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“Who was that?” a woman asks me as I wrap up a conversation with Doug Emhoff at Brentwood Country Mart.
“The VP’s husband,” I tell her.
“The VP of what?” she replies.
“The country.”
You might not realize it, but the first-ever Second Gentleman of the United States—that is, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris—is an Angeleno, and when he’s not in Washington, D.C. or traveling the world on White House business, there’s a good chance you may run into him ordering a cup of coffee (always black) at RustiCoffee or hiking the Santa Monica Stairs.
Of course, he’s busy, even during his rare trips home where his Westside existence has to compete for time with his White House responsibilities: working in support of pay equity, to protect reproductive rights and against antisemitism. But on the day I’m speaking with him in late June (which, yes, a lot has happened since then that we obviously didn’t talk about), we’re meeting to talk about life on both sides of the 405 instead of inside the Beltway.
We start the morning at Will Rogers State Historic Park, the hilly Pacific Palisades destination that he considers his neighborhood park. He gestures toward the polo fields and remembers, as a young dad, playing soccer there with his son. “I was a coach at first and then I transitioned to a referee because I was a little too annoying to my son as a coach.”
The park is still a go-to for family hikes. He recalls trekking up one of the trails last year to a set of benches, where he and the Vice President admired how beautiful the coastline looked on a day that was clear enough to see Catalina Island—perhaps the unofficial benchmark among Angelenos of air cleanliness.
It wouldn’t be an authentic L.A. conversation without chatting about traffic, weather and the marine layer, and as a publication more interested in weekend plans and places to eat than politics, that’s kind of precisely the focus of our conversation. Emhoff has crossed just about everything off his L.A. bucket list aside from getting up close to the Hollywood Sign—though he’s also been meaning to check out the Academy Museum. Otherwise, he likes to skip some of the obvious touristy spots when people come to visit. He also knows that plenty of out-of-towners get L.A. wrong: “I think they get too hung up on all the cliches about L.A. and they don’t really get what the real L.A. is.” Sure, he appreciates the sunshine and beaches and canyons, but he knows that it’s the local culture and diversity of people that power the city’s business and creative vitality.
Emhoff was born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey, but he moved to Southern California in the early ’80s when he was only 17. He graduated soon after from Agoura High School and then got a degree from California State University, Northridge—“so I do consider myself a true 818’er, it’s in my blood.” Though he was hanging out in the area at a time he compares to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Emhoff never picked up a Valley inflection, but he does occasionally slip into the remnants of a New Jersey accent when he’s around his mutha, as he animatedly tells me.
He was particularly captivated by L.A.’s live music scene back in college, and he recalls heading Downtown to see Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Emhoff reminisces about seeing shows at the Olympic Auditorium (now a church), the Palace (now Avalon Hollywood) and the Hollywood Palladium (still the Palladium). He worked in restaurants to earn some cash, including Geoffrey’s in Malibu when it first opened.
Emhoff went on to earn a law degree from USC and began working at a firm in DTLA. Fast forward a couple of decades and he had established a career and some pretty firm roots in L.A.—and convinced the very-much-NorCal-based Harris, who he married in 2014, to do the same. “I think she loves Northern California—still does—and I think she calls herself a ‘Sangeleno,’ because there’s still that part of her that’s up north and she’s got family up there,” he says. “But this is where our home is now.”
The sports rivalries, however, have yet to be settled. Emhoff was a longtime Lakers season ticket holder, and Harris remains a die-hard Warriors fan, and when both teams are in the playoffs, “it’s kind of go time in the household—and this also goes for the Rams and the Niners, and Dodgers and Giants.” She once slipped a Giants hat onto his head during a game at Oracle Park, and Emhoff says his buddies still haunt him over that photo.
Sports play a role in his Second Gentleman’s causes, too: After our chat, he’s heading to an Angel City FC practice, where he’s continuing his work to promote training and pay equity in women’s sports. But before then, we move our conversation over to Farmshop, the all-day restaurant and marketplace at Brentwood Country Mart.
In a past life, Emhoff would’ve just driven himself there, but he hasn’t been behind the wheel since August of 2020, when Harris was picked as the Vice Presidential nominee. Now, he’s accompanied by a Secret Service detail everywhere he goes—a lightweight one (at the time) by presidential standards, but a head-turning posse to the unsuspecting diners at Brentwood Country Mart.
Since he’s running around today sans Harris, Emhoff is sitting at the same traffic light at San Vicente Boulevard as I am. That’s, of course, not the case when he’s with the Vice President, whose motorcade halts the surrounding streets. Like all Angelenos who lived here in the 2010s, Emhoff remembers the onset of Obamajam, former President Barack Obama’s fundraising trips to L.A. that would shut down entire swaths of the city at a time (“I was working in Century City at the time and I remember, like, it’s so amazing President Obama’s here—but I can’t leave my office.”) As a result, he notes that the Vice President’s team tries to minimize her movements in L.A. to appease already-gridlocked Angelenos. It’s part of a larger set of duties that he says they take with pride and patriotism. “We love our country and the fact that we get to serve our great nation, it’s pretty remarkable,” he says.
We meet back up inside Farmshop, a longtime morning hangout for Emhoff. “In the old days, I would come get a coffee, maybe a bagel, and sit out on one of those benches, look through my emails and just get ready for my day as a lawyer,” he says. “And so now I still do the same thing… and get ready for my day as Second Gentleman.”
And, well, that’s exactly what we do: We walk over to the coffee counter in the marketplace, and he searches the pastry case for a lemon poppy seed muffin (“I usually get a bagel when I’m really going for it.”) He holds a coffee (black, of course) in one hand and waves to a few regulars with the other, and we walk past the place he got his haircut the day before and get situated at a shaded picnic bench.
“This is my neighborhood place,” he says, later comparing it to a little bit of a local recharge. “I’ve been coming here so long with the kids, with Kamala, you usually run into people you know… But you can see with the detail and all the stuff, it sometimes gets a little surreal.”
(Other folks absolutely notice the detail surrounding the patio—three people separately ask me what was going on almost immediately after the interview wraps.)
“Being the first Second Gentleman and traveling the country, traveling the world on behalf of our country, supporting my wife—life has become a little surreal,” he says. “And when I get to come back to Los Angeles, it really is home.”