Gavin Newsom’s Slicked-Up Origin Story

‘Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery’By Gavin NewsomPenguin Press, 304 pagesOne indicator of the persistent oddness of the autobiography Gavin Newsom has published to lay the ground for a presidential run is that the governor of California gives readers and enemies a choice of which empty suit they might decide he is.Early on, Mr. Newsom declares himself to have been “obsessed” as a kid with Remington Steele. In that ’80s TV series, Pierce Brosnan played “a former thief and conman dressed to the nines” who becomes a frontman for Stephanie Zimbalist’s private investigator, the real brains of the piece. “Glued to the tube,” Mr. Newsom copied Steele’s manner and dress, wearing suit and tie. “Some of my schoolmates started calling me El Presidente,” he writes.Later, Mr. Newsom describes how his second wife, the filmmaker Jennifer Siebel, first visited his post-divorce apartment. Mr. Newsom had “just moved in.” As mayor of San Francisco, he was surely busy. Nonetheless, most people would’ve installed a couch and some blinds, not “taped rolls of black plastic” over the windows. Siebel “later confessed that her first glimpse of my abode brought to mind a question: ‘Did this guy take his interior design inspirations from ‘American Psycho’?”Christian Bale on the set of ‘American Psycho,’ 2000. Eric Robert/Sygma via Getty Images)Gavin Newsom doesn’t name Patrick Bateman, the antihero of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, from 1991. He doesn’t have to. Most readers will know the tall, slim and handsome governor looks not unlike Christian Bale as Bateman from Mary Harron’s movie version. Many will have read this piece by Ruby Rippey, the staffer who was married to Mr. Newsom’s campaign manager when she and the mayor had an affair. Mr. Newsom’s account of that infamous episode is brief and decidedly cold. I didn’t note any rhapsody over Huey Lewis and the News or paean to embossed business cards but Mr. Newsom’s Remington Steele episode does include a meditation on Dippity-Do, to slick back hair lustrous then as now. “Young Man In a Hurry” is indeed a slick piece of work, keeping the pages turning. But the question of whether Mr. Newsom will prove too slick for Democrats in the primary, never mind Americans in the general, hovers over it all. Mr. Newsom is a centrist really but he leads a progressive state and has a strong progressive résumé: Leading on gay marriage, attempting to cope with the climate threat. His debate with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the run-up to the last election, sideshow that it was, showed off skills he has used to bait Donald Trump. (In the book, Mr. Trump’s “Newscum” nickname comes out of the mouth of a BMX-riding bully. Any reader will see the point, though President Biff Tannen may not.) It’s a version of a Gavin Newsom social media rejoinder, clipped, efficient, referencing popular culture. Mr. Newsom has the chops for this public square. Weaknesses are either given one-sided examinations or quietly set aside. He handles his marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle — then an ambitious lawyer, later a Fox host and shrill Trumpist, once engaged to the president’s son — with the care he says he failed to show when he became involved with her. Which partly explains that photo. He admits his attempt to end homelessness in San Francisco, if strenuous, fell short. Whatever lessons he learned during Covid, he doesn’t share them, or much at all about his time as governor. There’s also a good bit of old-fashioned triangulation, on presentation as well as policy. A creature of the coastal elite, Mr. Newsom wants us to see him as an outdoorsman too, Teddy Roosevelt in skinny-fit chinos. He has kids named Montana and Hunter and, via his in-laws, a ranch in Montana to hunt from. He writes of “showing Hunter how to hunt doves with a .22 and bag an elk with a bow and arrow.” He describes catching rainbow trout, letting all but one go. That one got eaten by a bald eagle, its stomach ripped out on the line. Mr. Newsom put it back in the river to die.“Young Man In a Hurry” is about Mr. Newsom before high office: mostly about his youth. Son of a judge who left the marriage, he grew up if not hardscrabble then not gilded either. Dyslexic, he struggled academically before finding his feet in the wine trade. Mayor Willie Brown gave him his first political role. (Prompting the deathless question, “Why was Willie choosing me, except that he knew my father?”) From there, the rise: Mayor, lieutenant governor, governor, presidential hopeful. Newsom hasn’t been out of office since 2004. We’re told voters don’t want career politicians. After Donald Trump, maybe they do. In the last election but one I told fellow New York parents I wanted a T-shirt with “Competent Technocrat-Competent Technocrat 2020” on it. ‘Young Man in a Hurry,’ by Gavin Newsom. Penguin PressThere’s more to quibble with in Newsom’s book, including some predictably ponderous writing, the result of trying too hard to be soulful or vivid or both. Of his great-grandfather, from the inevitably emphasized Irish side of the family: “The year of his arrival was never given a specific date.” Eh? Of grabbing a bite with his grandfather: “We wolfed down our confections.” Why not just say you ate your donuts? George Orwell rolls in his grave. Clive James, author of The Perfectly Bad Sentence – “In writing, to reach the depths of badness, it isn’t enough to be banal. One must strive for lower things” – leaps out of his.There are omissions. Mr. Newsom doesn’t mention Kamala Harris, DA to his mayor, until page 214. Why offer Republicans open goals, or start primary fights now? But I’ve made an omission too. I haven’t mentioned the Gettys. There’s a “poor little rich boy” tinge to some of Mr. Newsom’s writing about his childhood (an aunt tells him his parents were guilty of “abuse by omission” because they didn’t know how to tackle his dyslexia), but he makes the case that he didn’t have it easy. Then again, through his father he did have a close relationship with one of the richest families in the world. Tales of high-life holidays and the bizarro beau monde – he knew John Paul Getty III, the son whose kidnappers chopped off his ear – are engrossing but never entirely explained. Another early ’90s reference occurs: Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” which would make Mr. Newsom… Richard Papen, the outsider-insider, I guess. Ending a scathing description of Donald Trump’s behavior on a tour of wildfire damage in 2018, Newsom writes that one difference between him and the president is that Donald Trump “grew up with wealth” while Newsom grew up “around wealth, though it was a different sort from Mr. Trump’s grift.” Will voters give a different sort of rich guy a run?Run, Gavin Newsom will. Maybe he’ll face JD Vance. The vice president is a generation younger but in some ways strikingly similar. Tall, clever, slick, Mr. Vance is Bateman-ish too. Another empty suit, onto or into which voters can project or pour whatever they wish, as the Veep does himself. Mr. Newsom has a stronger record, more scars too. Such a race is not a particularly cheerful prospect, but this is politics. We get what we deserve, including books like this. Martin Pengelly is a writer and editor in Washington, DC. He writes on Substack at The National Maul.

Gavin Newsom’s Slicked-Up Origin Story

Gavin Newsom’s Slicked-Up Origin Story

More from the New York Sun

Author Joyce Carol Oates Calls It Hard To ‘Feel Sympathy’ for USS Lincoln Sailors Who Helped Elect Trump

Cuba’s Young Castros, a Generation Beyond the Reach of American Law, Woo Washington

Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

With Senate Control at Stake, Expect Obama To Campaign in Michigan and Urge ‘the Brothers’ To Back El-Sayed

Longtime Netanyahu Critic Senator Sanders Now Says All Israeli Politicians Are Extremists

The Revolution Will Be Sanitized, If AOC’s Attempt To Dismiss ‘Woke One’ Is Any Guide

Court Sides With City, Allowing Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax To Advance

Federal Court Approves Testing of Radioactive Materials in Florida Road Construction

More from the New York Sun

Author Joyce Carol Oates Calls It Hard To ‘Feel Sympathy’ for USS Lincoln Sailors Who Helped Elect Trump

Cuba’s Young Castros, a Generation Beyond the Reach of American Law, Woo Washington

Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

With Senate Control at Stake, Expect Obama To Campaign in Michigan and Urge ‘the Brothers’ To Back El-Sayed

Longtime Netanyahu Critic Senator Sanders Now Says All Israeli Politicians Are Extremists

The Revolution Will Be Sanitized, If AOC’s Attempt To Dismiss ‘Woke One’ Is Any Guide

Court Sides With City, Allowing Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax To Advance

Federal Court Approves Testing of Radioactive Materials in Florida Road Construction