(2021-09-12) Why Our Monsters Talk To Michael Wolff

Why Our Monsters Talk to Michael Wolff. *In his new book, the author of “Fire and Fury” continues his specialty: teasing out stories from men in power.

It’s early 2019, a few months before Jeffrey Epstein will be arrested on sex charges, and he is sitting in the vast study of his New York mansion with a camera pointed at him as he practices for a big “60 Minutes” interview that would never take place.

The media trainer is a familiar figure: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign guru and onetime White House adviser.

This explosive, previously unreported episode, linking a leader of the right with the now-dead disgraced financier, is tucked away at the end of a new book by Michael Wolff, “Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned.” Mr. Bannon confirmed in a statement that he encouraged Mr. Epstein to speak to “60 Minutes” and said that he had recorded more than 15 hours of interviews with him.

Mr. Bannon, who has made 15 documentaries, said that he “never media-trained anyone” and was recording the interview for a previously unannounced eight- to 10-hour documentary meant to illustrate how Mr. Epstein’s “perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence.”

Mr. Bannon was a major character — and a great on-the-record source — for Mr. Wolff’s biggest success, “Fire and Fury,” his best-selling, no-holds-barred account of the Trump White House. To write about Mr. Bannon’s dealings with Mr. Epstein in the new book, Mr. Wolff relied on transcripts of what Mr. Epstein appears to believe are practice interviews.

As usual, he relies on an omniscient third-person narration in “Too Famous,” an approach that has for decades drawn criticism from reporters like me because it does not bother to include explanations of how the author came by his information.

He has managed to stay at the top of his game because of his undying interest and expertise in a particular subject: big, bad men.

The litany is astounding: Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Harvey Weinstein, Boris Johnson, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Trump. All appear in his new book, a collection of profiles, some previously published, some not.

Magnates seem to think Mr. Wolff gives them their best shot at a sympathetic portrait. He writes, in “Too Famous,” that Mr. Weinstein called him during his 2020 rape trial to propose a biography. “This book is worth millions,” Mr. Weinstein told him, according to Mr. Wolff

Few women appear in “Too Famous.” Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington and Hillary Clinton are the exceptions. “These are the women, and there are not too many, who have done exactly what men would do,” he said. And Democrats rarely talk to him. “They don’t have a sense of play,” he said.

He became friendly with a number of moguls in the 1980s and 1990s when, after a promising start as a writer, he took a run at joining their club himself. He started a company, Wolff New Media, that published books about the internet when it was the new thing. In the mid-1990s, he was worth $100 million (on paper) and had a stipple portrait in The Wall Street Journal.

When it all came crashing down in 1997, he wrote about it, scorching the investors who had backed him in a jovial memoir, “Burn Rate.” The book earned him a column in New York magazine and a regular table at Michael’s, home of the power lunch for the Manhattan media set.

When he talks with powerful men in finance and politics, he said, he falls into a bit of a Walter Mitty trance that he could be living their lives, something they can sense and appreciate

he thinks that most of these reviled characters “are not as bad as everyone says,” adding, “Just the fact that everyone says it means they’re not.”

“This doesn’t mean that they’re not bad and haven’t done terrible things,” he continued. “But everybody who achieves that kind of power and centrality has done terrible things — you know, behind every great fortune is a great crime.”

He is also able to gain the confidence of moguls because he lets them know he has the same enemies they do — that is, just about everyone in the news media

And he ingratiated himself with Mr. Trump and his circle, in part, by publicly attacking other reporters who covered him, sneering at one point that the beat covered by Maggie Haberman for The New York Times appeared to be the “aberrant” presidency.

When “Fire and Fury” arrived in 2018, however, it painted a more extreme picture of the president than most newspaper reports, even as it relied on many of the details unearthed by White House beat reporters. Mr. Wolff insisted that he hadn’t meant to deceive the people he was writing about — he was just surprised to find how bad it was on the inside.

He also argues that the fact-based, evenhanded approach of so much nonfiction writing these days has turned what used to be called magazine journalism into a lost art. He would rather not sully his text with such bothersome things as source attributions and footnotes, asking readers to simply trust him and the power of his narrative

Given that I hail from the bill-of-particulars school, I have found Mr. Wolff to be annoyingly accurate on big-picture questions ranging from the enduring strength of the television business to the secret motives of moguls.

cashes in on the success of “Fire and Fury” with his third book in four years. But he offers a scarce commodity in a media market that has moved away from his kind of journalism. A hot political environment has taught many reporters to see their work in moral, even didactic, terms. Magazine writers are out looking for heroes, not villains,

That generation may, at last, be aging out, meaning Mr. Wolff risks running out of subjects. When I asked who will hold his interest in the years to come, he said he was “scouting the next generation” of powerful media figures.

“Too Famous” includes a few of them — Jared Kushner, Tucker Carlson and Ronan Farrow