Louise Linton, Baroness of the United States Treasury and Hermés scarf owner, was recently profiled by Los Angeles Magazine. You might ask: Why is the Treasury secretary’s wife being profiled by a magazine for retired sit-com stars? Thankfully I have answers! It’s a profile tied to her upcoming movie, which is “a campy horror flick about a bisexual hedge-fund CEO who kills men for fun and sport. She is the film’s writer, director, and star.” (Didn’t you know she was also an actress?) What’s strange is that, for someone obsessed with her public image, she sent her publicist away halfway through the interview. It shows!
The interviewer, Maer Roshan, takes great care in setting the stage for the Baroness’ big comeback after what you might call a two-year rough patch. She enters the scene “swaddled in a white terry cloth robe and perched on a director’s chair in the marble floored powder room of her massive Bel Air mansion.” (Remember the director’s chair, it’s symbolic of something I haven’t yet defined.) We’re reminded of her brief stint as a Lifetime original movie actress as an extra in the Kate Middleton biopic and her “failure” to “make a dent” until the scandal that defined much of the early press surrounding Trump’s cabinet, which entailed a “heavily hashtagged Instagram image of herself laden with luxury label callouts (#tomfordsunnies, #hermesscarf, #valentinorockstudheels) and disembarking a government jet.”
She later apologized, but the fallout was immense on her National Alliance Of White Supremacy Barbies leaderboard ranking. As Maer Roshan explains, she “insists the stereotype” of privilege we’ve applied to her is “far from accurate.” Here’s her reasoning:
Linton insists the stereotype is far from accurate. Born to a wealthy Scottish family, she moved to Los Angeles when she was 18 with the dream of becoming a Hollywood starlet. A not-quite-Cinderella story of riches to riches played out as she earned a journalism degree at Pepperdine University, married and divorced a Beverly Hills criminal defense attorney, and launched her all-woman production company, Stormchaser Films.
I’m extremely surprised that she’s the product of extreme wealth who married into more wealth. As for her actual identity, it shouldn’t surprise nobody that she’s a combination of “Scottish socialite, Hollywood dilettante, and Maligned wife of a reviled Cabinet official.” LA Mag explains:
In person she is far more laid-back and funnier than her public persona. Also surprisingly likable. Her closet, while nearly the size of a studio apartment, is mostly filled with youthful, egalitarian brands: Cotton Citizen, Alice + Olivia, H&M; her floor-to-ceiling shoe shelves display Louboutin red-bottom soles next to $150 heels from Schutz.
Shocking that a writer for a magazine who’s previous covers include an issue on fine dining with headlines like, “How Waiters Really See Us,” could stand to be in the presence of a vacuous, trust fund nightmare like Louise Linton. It’s at this point in the interview that she dismisses her publicist so she could “[talk] freely about everything from D.C.’s treacherous ways to her complicated feelings about the Trumps to her fondness for bad ’80s pop music.” Later, we’e treated to an incredible scene where, amidst a downpour that “enveloped L.A.,” Linton dons a latex bathing suit and leaps into the pool in full makeup. Because “Louise Linton knows a photo op when she sees one, and she always likes to make a splash.”
Some quick facts I learned accompanied by parentheses, like they do in prestige print magazines to affect a tone of earnest sincerity: She changes the channel when her husband’s on the TV. (He was “dueling with Maxine Waters.”) She was “deeply depressed” after posting a series of tone-deaf Instagram posts. (“It sucks being perceived as a person you’re not.”) She thinks people only know her for “the gloves.” (We also know her for the horrific administration her husband is willingly and gainfully employed under.) She wore gloves to the mint because “It was the Bureau of Engraving, darling! (She asks, haven’t you heard of “cold cash”?) She had “advisers” who instructed her to be “glamorous and fashionable.” (She later learned “what’s good for movie stars doesn’t work for a Cabinet secretary’s wife.”)
My favorite moment in the entire profile, however, comes when the editors at LA Mag chose to put this quote in bold, title font. I’ll add it here for similar effect:
I have the high honor of being the only person who has been compared to Marie Antoinette, Darth Vader, and Cruella de Vil at once.
What else?
- She compares her journey to the plot of The Princess Diaries. (“You know that movie The Princess Diaries, where a mentor held her hand saying, ‘Walk this way. Talk this way. Do this; don’t do that’? Well, I didn’t have anyone like that.”) While Anne Hathaway famously dated a prolific financial scammer, I find the correlation rude.
- “Let’s face it—I don’t exactly fit the traditional bill of “Treasury secretary wife.” I’m an actor and a producer!” Sounds like you fit the bill just fine!
- She repeatedly mentions her position as a “cabinet wife,” which Jezebel features editor Stassa Edwards declared as “the new curvy wife.”
- A list of Cabinet wife bonuses: Flying on an Osprey helicopter, attending the commissioning of an aircraft carrier, having the president attend your wedding, and seeing the White House.
- She’s a “huge celebrity in the U.K.”
- The “happily married couple” met at a wedding reception, where she invited him to an animal rescue fundraiser.
- The Secret Service follows her to SoulCycle, where she once ran into Perez Hilton.
- “Why is it that we perceive people who are in politics as caricatures?”
- She Googles what Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton wear and tries to emulate them.
Here’s an exchange which I believe perfectly summarizes this profile and the clear disconnect Linton experiences with any tangible reality.
Does it bother you that the Trump administration supports a measure that allows landlords and businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people?
Look, all of my besties are gay. I did the Pride Run last year and again this year. Stormchasers was a sponsor! So…I’m caught between a rock and a hard place with these questions.
As for her future projects? She’s planning a new thriller called Celebrity, which is about “a young actress who has a psychotic break and ends up going out for revenge on the meanie reporters and trolls that stalk her on the internet.” Pushing past her troubling obsession with murderous rich women that sound like herself, I have to ask: Who will she cast to play me? (I’ve been likened to Kathryn Hahn but am open to suggestions!)