Alex Shoumatoff - Mid To Later Life and Career

Mid To Later Life and Career

In 1986 Shoumatoff wrote his first piece for Vanity Fair, about the murder of Dian Fossey, which was made into the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff became one of the newly resurrected magazine's stars, writing about everything from a riveting account of the fall of Paraguay's dictator Alfredo Stroessner (see the article on his web site) to trying to pinpoint the source, in central Africa, of the AIDS virus. In 1990, his book The World Is Burning, about the murder of the president of the Amazon Rubber-Tappers' Union Chico Mendes, was optioned by the actor Robert Redford though the movie was never made. In the early 1990s, he became obsessed with golf, and to justify all the time he was spending playing, he frequently published pieces in a category he called "investigative golf." (See Annals of Investigative Golf: The Gavea Golf Club in Rio de Janeiro). Two of his more famous golf pieces were one in 1994 which former President Bill Clinton's golf buddies extensively and specifically discussed his extra-marital affairs, prior to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Esquire Magazine would not print; and another piece about playing with O.J. Simpson's golf buddies that revealed that Simpson may have hidden the murder weapon in his golf bag. He also profiled Uma Thurman and her father, Buddhist Robert Thurman, for a feature in Vanity Fair. During this era, related to these articles, Shoumatoff also appeared several times on tabloid T.V. shows such as Inside Edition, then hosted by political commentator Bill O'Reilly, and E! True Hollywood Story.

In the mid-late 1990s, realizing that many of the places that he had been writing about since the 1970s had been changed drastically by the West's appetite for goods, he strengthened his focus on the environment and an interest in creating a written record of these places and/or cultures and species. He wrote about global warming and the Kyoto conference (see Dispatch #5) in 1997, and started his Web site four years later. He was also selected as the correspondent from Vanity Fair to profile Al Gore for the 2000 election in a piece that was never published.

In 1997, his book Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest, (Knopf, 1997) was published to high acclaim. It was on the cover of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle book reviews, was named a New York Times notable book of 1997, Time magazine and New York Post's top ten books of 1997, and Mountain and Plains Booksellers' Association best non-fiction book of 1997. This is Shoumatoff's last published book.

Having back-burned his music career for 37 years, Shoumatoff also recorded his first compact disk, Suitcase on the Loose, produced by his longtime friend Kate McGarrigle (the mother of Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright), and featured on VanityFair.com including his song from the 70's Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues that was featured on NPR's weekend edition of All Things Considered during the Pennsylvania primary for the 2008 primary election.

In 2008, Shoumatoff was arrested for trespassing while trying to research a piece for Vanity Fair at the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California.