How Doug Pitt Stepped Out of His Brother's Shadow

The story pitch is straightforward: Brad Pitt’s brother is bringing Care to Learn, the nonprofit he founded in Springfield, Missouri, to St. Louis. The organization steps in with instant, practical solutions whenever poverty keeps kids from going to school or makes them too miserable to learn.

It sounds like a nice short piece. In our celebrity-crazed culture, Brad’s name will get people’s attention, and the kids’ problems will pluck their heartstrings.

I Google “Brad Pitt’s brother.”

His name is Doug Pitt. He was the first goodwill ambassador to Tanzania and the first man to cycle—with unprecedented government permission—down Mount Kilimanjaro. He received a humanitarian leadership award from the Starkey Hearing Foundation in 2011, alongside President Bill Clinton. He joined the board of WorldServe International and helped it grow into one of the largest private drilling companies in East Africa, bringing clean water to more than 1 million Tanzanians. He’s a successful business owner, and both the Republicans and the Democrats have asked him to run for office. He said he’d frustrate them; the only thing predictable about his politics is his independence.

I click yet another link and start to laugh. After years of living quietly in Springfield and politely repeating “no comment,” Doug decided to leverage his celeb-brother status to raise some money for Care to Learn. The tongue-in-cheek video he made for Virgin Mobile Australia in 2012, “The Second Most Famous Pitt,” went viral and got more than 1.2 million YouTube hits in its first week.

The second most famous Pitt was promptly invited onto the Today show. On the clip, host Matt Lauer asks Doug if he had to get Brad’s permission to do the video and how he handles the “Brad moments” (strangers buttonholing him to ask breathless questions about his sibling).

“Whatever you do, don’t ask him about his brother,” my husband calls from the next room.

“Not even how hard it is to be Brad Pitt’s brother?”

“Not even that,” says my husband, who still dreads his mother’s news flashes about the meteoric rise of cousin Selden the stockbroker.

And so, Brad becomes what he’s been for his little brother for two decades now: the elephant in the room.

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I first meet Doug in August. Turns out he comes to St. Louis fairly often for business meetings. In 2013, he merged his company, ServiceWorld Computer Center, with TSI Global Companies, which is headquartered in St. Charles.

On this trip, though, Doug is launching Care to Learn. He’s already got three school districts interested: Hazelwood, St. Charles, and Warrenton. Joe Buck (who went on a Kilimanjaro expedition with Doug), Chris Long, Jim Edmonds, and Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder have all agreed to join the board. Its chair is an old friend from Springfield, Donn Sorensen, who came to

St. Louis to be regional president of Mercy health system. Early on, he told Doug, “We need to bring Care to Learn up here.”

Care to Learn began with a 2005 Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce meeting. Morey Mechlin’s term was up, and she used her parting speech to talk about poverty and homelessness in Springfield. She listed off examples: three siblings sharing a toothbrush. Children without shoes or winter coats. Children too hungry to concentrate.

“Just a number of stories like that,” Doug tells me. “I couldn’t shake them, just couldn’t shake them.” His voice is warm, and though he measures his words, his southern Missouri twang makes everything he says sound casual and friendly.

The story that particularly bothered him, he adds, was the fifth-grade boy teased mercilessly because he had to wear his mom’s jeans to school.

Why that story, I wonder, psychoanalyzing wildly. Did he feel gawky and insecure at that age? Was he teased?

“I think why it bothers me so much is because it’s so easy to fix,” he says. “And here I couldn’t find that kid. I didn’t know who he was.”

A few days after Mechlin gave her speech, Doug sat at a stoplight thinking, “We’re gonna do something about this.” A $50,000 check from Brad started him off, but from there, the fundraising was on him. He ran Care to Learn like a business, slashing through red tape. He hired Mechlin as executive director and told her not to bother hiring coordinators to investigate a child’s need. The teachers know who needs help. And don’t make this difficult. Don’t insist that parents fill out a 10-page form. If you hear of a child’s need, don’t ask questions. Get the kids what they need, that day. If they show up without a coat, they go home wearing one. If they can’t see the board, they get glasses that afternoon.

“There’s always that pessimist in the crowd who says, ‘You’re just enabling these deadbeat parents,’” Doug remarks. “My original response was, ‘So what?’ The kid didn’t ask to be there, and he sure as heck doesn’t deserve to be there. The parents, whether they’re awesome or struggling or idiots is really not my concern.” These days, he fights back harder because he can see the trajectory. In six years, Care to Learn has filled more than 350,000 needs, large and small, and spread to 18 chapters.

Care to Learn sets no ceiling on the help it will give. “And if that kid needs help and has a sister or brother, obviously they will need help too,” Doug says. “We try to be proactive. In elementary school, it’s easy to find them. They cry or wear it on their sleeve. In high school, they will get to school and clean up in the sink. They do their best to hide it. And by the time we find them, it’s extremely serious. Their food’s coming from Dumpsters; they’re jumping couches. We’ve got a lot of kids making adult decisions.”

There’s an intensity about this guy, a quiet core that refuses to be rushed or provoked. Even when he glances at his phone, he manages to seem unhurried. He doesn’t babble; he just answers questions and stops. Self-contained.

I ask when we can talk again. He says he won’t be available the following week; he’ll be in Europe.

Something work related?

“Noooooo, just a family fun thing,” he says, sounding awkward and evasive for the first time.

While I wait, I piece together Doug’s youth by talking to three of his closest buddies. Stuart Walsworth and Steve Mabry have known him since first grade, when they all played Kiwanis baseball. Matt Miller joined the trio in middle school.

And Doug was anything but gawky and insecure. “He looked like a beach bum,” recalls Mabry, who swam at the same pool. “He had super-blond hair from sun and chlorine, and he always had a great tan.” At Kickapoo High School, Doug was the well-rounded sort, kind of quiet but still popular, a jock who still pulled down decent grades, ensconced in a tight group of 15 guy friends. When he and his buddies started chasing girls, his shy grin was a magnet for any female in their path. “He’s a pretty reserved guy,” says Miller, “so his flirting was probably limited to showing his dimples. And he’s a pretty loyal guy—he would have a girl around for a long time. Usually the most popular girl, a cheerleader.”

The Pitts were the most wholesome family on the planet. Bill Pitt managed a trucking company and made enough money to keep his family more than comfortable, but he and his wife had too much God-fearing good sense to put on airs. Jane was an artist but practical enough to give her children—Brad, Doug, and their sister, Julie—a solid framework of love, faith, home-cooked meals, and consistent curfews. Jane got kids, understood what they needed. And though she was a devout Southern Baptist, she never presented having fun and being good as mutually exclusive.

The Pitts’ basement was a regular hangout for the kids’ friends, strategically equipped with a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, a pinball machine, and dartboard. Friday and Saturday nights, it rang with shouts and laughter.

But what Doug heard on Sunday mornings stuck, in a way it didn’t with most teenagers.

“We were thick as thieves first grade through junior high,” Mabry says. “In high school, Stuey and I probably took a little bit different path than Doug did. His faith was strong enough early on. We got a lot wilder. Doug definitely did not.”

They muttered about him “going hard-core” when he enrolled at Oral Roberts University, influenced by his girlfriend and his youth pastor. But three semesters later, Doug decided to transfer to Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University).

Brad, meanwhile, had left the University of Missouri–Columbia two credits short of graduating, and he was out in L.A. driving limos, moving refrigerators, snagging bit parts in soap operas, and dressing as a giant chicken for the El Pollo Loco restaurant chain. Doug went out to stay with him for a month—and arrived just as Brad got his first movie part and flew off to Yugoslavia to film The Dark Side of the Sun. Doug, 20 years old and away from the Midwest for the first time, had the apartment to himself.

One month turned into six. He got a job waiting tables at a little French restaurant, went to the beach a lot, asked the homeless people sleeping there if they’d been saved. He was learning to integrate his faith, developed in a sheltered and familiar world, with an exciting, sometimes jarring new culture. And in the hours he spent alone, he was developing an inner compass.

He was about to need it.

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Doug calls me Wednesday morning, August 27. “I flew in last night from overseas. Thought I’d be wiped, but I’m not. Do you want to talk about 10? A little earlier, a little later’s fine. I’m in no hurry.”

This time, he’s more relaxed. He tells me he was rowdy as a kid and got some epic spankings from his father. “Well deserved, and I remember them all. I wasn’t afraid to push the boundaries.” In school, he says, “We were all three pretty similar. All got decent grades. I probably had a few more red check marks than the other two.”

I feel like I’m playing a sorting game: “Rowdy” doesn’t fit with “quiet.”

“I guess my definition of ‘rowdy’ may be a little different than other people’s,” he concedes. “I was the designated driver often.”

We set a time for the next interview. That afternoon, I see the news online.

Doug’s “family fun thing” was a trip to Château Miraval in Provence for his brother’s long-anticipated wedding. Only 22 people were invited—including Brad’s parents and siblings but not their spouses.

Mabry tells me later that the guys went to the Kiss/Def Leppard concert when Doug got back to St. Louis. “He called Lisa from the car and had her on speaker phone, and I could tell she was peeved. She didn’t get invited. And she’s going to get barraged with all these questions from her friends. So Doug gets back to St. Louis and meets his boys for Kiss and Def Leppard. I could hear it in her voice. I would have noticed in a heartbeat and taken it off speaker. I always want people to think my wife thinks I’m wonderful. But no, he just kept answering her: ‘All right, babe. I’ll see you then.’”

Doug’s steady. And while there may have been a little strain in Lisa’s voice that evening, most days she bubbles over with warmth and energy. It’s like somebody gave her extra, and she can’t wait to share it. She’s frank and nonchalant about living “under the Brad cloud, the whole Hollywood thing.” Their kids had to be discreet growing up, she says, “because Doug would never disrespect Brad ever, ever, ever.” They’ve all learned to smile and nod. As for Doug, “he’s just kind of cool. Being in the spotlight puts you in that position. You don’t really ever go out in your underwear. You don’t wear black socks. But he has never shown arrogance or any type of—I just call it Hollywood. I’ve never seen that in him.”

Still, Doug Pitt has got to have the toughest celebrity-relative gig ever. Three years away from somebody who, when his hair’s short and his cheeks aren’t hollowed, looks just like you, yet exerts, effortlessly, an inexplicable, almost primal magnetism—the sort that makes teenagers manic and spinsters swoon and prompts a male Ukrainian TV reporter to jump over the ropes and punch you on the red carpet? People named Brad the sexiest man alive—twice. Time chose him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world three years in a row. He made Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list three times. And there you are in Springfield, Missouri, with a computer-repair company, a 24-year marriage, and three nice, normal kids.

As a wedding present, Angelina gave Brad a Patek Philippe watch worth more than $2 million.

Doug gave Lisa a big white Easter basket when he proposed, tucking her engagement ring inside a brightly zigzagged plastic egg and surrounding it with smaller eggs, chocolate, and a fuzzy yellow plush chick. She was over the moon. “I never got fru-fru-ish stuff growing up,” she says. “We were really frugal. So to have something like that, somebody taking the time…”

Brad and Angelina are mobbed everywhere they go; they need security guards to take the kids bowling. They call their homes “base camps.” Brangelina has its own online horoscope.

Doug and Lisa have never considered living anywhere but Springfield, surrounded by their families. Lisa says what keeps their marriage strong is their faith: “It’s so easy anymore in our society to just say, ‘Hey, you did that to me. I’m done.’ I think having the Lord first in your life takes away that ‘me’ factor. It’s us.”

When Brad and Angelina wore tuxes to an event, headlines squealed, “Brangelina Go Matchy-Matchy.” Their daughter Shiloh was the first baby ever included in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.

“Things are amped-up,” Doug says in his matter-of-fact way. “But Brad does a good job of staying normal. His way of handling all the publicity is, he doesn’t read it. He doesn’t look. I’ll ask him about something, and he’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.”

And Doug’s way of handling the incessant questions? “I couldn’t be more proud of him. I think the monotony of it is, I’ve answered the same questions now for 25 years. ‘How is he doin’?’ ‘Do you see him?’… I understand their excitement, but if you were asked every week for 25 years the same question, your eyes would kind of glaze over.

“I was ‘no comment’ for years,” he says. “Now, when I get calls from the paparazzi, I make up my own stories just to see if they’ll get into print.” His dimples deepen. “And I’ve started taking photographs of them, and they don’t like it. I just started that recently. Doing things more on my terms.”

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The next time we talk, he loosens up enough to tell me the paparazzi story.

Back in 1993, when Brad was just starting to make it big, he came home for a break. That evening, the phone rang. Their neighbor wanted them to know he’d seen a bunch of paparazzi hiding in the woods in full camo.

Brad had college buddies over, and they all ran outside and chased off the stalkers. One photographer panicked, dropped his camera, and kept running—so a friend picked it up. He kept the camera and gave Doug the extra-long Canon lens. Doug bought a camera to go with it, and he got good fast—some of his photos are National Geographic–quality.

“So the paparazzi,” he says with a twinkle, “gave me my start.”

Now he’s using a (better) long lens to photograph women gathering drinking water from a pond where baboons bathe and Maasai warriors appearing out of the fog on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater, which has one of the world’s densest populations of lions.

This wasn’t the likeliest outcome.

The Maasai will jab a stick into the jugular of one of their scrawny cows, collect blood in a hollow gourd, seal the wound with thrown mud, and drink the blood for breakfast. Doug makes his kids steel-cut oatmeal.

He learned about WorldServe International at the James River Church, an Assembly of God church pastored by his former youth minister. One of its 12,000 members, John Bongiorno—president of WorldServe—invited Doug to come to Africa and take photographs to document the nonprofit’s work digging wells.

“Everybody’s always, ‘Yeah, come on over,’ like, ‘Yeah, we ought to have lunch,’” Doug says. “But three days later, he called and said, ‘I’m booking flights.’”

They went to the village of Loibersoit, in northern Tanzania. Doug saw a dusty field with a two-room cinder block medical dispensary. The tribe’s watering holes had all dried up, and cows from the Maasai’s herds were lying dead on the hard ground. Some little boys had tied old clothing together with twine to fashion a soccer ball. Their fathers were hunkered down, holding sober clan meetings. Women and girls were carrying water from muddy streams far away, walking hours every day with heavy urns on their heads.

He saw a little girl about 10 years old—the age of one of his daughters. “She had on this little faded-yellow sundressy thing, probably donated, and she was pulling her water can behind her, and she looked kind of happy.”

The image stuck. He’d been one of the lucky ones—he’d known that since boyhood, listening to his pastor at the pulpit. What if his girls had this life? She’d be fetching water the next day, the next 100 days, the next 1,000 days.

Doug was ready to start learning.

On another day, he and Miller, who’d come with him, drove to a village and saw 100 Maasai warriors in a giant circle, clad in bright red and purple ceremonial robes. Doug hopped out and reached for his camera. The next thing they knew, the warriors were coming at them, spears in hand, screaming. Someone whisked them off to a cinder block building until the crowd quieted.

“Doug was nestled up under my side,” says Miller, who’s 6-foot-6, “and we were both pretty puppy-dog-eyed. We’d obviously done something wrong, and we didn’t know what it was.”

Doug winces at the memory. “Culturally, I made a big mistake. We were on their land, they were in a clan meeting, and their chief was present. And here I am walking up all John Wayne taking pictures. Haven’t made that mistake since.”

Miller remembers another, calmer village meeting. The elders sat in a circle and talked about their village’s need for clean water. One man said, “I’ve been thirsty my whole life.”

Now Loibersoit has 11 wells, and WorldServe has built three schools, built a sanitation building, made irrigation possible, built a granary for the agriculture that’s now developing.

“They don’t have to be so nomadic,” Doug says, “and the girls don’t have to fetch water, so they can go to school. It’s a game changer.”

After he joined WorldServe’s board, the organization’s scope began to grow, and with it, his understanding. “I was completely laser-minded on just bringing clean water and hoping that would restore life and stop sickness,” he says. “In remote areas of Tanzania, two of every five children don’t reach the age of 5.”

He’d walk around villages taking pictures, and kids would gather and follow, singing and chanting with him, giggling when he repeated their words. Their lit-up smiles made great photos. But when he looked at the images five years later, he’d have to wonder how many of those kids were still alive.

That’s what drove him. But he caught some heat, Miller tells me, for raising money for kids in another country.

“Yeah, I think that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Doug says. “When people say that, my eyes roll back. Kids are kids. I don’t care where they are, 6,000 miles away or one mile. People need to travel a little more. Open their eyes and shut their mouths a little more. One community well in Africa affects 2,000 kids. The same money here affects 150.”

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The paparazzi chase through the woods came early on, when the family hadn’t grown used to the surreal attention. Now, the response is “on autopilot,” Doug says. “We handle it pretty easy.”

His eyes have that sexy, taking-it-all-in slant, and he seems laid-back, as mellow as anybody in that situation could be. But Miller assures me that “when the Brad Pitt thing affects Doug’s family directly, it doesn’t end well for those guys.” Because Doug, despite his warm fuzzy charity work, “is kind of a badass.”

“Now, I don’t know that he’s truly a badass,” Miller adds. “I’ve never seen him have to back it up. And he’s not the sort of person who’s going to go start something. But he is not passive.”

Miller offers an example: a rough, emotionally draining West Africa trip. Near the end, Doug and Miller were packed tight in a Land Cruiser with four other guys, driving on dirt roads for two days straight. Doug saw a man by the side of the road, dragging a sick dog by a chain. He yelled, “Stop!” and jumped out. “Hey,” he called to the man, “hey!” The more he said, the wider the man grinned—which looked like sarcasm but was actually a cultural response to confrontation. A translator got out of the Land Cruiser to help. And Miller sat inside thinking, “Great. He’s going to get us into some big altercation trying to save a damn dog.”

It ended fine. So did Doug’s walk through Ngorongoro crater—right past prides of lions—with Maasai pastoralists. And the trip when a black mamba—the most poisonous snake in Africa—whacked its body against his open jeep and sprang at the window where Doug’s father was resting his arm.

That one gave Doug pause.

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In 2010, the president of Tanzania made Doug Pitt the country’s first goodwill ambassador. His job would be to bridge cultural barriers, clearing the way for American businesses and philanthropists. One example was Askinosie Chocolate, a Springfield company willing to give Tanzanian farmers a share of profits. They’d lived surrounded by cocoa beans for generations and never tasted chocolate.

In 2011, Tanzania’s president gave Doug permission to bike down Mount Kilimanjaro, which was illegal. Walsworth and his fiancée, Jenn Dice, agreed to do a scouting climb with him, looking for a path that wasn’t too steep, stair-stepped, or scattered with loose shale.

They started in T-shirts and climbed up, sweating lightly, through a jungle alive with leaping monkeys, through woods, through farmland. The air cooled as they passed through rainforest to the alpine moors and bogs. At base camp, 13,000 feet up, Dice gave Doug his first lesson in rolling over rocks.

He now calls the mountain “Kili,” and his tone’s so fond you’d think he was nicknaming his girlfriend. There must be something intimate about hurling headfirst over the handlebars onto loose shale. Repeatedly.

They bathed from a bucket and continued the five-day climb, past rocky outcrops and into alpine desert, the air so cold it sheared their bones. By the time they’d climbed above the clouds and reached the summit, they were huddled into parkas. Doug looked down and saw the ledge of the glacier, striated like frozen white bark. Beyond it stood smaller mountaintops, silhouetted against an orangey-pink sunrise. They cycled down the ridge, the glacier right below them. Doug drew a deep breath and let the beauty settle inside him.

Then he skidded on some shale and almost went over the handlebars again. They proceeded down the 19,340-foot mountain (a mile higher than Colorado’s highest), dodging volcanic rock and weaving between narrow trees. Doug crashed more than once, but he made it to the bottom, the first American on record to bike down Kilimanjaro.

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In 2012, Doug entered the Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race. It’s really 104 miles, and you have 12 hours to do it. Doug trained for five and a half months and dropped 30 pounds.

“Stuey and I got him into that,” Mabry says, sounding satisfied. “He freakin’ transformed himself.” He hurtled down Rocky Mountain trails at 40 miles an hour, salted boiled potatoes stuffed in his jersey for energy. “Leadville was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says now. “But I had to finish to get the 100 grand.” He’d been pledged $1,000 per mile, and the money would go straight to WorldServe and fund four deep wells. “So then your ego comes into play. If you crap out at 99 miles, everybody’s going to know it, and you get nothing.”

He finished in 10 hours and 22 minutes. “I can tell he’s already thinking about it again,” Mabry says. “Stuey’s done Leadville seven times; I’ve done it five times. I think it bothers Doug that we’ve done it more, and we’ve done it faster. He’s competitive. You want to say, ‘Relax about this,’ and he won’t.”

Mainly, he competes with himself. He walks at a pace that would be a jog for anybody else, and he takes solitary bike rides, racing the wind until the stress blows away. He loves traveling alone, soaking up new worlds. He studies languages, reads history, listens to biographies on audio books.

His favorite is Winston Churchill: “He was the quintessential leader. He had a lot of stressful situations, and just this ability to stay calm. He did it on his terms. He wasn’t moved by polls of the public. He said what he thought and owned it.”

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Doug goes to Tlaquepaque, Springfield’s sister city in Mexico, with other Springfield business leaders. He winds up standing for hours getting his picture taken with Mexicans of all ages, shapes, and genders because he is Brad Pitt’s brother.

“Imagine being Doug in that situation,” says Miller. “First of all, why is it like that? And how does that then translate into somebody wanting their picture taken with Doug? I wouldn’t go up to Michael Jordan’s brother and want a picture.”

Miller remembers going to a Sigma Chi party at Mizzou when he and Doug were high-school seniors. “Brad came in, and the whole mood of the room changed. That was the first time I saw the charisma. Doug’s just built differently. His charisma comes from a different source.”

Doug insists he’s “got the best of both worlds. I get to go and do and see a lot of things because of his life, and that’s awesome. But I don’t have to experience the intensity and the pressure.”

So all that celebrity doesn’t sting? “I think it did for a while, absolutely,” Mabry says. “Maybe that’s the reason Doug has started doing some of this philanthropy”—to have something all his own.

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I watch the Today interview again, to see how Doug handles it when Lauer asks about his mother’s impassioned letter to the Springfield News-Leader. She called President Barack Obama, “a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.” Doug’s chest rises as he gulps enough breath to field that one. But when he speaks, his voice is relaxed: “Moms and dads and kids agree to disagree all over the world, so why would our family be any different?”

He doesn’t say where he landed in that argument. I ask what he believes in. “I have no problem saying I’m a Christian,” he says. “I’ve been very involved in my church for a long time. There are things within me that are nonnegotiable. But from a political standpoint, I wish that common sense were a political party. I believe private business can always do things better than the government, but I align myself socially with the government on some of the programs and some of our responsibilities around the world.”

Lisa worries that if he ever does enter the political fray, he’ll lose balance. But he makes sure to spend plenty of time with his family. This summer, they floated the Buffalo National River and tried Flyboarding in Branson. “Look it up,” he urges. “It’s hysterical. You put jet boots on, and the water propels you into the air.” He also makes sure to get plenty of time alone—his cycling’s almost a prayer. And he takes a “guys trip” every year with his buddies.

“None of us give a rip about who his brother is,” remarks Mabry. “Doug’s so well-connected himself—he’ll say ‘I’ve got a meeting,’ and it’ll turn out to be with the president of Tanzania.

“Now, we do blow him some crap,” Mabry adds. “He went through that phase where he was out on the beach ministering to these people, and you’re like, ‘dude, really?’ I think he felt like he had to prove his faith. But he’s come full circle. I don’t think his faith has wavered at all, but you wouldn’t know that he feels so strongly. It’s his belief; he doesn’t feel like it has to be mine. He’s found a balance.”

On St. Louis World Food Day, October 10, Doug stands in the John Burroughs School gym. This is his third year as honorary chair. Assembly lines of schoolkids race to scoop rice, soy, dried veggies, and vitamins into clear bags, stopping every once in a while to cheer or yell, “We need rice!” The teenagers’ shift comes later, and Doug’s impressed that they’re giving up their Friday night. I ask if he ever did this kind of volunteer project as a kid.

“Oh, yeah.” He describes stuffing goodies into Christmas baskets for “the needy,” back when that was still an abstraction for the kids at big, shiny Kickapoo High. They joked around as they packed, and he loved the camaraderie, the way everybody was working together with a common purpose.

But then they drove the baskets to people’s homes, and he stood in the doorway of a shack maybe five miles from his neighborhood.

“I saw a dirt floor in my own town,” he says slowly. “I didn’t even know such a thing existed. It was five miles from my house.” He went home quiet. “I still can’t, today, put words to it.”

Our photographer arrives and spirits Doug away to a quiet commons. He looks up at the portrait of John Burroughs, his white beard flowing, and makes a crack about Duck Dynasty. “That’s probably heresy around here!” he adds, grinning. I ask if he likes the show. He says he did before it got scripted. I ask if he hates posing for pictures, and he shrugs. “I don’t think about it.” He’s been shooting his daughter’s senior pictures, and he told her, “Make sure you feel comfortable. When you don’t, it’s going to show.”

After the shoot, I head for the parking lot, then remember one more question. “Have you seen Doug Pitt?” I ask one of the volunteers in the lobby. She looks at me blankly. “I don’t know what the gentleman looks like.”

I bite back who he looks like. Her ignorance is a relief. Even I have grown weary of the elephant. Grown men, heterosexual corporate executives who barely compliment their wives, have been rushing up to tell him he’s more handsome than his brother. It’s intended, I know, as a compensatory kindness. But Theodore Roosevelt said it: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”