Anger Management

Forty-five years later, the Hulk is still our favorite green giant. By Bryan Reesman

“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

Image about The Incredible Hulk

With that thinly veiled threat on The Incredible Hulk, the late Bill Bixby delivered a culturally resonant statement echoing the frustrations of anyone who’s ever been provoked or persecuted by someone or something. Many of us wish that we had our own personal demon to launch upon the world when it comes down on us. Growing up, I was a scrawny kid, and I always thought it would be great to teach local bullies a lesson by transforming into a giant green creature that would scare the bejesus out of them and toss them a mile away.

The Hulk represents our inner id, a wild and unfettered being that can smash and crash through everything, the side of us that seeks to use fists and feet when we decide to cease being rational. And in his various incarnations over the years — from comic books to animation to live action — he has provided plenty of vicarious mayhem for his legion of devoted fans.

The original story, unleashed in 1962 by Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee and legendary comic artist Jack Kirby, was simple: The brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner developed a powerful gamma bomb. Just prior to a trial detonation, teenager Rick Jones recklessly drove out on the test field as part of a dare. Banner ran out and tossed him into a trench but could not join him before the bomb exploded; thus Banner absorbed a massive dose of gamma rays that later transformed him into the rampaging Hulk. Despite his lesser intelligence, the Hulk’s superhuman strength and size allowed him to soar high into the air, hurtle through buildings, and tear asunder everything from lab machines to missiles.

Lee and Kirby’s stories were straightforward. Initially transforming only at night, but later also when experiencing rage or anxiety, Banner worked to conceal his dual nature, while Ross, Talbot, and the armed forces, not to mention a plethora of nemeses, including the gamma-ray-altered Wendigo and the Leader, hounded the Hulk relentlessly. Over the years, the less-than-jolly giant went through numerous incarnations: He was originally gray, and then green, which remained his dominant color. His personas ranged from his savage side to one where his body and Banner’s intelligence were merged. He occasionally joined superhero teams such as the Avengers, the Defenders, and the Pantheon, and he embarked on all manner of adventures — terrestrial, intergalactic, and even subatomic. One thing that stayed the same is that he always had the ability to speak, referring to himself in the third person (“Hulk smash!”), unlike his solely growling television-and-movie self.

The live-action television show developed by Kenneth Johnson in the late ’70s abandoned most of the comic-book ideas and characters, undoubtedly for budgetary reasons but also to make the concept more appealing to a mainstream audience. Bruce Banner became David Banner, a scientist who felt guilt over being unable to rescue his wife from a fiery car wreck and thus delved into exploring the hidden strengths many of us tap into during times of great stress. An accidental but self-administered overexposure to gamma radiation created his mean, green Mr. Hyde persona, which emerged during times of anger or great stress. Banner and his colleague Dr. Elaina Marks tried to contain “the raging spirit within him,” but her accidental death in a massive lab explosion and the mistaken belief that he had also died, along with the mistaken assumption that both deaths had occurred at the hands of the Hulk, put the good doctor on the run.

From there, the series developed a formula: Banner drifted from town to town, using a different surname each time, befriending people who hired him and then becoming entangled in their lives, which usually involved the intrusion of a criminal element that was eventually rectified by the Hulk. His alter ego was now pursued by tabloid reporter Jack McGee.

Johnson’s television series was radically different from its printed origins, but it still worked because of Bill Bixby’s intelligent, sensitive portrayal of Banner and because of Lou Ferrigno’s impressive physique and ability to generate sympathy for the creature. The Incredible Hulk won an acting Emmy for the tragic season-two opener “Married,” one of the only instances in which David Banner found happiness on the series. The show also had a sense of humor, like in “Terror in Times Square,” when a mobster intimidating Banner warns him, with unintentional irony, “You really don’t want to make me angry, and I really don’t want to make you angry.” The three fun but goofy television movies that came after the four-year series was canceled brought us the first screen representations of Marvel heroes Thor (Return of the Incredible Hulk) and Daredevil (Trial of the Incredible Hulk) and portrayed the end of our green hero (Death of the Incredible Hulk). (Cool trivia footnote: The show’s opening title narrator was Ted Cassidy, a.k.a. Lurch, from The Addams Family.)

An essential element to the series’ success was Joseph Harnell’s impressive, multifaceted score. It spanned everything from ominous orchestral sounds for the Hulk to the signature melancholy piano piece for Banner (“The Lonely Man”), which emphasized his isolation and alienation. As the closing theme for a superhero-based show, it was highly unorthodox and eternally memorable.

For my money, The Incredible Hulk series is still fun, and its gradual re-release on DVD will allow a new generation of fans to discover its guilty pleasures. (The Incredible Hulk: The Complete Second Season was released in July through Universal Home Video.) At the very least, it’s cool to imagine yourself being able to transform into a fearsome beast when those who provoke, anger, or prey on you just happen to press your buttons on the wrong day. Perhaps at the end of the day we’re just like the Hulk — we want a little respect.

Meet Horst Schulze

He’s the former president of Ritz-Carlton. He’s just launched his own posh hotel company. And now he’s telling us why he thinks his hotels are going to outluxe all the competition.

Meet Horst Schulze.

Photographs by Sean McCormick.

When was the last time you made a hotel reservation and were asked, “How can we make your stay as wonderful as possible?” If all goes according to plan, that’s exactly what will happen when you call a Capella Hotel to book a room.

Perhaps you’d like to in-line skate in Central Park at midnight? No problem; they’ll arrange it – and send Security along with you.

Do you go absolutely mad for moules marinière? They’ll make it for you – and teach you the recipe, if you wish.

Want to visit Roman ruins, see cave paintings, or tour a banana plantation? They’ll charter a plane. Have the urge to dine in the kitchen­ of a Michelin three-star restaurant? They’ll call the chef.

And what if you don’t know what you want? “We’ll give you a list of ideas,” says Horst Schulze, Capella’s founder, president, and CEO.

With fewer than 100 rooms at each property, Capella Hotels & Resorts – named for the alpha star of the constellation Auriga – will offer a level of personalized service that few hotels in the world can match, says Schulze. “The staff will operate as if they had a sixth sense,” he proclaims. “From the driver waiting at the airport to the greeting – like you’re arriving at a friend’s estate – to every element of your stay and departure … [like] giving each guest the kind of pillow he wants. You can’t do that in a 300- or 400-room hotel.”

Schulze says that Capella will stand out, even in the rarefied world of superluxe lodging. And while a six-star rating doesn’t exist, that seems to be exactly what he’s shooting for. All Capella hotels will have spas, boutique shopping, and gourmet restaurants; some will have golf courses and/or marinas. Two of the five Capella hotels currently under construction will anchor larger developments that include sole- and fractional-ownership homes and apartments.

But if you can’t afford to stay at a Capella hotel, where room rates will likely match existing suite rates at five-star hotels in the same region, you can still experience lodging Schulze-style: He’s also creating a second “brand,” a company called Solís Hotels & Resorts, designed to appeal to the traditional four- and five-star-hotel guest. Priced “just below the closest competition,” Solís (pronounced so-LEES) will target the same customers as upscale chains such as Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and Fairmont.

Think of it as one brand for the haves … and another for the have-mores.

At press time, Schulze had five Solís hotels in progress and was in negotiations on several more. Capella has five properties under construction, with more in development. But since none of these new hotels is actually up and running yet (the first Solís will open in Chicago in September; the first Capella in Castlemartyr, Ireland, in December), Schulze can only point to his experienced management team, to his track record at Ritz-Carlton, and to the more than $1 billion in investment capital already committed to the company as evidence that there’s no doubt in his mind that both brands will go on to become wildly successful.

“The idea that we won’t succeed is impossible,” he says matter-of-factly. “The only question is how long it will take.”

Industry analysts say Schulze is unveiling the right product at the right time. After weathering the three-year downturn that followed the events of September 11, the hotel industry is hot again, with investors sinking billions into new and existing properties. The trade publications are talking about “record levels of activity,” and it’s the luxury segment of the industry that’s leading the pack.

“The time is right,” concurs R. Mark Woodworth of PKF Consulting, a research firm specializing in the lodging industry. “I definitely believe there’s room for a new hotel player at the highest levels of luxury.”

“Horst has been doing his homework for years,” chimes in Gene Ference, president of HVS/the Ference Group. “He and his executives, many of whom came from Ritz-Carlton, have everything it takes for success.”

And how do Schulze’s competitors feel about all this? One can only guess, because no one’s talking. When asked to comment on Schulze’s plans, the corporate offices at Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Aman Resorts, Le Meridien, Marriott (which now owns Ritz-Carlton), and Ritz-Carlton all said they’d prefer not to comment, other than to say, “We wish him well.” (And some didn’t even say that.)

You can almost see Schulze, who is 65, rubbing his hands together, dying to start getting heads into beds. For the time being, though, he’s traveling the globe (he’s flown close to 500,000 miles in the last three years), calling on banks and investors, and working on real-estate deals.

“Once we have an infrastructure of developers on board,” he explains, “I can go back to actual operations. Right now I’m like a fish out of water. What I love is the daily business, the service. And I love making a profit.”

But he’s careful to qualify that last comment. “Many hotel companies believe the way to make money is by cutting costs,” he says. “I prefer to do it by creating ­excellence.”

Building a Brand

The seeds for all of this were planted in 2002, when Schulze founded the Atlanta-based West Paces Hotel Group shortly after leaving Ritz-Carlton. He started off by signing management contracts to run existing hotels for their owners, and today West Paces oversees an impressive roster of 11 properties, including the Carefree Resort in Arizona and the Daufuskie Island Resort in South Carolina.

But when Schulze talks excitedly about his plans, what really gets him going are the two brands he’s creating from the ground up. All Solís and Capella hotels will be privately owned – but Schulze and his team will manage them.

Solís Hotels will occupy new as well as existing (but fully renovated) properties. In Chicago, for instance, Schulze and his development partner are spending $125 million to convert the 46-year-old, 39-story Hotel 71 into the Solís Chicago Hotel Condominiums.

“Today there’s a lot of concern about chemicals,” he says. “So all Solís amenities will be organic, and so will much of the food.” When it comes to amenities, he says the hotels will have all the best bells and whistles but will emphasize service amenities, such as on-site activity directors, great bartenders, and greeters (rather than doormen) at the entrance. He’s asked his team of architects and designers to create classic, high-quality interiors designed with comfort foremost in mind.

The Capella experience, on the other hand, will be more about wants than needs. Location is critical to the Capella experience, so Schulze’s team is working triple time to secure its one-of-a-kind settings. The flagship Capella Pedregal in Cabo San Lucas, for example, will perch on a spectacular 24-acre parcel where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Cortez. The two Capellas in Ireland will be built in medieval castles.

“Capella is for travelers who desire enriching experiences and superb service rather than ostentatious displays of consumption,” Schulze says. “It will be elegant but with lots of heart. Elegance without warmth is arrogance.”

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hotel Man

Born in Winningen, Germany, Schulze was just 11 years old when he announced that he wanted to work in a hotel; never mind that he had never even set foot in one. Three years later, he quit school and went off to be a busboy at a hotel 110 miles from home. His mother warned him to behave, he remembers, because the hotel was fancy, and the guests were “important people.”

Shortly after he started, he had his first life-changing epiphany. “The maître d’ of the restaurant was exceptional in his position,” Schulze remembers. “When he ­entered the room, you felt it. People felt honored when he came to the table. He was as important to the guests as they were to him. Some see service as menial, but it was clear to me early­ on that it was an art. I knew from then on … hotels would be my life.”

Schulze’s next seminal experience took place at the Beau-Rivage in Lausanne. “The place was a palace,” he recalls. “Everything about it exuded sophistication: the original art, the huge chandeliers, the painted ceilings, the view of the lake. It made an enormous impression. There was no way I could afford to be there as a guest. Yet, I had the same beautiful things around me. Why not enjoy it?”

Schulze felt the same giddy excitement at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, where the clientele included Gary Cooper and Brigitte Bardot. “My little room was barely as wide as a bed,” he says, “but I was spending my days in the same surroundings as the Aga Khan. It just confirmed for me that I had chosen the right career. And that feeling has stayed with me ever since.”

It was in 1959, while working as a waiter for the Holland America Line, that Schulze got his first glimpse of America. The ship docked in HobokenNew Jersey, and the crew had a two-day leave. “All my friends ran off the boat, heading for the Empire State Building or Times Square,” he recalls. “I went straight to the Waldorf-Astoria.”

Schulze went on to management positions with Hilton and, later, Hyatt. When he quit in 1983 to join Ritz-Carlton, the company had just three hotels. “My father-in-law called and said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” Schulze remembers. ” ‘You’re leaving Hyatt for a company with no hotels?’ ” Schulze was named Ritz-Carlton’s executive vice president in 1987 and president and chief operating officer a year later.

The catchy Ritz-Carlton motto – We Are Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen – may sound like a slogan dreamed up by a slick branding firm, but it’s actually something Schulze wrote in an essay when he was 15, while working as a busboy and attending hotel school once a week.

“It was the only ‘A’ I ever got,” he laughs, “and so of course I remembered it. In this business, we’re not servants; we’re professionals. If you want respect, you have to create excellence.”

Anyone who has ever worked for Schulze knows that “creating excellence” is more than just a motto to him – it’s his raison d’être, his religion.

“If an ashtray was dirty, Mr. Schulze would pick it up himself,” remembers Pascal Bertrand, who was with Ritz-Carlton for 10 years and is now the general manager of the luxurious Legends Resort in Mauritius. “How often do you see the COO doing that? Then he’d bring it up to our office to remind us what it takes to be the best.”

“Few company leaders roll up their sleeves and get involved like Horst does,” agrees Wendy Reisman, who spent eight years with Ritz-Carlton and now runs her own Washington, D.C.-based PR firm. “And few are as motivating. When Horst got up to speak, the entire room sprang to attention.”

At one point in his Ritz-Carlton days, Schulze set out to lure a group of ­Michelin-starred chefs into leaving their European restaurants and coming to work for him in the United States. One of them was Guenter Seeger. Today, as chef/owner of Seeger’s in Atlanta, Seeger praises Schulze for devotion not only to “heads in beds,” but also to serving the finest food.

“He’s one of the very few hoteliers who has a vision for the culinary part as well,” Seeger says. “If anyone can do a six-star hotel, it would be him.”

In 1999, Schulze and his corporate food-and-beverage director invited their 45 ­executive chefs and 45 hotel food-and-beverage directors to join them on a whirlwind culinary and wine tour of France and Germany. The eight-day trip was an epic undertaking that involved moving about 90 people and their luggage around Europe; arranging tours, tastings, and vineyard visits; and ­securing reservations at some of the ­hardest-to-get-into (and most expensive) restaurants in the world, including many Michelin three-stars. The goal was twofold: to inspire the employees and to reward them for all their hard work.

Schulze was also known for having an almost gurulike effect on his staff and, at the same time, maintaining an approachable, down-to-earth style. “I’ve never known a company president who knew almost every employee’s name,” Reisman says. “And he really, sincerely cares. Horst was totally accessible by phone and by e-mail. He is about as loyal as they come.”

Also legendary was Schulze’s policy that empowered each and every Ritz-Carlton employee – from chambermaid to busboy to corporate VP – to do whatever was necessary to satisfy an unhappy guest. (Schulze says the policy will be the same in his new companies, as well.) As a result, one year, 96 percent of Ritz-Carlton guests surveyed said they would “recommend or repeat” the experience, an unprecedented display of customer satisfaction.

Under Schulze, the company also enjoyed extremely low employee turnover: 24 percent in 2000, compared with 100 percent, on average, for the industry as a whole. So now that Schulze is hiring again, it’s no surprise that he has his pick of the pack.

Hans Van der Reijden, for example, left his management post at the Ritz-Carlton Bali to work for Schulze as the general manager of the Solís Chicago. “I had always envied the people who got to work with Horst creating Ritz-Carlton,” he reports. “Leaving Bali? I didn’t give it a second thought.”

When Schulze left Ritz-Carlton in 2001 to form West Paces, he was responsible for a company with $2 billion in sales. He held a position most hoteliers would be silly to fantasize about, with cash compensation alone estimated at more than $1 million a year.

“It was a beautiful time, but that painting was painted,” he says, explaining why he left the company when he did. “For me, the magic lies in the creation – and I wanted to create. It was time to start a new canvas.”

Whether Schulze creates a masterpiece remains to be seen. But he, of course, is optimistic. “If you do your homework, concentrate on your vision, and stand up when you fall … you will win,” he says. “Nobody would say I don’t know the business. And anyone who knows me knows I’m relentless.”

Girl Power

Image about Leonardo DicaprioJuno star ELLEN PAGE holds her own against the big boys of moviemaking in Inception.
Photograph Credit: Melissa Moseley/Warner Bros. Pictures

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY THAT A YOUNG HOLLYWOOD STARLET QUOTES EINSTEIN. Or talks about permaculture and feminism. And yet Ellen Page, 23, does all of these things when she calls from her home base of Nova Scotia to chat about her latest project. This quirky, smart gravitas is exactly what audiences love about her — whether she’s playing a pregnant teen in Juno or a roller-derbying high schooler in Whip It. This month, Page co-stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the intellectual thriller Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan, the brain behind Batman Begins. Minds, prepare to be expanded.

There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Inception. What can you share without blowing its cover?

I am not sure of what I can say, and I also want people going in knowing nothing, because I think it will be just so much more exciting. But essentially, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character has a certain objective, and he acquires individuals to perform this with him. And it involves stealing an idea, or perhaps even going one step further than that, and that is what becomes the big challenge.

And what can you spill about your role?

I play a young architectural student named Ariadne who is studying in Paris, and I end up being drawn into his web.

When Christopher Nolan and Leonardo DiCaprio come calling, it’s a no-brainer, correct?

h my god, yes. I am a huge fan of Chris’ work, and it is always a massive bonus to meet someone and see that he’s such an awesome person. And Leo — he is just totally down-to-earth, a really cool guy. To be honest, I just had a blast working with him.

Switching gears a bit, you’ve explored the sustainability movement of permaculture. Can you explain a bit what that is and how you got turned on to it?

Well, I think a lot of people feel very saddened by the state of the Earth, and I’m amazed at how we have gotten to a place where the way we live doesn’t really incorporate a lot of common sense. So I became very interested in sustainability and, for a month, went to an eco-village in Oregon called Lost Valley. They do permaculture design courses, and it was an unbelievably eye-opening, incredibly humbling experience.

In previous interviews, you’ve called yourself a feminist, which we don’t hear a lot from 23-year-old actresses. The term itself carries a long history. How do you define it for yourself?

To me, the idea is, ‘Why wouldn’t I be a feminist?’ Why wouldn’t everybody be a feminist, humanist, environmentalist? It’s so funny that environmentalism has such a stigma to it or that organic food is considered a fad. Actually, no, it’s the way we have been eating for 99.99 percent of the time human beings have been on Earth.

Does this attitude toward feminism affect how you select roles? You have a knack for picking strong young women who are wise beyond their years.

I am just drawn to things that are well written and that are honest and sincere. And I have been incredibly lucky to have been the girl that has been cast in those things. There are a lot of scripts you see where they are not fully fleshed out and they are “quirky,” and there is no substance behind that.

Ever consider an alternative career?

I always want to be open to reinvention. I am really not interested in becoming complacent. Einstein has that awesome quote about the illusion of reality in how it is so [pauses] — I am forgetting it, so I sound like an idiot. [Laughs] Something awesome that Einstein said that has something to do with illusions. [Laughs] And you can quote me on that.

London Calling

Kate Beckinsale lives in Los Angeles now, where she makes movies like the recently released Click. But she can never resist the urge to go back to London. Photograph by James White.

London CallingShe was attending Oxford University, studying Russian and French, but Kate Beckinsale was always going to be an actress. Her parents were both actors. Her father, the late Richard Beckinsale, was a comic; her mother,­ Judy Loe, is a stage and television actress. Beckinsale had grown up around actors – her godparents were actors – and she never doubted that she, too, would join the family trade. But she went to Oxford anyway. “I was going to probably spend a lot of time around actors for the rest of my life, and I thought that going to university would be interesting, to be around people who were passionate about other things like, you know, biophysics or that sort of thing,” she says. ¶ In 1993, after some early work on stage and television, she got a call from Kenneth Branagh, who would cast her in her first major film, Much Ado about Nothing. So she was off to London and her preordained destiny as an actress. After breakthrough roles in Pearl Harbor, Underworld, and as Ava Gardner opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes in The Aviator, Beckinsale is a star. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Len Wiseman, who directed her in Underworld and its sequel, Underworld: Evolution, and her daughter, Lily Mo. Her most recent role, in Click, is as the beautiful wife of an architect (played by Adam Sandler) who discovers a television remote control that allows him to run the universe. But when London calls Beckinsale back to her roots – and it calls frequently – here’s where the city sends her.

Tell me about your background in London.

I grew up in West London and went to school in Hammersmith, which is sort of a little garden near Kensington. I took the subway every day and went to school, and that’s pretty much where I grew up. I’m completely a fish out of water in L.A. I don’t really know how to handle the fact that it’s sunny all the time. And I can’t drive. The taxis in England are like commanders. They know where everything is. They have to pass a test. They take up to four years to study every single street and restaurant and everything in London. And you can just sort of hurl yourself drunkenly in the back of a cab and say the address, and you don’t even have to know where it is, but they all know. So that was a bit of a culture shock going to L.A. Because the cab drivers don’t know where anything is at all.

Where do you go immediately upon returning to London?

I tend to go straight to my mother’s house. She still lives in Chiswick, where I lived. I guess you’d say it’s a suburb, but it’s got lots going on. Every kind of restaurant and bar and, you know, you can get a really good blowout there if you want to …

A blowout?

You know, you get your hair blow-dried. And Chiswick also has an extraordinary chocolate shop. There’s this guy who sits there and makes chocolates in his own tiny little shop. They’re like narcotic-based mounds of chocolate. It’s called Theobroma Cacao. It’s on Turnham Green Terrace. He’s just this one guy, and he makes killer hot chocolate out of actual chocolate in this little sack of broken-up chocolate. It’s not a powder or anything like that. But it’s evil. And my daughter goes in there and her eyes cross. I mean, my eyes cross, too, I have to say. She’s only six, so she just inhales the smell.

Where’s a favorite place in London?

One of my favorite things about London is Marks & Spencer. It’s a chain of stores you can really find anywhere in London. And they have the best food. So if you happen to be a lousy cook, you can walk in there and buy amazing food that you throw in the oven or throw in the microwave. The produce is amazing, and, you know, all the beans have been kind of trimmed. And it also happens to, bizarrely, sell really great underwear. One of my favorite underwear shops in London is Agent Provocateur, which I think you have here in the U.S., and which is extremely risqué and very sexy. Marks & Spencer is a bit more serviceable. It’s more for every day. I think I’ve probably got underwear that I bought at Marks & Spencer when I was a teenager that is still pretty. You can wash it a lot.

Tell me about your first journey to London from Chiswick. You’ve been going there all your life, right?

I was very lucky in that I was able to grow up there and go and see plays in the West End. Plus, you can jump on a train and go to Paris if you want. But we lived in West London. There was a theater called the Orange Tree Theater, a tiny little theater. It has been redone. It’s a little bit bigger now. But when I was small, they did lots of really great new writing, new plays, and they had an extremely intelligent and creative director. Your knees are almost touching the actors; it was so tiny in there. But when I was about 14, or maybe 13, they made a youth theater, and that’s really where I first went and had an acting class. So it’s always nice to see it. It’s on such a tiny scale, and it’s usually really well done.

What are your favorite public landmarks?

I love the Natural History Museum. There’s nothing quite like it. It was all black and destroyed, but they cleaned it up, and it’s just the most beautiful building. And you know, having a small child, you can take her in and see gigantic dinosaurs and press little buttons. They had the party for the Harry Potter premiere there, the last movie, which I was bribed into taking my daughter to. And it was just absolutely magical what they did. They just made it like this kind of ice palace inside, but you know, you’re walking around past these gigantic skeletons of dinosaurs. It was amazing. I mean, it was really the most beautiful thing.

What’s your favorite time of year in the city?

I always go back for Christmas. I made my husband go to Harrods a couple of times with me just because it’s such an experience. We’re always fighting over it. He’s American. He calls it a mall. And it’s not a mall! It’s a massive department store. It’s an entire block. It’s renowned for being incredibly fancy, and you can buy jewel-encrusted cell phones and God knows what. It has an amazing food hall. It has an ice-cream parlor where you sit on little stools. You can pretty much get anything there. I mean, I’m sure you could buy a small working Ferrari for a two-year-old or really nice Christmas cards as well. You don’t have to be a visiting oil baron or anything. But they don’t let you in if you have holes in your jeans. Yeah, they have a dress code [in] the store, which I always find hilarious. I remember there being some big scandal over some visiting rock star. I cannot remember who it was, who was turned away because of ripped jeans sometime in the ’90s.

Where would you go if you wanted to wear your ripped jeans?

Farther out even than where my mother lives, there is a big park called Kew Gardens. It’s a lovely, organized, beautiful botanical gardens, and also there is this old tea shop, the Maids of Honour, which has been around since Henry VIII. It’s tiny. In fact, I got locked in the bathroom there when I was three, and they had to take the door off to get me out. So it’s a slight zone of terror for me still. I even think that one of the older ladies who helped get me rescued is actually still working there. It’s basically cakes and pastries and stuff that’s baked. It’s the kind of place you would always take a visiting American, because it’s incredibly quaint. There’s an alluring fire in the grate and the whole thing. They make this one particular pastry called the Maid of Honour. It’s a very fluffy pastry with a sort of baked-egg-­custard thing in the middle, which sounds disgusting, but it was apparently Henry VIII’s favorite dessert, and they are still making it. It’s a secret recipe. I don’t know what they put in it, but you tend to have to eat 12 of them.

Is Oxford worth visiting?

Oh, it’s amazing. I love going there. You can get the Oxford Tube, which is basically a bus that picks you up from Kensington or somewhere, and it takes 45 minutes to get back and forth to Oxford. I used to do it a lot. I took my husband last time we were there, and it’s just so old. And all of the colleges are so beautiful. My college was built in the thirteenth century, and obviously my husband had never seen anything that was that old. And the grounds are beautiful. You can really get the whole sense of, I don’t know, Thomas Hardy and people with passions. They call it, you know, the dreaming spires. Obviously, there’s a Starbucks, and there’s a McDonald’s, and it’s all kind of lumped together with these incredible old buildings that have porters, and they are all wearing bowler hats and long coats and are usually incredibly nice. My God, what interesting things are going on behind these walls? My husband arrived in Oxford and went, “My God, they should make a movie here!” I thought I was going to hit him with my handbag. They’ve made like 10 million movies there. I think parts of the Harry Potter films were made at Oxford. So, you know, my daughter is pressuring me to take her there.

What are the must-sees at Oxford?

The Bodleian Library is the main huge library. When you join, you have to do this swearing-in ceremony. It’s all incredibly archaic and traditional, and there is some part of the oath that involves promising you won’t bring your sheep into the library. I guess the vows were written so long ago, it must have been appropriate at some point. And that you won’t kindle any flame therein.­ Very old-fashioned. I loved my college. It was New College, which is not very new, being thirteenth-century. And Christ Church is one of the wealthiest colleges. That’s kind of like walking into an extraordinary sort of palatial castle. Sort of deeply intimidating, really. Very spectacular.

Okay, back to London. Any hotels you favor?

Yeah, I like the Sanderson Hotel. They have a sofa shaped like a pair of big red lips and hanging plastic globes that you can sit in. My daughter loves it. Sometimes they have a big box of candy canes sitting on the counter.­ I don’t think it’s designed to be incredibly child-friendly, but my child thinks it’s fabulous. And they’ve got a little gift shop that has just amazing jewelry and underwear and interesting little offbeat designer pieces.

Let’s say you had a free Saturday. Where are some good places to eat?

There’s a little café in Chiswick called the Bedlington Café. We call it a greasy spoon. You can get a really good fried English breakfast there. But it happens to be a really good Thai restaurant at night. It’s like a weird mix. So you can have fried eggs and bacon and a cup of tea and all that stuff in the daytime. But then, you can also have really delicate, amazing Thai food in the evening. Then where would I go for lunch? Probably the Ivy. I think it was the first truly fancy restaurant I ever went to. And they are very discreet. You know, you can always see other interesting people there. The food is amazing. I always eat the same thing. I’ve only tried one thing on the menu – a tuna with little tiny lentils, and it’s delicious. I liked it so much I don’t want anything else. Then they have various desserts, which come with sort of their own little jugs of caramel sauce and chocolate sauce; I’m a big sucker for things like that. You always run into someone incredible in the ladies’ toilet. You might run into a Spice Girl or some fantastic feminist writer. It’s not intimidating in the sense that, you know, it gets a bunch of interesting-enough people who tend to look reasonably scruffy. I don’t like restaurants where you walk in and you feel you should have had hair and makeup done before you went in.

London’s the ultimate shopping city. What are your staples?

Well, I like Smythson stationery, where they do leather-bound stationery and incredible things. Where else? I like Selfridges, which is another big department store – what my husband would call a mall. There’s a shop called Rellik, which is a vintage-clothing store on Golborne Road. It was set up by three Portobello market store holders, and it sells vintage Dior and Vivienne Westwood, Ossie Clark, and amazing old vintage jewelry. It is a really cool store.

Um, what else? There’s a ribbon store on Marylebone High Street, called VV Rouleaux, which is literally just any different kind of ribbon or braiding, and it’s amazing. There’s a kid’s shop on Columbia Road that is only open six hours a week, and it coincides with the Columbia Road Flower Market. It’s called Bob and Blossom. They do great little tiny onesies with, you know, things written on them and little matching hats and stuff. And they’re pretty cool. I love the bookstores in England. For some reason, I can find my way around the bookstores really easily. So there’s a sort of chain of bookstores like Waterstone’s. That’s pretty much everywhere. But then there’s Ian Shipley books on Charing Cross Road, which has old books and new books and out-of-print ones. And Portobello market is a big favorite.

How else would you spend a perfect Saturday afternoon?

I might go to the Sanctuary, which is a women-only spa in Covent Garden. I mean, I might not anymore. It’s probably less fun being well known going there because you can walk around completely naked inside, and everyone does. It’s actually a little embarrassing if someone is wearing a swimsuit. You stare more. It’s a very nice spa. You can get amazing massages and facials and treatments.

Okay, so outline the perfect Saturday night.

There is a little place called Ffiona’s, and it’s on Kensington Church Street. It’s tiny and it’s run by this very formidable woman,­ Ffiona, who has a gigantic personality. All the tables are sort of scrubbed wooden tables, and the food changes every day. And none of the plates match. It’s a very sweet little sort of personal restaurant. It’s ­English-based, so you can get various sorts of old-fashioned dishes. They have this thing called colcannon, which is like a mix of cabbage and mashed potatoes or something. But it’s really good. And then various English desserts – sticky toffee pudding and apple crumble and custard and all of that stuff. Then I would probably go to the theater or to a movie. I love that when you get to London, you can go to the national theaters and kind of see what’s going on there, and there is usually a great new play and a revival of something really interesting. I would probably haul myself down there and go check it out.

Any live music places you like?

I haven’t been for a really long time. We used to go to the Mean Fiddler or the Town and Country [now the Forum], but I think I ended up going to see Curtis Mayfield at the Town and Country Club. The Mean Fiddler is quite a small venue, and they get really great, interesting bands. Town and Country gets bigger bands.

Is there a bar or pub that you like to go to?

I’m like the only English person who’s not a big drinker. I prefer to eat. There’s an Indian restaurant that I always have to go to in Shepherd’s Bush, which is not high-end at all. It just happens to be the most delicious food. It’s called the Ajanta. In fact, that was the thing that ended up getting my baby born.

My baby was 10 days late, and everybody said, “Oh, you know, you’ve got to drink raspberry-leaf tea and jump up and down” and all of that stuff. And then the other thing they tell you to do is to eat a curry. By that point – because, you know, 10 days late is a lot of extra pregnant – I was enormous. And I actually suddenly developed a massive craving for curry, which was handy, so I said, “Oh, let’s go.” So [my mom and I] went zooming over there. Once I’d thought of the curry, I had to have it immediately, so I was probably drooling and groaning. You can eat it there, or you can pick it up and take it home, which is what we did. I probably ate most of it in the car. I really needed to kind of fall on it like a tiger. So we had that, and then I went to bed and woke up several hours later in labor and had a baby. I might still be pregnant if I hadn’t gone there.

Home And Peace

Using the ancient architectural secrets of Vedic design, you could possibly transform your house into a holistic home.

Home And PeaceLen Oppenheim considers himself a skeptic. So the Wall Street trader can’t say with any certainty whether his headaches came to an end simply because he and his wife, Dena, moved from the suburbs of San Francisco to a rural farmhouse near FairfieldIowa. Or if his health improved due to the fact that the house on 14 rolling acres was built following the architectural guidelines of an ancient Sanskrit text called Sthapatya Veda, which suggests there’s a correlation between human harmony and the orientation, spatial, and material elements of one’s home.

“How much of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, I really can’t say. All I can tell you is [that I find] I sleep better and wake with more energy,” says Oppenheim, adding that a new sense of calmness has come over him in business, too. “I still have my ups and downs in the [stock] market,” he says. “But I seem to find that the setbacks don’t affect my mood as much.”

Oppenheim’s experience doesn’t surprise Jonathan Lipman, AIA, chief architect of Maharishi Global Construction (MGC), the Iowa-based company that designed and built the Oppenheims’ 7,000-square-foot Sthapatya Veda, or simply Vedic, home, along with hundreds of others across the nation. “Every architect has had the experience that some buildings foster quality of life and others seem to be failures – not because they don’t function, but because they don’t nurture the end users,” says Lipman, who, along with a growing legion of architects and scholars, believes that by using the principles of Vedic design, it’s possible to incorporate health benefits and good fortune directly into a home’s foundation. And a growing number of architects and home builders are beginning to put these principles to the test in their designs for the average American family.

The blueprint for this challenge comes from the widely debated writings – thought by western Sanskrit experts to date back to 2,500 B.C. or earlier – of ancient Indian Rishi, or seers, who claim to have intuitively­ ­understood the laws of physics, the science of nature, and the cosmos, among other things. In these nonscholarly texts, they concluded the human body is somehow reactive to the movements of the sun, as well as spatial orientation. Over centuries of interpretation, the original Sthapatya Veda text – one of 40 dealing with everything from music, art, and philosophy to medicine and city planning – was modified and, some say, morphed by the Chinese into the similar but even less-scientific concept of feng shui.

Twenty-five years ago, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the world in the 1960s, made it his mission to put the pieces of the original Sanskrit text back together.­ In 1997, he established Maharishi Global Construction in the U.S. to create a prototypical development, Maharishi Vedic City, just outside Fairfield, Iowa, that would put this ancient architectural knowledge to the test. Today, that city is a thriving community containing more than 150 homes priced from $200,000 to $2 million, a 272-acre Maharishi University of Management (formerly Parsons College) campus, and a recently built College of Vedic Medicine, partially funded by an endowment from the National Institutes of Health, which often provides money for alternative sources of medicine. The area is also quite prosperous, with Cambridge Investment Research and other locally based firms filtering as much as $8 billion in managed funds through Fairfield County and Maharishi Vedic City within the last year. That, combined with several other statistics, prompted Wired magazine to facetiously dub the farming community “Silicorn Valley.”

Vedic architecture is by no means limited to Iowa‘s borders, however. In the past 10 years, MGC has worked on Vedic homes for clients in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Austin, Texas; and Potomac, Maryland; it has retrofitted other homes with Vedic elements. The practice isn’t just confined to residential design. In addition to building the 27,000-square-foot Comprehensive Blood and Cancer Center in Bakersfield, California, MGC is currently working with the Tower Companies, one of Washington‘s largest commercial real-estate developers, on a 200,000-square-foot office building in Rockville, Maryland. The building is expected to be a prototypical smart/green workplace incorporating Vedic architecture and earth-friendly building materials.

What’s more, since MGC pioneered Vedic design principles nearly a decade ago, other home builders and architectural firms, such as Lexington, Kentucky-based Veda Design and Boone, North Carolina-based Karu Architects, have instituted Vedic theory into many of their homes and office projects across the country. Florida­-based builders Richard Bialosky and David Ederer are breaking ground this winter on Mandala Club, a 90-unit Vedic-designed planned residential community being built in Vero Beach. At its core, Vedic architecture proposes that the direction a building faces (east dissipates fear, disease, and poverty; west fosters health decline and loss of income), the size and placement of the rooms (based on mathematical formulas prevalent in the universe and nature), and the materials with which the building is made (all natural and nontoxic) all objectively influence the quality of life of the users. “It has nothing to do with the architectural style or the size of the home,” offers MGC’s Lipman. Instead, he says, it’s usually a question of placement.

“When I’m designing a house, I focus on where to place the kitchen, the master bedroom, the study, and the living room, based on different qualities of the sun’s energies as it passes overhead,” he says, noting that Vedic rules pinpoint living rooms in the central west portion of the house as more convivial, kitchens in the southeast corner for better digestibility, and master bedrooms in the southwest corner for being more conducive to rest. Although linked more to spirituality than to religion, all Vedic homes also have a meditation room in the northeast corner to strengthen the effect of meditation or prayer. And they all contain a Brahmasthan, or a silent central core, which literally translates into “establish wholeness.”

Golden Boy

href=”http://www.americanwaymag.com/bob-costas”>BOB COSTAS HAS ARGUABLY THE BEST — AND TOUGHEST — GIG IN BROADCASTING: HOSTING THE OLYMPIC GAMES, WHICH KICK OFF THIS MONTH IN BEIJING. BUT AFTER EIGHT GAMES AND 16 YEARS, HE’S STARTING TO GET THE HANG OF IT. . PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVEN FREEMAN.

Tatyana Efimenko, a high jumper from Kyrgyzstan, will march into Beijing’s Olympic stadium this month accompanied by her country’s flag, a solid red banner that depicts a yellow sun with six lines intersecting at its center and 40 rays emanating from its circumference. Bob Costas, who will likely have to explain what the 40 rays, six lines, and red background represent while still managing to correctly pronounce both Efimenko and Kyrgyzstan, will also have a flag. But his will be a much simpler design: solid white.

“At the Olympics, there is almost nothing you can say that isn’t going to make someone angry,” says Costas, 56, who has served as host of NBC’s Olympic coverage since 1992 and will continue to serve until at least 2012. “The opening ceremony is the perfect laboratory for discovering what upsets people. There are some people who want the event to be treated as if it were a High Mass. And some aspects of it are. But there are other aspects that are like the Cirque du Soleil. I try to acknowledge both. But does that annoy people at either end of the audience? Absolutely. So, you know what? I wave the white flag. The opening ceremony should be broadcast by Kofi Annan and Mary Hart, because it is half United Nations Security Council meeting and half Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Really, if anybody knows how, exactly, this is supposed to be done, please contact me immediately.”

The thing is, no one knows better than Costas. He’s been criticized, sure. But his work on the Olympics and elsewhere has earned him more cheers than jeers — not to mention 19 Emmys and a pile of other awards. With his current HBO show, Costas Now, he has taken Howard Cosell’s title of America’s most provocative sports broadcaster. In commentary and investigative pieces on that show, Costas regularly takes well-researched shots at big-time athletes and major sporting leagues. And with his work on the Olympics, he has succeeded in redefining a job that was created by the late, legendary Jim McKay — one of Costas’s broadcasting idols. Then there’s his respected play-by-play work for Major League Baseball games, as well as his hosting of National Hockey League contests on NBC, the Kentucky Derby, and the newish Sunday Night Football. He even had a six-year stint as host of the Emmy-winning Later with Bob Costas, a quiet talk show that had little to do with sports and the understated likes of which we may never see again.

All of that has given Costas exactly what the host of the Olympic Games coverage, particularly one who’s

broadcasting the games in Beijing, needs: gravitas.

The games of the 29th Olympiad will be a showcase for sprinters, swimmers, cyclists, and the like, but also for China’s present and its future. Since China’s present and future are not without controversy, Costas will have to be able to present the serious side of the games along with the sports side. And, sure, the silly side too.

“The role of the host is to be a well-informed generalist,” Costas says, “and to also have a really strong foundation in the history of the Olympics, what’s going on in the host city and the host nation — particularly important this time, in Beijing — and to know what are the main broad-stroke stories in the Olympics. I’m not Bill Moyers on PBS, but there has got to be some recognition of the context in which these sporting events are taking place. I hope we strike the right balance.”

As we meet on one warm Manhattan afternoon as Costas prepares to leave for Beijing, he seems ready for the challenge.

In his 16 years of hosting the Olympics, Costas has learned …

“I’ve learned what you don’t have to know. In Barcelona, for the first Olympics for which I was the prime-time host, I was studying every athlete. And then it occurred to me that no one cared if I knew who was the second-best platform diver from Peru. And what’s the point of feigning expertise, anyway? If Rulon Gardner wins Greco- Roman wrestling [which he did in the 2000 games in Sydney], upsetting Aleksandr Karelin, the ‘unbeatable’ Russian wrestler, then the host’s job is to find out some basic nuggets of information about this kid from Wyoming and then ask the question that 99.9 percent of the audience, which knows nothing about this sport either, would want to have asked. Essentially, I’m just like you at home, except that I’m wearing a suit and tie and I have access to this kind of information. That’s the approach.”

One misconception about him is …

“People really think the host is the guy in charge. They’ll say, ‘I was watching the platform diving, and then Bob Costas decided we should go to the swimming.’ I no more decided that than you did. Or they’ll give the host credit … for something he or she had nothing to do with. People have sent me letters thanking me for a particular story that was wonderful. All I did was introduce it.”

One of the hardest parts of his job is …

“Sometimes, you’re in a situation where, because of the realities of television, you’re presenting stuff well after it happens. In Sydney, there was a 15-hour time difference [there’s a 12-hour time difference between Beijing and Eastern time], so we’d be broadcasting things for the first time that had actually happened the preceding night — not just earlier the same day. Now, I don’t care if someone long-jumped 35 feet. By then, the surprise and the initial excitement will have subsided. You can’t honestly have the same reaction you would if it were live. So what I try to do in those situations is be on an even keel. Engaged, interested, appreciative, yes. But it would be dishonest to feign anticipation or initial excitement.”

His responsibilities as host include …

“We have to explain what is going on in a general sense in China right now — the emergence of China’s economy, its influence on a global scale. We have to reference the earthquake. We have to reference not only their growth and the emerging middle class but also that there are still millions and millions of people living in poverty there. This isn’t National Geographic, but there has to be some of that context.”

The Beijing games are unique because …

“What Jim McKay and ABC did in 1968 might seem very different from what NBC will do in 2008. I mean, remember when we were kids and it was like, ‘Wait a minute — is that a live picture from Munich? Wow. And, hey, that’s Mexico City. Live!’ Some of that fascination has worn off because we’ve come to expect such things. But I think Beijing is almost an exception. Because even in this era, where if something happens in Timbuktu, people expect it to be on CNN in 10 seconds, there is still an element of mystery and the unknown about China. Somebody watching in OmahaNebraska, is very curious about what it is like to be living in China in 2008. How many people speak English there? What’s the difference between the Chinese food that you get in Shanghai and the Chinese food that I get at home?”

The quirkiest Olympic sport is …

“Well, curling is kind of an endearing Olympic sport. People think, Wait a minute. I can get an Olympic gold medal — the same medal that they gave Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis — for a sport where they use a broom and drink beer while they’re doing it? Not at the Olympics, of course, but, yes, people can drink beer and still excel at curling. That’s unbelievable. Why don’t they just have Ed Norton and Ralph Kramden show up with their bowling bags and make that an Olympic sport?

Still, on balance, you have to say the weirdest is racewalking. I made a bunch of people mad in 1992 in Barcelona when they showed the racewalking. Look, I know that they are athletes. I know I couldn’t do it. I know it takes training and dedication, and I know that there are pockets of the world where racewalkers are big sports celebrities. But it looks so funny. You know what it really looks like? It looks like a person who has to go really bad. ‘I gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now’ — except they just don’t want to break into a full-scale sprint.

So I say, coming off this racewalking footage in Barcelona, ‘You know, having a contest to see who can walk the fastest is kind of like having a contest to see who can whisper the loudest.’ If you’re really in that much of a hurry, run. And if you really want me to hear you, shout.”

Though frequent American Way contributor JOSEPH GUINTO is a native of Syracuse, New York, he is in no way biased in favor of Bob Costas. Go Orange.

The Bob Costas CV

BIRTH NAME Bob Costas

AGE 56

BIRTHPLACE Queens, New York

WHERE HE HANGS HIS HAT Divides his time between a home in St. Louis and a condo in New York City

EDUCATION Syracuse University, where he studied broadcasting at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

FIRST BROADCAST JOB During college, for $30 per gameday, he called games for the Syracuse Blazers of the North American Hockey League, a semipro outfit that inspired the Paul Newman movie Slap Shot. “The character Ogie Oglethorpe is based on Bill Harpo Goldthorpe, who played for the Syracuse Blazers,” Costas says. “Goldthorpe was brought aboard because of his ability to fight. He seemed to have little regard for me. I’m sitting on the bus one day … and we’re driving down the road to who knows where, and I’m reading the New York Times. I think that very fact enraged Goldie. So he reaches out from the seat behind me, pulls the paper out of my hands, stands up with great ceremony, rips it to shreds, and lets it fall like confetti to the floor of the bus. I’m 21 years old and stupid, or at least foolish, and I think I’ve got to have some kind of response. So I stand up and say to him, ‘Don’t be jealous, Goldie; I’ll teach you to read.’ He grabs me, yanks me out of the seat, slams me up against the wall of the moving bus, and proceeds to threaten life and limb. Somehow I escaped.”

THE OLYMPICS ARE GREAT AND ALL, BUT RADIO WOULD HAVE WORKED TOO After college, Costas started working at the radio station KMOX, a CBS affiliate in St. Louis. His goal was to land a longtime gig as an announcer for a Major League Baseball team. Instead, at KMOX, he was noticed by CBS TV, where he was then noticed by NBC, which led to the job with Later and, eventually, to hosting the Olympics. “I’ve never been a careerist, which, I guess, is easier to say when you’ve had your career turn out well,” he says. “I can honestly say I have never pursued a single job.”

HE GREW UP IN QUEENS, SO GIANTS OR JETS? “When I was a kid, Giants. Because the Jets didn’t come into existence until the 1960s, and the first time I remember watching pro football was the 1958 championship game with the Giants and the Colts. I’ve always felt about sports — at least for people of my generation — that the stuff that grabs you when you’re younger is the stuff that stays with you.”

YES, HE REALLY CARRIES A 1958 MICKEY MANTLE CARD “The 1958 Mickey Mantle card happens to be the first baseball card that I remember. I was six years old. It cost five cents. You’d get the pack of cards, which had five cards and a piece of chalky, powdery gum that, if you dropped it on the sidewalk, would shatter like glass. The smell of it would adhere to the face of whichever player was on the bottom. In an archaeological dig, if someone like Wes Covington was the last guy in the stack, they would still be able to discover traces of that gum on Covington’s face in, like, the year 2812.

“So, anyway, I tucked the Mantle card into my wallet, and I kept it there. One day, I’m out to dinner with Tony Kubek, back when we’re doing the Saturday-afternoon game of the week. I go to get the tab, and the card spills out of my wallet. Of course, Kubek played with Mantle. So the next day at the game, he tells the story. It also happens that Sports Illustrated is working on a story about me. So they take a picture of the card — it’s in the story. Now, everywhere I go, to ballparks around the country, hundreds of times a week, people want to see it. The thing was getting dog-eared from my showing it so much. But the upside was that once this got out … fans would send these things to me. I have, like, 20 of them now. So finally, I decided to have one laminated. And now it is almost like an obligation to carry it, because the few times I’ve been caught without it, I’ve always felt like I was letting the person down who asked me about it.”

HIS BEST CALL During the 1998 NBA Championship, in Game Six, Michael Jordan shot with five seconds left and scored, winning the game and the series for the Chicago Bulls against the Utah Jazz and sending him into retirement (for a while). Costas’s call: “If that’s the last image of Michael Jordan, how magnificent is it?”

The Brady Brunch

Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady obviously loves his football, but he loves a good meal even more, as we discovered when the Patriots QB huddled up with writer to talk about his favorite places in Boston.

Quarterback Tom Brady and his fellow Patriots own Boston.

tom bredyAfter winning two of the last three Super Bowls, the New England Patriots are the pride of sports-mad and championship-starved Beantown. The Bruins haven’t won a title for more than 30 years. The Celtics haven’t been the same since Larry Bird. And while hope springs eternal for the beloved Red Sox … well, never mind.

Sporting two championship rings and a winning personality has a way of getting you the proverbial keys to the city – even for a former California dude. The still-single Brady was born in 1977 in the Bay Area, but this amiable, down-to-earth, all-around cool guy has taken to New England in a big way. And vice versa. Of course, it helps that he comes from an Irish-American family that loves sports and leisure activities – all the better to live in New England.

It also helps that the 26-year-old quarter­back loves exploring Boston’s myriad attractions, restaurants, bars, and otherwise happening places. Brady, who says he could talk food all day (and just about does), gets jazzed about sampling all sorts of different fare in addition to golf courses, city hot spots, and coastal hideaways.

Heading into his fifth season, Brady says the Patriots’ goal is to take home the title again, and that while he has an “insatiable thirst” to win, he’s totally into the journey of just getting to sports nirvana. He enthusiastically takes up that sense of exploration to give us a tour of Beantown.

American Way: You have a highly structured life during football season. How do you start your day in the off-season?

Tom Brady: I sleep in and enjoy the morning. I live south of Boston in Quincy, near a bay where lots of people house their boats in summertime. I love waking up near the water. There’s a great waterfront scene down there with some terrific restaurants. There’s a path near my place and I love walking along the water. Other mornings, I drive up to New Hampshire. So many places are close. Providence is only 45 miles away. Cape Cod is 45 minutes from me – there are some great bed-and-breakfasts to check out for a long weekend. And Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are just a short boat ride away.

American Way: What other activities do you like to do in the morning?

Brady: I practice yoga at Baptiste Power Yoga, which has studios around town. It’s great for flexibility, it’s therapeutic, and great for your attitude. And it gets you some silence during your day. During the season, I use videotapes and do it on my own. A lot of my teammates have tried it. When you get to this elite physical level, everyone’s trying something – acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, whatever. Also, two of my sisters live close and they’re really competitive, so they always try to drag me down to The Sports Club/LA, where we play some one-on-one basketball. I was brought up in a very competitive family.

American Way: We know golf is one of your hobbies. What’s your handicap and where do you like to play around town?

Brady: I’m probably about a 7-handicap. I’ve been playing since I was two, when my dad took me out, and like most people, I’d like to play more. During the season, I’ll play on an off day, or we might sneak out for a day on our bye week. But mostly, it’s in the off-season. If we have all day, my buddies and I will travel down to the Cape, where Sandwich Hollows, Waverly Oaks, and Willowbend [the latter is a private course] are my three favorites. The setting is very serene, yet you kind of get a little of everything – some water, some trees, a little bit of sand, some challenging courses. It’s a great getaway.

American Way: Where do you like to play in the city?

Brady: Closer to me, the TPC, designed by Arnold Palmer, is a fun new course. They’ve already played a PGA tournament there. It’s challenging, with some nice length and a solid layout. And it will get better as it matures. It also has a bit of land, so when you’re on the 9th hole, you’re not falling on top of another hole. Brookline, probably four miles outside the city, is one of the more popular courses. It has so much tradition to it, with so many stories.

American Way: When you’re done playing 18 holes, where do you go to chow down with the fellas?

Brady: There are great pizza places all over the city, but there’s a very good one, Omega Pizza, over by Gillette Stadium. Everything I’ve ever had there, I love. The East Coast has a lot of these small pizza places that specialize in “grinders” or hoagies, along with stuff like chicken tenders and fries. When you hang with a bunch of 300-pound linemen, you tend to find the places that are the greasiest and serve the most food.

There’s another place nearby called Fresh Catch, a great seafood spot. Another one the guys know is Kelly’s Roast Beef. They make the best roast beef sandwiches. Those are some places where the big boys want to go eat. There’s also a great lunch spot, Fat Belly Deli, near my place. They put so much meat on the sandwiches. They’ve got a great little menu, too. The steak and lamb tips are out of this world.

American Way: Do you get recognized every­where you go in Boston?
Bra­dy: I used to walk around pretty anonymously after our first Super Bowl win. Now it’s definitely tougher.

The Killer App – Bar None

WHAT The bar code and scanning device
WHEN Invented in 1949; patented in 1952; first used commercially in 1974
WHERE South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida
WHO Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver

The format for the bar code came to Joe Woodland while he was at the beach in 1949. Woodland, who is now 80, had spent World War II working on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he returned to Drexel University to teach mechanical engineering. While there, Woodland’s colleague, Bernard Silver, overheard the president of the Food Fair grocery stores appealing to a Drexel dean for help automating the grocery checkout process. So Woodland and Silver started brainstorming ideas.

Months later, Woodland was relaxing at the beach, considering how Morse code might be used to solve the problem. He idly stuck his fingers in the sand and raked a set of parallel lines that represented a kind of “long form” of dots and dashes. Those lines inspired the bar-code design that he and Silver ultimately patented.

Today, more than a million companies worldwide use the familiar UPC (Universal Product Code) symbols to identify consumer products. The Uniform Code Council, which issues the codes, estimates that UPC symbols are scanned some 5 billion times a day — and that represents only half of the total bar-code universe.

The equipment and software used to print, scan, and program bar codes is a $16-billion-a-year business. Even Woodland is amazed at how widespread the bar code has become. “Fifty years ago, we didn’t even imagine all of the ways that it would be used in the grocery store.”

The American Dream (girl)

Image about Mila Kunis

By the time you read this, you will likely have Halloween plans. Or maybe you’re finalizing them now. Or maybe you’re going to just sit at home, like many of us, and hand out mini Snickers. By most accounts, this would be normal. What’s not normal is planning your Halloween by July, which is exactly what Mila Kunis has done.

The actress, whose first name is short for Milena, and I are speaking on a sweltering day in midsummer, a day so steamy I can’t imagine contemplating ghosts and jack-o’- lanterns or inhaling my kids’ candy stashes, which I would inevitably regret doing the next morning. But Halloween might just be Kunis’s favorite day of the year, so of course she has plans, she tells me, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

“You have no idea what Halloween is in my family,” she says. “We do murder-mystery dinners at our house with a group of 10 to 20 people. It’s been a ritual for the past couple of years. Our parents come, but they don’t always participate; they think it’s crazy. We make a whole feast of food, and you dress up in your character … ”

“So it’s like Clue?” I ask.

“It is exactly, because we love Clue,” she says. “We think Clue is amazing. So it’s very similar to Clue. And [there are] different ways of playing the games, but it takes about four hours. And you know, we have mai tais and Ghoulish Goulash and crazy, stupid food, and we just sit around and play murder-mystery games.”

“Goulash?” I interrupt again.

“Yes, Martha Stewart’s recipe. I’ll make it, or my boyfriend or my mom will. And the house is decorated — there are, like, fog machines everywhere,” she continues, words rushing out over themselves. “And we have a Halloween tree. We start decorating in September!”

Image about Mila KunisEven though it’s months away, Kunis can’t stop talking about this holiday, one that most of us gave up in mid-adolescence. Her effervescence is palpable, and suddenly, I want in on the party, even though I haven’t dressed up for Halloween since I donned a regrettable biker-chick outfit in college.

When I hang up the phone, I realize that Kunis’s Halloween anecdote, if you pay close attention, reveals just about everything you need to know about her:

• The “we” in the story is Kunis and her boyfriend of six years, Macaulay Culkin, of Home Alone fame. She refers to him often during the interview but never by name.

  • That she doesn’t shill for their relationship conveys how much she guards her privacy.
  • The house where she and Culkin host the party is just down the street from that of her Ukrainian parents, who brought seven-year-old Kunis and her older brother to the United States to live some 18 years ago.
  • Her Halloween planning — both whimsical and precise — reflects the impression you’re left with after chatting with the star: She is that effortless blend of funny and bitingly smart.
  • The life she leads — robust, informed, a celebration of everything her parents hoped for when they came to the States — is the epitome of what our nation makes possible.

“Yeah,” she concurs at one point during our chat. “It’s 100 percent the American dream.”

TO understand how far Kunis has come, you have to rewind a bit to see where she’s been. She’s hesitant to exploit her parents’ background — “That’s their story, not mine,” she says — but she just as quickly concedes that it’s impossible to ignore how much their history has shaped her. “What my family went through in 1991 when we came to the States absolutely molded me into the person I am today,” she says.

Indeed, the mere fact that her life is the way it is today — with her hosting elaborate Halloween parties, tucked away in her Los Angeles home with her famous boyfriend, and poised to become an even bigger star than she already is with this month’s Max Payne — is somewhat of a small miracle.

“No parent — no adult — whom I’ve met who is Russian came here for themselves,” acknowledges Kunis. “They only came for their children. We were really well off, but we left everything behind because at that time, we were only allowed to come to the States with $250.” Her parents took odd jobs to pay the bills — her mother, a former teacher in the Ukraine, worked behind the counter at a drugstore; her father, previously a mechanical engineer, did everything from sell toilets to deliver pizzas — while Kunis went about the task of assimilating as best she could.

“I had my first hamburger,” she remembers. “I’d never had soda before in my life. I’d never had a Coca-Cola — I had only had juice and water. I’d never seen anybody of color or any ethnicity. I grew up in a town where all I saw were white people. Just white people; blond and brunette, but not even a redhead. I met my first African- American. I met my first Asian person. I saw palm trees …”

She pauses and then, trying to sum up the experience, says, “The opening statement of my essay for my college application was, ‘Imagine being blind and deaf at the age of seven.’ ”

Kunis means this only half metaphorically. She didn’t speak a word of English when her family immigrated. In fact, she says she’s blocked the second grade from her memory because the experience was so difficult. “If I talk to my parents, [they say that] I cried every day. I remember my mom telling me that my grandmother would come to school with me and bring kids chocolate to try to make them be friends with me. If a seven-year-old can go through a sort of depression, that’s probably what I went through for a year. But because I was so young, I was able to get out of it very fast.”

By the third grade, Kunis spoke English well enough to fit in. This was thanks in part to Bob Barker on The Price Is Right, whose manner of speaking helped her hone her language skills. By the fourth grade, she was fluent. (That she now does flawless voice-over work on Family Guy and Robot Chicken is all the more remarkable.)

That same year, her life shifted in another dramatic way. Her father enrolled her in acting classes. “To keep me preoccupied,” she says. “I talked a lot and had a lot of energy. My parents never wanted me to do this. They never pushed me, even when I was working. They were like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ ”

In that very first acting class, Kunis met the woman who remains her manager to this day. “My parents told her, ‘Listen, we can’t afford head shots; we can’t afford anything. We can’t take her to auditions because we work full-time. And we can’t do this and we can’t do that.’ For one reason or another, being the crazy woman that she is, [my manager] said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll fix everything,’ and she did. I ended up getting the first thing I went out for, which was a Barbie commercial. All my parents said was, ‘You can do whatever you want to do as long as you get A’s and stay in school.’ ”

Barbie commercials were just the launching pad. At 14, Kunis auditioned for That ’70s Show. Actors had to be at least 18 to be eligible for casting. She omitted the truth to the casting directors (lied is such a strong word), declaring that she’d be 18 on her birthday but neglecting to specify which year. Though they eventually picked up on the fib, the producers still thought Kunis was the best fit for the brash, sassy, and sexy role of Jackie. Over the next eight years, Kunis grew up in front of the eyes of millions.

But while we watched her on TV week after week, we know surprisingly little about her personal life. It’s no accident. “Every ounce of me tries not to be in the public eye,” she says. “My private life is superimportant to my family and me, and it’s not something that I want to ever jeopardize. But you know what? Everybody makes mistakes, whether you’re famous or not. I’ve made mistakes. It’s just that I think I’m better at making them in private.”

IN last April’s megahit Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Kunis managed an unthinkable feat — stealing the movie out from under the feet of Judd Apatow’s veteran band of comic players. This month, she tackles a very different kind of role, headlining Max Payne — based on the video game of the same name — opposite megastar Mark Wahlberg. “It’s slightly intentional,” she says of how she’s navigated her way through Hollywood. “I’m not Julia Roberts, with offers being thrown my way left and right, so you fight for the projects you think are right for you. I wanted to do Max Payne because after Sarah Marshall, working with Judd [Apatow] and Jonah [Hill] and Jason [Segel] and [director] Nick [Stoller] and everybody, how are you going to go make another comedy after that? When Max Payne came along, I was super-stoked to end up doing something where I got to kill people.” That’s right: As if the male population of the world didn’t need another reason to drool, in Payne, Kunis plays a billy-club-carrying tough chick.

So does Kunis fancy herself the next female action star, à la Jennifer Garner in Alias? “I wish,” she says. “I’m not out of shape per se, but no, I’m not in Jennifer Garner shape. But it was really fun to be a [tough] chick. The problem became being [tough] in five-inch heels. It’s not quite the same as kicking [butt] in sneakers. Your balance is off, and all of a sudden, you feel like an idiot walking up stairs. I’m barely coordinated on my two feet as it is, let alone with a 10-pound gun, a two-pound coat, and five-inch heels.

“I hope I pulled it off,” she says.

Even if she doesn’t (doubtful), I suspect she’ll still land on her feet, five-inch stilettos or not. That’s what’s remarkable about Kunis and her story. Not that it’s been a charmed life, or even a moderately easy one, but that as she makes her way through it — from the Ukraine to L.A., from unknown to celebrity — her foundation hasn’t shifted. She still keeps her family close, she proves herself loyal and asks the same in return from others, and she works hard and doesn’t take the life she’s earned for granted. Most importantly, she’s smart enough to trust herself and her instincts as she goes.

In an industry in which so much is measured by superficial, ephemeral factors, Kunis has chosen to live her life by her own measures of success. And that, truly, is the American dream her parents hoped for.

Wellington New Zealand Peter Jackson Adrien Brody

Oscar winner Adrien Brody battles amnesia in The Jacket, fights a giant ape in King Kong, and takes down bacon-and-banana pancakes in New Zealand.

This month, Adrien Brody stars in The Jacket, a George Clooney-produced drama about an amnesiac Gulf War veteran who returns home to Vermont. But when Brody phones me from a time zone 19 hours ahead of my own, he’s not calling from Vermont, but rather New Zealand, the faraway land the New York-born and Broadway-bred actor dreamed of as a child. He was there to film the December release King Kong, also starring Naomi Watts and Jack Black and directed by Lord of the Rings wizard and native New Zealander Peter Jackson.

Chasing a giant ape for 12 hours a day, five days a week doesn’t give a guy a lot of downtime, but Brody filled his breaks with all the best that Wellington, Queenstown, and the lush hinterlands in between have to offer. Of course, it didn’t hurt that his director, and, more importantly, unofficial guide, was none other than Jackson.

“I’ve always wanted to come here,” says Brody. “New Zealand always seemed like the other end of the earth to me. Like as far away as you could go would be New Zealand.”

After a career that began as a six-year-old dwarf in a summer camp production of Snow White and culminated when he became the youngest male actor ever to win an Oscar in the Leading Actor category (for his performance in 2002’s The Pianist), Brody snagged the role of Jack Driscoll, the former fighter pilot who tracks the great ape and his gorgeous captive (played by Watts). And before he knew it, he was on his way to the land he once dreamed about.

King Kong, Peter Jackson, and New Zealand, huh? That’s a powerful combination.

Wellington New Zealand Peter Jackson Adrien Brody
First of all, King Kong is one of the greatest­ fables and epic stories you can tell, and ­Peter is a genius, to put it mildly.

Where have you been filming?

In Wellington, in a town called Miramar. It’s a sea town 10 minutes outside of the city center. Peter has a house here, and the movie studio is here, but it’s more of a residential area.

Where have they put you up?

I’m camping out in [a movie trailer in] a parking lot at the moment, but technically I’m staying in Wellington. I have done some traveling since I’ve been here, though, mostly inland, farther north. South becomes colder, because it’s actually toward the South Pole. I’ve also been up north to a region called Martinborough. I stayed up there in a cottage, and Peter Jackson has a lovely home up there, too, where he’s building a castle with a moat. It’s a fantastic place to go.

Before we get too far off course, tell us more about Wellington, where you are now.

Well, it’s windy. But it’s actually a lovely place, where you’re pretty much surrounded by water and the bay. The city itself is quite small, but the surrounding areas are very reminiscent of the hills up in northern California, like Marin County near San Francisco and the Bay Area climate and some of the architecture. Kind of a cross between that and Hawaii.

Any place you regularly frequent in the city?

Yeah, the Chocolate Fish, which is a great outdoor/indoor cafe. They have great breakfast fare, including bacon-and-banana pancakes, which are basically a tower of pancakes with a layer of sliced banana in between a layer of bacon, a layer of pancake, another layer of banana, another layer of pancake, etc. They have bacon-and-banana pancakes everywhere in New Zealand.

What about other restaurants? Where have you eaten?

Chow is a good Asian restaurant. It’s simple as far as interior and just your basic Asian fusion dishes. The same owners run a bar called Motel that operates later on at night. You basically go through the restaurant and up the stairs and you’re in an area that’s kind of hidden and has dim lights and a cool bar and lounge area. Another cool place to eat and drink is the Matterhorn. It’s a happening weekend nightspot. There’s another great restaurant down the block from me called The White House. It’s more upscale and romantic.

What kind of food do they serve?

I don’t know how to describe it. It isn’t necessarily Italian and isn’t necessarily mainstream. They have fantastic mushroom risotto and lamb dishes. New Zealand is known for great lamb. There are a lot of them here, that’s for sure. New Zealand has a lot of space, and I guess the lamb is fresher because there’s so much land. The Logan Brown is another pretty cool restaurant. They have a bar with an aquarium built into it, so when you’re sitting at the bar, you’re looking into an aquarium. There are a lot of cool cafes in Wellington. Cuba Street is the main street in the center of town, and a lot of young people go there to hang out. It’s pretty much a walking street. It’s kind of closed off, so it has cafes and little stores on both sides.

What other landmarks have you come to know in Wellington?

There’s a fault line nearby. I believe Miramar was born from a major earthquake in the 1800s. The edge of town where we’re at, and where the studio is, was basically a swamp and where a new land was born some 100 years ago. They actually had an earthquake while we were here, but it wasn’t very noticeable.

Are there any sights you always go to when you’re visiting a new place?

I always like to check out the museums and get a sense of the culture. I know they usually have things about the indigenous people. In Wellington, there’s Te Papa, The Museum of New Zealand. It’s a lovely place. They have a lot of stuff about the local culture, and a natural history section as well. I’ve also been to the zoo here. I’m not normally a fan of zoos, because the animals often don’t have enough space. But for the most part, the animals here are happy and have space to roam around. They’ve got an especially good chimp section that I’ve been checking out.

That makes sense, considering the movie you’re doing.

Yeah. Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, is King Kong in this movie. Andy’s gone to Rwanda to study the gorillas in the wild, but I was recently in Sydney, and I got a pass to go in the morning before the zoo opened, when they fed the silverback gorilla there. The Wellington Zoo doesn’t have a gorilla population, but they do have a decent array of animals. It’s just a nice, kind of meandering zoo.

What else are you doing with your time off? Any shopping?

Yeah. There’s the Sheepskin Warehouse, between Miramar and Wellington. It’s basically just a warehouse with everything from sheepskin boots to Murano wool, which is kind of a blend. It’s a good spot, a good place for gifts. I don’t wear much sheepskin, but they do make nice boots. I also went to this fantastic chocolate shop up north, about an hour and a half from Wellington. It’s in a neighboring town called Greytown, near Martinborough, and it’s called Schoc. They have every kind of rare spiced chocolate and all kinds of exotic things.

You’ve talked about the food, but what about the wine you can get? New Zealand is famous for its wine.

There are several wine regions, but Martinborough is an area that you can actually go to and have wine tastings, which I did. You roll up into Martinborough and there will be vineyards with signs out saying they’re open for tasting. I bought an interesting sparkling wine at one of them. I don’t remember where it was from, but it was quite nice. I like the Hawkes Bay region. There’s a wine from there called Gunn Estate. It’s pretty inexpensive, but quite good. It’s a Cabernet/Merlot. Someone brought it around and I had a bottle of it, and I’ve bought a bottle of it since.

What about beyond Wellington and Martinborough? Where else have you gone?

Queenstown. It’s lush, it’s green, it’s awe-

inspiring. There are places you can go backpacking there and you don’t need a lot of money. There’s every kind of adventure you can imagine there: trail riding, mountain biking, sky diving, cliff jumping, bungee jumping, lugeing, you name it. Some of The Lord of the Rings was shot in Queenstown. Peter Jackson and his production company, Camperdown Studios, did it. When I was in Queenstown, there were moments when I felt like it was something out of The Lord of the Rings.

Explain, please.

Not only is Queenstown probably one of the most spectacular landscapes I’ve ever come across, it’s like something from another planet. It has the most jagged mountaintops and snowcaps, and yet at the base of them are these beautiful bodies of water. It’s just amazing. The easiest way to describe it is if you got in a car and drove, you’d come across every kind of terrain imaginable. And there’s an immense sheep population. There are more sheep than people. So you’ll come across wonderful farmlands with sheep and cattle and you’ll end up at beautiful coastlines and hilly valley regions. It’s about an hour’s plane ride or a long ferry ride and drive from Auckland, which you fly into. I don’t know Auckland, but I hear it’s a pretty cool city.

You mentioned quite a few outdoor activ­ities. Have you done any of the stuff you talked about?

I did a bit down on the south island, where there are all kinds of crazy activities to do. I don’t know if I can discuss it, though, because I’m not supposed to be doing certain things, so I don’t want to incriminate myself. There are some things [contractually] I shouldn’t be doing.

Any great hotel experiences?

Yeah, we stayed at a lovely cottage called the Rose Cottage. It’s a little country house in between Martinborough and Greytown. It’s very inexpensive, not more than a few hundred dollars for the house. I will probably go back again at some point. I also had a wonderful time in Martinborough at a French restaurant called The French Bistro, a quaint little place run by a husband and wife named Jim and Wendy Campbell. I got to know them. The food and wine were fantastic, but they were the highlight. I showed up at The French Bistro one day after it had closed, and the owners cooked my girlfriend and me a lovely dinner with drinks and stuff off the menu. They were just incredibly generous and ended up joining us and dining with us. I brought a bottle of champagne and we all had a lovely time.

It sounds like Peter Jackson was a pretty generous host as well. What was it like having him as your guide?

Pretty great. Jack Black and I and Peter’s son were sitting in the back of Peter’s car being driven around all the south island. We had a wonderful time.