Lifestyle
She’s Young, Trump-Friendly, and Has a White House Press Pass
The waitress was pouring tap water. But Natalie Winters was quick to ask for bottled.
“No fluoride for our dear dinner guest!” she said, gesturing to me. “Only filtered water and pesticide-free limes.”
We were sitting in the back corner of Butterworth’s, a Capitol Hill bistro that has become a destination for friends and supporters of President Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, Ms. Winters’s current boss, has hosted private events there. Her former boss, Raheem Kassam, the editor in chief of The National Pulse, is an investor. The menu that night featured lamb tartare, oysters brûlée and pork cheeks.
Ms. Winters and I had met for dinner, or so I had thought. “Honestly,” she said, “I’m probably not going to eat because that’s my brand. I don’t eat at restaurants because I don’t like the seed oils that they use.”
At 24, Ms. Winters has been a White House correspondent since Jan. 28. She reports for Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, whose audience includes large swaths of the Republican base, high-level officials and the president himself.
She belongs to a group of journalists from conservative outlets who have taken on a new national prominence in recent months as they jostle for positions in the cramped James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has described long-established news media organizations as increasingly irrelevant while accusing them of spreading “lies.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association, which includes journalists from dozens of outlets, has criticized the new administration’s handling of the press, saying it discourages independent reporting and gives priority to those who favor President Trump’s agenda. But the elevation of nontraditional outlets has been a good thing for Ms. Winters and some other journalists in the West Wing, including those representing Breitbart News and Lindell TV, the platform founded by the conspiratorial MyPillow salesman Mike Lindell.
When Ms. Winters is not seated beside Mr. Bannon in the basement studio of his townhouse near the Capitol, she is often reporting to the loyal “War Room” audience from outside the White House, delivering off-the-cuff monologues that pillory Democrats and, sometimes, her fellow reporters.
“It’s very gonzo, which I like,” she said. “I think of it as an I.Q. test every day.”
Ms. Winters describes herself as a “populist nationalist,” like Mr. Bannon. She says she “detests” more Republicans than she admires. She frequently attacks party leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson and usually supports Mr. Trump.
“Even though I agree with most of what Trump does,” Ms. Winters said, “it’s because I ideologically agree with him. Not because I am a cultist.”
She counts Mr. Bannon not only as her co-host and boss, but also as her mentor. When he went to federal prison last year for defying a subpoena from a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, he entrusted her to host “War Room” in his absence.
Since Mr. Trump’s reascension, her profile has skyrocketed to the point where she says she is recognized in restaurants and airports. She says her parents have been surprised by her often combative onscreen persona.
“It’s such a different version of myself than I am in my day-to-day life,” she said, adding, “I don’t even recognize myself.”
Ms. Winters grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., the daughter of a physician father and a stay-at-home mother. She attended Harvard-Westlake, an elite prep school in Los Angeles, and was relatively apolitical until the 2016 campaign was underway.
Various school activities struck her as liberal-coded and performative. First it was a bake sale intended to raise awareness of the gender pay gap. “Just straight-up bogus,” Ms. Winters said. Then came the student walkout in protest of gun violence after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. “A school-sanctioned walkout,” she said. “What are you doing?”
Her only published piece in the high school paper was a letter to the editor in which she made the case for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. It was not well received on the mostly liberal campus. Because of her conservative views in general and her support of Mr. Trump in particular, she was ostracized by her peers, she said.
“Maybe the trope that everything goes back to high school trauma is true,” she added.
During her senior year, after she learned she had gotten into the University of Chicago, she more or less stopped going to class. She skipped her high school graduation day because she was flying to Washington to start working as an intern for Mr. Kassam, who was then a “War Room” co-host. She also missed out on prom. “It was the best thing I ever did,” she said.
During her first year of college, Ms. Winters became a “War Room” staff writer. She frequently commuted to Washington instead of attending class. “My best friend from college is, like, Steve,” she said, referring to Mr. Bannon. As Covid spread across the globe, she made her first on-camera appearance.
“The pandemic’s really where she got her sea legs,” Mr. Bannon said in a phone interview. He used some baseball-scout lingo to describe Ms. Winters, calling her “a five-tool player.”
She has raised her visibility with her appearances on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” a YouTube talk show hosted by the former CNN personality. “She is always a lively and provocative contributor, even if I don’t agree with many of her views,” Mr. Morgan said by text. But Ms. Winters insists she’d be happy spending her days sifting through federal databases.
“She’s essentially a nerd at heart,” Mr. Bannon said.
One of the biggest feuds on the right has been between Ms. Winters’s boss and Elon Musk, who, with the president’s blessing, has embedded himself within the federal government. At the height of the rift, Mr. Bannon called Mr. Musk a “truly evil person.” In response, Mr. Musk wrote on X: “Bannon is a great talker but not a great doer.”
The spat has put Ms. Winters in a unique position. Mr. Musk is one of her 630,000 followers on X, and he frequently reposts her. She has lauded him and his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“I think I’m the only person who could bring them together and get peace,” she said, laughing.
Ms. Winters may be a White House correspondent, but her job is not so much to cover Mr. Trump’s avalanche of executive actions as it is to report and comment on what she labels “opposition forces,” whether they be Democratic politicians, liberal organizations or major news outlets.
Hugo Lowell, a White House correspondent for The Guardian, said that Ms. Winters differs from other reporters on the beat because she is “vocal about her own political views and clearly infuses them into her coverage.”
“But she’s good on TV,” Mr. Lowell added, “and she has built up an audience with Trump’s base that translates to a degree of influence in a fragmented media ecosystem.”
Ms. Winters compared the White House briefing room to high school. “This is my first time in a professional setting where my MAGA royalty clout means nothing,” she said.
Her outsider status was confirmed when the National Press Club rejected her bid to become a member. Asked about the denial of Ms. Winters’s application, a spokesperson for the organization, which was founded in 1908 and has roughly 2,500 members, said: “Decisions are made in alignment with the standards of journalism we uphold. We do not publicly comment on individual applications out of respect for all involved.”
Many White House reporters affiliated with large news organizations do not talk to her, Ms. Winters said, and several of them contacted for this article declined to comment. But, ultimately, someone who has blasted much of the news media as “ground zero of left-wing opposition to Trump” was always going to be in for a chilly reception.
At Butterworth’s, true to her word, Ms. Winters had only bottled water during our three-hour talk.
She said she has had two drinks in her life and has never done drugs. She also has a budding lifestyle brand. Items for sale include a tank top with “More insecure than the border” plastered across the front and a tote that reads “A little conspiratorial.”
Her cable news network of choice is MSNBC, which she watches partly to generate material. She said that in another world she might have been a poetry professor. “I always joke — in my day-to-day life, I really am a lib at heart,” she said.
She also loved “Barbie” and agreed with the monologue delivered by America Ferrera, in which her character says, “It is literally impossible to be a woman.” But, Ms. Winters caveats, “It’s also really hard to be a man.” She added that scores of women younger than she had asked her not only for career advice but also for tips on how to be like her.
Like a growing Gen-Z contingent, she is “anti-app,” meaning dating apps. One day, she would like to settle down with a man she can be “submissive” to, she said. She added that she had been wronged in past relationships, which only stoked her ambitions.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to get revenge,” she said. “You can watch me on TV being the next big deal.’”
Why aren’t we talking about colorectal cancer?
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If more and more young people are dying of colorectal cancer, why aren’t we talking about it? Is it because we’re too ashamed of our bodies?
Rates of colorectal cancer are rising, especially for people under 50. But it’s hard to raise awareness for a cancer that a lot of us find hard to talk about. In a recent essay for The Cut, writer Laurie Abraham described her experience of colon cancer, which included a lot of embarrassment. Talking about your bowel movements is…not fun. Can you relate?
Today, Brittany is joined by Laurie and Dr. Kimmie Ng, Co-Director of the Colon and Rectal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to get into the cultural shame around how we talk about colon cancer – and how that extends to a lack of funding and research.
Follow Brittany Luse on Instagram: @bmluse
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This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose and Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Engineering support came from Becky Brown. Our Supervising Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our Executive Producer is Veralyn Williams. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
In an overstuffed workshop in East L.A., Chris Francis reached out a heavily tattooed arm and pulled a single shoe box from one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the walls.
“Anjelica Huston,” the shoemaker and artist said. “Let’s see what’s in here.”
Removing the top of the box, he revealed two carved wooden forms known as shoe lasts that cobblers use to make their wares. Beneath those were strips of yellowing shoe patterns and a tracing of the actor’s foot with a note written in loopy cursive:
To Pasquale
My happy feet shall thank you
— Anjelica Huston
The Di Fabrizio collection includes shoe measurements for stars like Nancy Sinatra, Kim Novak, Joe Pesci and Madeline Kahn, all adorned with green, white and red striped ribbon.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Cool, huh?” Francis said, gazing reverently at the box’s contents. “Every time I open one it’s amazing. It’s like Christmas all the time.”
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For the last three years, Francis has been surrounded by a sprawling archive of famous feet originally amassed by Pasquale Di Fabrizio, the late shoemaker to the stars. From the early ‘60s to the early 2000s, Di Fabrizio created custom footwear for the rich, famous and notorious out of his humble shoe shop on 3rd Street.
The shoes went to his customers, but his voluminous collection includes shoe lasts, patterns, drawings, correspondences, leather samples and handwritten notes from thousands of clients, all stored in cardboard shoe boxes that the Italian immigrant trimmed with green, white and red striped ribbon.
The names, written in bold Magic Marker on the front of each box are a who’s who of entertainers from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and beyond: Liza Minnelli, Tom Jones, Richard Pryor, Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bea Arthur, Arsenio Hall, Nancy Sinatra, Ace Frehley. The list goes on and on.
Francis found foot measurements, wooden shoe lasts and a shoe in progress that Pasquale Di Fabrizio made for Ginger Rogers in a box marked with her name.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Shoe Machine” is one of Chris Francis’ art pieces that he has shown at museums.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“So many great people stood on these pieces of paper,” Francis said, looking at the stacks of boxes around him. “Roy Orbison. Eva Gabor. Stella Stevens. Lauren Bacall. I could pull these down all day.”
Francis never met Di Fabrizio, who died in 2008, but in 2022 he traded two pairs of his sculptural shoe-art pieces to Di Fabrizio’s friend and fellow shoemaker Gary Kazanchyan for the entirety of the Italian shoemaker’s archive. Three years later, Francis is still making his way through it all.
The amount of material is overwhelming, but he is committed to preserving Di Fabrizio’s legacy. Ultimately, he wants to find a space where he can share it with others.
“I never want to be without it, but I’m realistic that it deserves to be appreciated by more than just myself,” he said. “If my life’s work ended up in somebody’s hands, I don’t think I’d want them to just keep it for themselves forever.”
A shoemaker’s journey
Francis isn’t just cataloging L.A.’s shoemaking history, he’s helping to keep it alive.
Over the last decade and a half he’s made a name for himself as a custom shoemaker, creating handmade bespoke footwear for rockers like former Runaways guitarist Lita Ford and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, as well as sculptural art shoes that are displayed in museums like the Craft Contemporary, the Palm Springs Art Museum and SCAD FASH in Atlanta.
Wooden shoe lasts hang from the ceiling as Chris Francis works on a shoe for the singer Lita Ford in his garage.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
In his East L.A. workshop, he eschews modern technology, focusing instead on traditional methods of shoemaking, often with hand tools.
“The handmade shoe is alive and well in this shop,” he said, dressed in pressed black slacks and tinted sunglasses, chunky gold rings gleaming on his fingers. “There’s no computer here, and even the records half the time are vinyls or 78s.”
Making shoes by hand is time-consuming and expensive work — Francis doesn’t sell a pair of shoes for less than $1,800 — but for his mostly musician clientele, a sturdy, custom-made, comfortable shoe that also boasts over-the-top style is well worth the price.
“At my price point, my customers are buying something that’s really a tool,” he said. “It’s part of their look, but it also has to hit 27 guitar pedals, keep all of its crystal, be beautiful, last multiple tours and they have to be able to stand in it all night.”
Francis, who has a certain aging-rocker swagger himself, never expected to become a shoemaker.
After going to art school and hopping freight trains for several years, he moved to Los Angeles in 2002 originally to join the Merchant Marines. Instead he found work hanging multi-story graphics and billboards on the side of hotels and high-rises on the Sunset Strip and at casinos in Las Vegas. “That gave me the same thrill of riding a freight train,” he said. “Being on a high-rise building and rappelling down.”
Francis found fabric samples and designs for shoes that Pasquale Di Fabrizio made for a Broadway production of the musical “Marilyn: An American Fable.”
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Shoemaker and artist Chris Francis makes shoes the traditional way in his workshop in East Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
He discovered he had a knack for pattern making in 2008 when he began creating hand-stitched leather jackets to wear to the Hollywood parties he had started attending with his now-fiancee. One day a stranger approached him and said she knew someone who would appreciate a jacket like the ones he was making. She was a stylist for Arnel Pineda, the lead singer of Journey. Commissions from Mötley Crüe and other rock bands followed.
A few years later he became interested in making shoes, but although he knocked on the door of several shoe shops in town, he couldn’t find a mentor.
“They didn’t have time, or they’d say, ‘You belong in a rock and roll band, you’re not one of us,’” he said. “But I would say, ‘Just teach me one thing, one trick.’ And everyone had time to teach one trick.”
It was an education in much more than shoemaking.
“Almost every shoemaker I met had immigrated to the country,” he said. “So I learned how to make shoes from the Italians, from guys from Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Syria, from everybody. And while doing so, I learned about all these different cultures.”
‘He was the king’
As Francis dove deeper into the history of shoemaking in Los Angeles, one name kept coming up again and again: Pasquale Di Fabrizio.
The late Pasquale Di Fabrizio, a cobbler to the Hollywood elite, photographed in front of his collection of shoe lasts, circa 1982.
(Bret Lundberg / Images Press / Getty Images)
“I started asking other makers about him, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we remember him,’” Francis said. “He was the king.”
For more than 50 years Di Fabrizio was the most sought after shoemaker in Los Angeles. He made Liberace’s rhinestone-encrusted footwear and shod Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck for touring productions of Disney on Parade. He was the go-to shoemaker for country western stars, Vegas showgirls, Hollywood movie stars, gospel singers and casino owners. The Rat Pack helped put him on the map.
“My best customer is Dean Martin,” Di Fabrizio told The Times in 1972. “He buys 40 pairs a year.”
Sporting a thick, bristled mustache and oversize glasses, Di Fabrizio had a tough reputation. He once kicked a movie star out of his shop because the star brought back a pair of patent leather shoes that he claimed were defective. Di Fabrizio accused him of missing the urinal and peeing on them at the Oscars.
“Never come back here again,” he said in his thick Italian accent.
The shoemaker occasionally made house calls, but his customers mostly came to him. In his workshop on 3rd Street near Crescent Heights, he would trace their bare feet on a piece of paper and measure the circumference of each of their feet at the ball, around the arch, the heel and the ankle. Then he would customize a pre-carved wooden last from Italy, adding thin pieces of leather 1 millimeter at a time to more perfectly mimic the unique shape of the client’s foot.
The size and shapes of the lasts varied wildly. He once told a reporter that it took “half a cow” to make shoes for Wilt Chamberlain, who wore a size 15. In his archives, Francis found a petite high heel shoe last roughly the length of his hand.
Francis holds a foot tracing and shoe lasts made for Robert De Niro by Pasquale Di Fabrizio.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Di Fabrizio did lots of shoes for little people,” Francis said. “He really offered an important service for that community. They could have formal footwear rather than having only the option of wearing kids shoes.”
The same lasts could be used over and over again to make several pairs of shoes, as long as the heel height was the same. Each last went in its own box decorated with a ribbon in the colors of the Italian flag.
“It’s so simple, but he claims his territory with that ribbon,” Francis said. “He cared enough to take one extra step. It’s what really made that collection iconic.”
A legacy preserved
Francis first encountered Di Fabrizio’s archives in 2010 when Kazanchyan offered him a job at Andre #1 Custom Made Shoes on Sunset Boulevard. Kazanchyan inherited the shop from his uncle, Andre Kazanchyan, who once worked with Di Fabrizio and became his good friend.
Gary Kazanchyan and Di Fabrizio were close as well. When Di Fabrizio retired in the early 2000s, Kazanchyan hired all of the guys who worked at his shop. Di Fabrizio was at Kazanchyan’s wedding and when the older shoemaker was in a nursing home at the end of his life, Kazanchyan visited him every day.
For years Kazanchyan stored as many of the ribbon-trimmed boxes as he could fit in his Hollywood shop, but just before COVID he moved his shop to his garage in Burbank and transferred Di Fabrizio’s archives to his backyard. “At one point, my whole backyard was this mountain of shoe lasts,” he said.
Chris Francis, left, and Gary Kazanchyan at Palermo’s Italian Restaurant in Los Feliz.
(Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times)
Kazanchyan started a renovation on his house in 2022 and could no longer store Di Fabrizio’s archive in his backyard. He’d sold some of the most famous shoe lasts at auction — a bundle of Di Fabrizio’s shoe lasts for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. went for $4,375 in 2013 — but he still had several tons of material stacked on pallets and covered in tarps. He remembered that Francis loved the collection, so he called him and asked if he wanted it. Francis did.
Francis didn’t have the money to purchase the collection in cash, but he offered Kazanchyan two art pieces that he’d exhibited and Kazanchyan accepted. The first carload of boxes Francis took to his studio included lasts for Wayne Newton, Paula Abdul, Ginger Rogers, Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone.
“My excitement was on fire,” he said.
Francis spent a few weeks sorting through the archive and discarding lasts and shoe boxes that were too covered in mold or deteriorated to be worth keeping. Just before a rainstorm threatened the rest of the collection, he brought thousands of shoe lasts to his studio but even now regrets that he was unable to save it all.
“I tried to grab the big names, but there was so much I couldn’t keep,” he said. “It was heartbreaking.”
The boxes hold stories — and life lessons
Living and working among the Di Fabrizio collection has taught Francis a lot more than just the art of making shoes.
“I’m constantly seeing the obituary of a celebrity who has passed and I go to the workshop and there’s their box,” he said. “It really lets you know that life is for the living. It’s up to you to be responsible and live your life when you’re alive. Be yourself, teach others, leave something behind.”
Hanging onto the collection has not been easy — but Francis believes he was chosen from beyond to care for Di Fabrizio’s archive and to share it with others responsibly.
He’s still not sure what that will look like, but he’s determined to try.
And in the meantime, he is also determined to keep the traditional art of shoemaking alive in Los Angeles.
If you look around his workshop, you’ll spot several boxes adorned with red, white and blue striped ribbon.
Francis is making those boxes his own.
Working with hand tools, Chris Francis makes a custom pair of shoes for musician Lita Ford.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: Bobbi Brown’s massively successful career started because of two words, “Why not?” Why not cold call a bunch of famous make up artists to get her first job in the industry? Why not make her own make up? Why not go into business with a global cosmetics brand, then break up with them decades later? Why not start over in her sixties, launch a new company and become a TikTok star in the process?
When Bobbi Brown asks “Why not?” it’s like she’s daring someone to answer. Daring someone to curb her ambition or thwart her dreams. Which is impossible since she has already made up her mind to go for it.
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