Kris Carr: Crazy Sexy Entrepreneur
By MIREILLE SILCOFF
Published: August 12, 2011
Please note that nearly every person at the vegan cafe in Woodstock, N.Y., was looking at Kris Carr. The waiter was trembling a little. This has been happening to her a lot lately. In New York City, in Denver, in San Francisco, in Portland, Ore., she can’t get a green drink at an organic juice bar or pick up goji berries at the Whole Foods Market and remain incognito. Somebody will see the giant, slightly googly green eyes and the hair whipped into a folded-over ponytail with a trademark streak of hot pink, and that’s enough for the tweeting about another Kris Carr sighting to begin.
Andres Serrano for The New York Times
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Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan
Carr and Donna Karan, at the launch party Karan hosted for “Crazy Sexy Cancer.”
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Carr — “wellness warrior,” best-selling author, prominent green-juice lover, emerging force on the motivational circuit, a woman Oprah has called a “crazy sexy teacher”— said it’s easier here in Woodstock, where she lives. She said that sitting here, in the Garden Café on the Green, with Bob Dylan warbling through the speakers, she was sure that nobody cared who she was. She was being humble. In truth, Kris Carr could be no more famous anywhere else on the planet than in the orbit of Woodstock vegan cafes. This is changing quickly, however, as the self-described “healing junkie” looks to ascend to the rarefied air where health and pop culture and marketing all intersect, a realm where names like Dr. Oz and Andrew Weil currently reign.
Such an ascent might not be all that unusual if Carr were simply a sparkling and attractive 39-year-old, who looks as fresh as a blade of grass and who signs her e-mails “love & glitter & unicorns!” and “peace ’n’ veggies!” while also sharing stages with top Harvard doctors and Deepak Chopra. But in the case of Carr, the idea that everyone seems to want a little bit of what she has is frankly fascinating, because the thing she is most famous for having is cancer. She was given the diagnosis in 2003 and rose to prominence with a 2007 documentary called “Crazy Sexy Cancer.” She subsequently wrote two successful books— “Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips” and “Crazy Sexy Cancer Survivor” — about her peppy, pop-spiritual approach to her disease, and she soon became what she sometimes describes as a “cancerlebrity” or, at other times, a “cancer cowgirl.”
Now she has a blossoming business. At the cafe, she laid it all out while sipping a coconut-vanilla chai with soy. Her blog postings are being syndicated, she has pending sponsorship contracts, her weekend workshops are thriving and she has provided one-on-one coaching sessions on Skype ($250 for 90 minutes). She also just bought a farm — 16 acres complete with two houses, a barn, a meadow and a forest to get lost in.
Her next move, however, is her most audacious, as she looks to make the leap from “cancer person” to “total wellness” guru. Her third book, “Crazy Sexy Diet,” which came out in January, became her first New York Times best seller, and for the first time for Carr, the word “cancer” isn’t on the cover. She is also in the process of consolidating a couple of her various Web sites, including crazysexycancer.com, into one megasite under the name crazysexylife.
She regards all this as a natural progression. “I mean, what is health?” she asked me, her lashes fluttering over her chai. “Or sickness?” She sees her tumors as beauty marks and illness and health as two sides of the same coin. “And anyway, would you listen to some plain Jane who’s never been in the trenches tell you why you need to eat more kale? I don’t think you would.” She unraveled her ponytail. Her hot pink lock, what she calls her freak flag, fell over her collarbone. “That’s just not the world we are living in,” she said.
It’s safe to say that Kris Carr’s journey could not have existed at any other moment in history. Even 10 years ago, her cancer might well have been the end of her story, not the beginning. Carr was 31 when doctors diagnosed Stage 4 epithelioid hemangioendothelioma, a vascular sarcoma that had dotted her liver and lungs with tumors. This sarcoma is so rare that only 40 to 80 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year. And it is only since the mid-’90s that American researchers have understood that this cancer generally presents in two ways: very aggressive, when an EHE patient can learn they have dozens of lesions after a visit to the doctor’s and be dead of rampaging tumors six weeks after the discovery, or extremely passive, when the growths, even vast constellations of them, can remain more or less dormant for long stretches. Carr’s turned out to be the latter sort.
Had her cancer been diagnosed only a handful of years earlier, says Dr. George Demetri, her oncologist at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a world leader in the study and treatment of rare sarcomas, chances are she would have been subjected to aggressive chemotherapy, probably to no benefit. Instead Carr received what at the time may have still seemed an experimental strategy for treatment: no treatment at all. They decided to keep it under medical surveillance, but otherwise, “it was, ‘Let’s let cancer make the first move,’ ” Carr says. “It was, ‘Go out and live your life.’ ” And she has since made that her message, one that’s suited to these times: not life in spite of cancer, but because of it.
In 1971 there were three million cancer survivors living in America. In 2011 there are nearly 12 million, and more than half that number received their diagnoses 10 or more years ago. “So with Kris Carr, you see it’s this new era,” says Ellen Stovall, senior health-policy adviser for the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. “Because she’s tapped into this phenomenal sociology of what it’s like living with the sword of Damocles there all the time. With cancer, it’s not ‘death or cure’ anymore. You see the word ‘chronic’ a lot more. It’s a very different way to live with it — and many need to figure out how.”
This new reality — millions of Americans living long, full lives with cancer — has become so widespread that it has even been popping up outside the zone of clinics and support groups, making inroads into the popular culture. In her influential 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote, “The cancer personality is regarded . . . with condescension, as one of life’s losers,” but to look at television today, the opposite is true. The flipside archetype is personified by Cathy Jamison, the heroine of “The Big C,” who takes a diagnosis of melanoma as her cue to quit being a doormat and become the sports-car-driving, fire-blooded woman she’d always wanted to be. Or by Walter White, the gun-slinging, Wild West outlaw in “Breaking Bad,” who, before a lung-cancer diagnosis, was a sapless, nerdy Albuquerque chemistry teacher.
Then, of course, there is Carr’s success. “I wanted to say this isn’t your grandma’s cancer,” she says. “And at the bookstore, all I could find was all this old, sad, pass-the-tissues Hallmark stuff.” So she developed a style that’s a mash-up of “Eat, Pray, Love” and the expletive-laced pro-vegan “Skinny Bitch” books, her voice frilled with easy intimacy and bedecked with hot-pink chick-to-chick flourishes. Carr’s cancer world is a place where prostheses are for “boobies,” medical binders are “bitchin’ ” and patients are encouraged to become “ ‘Prevention Is Hot’ cheerleaders.” In one of her books, she suggested you deck out your bathroom like “a detox ashram” before giving yourself an enema. Through her looking glass, there is the time, money and energy for vigorous dry brushing and eco-friendly “shopping therapy” and long, meaningful moments spent signaling the wellness muse in a self-built “sacred space” garlanded with flowers. She has created an aspirational fantasia, and she has implemented it in a place nobody dared try it before: the realm of illness. Just because you are giving yourself an enema with a hose, she wrote in one passage, “doesn’t mean you have to be in an antiseptic environment. Surround yourself with style and beauty.” This is, in a way, her call to arms.
Carr got her news on Feb. 14, 2003: more than 20 tumors on her liver and lungs. In her journal, she wrote: “Happy Valentine’s Day — you have cancer,” and encircled the greeting in a heart. She was a party girl living in New York City, an actress and dancer who had put herself through training by working as a cocktail waitress at Manny’s Car Wash, a blues club. In those days, her primary concerns included “not having back fat in a leotard.” She says she was “a social smoker, a drinker” and “a scarfer, a barfer.” “I basically lived on microwaveable diet food — the faster, the simpler, the faker, the better. If you had asked me then about natural healing, I would have said tea with honey with a shot of Wild Turkey. Wild Turkey was holistic.”
She grew up in a former one-room schoolhouse in the middle-class town of Pawling, N.Y. Ambitious for stardom, she decamped to New York City at 19, and her career had its highlights — a lead in an Arthur Miller play directed by the playwright; a spot in the touring production of “Chicago” — along with commercials for Taco Bell, Budweiser and Lysol. But after getting her diagnosis and moving back in with her parents, she started to realize how her life in Manhattan had been grinding away at her. She’d been gobbling Prozac, searching for meaning. “It was all exhaustion,” she says. “I was not satisfied with my life, and I was treating myself like garbage.” One night, a year before her diagnosis and months before she started having the excruciating gut pains that would ultimately take her to hospital, she looked into a bathroom mirror and said, out loud: “You have got to change. You are going to get cancer.” She now thinks it was her body telling her what it already knew.
Carr calls that period “B.C. — before cancer.” In her narrative, the phoenix emerges from the ashes only after she enters the white world of the hospital. This transition was not easy. Before finding Dr. Demetri at Dana-Farber, she spoke to four other oncologists. One kept her waiting for three hours, gave her 10 years to live and then abruptly left to see another patient. Another off-handedly suggested a triple organ transplant. But something about the wrongness of it all galvanized a previously untapped drive in Carr. “I realized,” she says, “that if I was going to make it through this, I needed to become the C.E.O. of my own healing start-up.” Carr called her imaginary company “Save My Ass Technologies Inc.” She began meeting with doctors as if they were applying for a choice job with her.
Carr’s earliest “corporate” decision — that of picking up a camera and beginning to film everything that happened, first alone, and then with a crew — might seem like a career-minded move in an age of blockbuster memoirs and reality TV, but she says it was about “using my creativity to channel my fear, a way to distance myself from my story.” In the landscape of young adults with cancer, there seem to be a good number of women, in their 20s and 30s, who have fashioned their bad diagnoses into springboards to more public profiles — becoming bloggers or memoirists or starting foundations. When faced with the lens of Carr’s video camera, Dr. Demetri said that many of his patients were “filming their cancer journeys.” What is clear is that Carr could construe that cancer had its opportunities, be they personal (“what if you could come to understand the Big C not as the stereotypical death sentence, but as a chance . . . to truly live life”) or professional (“I decided cancer needed a makeover, and I was just the gal to do it!”). About a year into filming, she wrote, again in her journal, “Oprah, I’m coming, save me a seat!”
Carr took her documentary’s title, “Crazy Sexy Cancer,” from the one she used for the update e-mails she’d been sending to family and friends since her diagnosis. The film premiered at the South by Southwest Festival and then was shown on the cable network TLC in August 2007. It is the presentation of one woman’s universe as a classic hero’s journey. We are with Carr as she enters the M.R.I. tunnel as a scared, miserable patient, and we are there when she emerges twirling down country roads, the world on a string. After a yearlong flirtation with macrobiotics and the freakier end of the new-age healing scene, she cracked what she believes to be her own personal life-giving code: a very of-the-times regimen of daily green juicing and a pH-conscious, plant-based, high-alkaline, anti-inflammatory diet, “because cancer thrives in an acidic environment.” She embraced purified water, nontoxic cosmetic products, light Eastern spiritual practice like yoga and giant helpings of blowsy self-love.
At her most exuberant, Carr can make cancer look like some haute hippie holiday, less a terrifying diagnosis than an escape from the rat race. In less immoderate moments, she shows illness to be a chance for growth, espousing some of the same “problem as opportunity” ideas you can find in the best-selling pop-Buddhism books by authors like Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh, which have become popular lately in oncology wards. At the close of her film, Carr is joyful, her tumors are inert and she is newly married to the editor of her movie, Brian Fassett. She says she feels healthier than she ever knew humanly possible.
Before “Crazy Sexy Cancer” had even been on TV, Carr found a way of getting copies of it to a few influential people. “I already knew that people were seeing me as awake,” she says. “Somebody who had life force. And if I had that, with this cancer, it became a reflection of how their life could go.” The day Donna Karan — the fashion designer who set up a wellness institute called the Urban Zen Foundation after losing her husband to cancer — received Carr’s film, she watched it twice, phoned an assistant and said, “Find this girl.” Karan ended up giving Carr the launch party for “Crazy Sexy Cancer” at her house in the Hamptons. Katie Couric, Christie Brinkley, Christy Turlington and Ed Burns attended. The event was covered by Vanity Fair. The morning after the film was on TV, Carr woke up to thousands of e-mails in her inbox. Two months later, she was telling the rest of America all about it, sitting on Oprah’s white couch and clinking glasses of cucumber-kale juice with Dr. Oz.
For a woman whose public face relies on a certain open-fronted brio, Carr’s life in Woodstock is surprisingly hermetic. She travels between her home — a brown bungalow until the renovations at the farm are complete — and her office, an apartment above an incense-redolent head shop on Woodstock’s main drag. “I can just see what you’re thinking, what you’re going to write,” she said as we climbed the stairs. “ ‘Kris Carr’s office staircase smells like a head shop.’ ” Her staff members, including Fassett, refer to themselves as her “protective team,” and she admits to having little time for a social life. Carr counts her dog, a rescue mutt named Lola, among her best friends, and she seemed more comfortable talking about professional mentors, of which she says she has had many, including Karan, the self-help author Marianne Williamson and a handful of high-profile doctor-slash-authors who have contributed to Carr’s books, including Mark Hyman and Dean Ornish.
Fassett used to work as a film editor for PBS’s “Frontline” and the Discovery Channel, but now he’s employed full time, as director of production and operations, by Carr’s company, Crazy Sexy Wellness. At the office, he was sitting between two monitors, editing footage of Carr swinging a sledgehammer, knocking down walls in the main house of the new farm. The footage was destined for crazysexylife.com, which currently attracts about half of Carr’s 200,000 monthly Web readers. And what everyone wants to see, Fassett said, pointing his chin at his wife onscreen, hacking at a mantelpiece, “is this. People just want to know what Kris is doing.”
Carr says it was just over a year ago that a “new era” had crystallized for her. On the road, between signings and media appearances and keynotes at oncologist’s conferences, she started asking her fans, the women who waited offstage wanting autographs, “So what’s your cancer?” Previously, answers had ranged from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to clear-cell carcinoma, but the more Carr got around, the more the answers changed. Some said the loss of a spouse or child, some said divorce, some said diabetes, or career dissatisfaction, or chronic fatigue, or relentless boredom, or postpartum weight gain, or just feeling gross. For some of Carr’s growing fan base, the big C was cellulite. Carr decided to take it all seriously. “I just think it’s not my job to judge your [expletive] pickle,” she says. “But it is my job to help you get out of it.”
In a way, this is a more comfortable place for Carr. When she came out in 2007 as a self-titled “poster girl for cancer,” she might not have imagined her condition would turn out as stable as it has. Since the point at which she decided to forgo conventional medical treatment, she has been virtually asymptomatic.
While it’s all very well to attribute this to her diet and lifestyle changes, when she is presented as a spokeswoman for a disease that ravages the lives of millions, her message can be harder to swallow. She has been in the trenches, as she says — her disease is Stage 4, and with cancer, there is no Stage 5 — but her trenches have proved to be largely metaphorical: the specter of what might happen to her. To a person currently undergoing hardcore combination chemotherapy, the idea that now’s the time to be “pHabulous” might make that person want to throw Carr’s chipper empowerment out the window. Someone on the brink of death might read that cancer is a chance to “shake your booty” and think it’s the bitterest form of peer pressure. One, after all, needs to be at a certain level of healthy to create an enema ashram.
Carr’s assistant, Rachel, arrived at the office, sitting down at a desk and tearing into a large package containing a variety of message-emblazoned T-shirts she ordered from a company called Herbivore Clothing, which read “Wings Are for Flying, Not Frying” and “Cow-Hugger.” Rachel says there are some weeks in which dozens of packages arrive daily from companies hoping to entice Carr into a deal. She makes a small commission through endorsement of products. Currently, on her crazysexylife shopping page, the products she “loves” include nutrient supplements, water ionizers and portable saunas. She gets a cut every time her site leads to an online purchase. She says she sees herself as eventually becoming “the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in the wellness world.”
Possibly as a result of this, brand names fly around her office like confetti at a wedding. Carr noticed I was “not hydrating enough” and offered “a cold Klean Kanteen of pure water.” Breville juicers and Vitamix blenders and the Whole Foods Market are mentioned so often, you wonder if Carr doesn’t get a cut every time her lips form the names.
“But I have to be careful about what I come out liking,” she said. “I’m under a microscope. I had red nail polish on in one of my Web videos, and it wasn’t natural, and I got called out.”
She produced containers of green juice from a cooler. “Today it’s smoothies,” she said, handing me a sealed jar. “Almond butter, cucumbers, romaine, kale, ginger and two pears.” The concoction tasted infinitely better than you’d think something this green and unctuous would. I made a joke about the vegans I used to know in college in the early 1990s, when eating zero animal products was more of a niche pursuit. Those vegans all looked a bit sallow. They didn’t tend to smell great either. “Oh, that’s because they were probably muffin vegans,” Carr said. “The gaunt, unhealthy vegan is the muffin vegan. Bread and fries and processed veggie dogs. It’s like, hello? Did you eat your vegetables? The plants are the root of everything in this lifestyle.”
Rachel sorted through Carr’s inbox with her. Many messages were business proposals: Theodore from a publishing house in Brooklyn wanted Carr to feature his books on her site; the owner of a raw-food place on Long Island wanted to know about fees; a woman with something called a “water enhancer” was interested in an affiliate relationship, as was an all-natural mattress company.
“They want to send you a mattress,” Rachel said. “So you can see what you think. They only have a few endorsement relationships, and say they want to be as creative with endorsement as possible —”
“Sounds like me, on a mattress, like, helloooo,” Carr said, deepening her voice and striking a sexy pose.
“They’re on Dr. Oz’s No. 1 hot list for products — ”
“Oh, Oz is endorsing?”
“Ha, ha, look how cute. Here’s Dr. Oz on their Web site. ‘I believe in this mattress. . . . ’ ”
“That could be me! Except they’d want me all helloooo,” Carr said, reprising the pose.
The inbox was also stuffed with fan mail, though Carr no longer has the time to read it all. Form replies, sent out by Rachel, usually direct people to share their experiences, cancer and otherwise, on Carr’s online forums. The only e-mails Carr is completely shielded from are those sent by people with a much more aggressive form of the same cancer as her own. Those messages go from the inbox to Fassett, who decides whether they should ever be seen by Carr. “I used to do it,” Carr said. “Read them. But usually these people are very, very sick, losing limbs. And it just affects me too hard, like, ‘Is that what is going to happen?’ It’s just too scary. So I tell myself: Move on, Kris. Grab a green drink, Kris, and move on.”
It was late afternoon when Carr and I left her office. I was sloppy with hunger, grateful for an energy bar I had in my bag and exhausted to the point of slurring. Carr showed no signs of flagging energy or a rumbling stomach, having efficiently gone the day on a vegan wrap, the smoothie and that coconut-vanilla chai. We headed over to her new farm. Fassett was already there, clearing debris from the barn that will be Crazy Sexy Wellness’s new headquarters.
“I always wanted a fun barn,” Carr said, bounding into the space, describing how she was envisioning it with oriental rugs and a drum kit. “Wouldn’t it be great to run my company from a fun barn?” She showed me the main house: where the master bedroom will go, the second bedroom, the third. She talked a lot about nesting, about starting a family with Fassett. I asked if she ever thinks about what would happen to everything she’s building — in so many ways predicated on her continued health — if her cancer did flare up. Carr didn’t really heed the question. She said that’s not the shape her thoughts take. “I know you can’t fight the river,” she said, though she added, “I’m trying to build a company that can run without me at some point.”
A week later she phoned me from a hotel in Chicago, wanting to clarify. She was afraid that she made too much light of the dark, that in presenting herself as a new-school beacon of health, she had left too much illness behind. “Something happened when I got onstage to teach tonight,” she said. Usually, she opens with a standard, “Hi, my name is Kris, and I am a cancer survivor.” But this time the words didn’t ring true to her. “So I got up on the stage, and the whole room felt really still to me. And I said, ‘Hello, my name is Kris Carr, and I am a cancer thriver.’ And as soon as I said it, I knew it was right. Because that is what I am, isn’t it?”
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