If you can't wait for the long-awaited FRANK BRUNI profile of #masen SCOTT BROWN in next Sunday's New York Times Magazine, it's now online. Spoiler alert: SCOTT BROWN WORE PINK LEATHER SHORTS. On a first date! Sexy stuff, Grey Lady!
[Brown's daughter] Arianna told me that
he showed up for his first real date with her mother, Gail Huff, a TV
newscaster to whom he has been married for more than 23 years, in pink
leather shorts. It’s family lore.
The pinkish color drained
from his face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his
campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that
the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t
like that at all. “I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in
cash, they paid in clothes,” he said. “And one of the things I had to
wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.”
As he
told the story, he seemed, almost in spite of himself, to get into it.
“If I wore these now,” he said, “I’d get shot. But it was the ’80s.
Pastels were in. It was all pastel-y.” The shorts went with his tan at
the time and a pair of white shoes that he owned, so he gave them a
whirl. “Gail comes out and she’s like, ‘Those are pink shorts.’ I said:
‘Yeah, you like them? They’re great. Comfortable. Feel this leather.’ ”
With this last phrase, he slowly stroked the side of one of his thighs,
apparently miming the gesture he made in front of her.
He
emphasized: “This isn’t cheap leather. This is, like, $750 shorts back
then.” He shook his head at the memory. “Crazy stuff.”
Bruni also got a look at Brown's lookbook, from his modeling days:
In print ads and department-store catalogs he was cast as
construction workers, business executives and, in one instance,
according to the stylist who put together the shot, a pampered hubby in
plaid pajamas being fed popcorn by a wife in a matching flannel
nightgown. His hourly rate was $150, he often earned $1,200 a day and
he did, by his own estimate, “thousands and thousands of ads.”
Photographers, stylists and others who worked with him say he was a
no-nonsense professional, more interested in the paycheck than the
parties. But he wasn’t exactly shy about posing and its potential.
“Are
you kidding me?” Quinn says. “He had posters made of himself — not that
Cosmo picture — but one of him in jeans with the top button undone, and
he was shirtless.” Quinn says that Brown tried, without much success,
to sell them for something like $5 a pop.
Also, about that pickup truck: while taking a ride in it, Bruni notices "the kind of plastic container used to hold a teeth-whitening mold. One of his daughters, he said, must have left it there."
File under: Vanity Fair.
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