KILLED - Episode 7: The World

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

A double kill! Travel & Leisure and Playboy sink stories on a secretive cruiseliner for the megarich. Featuring J.C. Hallman.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

There are generalists, journalists who are captivated by most any topic, who can blend their way in to any landscape. And then, there are lever, or a vein. And if you're a specialist, one with a lifelong fascination with finding utopia, you'll do whatever it takes to get there. It just became a kind of floating community of millionaires having their adventures around the world. it takes to get there. No matter how many times they try to thank you. From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories

back to life. Season 2, Episode 7, The World. My name is JC Hallman, and I'm a writer. I've written five books of nonfiction. I'm about to publish my sixth book of nonfiction and a book of short stories. I've been a teacher. I've done some other things in life,

but mainly just a freelance author. JC Holman can't be summarized neatly. He's a prolific writer, but one with an almost telescopic focus on invisible OACs, which makes sense really when you consider where JC comes from. I had actually grown up in a master planned community in Southern California on a street called Utopia Road. Rancho Bernardo, the San Diego development where JC grew up,

was designed as a better way to live in the suburbs. If you look out over there in the horizon, you'll see all red roofs. That's rather unique. We didn't have one blue when they made them take it down. So that's a type of town. And there, in one of those red roofed homes on Utopia Road, was a boy named JC Holman. I think that for me writing is the best way to respond to the basic mystery and intricacy of the universe.

Everything about his career has been unusual. J.C. has his own rulebook, or he just makes it up as he goes. Also, if you hear weird sucking noises in the background, it's construction across the street from his apartment building in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he lives now. I don't have the usual journalists career trajectory. I don't even really think of myself as a journalist per se. I have kind of an upside down career. I started out as a fiction writer, and I studied fiction as an undergraduate,

and then I went to the Iowa writers' workshop, and then the Johns Hopkins writing seminars. So I was thinking of myself as a fiction writer for many years before finally turning to nonfiction in about the year 2000. I sold my first book, which was about the chess subculture, and basically felt like I invented what I thought a nonfiction book could be. That book did pretty well. Then I did another book about modern American religions and William James, the writer philosopher and religious thinker.

And for that book, I infiltrated Scientology, I attended satanic rituals, I hung out with witches and druids and spent time at a monastery. I developed an affinity for looking at things that were on the surface quite ridiculous or preposterous in some way. You look at it and you're just like, what is that? And I wanted to take those things and experience them firsthand, so go to them and chronicle them in some way, but then also at the same time put them in a kind of historical context so that over time as you're reading about it, this nutty thing that you're reading about starts to feel a little not so nutty and then eventually starts to feel possible. Here's where our story begins. So for my third book, I set out to write about various kinds of modern utopias, actual

places, or actual things that you could visit. So this included like a utopian mega city, it included the slow food movement, it included this crazy gun utopia outside of Las Vegas, some trained, learned how to shoot a clock. So it included all these various things, and one of them was the story of the world, this utopian cruise ship. It was the first time that you were ever able to buy a real estate on board of a ship. The world is the largest private residential yacht on earth. An international community of global adventurers each sharing a sense of wanderlust and a thirst for knowledge. Each day. Well it was you know this was just

a nutty story from the very beginning. You know it's it you know I wanted to write the whole thing. I wanted the whole thing to be the story. But in order to write about these modern utopias, these human-made eat-ins all across the globe, JC needed some money. Figuring out how to be able to afford all of this was what sent me on the path to selling this as a magazine piece. JC decided he'd sell two separate articles, both meant to fund and provide access to, places he'd need to gain access to in order to write his book. Does that make sense?

Step one, gain Entrez to the super secretive super expensive mega-yacht the world. Getting on board with the ship was going to be the really tough part. We knew that from the beginning and I'm talking about my agent and I as we were contemplating how to go about getting this thinking of it just for the book, let alone, you know, for a magazine. And the tough part there was approaching the company that represented the ship and just encountering their gatekeeper. At this point in the history of this vessel,

they didn't really want or need publicity. And so they had a publicist, but the publicist's job was basically just to say no to everybody. They had a lot of bad press because it just sounded like, you know, rich people's paradise and who wants to hear about that, you know, or whatever, you know, it just, it sounded kind of snooty. We flew over the plane of Africa by Otter Balloon. And how about diving from that deserted island in the Maldives? The first thing we had to do was get around

that gatekeeper publicist figure. And I wasn't so great at that. I was kind of a bowl in a china shop in terms of trying to get into things and doing things. I would just show up and do stuff. And that just wasn't working in this case. So my agent at the time actually kind of went behind the scenes and played good cop and eventually got to somebody at this company that wasn't this gatekeeper publicist figure. JC's unusually helpful agent may have had to grease the wheels, but JC knew how to convince

higher ups at the world that he was the right writer for this story. It's not like he's some casual utopia Stan. And so what we did, the way we got in, is I'd already written some of the history. And this included the story of a famous Jewel's Vern novel called The Floating Island. novel called the Floating Island. And in this novel, what had happened was that a whole bunch of millionaires had gathered together and they built this giant like 5,000 acre Floating Island thing that sometime around the time of Jewel's Verne's life was sailing around the world. And the absolute crazy thing about the world, this ship that I was trying to get on,

is exactly the same thing had happened. This company called Residence C, had started the ship, and they sold all the properties, and they began the voyage, and they went bankrupt. And it was very uncertain what was going to happen with the ship. And the people who had bought the condominiums or the spaces on board,

they gathered together and they bought it and it became a floating co-op. So when we managed to get past that kind of gatekeeper publicist figure, we presented them with a history that included this Jewel's Verne thing, and they liked that. They loved it. With some terms, Jay-C could write about the world, but only for an acceptable outlet. They offered up a list of publications that they were going to find acceptable. You know, maybe 18 or 20 publications, but one of them was travel and leisure. And so that was who we went to. And more or less as soon as we had the okay from the ship,

Travel and Leisure said yes, too, because, you know, this was a very expensive trip, and for the ship to say, well, we'll give you a space on board our ship for a week or four days or whatever it was. That's like them giving me $10,000. It was expensive. Travel and Leisure would never have been able to pay for that, otherwise. So once I had gotten to that, travel and leisure was like, sure, we'll do that. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Okay, so here's where we are. Freelance writer, J.C. Holman, had finally been invited aboard the world.

And all of a sudden, everything in his life took on this eerie like the polar expressive vibe. The invitation to go on board the ship arrived in a very mysterious way. The postman sort of opened my door and put this box inside of my house and I never saw them and it just appeared. And so the whole sort of experience had this weird magical quality to it. You know, it sort of reminded me of that Michael Douglas film The Game, where you just feel like there's this huge organization that's orchestrating all of these weird events for you.

This is for you. Consumer Recreation Services. Call that number. Why? They make your life fun. J.C. shared his very official actin' rary with Killed. Friday, August 18, The World. Destination, Captain's Choice. Seriously. 9 a.m. Breakfast and Meeting with Hotel Manager. 10 a.m. Meeting with Spa Manager. 10 30am spot treatment meeting with

tour planners golf pro castles and countryside private tour dinner leisure captains choice and then I flew to Sweden and I met the ship in Sweden and I got on board. And I had a whole bunch of cultivated experiences. They gave me a massage, they were comped meals, just being in these luxurious cabins. You wouldn't even call them cabins. They were like huge apartments. I had like the smallest space on board the ship, but it was so big that I got lost in

it. It was so vastly different from what a cruise ship experience is really like. You know, cruise is about crowds and big dinners. You know, and everything on board the ship was quiet. It was almost like being on a ghost ship. It felt like you'd rented out Disneyland for yourself or something and it was just like you could walk through it all on your own.

And it was weirdly very restful, though I have to say, I have motion sickness pretty bad. And so for me being on the ship was like four days straight of drame mean. They gave me a lot of tours of like the behind of the scene stuff, you know, down in the engine room, you know, where they would convert sea water to freshwater. All of the employees were dressed in kind of like identical or color-coded jumpsuits.

So it was like, it was either like you were at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory or you'd like ventured into the lair of a James Bond villain. I was the first journalist who had gotten on board this ship. It was the first time they had gotten on board this ship. It was the first time they were letting anybody on board, but I wasn't, it wasn't like I was sneaking on to find out about the rich and famous. I was writing about utopias.

So the problem, when you're writing about utopian concepts or you were realized utopias is, well, if everything is perfect, where's the tension? That's the problem. You're writing a magazine piece, where's the drama, where's the conflict? And I would say things like, well, has anybody died on board? And they were like, no, nobody's ever died on board the ship.

And so that seemed unusual in and of itself. And so that seemed unusual in and of itself. My goal as a writer wasn't to figure out what was unusual about it. It was rather kind of the opposite. I was trying to figure out, well, what is usual about this? What is the thing that puts this in the kind of context that makes it make sense, that makes it seem possible, because a ship on which you buy property and then you endlessly sail just sounds insane.

And so, I wrote up the piece for travel and leisure, and it was about 4,000 words, and I think they had actually asked for 1,500 words. So I went way over what I was supposed to write. And I thought, well, what'll happen is they'll see it. Now they'll want to edit it down. And we'll talk about that. That's what usually happens.

But then it never happens. You know, I was told that the piece was accepted. They got it. They liked it. I got paid in full, I think it was $4,000. And then I just never heard anything. And I didn't know what to make of that. And then finally, I think I had my agent reach out to them and say, well, what's going on? Finally, I think I had my agent reach out to them and say, well, what's going on?

And I don't think he even got a response. And so it just seemed like it was slipping through the cracks. And I think we later learned that the editor who had bought the piece had left. And whenever that happens, pieces that are under that particular person's purview, you know, die along with them. But remember, JC had been shopping around two stories.

One about luxury cruise liner the world which just got killed by travel and leisure. Kill, kill, kill, kill. about luxury cruise liner the world which just got killed by travel and leisure. But then also a profile on a Norwegian cruise visionary named Knut Closter, Jr. Hit it boys. They say that the steels in the herd is very special that they made the steels so that it could last almost forever. Knut Closter was one of the founders of the modern cruise ship industry. He was just of a much more utopian mindset. He was just absolutely convinced that what we now think of as cruise ships could serve kind of

important cultural functions in terms of bringing people together and affording people the opportunity to learn and he had spent his whole life pursuing that and it spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bring to pass a kind of massive utopian cruise ship that was first called the Phoenix Project and then was called America World City. And he was just this weird figure. And so I really wanted to get to him. It was 2007 and he only communicated by Fax, which was a little unusual at that point. by facts, which was a little unusual at that point. One little problem. Fax only cluster was in Oslo,

and JC would need someone to foot the airfare to Norway. He and his agent put their heads back together and devised a pitch. I needed to sell another magazine piece, and so we wrote up a kind of profile of this guy, and I don't know how it happened, but Playboy went for it. And the biggest mystery of all of this to me is why Playboy was interested in this guy.

Canoe Cluster was wealthy, but there was nothing sexy in this guy. Canoe Cluster was wealthy, but there was nothing sexy about this guy. We're breaking up the hunt, the steel hunt. Why would play boy want an article about him? I didn't understand that, but I was relieved when they said yes. The editor was a woman named Amy Grace Lloyd and she had been tasked at

that time with rejuvenating the image of Playboy as a serious publication. Once upon a time, you know, in the early years, Playboy was a pretty serious publication. And Amy Grace Lloyd had been tasked with rejuvenating that part of its image. They had published you know Margaret Atwood and Richard Powers and a whole bunch of other really significant authors that she'd been very successful in bringing that magazine back. J.C. was summoned to Playboy's former New York HQ.

Playboy's offices are at about 59th and 5th, sort of right at the southeast corner of Central Park, right where the plaza is. And they've got the frosted glass doors and the big beautiful desk. And there's women manning the desk who look like playmates and these beautiful offices. But that's not where Playboy Magazine is, right?

They're on the floor below. And you go to the floor below and it's like dark. And it's just this hive of very spare cubicles. Everybody's got like things pinned up all over them. It's the issue they're working on. And so basically, when you're walking through this kind of dark, cavernous space, and there's pictures everywhere,

what you're looking at is centerfolds and pictures of naked women. Amy Grace Lloyd was like fighting to bring this literary spirit back to a magazine that had gone a very different way from its early years when it took 50 pages to get through to a naked person. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. J.C. Holman had somehow convinced Playboy magazine to fly his ass to Oslo to meet an eccentric millionaire named Knewt Closter, with whom he's only communicated so far by facts.

I met him at the airport, he just met me on his own. He was a weirdly kind of, you know, sedate and charming guy, but the first thing we did is we went to the hotel where I was staying and we sat down and he plopped in front of me to issues of the Norwegian edition of Playboy. And of course, there were naked women on the cover and he starts flipping through all his pictures of naked women. And basically, he says, why would I want to be in this publication? And for really the next two or three days,

I had to defend my boy. I had to say, well, look, you know, used to be a very interesting magazine, and we're trying to go back to that. And I'm not like, I wasn't like a staff writer for Playboy. But we had all these weird conversations. And it was simultaneously the case that because this guy had spent tens of millions of dollars trying to build this ship, this utopian mega ship that never came to pass, that he was

just kind of depressed. And he would say over and over that there wasn't a story to tell, that there wasn't really anything interesting about it. He had this like special room that was devoted to all of the materials that he'd gathered for this effort to build this utopian ship. And it was all perfectly organized. You know, and I would say to him,

well, if your story's not interesting, why do you have all this stuff? Why have you saved it on you? And you'd be like, that's a great question. There is a story here. You know, and he wanted me to be writing a story, but he didn't want it to be in playboy. So I had this weird experience of eventually writing a profile

of him that was quiet and was sort of about his belief that his story shouldn't be told. And it actually wound up being, I thought, a kind of perfect portrait of this guy. Playboy didn't think it was so perfect. Amy told me that there were concerns about it. They thought it was going to be different or something, and remember Amy talked about the Playboy readership. Instead of an interview, Amy Grace Lloyd provided killed with an email she sent JC on August 9, 2007. In it, she says that her boss, Chris, hoped to zoom out from Closter a bit.

Get some more epic, mega yacht, sexy utopia stuff in there. She wrote, quote, I understand perfectly why you became so enchanted with Closter. To me, failure is much more interesting than success. What you gave us was very sensitive and smart, but finally, too narrow in its reach and intentions for an audience like ours. End quote. We talked and then I tried to write the piece again and I took a slightly different tack. And you know, they looked at the second draft and then they killed it.

Kill, kill, kill. That was annoying, you know, because I, you know, but it was funny. My agent had done something quite good. He had negotiated a quite high kill fee, 50%. I was supposed to get paid $10,000 and I got a 50% kill fee. So I'd weirdly now been paid $9,000, you know, five on Playboy and four from Travel and Leisure for nothing. JC had been shut down not once, but twice.

First by travel and leisure, and then Playboy. But then again, he did have $9,000 research for his book, The Best Agent in the Goddamn World, and oh yeah, a master plan. What I wound up doing was what I planned to do all along. I took those two pieces and I smushed them together. I put them into the form that I had envisioned from the very beginning. And there were really only a few venues that you could go to with that kind of work at that point. And one of them was a magazine called The Believer,

which does a lot of really interesting things. And they don't really mind if it's something's long, and they like it if it's quirky and weird and strange. And so the believer went for it right away. The believer. A beloved and idiosyncratic literary journal. Immediately understood, Chasey's vision. The believer does not have a huge circulation, right?

It's not travel in leisure, it's not playboy. But, you know, the believer paid me $500. And, you know, I was grateful even for that. They were gonna publish the whole thing. And that was fantastic. When the believer went to fact check the piece, they called the world. And the world pitched a fit because we'd had

this agreement about the publications that could publish that. They offered up a list of publications that they were going to find acceptable. The believer called me and it was almost on the brink of getting killed a third time because they were like, what's going on here? I got this news like I was at a coffee place or something and I took my cell phone out to the street and was having like screaming conversations with my agent and trying to get in touch with the world. But eventually it worked. We got them to agree to it.

They were okay with it, and the believer published it. In October of 2009, J.C.'s story, a house is a machine to live in, was published in the 66th issue of the believer. It's a long story, chock full of meandering commentary of the history of utopian parodices and self-loathing quotes from Canute Closter who died in 2020. The following year,

St. Martin's Press published JC's book, In Utopia, Six Kinds of Eden and the search for a better paradise. It was exhausting. Every part was just like a fight and a battle and it was always like hanging on by the skin of your teeth. Are you going to be able to make this happen or aren't you? There's always this sort of democlease hanging over your head when you're writing a magazine

piece that it can get killed for any reason. Not just because your editor says that they don't like what you did or whenever there are so many things that can go wrong that it's almost as though any celebration at any point during the process is just premature. The upshot of the whole story is that sometime later that piece was selected for the best American travel writing of 2010. And I think that was the moment when I finally said, yay. Next time on Killed.

Sometimes a story would come back and it would say, brilliant, amazing, great work. And then a lot of times you would get a story that would say, let's discuss. And that was Graydon's coded language for like something's wrong. Killed is an audio chuck production, created and written by Justin Harmon and edited by Alistair Sherman. You can find links to all the published stories featured on the first and second seasons of Killed at KilledStories.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa you