Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (23 page)

It is difficult to track narcissistic personality disorder with any kind of precision. Most people who exhibit characteristics of the disorder aren't rushing in for treatment; in general they see nothing wrong with their behavior, nor do they recognize its impact on others. If one does happen to land in a therapist's office, it's almost always because he or she is there for a coexisting condition, like drug dependence, or because a spouse or a boss has given an ultimatum: Shape up or you're out of here. The best estimates for a clinical case of narcissistic personality disorder show that it affects up to 6 percent of the general population.

Everyday narcissism is far more widespread and, according to some researchers, on the rise. Anybody living in 21st-century America knows that there are plenty of self-absorbed people out there. The standard assessment tool for garden-variety narcissism is a questionnaire called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which consists of 40 statements, each written in two very different ways: “I prefer to blend in with the crowd” or “I like to be the center of attention”; “I like to do things for other people” or “I expect a great deal from other people”; “The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me” or “If I ruled the world it would be a better place.” Respondents are asked to pick the best match, and scored according to which option they choose. College students have been administered this test for decades, and a recent study
found a striking 30 percent increase in narcissism levels between 1979 and 2006.

The study's authors speculated on a number of social causes, including an emphasis on boosting self-esteem starting in preschool. Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University and one of the investigators, says parents' efforts to build self-esteem by making their kids feel special can backfire. In a later study, published in 2015, Bushman and his colleagues found that when parents view their children as “more special and more entitled,” the children internalize these inflated views and are more likely to develop narcissistic traits. Parents who express affection and appreciation, by contrast, nurture healthy self-esteem. For children, “it's really important that feedback is contingent on behavior rather than blanket praise,” says Bushman.

Social media can also foster narcissism. Technology has certainly made it a whole lot easier to
act
like a narcissist. Among celebrities, who score higher than the general population on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, reality TV stars are the most narcissistic of all. Today, anyone with a computer or mobile device can perform in her own reality show. Where once we might have talked about a promotion over coffee with a friend, we can now share the news with hundreds of admirers who laud our every move with “like” clicks—and expect similar ovations for their own status updates. Technology is making it easier than ever to self-promote in the guise of sharing. Just when the selfie seemed to be as vainglorious as it could get, crafty marketers added the attachable pole to give iPhone photographers a better angle on their double chins. No wonder it has been dubbed the “narcissistick.” One can only imagine what Wright might have done with Instagram.

Charming, charismatic, and richly endowed with self-esteem, narcissists are often well rewarded, too. Charles O'Reilly, a professor
at Stanford Business School, found a direct correlation between how employees rated their CEOs at 32 high-tech firms in Silicon Valley and the executives' total compensation. The most narcissistic bosses, whom colleagues described using adjectives such as “arrogant,” “boastful,” “conceited,” and “egotistical,” earned higher wages, owned more stock, and showed the biggest gap in pay compared to CEOs who ranked lower on the narcissistic scale. Confidence and power are vital components of leadership, but narcissistic bosses cross the line. “When you talk to people who work for them,” says O'Reilly, “you find out that they're typically abusive and manipulative.”

Like Wright, Steve Jobs was one of the world's greatest innovators, turning characterless technology into elegant, user-friendly works of art. Jobs was adopted as a baby, and his parents made him feel special, he told his biographer Walter Isaacson: “They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.' ” The truth was that another couple had turned him down first because they wanted a girl. Jobs knew that. But he
was
special in his signature black turtleneck, guiding his disciples through Apple's latest innovations—from the 13 “flavors” of the iMac (where else could you get a blueberry desktop?) to the sleek, palm-of-your-hand iPod and iPhone. Jobs's creative genius, however, was coupled with a thorny personality. He had a reputation for bullying some of his employees until they cried, twisting the truth, blaming others for his faults, and cheating his friends out of money. His sense of entitlement was legendary. A longtime girlfriend told Isaacson that she believed Jobs met the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. “Expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered,” she said, “was like expecting a blind man to see.”

Political rulers are narcissistic almost by necessity. A slew of American presidents, from Chester A. Arthur to Bill Clinton, have earned the moniker. Dictators, especially, tend to be narcissistic; you can't rule with an iron fist without thinking you're better than everyone
else. A litany of world leaders have exhibited the worst kind of hubris over the years, from Napoleon to Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin to Chiang Kai-shek. Men have no monopoly on narcissism; Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the despotic ruler's wife, exhibited plenty of her own. Wellesley-educated and elegant, she could be charming at one moment and ruthlessly insensitive the next. One night at a dinner party, President Franklin Roosevelt asked her how the Chinese government would handle a labor dispute. “She never said a word,” Eleanor Roosevelt later reported, “but the beautiful small hand came up very quietly and slid across her throat—a most expressive gesture.”

It has long been thought that an effective treatment for narcissism is hard to come by, given the inflexible nature of symptoms. There's no pill to make people more amiable, and traditional therapy won't work if a patient doesn't show up or has no interest in participating. One of the biggest sticking points is lack of empathy. A recent study found an intriguing clue about how people with narcissistic personality disorder may differ in this realm at a biological level: Compared to a control group, highly narcissistic people had less gray matter in the left anterior insula, a part of the brain linked to empathy.

But empathy may not be as all or nothing as it seems. People with narcissistic personality disorder are capable of turning it on when they're motivated to do so for self-serving reasons. The novelist Ayn Rand, who abided by a philosophy of “rational selfishness,” was known to be ruthless, dismissing people she had no use for, including a long-lost sister. (Howard Roark, her lead character in
The Fountainhead
, is said to have been modeled after Wright; when asked about it, Wright famously retorted: “I deny the paternity and refuse to marry the mother.”) And yet at times, she appeared to care when it was a matter of self-interest. A friend once said that Rand “could be immensely empathetic if she saw things in you that were like her. But if she didn't see
herself in some aspect of you, she didn't empathize at all. You weren't real to her.”

Rather than view it as present or absent, empathy should be seen as a skill that needs to be nurtured in people with narcissistic personality disorder, says Harvard's Elsa Ronningstam, who is pursuing this approach as a new way of conceptualizing the condition. Several small studies indicate that empathy may be more malleable than previously believed, and that actively guiding people to identify with others can alter behavior. In one report, scientists found that when female narcissists were prompted to “imagine how [she] feels” while watching a video documenting a woman's experience with domestic violence, they reported higher levels of empathy than they had without prompting. In another, prisoners given a similar test actually showed more empathic activity in their brains.

A more discerning view of empathy could open new avenues for treatment. If empathy actually exists under the narcissist's bombast, therapists might be able to unearth it—and maybe narcissists can become less self-absorbed and more compassionate people.

W
RIGHT SPENT THE FINAL YEARS
of his life overseeing construction of the Guggenheim in New York City, where he set up camp at the Plaza Hotel. Never wavering from his aesthetic ideals, the architect overhauled his suite, which he named “Taliesin East,” with velvet curtains, Japanese gold wallpaper, and, of course, a grand piano. A
Saturday Review
writer who interviewed him there in 1953 described the 84-year-old architect pacing about in a gray robe, beaded green slippers, and an orange-blue scarf, his long hair flowing. In a booming voice, Wright grandstanded about his favorite subjects—the poetic elegance of Japanese art, the debacle of
American architecture (“Look at the U.N. Building—a great slab in a great graveyard”), and his ongoing efforts to “wake my people up” to the fact that without worthy architecture, there would be no culture. “They'd call that arrogance, wouldn't they?” Wright quipped. “Well, I suppose it is.”

The Guggenheim, one of Wright's most iconic achievements, would take 16 years to build, from start to finish. On April 9, 1959, just six months before it opened, Wright died at age 91 in a Phoenix hospital, where he had been transported after suffering an intestinal obstruction at Taliesin West, a winter home he built in the Arizona desert.

The Guggenheim's debut that fall was met with both acclamation and disdain. By then, numerous tweaks had been made, including the addition of metal rods that allowed the paintings to be hung vertically instead of tilted back against the sloping walls. In a review in the
New Yorker
that December, Lewis Mumford extolled Wright as “a true artist, one of the most richly endowed geniuses this country has produced” before skewering his design. The color was dull, the concrete “sullen” and fortress-like, and then there was the building's “ruinous” interior, commandeering both painting and viewer. “If the outside of the building says ‘Power'—power to defy blast, to resist change, to remain as immune to time as the Pyramids,” Mumford wrote, “the interior says ‘Ego'—an ego far deeper than the pool in which Narcissus too long gazed.”

It is impossible to disentangle Wright the architect from Wright the boy, the husband, the father, the philanderer, the tyrant, the innovator, the narcissist, the visionary. He was all of these, driven by his unique tangle of circumstances and experiences. In the end, Wright drove his people into the ground and he woke his people up. In so doing, he created a towering legacy that lives on in the breathtaking structures he created—and the beauty he fashioned from nature.

O
N
S
ATURDAY,
A
PRIL 1, 1978,
former president Gerald Ford sat his wife, Betty, down on a green-and-white couch in their living room in Palm Springs, California. Gathered in a semicircle around the former first lady were the Fords' four grown children, Mike, Jack, Steve, and Susan; Mike's wife, Gayle; two doctors; a nurse; and a couple of close friends. When the kids had first arrived at the house, Mrs. Ford assumed that they'd come for a family visit, and she was delighted to see them. But she quickly realized that there was nothing joyous about this gathering; nor would it turn out to be an April Fool's prank, much as she might have wished it to be. Instead, the Ford family had joined forces with medical experts to stage an intervention in
which they confronted Mrs. Ford about her dependence on alcohol and prescription drugs. “Mother, we've got something to talk to you about,” Betty Ford remembered her husband telling her, “and we want you to listen, because we love you.”