Gavin Newsom looked giddy. Joe Biden had just done his best imitation of a corpse in a debate with Donald Trump and rumours were swirling around the Democratic Party that a new leader had to take his place. The obvious candidate, vice president Kamala Harris, maintained her usual impassive loyalty. It didn’t matter that Newsom was singing Biden’s praises. He couldn’t help it. In his grin, beamed across the country from the spin room, all of Newsom’s foibles were on display: garishness, ambition and the slightly silly and childlike way he so brazenly believes in one thing above all: he ought to be president.
But he cannot have American voters think that of him if he actually wants to take the White House. And so now, the California governor has written, with the help of a very competent ghostwriter, a memoir, Young Man in a Hurry. At this point in the election cycle, political memoirs are often designed to do no more than provide journalists with a library of favourable anecdotes to pad out the candidate’s backstory in the hundreds of articles that will be written before the election. They allow politicians to embark on a handily timed tour of the country armed with a flattering 80,000-word profile they wrote themselves. As such, they often read like chronically verbose campaign leaflets.
Less so, Newsom’s. Of course, he wants you to stop seeing him as an entitled narcissist. But he also seems more or less sincere in his desire to use his family history to understand his repressed relationships with his divorced parents.
Soon after Newsom was born in San Francisco in 1967, his father, William, moved 200 miles away to Lake Tahoe, nursing debts from two failed runs for public office. William became a judge – the kind of man who would recite verse from Hilaire Belloc and WB Yeats with his buddies in restaurants. Meanwhile, Newsom’s mother, Tessa, worked three jobs and fostered several children, leaving the young Gavin and his sister Hillary fending for themselves. Tessa would later kill herself with morphine as she struggled with terminal cancer. “She could not fill out what was missing in herself, much less what was missing in my father,” he writes “They were woefully unprepared to share a life of marriage, children, and work.”
Young Man in a Hurry is a tale of two childhoods. One was spent in Marin, north of San Francisco making his own mac-n-cheese for dinner while his mother was at work. The other was with the Gettys, the family of oil magnates for whom Gavin’s father became a consigliere, fixer and uncle-like figure. The Gettys were more than family friends and became quasi-cousins: they were the Newsoms’ portal into a gilded world. Gavin would be taken in a helicopter to the shores of Hudson Bay to take photos of polar bears frolicking on the ice. He writes as if he was only a spectator to this world, and resents the accusation he was raised as the “fifth Getty boy”. “My window on the Gettys would serve up many lessons of a realm I could see and touch but never hold,” he writes. But his bashful claim to be an unenthusiastic member of the Getty clan often slips: “Dad later blew up two of my pictures and sold them for four hundred dollars each at an auction to benefit his foundation to protect the California mountain lion.” Money, stardom and popularity were becoming one and the same in Newsom’s mind.
Newsom hints at the awkwardness his mother felt at his other life with the Gettys. He didn’t tell her about that time Arthur Miller had joined their Thanksgiving vacation in Barbados, nor about the time they arrived by gondola at a party in a sixteenth-century Venetian palazzo where Jack Nicholson confused him for one of the Getty boys.
But of course his scion status fuelled his career. His father landed him his first job with a local bigshot who had known his grandfather back in the day. Gordon Getty is a key investor in the wine business, Plumbjack, which Newsom founded with Gordon’s son, Billy Getty. He lived for free at the Getty Mansion, where celebrities would compete to get married and a lavish million-dollar fundraiser for Bill Clinton was later held. He recalls a time he had to take a big decision at Plumbjack over whether to put screwtops on his wine bottles instead of corks. He pondered for a while, consulted experts and mused on the necessary type of tin. Eventually, he decided to go for it. “It wouldn’t be cheap,” he writes, “but it aligned with our whole irreverent reason for being.”
It feels cruel to do more than politely cringe at revelations like these because Newsom is so earnest in his attempt to grapple with his flaws and mixed identity. He holds tightly to slogans from the self-help guru Tony Robbins, such as “your past does not equal your future”. He writes about his dyslexia, “obsessive side”, the “frustrated magician in me”, “the wonk in me”. He wore a gawky suit to school, forged bibliographies for school essays and swung a baseball bat until his palms blistered. He married a stylish lawyer, Kimberley Guilfoyle, whom he didn’t love, because he thought she was the right person to play the role of Mrs Newsom. They got divorced and she married Don Jr Trump (they remained married until two years ago). Newsom admits he slept with his aide whose husband was his deputy chief of staff. The driving force throughout is Newsom’s desperation to be liked.
But we learn little about why Newsom actually wants to be a politician. His initial foray into politics came about because Mayor Willie Brown, a patron of Newsom’s restaurants, asked him to join the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission. Newsom mistakenly thought he was joining the Film Commission. At his swearing in, a journalist asked him what his vision for parking and traffic was. Newsom writes: ““Vision?” I stammered, and laughed. I blurted out something about paying my outstanding tickets and dashed out the door.”
At least he’s honest. This blasé shallowness crops up throughout the book. After he mentions meeting Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as San Francisco mayor, anticipation builds that he will eventually realise that his warmth to these proto-oligarchs was a mistake. But an anecdote about Jobs beckoning him over at a party to show him this small rectangular device with a touch screen that could make calls turns out to be nothing more than name dropping. Newsom is immune to the idea that Silicon Valley might not be an unalloyed public good. His progressive optimism precludes the notion that technology might have a downside. He does not have the grasp of political economy needed to criticise Silicon Valley. Or perhaps more accurately, his vision of political economy is compatible with the wealth amassed in the Valley. He is much more comfortable tilling social and cultural fields. The two issues he championed as lieutenant governor were greater gun control and the legalisation of marijuana.
The fact his book is so detached from the panic among Democrats that Trump is reading the last rites to American democracy shows Newsom’s optimism. He seems to think the republican experiment will survive Trump’s reign. This is down to his sunny, carefree approach to politics. But also, perhaps, because he has an ambiguous relationship with Donald Trump.
After Trump’s victory in 2016, he told his second wife, Jen, that “something fundamental had been revealed about our country, something I had missed”. This reads like a primer for him to peer into the country’s soul. Instead, he recalls the time President Trump visited California after a wildfire. As Trump shows off his bedroom on Air Force One and boasts that he can call anyone in the world, Newsom reflects that Trump had a “surface kindness he tried to express and maybe even a longing for something more”. “I wasn’t immune to the power of his office or his eloquence for bullshit and flattery,” he writes.
There’s that honesty again. You believe him because he doesn’t suggest there’s much else motivating him. Newsom has always been in a hurry. But he still doesn’t really know what he is hurrying towards.
Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery
Gavin Newsom
Vintage, 304pp, £25
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[Further reading: Do you want to be part of Donald Trump’s new empire?]
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