CHAPTER 10 
Be sober. Be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
—1 PETER 5:8
On June 3, 2010, the Thomas Kinkade Company filed for bankruptcy. It was just one day after the second installment, a $1 million payment, was due to Karen Hazlewood and Jeff Spinello, after the first payment of $500,000 had been handed through the door at the company’s Morgan Hill headquarters. Norman Yatooma threatened to once again come to get it personally, with moving trucks and helicopters, if the payment wasn’t made. Before he had the chance, Yatooma received an email from the company lawyer saying the Thomas Kinkade Company had filed for Chapter 11 protection, and therefore an automatic stay on all payments was in effect.
Bankruptcy was the final step in the mounting ills of the company. The gallery boom had long collapsed. More than 150 galleries had already closed, as early as 2006. The business was still struggling in the aftermath of the loss of income from the galleries, and from the huge legal fees incurred during years of battling with Norman Yatooma and a host of other lawyers.
Thom continued his output of twelve masterpieces a year. None of his personal struggles were ever apparent in his work. He painted as vibrantly and beautifully as he always had. And he valiantly went on the promotional tours to the remaining 150 galleries, to help stir the collectors’ market and bring in some extra income. But it wasn’t nearly enough to sustain the huge overhead of several hundred employees and the company’s Morgan Hill headquarters, which was the size of ten football fields.
As I later learned, senior management at the company knew they had to talk to Thom. John Hastings was doing a good job in a tough situation. He sat Thom down, along with his executive team, and made him hear him out. He told Thom the company was running out of money. Thom asked him what he meant by that. Hastings explained that business was down, and the lawsuits had cost them greatly. He told Thom they needed him to loan the company more money. He suggested Thom take out a loan on his house in Monte Sereno, or on his house in Carmel-by-the-Sea, or on his ranch in Hollister. He said Thom might even have to take out loans on all of them. But that he needed to step up now if he wanted to save the business.
By this point Thom had already loaned the company a lot of money, and he just didn’t have any more. He eventually did have to take loans out on some of his properties to sustain his company. It was a major wake-up call about just how bad things had become. Thom owned his company 100 percent; a company that had achieved sales in the billions. Everything should have been great. But now it was sucking the life out of him and draining him financially.
For Thom, having to have that particular conversation was terribly defeating. It must have felt like part of him wanted to die. Knowing him as I did, he would have been mortified, horrified, and embarrassed. He was always afraid of losing everything he had. He had talked about that fear with me many times, and told me it never left him. The memory of going hungry in the trailer park was permanently part of his consciousness. He was always afraid that one day everything he had might be taken away from him.
To have to mortgage his houses and go into debt to save his company was devastating. The money kept his dream alive; Thom took it as a sign that what he was doing was still good, and that he deserved the blessings he had. He had to believe everything was under control so he could concentrate on painting. He had to trust that the company would be successful as long as he followed the advice he was being given by his team.
The prospect that Thom might lose everything—that the company he founded, based on his mission to give people hope and provide joy, was failing—was difficult for him to endure. It wasn’t just about the art; it was also about the entire brand. The lifestyle. His faith. How could things have gone so wrong when all he ever wanted to do was right?
Thom listened to the executives on the board. He did what he had to do; he took out the loans and saved the company. But from that point on, he was a changed man. The carefree Thom, the man who never grew up, the ebullient Thom I knew so well, was less and less to be seen. Instead, a darker side came out. Nanette told me later that it was as if she was watching the light in Thom slowly go out.
I can only imagine how deep the despair inside him must have been. What began in his garage had grown into a business, and then into an empire. And now it was crumbling. The highs had been so high, and he had felt so invincible for so long, that a low point didn’t even seem possible. Thom certainly never entertained the notion. For him, the ride had seemed endless. And now it was all imploding.
In hindsight, I could see that the company had grown too fast, in part because of pressure from Wall Street. And it had been sold out by the sales machine. It had been exploited for short-term profit instead of responsible long-term fiscal planning. And the revolving door of CEOs, six in seven years alone, even though some of the executives were immensely qualified, couldn’t sustain the most extraordinary phenomenon of an art business in the history of art.
I believe this moment was the beginning of an unwinding death spiral for Thom that would take less than two years to fully unravel.
After the first intervention had failed, Nanette staged a second one in the spring of 2010, this time bringing her daughters with her, as well as Ken and Thom’s brother, Pat. It was her last-resort effort to save his life and to save their marriage. She had fought and hung in valiantly, but she had become increasingly alienated from him. There was just no reaching him anymore. The Thom she knew was disappearing fast. There comes a time when the disease progresses into such a detrimental state that the only thing that matters is to save the alcoholic from himself, even if nothing else can be saved. Recovery programs often counsel that most addicts won’t stop until the family gives them an ultimatum and they face losing everything. This was Nanette’s last resort. With everyone present, she confronted Thom with the message “Get sober or lose us.”
Thom was more than devastated; he was furious. Ken described to me later how Thom was forcibly led away by medical assistants and taken to a rehab facility, literally kicking and screaming. This ultimate humiliation was too much for Thom and resulted in the end of the marriage. He could never forgive Nanette for the shame and mortification he was made to feel. As he was being dragged off, Ken told me Thom had looked at Nanette and said, “How can you do this to me?” Sadly, Thom rejected Nanette and his family from that point on. I know how much Nanette and his daughters meant to him, and I can only imagine the depth of the disease that would allow him to be separated from them. The monstrous shame inside, mixed with the siren call of the addiction, sadly destroyed Thom’s family in its wake.
Within a month, Thom was back to drinking, even worse than before. And Nanette, his beloved Becky Thatcher, filed for divorce.
Less than two weeks after the Thomas Kinkade Company declared bankruptcy, and shortly after Nanette had filed for divorce, Thom was out at ten o’clock one night in his beloved Carmel-by-the-Sea, driving himself home after spending the evening in town. He headed up the winding path along the ocean, the Monterey pines pointing the way to his beach house.
A local police officer saw that Thom’s 2006 Mercedes was missing its front license plate and pulled him over. Speaking to Thom about the license plate, the officer suspected alcohol and called the California Highway Patrol. When they arrived they proceeded to give Thom a field sobriety test, checking his horizontal gaze tracking, making him walk and turn, and do the one-legged stand. The California Highway Patrol made a determination that he was indeed impaired and took him to the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, where his blood was drawn. He was booked into the Monterey county jail, where the police report later described him as polite and cooperative. He spent the rest of the night in jail before posting bail in the morning.
A week later, a lawyer for Thom entered a not-guilty plea at the Monterey county courthouse in Salinas, asking for additional time to retest the blood samples. A pretrial was set for a month later.
Thom texted me a few days after the arrest and said, “Can you believe these guys, Eric? I only had five beers!”
The story spread like wildfire in a Southern California Santa Ana wind. Newspaper articles and websites exploded everywhere with the news. Bloggers couldn’t get enough.
Thom always elicited strong emotions in people, both good and bad. Christians saw him as a prophet, a beacon of hope, and a messianic figure. Art aficionados strongly disliked him from the very beginning, and didn’t hesitate to say so. After Thom’s drunk-driving arrest, attacks on his person and his art took on a fevered, vitriolic pitch.
The mug shot of his DUI arrest went viral on the Internet. The photo of him with hair in disarray, eyes glazed and vacant, and red face and even redder eyes was shared, derided, and a source of copious mirth on the blogosphere. An “I Hate Thomas Kinkade” Facebook page sprang up. Bloggers called Thom pompous. They said his art sucked. They called him the Painter of Blight. They said the light had, all these years, been emanating from the bottom of a bottle.
It wasn’t just the DUI that made the news. It was the fact that the Painter of Light’s company filed for bankruptcy, that his wife filed for divorce, and that he was arrested for drunk driving—all within the space of two weeks—that made the real story. All the pieces put together made for a terrible image for Thom, and a feeding frenzy for the media.
A week before Christmas of that year, Thom entered a no-contest plea. His blood alcohol level had been found to be twice the legal limit by laboratory tests. He was sentenced to ten days in jail, with mandatory attendance at a nine-month DUI offender program, a fine of $1,846, and five years of informal court probation. The bloggers thought he was getting off too lightly. One blogger wished him a “Merry Fucking Christmas.”
Contrition requires confession, and Thom didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. He didn’t feel he deserved the hatred raining down on him, or that he had caused it in any way. He lived inside a self-protective shield of denial at all times. He couldn’t see his own sickness; the alcoholism eating away at him. He couldn’t see how his avoidance of conflict made him allow bad things to happen, simply by default. He couldn’t fathom that by so fervently wishing things to be whole and beautiful, he turned a blind eye to ugliness, and therefore the ugliness crept into his life and rooted in.
The few times I saw Thom in those days, he never talked about what was going on, or whether it was bothering him or not. Over three hundred signature galleries had closed, but we never talked about it, because Thom never talked about problems. If you brought them up, he would change the subject. But he drank more, and he looked more miserable beneath his endless hilarity and late-night antics. The toll on his psyche was written on his face, and his body was taking a beating. The humiliation and the dying dream were eating him alive.
Thom had spent his life following his dreams. He painted his heart out, and dedicated his message to the god he fervently believed in. He had enjoyed the fruits of his labor and the pleasures of the world with a kind of naïve entitlement. He loved beauty in all forms, from landscapes to the female form. He had put his vision into the world and declared it good, and he intended that his vision do good for people. He had enjoyed the effect he had on people, he loved their admiration, and he believed in his ability to serve their needs. He wanted to envelop his audience in a memory, a feeling, a world that held a sacred, safe place for them.
Thom didn’t judge others. He wasn’t a preacher, nor did he claim to be. He didn’t condemn those who didn’t follow the god he worshipped; he only witnessed to those who already believed like he did. Being Christian doesn’t automatically make you a hypocrite if you acknowledge that you are also flawed. Of course, he didn’t see his drinking as a flaw; he didn’t see his passions and boundless curiosity as flaws, either. Nor did he see his images, soft and inviting, easy on the eye, sentimental, romantic, and inherently pleasing, as flawed.
Thom’s work questioned the modern art mandate that art had to be inaccessible, cerebral, or negative in order to be legitimate. Was all art not simply a creative representation, in a variety of mediums, by one human being, of the world around him, in the way the artist understood that world? It seems that in contemporary art circles, if religion is affirmed as opposed to derided, the artwork is scorned. But should Thomas Kinkade have been ashamed of his religion?
When people have success in America, they are lauded and respected as long as they remain successful. When they lose that success, they are often descended upon like a wounded animal by a marauding horde of hyenas. Thom was under constant attack in the blogosphere after his DUI. After the lawsuits. After the truth of the Painter of Light’s alcoholism became a public fact.
What made Thomas Kinkade fair game? I’m certain that part of it was that he shook up a basic notion of the modern art world, which venerates the concept of the original. But is there inherent value or lack of value in the original versus the identical copy? Thom’s reproductions throw up interesting questions, and it will take more time to unravel the answers. It is really a conceptual question. Is art only art in the original? Is the Mona Lisa less art when depicted in a coffee table book? Did the words in the Bible become less meaningful when they were printed by Gutenberg’s printing press, rather than hand-painted by one monk for over a year? And who is the arbiter of this value, if not an art market that is most interested in its own survival?
Modern art has its own rules by which it sustains itself. Art dealers are making and breaking artists all the time. The modern art market inflates prices, collectors dump art and ruin careers, and dealers guarantee bids at auctions to protect the market value of their favored artist. There is a considerable amount of manufacturing and manipulation involved in keeping a stable collectors’ market humming. These practices aren’t necessarily any better or any more salient than Thom’s copious reproductions. They are all about creating and sustaining value, and selling to a market willing to pay. Art is a market, and it is a for-profit market. The conventional art world supports that market. Market values are intangible, driven by critical validation and scarcity.
At the height of his success, Thom drew criticism and envy for success that was largely deemed undeserved. When the business practices of his company were exposed through years of lawsuits and depositions, the art world felt redeemed. And when Thom’s drinking problem was exposed by his mug shot’s proliferation in cyberspace, he became fair game for all forms of venom and derision.
Perhaps Thom’s greatest fault, in the eyes of others, was how much he profited from the sale of his art. But is it any less shameful to sell a shark suspended in formaldehyde for $9.6 million, as did Damian Hirst in a Sotheby’s auction, than it is to sell a replica of a painting a hundred thousand times?
Slowly the light went out in Thom. I visited him at Ivy Gate Cottage one evening around ten o’clock, planning to stay the night in his spare bedroom so we could spend some time together, catching up. By this time, I had already left Creative Brands, but took great pleasure in hearing that the licensing business was essentially keeping the company afloat. While the print business was slow from the closed galleries, and the costs of the lawsuits had impacted the company’s income severely, the licensing stream still made the company millions in pure profit. Licensing had always been the redheaded stepchild in the company compared to the art business. “Eric is making calendars,” was the pervasive attitude I sensed. While the company was opening galleries, licensing was an afterthought. But the calendars people would joke about made the company well over $1 million in profit every year. Without licensing, the company most likely wouldn’t have survived.
When I reached the cottage, I knocked and heard no answer. I looked in through the windows and saw Thom lying on the floor, passed out at the foot of his easel. I later heard the housekeeper often found him this way in the morning when she came in to clean. It was the first time I saw him myself, lying on the bare wood floor, just steps away from his bedroom door. The image was disconcerting, but even then I didn’t understand why he didn’t just go and sleep in his own bed. I still couldn’t fathom the severity of his disease, not understanding that he couldn’t even make it that far at the end of a long day of drinking. I went inside and shook him awake.
“Thom, buddy, wake up. What are you doing sleeping on the floor?”
He came to, incoherent and groggy, and I just managed to get him to his bed. The next morning he was his usual self, wide awake and painting before I even got up. The previous night’s spree was forgotten, as if the world was reinvented every morning, before the drinking would begin again.
Thom now lived in his studio permanently, separate from his family. When I saw him months later, the transformation that had taken place in him was quite staggering to behold. It was Kaf kaesque. I had recently seen press photos of Thom at the Kentucky Derby; his face, unrecognizable to me, was puffed out, his eyes narrowed and lifeless, his smile wan and forced. It didn’t look like there was anyone inside the altered physical shell that was now Thom.
When I entered his cottage the day I went to visit him, I was shocked. He had gained weight, and now weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He looked terribly unhealthy, sweating and pale, with red splotches on his face from all the drinking. He had grown his hair long, but there wasn’t enough hair to grow, so he had resorted to getting hair extensions to fill out the bare spots, which only made it look worse. He wore his biker gear; his leather jacket, his torn jeans, and biker boots. He looked like a huge, angry rebel surrounded by the beautiful scenes on canvases scattered throughout his studio. It was an absurd sight. He had taken to wearing multiple skull rings, their pirate death faces grimacing from the short fingers on his small hands. He was utterly transformed from the Thom I had known for nearly two decades. I was alarmed to see him in this state.
He was edgier and less jovial than his usual self. And when he told me about how Nanette and Ken had ambushed him for an intervention and dragged him to rehab, he said, “They’re all out of their minds!”
I told him I thought they were worried about him, but he brushed it off, telling me there was nothing to worry about. He said he didn’t have a problem; that they were the ones with the problem.
This wasn’t the Thom I knew. I could see that desperate measures were necessary. Thom wasn’t the ebullient life force he always had been. The constant criticism and derision had obviously plummeted him into a deep despair and depression that he didn’t seem to be able to pull himself out of. He was dying inside. His organs were failing. His mind was fuzzy. Only his painting hadn’t slowed down; he was painting as much as ever, always at his easel. It was his sanctuary and his place of truth. No matter how physically ill he became, Thom was always a true artist. There was no denying his passion and God-given talent; it was what he was born to do.
I left his studio that day with a heavy sense of foreboding. Where would his trail of despair end?
It was the last time I ever saw him.
Meanwhile, Thomas Kinkade Company, despite its shrunken sales base and the ongoing losses from the lawsuits, quietly crossed over the $4 billion mark in total retail sales.
Months later, Thom traveled to Portofino, a picturesque seaside resort in the province of Genoa, nestled along the Italian Riviera. Italy and its Adriatic villages were favorite subjects of Thom’s for his paintings, and always a good excuse to take a vacation. Thom packed his painting supplies and flew to Portofino to paint, taking along with him a young, pretty girl he had recently met at the Hacienda bar. Thom and Nanette had not finalized their divorce at this point, and their separation was not largely known. But Thom wasn’t speaking to his family much in those days, and a trip would have seemed like a good opportunity to get away from it all.
A few days into Thom’s trip, I was told CEO John Hastings received a phone call at his office at Morgan Hill. On the other line was the young girl, crying so hysterically that he could hardly understand what she was saying. He finally managed to grasp that something had gone terribly wrong. Thom had been drinking heavily and was out of control. Apparently he hadn’t moved in his bed for two days, and the girl was afraid for his life. Hastings asked the girl if he was breathing. She said, “Yes.” He managed to get out of her that the hotel was trying to protect Thom from a scandal; they were worried about the press getting wind of it, since Thom was a prominent figure. Then she dissolved into crying again. John Hastings thought of the press and the scandal and the liability, and hung up the phone and drove right to the San Francisco International Airport to take the next nonstop flight to the Genova/Sestri airport. Then he drove to Portofino.
When he arrived at the Imperiale Palace Hotel ten hours later, he asked the front desk for the Kinkade suite. The hotel manager personally ushered him up to the room, whispering, “Thank God you are here.”
As John entered the suite, he was hit by the smell of booze, sweat, and urine. The curtains were drawn, and the girl was huddled in a corner, curled up in a fetal position, quietly crying. John approached the bed where Thom lay naked, motionless, and soiled. Two empty whiskey bottles stood on the bedside table, and one, nearly empty, was clutched in his hand.
John picked up Thom’s three-hundred-pound frame and dragged him naked into the bathroom, where he began to wash his body in the bathtub. Thom slowly came to as the girl hurriedly packed their belongings in the other room.
John got Thom down to the lobby by pushing him on a luggage cart. When the valet brought up the Mercedes Thom had rented, it was covered in dents and scratches on all sides. The girl explained that Thom had driven the winding coastal roads drunk for days, a bottle wedged between his legs, repeatedly smashing into the low stone walls and guardrails of the steep cliffs of Portofino, nearly plummeting them down to the shore. This had been the auspicious beginning of a weeklong binge that finally left him immobilized in his hotel bed.
Thom and John Hastings and the girl boarded the next plane and flew back to California, where Hastings made sure to get both Thom and the girl home safely.
Only weeks later, Thom ended up in a hospital bed, his body completely paralyzed from the neck down due to acute alcohol poisoning. For two weeks he had no use of his limbs and no sensation in his body, which had gone into toxic shock. It took two weeks of detoxing before he slowly regained the feeling and the use of his arms and legs.
Doctors told him that if he had just one more drink, it would kill him.
They told Thom there was just one decision for him to make—whether to live or die.