The Kevin Show
For Dad
ALSO BY MARY PILON
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game
CAST
KEVIN HALL
sailor, patient, case study, surveillance subject, star of The Show
AMANDA
Kevin’s love interest
GORDON
Kevin’s father
SUSANNE
Kevin’s mother
KRISTINA
Kevin’s younger sister
THE DIRECTOR
the guide of The Show
With several guest appearances along the way.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART I: MEET KEVIN HALL
PART II: THE HIGHS
PART III: THE LOWS
PART IV: FINALE
AFTERWORD
A NOTE ON SOURCES
RECOMMENDED READINGS AND MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES
THANK-YOUS AND COFFEE SHOPS
NOTES
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
I think that melancholia is the beginning and a part of mania … The development of a mania is really a worsening of the disease (melancholia) rather than a change into another disease … In most of them (melancholics) the sadness became better after various lengths of time and changed into happiness; the patients then developed a mania.
—ARETAEUS OF CAPPADOCIA (First Century CE)
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet (1603)
Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!
—JIM CARREY in The Truman Show (1998)
Screenplay by ANDREW NICCOL
PROLOGUE
KEVIN
As Kevin Hall stood onboard the Artemis, a 72-foot catamaran, trying to help his teammates dredge Andrew Simpson’s body out of the water, he wasn’t entirely sure if the scene unfolding before him was really happening or not.
Dressed in a sleek black wetsuit plated with metal and a knife strapped to his calf, Kevin was one of eleven professional sailors moving with the swift, tense alacrity that only emergencies can trigger. Capsized boats are an inevitable part of sailing, but most boats weren’t this boat—one of the largest and fastest sailing vessels in the world, made of a carbon fiber that turned into a plank of daggers when shattered. The sound of the boat breaking had cracked the air just seconds before, as if the sailors had been standing in a forest and all the trees around them had snapped at once.1 Yet only moments before that, Kevin and his teammates2 had been skimming comfortably along in San Francisco Bay. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
With his shaved head and athletic build, Kevin bore a strong resemblance to his teammates. Their fitness and physical similarity evoked military or comic book heroes more than it did a sport on water. Still, the day was supposed to end with going back to shore, maybe having a meal and some jokes. Not with a visit to the coroner.
Andrew “Bart” Simpson, whose body might or might not have been in the water, was a stocky British Olympic gold medalist with short, spiky chestnut hair and a wide smile. Universally loved by his teammates, he, like Kevin and many of the others on the Artemis, had a wife and children. One of the world’s best sailors, Simpson knew what to do in emergencies, which made his being trapped underwater for ten minutes all the more incomprehensible. The $140-million Artemis3 was supposed to be a technological wonder, so it made no sense to anyone onboard that it had crumpled so quickly into a taco shell, trapping Simpson in its fold.
When they had started their test run more than three months out from the first race of the America’s Cup, light charcoal skies and moderate winds had made the patch of water between Alcatraz and Treasure Island less intimidating than usual. The city was wrapped around them in a sheath of familiarity, as it was just another weekday when those on land were at work, in school, and otherwise going about their lives. A few errant boats carrying tourists chugged to and fro in the distance. Tiny specks of cars puttered across crowded bridges. Seagulls surveyed the scene and whisked overhead. Organizers of the America’s Cup had touted this very city-meets-sea quality of San Francisco as one reason why the Bay Area was a perfect stage for the event—a place where the boats would be visible to those on land. It wasn’t immediately clear to Kevin how much of this capsize was viewable from the shore. Thank goodness they had only been on a test run and that a full crowd and the press weren’t watching. That wouldn’t be the case for much longer, but Kevin couldn’t think that far ahead, as catastrophes have a jarring way of bringing one smack into the present.
Finally, Kevin and his teammates were able to pull Simpson’s soggy two hundred pounds out of the water and onto a floating backboard. They began performing CPR. The San Francisco Police Department’s Marine 7 unit pulled up to the site of the crash in a white police boat that was dwarfed by the Artemis.4 The cops observed the red hulls, or main bodies, of the boat completely flipped over, the white letters spelling out ARTEMIS upside down, and a tall, black wing-sail twisted into a knot of trash floating against San Francisco’s skyline. Or, in sailing parlance, a boat that had “turtled,” the rounded shells meant to be underwater instead facing the sky.
The emergency responders began to perform CPR, one officer cutting open Simpson’s wet suit so he could apply a defibrillator to his chest. They pushed, the sailors waiting for Simpson to breathe, to show some sign of life. But Simpson was dead. He was thirty-six years old.
For all of their years of disaster training, the crew now realized that nothing could have prepared them for the death of a man onboard, a freakish occurrence in their sport. Kevin and his teammates were in a state of shock, wondering how what should have been a simple practice run had turned tragic. Sailing is a moody sport—even top sailors can’t compete without a wind, yet they’ll also delay a competition if there’s too much of it—but the conditions that day were mild. And months of preparation and millions of dollars had gone into the design of the Artemis, a vessel that had stunned other sailors with its foils and gadgets and that had seemed almost to fly over the water. Kevin suddenly felt lost. What had happened? Who, if anyone, was to blame? And why had Simpson, of all the sailors on the boat, been the one to die? Kevin had known Simpson for years, their sailing careers often overlapping, intersecting, and running in parallel. Simpson had something that Kevin and some of the other men on board the Artemis did not—an Olympic gold medal—and he represented something that all of the men on board aspired to be: a champion athlete and family man with a kind heart and generous spirit, seemingly unfazed by the success that he had attained.
Kevin thought about all this and more as the emergency workers took Simpson’s body away and everyone went home. In the days that followed, part of him wanted to talk to his teammates about what had happened, but part of him dared not. Because, if he was honest, he still wasn’t entirely sure that the crash and Simpson’s death had really happened. It seemed too horrifying to be real. And for a few moments, there had been that flash.
The Director. Cameras. Actors. Scripts.
Kevin wondered: Had it all just been part of The Show?
PART I
MEET KEVIN HALL
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
—T. S. ELIOT, “Burnt Norton”
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a
virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, “On Being Ill”
I can’t find being born in the diagnostic manual.
—FRANZ WRIGHT, “Pediatric Suicide”
KEVIN
Although he was born on land, Kevin was more at home on water.
To those standing on the shore in Ventura, California, it could be a peculiar sight: a six-year-old boy, noticeably smaller than the other young sailors around him, maneuvering a sailboat with the confidence of one far beyond his years, all on his own. From the moment he first approached the water the year before, Kevin understood that sailing was a large-scale, nautical game of chess, a sport that combined an obsession with detail with a feel for the wind. Here, on the water, he could be independent, on his own, at one with his surroundings, and far away from the expectations and hoop jumping of school, home.
Kevin had confidence radiating through every pore. He had the kind of tanned skin and blond hair, the product of an untold number of hours out in the sun, that is distinct to many children of European ancestry living in Southern California. His face was bedecked with a constellation of freckles, and his hair was straight and dutifully parted in the same direction as his slightly curled smile.
Some talents are born. Others are made. It’s possible that Kevin Hall was both. From his mother, Susanne, he had inherited a natural feel for the water; from his father, Gordon, an aptitude for math and the ability to interpret and apply data to a sport. Both are critical for sailing success, and within days of his first sail, Kevin was engaged in a positive feedback loop: he sailed and won, and then received praise for winning, which made him want to sail (and win) more. Kevin wasn’t especially well coordinated,1 but he was an active child who loved climbing trees and playing sports. Like many children, he began to dream of going to the Olympics one day, an aspiration to Wheaties-box-inspired fame. Sailing wasn’t the most popular event at the Games, but it had been part of the Olympics since their modern inception in 1896. And for good reason: for centuries, sailing had spoken to the most primal competitive instincts, as well as humankind’s relationship with the water, technology, and, of course, grueling physical prowess.
To watch the home movies of the Hall family is to see a depiction of Southern California’s many promises: sun-soaked days, majestic Pacific shores, suburban ease, and the spaciousness of a swath of America where days easily blend into months and years. Kevin was the son of two doctors who had relocated there to live that idyllic life where careers and children could bloom together. “The future always looks good in the golden land,” Joan Didion wrote of California in 1966, just three years before Kevin was born. “Because no one remembers the past.”2 In California, more than anywhere else in America, she went on, people are “trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.”
It was hard to blame the Hall family for drinking it all in, especially since everything seemed to be going their way.
SUSANNE
When Susanne watched Kevin on the water, she couldn’t help but think of her father. It was strange to think that just after he died, her son had started developing confidence in the very sport his grandfather had loved, almost as if some baton had been passed.
So much had happened over the past few years since she first left Canada—it was staggering to think about. Susanne had been only twenty-two years old when she and Gordon married in 1964. Concerned at the time about the looming possibility that Gordon might be drafted to the war in Vietnam, they had decided to both volunteer together to serve, even though Susanne was a Canadian by birth.3 The three years they spent stationed in Germany were some of the best of their lives, as they were relatively carefree and their time there was full of European travel.
Kevin was born in Germany in 1969, just after man walked on the moon. Susanne stayed home with him that first year, but she longed to get back to work and eventually did. After a short posting to Africa, she and her husband moved back to the United States in 1971, settling in Rockford, Illinois, where Gordon had grown up. Kevin’s sister, Kristina, was born there that same year.
As a girl growing up in eastern Canada, Susanne had learned to sail from her father, spending hours and hours on the water with him as he taught her and her two sisters how to understand the wind and command a boat, even though sailing was a chiefly male pursuit at the time. Susanne carried what she had learned from her father into her academic life. When she entered medical school at McGill University in the 1960s, she was one of only a handful of women in a class of more than a hundred.
Living in the Midwest, where the land feels as flat and vast as an ocean, yet knowing she was nowhere near the shore, somehow made Susanne feel oddly claustrophobic. It had been years since she had had meaningful access to a boat, but now, back stateside and staying not far from Gordon’s family in Illinois, she found herself yearning for it. On a whim, she and Gordon booked a trip to California for a medical symposium, and while out there, to secure a tax write-off for the trip, Gordon signed up for a job interview. Susanne had been to California only once before, for a brief visit, but as she sat at the pool while her husband was at the interview, gazing at the clear, crisp skies above her and the islands in the distance, she fell in love with the Pacific coast and the idea of raising her children in a place where they could sail even more than she had as a child.
Within weeks, she and Gordon had bought a boat (before a house) and quickly found that they had the entire infrastructure they would need to relocate their family of four to Ventura, California. Located northwest of Los Angeles, Ventura had sprouted in the mid-nineteenth century around a Spanish Catholic mission, and had boomed in the post–World War II years into a quilt of single-family homes overtaking an agriculturally rich land.
Their home was situated beyond the farming roots, however, and rested on the water, a ranch-style house on a small, street-like canal that curled out into the ocean. The road was well paved and lined with sixties-style California architecture, colorful houses with white trim, accompanied by palm trees and clean, well-maintained cars. The Halls had a boat dock in their backyard, as did all of their neighbors. Easy canal access gave the Halls’ neighborhood a nautical yet suburban vibe—life on the water, but just off Highway 101.
Gordon had his position as a doctor lined up, but soaring malpractice insurance costs made Susanne’s reentry into medicine impractical. Gordon and Susanne backed a successful boat, which led to expanding their investment in the boat industry and Susanne becoming a yacht broker, a job akin to that of a real estate agent but centered on boats rather than buildings. Susanne would help those looking for a boat to purchase, as well as list and represent boats for those looking to sell, and receive a commission for her services. Like real estate, the boat business has its inherent ebbs and flows, as it is a high-stakes line of work that can be susceptible to greater economic trends.
Susanne missed medicine but was thrilled with the reentry of sailing into her life. If only her father were still alive to see it. But sadly, six months before their move to Ventura in July 1975, he died and would never have the chance to see his daughter’s reconnection with, or his grandson’s love for, the water.
GORDON
Every night as they sat around the dinner table, Gordon impressed upon his children the responsibility that came with the advantages of their environment. He regularly made a point of telling Kevin and Kristina that they were the offspring of two intelligent, well-to-do parents, and they were exceptional by many metrics. They got good grades, lived in a good neighborhood, and were exposed to things that as children, Gordon and Susanne could only have imagined. Success mattered in the Hall family, but it was to be earned, not taken for granted.
Gordon took great pleasure in Kevin’s progress on the water,
and he spent most of his weekends driving his son and his boat to competitions in the area. Whenever Kevin won a regatta, Gordon proudly placed his medal, trophy, or other award on the Hall family mantel, where a model ship rested on the corner. The titles included back-to-back wins in the U.S. Youth Camps, an unheard-of feat in the sport. They were titles that confirmed Kevin wasn’t just a winner in the eyes of his parents; rather, he was the one everyone else was looking to try and defeat.
Before long, Kevin’s sailing effectively became a part-time job for Gordon—and for Susanne as well. Kevin’s parents embraced the duty, happy to encourage their son in something that he was not only talented at, but appeared to be enjoying. Neither parent wanted Kevin or his sister to feel forced into sailing, so when Kristina didn’t take to the sport, and, after a short time, she quit, they didn’t object.
Gordon delighted in the sport of sailing, but he loved the natural high that came with regatta competition even more. Unlike Susanne, who had grown up around boats, the sailing world was new to him, and he learned about it through the prism of his wife and son. In college, he had been a competitive marksman, but sailing resonated with him more than shooting ever had. He loved the strategy, the planning, and the pursuit of perfection involved and spent countless hours studying the minutiae of the sport. Gordon believed that the world was a zero-sum game of winners and losers, and the goal, of course, was to be a winner. Focus was paramount.
Kevin Hall as a teenager (courtesy Hall family)
Kevin, meanwhile, maintained his targets on the water, but he also had a voracious appetite for reading, particularly fiction. On his bookshelf were several volumes by C. S. Lewis, including The Chronicles of Narnia. “There are no ordinary people,” wrote Lewis, a notion that reverberated with father and son, but for different reasons. Like many children, Kevin absorbed the messianic world of Lewis, the notion that one could save the world. His father was far more practical, finding such notions living where they belonged: in pages of storybooks that were intended to sit on shelves.