1
H E L L’S KITCHENBOY
UN-RAPPER-LIKE
A
lot of up-and-coming rappers drive
rented Maseratis, or live in Mc-
Mansions with underwater mortgages,
or borrow jewelry to wear on Instagram.
Marlon Craft, who is twenty-six, lives
with his parents and his sister in Man-
hattan Plaza, the Section 8 apartment
complex in Hell’s Kitchen. On a recent
Thursday, wearing a T-shirt and slip-
pers, he gave a tour—his desktop re-
cording studio, his folded-up Murphy
bed—before settling in the living room,
where there were several hand drums,
a vibraphone, and framed photos of
Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington.Marlon Craft“Pops is a jazz drummer,” Craft ex-
plained. “That’s why the new album is
full of live instrumentation—my little
homage to him. That, and we couldn’t
afford to clear too many samples.” He
was referring to his début album, “Fun-
house Mirror,” which would soon be
posted on iTunes. To mark the occa-
sion, he had planned an unusual listen-
ing party: a pair of speakers would be
set up next to the Halal Guys food carts,
on Fifty-third Street, and he would play
the album while his fans ate free chicken
with white sauce. “As soon as the homies
get here, we’ll start walking over,” he
said. “Yet another un-rapper-like thing
about me: I hate being late to shit.”
Manhattan Plaza occupies the square
block bounded by Forty-second and For-
ty-third Streets and Ninth and Tenth
Avenues. Most of the units are reserved
for performing artists. (Craft’s mother
is a producer at an Off Broadway the-
atre company.) “Except for college”—
American University, in Washington,
D.C.—“I’ve been here my entire life,”
he said. His neighbor Kenny La Rosa,
who is now his manager, sat nearby,
working on a laptop. Craft’s sister Mia
read a book on the couch. Another friend,
Dev Garner, arrived a few minutes later.
“Dev, style me, bro,” Craft said.
“Hoodie? Jacket?”
“It’s gonna be cold later,” Garner said.
“I just asked Alexa.”
Craft put on a Knicks jacket and vin-
tage Jordans, and they headed down-
stairs. “Alicia Keys grew up in this build-
ing,” he said. “Terrence Howard. Samuel L.
Jackson used to be a security guard.”
“Don’t forget Timmy,” Mia said—the
actor Timothée Chalamet. “Everyone
used to call him French Timmy.”
“My friends called him Soccer Timmy,”
Craft said. “He was always playing soc-
cer in the yard while everyone else played
basketball.”
They got to the corner and waited
for friends to arrive. Talk turned to gen-
trification. (Craft once rhymed “Star-
buckses” with “Horcruxes.”) As if on
cue, a man appeared walking one poo-
dle and carrying another in a Babybjörn.
“You see?” Craft said. “This is the new
Hell’s Kitchen. Is it cute? Yes, exceed-
ingly. Can I rap about it? Fuck no.”
Craft went to Beacon, a selective pub-
lic high school, and played A.A.U. bas-
ketball in the South Bronx. “I knew kidsNovember 12th at 2PM.” (“They don’t
ask, ‘Is such-and-such date good for
you?’” McNeil said.) Regnier, McNeil,
and two other Oxfordians—all attor-
neys—arrived at Stevens’s chambers to
present him with a plaque. They chat-
ted about the authorship question. Mi-
chael Pisapia, one of the Oxfordians who
joined, said that Stevens made it clear
that he was an anti-Stratfordian, but
that he shied away from endorsing a
definitive theory of authorship.
“He said, ‘Of course it’s not the guy
from Stratford,’” Pisapia recalled. “But
when we asked about the other candi-
dates he’d say things like ‘Oh, I don’t
bite.’ ‘What about Bacon?’ ‘No, I don’t
bite.’ ‘O.K., so what about Oxford?’ He
said, ‘Well, you certainly couldn’t con-
vict anyone else of it.’”
But the award was not rebuffed. “He
accepted it with both hands, literally,”
Pisapia said. The Oxfordians under-
stood Stevens’s reluctance to commit.
“Let’s say some piece of evidence comes
out and proves that it was Queen Eliz-
abeth I,” Pisapia said. “His whole ca-
reer as a jurist would have a shadow
over it. Like, ‘Wow, he sure missed that
one.’” (Although the reputation of Hugh
Trevor-Roper, the historian, never quite
recovered after he authenticated the
Hitler diaries, Whoopi Goldberg’s ca-
reer didn’t suffer when she raised doubts
about the moon landing on “The View.”)
The late Justice Antonin Scalia was
openly Oxfordian. Scalia told the Wall
Street Journal, in 2009, that his wife
“thinks we Oxfordians ... can’t believe
that a commoner could have done
something like this, you know, it’s an
aristocratic tendency.” (Scalia was never
named Oxfordian of the Year.)
McNeil said, “We’re often accused
of snobbery by the other side, but we’re
not saying that someone from a small
town, a four-day trip away from Lon-
don, couldn’t have done this. It’s that
he couldn’t have done this without leav-
ing any evidence behind. And, for law-
yers, it’s the evidentiary question that
sticks out the most.”
The Oxfordians are busy planning
their annual conference, which will be
held this fall at the Mark Twain House,
in Hartford, Connecticut. (Twain was
skeptical of the Stratford man, and his
last book, “Is Shakespeare Dead?,” ad-
dresses the authorship question.) “We’ll
THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019 17do something to honor Stevens,” Reg-
nier said.
Pisapia credits Stevens, as well as the
2011 film “Anonymous,” with bringing
the Oxfordian theory into the main-
stream. “Thirty years ago, if you talked
about the authorship question, you were
lumped in with the flat-earthers, with
the people who were going to stake out
Area 51,” he said. “The Stevens thing
wasn’t so groundbreaking to the rest of
the world—it wasn’t like Beyoncé hav-
ing twins—but it made it more accept-
able to talk about.”
—Tyler Foggatt