150 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019
describes how Phoenix screened the nal cut
at Phillips’s house and emerged satised with
the risk he had taken. “I started crying,” Phil-
lips says. “And I’m crying again retelling it.”
“Rooney said to me the other night, ‘Do
you realize how many great opportunities
you’ve had? These lms?’ ” recounts Phoe-
nix. “I said it’s true, I’ve been so fortunate, so
many movies where I was like, I don’t know
if I’ll ever be able to top this experience. The
experience of making this movie. It was
incredible that I found another one.”
In the past, Phoenix wasn’t able to play an
all-consuming role like Arthur Fleck without
grappling with some personal emptiness and
neurosis after the experience. There was the
insecurity of making the movie and the inse-
curity of promoting it. He was often uneasy
about his performances and typically didn’t
watch them. After lming the Cash movie,
about the alcohol- and drug-addicted coun-
try star, Phoenix famously went into real-life
rehab. At 44, he’s nding it easier to separate
himself from his characters and simply go
home. On a table in his house, he displays a
white Styrofoam head adorned with a fake
beard and moustache he wore in I’m Still Here.There’s “Joaquin Phoenix,” the actor, and
then there’s Joaquin Phoenix, who’s getting
married and who quit smoking the week after
I saw him. “It was the hypnosis,” he says. Then
he lapsed, in Venice. “I failed,” he confesses.
“I’ve always had a hard time,” explains
Phoenix. “And, I think only recently, as you get
older or whatever, you’re okay. You go, ‘Maybe
it is going to be a bad experience’ or ‘Maybe
I’m not going to enjoy it. And maybe I won’t
have any of those connections, maybe I’ll feel
just hollow afterwards.’ That’s okay. Because
I know that I have meaning in other parts of
my life. And that’s really what sustains me. I
enjoy it. I love my life. I fucking love my life.”Joaquin Phoenix
restaurants,
massage parlors—frequently provide room,
board, and transportation for newly arrived
workers, who often lack the means and con-
nections to buy or rent a place on their own.
After a few years of hard work, Mandy
raised enough money to buy Orchids in
- She hired workers from Chinese immi-
grant communities across the country, plac-
ing ads in Chinese-language newspapers.
Mandy also provided day care for children
while their mothers were at work. By then,
her son had moved to Florida, and word got
out that a Chinese woman and her English-
speaking son would take in your kids for a
reasonable fee. Soon, Mandy was looking
after as many as 11 children.
In 2017, Mandy signed over half of the spa
to Lulu, one of her steadiest workers. She
began devoting most of her time to her grand-
son, Michael—named after local resident
Michael Jordan, who owns a 28,000-square-
foot mansion on three acres in Jupiter.
On the morning of February 19, Mandy
was making coee at a condominium near
the spa that she had rented to house her
workers. Suddenly, there was banging at
the door. Six police oficers swarmed in,
handcuffed Mandy, and booked her into
the Palm Beach jail.
“At the time I thought: They must have
made a mistake,” she says. “It’s so funny—
they treat me as a treacherous criminal. I
can’t believe what kind of system it is. Why
do you make such a big move against a fam-
ily woman?”
As the co-owner of Orchids, Mandy was
charged with a second-degree misdemeanor
for “maintaining a house of prostitution.”
She was also charged with 26 counts of solic-
iting others to commit prostitution, as well
as a second-degree felony for deriving sup-
port from prostitution, a crime punishable
by up to 15 years in prison. She has pleaded
not guilty to the charges. A police a¥davit
lists the “victim” of her crime as the state of
Florida. “Because it’s our society as a whole
that has been victimized by this prurient
behavior,” explains Robert Norvell, a West
Palm Beach attorney who represents one of
the defendants in the case. “I shit you not.”
After a few weeks, Mandy was released on
bail. Unable to return to the condo, where two
of her employees were being detained, she
was placed under house arrest in a home that
a cousin of hers had put on the market. The
house, on a quiet street in a gated subdivision,
had not been lived in for some time, and was
infested with vermin. Mandy spent six weeks
scrubbing its ̈oors. Her ankle monitor pre-
vented her from taking out the trash or pick-
ing the ripe mangoes in the backyard, so she
stared at the falling fruit from the window. . The men who were arrested for avail-
ing themselves of Mandy’s services faced
no such restrictions. After his arrest, Kraft
was free to live his best life. He reportedly
donated $100,000 at a charity dinner at the
Breakers in Palm Beach, attended the annual
pre-Oscar brunch at the Beverly Hills home
of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg,
and watched Rafael Nadal defeat Dominic
Thiem in Paris to win the French Open.
Kraft was born in 1941, in the a«uent Bos-
ton suburb of Brookline. In 1963, he married
Myra Hiatt, an heiress to a paper box fortune
whom he met at a Boston deli. They had four
children. In 1994, he purchased the New
England Patriots, growing the team into
one of the most valuable franchises in the
National Football League.In 2010, Myra, referred to by some as the
“smartest Kraft,” fell ill with ovarian cancer.
During the NFL lockout in 2011, Kraft spent
his days negotiating with union representa-
tives, then came home each evening to rub
Myra’s feet. She died later that year, and
Kraft’s life became a boat you forgot to tie up.
The following year, at a party in Los Ange-
les at the home of New York Giants co-owner
Steve Tisch, Kraft met Ricki Noel Lander,
an aspiring actress 38 years his junior. The
two began seeing each other: on, then o,
then on again.
Kraft reveled in his newfound status as
a single rich guy. Owning a winning foot-
ball team in America gave him access to a
world that money alone can’t buy. He was
seen at the Met Gala and the Grammys and
the Vanity Fair Oscar party, and sometimes
appeared at events alongside young women
who remained uncredited in photos.
Kraft hadn’t gone to Orchids on that Janu-
ary day because the Florida heat had driven
him mad, or because he was in search of ano-
nymity, or because he had served his country
in the Far East. Born the year of Pearl Harbor,
he was 13 when the Vietnam War began. He
went to Orchids, in his relatively new status
as a single rich guy, to get a massage. And
it was in his part as a single rich guy that he
came to believe he had done nothing wrong.
According to his best friend, he thought there
had been something between him and Lulu.
He thought she liked him. He thought that
what had transpired between them had no
business being discussed in a courtroom.
“If you are a«uent, rules loosely apply to
you,” says Norvell, the lawyer representing
one of the defendants. “You wear it like a
loose garment.”
As the owner of a six-time Super Bowl
championship team, Kraft understood that
sometimes the best defense is a good oense.
To represent him in court, he hired William
Burck, who withheld sensitive documents
from Congress during Brett Kavanaugh’s con-
rmation hearing; Alex Spiro, who defended
former Patriots tight end Aaron HernandezRobert Kraft
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