and wrote a bouncy little love song called “My Imaginary Guy.” For the B-side, she wrote a slow tune, “Until You Return,” and she recorded them both in the studio. The single became a regional hit. She wrote her next song with Steve Cropper—a churning torch ballad called “I’ve Got No Time to Lose”—and thought that it would be her follow-up single. Instead, Carla Thomas walked through the studio one day and heard Cropper playing the chords. Thomas was the studio’s biggest star. When she asked if she could record the song, the answer, of course, was yes. “Here’s the thing you must understand,” Parker says. “Jim Stewart would have volunteered to be in a fight with a bear to get the best song for Carla.”
Stardom owes as much to circumstance as to talent. Fifty years later, it’s hard to choose between Parker’s demo of “I’ve Got No Time to Lose” and Thomas’s official release. Thomas finds a deeper, steadier groove, with the chorus crooning back her lines and punching in on the offbeat: “No! No! No!” The horns are fuller, swelling and fading in the background, and Cropper’s guitar fills are more intricate and cleanly worked out. But Parker’s version sounds more heartfelt, more true. She leans into the words like she’s talking out loud, too distraught to care what people think: “I’ve got to find my man, make him understand. I’ve got to try and see if he’ll come back to me.” When two voices join in—“No time to lose, no time to lose”—they sound less like backup singers than like girlfriends sitting on her bed, echoing her words as she weeps.
“I’ve Got No Time to Lose” was a hit for Thomas. For Parker, it marked the end of her dream of becoming the next Aretha. She wasn’t prolific enough to keep writing hits, and she didn’t have the stomach for touring. She’d been on a couple of road trips with Thomas, Otis Redding, and BookerT.& the M.G.s, but she could never get used to being a Black musician in the South. “You couldn’t check into a hotel or motel. You couldn’t go in the front door of a restaurant. You couldn’t go into a rest room in a service station,” she says. “And, hell, if you were driving a luxurious automobile, you were really asking for trouble.” Thomas had her father, Rufus, to protect her—they toured together as Rufus and Carla. Parker was alone and only eighteen years old. After the shows, the guys in the band would go out drinking or hang with groupies. Parker and Thomas had to stay back at the hotel and lock themselves in.
“I learned very quickly that I wasn’t going to be a success on the road,” Parker told me. “I didn’t have the stamina to deal with it. Not in that time, in that place.” Others kept at it. Thomas was still touring long after her father quit performing with her. Bettye Crutcher, Stax’s only full-time female songwriter, continued composing while raising three sons as a single mother and working night shifts as a nurse. Her songs for Sam & Dave, the Staple Singers, and others would later be covered or sampled by everyone from [Joan Baez](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/joan-baez-is-still-doing-beautiful-cool-stuff) to the [Wu-Tang Clan](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/wu-tang-clan). For Black women in an industry as cutthroat and unforgiving as music, success required more than talent and luck. It required sheer, unwavering drive.
Eddie Floyd and William Bell, photographed in 1973.Photograph from David Reed Archive / Alamy
Parker wasn’t that single-minded. She enrolled in business classes at Memphis State University, worked part time in the studio’s record store—the nerve center of Stax, where Estelle Axton played demos and new singles for customers and tracked their shifting tastes—and eventually established the Stax publicity department. “Those were the early days at Stax, when things hadn’t galvanized yet,” she told me. “We were all searching, all trying to master something, trying to define that Memphis sound.” Parker was essential to the task. She knew the music from the inside, and she was an expert at shuttling between worlds. She would chaperone the artists on interviews and promotional tours—Johnnie Taylor and Albert King were a particular handful—and help explain their music to an indifferent or openly hostile press. “You can tell when a journalist really doesn’t give a shit about you when they won’t even look in your Black face, and that was typical,” Parker says. “Sitting on a gold mine in Memphis, Tennessee!”
They paid attention eventually. Hits like “Knock on Wood” and Mack Rice’s “Mustang Sally” were hard to ignore, and Parker had the eloquence and the poise to promote the rest. “Deanie is Memphis friggin’ royalty,” Pawelski says. “She’s the reason, beyond the music, that Stax has such a huge footprint.” Parker would release only one more single under her own name: a sultry girl-group number called “Each Step I Take.” But she never stopped writing songs—including “Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas” for the Staple Singers and “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” which Sam & Dave recorded. “I’m not the kind of person who can sit in a room like Carole King or Eddie Floyd, doing it over and over,” Parker says. “A song comes to you in crazy ways and crazy places. Somebody might have just cussed you out, or made great love to you, or given you a piece of wisdom. I cannot plan for it. I just think”—she held up the flat of her hand—“let me do it when the spirit hits!”
The first time I heard the Stax demos, I was in a studio built by Pawelski’s audio engineer, Michael Graves, in a garage behind his house in Altadena, California. Pawelski and I were slouched in wicker chairs facing a huge monitor on the wall. Graves was perched at a long desk in front of us, manipulating an iPad and an audio interface. When he played the first song—a demo of the 1966 hit “634-5789”—a spectrogram began to scroll across the screen, showing the song’s rising and falling frequencies.
Pawelski and Graves were there to master the demos for a seven-CD collection called “Written in Their Soul.” Pawelski had managed to winnow her hoard of six hundred and sixty-five songs to a hundred and forty-six. “That hurt,” she said. “That left a mark.” Fifty-eight were demos of official Stax releases; twenty-two were demos of songs on other labels; the other sixty-six were never released. “634-5789” was from the first batch. The hit version was sung by Wilson Pickett; the demo was by Eddie Floyd. Steve Cropper, who wrote the song with Floyd, played guitar on both takes, but the demo lacked the tight, chugging rhythm of the official release. The reason to hear it was Floyd. His singing had a sweet, almost bashful quality that belied the silky self-assurance underneath. Where Pickett yipped and rasped and leaped to falsetto, Floyd’s voice was full of pleading sincerity. “If you need a little lovin’, call on me,” he sang. “I’ll be right here at home.”
Graves paused the song and scrolled back through the spectrogram. He zoomed in on a jagged section where he’d heard a click—a frequency spike between five hundred and a thousand hertz—and smoothed it down. One click gone, a thousand more to go. Tall, fine-boned, and pale, with rose-gold spectacles and a tuft of blond hair, Graves worked with delicate, unhurried precision. When I first met him, in 2007, he was mastering an album of folk songs called “Art of Field Recording,” for which he later won a Grammy. (He has since won three more, two of them with Pawelski.) He dealt mostly with old 78 records back then, trying to unearth music from beneath decades of nicks and scratches and needle wear. Pawelski’s projects posed a different problem. The tracks that she collected were almost always on tape, but in a bewildering variety of formats. To play them, Graves needed a battery of devices that hadn’t been made in years. “People talk about tapes disintegrating,” he said. “They will outlive all of us. It’s the machines that are the bottleneck.” His house was a museum of obsolete technology, populated with devices of every shape and vintage: MiniDisc, Hi8, *DAT*, *ADAT*, and DTRS players, and quarter-inch, half-inch, and two-inch reel-to-reel players. “You can go down a serious rabbit hole of collecting weird, esoteric gear,” Graves said.
Without the machines, the music would be lost. But even if you had the right gear and kept it running—“The know-how to fix these machines is almost gone,” Graves said—the recordings could sound terrible. Some were made on noisy boom boxes: you could hear the thunk of the Record button. Some were transferred to digital tape at fluctuating speeds, so the music wobbled out of pitch. Some were recorded on four-track tape but were transferred to two tracks, so two songs would play at once, or one would play forward and the other backward. The newer the tape, the worse its condition. Starting in the eighties, a new adhesive was used to bind magnetic particles to tapes. This absorbed moisture over time, rendering some tapes unplayable. Digital tape was even worse. An analog recording might sound a little dull after a few years, but digital tape lost whole chunks of code. “Either the sound goes away or it’s an ear-piercing screech,” Graves said. “Whatever is trying to read that tape just says, ‘Nope.’ ”
Fortunately, he had some digital tools to compensate. If a track went silent for a few measures, Graves might clone a similar passage elsewhere in the song and drop it into the gap. If the song was missing a beginning or an end, he could create one out of a guitar riff or a drum fill. He was like a record producer working on a miniature scale. At one point, Graves pulled up a demo of a song called “Coming Together.” Written by Homer Banks and Carl Hampton, it was an earnest appeal for peace, set to a sinuous groove. “Why must bullets fly before we live as one?” Banks sang. “Why must so many die now, before we ban the guns?” Banks was a Vietnam veteran and a former gospel singer. He sang with keening conviction, but the recording was strangely muffled. Pawelski grimaced. “Now you have to unfuck that for me,” she said. Graves laughed. “My life in noise.”
He suspected that when the original tape was transferred to digital it was spooled onto the player incorrectly, flipping the tape inside out. “It sounds like a pillow was held over the speaker,” he said. He tried boosting the upper frequencies to lift the music out of the murk. That brightened the instruments but added a loud hiss. A digital de-noiser could get rid of that, Graves said, but raising the top end had also distorted the singing. To fix it, he needed a program of more recent invention, known as a de-mixer. It took the original recording and disentangled its parts, sending each instrument to a separate track. Graves could now work on the vocal line alone, clarifying the sound without distorting it. When he was done, he dropped it back into the mix and moved on to the next song.
“‘Demo’ stands for ‘demonstration,’ ” Pawelski said. “This is not going to sound like it was made last week.” Yet most of the recordings were startlingly clear. The rock and folk demos that I was used to hearing were mostly home recordings. The singer strummed a guitar, or played some chords on a piano, and mumbled a few cryptic lines into a cassette deck. These were nothing like that. All but a few of the demos were professionally recorded, in the same studios as the official Stax releases. Homer Banks, William Bell, and the other songwriters had all been singers first, and the musicians were a crack unit, always on call. Al Jackson, Jr., the drummer in the M.G.s, lived just around the corner from the studio. “It’d be two in the morning and we’d call him up, say, ‘We’ve got something going!’ ” Eddie Floyd told me. “Twenty minutes later, he’s walking through the door.”
On official releases, the arrangements were more intricate, more subtly fused: vocals, guitar, horns, and rhythm section, all interlaced in a shimmering fabric. “This music is so much about the groove, about the underlying bass and guitar,” Manuel told me. “It took a long time to get right—it could take twenty or thirty tries. It had to have that magic, the right lick for that moment, and it hooked you. You couldn’t sit still.”
The demos didn’t always have that magic, but they had their own sort of potency. These weren’t just sketches or aide-mémoire. They were audition tapes—a writer’s one chance to sell a song to an artist or a producer. Yet they were never meant to be released. Even the best songs that Pawelski found had long since been filed and forgotten. She could dust them off and restore their sound, but she sometimes had no idea who the musicians were, or who wrote the songs.
For that, she needed Deanie Parker.
“I want this to be good, but not too good,” Parker said, setting a Crockpot full of spaghetti on a table. “I don’t want them to think that they’re here to fill up.” We were standing at a buffet station in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, waiting for the other Stax songwriters to arrive. Built in 2003 on the site of the former studio, the museum is part music school, part performance space, archive, and memorabilia collection. (BookerT. Jones’s Hammond organ and Cropper’s Telecaster sat in glass cases along the walls.) Parker had swept in a few minutes earlier in black pants and a sunflower-yellow top, her shoulders wrapped in a jewel-toned silk scarf. Her hair was pure white and pulled back into a French roll, her round cheeks still unlined at seventy-six. “I’m responsible for the mood food,” she said. She took two bottles of strawberry Fanta from a shopping bag and plunked them on the table. “We’ll have to toast each other with red pop.”
An elegant older gentleman, with a snowy beard and a brocaded vest, sauntered over and lifted the lid on the Crockpot. “I hope it’s edible,” he said.
“Henderson, that was not the right thing to say.”
“What would be nice is some bologna and crackers.”
“You can get your own little freaky food.”
Henderson Thigpen was one of Parker’s early collaborators at Stax. They wrote their first song together in 1966—“It’s Catching,” sung by Mable John—when Thigpen was eighteen. He had grown up on a cotton farm in Red Banks, Mississippi, writing poetry and reciting it in the fields. “I was a mama’s boy,” he told me. As soon as he graduated from high school, he started taking the Greyhound to Memphis every weekend, just to hang around Stax and learn how to write songs. Parker eventually took him under her wing. Bobby Manuel taught him some guitar, and Thigpen went on to co-write some of the label’s last hits, including “Woman to Woman,” by Shirley Brown, which reached No. 1 in 1974. Thigpen was now seventy-five and living back on the family farm. He had come up from Mississippi at Parker’s request to help identify Pawelski’s demos. They hadn’t heard some of the songs in more than fifty years.
Pawelski walked past us on her way to the archive—she’d spent the day there, looking for photographs of the songwriters. “We just saw you partying with Janis Joplin,” she told Parker. Parker laughed and fell in behind her, along with Thigpen. “I couldn’t keep up!” she said, “When I heard about the after-party? That wasn’t my pay grade.” The pictures that Pawelski had found were mostly black-and-white, with an occasional Kodachrome thrown in. It was hard to believe that they were half a century old. The people looked so vibrantly alive: Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers, and others less known but equally dashing, draped on couches and standing on street corners, scribbling in notebooks and gathered around microphones. They wore beads and headbands, porkpie hats and department-store dresses, seemingly unaware that they were future royalty.
Deanie Parker and Bettye Crutcher, photographed in 1963, at the Rivermount Hotel in Memphis.Photograph courtesy Deanie Parker collection
“You see these really square-looking people next to really groovy-looking people,” Pawelski said. “And you think, What’s happening here? But everything in this picture is serving the music. That’s the privilege of being in those rooms. The only qualifiers are how good you are.” Bobby Manuel had joined us and was bent over Pawelski’s shoulders beside Parker and Thigpen, looking at the pictures. There was one of Manuel as a lanky young hipster in a cowboy shirt, with a scruffy mustache. He was rounder now, with silver hair and shy, thoughtful eyes, but still dapper in a suède jacket. “There’s O.B. McClinton,” he said, pointing to a rugged-looking man with long sideburns and a heavy overbite. McClinton was Stax’s only Black country artist—its answer to Charley Pride, the RCA star.
“Lord, I hated to get hung up with O.B.,” Parker said.
“He would keep you forever.”
“I did not like to shake his hand. He had the hand of a reptile. Cold!”
Music could sometimes blur the lines between genders. A good song was a good song, whether it was written by Isaac Hayes or by Bettye Crutcher. As long as women like Carla Thomas and [Mavis Staples](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/the-gospel-according-to-mavis-staples) were producing hits, all the writers courted them. The demos were full of musical cross-dressing, as male songwriters sang lyrics meant for women, and vice versa. “We women work hard every day, doing our very best,” Homer Banks complained in “Too Much Sugar for a Dime.” “But you men will buy tires for your automobiles and get mad if we buy a dress.”
Still, role-play wasn’t the same as real equality. Parker’s mood food was part of a long tradition of women taking care of men at Stax. As a publicist, Parker was everyone’s champion and mother confessor. “They are interesting creatures, and you know their temperature,” she said. “I can’t remember anybody storming out of the office, but whining, yes. Whining was common. Some of us can’t accept our own failures.” Even Crutcher, who died last fall, and who was one of the label’s best and most prolific writers, sometimes needed extra leverage to get her songs heard. “Bettye was soft-spoken, and the writers protected their turf,” Parker said. “So she would cook a pot of spaghetti. That’s what she would do. And when she had finished feeding these jokers”—she arched an eyebrow at Henderson and Manuel—“they were ready to cut anything.”
The songwriters took their seats around a conference table in the museum’s main gallery. Parker, Thigpen, and Manuel sat next to a video feed of William Bell, at his home in Atlanta, wearing shades and a black baseball cap. Pawelski was beside Robert Gordon, the author of the 2013 book “Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion.” Gordon and Parker would be writing the demo collection’s liner notes together. “Are you going to doctor the demos up to make them sound better?” Thigpen wanted to know.
“I would never think to add any instrumentation,” Pawelski said.
“I just had to ask. Because I know some of those demos.”
“Henderson, let me tell you, you sound great,” Parker said. “If I hadn’t been so in love with Johnnie Taylor, I would have gone for you.” She lifted her cup of red soda and offered a toast to another forty years. Then Pawelski played the first song.
It was a girl-group number backed by a bluesy honky-tonk piano, called “You Make a Strong Girl Weak.” Isaac Hayes and David Porter were the songwriters, but who were the singers? Manuel guessed the Soul Children. Or was it Jeanne & the Darlings? “That makes every kind of sense,” Parker said. Jeanne Dolphus, the group’s leader, was a home-economics teacher from Arkansas who sewed the band’s costumes at night, she said. “They wore everything alike, and they were *not* fashion designers. Let me tell you something: Henderson says Mississippi is slow. Arkansas is from the *dinosaur* age.”
And so it went. Pawelski would play a demo, names would fly around the table—“David Porter!” “Byrd Burton!” “That’s Crop on the guitar!”—and a flood of reminiscences would follow. That jangly piano part must have been recorded in Studio C; it had an old brown upright in it. But that flabby bass sound was definitely from Studio B—it never had much bottom end. A high voice with a bit of a quaver came over the speakers, and suddenly it was as if Carl Smith, who wrote “Higher and Higher” and “Rescue Me,” was standing there in the room, with his oversized glasses and boyish grin. And that deep moan? It could only be Mack Rice, mouthing his improbable rhymes—thrown, gone, own, telephone. The longer they listened, the more the gallery around them seemed to fade, replaced by the dusky halls and echoing rooms of the old theatre. Every song was a memory palace, every instrument a key to a different door—though not always the same one for every listener.
“That sounds like Jeanne again.”
“Not unless she was taking hormones.”
At one point, Parker asked to hear “Woman to Woman,” Thigpen’s biggest hit. The song was inspired by a conversation that he’d overheard between his second wife and one of her friends. “It was just like when men say, ‘Let’s talk it out man to man,’ only this was woman to woman,” he said. In the demo, Thigpen delivered the opening monologue in a gently aggrieved voice—a wounded lover trying to talk sense into a rival: “Barbara, this is Shirley.... I was going through my old man’s pockets this morning, and I just happened to find your name and number. So, woman to woman... it’s only fair that I let you know that the man you’re in love with, he’s mine, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.”
“This is going to be on the album?”
“Yeah.”
Thigpen covered his face with his hand. But then, after a moment, his voice on the recording began to sing—a rich, warm baritone with a delicate vibrato: “Woman to woman, can’t you see where I’m coming from? Woman to woman, ain’t that the same thing you would’ve done?” The other songwriters were snapping their fingers now, as the bass and the drums found their groove and Thigpen’s voice rose to a soft, clear falsetto. He looked up and grinned. “That’s the money note right there,” he said.
“Woman to Woman” was the studio’s final hit. A year and a half later, Stax was forced into bankruptcy, done in by mounting debt, bad distribution deals, lawsuits, and accusations of bank fraud and tax evasion. Federal marshals served an eviction order on January 12, 1976, while Manuel was rehearsing in the studio. They marched him and the other employees to the parking lot in single file, with Jim Stewart in front, and padlocked the doors behind them. Parker’s utopia was long gone. The dream of music as a refuge from racism and violence was always a fragile thing. At Stax, it was shattered eight years earlier, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel—the same place where so many songwriters, Black and white, had done their best work together.
On the night that King was shot, Parker and Crutcher went to the studio to work on a song for Albert King. “I had to get to Stax,” Parker later said. “I didn’t even think about stopping at home. I needed to be with the people I loved, the people I trusted—with the people who could understand what I was feeling.” A curfew had been declared to prevent rioting, and Parker could hear the National Guard walking on the roof above the studio. If the soldiers hadn’t discovered them and sent them home, she says, she and Crutcher would have kept writing through the night.
The Stax demos traced the full arc of that history—from hope and denial to disillusion and protest. The songs were messy, unfiltered, incomplete. The voices faltered and the musicians missed notes. By the end of our session at the museum, no one doubted that the demos were worth releasing. But the question remained: Why now and not then? What was missing from these songs in the first place?
Earlier that week, I had gone to see Steve Cropper in Nashville, where he now lives. He was too busy to come to the museum, he said, and wasn’t especially interested in hearing the demos: “If I’d known they’d release them, I would have erased them.” Tall and craggy, with a balding pate, a white beard, and a ponytail, Cropper looked like an old moonshiner, or an elder in some austere religious sect, but he spoke with easy, self-deprecating bluntness. He was a ubiquitous figure in the stories about Stax—hanging around the studio at all hours, playing guitar or running the board, pairing up with other writers at will, like a free radical in a pool of more stable molecules. “Cropper was convenient,” Parker told me. “He was always around. Did he help with my lyrics? Not a lot. But he would fill in the pieces that were missing. He could sharpen your song. He was like the shoelaces on the shoe—ain’t no good if the shoe doesn’t hold together.”
Cropper had the same refining touch on the guitar. He wasn’t a flashy player, but he knew just what a tune needed—whether a quick rockabilly fill or the two-note slide at the beginning of “Soul Man.” Cropper was always working on new material. When we met, he was recording a tune with his engineer, Eddie Gore, in the historic RCA Studio A building, where Chet Atkins and [Jerry Lee Lewis](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-lee-lewiss-life-of-rock-and-roll-and-disrepute) used to record. He was hoping to pitch his song to Shemekia Copeland, who’d had a minor hit with a chorus that began, “I’m drivin’ out of Nashville with a body in the trunk.” Cropper’s song was of a milder sort. He’d come up with the idea at a bar down the street, watching a young woman dance in shoes that were too big for her. He and Gore had recorded the demo that day—an easy, mid-tempo ballad, with Cropper’s voice croaking amiably over the beat:
> Now I’m dancing in my mother’s shoes
> Looking for someone to hold on to
> Wondering what Mama would do
> Now that I’m dancing in my mama’s shoes.
“I know I can’t sing,” he said, switching off the tape. “I can write a pretty good song, but I can’t sing shit from Shinola.” But then this demo was never meant to be heard—not by the public anyway. As long as Copeland, or some other singer, could hear the gist of the song in the demo, it had done its work. Cropper was a perfectionist by nature, a fixer, a finisher. He had no patience for rough edges or unruly inspiration. Look at “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks, Gore said. When that song, written by Dewayne Blackwell and Earl Bud Lee, became a smash in the late eighties, everyone assumed that it was a surefire hit. Who could resist that melody and title? But another singer, David Wayne Chamberlain, had recorded the song before Brooks did, and no one bought it. Success was all in the execution. “As far as I’m concerned, anything I write can be a hit,” Cropper said.
The Stax demos tell a different story. It’s hard not to feel, as you listen to them, that success is arbitrary, ephemeral. That inspiration is what lasts. Toward the end of the session in the museum, Pawelski played a recording that no one could identify. The singer’s name wasn’t written down, and he never sang at Stax again. Pawelski suspected that the demo was taped at one of the “neighborhood auditions” that the studio held on Saturday afternoons, open to anyone with a song. “Was on a cold Saturday night and we just had a fight,” the singer began. “You walked out on me, knowing that you killed my heart with grief.” His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter. He sounded hopeless, abandoned, as if he knew that there was no point in begging, but he couldn’t help but do so. “Just walk on back,” he sang, and a pair of voices joined in to help carry the tune. “Walk on back. I don’t care how long it takes if you just walk on back.”
It was only one song, salvaged from a pile of old rejects. The arrangement was simple, the artist unknown. But if it lacked the polish of a full Stax production, it had something more elemental: urgency and need. Like Parker and Thigpen, this singer knew that he had one chance to be heard. One chance to strip a song to its essence. He and his bandmates must have practiced for days, in a bedroom or a basement or on an empty street corner, till their harmonies chimed like bells and their voices dipped and swooped in perfect synchrony. “Walk on baa-aack.” For just one take, they sounded as good as anyone. “That first take had the feel,” Eddie Floyd told me. “The way I thought of it, every song was a demo. It was always the first time.” ♦
*Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.*
ROUND HILL, Va. — They said goodbye to Aimee outside her elementary school, watching nervously as she joined the other children streaming into a low brick building framed by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Christina and Aaron Beall stood among many families resuming an emotional but familiar routine: the first day of full-time, in-person classes since public schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic.
But for the Bealls, that morning in late August 2021 carried a weight incomprehensible to the parents around them. Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knew it would be years before she understood how much he meant it — understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt.
Aaron and Christina Beall pose with their daughter, Aimee, then 6, on her first day at Round Hill Elementary School on Aug. 26, 2021. (Christina Beall)
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.
[Press Enter to skip to end of carousel](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/christian-home-schoolers-revolt/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjM2NTY2MzMiLCJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjg1NTkyMDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNjg2ODg3OTk5LCJpYXQiOjE2ODU1OTIwMDAsImp0aSI6IjlmMTc5ZTkzLWQxODQtNDhiYi1hMTdmLTc0ZDYwNTRhN2ZiYyIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9lZHVjYXRpb24vaW50ZXJhY3RpdmUvMjAyMy9jaHJpc3RpYW4taG9tZS1zY2hvb2xlcnMtcmV2b2x0LyJ9.3R_BYAAaUIAeGMFUzNMNcEMBk084U59R3B5fKs_z_xg&itid=gfta#end-react-aria4241862020-1)
###### About this series and home-schooling’s rise in America
1/4
End of carousel
At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern [home-schooling movement](https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/06/11/parent-rights-home-schooling/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
Aimee Beall, 7, left, and her brothers finish getting ready for school while their father, Aaron, helps Oliver, 5, at their home in Northern Virginia. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post )
Ezra Beall, 9, climbs into the family car to head off to school earlier this year. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis.
“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.”
Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.
And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry.
Across the country, [interest in home schooling](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/27/pandemic-homeschool-black-asian-hispanic-families/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ [frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/01/08/omicron-working-parents-schools/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.
But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.
\[[Tell us about your home-schooling experiences](https://wapo.st/homeschoolingstories?itid=lk_interstitial_enhanced-template)\]
Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a [“Joshua Generation”](https://www.amazon.com/Joshua-Generation-Restoring-Christian-Leadership/dp/0805426086?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.
Christina (Comfort) Beall with Home School Legal Defense Association founder Michael Farris at her graduation from Patrick Henry College, which was founded by Farris to cater to Christian home-schoolers. (Family photo)
Home schooling today is [more diverse, demographically and ideologically](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/27/pandemic-homeschool-black-asian-hispanic-families/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), than it was in the heyday of conservative Christian activism. Yet those activists remain extraordinarily influential.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s [culture wars](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/18/pandemic-schools-parental-involvement/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
But what should be a moment of triumph for conservative Christian home-schoolers has been undermined by an unmistakable backlash: the desertion and denunciations of the very children they said they were saving.
Former home-schoolers have been at the forefront of those arguing for [greater oversight of home schooling](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/these-activists-want-greater-home-school-monitoring-parent-groups-say-no-way/2017/03/01/b6d23c6e-e747-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), forming the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make their case.
“As an adult I can say, ‘No. What happened to me as a child was wrong,’” said Samantha Field, the coalition’s government relations director.
Arkansas state Rep. Jim Bob Duggar and his wife, Michelle, lead 12 of their 13 children to a polling place in Springdale, Ark., in 2002. (April L. Brown/AP)
Bill Gothard, founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), an ultraconservative Christian organization. (Institute in Basic Life Principles)
Earlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo — familiar to millions of TV viewers from the reality show “19 Kids and Counting” — published a memoir in which she harshly criticized Bill Gothard, a pivotal but now disgraced figure in conservative Christian home schooling whose teachings her parents followed. Beginning a decade ago, [Gothard was accused of sexual abuse and harassment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/01/06/new-charges-allege-religious-leader-who-has-ties-to-the-duggars-sexually-abused-women/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) by dozens of women — allegations the minister vehemently denied.
Farris said it is not uncommon for children who grow up in oppressively patriarchal households to reject or at least moderate their parents’ beliefs. However, he said such families are a minority in the home-schooling movement and are often considered extreme even by other conservative Christians.
“I view this as the fringe of the fringe,” Farris said. “And every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.”
Aaron and Christina Beall, pictured in the months before their wedding in 2012. (Family photo)
Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.
Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”
The Bealls knew that many home-schooling families didn’t share the religious doctrines that had so warped their own lives. But they also knew that the same laws that had failed to protect them would continue to fail other children.
“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” Christina said. “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”
Christina had felt no urge to escape when, at the age of 15, she listed her “Requirements for my husband” in neat, looping script on a ruled sheet of notebook paper.
“Must want me to be a full-time homemaker & only have an outside job if required or instructed by my Potter,” she wrote, referring to biblical verses that liken humans to clay in the hands of God. “Must believe in ‘full & unconditional’ surrender of our # of children to God Almighty.” And: “Must desire to homeschool our children.”
Christina’s list of requirements for her husband, written when she was 15. (Peter Jamison/The Washington Post)
The list is a blueprint of what she had been taught about the proper ambitions of a woman: to bear and raise children while shielding them from what those around her called “government schools.” She felt both hopeful and nervous when, several years later, her father, Derrick Comfort, came home with news: He had just met with a young man who had been raised with those same ideals — and who wanted Christina to be his wife.
Aaron was shy and cerebral, a self-taught web developer who had grown up in Fairfax County, Va., had never attended college and, at age 26, still lived with his parents. He barely knew Christina Comfort, the oldest of eight children on her family’s 10-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A graduate of [Patrick Henry College](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/05/26/patrick-henrys-first-graduates/6e1b0733-522e-4b57-ac85-43cc587af987/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) — founded by Farris in Virginia to cater to Christian home-schoolers — she taught math and writing to her siblings and did chores around the farm. She prayed while riding a lawn mower for God to send her a husband.
The Comfort and Beall families were both active in a religious community led by Gary Cox, an evangelical pastor and pioneer of Maryland’s home-schooling movement. Christina was a graduate of Cox’s home education network, Walkersville Christian Family Schools, while Aaron began attending Cox’s church in rural northern Maryland as a teenager. The minister exerted a powerful influence over his congregation and students, teaching that children live in divinely ordained subjection to the rule of their parents.
\[[The Christian home-schooling world that shaped Dan Cox](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/03/dan-cox-christian-homeschooling-maryland/?itid=lk_interstitial_enhanced-template)\]
Cox — who still operates a home-schooling organization, now called Wellspring Christian Family Schools — declined repeated interview requests. Last year his son, [Dan Cox](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/14/dan-cox-nominee-maryland/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), a home-schooled Maryland state delegate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, won the Republican gubernatorial primary. He went on to lose in a landslide to Democrat Wes Moore.
During Aaron and Christina’s “courtship” — a period of chaperoned contact that served as a prelude to formal engagement — they seemed ready to fulfill their parents’ hopes. Eating calamari in Annapolis or touring Colonial Williamsburg, they talked about what their future would include (home schooling) and what it would not (music with a beat that can be danced to). But signs soon emerged of the unimaginable rupture that lay ahead.
On a spring afternoon in 2012, the couple sat in a small church in Queenstown, Md. In preparation for marriage, they were attending a three-day seminar on “Gospel-Driven Parenting” run by Chris Peeler, a minister whose family was part of Gary Cox’s home-schooling group. The workshop covered a range of topics, including the one they were now studying: “Chastisement.”
“The use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child’s will,” stated the handout that they bent over together in the church. “One way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.”
Bible verses were cited in support of corporal punishment. But Christina had misgivings.
“I really don’t think I can be a parent,” she wrote to Aaron in the margins of the handout. “It just feels like you have to be, like, hardened.”
“YES! YOU! CAN!” Aaron wrote back.
The use of the “rod” — interpreted by different people as a wooden spoon, dowel, belt, rubber hose or other implement — was a common practice among the conservative Christian home-schoolers Aaron and Christina knew, and one they had both experienced regularly in their own families.
The elder Bealls and Comforts did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the discipline they used with their children and the decision by Aaron and Christina to embrace public education. Aaron’s older brother, Joshua — who Aaron said still home-schools his children — did not return calls. Aaron’s other siblings could not be reached for comment. Christina’s siblings, some of whom have also left her parents’ home, either declined to comment or could not be reached.
Aaron actually shared Christina’s qualms. He knew that the term parents in the movement casually used for discipline, “spankings,” did not capture the childhood terror of being struck several times a week — sometimes more, sometimes less — with what he describes as a shortened broomstick for disobeying commands or failing to pay attention to his schoolwork.
The memory of waiting as a small child outside his parents’ bedroom for his mother to summon him in; the fear that his transgressions might be enough to incur what he called “killer bee” spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin; his efforts to obey the order to remain immobile as he was hit — all these sensations and emotions seeped into his bones, creating a deep conviction that those who fail to obey authority pay an awful price.
“For a long time, I’ve wondered why I was so unable to think for myself in this environment,” he says today, attributing the shortcoming to “learning that even starting to think, or disagree with authorities, leads to pain — leads to physical and real pain that you cannot escape.”
Now, on the threshold of parenthood — Christina would become pregnant within two weeks of their wedding on Sept. 29, 2012 — the couple’s reservations about “chastisement” could no longer be ignored. As a wedding gift, they said, Aaron’s brother and sister-in-law had given them [“To Train Up a Child,”](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=to+train+up+a+child&hvadid=616991107190&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9009859&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=17972697530634531578&hvtargid=kwd-356945225&hydadcr=24656_13611721&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_nzzw8dyfh_e&itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) by the popular Christian home-schooling authors Michael and Debi Pearl.
The Pearls advocate hitting children with tree branches, belts and other “instruments of love” to instill obedience, and recommend that toddlers who take slowly to potty training be washed outdoors with cold water from a garden hose. Their book advocates “training sessions” in which infants, as soon as they are old enough to crawl, are placed near a desired object and repeatedly struck with a switch if they disobey commands not to touch it.
The Pearls have defended their methods, saying they are not meant to encourage brutality and, when properly applied, reduce the frequency with which parents must later discipline their kids.
Aaron and Christina did not follow the Pearls’ advice when their first child, Ezra, was born. Nor did they take on authoritarian roles with their second, Aimee, or third, Oliver. All were home-schooled, albeit in less isolation than their parents: Christina joined co-ops with other Christian mothers in Northern Virginia.
But by the time the Bealls had Aurelia, their fourth child, Aaron — now a successful software engineer whose job had enabled the family to buy a four-bedroom house in Loudoun County — had begun to question far more than corporal punishment.
“When it came time for me to hit my kids, that was the first independent thought I remember having: ‘This can’t be right. I think I’ll just skip this part,’” he says.
But if that seemingly inviolable dogma was false, what else might be? Aaron gradually began to feel adrift and depressed.
“It’s like having the rug pulled out from under your feet,” he says. “All of reality is kind of up for grabs.”
He scoured Amazon for books about evolution and cosmology. Eventually, he found his way to blog posts and books by former Christian fundamentalists who had abandoned their religious beliefs. He watched an interview with Tara Westover, whose best-selling memoir, [“Educated,”](https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590528/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VH4QIAOLW42C&keywords=educated+book+tara+westover&qid=1682174009&s=books&sprefix=educated%2Cstripbooks%2C133&sr=1-1&itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) detailed the severe educational neglect and physical abuse she endured as a child of survivalist Mormon home-schoolers in Idaho.
And in the spring of 2021, as he and Christina were struggling to engage Aimee in her at-home lessons, he suggested a radical solution: Why not try sending their daughter to the reputable public elementary school less than a mile from their house?
Christina could think of many reasons. They were the same ones Aaron had learned as a child: Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.
But she also suspected that Aimee could use the help of professional educators. Just as important, she had learned all her life that it was her duty to obey her husband. She was confounded and angry, at both Aaron and the seeming contradiction his suggestion had exposed.
“I guess I’m just honestly confused and wonder what you think,” she wrote in an email to her father in May 2021. “I’m supposed to submit to Aaron, he wants the kids to go to public school. … You think that’s a sin but it’s also a sin to not listen to your husband so which is it?”
At first, Christina’s and Aaron’s parents reacted to the news that they were considering public school for Aimee with dazed incomprehension. Did Christina feel overwhelmed, they asked? Did she need more help with work around the house? As long as Aimee was learning to read, she would be fine, Aaron’s mother assured them. Christina’s father sent a YouTube video of John Taylor Gatto, a famous critic of America’s public education system.
The dialogue took on a darker tone as Aimee, with Christina’s hesitant agreement, began school that fall. By then, Aaron had told his parents he no longer considered himself a believer.
“This is absolutely devastating,” his mother, Linda Beall, wrote in a long email to Christina. “I hurt so much for you Christina!!!”
“I don’t think Aaron is going to be wrestled into heaven with good arguments,” Linda added. “I think this is likely about his response to hard things in his life. I think he needs to come face to face with God himself, and bow before Him in recognition of his own sin, and need for a Savior.”
Despite the sympathy expressed in the email, Christina bristled at the suggestion that her husband’s crisis of faith stemmed from his reluctance to face “hard things” in his life. She knew that reexamining his religious convictions and traumatic memories had perhaps been the hardest thing Aaron had ever done.
Aimee Beall, then 6, poses on her first day of first grade in 2021. (Christina Beall)
Aimee, meanwhile, was thriving at Round Hill Elementary. By the third quarter, her report card said she was “a pleasure to teach,” was “slowly becoming more social and more willing to participate in class” and showed “tremendous growth” in her reading skills, which had lagged below grade level at the beginning of the year.
For several months after that first week of classes — when she had come home wearing a paper hat, colored with blue crayon and printed with the words “My First Day of First Grade” — Aimee had had a stock response when her parents asked her how she liked school: She would suppress a grin, say she “hated it,” and then start laughing at her own joke.
“You should have asked to go to school,” Aimee, who knew her mom had been educated at home, would eventually tell Christina. “It affects your whole life.”
Now it was Christina’s turn to question her belief — not in Christianity, but in the conservative Christian approach to home schooling. She began to research spiritual abuse and the history of Christian nationalism. Ideas she had never questioned — such as the statement, in a book given to her by her dad, that it “would be a waste of her time and her life” for a woman to work outside the house **—** no longer made sense.
Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.
Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.
“This is the guy I’ve been married to for eight years,” she recalls thinking. “I know him. I know his heart. I know what kind of parent he wants to be to our kids. These easy answers of ‘Oh, you’re just not a Christian anymore, you just want to sin’ … didn’t work anymore.”
Christina prepares a snack for her daughter Aurelia, 2, at their home in Round Hill, Va. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
As Aimee’s first year at Round Hill Elementary came to an end, Aaron and Christina were more convinced than ever that they had made the right decision. But they were also at a loss for how to heal the tensions with their parents.
In a 2022 email intended for a pastor at her church but sent by accident to Christina, Linda Beall blamed her daughter-in-law for their deepening rift, saying she had taken undue offense at good-faith efforts to advise and support the family through Aaron’s loss of faith.
“So she is again flipping the script from the reality that we love them and her, want to support them, and have only tried to do that again and again, but have been assaulted every time we engage. And I have given up trying \[because\] it all gets flipped and used against us,” Linda wrote. “I really can not remember one conversations we have had since this unfolded that has not escalated things. So when she beats up ‘everything’ I say, never offers forgiveness, why would we want to engage again?”
Around the same time, Christina sent Aaron’s parents a series of text messages lamenting what she said was their unwillingness to reconcile and explaining that she had changed her opinions about the way she and Aaron had been raised.
“There has been so much pain but I am so excited to now understand and see past the ways that people control and manipulate me,” she wrote. “And you may not believe it but I still love Jesus.”
Aaron and Christina had decided that, in the fall of 2022, all three of their school-age children — not just Aimee but 5-year-old Oliver and 9-year-old Ezra — would attend public school. Aurelia, then 2, would remain at home.
Despite Aimee’s positive experience, Aaron and Christina were anxious, both for their children and about how their parents would react. One afternoon in June, Christina sent a text message to her mother.
“I need to tell you that all three kids are going to school in the fall. I’m sorry, because I know this will be upsetting and disappointing to you and dad,” Christina wrote. “I figured you should hear it from me first.”
Three hours later, her mother texted back.
“Dearest Christina, it is not at all upsetting or disappointing to me,” Catherine Comfort wrote. “You and Aaron are outstanding parents and I’m sure you made the decision best for your family.”
Even Aaron’s parents finally signaled a grudging degree of acceptance. In February, Linda and Bernard Beall walked into the gym at Round Hill Elementary one cold Saturday afternoon to watch a school performance of “The Lion King.” Ezra had a part in the chorus as a wildebeest.
Sitting on plastic chairs in the dark and crowded room, the pair gave no outward sign of the remarkable nature of their visit. When the performance was over, they hugged their grandkids in front of the stage and exchanged halting small talk with Aaron and Christina. Then they drove off, with no discussion of a visit to their son’s house a few blocks away.
About 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed — in their pajamas.
It was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls’ living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop.
Soon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school’s “For the Love of Reading Family Night,” held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.
As Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest, would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.
Aaron looked at her in bewilderment.
“Phil?” he asked. “Am I out of the loop?”
His daughter stared back at him in disbelief.
“He’s famous!” Aimee said. She explained Phil’s role in predicting the length of winter.
“I knew about groundhogs,” Aaron said. “I just didn’t know about Phil.”
Christina packs lunches as her children get ready for school. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
These were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.
Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as [“Raising Critical Thinkers”](https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Critical-Thinkers-Parents-Growing-ebook/dp/B094V95K7M/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UR2BG8IYMHJ4&keywords=raising+critical+thinkers+julie+bogart&qid=1682175458&s=books&sprefix=raising+critical+%2Cstripbooks%2C141&sr=1-1&itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.
But they could provide new and different opportunities for their own kids. They were doing so in Loudoun County, one of the hotbeds of America’s culture wars over public instruction about race and gender. To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.
“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”
There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.
Aimee walks ahead of Christina, carrying Aurelia, while followed by Aaron during a reading event at Round Hill Elementary. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Kate Jeffers, 8, left, Aimee Beall, 7, Christina Beall and Alice Lyons, 7, take part in a reading group at Round Hill Elementary. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
That breadth was on display as the Bealls jostled into the school library with other families. It was the second day of Black History Month, and the shelves were set up with displays of books about the Underground Railroad, soprano Ella Sheppard and Vice President Harris. Where the walls reached the ceiling a mural was painted, with Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh.
Aaron and Christina stood shoulder-to-shoulder, surveying the room. This was the belly of the beast, the environment their parents had worked to save them from.
But they weren’t scared to be inside this school, and were now familiar with it. On Tuesday mornings, Christina volunteered here, helping Aimee’s class with reading lessons.
“Let’s go out this way, guys,” she said, leading the way through an exit when it was time to disperse from the library to listen to the teachers read stories aloud.
The hallways were long and wide, with plenty of room for small legs to gather speed. Soon Aaron and Christina were watching as their children, who knew the way to their classrooms, ran far in front of them.
###### correction
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the source of Christina Beall’s post about her daughter’s first day of school. It was on Instagram, not Facebook. This story has been corrected.
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1 year ago