For a man who is to be crowned by the Gawker Web sites at an awards ceremony in New York next month as America’s biggest emerging sex symbol, Levi Johnston cuts a very modest figure when you meet him in person. He is wearing a pair of black canvas work trousers that are splattered with mud, a scraggy T-shirt advertising Browning rifles and a khaki cap from under which a splodge of rather greasy dark hair curls up. He badly needs a shave.
To be fair, he has just got back from what he calls a “suicide trip,” meaning a spontaneous hunting expedition, to the Alaskan outback. He and three buddies tracked and killed two black bears, skinning the hide off the 2m-long animals to turn them into trophies (they didn’t keep the meat because he says it’s “not very good”).
Immediately before that he was away for a fortnight’s moose hunting. And earlier in the summer he was out on the mountain ranges hunting sheep. Wait a minute, I say, as we sit talking in an office in downtown Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Did you say hunting sheep?
“Yeah. But it’s a totally different kind of sheep. They are living in the craziest, hardest mountains to climb, with cliffs on either side — if you slip and fall you are done. Besides, sheep are very smart animals.”
I interject a second time. Sheep are very clever animals?
“Yeah. Dall sheep are very smart.”
I’ve been with Johnston for under 10 minutes and already the conversation has taken a turn that, were we anywhere else, would seem bizarre. But that’s the way with Alaska, and certainly with Levi Johnston — you cannot understand the place, or the man, unless you suspend judgment.
It was, after all, while Johnston was out hunting sheep on the Delta River that he received the news that was to change his life. It was Aug. 29, 2008. When he returned to his truck at the end of the day he found his mobile phone full of messages from his girlfriend, Bristol Palin.
Her mother, the then governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, had just been chosen as John McCain’s Republican running mate, to go head-to-head against Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the US presidential elections.
That announcement didn’t just propel Palin from relative political obscurity into the stratosphere, turning her into the darling of large sections of the Republican rump and a soon-to-be bestselling author. It also dragged Johnston kicking and screaming behind her. Before that moment, his life had been unremarkable. He planned to be a professional ice hockey player or, if that failed, an electrician like most of the men in his family.
But from that instant, he found himself sucked into a media scrum within which he’s been confined pretty much ever since. When it was revealed just a few days after Palin’s candidacy was announced that her daughter was pregnant, interest in Johnston exploded. His photograph was plastered over newspapers, TV channels and billboards in the US; his childish MySpace utterances were forensically dissected; there was talk of a White House wedding should there be a McCain-Palin win.
Since the election last November, the birth of his son, Tripp, and his later split with Bristol, there has been no letup. His unsophisticated tastes have been recast into the image of a male model, a would-be Hollywood actor, and now Gawker award-winner. In short, the sheep hunter has been transformed into an international sex symbol.
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