Portfolio.com: Culture and Lifestyle

ABC-Ya Later

Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 GMT

With a dearth of new shows to announce—just two new ones airing this fall—the focus at the ABC Upfront Tuesday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall was on the numbers.

Oh, and slinging mud at the competition, at ABC's own shows, and at the American viewing public.

After an introduction from Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, Jimmy Kimmel, host of the network's late-night talk show, took the stage. He started by admonishing the sitting audience to "Please, sit," in a mocking reference to Jimmy Fallon's identical joke at the press conference yesterday where NBC anointed him the next host of their late-night show.

Kimmel then took several self-conscious digs at this year's Upfront’s general lack of stars, booze, and food—in light of diminishing ratings and weak slates of new shows, the networks have cut back on their annual presentations this year.

"ABC might be the worst date ever," Kimmel told the assembled advertising executives. "We expect you to put out, and we're not even going to buy you a drink."

But he soon moved from self-deprecation to attack mode, saying that things at ABC were better than at NBC, where the network had relabeled it's presentation the "Infronts" this year because they were "just in front of the CW"—a reference to NBC's fourth-place standing among the major broadcast networks. On Thursday, he added to raucous laughter, the Fox network would be hosting the "reach arounds."

As for the move of Scrubs, NBC's successful hospital-satire show, to ABC, Kimmel admonished that it was a bad idea to steal from networks in last place.

In a final display of cynicism, he proclaimed that the future for ABC looked bright. "TV sets are bigger than ever, kids are fatter then ever, and gas has never been more expensive. We have the whole country sitting on a couch, and if we can’t sell them stuff, we should all be very ashamed of ourselves."

Kimmel was followed by Mike Shaw, ABC's president of sales and marketing, who trotted out several PowerPoint slides for the afternoon's low point, a dry lecture on ABC's "advertising-value index," which allows advertisers to pick the audience metrics most important to them—education, household income—and weigh them according to priority.

Finally, Stephen McPherson, president of ABC entertainment, took the stage to review the upcoming fall schedule, built around returning shows like Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives—both of which are several seasons old and showing signs of age and viewer falloff since the strike.

Only two new shows—Opportunity Knocks, in which host Ashton Kutcher picks an American family and literally builds a family-style game show set in their neighborhood for them to compete in, and Life on Mars, a 1970s-style police drama complete with a time-travel hook—will debut in the fall, showing the extent to which ABC was left flat-footed by the writers' strike.

In a positive sign, five one-season shows, including Eli Stone, Dirty Sexy Money, and Private Practice, a Grey's spinoff, will return.

For ABC, which ranks a respectable second in the desirable-to-advertisers 18 to 49 age range, the challenge is to continue to deliver strong programming to audiences who remain in thrall to Fox’s Super Bowl event and juggernaut American Idol (which has had its own ratings decline this spring).

While second place sounds fine, the percentage of households tuning in to ABC on an average night of the week during prime-time programming is just 2.8 percent—the same as CBS. ABC squeaks by with 40,000 more viewers. Fox’s household rating is 4 percent.

And ABC's two fall shows are certainly not poised to become enormous Idol-style, or even Housewives-style, hits. The network does have a slate of almost 20 shows in development, but only felt confident enough to tease two of them at the Upfronts: Fourplay, a comedy about two male best friends and their lives, which drew weak laughter; and In The Motherhood, a series which began life online and stars Jenny McCarthy, Leah Remini, and Chelsea Handler as mothers dealing with the indignities of being moms. That one got a warmer reception.

An animated comedy from the producers of King of the Hill, called The Goode Family, will debut mid-season.

But the show that received by far the longest tease was for a reality competition that will air this summer, called Wipeout. Contestants have to navigate a seemingly impossible obstacle course for a prize of $50,000. The preview given to advertisers featured lingering close-ups of contestants jiggling in Spandex, tripping across a narrow platform next to a wall from which boxing gloves jab, knocking them into a muddy lake, and flailing—and falling—across four enormous rubber contraptions called "The Big Balls."

The Upfront closed with a sneak peak of the next season of Lost, which had audiences streaming for the doors, presumably to avoid spoilers. Or maybe they'd just had enough of ABC's watered-down Upfront.

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The Suite Smell of Success

Wed, 14 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Just three years ago, searching for English translations of Irène Némirovsky's novels was a largely futile gesture; there weren't any in print. Only a few of her dozen-plus novels ever appeared in the U.S., and after her death in the Holocaust in 1942, Némirovsky was largely forgotten.

It wasn't until her posthumous novel, Suite Française—discovered in a notebook by her surviving daughter several years ago—was translated into English in 2006 that Némirovsky became a bestselling author on this side of the Atlantic. The French writer is one of the publishing industry's biggest—and most unlikely—success stories in recent years.

"It's very unusual for a translated and posthumous book to do as well as Suite Française," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. The book was an instant hit upon its release in France in 2004, selling more than 640,000 copies, according to its publisher, Denoel. Translated into 32 languages and published in 35 countries (with more still to come), the hardcover edition sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In the U.S. alone, 900,000 English versions have sold, says Random House, whose imprints Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage had the domestic rights. Both editions of Suite Française were New York Times bestsellers; the trade paperback edition alone occupied a spot on the list for over 30 consecutive weeks.

Be prepared for a Némirovsky flood over the next few years. Not surprisingly, publishers are trying to capitalize as much as possible on the book's popularity, releasing as many other versions and novels as possible. A museum exhibit opens this fall. The film rights to Suite Française were snapped up by Universal two years ago, though no plans for production have been released.

According to publishing insiders, only a scant 3 to 4 percent of books published in the U.S. each year are translated from another language. "It's probably closer to 2 percent," says Dedi Felman, editor and vice-president of Wordswithoutborders.org, an online literary magazine that publishes and translates international literature and poetry.

Few of those have had tremendous success, and Némirovsky's sales figures already rank with bestselling contemporary writers. Take Colombian-born Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude published in English in 1970, and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. In 2004, he got a boost from a force more powerful than the Nobel Academy—Oprah Winfrey. The edition with her seal of approval sold 658,000 copies.

Celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is considered to have a strong audience in the U.S.; the hardcover edition of his 2004 novel, Snow, sold 42,000 copies here, according to Nielsen BookScan. Since then, the trade paperback edition of Snow has sold more than 342,000 copies in the U.S.—no doubt helped along by his 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet he's still nowhere near Némirovsky's numbers.

In the wake of her sales, Random House has wasted little time translating and publishing five other Némirovsky novels. In 2007, the publisher released another posthumous work, Fire in the Blood, in hardcover, which was discovered in archives by two biographers, Patrick Lienhardt and Olivier Philipponnat, and sold 24,000 copies (the paperback comes out in July). The company will issue the pair's biography, The Life of Irène Némirovsky, in the fall of 2009.

This past January, the publisher issued a single volume collection of four early novels —David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair—in an elegant, hardcover Everyman's Library edition, a higher-priced imprint usually reserved for classic works of modern-day masters. Némirovsky is already part of the Contemporary Classics series of the Everyman's Library, which includes novels from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Patricia Highsmith, Italo Calvino, and Toni Morrison.

"What the success of a single book like [Suite Française] means is that the rest of the author's backlist gets picked up and published," Felman says.

Which is why four more Némirovsky novels are currently being translated into English: Dogs and Wolves, Jezabel, The Wine of Solitude, and All of Our Worldly Goods. Némirovsky's titles will continue to be published until 2010 or 2011.

"It only makes sense for a publisher to try to recapture their past successes," Nelson says. "If there are four more Némirovsky novels, they would be crazy not to publish them."

The story behind Suite Française could easily be a bestselling book or movie itself (it will be the subject of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage in September). Born in Kiev to a Jewish family in 1903, Némirovsky moved to France, studied at the Sorbonne, started a family, and became a celebrated novelist. She published more than a dozen books of fiction to much acclaim—critics compared her to Tolstoy and Balzac—and a few of her works were adapted into film. After the Nazis invaded France, she and her family, like the characters in Suite Française, hid in a small village in Burgundy, where she continued to write, scribbling away in a brown leather-bound notebook. In 1942, she was arrested by French police as a "stateless Jew" and deported to Auschwitz, where she died.

When her husband was arrested, he gave his daughter a leather valise with the notebook among its contents. For decades, the book was left unread—Denise couldn't bear to see her mother's diary of those final, fear-stricken months. When she finally did, she discovered that it was the first two parts of a five-part work, Suite Française.

"We're lucky to have this book," says Lexy Bloom, an editor at Vintage and Anchor, who has edited all of the U.S. paperback editions of Némirovsky's books. "It's a gem and a testament to the power of good literature."Related Links
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Russian Dressing

Tue, 13 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

For years, Russian fashion has been considered a contradiction in terms, something akin to the Wendy's Soviet Fashion Show ad, in which a stocky, kerchiefed woman repeatedly marches down a runway in a gray smock.

Jump to 2008 and the world of 15-year-old designer Kira Plastinina. It's stocked with sheer dresses, gravity-defying black tutus, and bubblegum-pink accessories. Already famous in Russia for her rich father, heiress friends, and position designing clothes for the Russian edition of American Idol, Plastinina opened her first U.S. store in New York's SoHo on May 2.

Meanwhile, Veronika Jeanvie just teamed up with mentor Paco Rabanne to become the first Ukrainian designer to debut a collection in the U.S. Moscovite Alexander Terekhov is a fixture at New York's fashion week, with four seasons of well-attended shows under his belt. Russian designers Valentin Yudashkin, Denis Simachev, and Igor Chapurin—some of the better-known names in Russia—show their collections in Europe.

"The world is shifting," says Fern Mallis, organizer of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Weeks in New York and Los Angeles. "Russia, India, and China—that's where more people are making money now, and they can afford to fund and show collections abroad."

Fifteen years ago, no one but Yudashkin was known outside the region. In 1991, he was invited to Paris Fashion Week and, after presenting a collection of dresses inspired by Fabergé eggs, became the first Russian designer to be chosen as a member of the Syndicate of High Fashion in Paris. Chapurin followed, with his tailored, feminine clothing winning a Nina Ricci competition for young designers in Paris in 2002. Around that same time, Simachev, known for his avant-garde street style for women and men, began showing in Milan.

Though the domestic market for fashion has grown dramatically in the past decade, there are obvious reasons to chase the fashion dream outside of the former Soviet bloc—money and prestige chief among them. Though there are Russian and Moscow fashion weeks, foreign buyers and press don't bother to attend. Capital can be nigh impossible to come by at home because Eastern European investors generally consider fashion a poor investment. And even a bit part on the global fashion stage can give a brand cachet back home.

That's not to say that these fashion defectors have an easy time abroad.

Each season in New York, Terekhov sends his label, Terexov, down the runway. With its streamlined look and feminine flourishes, the line can hold its own next to those of American fashion ingenues like Phillip Lim or Jenni Kayne. For fall, standout pieces include a belted, silver down coat, a crimson V-neck gown and a sheer cocktail dress with a ruffled hem. Neiman Marcus and Barneys New York buyers sit front row, but the 29-year-old Terekhov has yet to score an order from a major department store.

"They have more to prove than American or European designers," says Mallis. "[Buyers see] them as a business risk in terms of sales and distribution." Mallis predicts that eventually American buyers, who wrestle with sameness in their stores, will take a gamble on a designer who can show stability and consistency season after season. "Terekhov is doing it right," she says.

At the consumer level, designers still have to overcome the perception that Russian style is drab or gaudy. Their names pose a challenge to brand recognition too. Remembering (let alone pronouncing) a name like Valentin Yudashkin is more difficult than, say, Valentino or Calvin Klein.

Ukrainian designer Jeanvie made a play for the American customer with her first U.S. show at Los Angeles Fashion Week in March. But even with a major name like Paco Rabanne behind her, American boutiques weren't snapping up her gold lamé catsuits or midriff-baring neon blue and green cocktail dresses. "It's hard to break into another country—another part of the world with another people and culture—if you don't have somebody's helping hand," she says. Still, the 28-year-old was "delighted" with the runway shows and plans to be back.

Meanwhile, there is still a real gold mine in their backyard. Alexander Shumsky, owner of Russian Fashion Week, says the number of Russians embracing homegrown designer goods is on the rise, particularly at the boutique level. Total clothing, footwear, and accessories sales amounted to $63.3 billion in 2007 and is projected to climb at least 10 percent annually by 2010. "The American market is the biggest in the world, but it's a hard market," he says. "Russia is one of the biggest emerging markets in terms of fashion. It's smarter to expand in Russia."

Terekhov is covering his bases. He operates a store in Moscow but says he will stay the course in New York, too, explaining that his shows in the U.S. make him more covetable back home. "There's a very high level of professionalism in New York," adds the designer, pointing to American designers like Halston and Michael Kors as major influences. "I'm learning from other American designers. I just want to put my line on a very sturdy path right now. I feel in New York I have a really high chance."

And the Russian teen idol will be forging ahead on her sugary path Stateside. Financed by dad, whose produce and dairy business has a market cap of $4.4 billion, some 12 Kira Plastinina shops are set to open in Los Angeles and New York by August. An additional 50 are planned for the next three years. (There are 40 or so already in Russia and the Ukraine.)

The chain claims high fashion, but at price points averaging $48, it is going up against cheap-chic purveyors like H&M and Forever 21. "It's really taken off as a phenomenon in Russia," says Robert Higgins, president of Kira Plastinina U.S.A., based in Los Angeles. He hopes to hit average retail sales of $1,000 per square foot, about what the Russian stores pull in. "We think it's going to be so compelling here. It's a designer label, but not at designer prices."

Americans just might buy that.
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The Gold Rush for Endorsements

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Coca-Cola, Lenovo, and Samsung each paid millions to sponsor the Olympic torch—and each is feeling the heat from pro-Tibet groups. Activists confronted Coca-Cola executives on the issue at the company’s shareholder meeting in April. But the protests that disrupted the torch relay and embarrassed China this spring haven’t yet thwarted advertisers. Says Robert Kapp, former head of the U.S.-China Business Council: “Walking away from sponsorship opportunities would entail substantial risks.” Both superstar and niche athletes have so far been spared as targets. Here, a few key players and lucrative deals.

Satan's Accountant

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

On the outskirts of Las Vegas, Warren Jeffs, the prophet and leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamist sect of Mormonism known as the F.L.D.S., barreled down Interstate 15 in a red Cadillac Escalade. Driving him was Isaac Jeffs, one of his dozen or so brothers. Naomi Jeffs—a beautiful 32-year-old blond with hair to her knees who was both Warren’s former stepmother and the wife he reportedly called 91—rode in back. They carried $57,000 in cash in the lining of a suitcase, 16 cell phones, 12 pairs of sunglasses, four laptops, three wigs, a fistful of keys to other luxury vehicles, and a cache of handwritten letters addressed to “the Prophet.”

When a Nevada state trooper pulled the S.U.V. over for an obscured license plate, he didn’t know that the hollow-cheeked 50-year-old passenger offering only a contact-lens prescription as identification was on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted fugitives or that Warren Jeffs was fleeing charges of sexual misconduct in Utah and Arizona, where his colony of thousands of followers had lived by his word as though he were God. (View slideshow.)

That was in August 2006, long before the night this April when the sect became lurid Page One news everywhere, thanks to police raids on the West Texas compound that Jeffs’ church had financed. He had relocated hundreds of his most favored followers from Utah to a 1,700-acre former game ranch that he had anointed Yearning for Zion. Police reported that a 16-year-old girl had called a family-violence hotline and described being betrothed, beaten, raped, and impregnated by a 50-year-old man with multiple wives. For a moment, it looked like Waco revisited: Authorities faced off against dozens of Jeffs’ followers, who held hands and formed a human chain around their sacred white stone temple. When the polygamists finally relented, more than 400 children were removed from the ranch. Inside the temple, police seized evidence that pointed to a secretive world of power, sex, and submission, all reportedly controlled from prison by Warren Jeffs.

Over the years, as the leader of the F.L.D.S., Jeffs has had an ongoing conversation with God that’s resulted in prophecies both mundane and apocalyptic. He would have biannual revelations—usually on April 6 or December 31—that the end of the world would occur, wherein Christ would come to “lift up” his followers as the righteous, just as the rest of humanity was felled by pestilence and plague. Jeffs’ end-time visions meant real-life restrictions for those who followed him: no earthly entertainment, no flesh exposed from wrist to neck to ankle, no striped clothing, no dogs. Even the color red was banished: Jeffs predicted that Christ would return in red, former church members say, and that any mortal driving a red vehicle, or a convertible of any color, was committing blasphemy. But there he was on that hot August night, being arrested outside his own red S.U.V., a prophet hypocritical and humbled.

A year later, Bruce Wisan drives a convertible Mustang headed for Short Creek, Warren Jeffs’ polygamist community in the desert, on the Utah-Arizona border. The car is a rental—the only one Budget had left—and it’s very red. Wisan knows that isn’t good.
“Seeing me driving in a bright-red car is going to be a killer,” he groans. “The prophet said that to wear red is sacrilegious, and so people went through all their closets and got rid of red. You don’t see red anywhere in that town. I can’t believe they gave me a red car. You’re going to get shot.”

“Me?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “They wouldn’t dare shoot me.”

Wisan is neither a prophet nor a polygamist, but he holds an important position in the sect. In a sense, he has been hired by the state of Utah to replace Jeffs as the head of his community. Wisan has been put in charge of the United Effort Plan, the legal trust that the polygamists started by pooling their resources and creating a communal society 66 years ago. The U.E.P. owns about 85 percent of the land in this enclave and most of what sits on it. Worth an estimated $110 million, the trust holds all the assets—hundreds of homes, a few farms and factories, thousands of acres of land, a church, a zoo, several schoolhouses—accumulated by the labor, frugal living, and generous tithing of generations of these isolated believers. So conservative was their spending that, before Wisan, the trust never even had a checkbook.

Life under Prophet Warren Jeffs was restrictive and cruel, but his abuses went mostly unnoticed until 2004, when he seemed to have completely lost it. Jeffs, and the trust he controlled, had been hit with two civil lawsuits, later dismissed, charging the prophet with, among other things, sexually abusing a nephew. He announced in February 2005 that he’d ignore the suits, explaining that God had told him to fire the trust’s lawyer and refuse to defend himself against the unholy power of the state. There was also evidence that Jeffs had already begun draining the trust’s coffers, Wisan says.

So in May 2005, a state judge removed Jeffs from power and appointed Wisan to take over his orphaned flock.

Now Wisan is in the midst of trying to do something that, to his knowledge, has never been done: set up a functioning economy on the still-smoldering ashes of a theocracy. It is up to him to privatize the trust’s assets and get these radical believers on the grid, fiscally speaking. Wielding the blunt instrument of his accounting trade, he’s trying to use homeownership, property taxes, subdivision ordinances, and a few fire hydrants and other infrastructure amenities to bring these outsiders into the modern economic world.

But those he’s trying to help—Jeffs’ followers, including the police chief, two mayors, and virtually every resident—have tried to foil him at each turn. Meanwhile, Jeffs continues to advise community leaders, despite the fact that he is serving two consecutive five-year-to-life sentences in a Utah state prison for rape as an accomplice.

The polygamists believe Wisan is an agent of the devil, he says, and want nothing to do with him. They came up with a name for him almost as soon as he arrived: state-ordained bishop—S.O.B. for short.

“The people felt like, Oh, he’s going to take the land. He’s working for the devil. Why are you doing these horrible things to us? ” Wisan says. “There was great fear of me, great fear of what I was like.”
Bullheaded and bald, Bruce Wisan, 61, is a C.P.A. and a lifelong Mormon. His life appears well ordered. He has been married to one woman, Jean, for 37 years, and they have four children and three grandchildren. He and his wife enjoy golfing and boating and are active members of their church. Wisan says he disdained the practice of polygamy, like most Mormons, even before he took on the F.L.D.S. job. Most of his days are spent working at his office in Salt Lake City, where he heads Wisan Smith Racker & Prescott, one of Utah’s biggest accounting firms, with 51 accountants that serve 4,500 clients, including the state’s governor and many of its large construction firms. Wisan’s home, in a nearby neighborhood, is close to a golf course that he plays often, and he drives a BMW 545i, having recently sold his Porsche.

He frequently starts sentences by saying, “Well, you know me, I’m so bashful,” and then proceeds to prove the opposite, representing himself as a bit of a cowboy in the realm of accounting. “My business is advising; it’s consulting. People don’t call up their C.P.A. and say, ‘Hey, I’ve had a great day. Let me tell you about it.’ They call me up and say, ‘I’ve got this problem.’ So I’m a problem solver.”

Apart from his private clients, Wisan has worked for the state of Utah over the years as a trustee or as a court-appointed receiver. He has liquidated firms on the brink of bankruptcy, and helped others pay off debtors and back taxes and return to solvency. Over time, his work has made him the manager of a roadside motel, a wedding reception hall, a chain of Subway sandwich shops, an appliance warehouse, and a bowling alley and bar, even though he doesn’t drink. Often, those he was assigned to help were hostile, but nothing could have prepared him for the F.L.D.S.

We pull into Short Creek in the rented red Mustang. “Here we aaaarrrrrre,” he says, as though we’ve entered another dimension. The community sits in a 13-square-mile valley bracketed by a ridge of sandstone mountains. Cell-phone coverage ends as we drive past the Bank of Ephraim building. The streets are empty, and the only cars on the road are large S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks, all with darkly tinted windows. Technically, the community encompasses the border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, but since the beginning, locals have called the area Short Creek for the dry riverbed that cuts between the two towns. For the most part, the towns function as one place, and their combined population of 7,000 or so is made up almost entirely of polygamist Mormons, direct descendants of the pioneers who came to the desert after the Great Depression to live in accord with their belief that multiple wives provided the passage to heaven.

"Do you understand the culture enough to understand what the hold on the people is?" Wisan asks me. Like most of his questions, this one is rhetorical. “Okay. F.L.D.S. lesson No. 1: Warren Jeffs’ hold on the people is through fear. When I first went down here, I knew two things: I knew that he controlled where people lived, and I knew that he controlled whom they married.”

When Jeffs took charge of the community, he quickly moved to make every marriage his decision. At his whim, marriages would also be ended and families evicted from their homes. “If I go home one day and I’m excommunicated, and Warren kicks me out of my house and reassigns my wife and tells my kids not to ever talk to me again, I mean, I’d lose everything,” Wisan says. The unfairness upsets him, his face reddening. “I mean, you don’t have any trial, you don’t have any hearing, you don’t have any, ‘Let me explain something...’ ”

He recalls, “After I got appointed, I talked to a girl who was on a moving crew. They do it at night, 2 or 3 in the morning, to make sure nobody is looking. They could move a house in less than an hour. They’d go in, and they’d Saran Wrap the dressers; they wouldn’t unpack anything. Couple hundred people, trucks—boom.”

Wisan pulls the Mustang into the driveway of a large brick home, hurries up to the door, and knocks. Stefanie Colgrove answers, her blond hair swinging down to her waist. Before she can say a word, he cracks a joke about how his red car makes us a moving target. She laughs knowingly and invites us into a living room the size of a hotel lobby, where a crowd of children—she has seven—are sitting around eating cereal.

Last year, Wisan allowed Colgrove to move into this house. It once belonged to John Nielsen Jeffs, a successful businessman as well as a stepbrother and close ally of Warren Jeffs’. Not long after Warren disappeared, his stepbrother and other pillars of the community left too, moving to Texas, Nevada, South Dakota, and other outposts. The home has 19 bedrooms and 23 bathrooms—four with Jacuzzis—and a waterfall in the yard. The three kitchens were used to feed John Nielsen Jeffs’ five wives and more than a dozen children. It is a polygamist’s dream home.

Meanwhile, Colgrove had been living a polygamist’s nightmare. She is the great-granddaughter of one of the men who founded the Short Creek community. But by the time she was a teenager, her family was on the outs with the priesthood, and her father struggled to support his three wives and 36 children. Colgrove was married off to a 45-year-old man shortly after she turned 18. She was his third wife, and such was her misery that after a year, she made up her mind to have a one-night stand with a nonpolygamist she knew from work. Afterward, Colgrove went to her father and her husband and told them she was no longer worthy of the marriage. At 20, she married again, this time to a polygamist in Salt Lake City who had one wife. Stefanie says she spent most of her time in the basement, where she tended to her newborn son. After less than two years, Colgrove left her second husband and married a Lutheran from Nevada. When the couple heard that Warren Jeffs was on the lam, Colgrove convinced her husband to move to Short Creek.

"When you grow up around this kind of land," Colgrove says, "it's the only kind of beauty you know."

She applied to take over a house from the trust and made an appeal to Wisan: Let us live here, and we will help others. Wisan approved, with the caveat that the house also shelter women and children who have been banished or are fleeing the F.L.D.S. It’s called the Affinity Home.

As Colgrove tells this story, she asks if I’d mind running an errand with her to get milk and cheese for her brood. We drive in her ramshackle pickup to the only dairy store in town. “Are you ready for this?” she asks me. “I hope it doesn’t embarrass you that I’m paying in nickels and dimes.” Colgrove picks up an old baby-wipe container, filthy and full of change.

Inside the store, women in long dresses and braids quickly turn away from us. Men grab their sons tightly by the wrists and studiously avoid Colgrove as she pulls down a brick of cheddar cheese and a gallon of milk. Children stare at Colgrove, who wears jeans and bedroom slippers.

“They used to treat me like a ghost,” Colgrove says after saying hello to each person ignoring her, “but now I don’t let them.”

How this all came to pass is rooted in the Mormon Church’s early history. In the summer of 1843, Church of the Latter-Day Saints’ founder Joseph Smith announced a heavenly revelation stating that plural marriage was required to receive the highest glory from God. The following year, Smith and his closest followers were jailed, and in 1879, the Supreme Court upheld a congressional prohibition on the practice. In 1890, the Mormon Church’s fourth president, Wilford Woodruff, received a divine revelation decreeing that plural marriage should end. But it did not. Followers continued to practice polygamy in secret, splintering off from the main church.

In the 1930s, a group of rebels settled at a pioneer outpost 300 miles south of Salt Lake City, forming the Short Creek community. In addition to practicing polygamy, they also embraced unconventional communal economic policies and belief in total submission to church leaders. They incorporated these ideals into the United Effort Plan in 1942. Signed by a committee of men who called themselves the Priesthood Council, the U.E.P. was designed as a charitable trust to be administered by a group of male church elders. From the beginning, the trust document insisted that the funds be used for the sect’s security and protection, both from outside influence as well as unjust management from within the group. The assets included land from the gathered brethren—about 770 acres—along with seven horses, two dozen cattle, and farming equipment.

In the decades that followed, the community grew from a few dozen families to close to 10,000 people. Converts would donate their land to the trust, along with cash contributions to buy more real estate.

Warren Jeffs graduated from high school near the top of his class in 1973. He was the favorite son of Rulon Jeffs, a leader in the polygamist movement who controlled the Salt Lake Valley chapter. Warren was reportedly known in the community as humble and righteous. He worked for his father as an accountant, then as a teacher and principal at the F.L.D.S.’s private school.

At the same time, the leaders of Short Creek, 300 miles away, were tightening control over their flock. In 1987, according to court documents, residents received a letter informing them that they were “tenants at will” of the U.E.P. They were asked to sign forms acknowledging that their homes were not their own, essentially surrendering all economic agency to the leaders who ran the trust. Years later, after Rulon Jeffs had taken over the Short Creek community, Warren and the other trustees amended the trust to give themselves total control over the land and the people. This revision stated that “the privilege to participate in the United Effort Plan and live upon the lands and in the buildings of the United Effort Plan Trust is granted, and may be revoked, by the Board of Trustees. Those who seek that privilege commit themselves and their families to live their lives according to the principles of the United Effort Plan and the Church, and they and their families consent to be governed by the priesthood leadership and the Board of Trustees.”

When Warren took over after his father’s death in 2002, his domination became absolute. Whatever power was shared among the church elders vanished when Jeffs began evicting men and families from their homes for the slightest infractions, former members say. He squeezed his flock hard economically too. He liquidated assets and drained the coffers of local businesses. He closed the parks and the small local zoo, selling off the wolves and the wallabies.
Jeffs even closed the massive church where worship services were held, the social center of this isolated community, telling his followers that they weren’t worthy to attend.

Then Fred Jessop, who had spent decades as a church bishop and accountant raising cash for the tithing stockpile, vanished one night. His wives would later say that he had been relaxing in his La-Z-Boy recliner when four men who worked for Jeffs arrived and lifted him and his chair into a van. One of his wives reportedly jumped in after him, and they were taken to a small town in Colorado. Jeffs told church members later that Jessop was “called to another mission,” a former member said. Jessop died a few years later, his passing marked only by an obituary in a small Colorado paper. Jeffs’ purge culminated on January 10, 2004, when he announced that 19 other men, including the mayor and several prominent business leaders, had to leave. This news came at a weekly Saturday project meeting, according to one exiled member. There, Jeffs said God had given him a list of sins that the men had committed, and then he told them to exit the meeting hall, leave their families and businesses, and go away and repent. Their wives were later married off to other men.

After Jeffs finished naming the latest apostates, he darted out a side door. He was never seen publicly in the community again.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. and the criminal division of Utah’s Office of the Attorney General were pursuing investigations into Jeffs’ role in arranging marriages of underage girls in the community as well as allegations of tax evasion and welfare fraud. Utah’s Third District Court intervened in 2005 after several townsfolk filed a complaint, accusing Jeffs and the elders of secretly moving communal property out of the trust. At the same time, the lawsuits charging Jeffs with sexual abuse had been filed. In May 2005, a District Court judge placed Wisan in charge of the financially orphaned flock.

Today, Bruce Wisan has mastered Short Creek. He knows the grid of unmarked streets well and the byzantine laws that govern life there. He points out the hospital where women go to give birth. (The community reportedly has the highest rate of the birth defect fumarase deficiency in the world.) He drives past the cave in which followers built a bunker that could house hundreds in the event of government raids or the apocalypse. Wisan stops in front of the gargantuan compound, with more than six large homes, that Warren and Rulon Jeffs and hundreds of relatives called home. He steers down a gravel road, past looming gates and unfinished homes. Most of the houses are modest in design but monstrous in size, built to fit families of 20 or more.

The effects of Jeffs’ apocalyptic vision and the financial decimation it wrought are everywhere. Wisan looks at the dilapidated houses as he drives by and shakes his head. A number seemed to have been abandoned at critical moments of construction. They all lack something—siding, walls, windows, a porch, or even a roof. To Wisan, they are evidence of Jeffs’ crimes against his followers. In the years before he fled, Jeffs told his adherents that with the end of the world coming so soon, they must not invest money in earthly things. Instead, he told them that they should give the money to God, the church, him.

Wisan is here today to hold one of his occasional town-hall meetings. Weeks ago, he paid a few former F.L.D.S. members who’d been excommunicated to post notices in the area’s post office, only to learn that they had been ripped down. He isn’t expecting a large turnout. “Our contact with people on the inside is limited,” he says.

When Wisan was appointed to run the U.E.P., his mandate was to step in and quickly protect the trust against litigation and stop the bleeding of assets by Jeffs. Time was of the essence; two civil suits filed against Jeffs and the U.E.P. put the trust—and the thousands of people living on its property—at risk of bankruptcy, Wisan says.

One lawsuit, filed in August 2004, accused Jeffs of systematically expelling young men from the community to keep the young women available as wives for church elders. The other suit was filed by Jeffs’ nephew, Brent, who alleged that Jeffs had molested him when he was a child, telling him it was God’s will. Brent described years of being taken to a basement to be sodomized. He filed suit only after his brother, another alleged victim, shot himself in the head. (In March, the plaintiffs in both lawsuits filed court papers to dismiss the cases, saying that their goals—including removing Jeffs from power—had largely been achieved.)

Initially, the court appointed Wisan to take charge of only two large properties that Jeffs had put up for sale at a fraction of their value. Wisan sensed even then that what the F.L.D.S. wanted most was privacy. So he struck a deal with the men who Jeffs left in power: If they would quietly release the land to the U.E.P. without a fight, Wisan would use the sale proceeds to pay $500,000 in U.E.P. legal fees. When the land sold for more than $2 million, Wisan was also able to use some of the balance to pay his own accounting fees and those of an attorney. Soon after that victory, District Court Judge Denise Lindberg asked Wisan to tend to the entire U.E.P. trust.

Days after he started, Wisan received a report that one of the U.E.P.’s assets, Cozy Log Homes, an 18,000-square-foot steel commercial building, had been dismantled and vanished from U.E.P. land. It never turned up again.

Then, on New Year’s Eve 2005, Wisan was on the 15th hole of a golf course in Mesquite, Nevada, playing alongside his wife and another couple, when his cell phone rang. It was a former sect member calling. The agitated man said that a crew of dozens of church loyalists had gathered for a Saturday work project in order to dismantle a 60-foot-tall grain elevator. He described a scene of incredible efficiency, with two large cranes and several welders taking apart the elevator and carting it away. The court asked Wisan to find it and get it back. He filed a preliminary injunction, which enjoined any person from removing U.E.P. property. When police chief Fred Barlow was deposed weeks later, he refused to answer most of the questions.

In the deposition, a lawyer asked, “Do you understand that if Bruce Wisan requests that the police department do something to protect the trust that’s contrary to the desires of Warren Jeffs…you have a sworn duty to follow what Bruce Wisan asks you to do?”

Barlow answered, “I have a duty to uphold the law according to what’s on the law.”

But in a letter found following the arrest of one of Jeffs’ disciples and cited in court documents, Barlow addressed Jeffs as Uncle Warren and wrote, “I would first like to acknowledge you as the one man that was and is called of God to stand at the head of his priesthood and the Kingdom of God on the earth in this day and time.” Barlow went on to assure Jeffs that all the police officers were united in their desire to do Jeffs’ bidding and awaited further directives. He signed off, “I love you… I know that you have the right to rule in all aspects of my live [sic]. I yearn to hear from you.”

Roughly a year later, on the eve of a well-publicized visit to the city from state officials, the polygamists returned the elevator, rebuilding it piece by piece.

Next, Wisan tried to get Jeffs’ flock to pay their property taxes. He sent out written notices in 2006. But the letters, Wisan heard, quickly littered the floor of the local post office. Then, he hired exiled F.L.D.S. member Isaac Wyler to go from house to house, posting each family’s bill on the door. Wisan sent eviction warnings first to those whom he had been told were leading the community in Jeffs’ absence. Then he sent out a second round of letters, naming those who had paid their property taxes. Within a few months, about $1.5 million was collected—nearly all that had been due.

One of Wisan’s greatest challenges has been trying to distinguish exactly what belongs to the U.E.P. Since so much of the town and its businesses were formed by communal labors—called “the work” and performed in the name of God—it’s hard to tell what is private property. The church had long used Saturday work crews of local men that labored for the community, constructing widows’ homes and school buildings. But under Jeffs, those volunteer laborers spent their time working for businesses that then turned over their profits to the church. And they were used to build ever-larger homes for the families of the town’s elite. Former members told me that they received only half of their weekly wages; the rest was automatically deducted by their employers and turned over to the Prophet.

Over the past year, Wisan has worked toward his ultimate goal: liquidating the trust. He wants to end communal land ownership, subdivide the towns, and have the deeds to houses end up with the homes’ current residents. In 2006, Wisan hired surveyors and engineers at great expense in order to subdivide the area into individual lots, turning the community into a city like any other.

F.L.D.S. members who are loyal to Warren Jeffs have spent the past few years hiding from the public eye. Most homes are surrounded by fences. Windows of cars and houses are tinted black. While visiting the community, I would attempt to speak with the rare person I saw in the streets, but each time, the men would stare at me in icy silence and women would grab their children and flee. Wisan, despite his intimate involvement with F.L.D.S.’s financial future, gets the same treatment. He is proud to have cultivated a single secret source in the community. He has dined with the man and one of his wives, and they talk occasionally on the phone. One day, after much pestering, he agrees to put the source on a three-way call with me.

I ask the man what he thinks of Wisan’s vision of privatization. “We consider them consecrated properties,” the voice on the line says to me, thoughtfully and slowly. “And for us to accept or take on privatization of the properties that have been consecrated for the good people—it is just not acceptable.”

I ask him what the people think of Wisan and his work. “The feelings of the people were from the very first, and continue to be, that this is the takeover by the state of a private religious trust. It just doesn’t seem right. We are a religious people; the religious tenets are certainly going to take dominance. The people are the type of people that quietly live their lives. They’ve gone through this before; they quietly go on. Are they afraid of him? I don’t think they’ve ever been afraid of him. They’re disgusted by him.”

No one in Short Creek seems grateful for Bruce Wisan. He’s hated or, at best, tolerated. He has repeated to me several times the story about the lone F.L.D.S. member who once called and thanked him for his work. To date, Wisan’s firm has billed the trust $600,000. “It’s 50 percent of my time and 10 percent of my billable hours,” he says, explaining how the task has taken over his life. While the years he has spent trying to privatize the U.E.P. have made for some good stories, it has also meant hundreds of hours spent on a multitude of small details for the most infinitesimal of results. I ask him why anybody would ever get involved in such a morass.

“Well, I’m a boring old C.P.A.,” he says. “But I like excitement. Until just a few years ago, I rode dirt bikes out in the sand dunes, and I’ve always had fast cars, fast motorcycles. I like fast boats. So there is an element of that. But I looked at this as a chance to really do something different. I mean, how many C.P.A.’s do you know that affect hundreds or maybe thousands of people and the decisions they make? I looked at this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have an effect. To do something besides just be a bookkeeper.”

Since the raid in Texas, he says, residents of Short Creek have begun faithfully sending their monthly utility and trust-management payments to him. He wonders if it’s because sect members once planning to move to Texas are now determined to remain in Utah, which must look like a peaceful haven in comparison.

Wisan comes less frequently to the community these days. His office in Salt Lake City is sunlit and modern, taken over by neat stacks of paper that cover the floor, his desk, the couch, and the chairs. He shouts to his assistant and goes to lunch with other accountants and Jean, his wife, who works there part-time. Behind his wooden desk hangs an oil painting of an American Indian warrior, his men prepared for battle behind him. When Wisan sits at his desk, he faces a large aerial map of the Short Creek community. Despite his prosperous life in Salt Lake City, his heart and mind seem to often be consumed by the strange, distant world of the F.L.D.S.

I think that the fact I'm still here, that they haven't run me out of town, that they haven't intimidated me, is success," he says. "They treat me like I'm Sherman in Atlanta at the end of the Civil War, but I still think somebody had to do it, and I feel as good as I can about what I’ve done."

This story would have ended on that hopeful note, were it not for the April raid of the F.L.D.S. compound in Texas. Now it seems clear why Warren Jeffs was so intent on selling off the trust’s assets, where all that money was going, and why.

Eldorado, Texas, population about 1,900, used to be the kind of place where, says one resident, the local drama consisted mostly of “cousin killings and wife beatings.” But life changed one day in March 2004. The Eldorado Success newspaper ran a story about the sale of a 1,700-acre ranch on the outskirts of town, supposedly for a corporate hunting retreat. The paper received a phone call from a woman, who warned that the land was actually going to a radical group of polygamist Mormons who were building a temple in preparation for the apocalypse. The editor couldn’t quite believe it so he called the sheriff, who drove out to the ranch and found a series of large apartment buildings already being constructed. “When it first hit here, it was like a U.F.O. landing north of town,” the newspaper’s editor, Randy Mankin, says.

The polygamists, of course, had been sent to West Texas on a divine mission from Short Creek, in the Utah desert, and were said to have been handpicked by Warren Jeffs. In Eldorado, the F.L.D.S. seemed determined to avoid government interference; they paid their taxes on time and applied for the permits they needed to build a compound that could house more than a thousand believers—a small city.

Sam Brower, a private investigator who has spent the past five years investigating the polygamists for attorneys involved in a civil suit against Jeffs, says that a lot of Short Creek’s assets were funneled into Eldorado. “That’s what his followers do—they yearn to go to Zion. They buy in to that concept, and they are trying to buy their way into heaven.”

For the past few years, J.D. Doyle, technology director for the Eldorado school district, has flown his plane over the compound, taking photographs and posting them on a website that allowed locals to see what was happening inside the area. Otherwise, Doyle says, “There’s no way for us little podunks to know what’s going on.” He even used Google Earth to chart maps of nearly a dozen secret polygamist communities that have sprouted up around North America.

Months before the raids, Doyle took me up in his plane for a look. A six-foot-tall deer fence surrounded the compound. The centerpiece was the enormous three-story limestone temple. It was shockingly white against the dull scrub of the landscape. It looked illuminated.

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Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

One of the most talked-about museum shows of the summer couldn’t sound sleepier: an exhibition of 92 Impressionist paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago that opens at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 29. So why the fuss? The Art Institute is charging the Kimbell an estimated $2 million for the exhibition. The remarkable fee has sparked debate among industry watchdogs, who say that museums should be allowed to recoup the cost of transporting and insuring loaned artworks but not, as the A.I.C. appears to be doing, make money.

“The A.I.C. is not an A.T.M.,” says Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who writes frequently about museum ethics. “I have no objection to museums covering their costs through loan fees, but renting the collection for profit while pretending to loan it is just backdoor fundraising.”

Historically, charging outsize fees for lending exhibitions has been frowned upon. Art that’s in a museum isn’t supposed to be used to make money, the thinking goes. But in recent years, a few institutions have broken with tradition: While it was renovating, New York’s Museum of Modern Art charged for exhibits it sent to Tokyo, Berlin, and Houston. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Phillips Collection in Washington both raised cash when they sent paintings, most of them Impressionist works, to a gallery at the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas. The collection of Roman art from the Louvre, currently touring the U.S., has cost American museums as much as $1 million per venue. (View slideshow.)

Yet the A.I.C.’s $2 million fee is exceptional, and it seems even more curious in the context of the institution’s finances. At $700 million, the A.I.C.’s endowment is one of the biggest among American museums, and its $75 million annual budget has been comfortably balanced for years. A.I.C. director Jim Cuno says he entered the deal with the Kimbell to keep the works from sitting in storage while the A.I.C. renovates. The fee, he says, will cover the costs of printing a catalog and shipping the art. Some money will be left over, he acknowledges, but he won’t comment further, other than to argue that the arrangement isn’t a rental. “That makes it sound like it’s something that’s been motivated by some exchange of cash, as a means to gain some revenue,” he says.

With more than $1 billion in assets, the Kimbell can certainly afford to pay the A.I.C.’s asking price. What’s more, it’s a pretty safe bet the show will be a hit. The Kimbell’s last big Impressionist exhibition, in 1994, brought in 430,000 visitors, a record for Texas. Between sales of tickets, merchandise, items at the café, and thousands of new memberships, the show could generate revenue of $8 million to $10 million. Hence Malcolm Warner, the Kimbell’s acting director, takes the high road: “For us, the exciting new thing is just seeing one of the great Impressionist collections in the world in our galleries.”Related Links
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Mover and Sheika

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Selling perfume is about dreams. For fantasies of sex and glamour, spritz Tom Ford. For understated chic, use Armani. So what are we to make of the small bottle of perfume in an aquamarine leather box, soberly displayed on the shelves of Saks Fifth Avenue in Dubai? There’s a message in this bottle, and the clue is in its name, written in lush Arabic script: Mukhalat al-Sheika Lubna, which translates roughly as "Mix of Sheika Lubna." The name Sheika Lubna may not mean much in the West, but in the United Arab Emirates, it's synonymous with big money. Sheika Lubna al-Qasimi is a fast-talking, media-friendly 50-year-old princess who, as foreign trade minister of the U.A.E., is leading the most aggressive economic and social revolution in the region. She has helped turn the emirates, awash in oil money, into an Arab version of Las Vegas, all upscale resorts and over-the-top attractions. And she has helped direct some of its cash toward the West, through investments in Western companies, many of them struggling because of the sagging U.S. economy. While Sheika Lubna may not control the U.A.E.'s purse strings—investments are determined by the managers of the Dubai and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds—she is the face of the emirates for the West, the most prominent emissary other than Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the U.A.E.'s prime minister and ruler of Dubai. Thanks largely to Sheika Lubna, the U.A.E. has become the biggest recipient of foreign investment in the Middle East. (View an interactive feature showing Mideast investments in U.S. companies.)

But with economic expansion has come friction. In 2006, DP World, a business backed by the government of Dubai, was forced to sell the U.S. port-management operations it had acquired through the purchase of a British company. A political firestorm had erupted in the U.S. over fears that a Middle Eastern firm’s involvement in running port facilities could jeopardize national security. More recently, there has been dark talk that the U.A.E.'s ports are being used by enemies of the U.S., including Iran.

The sheika's role is to deflect criticism while keeping the cash rolling in. She has the right qualifications. She is the first Arab woman to create a multimillion-dollar e-commerce company in a region where women have traditionally played only bit roles in business. She's also the first woman to become the economic minister of an oil-rich nation and the only cabinet minister anywhere to have her own perfume. Think Carly Fiorina meets Condoleezza Rice, with a touch of Oprah Winfrey.

All of Sheika Lubna's firsts make it easy to forget that the U.A.E. is a nation very much in transition. The sheika's job is to represent that shift while at the same time making it look as effortless as possible.

Walking out of the elevator to visit Sheika Lubna's office in downtown Abu Dhabi, I almost bump into her. "You're early," she says, holding out a firm hand. Many Arab women, even thoroughly modern ones, dislike publicly touching men to whom they are not related. Not Sheika Lubna. Over sweet coffee and fruit juice, she makes small talk, showing off photographs of herself with Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Colin Powell, and Sheik Mohammed of Dubai. She lists her recent and upcoming engagements in Brussels, London, Paris, and Riyadh. She sees it as part of her job to be "an Arab capable of communicating across cultures." She says, "I support both sides. I argue for America in the U.A.E. and for the U.A.E. in America."

Indeed, Sheika Lubna personifies everything that the U.A.E. and much of modern Arabia aspires to be. To outsiders, the U.A.E. is all bling, a desert full of five-star hotels, skyscrapers, ski domes, million-dollar horse races, and mile-long malls where Russians queue to buy Fendi fur coats despite the 100-degree heat. It’s certainly gaudy. But beyond the razzle-dazzle is a steely sociopolitical mission.
The rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai—the two largest and most powerful emirates in the loose federation of seven that make up the U.A.E.—are gambling their current and projected oil revenues on the proposition that they can drag themselves into the modern world. They want to use expensive Middle Eastern oil, cheap East Asian labor, upscale Western professionals, and a sprinkle of celebrity glamour to create a pro-capitalist, moderate Muslim country that is a socioeconomic success story. Who better to sell the desert dream than an Arab woman who was educated in the U.S.? "I'm used as a front, as a face, partly because I bat for both sides and partly because I'm a woman in a Muslim Arab society," Sheika Lubna says. "It is not something you expect. You immediately get the message that it is an open-minded country."

Clearly, she's much more than a face: How else to explain that since the DP World debacle, the worst moment in the emirates' recent economic ascent, the U.A.E.'s investment in the West has nudged up to $50 billion a year without so much as a raised eyebrow? In 2007, private investment houses and sovereign wealth funds in the emirates have bought into financial giants like Citigroup; two private equity houses, Carlyle Group and Apollo Management; Nasdaq; upscale retailer Barneys New York; gaming behemoth MGM Mirage; and property, hotel, and leisure groups. In Europe, Dubai and Abu Dhabi have bought stakes in airplanemaker E.A.D.S., HSBC, Daimler, Standard Chartered Bank, and the Swedish stock exchange.

In return, the West is buying into the U.A.E. Overseas investment in the emirates reached a peak of $18 billion in 2006, representing more than one-third of all overseas cash coming into the Middle East. In addition, the U.A.E. is the No. 1 destination for U.S. investment in the region. Sheika Lubna, for instance, helped persuade Halliburton, the oil-services company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, to open a second headquarters in Dubai. Daeman Harris, who leads the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the Middle East, describes Sheika Lubna as a "superstar." He says, "She has a nuanced understanding of Western and, in particular, American culture. She’s the type of person who can walk into a roomful of U.S. businessmen or government officials who couldn’t find the U.A.E. on a map, give a presentation on the economy and its development, and walk out with everyone in the room saying, 'I've got to get on a plane and see this place for myself.' "

Sheika Lubna is one of seven children born into the extended royal family of Sharjah, the emirate just to the north of Dubai. When she was a child, the most that local girls could hope for was to learn Arabic and math and study the Koran. All that was expected of a minor royal was to marry another royal and have children. But her parents—her father ran the airport there, and her mother was a homemaker—encouraged her to think beyond that. She persuaded them to let her go overseas to learn English and study technology. "I decided to become a total geek," she says. She enrolled in a language school in Britain and soon moved on to study physics and math.

Her brothers persuaded her to swap Britain for the U.S. West Coast. "Two of them were already studying in California. They said that if I really wanted to study technology, I should be there." Sheika Lubna enrolled at California State University at Chico. She was a strict Muslim with a plummy English accent, and her American classmates found it hard to place her. "They used to call me Miss Shakespeare," she says.

She admired the American work ethic but turned down job offers in California and headed home to the U.A.E. at age 22. Though her parents urged her to get a government job—the acceptable career track for an establishment woman—she refused. Instead, she joined an Indian-owned software-development firm, becoming the first woman on the payroll.

As her profile grew, her experience and connections earned her a post as the first female member of the management team of Dubai Ports Authority, which in the early 1990s was starting to emerge as a global leader in seaport operations. The men, she says, dismissed her as a secretary and used the salty language of the docks to throw her off stride. But she silenced the bigots by coming up with a computerized manifest system that cut the time it took to handle loose cargo from one hour to 10 minutes.

That success helped her win a $5 million government grant to set up a new company, Tejari.com, to develop government and business-to-business e-commerce. Within three years, it had broken even and become the biggest e-commerce player in the Middle East. In 2004, she became the first woman to serve in the U.A.E. cabinet, as minister of economy and planning, and then, earlier this year, she was named its first-ever minister of foreign trade.

Today, Sheika Lubna splits her time between Abu Dhabi, the U.A.E.'s seat of government, and Dubai, its financial powerhouse. A few days after our meeting in her Abu Dhabi office, I catch up with her on the top floor of Dubai's Emirates Towers, where Sheik Mohammed has his executive office. From that vantage point, I can see through the windows the future she is selling. Straight ahead is the Dubai International Financial Centre, home to the nascent Bourse Dubai, where just about every major Western bank now has an office. To the left rises the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building. To the right, through the heat haze, I can make out the bikini-clad tourists swimming in the Persian Gulf and local businesswomen on mobile phones. Looking at the view with me, Sheika Lubna too is astounded. 'This country is only 36 years old," she says. "I think we’ve achieved a great deal in a generation."

True enough. But there's still a ways to go before the U.A.E.—and, at times, the sheika herself—can be considered genuinely modern. The U.A.E. has no meaningful elections or minimum wage, workers have no right to strike, and abuse of female domestic workers is a serious problem. But when a friend in the government calls to say he'll be late for a meeting because he's dealing with a complaint from the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, the sheika mocks him: "Don’t talk to me about domestic abuse! I am abusing myself as my own maid, moving all the boxes into my new house." It makes her sound like the princess she is.

I ask her what she thinks would happen if a Saudi woman wanted to launch a perfume in the Riyadh branch of Saks. Uncharacteristically, she ducks the question. "What you see is a different pace of development for women. I cannot impose the pace at which we are going on any other country." Call it mix-and-match morality, or diplomacy, or something else, but Sheika Lubna's approach has allowed her to avoid falling afoul of conservative social and religious forces in the region.

Sheika Lubna's success has come at a heavy personal price. When she was 19, she became engaged to her cousin, and a marriage was arranged. But the relationship fizzled. Since then, she has devoted herself to her career, but she regrets never having married. "I like men. I like kids. I always thought, I am going to do this job, build my career, and the marriage will come along in time. But it never did."

Sheika Lubna is split not just between East and West but also between her roles as a socioeconomic radical and a traditional Arab woman. But she says she has made peace with her past and is happy with her lot. If the first woman to break the mold of Middle Eastern business cannot have it all, so be it. "My proudest achievement is that I am a bridge. Women are following my example. I am changing the mind-set of young girls, saying, 'It’s okay. Look, I'm here. I'm on the other side, and you can breeze through.'"

The first lady of the Gulf pauses and smiles. "Not bad for a geek with a perfume."

Foul Ballpark

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Do richer Major League Baseball teams play in cleaner stadiums? We surveyed health-code violations at 11 stadiums to find out. It turns out that two of baseball’s richest teams, the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, and a team near the bottom of the revenue pile, the Kansas City Royals, play in stadiums with some of the best inspection records. But the big middle contains several ballparks where you might want to skip the hot dogs. Two West Coast teams, the Los Angeles Angels and the Oakland A’s, had far more food fouls than any other team. While most were minor, some were, well, disgusting. Teams contract out food service to a handful of vendors, though team management is responsible for stadium cleanliness. The A’s declined to comment; a spokesperson for the Angels conceded that 2007 was an off year but that the team had worked with its vendor and an outside consultant and “made a lot of changes” for 2008. (View an interactive feature that rates the filthiest stadiums.)Related Links
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Buying Chanel (All of It)

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Jimmy Choo, Peter Som, and Valentino did it in private equity deals last year. Prada and Salvatore Ferragamo have been hoping to do it in initial public offerings this year. The new trend in high-end fashion? Selling not just clothes, handbags, and shoes, but the company itself. Yet the one that moguls would love to get their hands on—Chanel—shows no sign of being for sale. Brothers Alain and Gérard Wertheimer of Paris tightly control the legendary fashion house, which boasts 151 boutiques and offers everything from the iconic No. 5 fragrance to contemporary versions of founder Coco Chanel’s pioneering little black dress. A Chanel blouse can cost about $3,000, but the company’s value is far less clear. We asked a handful of investment bankers—including Gilbert Harrison and Robin Andrea Harris, founder and vice president, respectively, of the fashion-industry investment firm Financo, and Mitch Hara, a managing director in Peter J. Solomon Co.’s mergers-and-acquisitions group—to help us come up with a guesstimate.

Step No. 1—Handbags, Heels, and the Little Black Dress

Fashion finance gurus believe Chanel’s annual revenue runs between $2.3 billion and $3 billion. But because Chanel’s financials are private, the best clues to its overall value must be gleaned from comparable public companies. Most experts say the best one to look at is Hermès—another revered European brand and a family-controlled player that’s not fond of licensing out its name. (Chanel has only one licensing deal.) Since Hermès isn’t active in the cosmetics business, it’s useful only in valuing Chanel’s fashion side, which is believed to account for about 50 percent of the company’s revenue (or between $1.1 billion and $1.5 billion). Hermès is worth 17 times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Do some eighth-grade algebra to apply Hermès’ margin (30 percent) to Chanel’s revenue, and voilà!

Estimated value of Chanel's fashion business: $5.6 billion to $7.7 billion

Step No. 2—No. 5 and Beyond

Things aren’t as straightforward with the other half of Chanel’s business—perfume and cosmetics—because there is no one ideal company to compare it with. Our investment-banking sources suggest that the best way to appraise Chanel’s beauty business is to take an average of the figures from some top competitors: Clarins, Estée Lauder, and L’Oréal. Apply their average cash flow margin—16 percent—to the other 50 percent of Chanel’s revenue, and the resulting range is $180 million to $240 million. Because, unlike our amalgam of cosmetics companies, Chanel is a luxury-goods business, our sources suggest multiplying that range by 17, Hermès’ multiple.

Estimated added value: $3.1 billion to $4.1 billion

Step No. 3—The Crystal Ball

Simple addition of the figures calculated in the two preceding steps suggests that Chanel may be worth between $8.7 billion and $11.8 billion (average of $10.3 billion). But those calculations were performed using values from today’s strained marketplace. From last year’s peak, the average luxury-goods stock is off 40 percent. Because Chanel is, well, Chanel, some in the industry believe that its value may hold up better. “Take one C, interlock it with another C, and what you have is priceless,” says Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at NPD Group, a market research company. That may be hyperbole, but Chanel is arguably the single most valuable fashion brand. Anticipating a future in which the economy is stronger and more customers can afford a thousand-dollar belt, Chanel may be worth significantly more. So some analysts argue that it’s appropriate to boost our results by about 25 percent.

Estimated added value: $2.2 billion to $3 billion

THE BOTTOM LINE How hard will Chanel be hit by the forces battering its luxury competitors? If you think Chanel is no different from the others, its value is probably around $10 billion. If you think it’s uniquely positioned, the number is closer to $15 billion.

Estimated value of Chanel: $10.3 billion to $14.8 billion

Abbacadabra

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

At first glance, the movie incarnation of the stage musical Mamma Mia!, which opens on July 18, seems as risk-free a project as a studio could make. Written, produced, and directed by the team behind the $2 billion global Mamma Mia! brand, the release follows nine years of advance advertising. It also has an easily digested story line, big stars, and a soundtrack you can’t get out of your head.

But the screen translation arrives in megaplexes with some not-inconsiderable baggage. Judy Craymer, the film’s producer and originator of the stage version, worries that a misfire could damage the thriving Mamma Mia! industry, which currently boasts nine productions around the world. The concern for Universal, one of the project’s backers, is historical. Contemporary audiences have been finicky about onscreen musicals. There have been hits, like Chicago, the 2002 movie credited with reviving the genre; it cost $45 million but took in more than $300 million worldwide. Last year’s Hairspray was a home run too. But looming just as large are film disappointments like Rent and Phantom of the Opera, as well as outright flops like The Producers, which cost $45 million to make but grossed only $37.9 million. (See how recent film versions of Broadway hits have fared.)

When considering a musical, "we have to ask, 'Does the idea overcome the audience’s trepidation?' " says Donna Langley, president of production at Universal. Yet Mamma Mia!'s proven stage appeal persuaded her to go ahead. “It’s a phenomenon,” she says. "We jumped at the chance."

On the most basic level, Mamma Mia! is the story of the search for identity, set to the tunes of Abba, the Swedish pop band. A bride-to-be invites three men to the Greek island where she lives with her single mother, hoping to find out which one is her father. The challenge for Universal and Craymer—along with Playtone, Tom Hanks’ production company—was to avoid the static feel that plagued stage-to-film translations like Rent. Instead of using a minimal set and no-name actors, as the Broadway moneymaker did, the studio budgeted $56 million and shot some scenes on location in Greece. The cast includes Meryl Streep as the mom, Christine Baranski as her best friend, and Pierce Brosnan as one of the potential dads. And yes, the actors all perform musical numbers. "I actually got to dance on a beach with 20 gorgeous men half my age," Baranski says.

Even if the film bombs, the stage show could stand to benefit. With Mamma Mia!'s 10th anniversary approaching, the timing is good, says Hollywood producer Craig Zadan, plus filmed versions of plays can boost attendance of the stage production. Before the release of the movies Hairspray and Chicago, both of which Zadan co-produced, ticket sales for those two Broadway shows had been slow. Once the movies were released, sales rebounded. "The movie is a big commercial for the show," Zadan says.