Could a Cormac McCarthy Character Have Been Inspired by Ghislaine Maxwell?
An investigation of a fever dream.
The Santa Fe Institute calls itself the “premier research center for complex systems,” which seems, to this layman, to indicate that it devotes itself to explaining how the solution to any complex problem is libertarianism. Recently, the Institute issued a press release celebrating SFI trustee Cormac McCarthy. “The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the early 1980s,” writes Laurence Gonzalez, a former visiting scholar at SFI. And here is the Institute’s director David Krakauer reminiscing about the author’s tenure there. Not only has the Institute served for many years as McCarthy’s writing studio (he wrote The Road in the SFI library), but it seems to be an organization to which he is genuinely dedicated. McCarthy told Oprah about his love of the Institute’s long freeform lunchtime conversations. Visitors run into him puttering around in the mailroom, where Krakauer says he likes to sort through packages, looking for books. McCarthy, a trained architect, has built shelves, redesigned rooms, and repaired broken steps at SFI. He wrote a short essay on the origins of consciousness based on ideas he developed there. And his new books The Passenger and Stella Maris are greatly indebted—Krakauer called The Passenger “full-blown Cormac 3.0”—to his intellectual journey at the Institute.
Another McCarthy project, his screenplay for the 2013 Ridley Scott movie The Counselor, also seems, to me, to be indebted to SFI—in a more roundabout fashion. I have been seized by the unshakeable conviction, of fever-dream proportions, that Cameron Diaz’s character in The Counselor, Malkina, could be based on Ghislaine Maxwell, whom I speculate McCarthy could have met or heard about through his connections to the Santa Fe Institute.
Jeffrey Epstein gave the Santa Fe Institute 275,000 dollars over time. He was “friendly” with Institute co-founder (and discoverer of the quark) Murray Gell-Mann, who was “among Epstein’s guests at dinners and scientific conferences.” Gell-Mann was also a good friend of McCarthy’s (“the pair would often visit at Murray’s home and cook elaborate lunches and dinners,” writes Gonzalez) and was responsible for “br[inging] Cormac to SFI” back in the eighties, according to Krakauer. The Institute is only about a 35-minute drive away from Zorro Ranch1, the desert mansion where Epstein hoped to spawn his demon child army. As for Ghislaine, her “sister Christine is a former SFI trustee, and their father Robert was an important early donor,” according to Erik Baker in a recent essay for the Baffler. McCarthy, famously media-shy, has so far only given an interview about his new books on Lawrence Krauss’ podcast. Krauss was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein who organized events for Epstein—the types of science-themed hobnobs that Gell-Mann attended—the most famous being a 2006 conference at St. Thomas on the subject of gravity.
In The Counselor, Michael Fassbender plays the titular Counselor, a lawyer who finances a drug deal with the help of his frosted-tip friend, Reiner, played by Javier Bardem. The drug deal goes bad, death and destruction follow, all to the benefit of Cameron Diaz’s Malkina, who is the manipulating hand beyond the chaos. Malkina is of vague origins. Her accent is not easily placed. She could be from anywhere. Rhyming with Robert Maxwell’s death at sea, she tells a priest that her parents were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean when she was three. Malkina intimidates through her obsession with sex and money. She tells Penelope Cruz’s character, Laura, when asking about Laura’s sex life and creepily caressing her, that she is “rattling her cage.” She drinks cocktails while watching her pet cheetahs chase after a hare, and, in what is surely the most memorable scene in the film, she makes grotesque love to Reiner’s convertible. Her outfits are awful—she wears a studded silk hooded shawl and a billowing paisley printed dress.
I admit that some of these similarities are broad and could just as easily be applied to a Texas housewife in Vail, Colorado, for the weekend. (While others are standard “cinematic sex criminal” behavior. But then again, who set the standard? She’s been around for a while. People met her. That’s all I’m saying!) The coincidence, if it can be called that, that really got me thinking is perhaps of even slimmer proportions. At the end of the movie, Malkina hires Natalie Dormer (character credited as Blonde) who seduces Brad Pitt’s character, Westray, in a hotel room in London and steals his bank codes, right before he is bolito’d. She tells him she is from New Mexico. So Malkina is something of a madam as well, and her girls come from New Mexico? Now the wheels are turning.
McCarthy has put real people in his fiction before—in The Passenger, for instance. But the appearances are all named cameos, not the kind of character study I’m talking about with Malkina. “Throughout The Passenger, great themes of science and mathematics are played out with references to… the names of legendary physicists sprinkled around as if they were old pals. As indeed, a number of them were to Cormac,” writes Gonzales, pointing to brief appearances in the text by Gell-Man and George Zweig, another physicist friend of McCarthy’s. And a friend of mine who lived for some time in Tucson clued me in to the fact The Passenger namechecks the legendary Tucson bar owner Jimmy Anderson, who was known for branding his customers and referring to himself as God. In The Passenger, Anderson never appears in the flesh, but is cited as tragically insane math genius Alicia Western’s employer.
Then again, McCarthy seems to include real-life details in his fiction just so he can “[throw] his readers a curveball,” as Dwight Garner realized when researching the cuisine of McCarthy’s books. When Garner reached out to McCarthy’s publicist to ask why Bobby Western, Alicia’s twin, eats fettuccine with clams at Mosca’s in New Orleans, even though Mosca’s has never served fettuccine with clams, McCarthy responded via the publicist, “No goddamn clams! Put a note at the bottom of the page!”
This piece is greatly indebted to Matt Farwell’s piece about Epstein in New Mexico, which got me thinking about the people you meet in Santa Fe. Subscribe to his substack Hunt for Tom Clancy.
Sam Jaffe Goldstein is a former bookseller. You can find him on substack at Dreamsofarcadia.
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More by Sam on TEOTWR:
Great Party, Isn’t It?: Stanley Kubrick, the masters of universe, and their lame parties
From Family of Secrets to Family of Readers: Jenna Bush’s intoxicatingly good book club
Revenge Has Always Been a Fundamental Literary Pretext; an interview with Joshua Cohen
I Feel That I Am Being Made Crazy By the Distortion; an interview with Lauren Oyler
Find Something To Hide As Soon As Possible; an interview with Anne Boyer
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