Spain’s sexy little island continues to live up to its reputation for illicit extravagance, from its wild characters to its all-night beach bacchanalia. But now, thanks to a monied mix of royals, moguls, politicians and celebrity revelers, it’s on the brink of reinvention.
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The end-of-summer party at Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel at Playa d’en Bossa.Credit Stéphane Gizard
It was a beautiful coming of age story, obsessively chronicled by the paparazzi this summer.
Never before had so many yachts anchored off the island of Ibiza with so much celebrity cargo. The daily stars-at-swim shots pouring into the media were proof that, as a destination, Ibiza had finally pushed past puberty — even if Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber’s much-publicized restaurant spat showed they themselves had not. Ibiza was no longer only the promised land for college kids, dreadlocked nudists and pedigreed black sheep looking for a religious experience in its fabled round-the-clock nightclubs. The island was now being staked out by the world’s trendiest pay-to-play big shots, trailing after the models, the photographers, the fashion designers and the art directors who are always early to the party.
Yes: Ibiza, where Prince William unwittingly courted Kate Middleton at the home of her drug-dispensing maternal uncle. The place has always had a raffish reputation. The parties continue where sweaty discos pump their dance floors full of foam. (Paris Hilton hosts one at Amnesia.) A draw this summer at Pacha, the nightclub that put Ibiza on the map, was the Empress Stah, an aerial artist working a trapeze with a laser light saber flashing from her posterior — a prismatic intersection of sex, circus and special effects that increasingly defines nightlife here.
But another Ibiza is emergent, a place where British Prime Minister David Cameron and Yahoo C.E.O. Marissa Mayer holiday, children in tow. Where the white-whale yachts of the billionaires Lakshmi Mittal, Roman Abramovich, David Geffen and the Saudi royal family are impossible to miss. Ibiza has been looking and acting very grown-up lately. Says jewelry and interior designer Jade Jagger, who has owned several homes on the northern end of the island and has been coming here for 18 years, “it seems that so quickly I went from running a disco” — she hosted her own night at Pacha — “to finding them an alien place. I think about once a year I make it to a disco like that.” Ibiza has even passed (sporadically enforced) regulations closing clubs by 6:30 a.m.; apparently children were seeing things on the street that they shouldn’t have on their way to school.
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Hjordis Fogelberg, a local art director who grew up on the island and is the author of the guidebook ‘‘My Ibiza,’’ with her daughter, Finn (left) and mother, Bel (center).Credit Stéphane Gizard
The tiny island has always felt Manhattan-big, but now it seems just as option-loaded. The south is the extroverted personality, the start line where the planes and yachts roll up, and where most go no farther than the area’s sunbedded sandy beaches and rollicking day and night clubs. The north is for the more experienced player: more rustic. Cows and coves. “Ibiza is high risk, high reward,” says the architect Daniel Romualdez, who’s been coming for 10 years and has played both fields, north and south. “You have to do the research. Make the wrong turn, and you wind up in hell. The right turn can be sublime.”
To navigate it all, many, like Calvin Klein, Kate Moss and Paul McCartney, have turned to local fixer Serena Cook, of Deliciously Sorted Ibiza, who’s seen a 26 percent uptick in business from last year. She’s gone from flying a private plane roundtrip to Barcelona to fetch white roses to finding an electric guitar at 6 a.m., though don’t ask her to get lion cubs or dancing bears for your birthday party, as one client did recently. “I draw the line at live animals,” she says.
At six years of age, the Ibiza Gran Hotel is a comparatively newish five-star establishment abutting the yacht parking lot known as Marina Ibiza. Its exterior oddly reminiscent of a prison, the Gran is where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian stayed this summer when he performed at the birthday of Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci. A neon sign at a side entrance glows, “Giuseppe Cipriani presents Downtown Ibiza,” like it’s some show instead of a restaurant. Inside, the vibe is El Morocco elegant, with bow-tied waiters and white boudoir chairs. A big band is fronted by a lady on a sax. Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” flickers on the wall as artwork. “I’m here to see Giuseppe,” I say to the old-timey maître d’, Gianni.
“Isn’t everyone?” Gianni replies, nodding in the direction of several spike-heeled models manquées standing at the bar like pigeons on a phone wire. The kind of women not generally seen unaccompanied in the wild.
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Clockwise from top left: the bongo drummers at Benirras beach celebrating the sunset; Tina Cutler, reformed partier and holistic healer; revelers at Blue Marlin Ibiza, a popular beach club in Cala Jondal.Credit Stéphane Gizard
Around midnight Cipriani strolls in and is handed a Sazerac by an understanding bartender. The handsome president and C.E.O. of Cipriani Worldwide is in residence here from May through October. “People have an image of Ibiza being the party-crazy island of the Mediterranean,” he says. Three years ago, he decided the island was ready for “a classic place that was the opposite. A place I would like.” Cipriani now has competition from Roberto Cavalli, who has opened a restaurant just around the corner, and will soon from Cirque du Soleil’s Guy Laliberté, who’s planning a dinner theater elsewhere in the Gran with the Surrealist Spanish chefs Ferran and Albert Adrià. It slips that Cipriani has sold his beloved yacht, the Gin Tonic. Fronting a group of investors, he recently paid more than $10 million for a giant space nearby, where he is thinking about a luxury hotel with a restaurant-shopping center complex.
Locals are grumbling that Ibiza is quickly approaching Vegas territory — minus the casinos. (The Gran has the island’s only one, and it’s a sleepy affair on the verge of a redo.) Amid the yachts of Marina Ibiza is Lío, a three-year-old cabaret run by the Urgell family (who also own Pacha) that offers a widescreen view of the Formentera ferries pacing the harbor beneath the historic walled town of Dalt Vila. The gently erotic variety show accompanying the $60 tomato-lobster soup plays a bit cruise-ship-of-the-damned to anyone from the opposite side of the Atlantic. But the Euro-riches adore it, and it’s one of the hottest reservations in town. A 10-minute drive away, Sublimotion at the Hard Rock Hotel in the newly revived Playa d’en Bossa area is yet another dining experience bristling with optical legerdemain and costume play. The $24,000 private dinner for 12 at what looks like Ernst Blofeld’s conference table qualifies Sublimotion as the most expensive restaurant in the world. “Now wherever you go, there’s a show,” Hjordis Fogelberg sniffs. She’s spent virtually her entire life here and is the author of “My Ibiza,” a new (and sorely needed) guidebook. “There’s always somebody hanging from the ceiling, isn’t there?”
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Clockwise from top left: a view of charming Ibiza Town on the water; top D.J. David Guetta, who is said to make $150,000 to $350,000 for one gig; Guetta presiding over a massive party at Ibiza’s famous nightclub Pacha.Credit Stéphane Gizard
As with electronic dance music and drugs, Ibiza continues to trade on her ruttish behavior. The newer, more business-like Ibiza is hoping people will confuse the organically arrived-at orgies of yore with contract stunt work. In July, a reported 2,000 people attended an “Eyes Wide Shut”-themed bash in a defunct military bunker in the north. Babes in bondage paid to pleasure themselves for the audience felt as authentic as the “image girls” now hired and housed by some of the high-end places around the island. Still, the party, thrown by some elusive Colombian Gatsby known only as Lio, was hailed in some quarters as the best of the summer. A few guests were discovered the next morning in flagrante in a next-door storage shed. “Years ago, it was the people at the party who were interesting. They were the show,” continues Fogelberg, the daughter of a Danish engineer. “The more eccentric you were, the cooler you were,” adds Tina Cutler, one of Ibiza’s legendary partiers who is now a vibrational holistic healer. (Cutler’s father was a flamboyant Tory leader and a right hand to Margaret Thatcher.) She says she’s been busy performing exorcisms on houses here. “There are 400-year-old fincas,” Cutler says. “Entities love to attack. The people who rent do a lot of drugs, and drugs blow holes in their auras. You have to clean a house after.”
Though one still hears of squatters in the local caves, the housing market is definitely getting more high-minded. Las Boas de Ibiza is a visually strident Jean Nouvel condominium directly facing Marina Ibiza. One of an unmatched pair by the marquee architect, the ziggurat trimmed with trippy Day-Glo gardens had a very lengthy gestation, delayed by Spain’s financial crisis. High-end property listings are traditionally kept confidential, but the askings on Ibiza’s $10 million-plus houses are way, way up, says John Stone, a real estate consultant.
Yachts rent space here, too, and the boat people praise the availability of slips, in contrast to no-vacancy St.-Tropez, even if the mooring fees are routinely listed among the five highest in the world. “I have a very, very rich Indian friend who was very often anchored outside the marinas,” says Sylvia, the Duchess of Serra di Cassano, who herself first arrived in the 1980s on a cruise ship, before committing to a 400-year-old finca nine years ago. “He said, ‘They’re completely crazy, what they’re asking.’ ”
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The art collector Friedrich Christian ‘‘Mick’’ Flick’s house, named Casablanca, currently on the market for $12 million.Credit José Hevia Blach
It’s too easy to complain about where the island is heading. The magnum with sparklers has arrived, some would say, like a deadly virus. But there’s still a beautiful and pristine Ibiza, dotted with 50-plus beaches where the $120-a-day sunbed is easily avoided. Such simple pleasures remain as picking the figs, lemons and avocados that grow on the side of the road. The scent of wild lavender and rosemary floats on air. Oyster salesmen rove the beaches dressed like Spanish sailors. And naked hippies still walk the beach at Aguas Blancas and beat their drums on Sundays at sunset at Benirras in the north. For $6, they’ll also make you a mojito.
There are no obvious points of entry to this island except the music scene, which remains the great uniting force. It is this constant infusion of youth that keeps Ibiza from petrifying into a St.-Tropez or a Capri. Summer in Ibiza may be the only time some of the ultra-rich come into contact with ordinary people, says Antonia Crespi, a real estate agent who has been coming here for years. The fashion photographer Mario Testino is not above Ibiza’s erratically scheduled, thousand-person Rave in a Cave.
“For me Ibiza means freedom,” says Serra di Cassano, who speaks of attending after-after-parties that pick up where the clubs leave off — at noon. “I don’t want to be told what to wear. How to behave.” She likes going straight from the beach to dinner in a pareo. She hopes this won’t change. “You cannot do that in St.-Tropez. You cannot do that in Sardinia, with the uptight Italians. You know, they seem so hahahaha. No, no. They are very bourgeois, and they are very uptight. Except my husband.”
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Clockwise from top left: longtime homeowner Jade Jagger’s yard near San Juan on the northern part of the island; the new luxury residence, Las Boas de Ibiza, designed by Pritzker-winning architect Jean Nouvel, facing the Marina Ibiza; Duchess Sylvia Serra di Cassano at the finca she’s owned for the last nine years; the Cala Salada beach cove in western Ibiza.Credit Stéphane Gizard
It’s 2 a.m. in the lobby of the Gran Hotel, and David Guetta, one of the world’s top D.J.s, who makes an estimated $30 million a year, is pouring himself a cup of ginger tea. He has an hour to kill before he goes on at Pacha, historically a trampoline to fame. It is in Ibiza that Guetta communes with his core fans. He says he tested a hundred different versions of his hit single, “Lovers on the Sun,” before its audiences. The light sticks that are thrown into the crowd during his show are branded.
Ibiza’s clubs are killing it like never before. Once, it was uncool to be seen in a V.I.P. room. Now clubs are doubling their private spaces, with gradations of V.I.P. rooms under one roof. A table for eight to 20 people that used to cost $3,000 an evening now goes for up to $30,000. A private party in a villa this summer, which several big-spending regulars at Amnesia attended, is said to have deprived that club’s V.I.P. room of $90,000 in one night. Ibiza’s hippies still lament the death of trance parties on the beach, believing the town cracked down because they competed with the nightclubs.
Yann Pissenem has certainly benefited from the influx of moneyed customers looking to dance. It was six years ago that the former law student introduced a second circadian rhythm to the island with a 5-to-midnight D.J.ed beach party in the then-tired Playa d’en Bossa beach-resort area. The idea was to lure well-to-do 40-somethings with kids whose days dropping Ecstasy and staying up to catch a 3 a.m. headliner in a big-box club were over. By 2010, his summer closing party was bringing in 14,000 people. The Matutes family, who own six of the surrounding hotels in Playa d’en Bossa, decided to take Pissenem’s party in-house, building him a state-of-the-art stage and making him the artistic director of the Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel and Tower. “The idea is to create an amusement park for adults,” Pissenem says. Impressed, Hard Rock International granted its first European license to the Matutes, who opened a Hard Rock Hotel next door to Ushuaïa this past summer.
I pay a visit to Pissenem’s boss, Abel Matutes, a man people refer to as “the Godfather of Ibiza.” Sitting at a conference table in his office, the 73-year-old presents as a kind of canny granddad. He laughs away the nickname, mentioning his latest gold medal from the town, the foreword in his biography written by former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Born into a powerful local banking family, Matutes went into national politics and served as Spain’s foreign minister from 1996 to 2000, all the while amassing a group of resorts around the world. Before he revived Playa d’en Bossa, his 37-year-old son of the same name (let us call him Matutes the Younger) says Dad was talking retirement. Not anymore.
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Clockwise from top left: the steamy dance scene at Ushuaïa; Aguas Blancas beach is one spot in Ibiza where nudity is still welcome; brother and sister Hugo and Iria Urgell at their family run Destino resort.Credit Stéphane Gizard
Matutes the Younger is a frank-speaking M.B.A. type who cites the importance of Ibiza “differentiating” itself from others in the “luxury league,” a race that now has Ibiza ahead of Marbella, neck-and-neck with St.-Tropez and Mykonos. It is local sport to accuse the Matutes family of self-interest: They own about 10 percent of the island, and their lucrative schemes are sited on their land. But then, Matutes the Elder remembers when the children he played with as a boy were obliged to leave the island at age 15 to find employment. One daughter was in charge of public works on Ibiza several years ago, shepherding a much-criticized plan to build motorways in response to epic traffic. At the time, says the Younger, locals raised all sorts of opposition to the project; some even complained that it would give rise to Galápagos-style differentiation, so to speak, among the island’s rabbit population. “And now, there were going to be two different races of rabbit, one from the south and the one from the north, because the rabbits could never meet,” he scoffs. “I’m telling you, if your I.Q. is more than 40, if you know how to count to 10, I don’t know how you can believe those things,” he says. “There’s an expression in Spanish, ‘Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande.’ Small town, big hell.”
The family is once again under fire. A $380 million plan to further develop Playa d’en Bossa, anchored by a luxury mall, has been slowed by the government as merchants in Ibiza Town worry about losses to their businesses. Matutes the Elder has offered to delay a proposed golf course if it will hasten the project. Father and son remain optimistic, the latter recently lobbying Air Europa (in which they own shares, as they do in the Baleària ferry line) to begin direct flights from New York.
Ibiza is in the throes of serious change. But to creative types, change isn’t the enemy. “I think every place has to keep progressing,” Jagger says. “I mean, when I arrived here years ago, there was a sense that with the roads now paved, donkeys were no longer the taxis.” The unlikeliest people are falling into bed together as Ibiza tries on a new identity. Matutes the Elder invites me to join him and Russia’s ambassador to Spain on his yacht for an excursion to Formentera, the more primitively beautiful island next door. The plan is to lunch at Juan y Andrea, a spruced-up fish shack where reservations are in the name of one’s yacht and whose prices some call insulting. Formentera is now everybody’s favorite day trip. It’s what Ibiza used to look like.
"revealing a nostalgia for a stylized past that never actually existed"
Always looking for new ways to sell things...
The Quaint Economy: How A Good Story Makes A Successful Product
Shane FerroThe author was horrified to learn earlier this year that sugar water is sold for $10 in certain upscale bodegas in Manhattan
There’s a hashtag being passed around a certain clique of finance twitter: #TQE. It stands for the the quaint economy, and if you’ve ever overpaid for distressed jeans or thought about forking over $12 for a jar of artisanal pickles, it’s time to acquaint yourself with the idea.
The quaint economy is a derivative of a derivative of The Way We Live Now. It’s about the way that upscale brands perceive the aspirations of their target audience, filter it through their corporate marketing department, and reflect it back at us, revealing a nostalgia for a stylized past that never actually existed.
The term Quaint Economy originated as a joke by Guillermo Roditi Dominguez, a portfolio manager for New River Investments. He was originally talking about his own neighborhood in Los Angeles. As it gentrified, he told Business Insider, he observed that “businesses that were useful were replaced with businesses whose only job were to look cute and not to make money.”
But it grew into a way to describe a certain kind of late capitalist aesthetic that’s often associated with artisanal products made for and by millennials somewhere in Brooklyn.
Dominguez’s partner, Conor Sen, described TQE on his blog a few weeks ago: “It’s our desire to drink cocktails out of mason jars rather than mass-produced glasses from Ikea, at a bar covered in reclaimed wood from a barn in Kentucky rather than something you’d find in the interior of a DMV.”
Shane FerroA leather six-pack tote for a steel bike, featured at Interbike 2014
While it started as a joke, it’s become a really helpful way to think about the way that products are marketed in 2014.
“More than anything it is the idea that it is no longer just the product that matters. The production has a really huge affect on how people think about products,” says Dominguez. In a world of cheap, readily available, mass-produced goods, “the scarcity factor is the story behind products.”
One of the best examples of how this works is Dan Nosowitz’s recent story in Buzzfeed about the J. Crew-owned Madewell brand. The store’s about page on Facebook reads, “Madewell's roots date back to 1937 and we're constantly taking inspiration from the brand's workwear beginnings. You'll find these references in our design's details: Selvedge edges, hand distressing, monograms.”
Shane FerroThis truck often parks outside of the BI office in New York's Flatiron District, a block away from the 5th Avenue Madewell store
Nosowitz is the great grandson of the creator of the Madewell brand (which J. Crew bought in 2004 and reappropriated) and writes that that’s not at all what the brand was about historically. Here he describes the disconnect:
Aaron bristled when I asked if the Madewell clothes were high quality — “Oh, yes, they were very well made,” he said — but these weren’t exactly pioneering designers crafting original clothing out of a deep passion. They weren’t inventors or artists. They looked at what was selling and made some of that to sell. It was a business, and Madewell did what made sense from a business perspective. J.Crew’s Madewell is grasping to emulate some sepia-hued commitment to quality in the original company, some moral or ethical standard from better, more authentic times. But that’s not what motivated my great-grandfather at all — his motivation was profit, and quality was a means to an end.
TQE is full of ironies. For one thing, says Dominguez, much of TQE is really about a nostalgia for a modernist culture that was, at the time, “hell bent on destroying the past.” For another, Sen writes, “‘authenticity’ is all about placing barriers on growth, which is interesting now that corporations and firms are trying to scale the authenticity economy.”
Can the artisanal economy scale? How does this fit into, or exist alongside, the robot economy? Stay tuned.
This is the first in a series of posts about the quaint economy.
Wet summer and sunny autumn create perfect conditions for prized truffles, sending usually high prices tumbling
They are a famously expensive culinary indulgence but an unusually wet summer followed by a warm autumn has made Italy's prized white truffles affordable for once.
Specially-trained dogs are digging up a record haul of the elusive fungi, which emerge from the damp leaf litter of the forest floor at this time of year.
Truffle hunters, who keep their best spots a closely guarded secret, are celebrating what could be one of the best harvests in recent years.
While the wet weather has been a disaster for Italy's winemakers, who fear one of the worst grape harvests for 50 years, it has been beneficial for the pungent truffles, which grow hidden at the base of oak, beech and hazel trees.
White truffles, which are rarer and more expensive than black truffles, are this season selling for around €2,000 (£1,580) a kilogram, down from €3,500 last year and an eye-watering €5,000 in 2012.
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The white variety, or "tartufo bianco" to give it its Italian name, is mostly found in the woods and fields of the Piedmont region, in the north of Italy, with the towns of Alba and Asti particularly famous for the delicacy.
As the wholesale price of white truffles drops, so too does the price of sampling the fungi in a plate of pasta, said Mauro Carbone, the head of the National Centre for Truffle Studies in Alba.
"The first harvest has been decidedly better than those of the past few years. With the weather we have had, the price has reduced substantially.
"This year you'll be able to enjoy a dish based on truffles for about €20," he said.
The bumper harvest will be celebrated at an International Truffle Fair in Alba which starts on Saturday and continues until Nov 16, where visitors can take part in tastings and cooking demonstrations.
The summer was a washout in some parts of Italy, particularly in the north, with unusually heavy rainfall and floods.
But it has been followed by a dry, sunny autumn over much of the peninsula, creating the perfect conditions for truffle growth.
There an estimated 200,000 regular truffle gatherers in Italy, with the sector worth around €400 million a year.
While the white truffles of Piedmont are particularly prized, black truffles are found in most parts of the country, with the central region of Umbria accounting for 30 per cent of total production.
Tuscany and the Marche region also produced large quantities of the aromatic tuber, which was celebrated by Plutarch and Cicero in Roman times and has been much sought after by gourmands ever since.
Honig realised that perceptions of beauty depend just as much on the individual as on the culture where that person is from.
“Even though there were over-arching themes to beauty, individuals, no matter their culture, had different perspectives of what the word ‘beautiful’ means. It’s hard to know what is cultural and what is personal..."
Larry Ellison Bought an Island in Hawaii. Now What?
By JON MOOALLEM
Henry
Jolicoeur is a retired French Canadian hypnotherapist and a
glass-products importer who enjoys making very low-budget documentary
films. In the summer of 2012, Jolicoeur read that Larry Ellison, a
founder of the Silicon Valley giant Oracle and the fifth-richest man in
the world, had bought 97 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai — not a
97 percent stake in some kind of company, but 97 percent of the
physical place. Jolicoeur was curious, so he booked a flight and packed
his camera.
Jolicoeur
knew a little about Lanai, having lived in Hawaii in the ’90s. It is
among the smallest and least trafficked of Hawaiian islands — a quiet,
spectacular place where Cook Island pine trees vault up everywhere, like
spires or giant peacock feathers — and can feel like a charming
wormhole to an earlier era. There is only one town, Lanai City, where
virtually all of the island’s 3,200 residents live. Ellison now owned a
third of all their houses and apartments; the island’s two Four
Seasons-run hotels; the central commons at the heart of Lanai City,
called Dole Park, and all the buildings around it; the town swimming
pool; the community center; the theater; a grocery store; two golf
courses; a wastewater treatment plant; the water company; and a
cemetery. In a single sweeping real estate deal, reported to cost $300
million, he had acquired 87,000 of the island’s 90,000 acres. And he
would subsequently buy an airline that connects Lanai to Honolulu as
well. On all of Lanai, I heard of only a handful of businesses — the gas
station, the rental-car company, two banks, a credit union and a cafe
called Coffee Works — that are neither owned by Ellison nor pay him
rent.
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Lanai City, in the center of the island, is home to virtually all 3,200
of the island’s residents. Credit Mark Peterson and Greta Pratt for
The New York Times
Jolicoeur
spent about three weeks strolling around the island, asking locals to
hold his ungainly, foam-sheathed microphone and tell the camera how they
felt about the big acquisition. Everyone seemed to feel very, very
good. “I want to thank Mr. Ellison,” one fishing-boat captain says.
“He’s got a vision, and he’s taking care of us over here on Lanai.” A
pack of landscapers, shown assiduously raking dirt, say things like:
“Thank you for work, Mr. Ellison! Thank you very much!” The owner of a
salon: “I just want to take this time to thank Mr. Ellison for the
unbelievable, incredible takeover of Lanai.” Inside the island’s
Catholic church, a priest in a purple robe, surrounded by children,
says: “Heavenly father. . . . We ask for your blessings for Mr. Ellison,
particularly, and those who work with him, that all the good plans and
intentions that he has for Lanai be fruitful.” Elsewhere, a woman shouts
a little breathlessly: “Mr. Ellison! Thank you for being here! We love
you! I’ve never met you before and really would like to, and I can
imagine that you will do awesome wonders for this place!”
Jolicoeur
is still working on his film but has posted some footage on YouTube in
the meantime. From time to time, he makes an appearance himself,
pontificating about the bewildering new relationship between Ellison and
everyone else. Introducing one segment, Jolicoeur announces, “The great
philosopher Plato said, 2,500 years ago, that rulers of man must be
philosophers.” A title card reads, “ORACLE = A person who delivers
authoritative, wise or highly regarded and influential pronouncements.”
Ninety seven percent
of Lanai may be a lot of Lanai, but it’s a tiny part of Ellison’s
overall empire. Ellison, who stepped down as C.E.O. of Oracle on Sept.
18, is estimated to be worth $46 billion. He made an estimated $78.4
million last year, or about $38,000 an hour. He owns a tremendous amount
of stuff — cars, boats, real estate, Japanese antiquities, the BPN
Paribas Open tennis tournament, an America’s Cup sailing team, one of
Bono’s guitars — and has a reputation for intensity and excess.
Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that when Ellison has played
basketball on the courts on his yachts, he has positioned “someone in a
powerboat following the yacht to retrieve balls that go overboard.” One
biographer called him “a modern-day Genghis Khan.”
At
a public meeting on Lanai last year, an Ellison representative
explained that his boss wasn’t drawn to the island by the potential for
profits but by the potential for a great accomplishment — the
satisfaction one day of having made the place work. For Ellison, it
seemed, Lanai was less like an investment than like a classic car, up on
blocks in the middle of the Pacific, that he had become obsessed with
restoring. He wants to transform it into a premier tourist destination
and what he has called “the first economically viable, 100 percent green
community”: an innovative, self-sufficient dreamscape of renewable
energy, electric cars and sustainable agriculture.
Ellison
has explained that Lanai feels to him like “this really cool
21st-century engineering project” — and so far, his approach, which
seems steeped in the ethos of Silicon Valley, has boiled down to rooting
out the many inefficiencies of daily life on Lanai and replacing them
with a single, elegantly designed system. It’s the sort of sweeping
challenge that engineering types get giddy over: a full-scale model. Of
course, there are actual people living inside Ellison’s engineering
project — a community being hit by an unimaginable wave of wealth. But
unlike all the more familiar versions of that story, Lanai isn’t being
remade by some vague socioeconomic energy you can only gesture at with
words like “techies” or “hipsters” or “Wall Street” but by one guy,
whose name everyone knows, in a room somewhere, whiteboarding out the
whole project.
Jolicoeur
seemed to understand the precariousness that power imbalance created:
the staggering responsibility, the incomprehensible control. At one
point, standing on a beach, he announces theatrically to the camera,
“The Bible says, ‘Where there is no vision, people perish.’ ” Eventually
he visits the island’s animal-rescue center, where a young employee
explains that because there are no natural predators on Lanai, the
feral-cat population just explodes. Right now, she tells him, the
shelter is housing 380 cats.
From behind the camera, Jolicoeur hollers: “So basically, these are 380 cats of Mr. Ellison’s?”
“They’re his cats!” the woman says, laughing and laughing.
Next
we see a half-dozen cats, occupying different areas of a multitiered
bungalow-style dollhouse for cats, licking themselves and lapping water
and napping. More cats appear as Jolicoeur enters the shot, holding his
long microphone, extending his free hand to stroke whichever cat looks
most cooperative. His eyes are bright. He looks thrilled with his
wonderful discovery: He has reached an unanticipated edge of the
island’s new reality.
Clasping
an animal with a meaty palm, he turns back to the camera and says, “Mr.
Ellison, do you know that you have, now, 380 cats?”
For thousands of years,
Lanai was ruled by the god of nightmares. No humans lived there until,
according to Hawaiian legend, a teenage chief from Maui was banished to
the island for bad behavior. The chief killed the nightmare god and
routed his army of spirits. Then he lit a fire. People on Maui, eight
miles to the east, saw the fire. It was a signal — an all-clear. They
got in their canoes and came over.
CreditMark Peterson and Greta Pratt for The New York Times
Hawaiians
lived happily on Lanai for about 800 years. Then the Mormons started
arriving, eventually led in 1861 by Walter Murray Gibson, who, in
retrospect, may have been only a megalomaniac con man masquerading as a
Mormon. An article published by the Hawaiian Historical Society in 1960
describes Gibson as “ambitious and romantic and interested in ruling a
tropical government.” Gibson spent his early years tramping through
Southeast Asia, stoking a native revolt against the Dutch in the hope of
commandeering one. He converted to Mormonism only one year before
showing up on Lanai. After building a Mormon colony in the island’s
interior, Gibson began buying land on Lanai until he controlled nearly
the entire island. He paid for the land with the church’s money but put
the titles in his own name. When the Mormons figured this out, they
excommunicated him.
Gibson
retained the land, though. By the time he died in 1888, it had passed
to his daughter, then through a few other owners as a single holding.
None of them could figure out what to do with Lanai. They tried ranching
sheep. They tried sugar cane. One crop that grew well was pineapples,
and this caught the attention of James Drummond Dole, a Harvard Business
School grad with a fledgling pineapple company on Oahu.
In
1922, Dole paid $1.1 million for the land Gibson and his successors had
accumulated. Just like that, The New York Times reported, “an entire
island, Lanai, has been taken over by a pineapple company.” Dole plowed
the interior into fields, built a harbor and roads and laid out an
idyllic town near the center of Lanai — a grid of plantation-style
cottages, with Dole Park in the middle — to house his mostly Japanese
and Filipino workers. By 1930, Lanai City had 3,000 residents, nearly
all of them Dole employees, and the island was exporting 65,000 tons of
pineapples a year. The company sent landscaping crews to weed and mow
workers’ lawns. It ran an athletics program and built a golf course.
Life on Lanai was good; Dole insisted it should be. His motto was: “Have
happy workers, grow better pineapples.”
For
70 years, Lanai was among the world’s largest pineapple plantations.
Then in 1992, the island harvested its last crop. Overseas production
had driven down prices, and Lanai was left behind. By that point, the
island had changed hands two more times. It was now controlled by the
California billionaire David Murdock, who acquired the company Castle
& Cooke, which took over Dole Foods’ holdings on Lanai in the ’60s.
Murdock was a somewhat imperial presence on Lanai. He referred to
residents as his “children.”
As
the pineapple era wound down, Murdock pivoted Lanai’s economy toward
tourism. He built two resorts — the first developments on the island
besides Lanai City and still the only major ones — and eventually
contracted the Four Seasons to run them. Pineapple pickers were
retrained as hotel staff and landscapers. Lanai was still a company
town; the company just did something different now.
The
transition did not go well. Murdock had to steadily infuse the island
with money — as much as $20 million or $30 million a year, he’d later
report. By the mid-2000s, he started cutting back. He laid off large
numbers of workers and began abandoning some of his quasi-governmental
responsibilities as the island’s majority landowner. Buildings fell into
disrepair. The Chamber of Commerce disbanded. As one resident put it,
“Economically, there was real potential that we might dry up and blow
away.”
Eventually,
Murdock proposed a way forward: He would build an array of 45-story
wind turbines on 20 square miles of the island and sell the electricity
they produced to Oahu. The idea was controversial. It would be a mammoth
development on an insistently small-scale island. Lanai had been
settled by disparate immigrants who had to figure out how to get along,
and that history, locals told me, keeps people from dwelling on
divisions and differences. (“That’s what makes the place so special,”
one woman explained. “We still have aloha together.”) But the long fight
over what the locals called Big Wind was brutal and divisive. Family
members stopped talking to one another. There were protests in the
street. Many people who supported the wind turbines saw the protesters
as reckless idealists; they were handcuffing the man the community
relied on and driving the island into the ground. Murdock seemed to feel
the same way. By the summer of 2011, he confessed to the editor of the
island’s newspaper that Lanai had been “the poorest financial investment
I’ve made in my entire life.” He had only so many options. One was to
“close it all down and leave.” Instead, he put Lanai up for sale.
The
island rippled with anxiety. People worried that Murdock might sell off
parts of Lanai to multiple owners, tossing the community into some
uncharted, joint-custody arrangement. Or that he’d sell to a big resort
developer who would shatter the character of the place. “Oh, my God, he
could sell to a Russian oligarch,” one woman remembered thinking.
Another said, “We were praying it wasn’t some sheikh!” It wasn’t some
sheikh. It was Larry Ellison.
It
was easy to be hopeful, and the civil war over Big Wind had left people
scarred and exhausted with fighting. Now Ellison wanted to revive the
island, and he had the money to fund his dreams until they came true.
But was he a utopian businessman like Dole? Or a slippery autocrat like
Gibson? Was he the nightmare god — or the renegade chief who finally
came to vanquish him?
One
morning, nearly two years later, at the Blue Ginger Cafe, I asked Pat
Reilly, a 74-year-old regular with a thin white mustache and oversize
glasses who has lived on Lanai for more than 30 years, how he felt when
he heard that Ellison bought the island. Reilly reached over his coffee
mug and drew a big, slow question mark in the air, then jabbed his index
finger at me to dot the question mark, hard.
“And it’s still that way,” he said.
Like a lot of
omnipotent forces, Ellison has remained mostly invisible. He has
visited Lanai many times — locals told me they can tell he’s on the
island when they see his yacht hitched in the harbor — but he seems
determined to keep a formal distance from the community, shielding
himself behind the executive team of Pulama Lanai, the management
company he set up to oversee the island’s transformation. Although
Pulama holds frequent public meetings on Lanai, Ellison has declined to
attend any or to address residents directly. Several residents told me
that they’d resorted to reading biographies of Ellison to learn more
about the man — books that have somewhat disquieting titles like
“Everyone Else Must Fail” and “The Difference Between God and Larry
Ellison,” the punch line being: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”
Ellison’s
vision for the island was first delivered, by proxy, early last year,
at a meeting of the island’s Community Plan Advisory Committee. These
meetings were part of a county-government process to update the island’s
comprehensive planning document, which dictates everything from zoning
and land use to cultural preservation. Butch Gima, a Lanai native and
social worker who was chairman of the committee, told me that Ellison’s
takeover put them in a tricky position. On one hand, it allowed for
greater ambition. (“A new world has opened up,” one member told the
committee.) But it also felt strange to chart a course for an island
that someone else had taken control of. Even the committee’s economic
research and growth projections might now be obsolete, depending on what
Ellison wanted to do. And so they invited Pulama’s new chief operating
officer, Kurt Matsumoto, to brief them.
Matsumoto
was hired to oversee operations on Lanai a couple of months earlier. He
had a background in running large resorts, but he was also a “Lanai
Boy,” as people kept putting it to me — he grew up on the island. “He
doesn’t come off as being real slick,” Gima told me. (As kids, Gima and
Matsumoto were in Boy Scouts together.) His appointment was encouraging;
the relationship between the island and its new owner had been brought
down to a more human scale.
Matsumoto
appeared before the committee in mid-January — a middle-management
Moses coming down the mountain with an important PowerPoint. He prefaced
his presentation by explaining that Ellison didn’t have any firm plans
yet, only “intentions.” Then he put up his first slide.
That
night, and in other meetings, Matsumoto unveiled a startlingly
ambitious vision for the island. He explained that Ellison aimed to
build a third resort, this time on the uninhabited southwestern coast,
as well as a complex of private estates — maybe 50 of them, each five or
more acres. Ellison intended to expand Lanai’s airport, adding a bigger
runway to accommodate direct flights from the mainland for the first
time. The limiting factor on Lanai has always been water, but Ellison
would build a state-of-the-art desalination plant to produce more fresh
water. Ellison would expand Lanai City; build an “energy park,” where
electricity produced with solar panels or photosynthesizing algae would
be fed into a new smart grid; and bring commercial agriculture back to
the island, in fields outfitted with sensors to control fertilization
and irrigation, so that Lanai could begin to feed itself and even export
products, rather than depend on weekly food barges from Oahu.
Eventually Matsumoto would tell The Wall Street Journal that Ellison
hoped to see the island’s population double to about 6,000. Elsewhere,
there was talk of organic wineries and flower farms and an innovative
aquaponics-and-hydroponics operation that would raise fish and fruits
and vegetables in a sustainable symphony of positive feedback loops.
Better health care. A bowling alley. An institute for the study of
sustainability. A 22-acre film studio. A top-flight, residential tennis
academy for competitive youth.
Matsumoto’s
tone at that first meeting was low-key, humble and inclusive. He used
words like “respect” and “empower,” “sharing” and “investing.” Then,
eventually, he hit his last slide: “Mahalo” — Hawaiian for “Thank you” —
and was done.
“It was hard to formulate any thought-out questions,” Gima recalled about the presentation. “I think people just went, ‘Whoa.’ ”
By the time
I visited Lanai last March, there was almost too much happening for one
person to keep track of. Pulama had gone to work around the island on
long-deferred maintenance, renovations and full-bore beautification.
They’d painted the shops around Dole Park, ripped out old hedges and
thinned or chopped down trees to air out the ambience. Herds of
construction workers moved around Lanai in fluorescent green or orange
shirts, then gathered outside Richard’s Market at quitting time for
drinks and snacks. “He is renewing, refreshing, rejuvenating every part
of the island,” said a woman named Mimi Evangelista. “I feel blessed,
blessed beyond my wildest dreams.”
After
several years of terrible unemployment, people on Lanai were back to
work. Within four months of Ellison’s purchase, unemployment shot down
to 1.2 percent. There were new faces everywhere, new luxury cars on the
road and lines of new Mercedes vans and Nissan Leafs parked in the
company’s lot near the center of town. Pulama had started a summer
program for kids and another program to help high-school students pursue
college scholarships, screened “Frozen” in the park and held an
“animal-care day” so people could get their cats dewormed free. They’d
opened a Nobu restaurant at one hotel. I saw posters advertising free
water-aerobics classes at the new community pool. There were ukulele
lessons and Pilates. A month earlier, at an Oracle event in Las Vegas to
unveil the company’s new cloud software, someone asked Ellison about
Lanai, and he pointed out that “for the first time, Lanai has a football
field where the high school can have home games.” He also noted, “We’re
empowering the locals to start their own businesses,” whether it’s “in
agriculture or a juice bar in Lanai City.”
The
juice bar occupies a cabana-like building at one corner of Dole Park
and is owned and operated by Tammy Ringbauer, an effusive woman with
bright flowers tattooed up her right arm. Ringbauer is deep into juicing
— I never saw anyone juice a turmeric root before — and charges 12
bucks for a large.
Ringbauer
told me she moved to Lanai from Maui just weeks before the change in
ownership, and this storefront caught her eye immediately. It was the
only vacant commercial space in Lanai City, though she had heard that,
for some reason, Pulama Lanai kept rejecting entrepreneurs who wanted to
lease it. (Pulama says that it did not turn down any previous
applicants.)
‘At
the end of the day, Mr. Ellison can do what he wants. He asks for input
but that’s like me asking for input on what to do with my backyard. I own my backyard.’
When
I asked Ringbauer why the company finally gave the lease to her, she
hesitated. “I don’t want to say anything wrong,” she said. “Because of
the changes that are happening, there’s sort of a model we’re trying to
move in the direction of. And I think certain businesses may not fit
into that model.” She thought her vision was aligned with Pulama’s: She
was using locally grown, organic produce and compostable to-go cups.
“I’m explaining the benefits of juicing, I’m educating,” she said.
Later, I heard that Ellison himself had come in for a juice a couple of
times, sitting on a stool and sipping away like a regular person.
I
couldn’t find any other small businesses that had started up on Lanai
since Ellison’s purchase. But there were stories about entrepreneurs,
like the owners of the island’s wood shop, who had approached Pulama for
leases or partnerships only to be offered a job with the company
instead — which was good but allowed Pulama to preserve its hold on the
economy. Ringbauer had no complaints. “If we all work together,” she
said, “we’re going to thrive.” The wooden sign hanging behind her
register read: “No whining. No complaining. No frowning. Only hugs,
smiles and warm feelings are allowed. Thank you.”
Despite my many phone
calls and emails to Pulama Lanai’s office, requesting interviews with
its senior staff members, the company basically wanted nothing to do
with me. A couple of walk-in visits to the office, and to the
standoffish man named Roger who worked the reception desk there, also
got me nowhere. (One time, trying to at least make small talk with Roger
before he turned me away, I said, “It’s beautiful, what you’ve done
here,” by which I meant the renovated office lobby, with its marble
floors and Pier 1-esque furnishings and the carved, hardwood box where
locals drop their rent checks. “Yes, it is,” Roger replied, barely
looking up from his computer.) Eventually a public-relations contractor
based in Honolulu told me that “the company is still in the planning
phase” and would not be participating in this article.
Another
obstacle: Roughly half of the adults on the island are employed by
Pulama Lanai or its hotels, and nearly everyone else, it seems, has a
sister or uncle who is — or else relies on the company indirectly for a
livelihood or lives in a house that Pulama Lanai owns. Lots of people
told me that they were instructed not to talk to reporters or that they
just didn’t want to risk upsetting the company. One young man delivered a
long, seemingly rehearsed preamble, insisting that he absolutely had to
remain anonymous and that any opinions he expressed were his alone and
did not reflect the views of either Pulama Lanai or his employer, which
did business with Pulama and which I also shouldn’t name. I expected
something inflammatory, but his opinion was this: “There’s a lot of
complainers — some people aren’t happy — but they don’t realize how much
they have. It’s just awesome!”
Well,
yes and no. As it turns out, my perception of Pulama Lanai — as a vast,
mostly incommunicative force — was pretty close to that of many
residents I was meeting. They didn’t necessarily understand how that
force operated either, but they saw its handiwork everywhere. And some
of it didn’t feel awesome at all.
For
starters, Pulama had inadvertently intensified a housing shortage on
Lanai. There was so much work that contractors had to be shuttled in
daily or weekly from other islands or relocated. A few off-island
construction companies bought up housing in Lanai City in anticipation
of winning contracts from Pulama, and the island’s independent landlords
found they could demand higher rents from the remaining workers. Though
the company was busily fixing up cottages to rent out, many displaced
locals wound up on Pulama’s indeterminably long waiting list for
housing, which they believed Pulama employees were bypassing. The
process didn’t feel transparent or fair, and Pulama was resisting calls
for a town-hall meeting about the issue. (Later, I attended one of the
company’s informational meetings about renovations at the Four Seasons —
“We’re adding two new teppanyaki stations,” a Pulama representative
explained — and watched residents try to derail its narrow agenda. “It’s
something you folks never even anticipated!” one older man said. He was
leaning on his walker, raising his voice. “You took all the housing! It
all went poof!”)
By
now, there was growing awareness that Pulama’s rhetoric of openness and
collaboration didn’t always match its actions. Some people wondered
whether the company was hiding its real agenda behind a veneer of
egalitarianism and good manners. As a schoolteacher named Karen de Brum
put it: “At the end of the day, Mr. Ellison can and will do what he
wants. He asks for input, but that’s like me asking for input on what to
do with my backyard. I own my backyard.”
A
27-year-old Lanai native named Zane de la Cruz told me that he was
“starting to think that communication is actually worse” than under the
previous owner, “because there’s a false sense of good communication.”
He elaborated: “They give out a lot worthless information. They give you
buzzwords.” At one meeting, a Pulama executive, Arlan Chun, was asked
how much residents would pay for water from the new desalination plant
and how Ellison expected to recoup his costs. Chun suggested that
Ellison wasn’t concerned with costs. “The mandate we have is to move the
island forward,” he said.
De
la Cruz told me: “Well, yeah, that’s a fun and fancy thing to say, but
someone is going to need to pay for this. And if Larry Ellison decides,
five years from now, that he doesn’t want to play this game anymore,
we’ll be paying for it then.” John Ornellas, chairman of the island’s
planning commission, said he was struggling to get a straight answer
about what would happen if Ellison dies. (“He does do a lot adventurous
things,” Ornellas noted; for example, there’s a rumor — the truth of
which remains murky — that Ellison once flew a fighter jet under the
Golden Gate Bridge.) And Diana Shaw, who directs the Lanai Community
Health Center, one of two medical providers on the island, said that
Pulama ignored her requests for an introductory meeting for months.
“They kept talking publicly about the health care system and how they
were going to improve it and enhance it and change it,” Shaw said. “But
nobody came and talked to us. We are the health care system — at least
50 percent of it.” Finally Pulama reps sat down with her. The meeting
didn’t go well. Shaw described one executive as “the master of spin.”
At
a small gathering one night, over pizza and beer, a retired school
principal, Pierce Myers, explained it to me this way: “The hope is real.
The potential is fantastic.” And yet lots of residents can’t help
seeing everything Ellison does through a scrim of “suspicion and
uncertainty.” He went on: “This place was developed on the backs of
humble people; people who cared for each other. When you live on an
island, you can’t afford to make enemies. A compassion grows from that.
Now it feels like everything’s being driven from outside by some force
that is not part of that tradition.”
Eventually
the man sitting next to Myers spoke up. “Any changes are going to be
uncomfortable, but the changes are happening so fast,” he said quietly.
His name was Anthony Kaauamo Pacheco. He is 29 and was born on Lanai but
left to study filmmaking on Oahu. Two years ago, he came back to the
island. He wanted to inspire would-be filmmakers there to tell their own
stories; he even imagined drawing Hollywood productions to Lanai. But
there wasn’t an obvious way to start. For the last two years, he’d been
teaching film at the school, unpaid.
Photo
A landscaper sprucing up the area around the community pool
and recreation area in Lanai City. Credit Mark Peterson and Greta Pratt
for The New York Times
That
afternoon, as a critical exercise, Pacheco had shown his students a
promotional video produced by Love Lanai, a new branding campaign that
Pulama was using to pitch the island to affluent tourists. Love Lanai is
the brainchild of a Southern Californian “approachable luxury” brand
consultant named Audrey Cavenecia. (Cavenecia has previously worked as a
personal “life redesigner” and developed a reality show for E!, “The
Apology Concierge,” which curates “high-end apologies” — like for
wealthy people who cheat on their wives.) The video showed swirling
aerial footage of the island’s beaches and cliffs, a man on a windy
ridge getting down on one knee to propose and a woman on horseback
rising from her saddle slightly, feeling free. It had been posted to
YouTube with the caption: “For Love Lanai, compassionate luxury is more
than just a phrase, it’s an action of purpose,” which doesn’t really
make sense.
In
an interview that Pachecho found online and showed to his students,
Cavenecia explained that she created Love Lanai to tell the stories of
everyday Lanaians as their lives, under Ellison, improved. It was the
kind of work Pacheco had come home to encourage. But for a branding
consultant to tell those stories, as promotional material for high-end
tourists, felt a little exploitative. “I’m not a spectacle,” he said.
He
seemed to be having trouble sorting out his feelings — deciding whether
his skepticism was warranted or just reflexive. Most of the island was
private property when Pacheco was growing up too, but Murdock left a
smaller footprint, tending to focus mainly on his hotels. “It never felt
like I was trespassing,” Pacheco said. Now it did. He said he wasn’t
sure he wanted to live on Lanai anymore.
Then,
two weeks later, in the middle of April, Pacheco’s situation improved.
Pulama Lanai funded his teaching position as part of its commitment to
improve education. He had a way to support his family now and resources
to start the idealistic work he’d come back to Lanai to do. He’d also
signed a nondisclosure agreement with the company and couldn’t talk to
me anymore.
Different people told
different stories, but for a local named Gail Allen, the first sign
that things had started to go wrong this summer came when Pulama Lanai
inexplicably abandoned its renovation of the golf course behind her
house, and the weeds and thistles grew waist-high and thick as a broom
head, and the fish in the ponds died, and their bodies were left to
knock around the algae-clouded edges of the water, floating on their
sides.
The
course, which is attached to the smaller of the two Four Seasons hotels
and abuts Allen’s neighborhood on the hillside above Lanai City, had
been slated for renovation at the beginning of the year. Pulama ripped
out the turf and irrigation systems, but little else happened after
that. Finally in May, the Jack Nicklaus design-company employee who had
been relocated with his family to Lanai to oversee the redesign was
abruptly sent home. He told neighbors that the golf-course renovation
had been put off until 2015 or 2016. By then, mosquitoes were breeding
on the course. The ponds’ stench blew through peoples’ homes. “It smells
like a sewer up here,” Allen told me in early July when I called for an
update.
Allen
owns a gift shop in town and looks a little like Meryl Streep when she
smiles. When we met on her patio back in March, she was adamantly
optimistic; she went on and on, telling me “I feel like I’m living in a
utopia!” and claiming to have inside information that Ellison was
outfitting Lanai with 4G cellular service. “Not even Honolulu has 4G!”
she said. (Actually it does.) Now she was distraught. It wasn’t just the
golf course; there were other signs of Pulama Lanai’s incompetence, or
maybe just its insensitivity — it was tough to tell which. “I don’t
think Mr. Ellison’s trying to hurt people,” she told me on the phone,
“but I don’t think he realizes what a delicate little ecosystem the
economy is here. We were so zealous: ‘Oh, my God, he’s coming to save
our island!’ It just feels like everything’s in limbo now. All of a
sudden, there’s a fear factor: ‘What are we going to do if this thing
falls apart?’ ”
I
flew back to Lanai a few days later. A lot had gone subtly sideways
since my first visit, as the company transitioned from the easy work of
sprucing up the island to rolling out its reimagined version. A central
problem seemed to be that Pulama underestimated the difficulties that
came with building on Lanai, where materials and labor have to be
brought in. In May, with work on the island consuming more and more
resources, Philip Simon — an accountant, and president of another of
Ellison’s companies, Lawrence Investments — was called in to consult
with Pulama executives. At public meetings, Pulama was now explaining
that it had given up on the second airport runway and was also
downshifting the $27 million makeover of the existing Four Seasons at
Manele Bay too: The company would renovate only half the resort this
year and was scrambling to finish in time for a large booking in
October. (Around town, the event was rumored to be a giant party for
Ellison’s daughter, Megan.) There were now 360 contractors on the job,
many of them living at the hotel and in half of the other Four Seasons
as well. Just before I arrived, Ellison bought the small Hotel Lanai at
the top of Dole Park — the last hotel on the island — and was filling it
with workers every Monday through Friday, too. Ornellas, head of the
Lanai Planning Commission, told me that lately the gist of his
conversations with company executives was: “The infrastructure can’t
support their lofty goals.”
On
such a small island, every adjustment Pulama made to its plans had
repercussions, and the strain of disenfranchisement I encountered in the
spring was spreading, as more stories of the company’s apparent
carelessness or undependability surfaced. Late last year, for example,
Pulama told the owners of Trilogy Excursions — a large family-owned
business based in Maui that, among other things, runs diving tours for
hotel guests on Lanai and whose employees hand out a free turkey and a
bag of rice to every family on the island at Thanksgiving — that in
October, the Four Seasons would begin running its own dive operation.
Then this spring, Pulama recanted; they were delaying that plan. This
was good news for Trilogy, except that several of its employees,
presuming they’d be out of work, had already taken other jobs, and the
company was now short-staffed.
It’s
possible that, internally, Ellison’s management team had reasonable
explanations for what was being experienced as aloofness and disarray.
But down here, on Lanai, locals worried that the inscrutable engineer
remaking their island was either turning away from his creation or —
worse — incapable of manning all those knobs and switches as competently
as they’d believed. People’s lives were entangled in each decision; all
the instability was upsetting their sense of the future.
“Pretty
soon, it’s not going to be the Lanaian way of living here anymore,”
Mike Lopez, Trilogy’s director of operations, told me one afternoon.
“Everybody feels that now.” Then, all of a sudden, he shot out: “See,
this guy here!” and gestured across the street, to a willowy man with a
gray beard, in a ball cap and sunglasses, standing at the edge of Dole
Park. It was a new face that Lopez kept noticing around, always alone.
“I don’t know if they put people in to observe the atmosphere or what,”
he said.
‘It
just feels like everything’s in limbo now. All of a sudden, there’s a
fear factor. ‘‘What are we going to do if this thing falls apart?’’ ’
I
turned around. The man, who’d paused next to a garbage can, quickly
walked away. I’m not really equipped to judge whether a stranger on
Lanai looks sinister or not. But neither was Lopez anymore, and that was
the point.
The week Ireturned,
those feelings of suspicion on Lanai were coming to a head over what
has been the most volatile political issue on the island for
generations: water.
The
planned desalination plant, already in its first phase of construction
near the Four Seasons at Manele Bay, was a linchpin in Ellison’s vision;
by converting up to 10 million gallons of salinated groundwater into
fresh water a day, it would make more development and population growth
possible. Earlier this year, the company went to the Lanai Planning
Commission for a 30-year special-use permit to operate the plant. (The
commission, made up of nine residents, is the one body of truly local
government on Lanai. Everything else on the island gets decided by the
county government, on Maui, or the state, in Honolulu. And it’s worth
noting that while Ellison has declined to meet with Lanai residents, he
hosted Alan Arakawa — the mayor of Maui County, which includes Lanai —
for lunch on his yacht and held two big-ticket fund-raisers for Gov.
Neil Abercrombie before Abercrombie lost his primary in August.) But
after months of hearings, the Planning Commission rejected Pulama’s
request and decided to issue a permit for 15 years instead. The move may
sound insignificant, but as Robin Kaye, a longtime resident, who helped
lead the resistance to Murdock’s wind farm, pointed out, “This is the
first time in two years, in a formal way, that any part of the community
has said no to something Pulama has asked.” And it provoked the first
instance of outright intransigence the community had seen from Pulama.
During one of the final meetings about the plant in June, Kurt Matsumoto
kept issuing the same ultimatum: Without a guarantee of 30 years of
operation, he said, the company probably wouldn’t build the plant. It
just wouldn’t be worth the investment. “It’s not a threat,” Matsumoto
explained, adding later: “But we’re not here to negotiate that tonight.”
When
I ran into Pat Reilly, the gentleman I met at the Blue Ginger Cafe in
the spring, he broke down the altercation for me. It was starting to
feel as if Matsumoto and his team saw the local political process as an
annoyance, he said. They weren’t acting like elected officials, building
public support for their agenda; they were acting like they owned the
place — because they did. “The local people want a say,” Reilly
explained. “And this was their chance. It was a display of power.
Psychologically, it makes all kinds of sense to me.”
By
now, the standoff was taking on an ugly feel. Many residents felt the
commission had acted impetuously, handcuffing Ellison the same way
activists sabotaged Murdock’s wind-farm proposal — even if, in this
case, the commission wasn’t actually opposed to the plant and had, in
fact, given the project a green light. The commission, meanwhile, had
just received a stern letter from Pulama’s attorney on Maui, laying out a
complicated argument attacking a separate restriction written into the
permit. (The restriction stipulated that, once the plant was up and
running, the hotel and surrounding homes could only draw water from the
island’s main aquifer in emergencies, and only then for human
consumption.)
One
afternoon, I was waiting out a rain shower in one of Pulama’s Four
Seasons, enjoying a very expensive ginger ale and some free popcorn,
when I overheard a woman venting to the bartender about the commission’s
audacity and underhandedness. “This is a lot of money they’re playing
with!” she said. She grumbled about one former commissioner in
particular, whom she saw as a ringleader, and huffed, “What was she
thinking?” She went on and got louder, until she’d finally talked
herself out.
Thirty
minutes later, I walked into a public meeting that Pulama was holding
at the old union hall in town and saw the owner of a luxury home near
the resort — a very large man in a polo shirt — standing over Pat
Reilly, pointing and shouting: “Talk some sense into those people! They
want to shut off our water!” I also saw the woman from the bar, smiling
and offering people pastries and bottled water: it was Lynn McCrory,
Pulama’s senior vice president of government affairs.
On
Sept. 12, Pulama suddenly stopped construction at the desalination
plant. It was unclear when — or even if — it would restart. “Sounds like
the baby couldn’t get his way,” Ornellas, the head of the Planning
Commission, told me. “It’s sad it had to come to this.”
Before I’d ever
been to Lanai, I watched a public-television interview online with a
man named Kepa Maly, who was an authority on the island’s cultural
history, and an unlikely one. He wasn’t Hawaiian but a white man in a
faded aloha shirt, with large, wire-frame glasses and a soft, breathy
voice. Even on the Internet, everything about him felt welcoming and
also a little square. He reminded me of a children’s folk singer from
the ’70s.
Maly
was born on Oahu, he explained to the interviewer. As a child, he felt
disconnected and lost, and eventually he was taken in by the Kaopuikis,
one of Lanai’s oldest families. Mr. and Mrs. Kaopuiki were born in the
1890s, 30 years before James Dole planted his first pineapple on Lanai,
and they raised Maly the way they raised their 14 other children:
speaking Hawaiian and steeped in the island’s history and traditions.
Maly was enthralled, and ever since he has dedicated his life to
perpetuating traditional Hawaiian culture. He was now executive director
of the Lanai Culture and Heritage Center, a nonprofit museum at the top
of Dole Park. Kepa was the name the Kaopuikis gave him. It means “to
embrace.”
I
called Maly, but never heard back. So one afternoon in March, I knocked
on the door of the small blue house where I was told he worked. I’d
just started to introduce myself when the openness on his face collapsed
into what seemed like embarrassment. He knew who I was, he said. “I
guess it was rude not to call you back. But I have to be cautious.” The
thing was, he’d taken a job at Pulama Lanai. He wanted to talk with me,
but I needed to clear it with the company first. After some phone calls,
and another fruitless face-off with the impregnable Roger, the company
surprised me: I would be allowed to interview Maly the next day.
“My
experience with the previous owner was a challenging one,” he explained
when we reconvened. But all that difficulty went away when Ellison
arrived. “It was really awesome!” he said. Last year, Pulama hired him
as its senior vice president of culture and historic preservation. He
has 10 employees now. A crew was out that afternoon clearing the area
around the religious center of ancient Lanai, and they’d soon be
restoring ancient fish ponds and taro fields. It was the sort of
stewardship he’d continually asked the island’s previous ownership to
support. “Now, all the things we were talking about, but really
struggling on, we are out in the field doing,” he said.
Maly
had not yet met Ellison, but he believed that Ellison understood that
investing in the preservation of Lanai’s culture and history is, at the
very least, good business. Today’s tourists, especially wealthy ones,
value more than beaches and mai tais. “It’s place-based now. People want
‘authentic.’ People want real experiences,” he said.
I’d
heard the same explanation that morning from Tom Roelens, the manager
of the Four Seasons at Manele Bay. Roelens led me through a newly
renovated room, noting all the local touches, like the wall panel
illustrating the story of the demigod Maui and the canoe paddle over the
toilet. (“It’s just a stunning room product,” Roelens beamed. “It truly
reflects Hawaii.”) Often, he said, resorts insulate guests from the
community. But on Lanai, the owner of the resort wasn’t in competition
with the surroundings; he owned most of those, too. “Lanai is this
entire experience,” Roelens said. And the people of Lanai are part of
that experience, as well. Nearly a quarter of the island works at the
two hotels, he explained, and the company believes improving residents’
quality of life will “truly translate to the guest experience.” Ellison
had once articulated this philosophy himself: “We think, If we do a good
job taking care of the locals, the locals will do a good job taking
care of our visitors.”
It
sounded like the same Silicon Valley philosophy that spawned all the
epicurean cafeterias, yoga classes and nap pods on tech-company campuses
— amenities designed to keep engineers happy and maximize their
productivity. But now, in his office, Kepa Maly reminded me that it was a
much older model too, and one that Lanai had fared pretty well under.
“It’s just like Dole said,” he said. “Have happy workers, grow better
pineapples.”
I
asked Maly if he had doubts about going to work for Pulama. Yes,
initially, he said. “And I have to tell you, sometimes I question my
ability to be a good assessor of people’s integrity.” But he pressed
company executives, and they assured him that they were committed to
protecting the island’s cultural resources. “I have to believe that,” he
told me. “We have to.” He explained that, when he was a
newcomer to Lanai, people could have viewed him with the same mistrust
some felt toward Ellison. Instead, they welcomed him. “I was blessed
that some of the oldest families on Lanai took aloha for me, and taught
me their language and shared their histories. It gave me my whole life,”
Maly said. “I realize that we can always be cynical, and question
motives,” he added. “But it’s also just a junk way to live.”
He
wanted to show me something: There are three words printed on Pulama’s
business cards: “Preservation. Progress. Sustainability.” His work —
preservation — is one of those words. “It’s the first one,” he
noted. He said it with conviction, as if he were lucky enough to live in
some unspoiled world where the slogan on a corporation’s business cards
reflected its genuine values. Maybe he still did. But maybe he didn’t
anymore.
