Profile examples

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Reckless Again - Clint Eastwood After 70
Parade Magazine, December 2008
by Gail Sheehy




He’s sitting at home, stroking his pet rabbit. 
His wife is out. His latest picture is a wrap. He is content to have nothing to do.
“When you’re young, you’re very reckless,” says Clint Eastwood with his usual economy of words. “Then you get conservative. Then you get reckless again.” That is, if you live long enough.
Days before, I had seen Clint’s latest film, Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood, in which he plays a bent and bitter old racist. In the film he lopes, with his trademark dynamic lassitude, into a hail of bullets. He does not look like a man who pets rabbits.
But that’s Clint—a coil of contradictions that go to the very soul of the American male. On film, Clint likes his characters gritty, dark, uncomfortable. In person, he looks younger, kinder, incredibly fit. He could be 50. He is, in fact, a year and a half from 80.


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Vanity Fair / January 2009 / What Tina Wants

Tina Fey has never dated a bad boy.
She didn’t even let boys she dated do anything bad.
“I remember the biggest trouble I ever got into—” says her husband, Jeff Richmond, a short, puckish man of 48 in jeans and a T-shirt, cutting himself off mid-thought at the mere memory of Tina’s wrath. “Oh, my God.” (He calls himself “the Joe Biden of husbands” because he’s prone to “drop the bomb” in interviews.)
Fey is sitting across from Richmond in their comfy, vintage-y Upper West Side apartment, where a lavender exercise ball lolls next to the flat-screen TV, a pink tricycle is parked under a black grand piano, and golden award statuettes abound. When I arrived, at 9:30 p.m., Fey had already put her three-year-old daughter, Alice, to bed and was tapping away on a silver Mac laptop at the kitchen counter on a script for 30 Rock, her slyly hilarious NBC comedy about an NBC comedy. She’ll return to the script when I leave, near midnight.
Fey shoots Richmond a warning look. It’s undercut by the fact that she’s wedged into her daughter’s miniature red armchair, joking about squeezing her butt in and looking like Alice in Wonderland grown big in navy velour sweatpants and pink slippers.
The 38-year-old Fey sips a glass of white wine and eats some cheese and crackers—all her food-obsessed doppelgänger on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon, longs to do is go home and eat a big block of cheese—while Richmond and I drink vodka martinis he has made.
“What are you gonna tell?” she teases her husband. “Think this through.”
Richmond wades in. “When we were first dating,” he says, harking back to Chicago in 1994, “some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over—”’
“‘—over to the Doll House,”’ Fey finishes. “‘We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will.”’

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PORTRAITS OF GRIEF
Leon Smith Jr.: Big-Hearted Driver
New York Times, March 9, 2003

Leon Smith Jr.'s boots just might be impossible to fill. He wore the only size 15's in the Fire Department, said his mother, Irene, and he had to have them specially made, once he had attained his dream of joining the department.
Mr. Smith, 48, was the chauffeur ? the driver ? for Ladder Company 118 in Brooklyn Heights. "He would wash his rig every single day, and when he went off duty, he'd say, `Listen, my baby better be clean.' " Mrs. Smith said. "He called that his girlfriend."
An only child, Mr. Smith showed his compassionate side when he was just 7 or 8. His mother often took him to the zoo or a play, but just before departure time the doorbell would ring, and a few neighborhood children would be waiting to come along. They never got to go anywhere, he explained.
"He'd say, `Oh, Mama, please let them come,' " she said. "I always made sure I had extra money and extra food."
Mr. Smith, who had three daughters, was known for fixing the cars of his brothers in the firehouse, and those of their wives or girlfriends, even if the repairs came after a 24-hour shift.
"I can just see you up there in heaven, with St. Peter's car on the lift, telling him it will only be a couple more minutes," a friend, Paul Geoghegan, wrote on a Web site in his memory.

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Body Collector in Detroit Answers When Death Calls
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
The New York Times
Published: September 18, 2006

DETROIT — With all the spectacular ways to die in this dying city, the fate of a man named Allan was almost pathetic. There he lay, in a weedy lot on the notorious East Side, next to a liquor bottle, his pockets turned out.

But as it goes with such things, one man’s misery is another man’s money. The body retrievalist for the county morgue had arrived on the scene. He was happy. He sang strange little ditties. Cracked odd little jokes. Said things like: “We got plenty of room in this here van, yes sir.”

Do not judge him. A happy attitude is necessary in his profession. It keeps the mind from shattering, salts one’s sanity. Call the job dirty. Call it 14 bucks the hard way — $14 a human body, $9 an animal. He said he made $14,000 last year. He made most of it at night.

His tax forms officially read “body technician.” Unofficially, Mike Thomas calls himself body snatcher, grim reaper, night stalker, bag man. Whatever you call it, it is one man’s life.

For Mr. Thomas, the demise of Allan was a cheerful occasion because, you see, work had been dead. There had been an odd lull in homicides, suicides and even natural passings here in one of the most violent American cities. It was the height of summer and people were supposed to be outside and killing each other, dropping dead from sunstroke, etc. Mr. Thomas wondered how he was going to feed his children the next week.

“I ain’t making nothing on these bodies,” he said on his porch, the screen door half gone. “I know that’s kind of weird to hear; I mean waiting around for somebody to die. Wishing for somebody to die. But that’s how it is. That’s how I feed my babies.”

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Dogtown Man is Face of White Power Here
Jan. 16, 2005
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Todd C. Frankel


In St. Louis, the public face of the white supremacist group National Alliance has a ruffled shock of white hair and white goatee and mustache. His eyes are blue. His name is Frank Weltner.

You may have seen him on TV or in newspapers or standing outside picketing for the Alliance, which is considered the largest and most active neo-Nazi group in the nation. It is especially active in St. Louis. Last week, Weltner was busy explaining to the press how the Alliance managed to get its recruitment ads posted for weeks on MetroLink trains.
He also is host of a local radio show and runs dozens of Web sites, all with racist and anti-Semitic themes.
Weltner, 63, is hailed and reviled across the nation for his views. Watchdog groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, consider him especially dangerous.
"It's not the Frank Weltners of the world who worry me most, " said Karen Aroesty, the league's regional director. "It's the lone wolves who really can inflict violence and listen to the Frank Weltners. He inspires others."
Weltner's story shows how one man turned to extremism late in life and then rose to prominence in the world of hate groups. It is a complicated story, full of surprising contradictions.