Imagine for a second that you are Kim Kardashian and you are approached by someone who wants to write a book about you.
You are wealthy enough to create your own gated kingdom in California. You can reach 343 million Instagram followers — a bigger number than the population of the United States — with the tap of a button. You are the star of a reality show on which you have documented multiple divorces, births, businesses and, very crucially, the aftermath of a sex tape that catapulted you to the molten center of early-aughts celebrity culture.
Why turn over the keys to someone else?
According to the real Kim Kardashian, the answer is simple: Anna Wintour assured her that Jonathan Van Meter, a longtime Vogue writer, would be perfect for such a project.
“When she does connections, yeah, always meaningful and important,” Kardashian said of Wintour, speaking by phone this month in between business calls and dropping her children off at school.. “I just thought to myself: You know what? There’s so many stories out there. Why wouldn’t I want something that was a little bit more authentic and just completely real?”
As readers will learn in Van Meter’s book, “Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future,” due out on Oct. 27, this is often how Kardashian makes decisions: definitively and often without a lot of deliberation. Even faster if someone like Wintour is involved.
“I just thought they would get along,” Wintour said in an email, “and I was right. Most people get along with Jonathan.”
And so, with the support of the most powerful woman in fashion — and without the burden of a nondisclosure or any other signed agreement — Van Meter set out in 2021 to write “Citizen Kim,” an authorized biography that positions Kardashian at the center of an influencer-takes-all culture she all but created. He bounced around Calabasas and Malibu for five years, interviewing Kardashian; her siblings; her mother, Kris Jenner; and her stepparent, Caitlyn Jenner. Even Van Meter is a little stunned that it all worked out.
“I still don’t really understand why people are so trusting of me,” Van Meter, 63, said in an interview last month at his apartment in New York City. “Why did Kim say yes? It’s like not for me to understand, in a weird way. And yet, everybody always says to me, ‘It’s because of the way you write about women.’”
Modern fame casts a klieg light on celebrities, who, given the rise of influencer culture and the declining power of traditional publications, seem more comfortable interviewing one another and holding hands than they are with talking to a journalist. But celebrities of a certain status — powerful and female, and often misunderstood — open up to Van Meter because his profiles about them have a warming effect. It is the literary version of throwing a scarf over a bright lamp. It helps that he carries the imprimatur of Vogue, where he has contributed since 1990, and that he does not consider himself a reporter. He considers that more intrusive than what he does, which is to tell a good story.
“I have to be somehow slightly celebrating them,” he said of his subjects. “That’s my nature.”
Some of the most famous women of our time have basked in the glow of his mood lighting.
Oprah Winfrey loves Van Meter because, as she said in an interview, “he got the most important thing that nobody gets: that I’m funny!” Lady Gaga, who happily greeted him at the door to her “sanctuary” in Malibu in a transparent nightgown, has sat for a Vogue profile with him four separate times. He called Jennifer Lawrence “hilarious and real,” and she enjoyed his company so much that she invited him for a sleepover. (He declined.)
In 2019, Kardashian appeared on her first solo cover of American Vogue, when she was still married to the rapper Kanye West. Van Meter wrote the accompanying article, in which Kardashian announced that she was studying to become a lawyer, and talked about her work to persuade President Trump, in his first term, to commute the sentence of Alice Johnson, who was then serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug conviction. (Johnson is now Trump’s pardon czar.)
For one of the most well-known celebrities in the world, working with the Trump administration was a risky move. Van Meter focuses more on the fact that Kardashian did not care about the reputational cost.
“That was the thing that bothered me the most about it, is that when I was writing the book,” Van Meter said, “people would say, ‘But she’s Trumpy.’ I’m like, “No, she’s not. But it made it look like she was, but she didn’t care.’”
The book only glancingly explores Kardashian’s politics or her friendly relationship with Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka: “It’s in her nature to be kind to the person who’s being battered,” he said of Kardashian’s embrace of Ivanka Trump.
As he points out, in Kardashian’s world, her visit to the first-term Trump White House was all practically a lifetime ago.
“The only thing I think that’s really lucky and amazing is that Kim’s life completely changed in the five years that I was hanging out with her,” Van Meter said. “Divorce, she became a billionaire. She bought a jet. She started acting. She might have said no to me a year and a half later.” That was around when, Van Meter noted, West made antisemitic statements and his behavior became more erratic.
Kardashian’s divorce from West, his mental health struggles and his embrace of Nazism is one of the more recent tumults chronicled in the book, but this work is largely focused on her past. Van Meter uses the book to present the argument that it was Kardashian’s childhood that gave her a preternatural drive to prove herself, plus a large helping of unteachable grit.
As many Kardashian scholars know, she had an idyllic upbringing in Beverly Hills, which her parents shattered with a divorce. Her father, Robert, became a defense lawyer for their family friend O.J. Simpson, who was accused of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Kardashian’s mother was a close friend of Brown’s. Simpson went free, but the trial symbolized a high-profile and traumatic cleaving of the family that never quite healed.
Kardashian, as a rule, does not really think about any of this.
“I’m really open all the time, so I don’t think I ever have any difficult conversations,” she said. But she allows for the fact that her interviews with Van Meter made her realize “I didn’t realize how much I had to grow up.” She also said that he “paints a good picture” and has “warmth about him that makes you trusting.”
Tall and bald, with a kind face and a whispery voice, Van Meter possesses the ability to get powerful women to confide in him, and quickly. While writing a Vogue profile of Jill Biden in 2021, they embraced while talking about his mother’s death. “I love you,” the former first lady whispered to him.
He and his husband, the editor Andy Young, have recently moved to what he refers to as the world’s “chicest retirement community” — a quiet corner of the West Village. They live on the ground-floor unit of a building owned by the actor Rupert Everett. Their neighbor is the director Sofia Coppola. Young edits a newsletter written by the journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh, 89, often butt dials him.
They recently moved back to the city from their home in Woodstock, N.Y., to reclaim some of the life they used to have. In spring 2020, when the pandemic hit, Van Meter said, his contract with New York magazine was canceled. Within a month, he had also lost his Vogue contract.
The art of the big celebrity profile, he said, “died while I’m on duty.”
He did have many years where he had a lot of fun. He made a name for himself in the early ’90s when he chronicled the excess of the supermodel era, capturing the 26-year-old model Linda Evangelista with a quote that lives in infamy: “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” They had been drinking — a common theme in a Van Meter piece — and when she said it, he knew he had gold. Evangelista, who declined to speak for this piece, was reportedly unhappy with how she was portrayed.
In 1991, Van Meter got in trouble for insulting Kim Basinger, his first Vogue cover-story subject, calling her “dumb as a shoe” during an interview with comedian Joan Rivers.
“I didn’t really understand that a Vogue cover story is not a place to, like, get snarky and mean,” he said. “Anna Wintour called me into her office and said: ‘Jonathan, what are you doing? You can’t trash the cover subject.’”
As time went on, he became practiced at giving his subjects a fair hearing, to the point where he has sometimes felt like a therapist. Van Meter was criticized for a 2013 New York Times Magazine piece about Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, in which he was seen as insufficiently skeptical of Weiner’s extramarital behavior. (Even Weiner said so.) “I really felt like I was his analyst,” Van Meter said of that experience at the time.
These days, he feels most comfortable writing about powerful women, and many of them seem comfortable having their story told by a man. When I asked Wintour by email if she’d consider letting Van Mater write about her, she responded with a single word: “Absolutely.”
What does it mean to be understood by Van Meter? Let’s ask Oprah.
“He’s an observer before he is an interpreter,” Winfrey said. “You know, he doesn’t come in interpreting. He doesn’t come in trying to prove some thesis that he already had.”
This was an appealing thought to Kardashian, who believed him when he pitched her on a book that would take her seriously as a cultural force. For Van Meter, Kardashian’s cooperation was his ticket back from the wilderness, or at least from upstate.
He does handle his subject with care. He delved into the long-tail aftermath of a 2006 sex tape, which Kardashian filmed with an ex-boyfriend, that had the double-edged effect of bestowing immense fame without earning her much respect from traditional cultural gatekeepers.
Relying on documents and financial statements, Van Meter presents the idea that she was well aware of its success and revenue and that she received a “surprisingly cordial” message from the distributor. But he does not interrogate any role she might have had in the tape’s release.
“I realized that I don’t know absolutely for sure,” Van Meter said. “And I don’t think she’s ever going to tell anybody, and so I just tried to present it so that the reader could experience what I did.” More important, he argues, is how she played her hand.
For a writer with an ear for a money quote, a subject who has an admitted aversion to introspection might have been a death sentence. But Van Meter finds in his book that she still has the ability to surprise him.
“Maybe,” she told him at one point during their years together, “I’m just the girl with a sex tape with a lot to prove.”
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