Sophie Elmhirst takes an insightful look into the unique therapy options for the super-rich. Like many people, loneliness and a lack of connection lie at the root of their problems, but, as Elmhirst alludes to in this essay, if even rehab treats them differently from other people can they really hope to find what they need?
But beyond the desire for privacy, extreme wealth has an oddly separating effect. โIf you put a billionaire in a group setting, even with well-off middle-class people, they will not be able to relate to each other,โ Gerber told me. They are not like the rest of us, these people; their lives and minds have been transformed by their fortunes.
Overcoming battles with mental health to become an incredible cliff diver, Gary Hunt also appears to be a lovely person, as Xan Rice demonstrates in this endearing portrait of an unusual athlete โ one unruffled by sponsors, other competitors, or great heights.
Just watching the divers walk along the platform made my heart pound. Some made the sign of the cross on their chest, or slapped their thighs to psych themselves up. Every now and then a diver would step back from the edge just before they were supposed to jump, disturbed by a gust of wind or a moment of apprehension.ย
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โTheyโre a little eccentricโ is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist โ an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and gravely advised, โnever marry a woman who makes you chop wood.โ I still donโt quite know what he was getting at.
But what do we really mean when we call someone eccentric? The word renders a verdict of harmlessness: A personโs style, conduct, or mannerisms may be memorable, but not concerning. And truthfully, we need people who are a bit of a character (to use an equally common euphemism). Their difference reinforces our sense of stability, their peculiarity a necessary splash of color in a landscape of conformity. We love to hear about them, to speculate why they are as they are โ the odder, the better. Whether in documentaries like Grey Gardens or the five stories collected here, well-reported tales of quirkiness always invoke a small thrill, vaulting their subjects out of the realm of local gossip and into a wider imagination.
However, itโs no accident that every entry here concerns individuals who are, to varying degrees, rich or famous. The sad truth is that the lives of the everyday working class are seldom celebrated, and least of all those whose habits and personalities fall outside of the bounds of โnormal.โ To quote a character in Ellen Raskinโs novel The Westing Game, โthe poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric.โ Wealth affords many privileges in life, among them the indulgence of oddity, and such indulgence is only magnified in the face of celebrity. Behavior that would be considered problematic becomes acceptable, even admired as a natural by-product of genius. (See: Andy Kaufman; Bjork; and, at least up to a certain point, Kanye West).ย
Whatever your take on the meaning of โeccentric,โ these stories โ sad, inspiring, tragic, and incredible as they are โ provide a fascinating glimpse into the minds of those whose lives are anything but conventional.
Every sport has its enigmatic geniuses, players of supreme natural talent whose volatile nature as often as not trips them up. Remarkably often, a pattern repeats: The young upstart appears as if they had ridden down on a lightning bolt, shakes up the landscape and transcends the limits of the sport, yet somehow never quite reaches the heights they could have, and should have, achieved. In boxing, โPrinceโ Naseem Hamed shot to fame on the back of extraordinary talent mixed with equally extraordinary theatrics, only to fall frustratingly short of all-time greatness, abruptly walking away from a sport he no longer loved. In soccer, mercurial French footballer-cum-poet Eric Cantona, an eccentric genius if ever there was one, lost the captaincy of his national team thanks to a bizarre display of temper. Basketball, of course, has Dennis Rodman, a player who eternally walked a tightrope between outrageous skill and self-implosion. Pick any sport you like and there will always be numerous examples; in chess, however, Bobby Fischer stands alone.
The World Chess Championships of 1972 were memorable for several reasons. Russia had dominated the competition for 24 years prior, and no American had won since the 19th century. The world was in the middle of a Cold War. The man who held the crown, 25-year-old Russian Boris Spassky, had learned how to play on a train while escaping Leningrad during World War II. Yet, Spasskyโs opponent might have been the most memorable element. Bobby Fischer was the definition of a prodigy: At 14, he had won the U.S. Championship with the only recorded perfect score in the history of the tournament. Fifteen years later, he carried the hopes of a nation upon his shoulders. But which Bobby Fischer would turn up โ the confident, happy young man, or the paranoid, furious recluse? Would he, in fact, turn up at all? Chess aficionados will already know this story, but Darrach writes with such insight and elegance, transporting us to a world of fantastic intrigue and unbelievable pressure, that even if you know the outcome, this article is a thrill from start to finish.
I was 2600 miles northeast of the Yale Club when the crisis broke. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, waiting for Bobby to fly up for the match. Spassky was waiting, tooโhe had arrived eight days beforeโand so were 140โ150 newspaper, magazine and television reporters from at least 32 countries. They were getting damn tired of waiting, in fact, and the stories out of Reykjavik were reflecting their irritation.
Those of us who grew up in England during the โ80s and โ90s will surely remember Frank Sidebottom, a bizarre character who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, lighting up various childrenโs TV shows and briefly enjoying his own series before disappearing back to the strange realm from which he had emerged. What made Sidebottom so singular was the fact that he wasnโt human. Rather, he was human, but his head wasnโt: Atop his shoulders sat an inflatable plastic oval, which Sidebottom never removed.
Watch Sidebottomโs first appearance on national TV.
At the heart of this fantastical story, here recounted by firsthand witness Jon Ronson, lies an astonishing quote from George Bernard Shaw: โThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.โย What begins as a tale about an eccentric, imaginative musician soon becomes one of identity, acceptance, and the blurring of the line between fiction and reality.
I never understood why Chris sometimes kept Frankโs head on for hours, even when it was only us in the van. Under the head Chris would wear a swimmerโs nose clip. Chris would be Frank for such long periods the clip had deformed him slightly, flattened his nose out of shape. When heโd remove the peg after a long stint Iโd see him wince in pain.
The tech zillionaire class is a modern phenomenon that tends to divide opinion. Depending on which side you listen to, the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are either visionary gurus transforming our society into a better, more desirable model, or childlike narcissists who treat the world and everything in it as disposable playthings. As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. The late John McAfee, who made a fortune from virus-protection software at a time when most had never even heard of the term, came to prominence in an era before the Tony Stark model of entrepreneur-as-hero entered the public imagination.
Again, we come to a crossroads. Was John McAfee a delusional paranoid or a tech-security messiah, hounded by government operatives and mysterious cartels desperate to protect their shadowy interests? Undeniably, heโs a fascinating figure, and the tales of guns, SWAT teams, wild flights, and deaths as recounted to journalist Stephen Rodrick are compelling, even as his readily apparent narcissism and deeply problematic trappings (such as his self-described โteenage haremโ) are highly disturbing.
At dawn, we land in Atlanta, and the six-hour drive to Lexington passes in a haze. The Blazer fills up with cigarette smoke as Pool and McAfee check their arsenal: a Smith & Wesson .40, a .380 Ruger, and another three or four handguns in the front seat. โI like to have a small one in my waistband,โ says McAfee. โSitting on the toilet is a real vulnerable position.โ
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Singer and dancer Josephine Baker would have been just as big a star, if not bigger, in the modern age of social media. Her talent, unconventionality, lifestyle, and beauty brought her fame and fortune at a time when few Black women could even dream of such a thing. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, became a celebrated performer at the Folies Bergรจreย inย Paris, received a medal for her work assisting the French Resistance during World War II, and was rewarded by the NAACP for her activism.
Baker was also temperamental, unhappy, and the instigator of a bizarre and unethical plan to combat racism that almost defies belief. In this absorbing piece, we learn of a side to Bakerโs character that is little known to many. It is, if we needed one, a sharp reminder that celebrities are just as flawed as the rest of us, that good intentions donโt always lead to good results, and that a life led with all limits removed rarely, if ever, turns out well.
In photos taken at the time, the chateau looks more like an orphanage than a real home. The children slept in a room in the attic, in eight small beds lined up in a row. Whenever Baker returned home, even if it happened to be at 3 a.m., she would wake the children and demand affection.
I suspect all parents find tales of unhappy childhoods difficult, even disturbing, to read. We want nothing but the best for our offspring, especially if we have not enjoyed a peaceful and stable upbringing ourselves. The saving grace of this piece is the beautiful prose with which poet Edith Sitwell recalls her formative years growing up in a famously eccentric and almost casually cruel household. The various characters and events as described by Sitwell resemble appalling fictions, their grotesquerie landing somewhere between Charles Dickens and H. P. Lovecraft.
You can read a potted biography, and a selection of Edith Sitwellโs poems, at the Poetry Foundationโs website.
During her adult life, Sitwell was divisive, controversial, flamboyant, gracious, and scornful. She possessed a heart capable of absorbing and displaying the most delicate beauty, hardened perhaps, by her upbringing in a family so well off that it was able to wallow in a pit of morbid peculiarity. Her poetry is wonderous; her literary analysis revelatory. Many thousands of words have been written concerning Edith and the Sitwells, but almost certainly none as moving and striking as those you will discover here, written by her own hand.
I remember little of Mr. Stoutโs outward appearance, excepting that he looked like a statuette constructed of margarine, then frozen so stiff that no warmth, either from the outer world or human feeling, could begin to melt it. The statuette was then swaddled in padded wool, to give an impression of burliness.
Sometime in the 1990s, a small group of amateur historians in Liverpool, United Kingdom, made a startling discovery. Local rumors had long circulated concerning a network of tunnels, even an entire subterranean world, hidden beneath the streets of the cityโs Edge Hill area. The group was able to verify that a number of underground entrances did indeed exist, on land previously owned by a mysterious recluse named Joseph Williamson. Excavating by hand, they could not possibly have imagined what they were about to discover.
Read more about the man and his โunderground cityโ at the illuminating website Friends of Williamsonโs Tunnels.
Born in 1769, Williamson worked his way up through the ranks at a tobacco factory owned by the wealthy Tate family of sugar importers. Williamson married into that family, took ownership of the factory, and prospered. He retired when in his 40s, and here is where the story proper begins. For reasons that are still unclear (and still heavily debated), Williamson, utilizing a small army of employees, began carving out immense underground chambers beneath his homes. It must have taken a large amount of his fortune and a huge portion of his time. But why? When youโre rich, perhaps nobody asks. Itโs known that Williamson was secretive about his tunneling activities, never revealing their true purpose. Fine arches led nowhere; certain passages were carved out and then filled in. All activity ceased with his death, and the labyrinth remained untouched until the locals whose voices you will hear in this excellent article rediscovered this giant conundrum.
โThe whole place is so full of mysterious questions โ an awful lot of questions that nobody will ever be able to answer,โ Stapledon told The Post. โWhen you look at some of the structures underground, you think: How the hell did he create these? What the hell was he doing building all this stuff?โ
Chris Wheatleyย is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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