February 2005 Archives

Robert Sullivan, Vogue

Stately, strong-voiced Paul Hewson, a.k.a. Bono, descended from the stairhead toward the beginning of an Irish day -- bearing not his sunglasses, amazingly, but his thick, strong-gripped hand, extended in gracious welcome. With Ali Hewson, his wife, working at her desk, with his daughter about to sit down to piano lessons, in a house that feels vast and yet warm only partly because of the fireplace that is crackling, he intones, in a somewhat gravelly but still immediately recognizable rock-star voice, "Come and have a look."

At which point, grabbing coat, he walks, semi-solemnically, down his stairs, out onto the terrace of the Hewson's little guest house, a terrace that sits high over the Irish Sea, that looks east toward Europe and, to be metaphoric about it, the world, which is what Bono, as is well known, is always looking at. He strolls relaxedly through his little guest house, its bathroom wall decorated with host-sanctioned graffiti, scribblings of the likes of Brian Eno, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie and Michael Stipe -- Stipe having mischievously signed in a corner, along, as his host gleefully notes, Bono's crack.