The seat beside me at Vanity Fair’s 2013 Oscar dinner in the Sunset Tower Hotel, on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, was empty and it remained so for about 20 minutes into the dinner. I looked at the placename and read “Kamala Harris”, which meant nothing to me, and started talking to the then CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer. Then a blur of an evening dress to my right and the attorney general for the state of California slipped into her seat beside me and irradiated the table with the smile that infuriates Donald Trump, probably because it’s as natural as his scowl.
If the future senator, vice-president and now presidential candidate was disappointed about her place next to the least powerful person in that room, she had the grace not to show it. The rest of the table consisted of three well-known power couples and one restless billionaire, so, Kamala and I, while not exactly paired off, were thrown together for the next three hours of intermittent dining and watching the glacial business of Oscar distribution on the TV screens around the room.
I explained to her that on a previous Oscar night, as UK editor of Vanity Fair, I’d found myself in a party of old-timers, the band leader Artie Shaw, the music mogul Ahmet Ertegun, table-hopping Tony Curtis and the game old society queen Betsy Bloomingdale. “Was this ever awkward?” Nope, I replied, all you do is ask people about themselves, which I proceeded to do. I heard about her scientist mother and professor father and her rise from the district attorney’s office in San Francisco, which she took over aged 39, to the top US law job when she was 46. She was 48 when we met – just before she hooked up with Doug Emhoff – and in the next 11 years she would rise to the Senate, challenge for the Democratic nomination in 2019 and serve as vice-president from 2021.
Her ability and ambition are palpable but, one-to-one, she is good company and a great listener. In manner, she is modest, silky smart and confidential. I remember talking her through two libel cases brought against the magazine by the director Roman Polanski and Harrods boss Mohamed al Fayed. Both men had abused women. That was not the issue at stake in the Polanski case, but Fayed was a serial predator of female staff at Harrods and his home. She asked incisive questions about British libel laws and the shocking evidence against Fayed that I and the legal team assembled before he backed down in 1997. You couldn’t doubt her seriousness or acuity.
Did I feel then that I was with a future presidential candidate? No. Did I spot the political genius of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? Their energy and ability as communicators? Absolutely not. But maybe the point about female leaders like, say, Nancy Pelosi, Angela Merkel and the recently departed prime minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, is that they rise with a lot less noise.
The paralysed glamour of those Oscar dinners, when guests must watch the nominations, film clips, awards and speeches for about 25 categories, can be an ordeal. It was a good year, with Argo, Life of Pi, Django Unchained, Lincoln and Les Misérables all collecting awards, yet the evening still dragged a little and our table felt the need to spice things up with each guest placing $100 in a pot and predicting the winners by ticking nominees on the cards provided. Now, for me and Kamala – who was on a public servant’s salary, don’t forget – $900 was worth having and I certainly concentrated.
About halfway through the ceremony, I thought I saw the billionaire ticking names after the awards were announced and mentioned my suspicion to Kamala. She rose, spoke to a few people she knew around the room then returned for the next presentation and hovered behind the billionaire to see what was going on beneath the table. When she returned to my side, she said she couldn’t be certain, but she aimed a few pointed questions in his direction and the card was placed on the table for all of us to see, at which point he seemed to lose interest.
My evening with Kamala Harris stayed with me and I have remained impressed through her extraordinary rise. I cannot say if she will be a good candidate, although she has started well – or, if she wins, a good president – but I can say that she is highly intelligent and a decent, thoughtful and modern human being – in fact, the polar opposite to the incubus that has settled on American public life in the shape of Donald Trump.
• Henry Porter is a writer and journalist specialising in liberty and civil rights
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