"Thomas Kinkade: The Painter of Light"

[00:00:02] The sound of a fist on the door nearly propelled Amy out of her skin. It shook the walls, sending a ripple of energy through the darkened corners she'd been slumped inside for hours? Days? How long had it been since she made the call?

[00:00:17] She tried to remember what day it was, but only anxiety presented itself. Her mouth tasted like acid. For the first time, she began to feel the ache of dehydration and sleep deprivation in her body.

[00:00:31] Clammy and shaking, Amy attempted to wipe the smear of mascara and eyeliner under her eyes away as she got off the carpet. She registered how pointless this was. The oversized t-shirt hanging over her curvaceous frame smelled just like the rest of the room,

[00:00:48] and the three-day-old plates of room service leftovers were piled on the coffee table. Two empty bottles of bourbon lay like a pair of corpses on the floor. Everything was a mess, including her.

[00:01:01] She cracked the thick damask curtains for the first time since Friday as she passed the panoramic window, squinting when the light slammed into both retinas. The sun was still low in the sky, streets below mostly barren of cars or foot traffic. It was early.

[00:01:20] She released the fabric, dropping the room back into deep shadow, then made her way to the door. The figure which reluctantly greeted John Hastings looked half-human, half-raccoon, and midway through a total nervous breakdown. She peered around the edge of the door like skittish wildlife,

[00:01:40] top half of her face an abstract mess of dried tears, dazzled makeup, and dirty hair. Her dark skin had an ashen look, as if a vampire had been feeding on her since the last time they saw each other. Where is he?

[00:01:56] John sighed, pushing past Amy into the suite. The smell of booze, sweat, and urine hit him like a cloud of mustard gas as he passed the sitting area, moving deeper into the swank but rank room.

[00:02:10] He found Tom slack-jawed on the king-sized bed in a soggy puddle of piss, motionless, a half-empty bottle of brown liquor still clutched in one swollen hand.

[00:02:22] His dark, graying hair was moist with sweat, plastered to one side of his head and sticking out at odd angles in some places. The scene was overwhelming. Has he woken up at all? John asked. Amy shook her head with a quivering chin.

[00:02:41] John had booked the twelve-hour flight from San Francisco to Italy the moment Amy rung his office, crying hysterically that Thomas had been unconscious for two days. Two hours at the airport, another two between driving and baggage claim,

[00:02:56] which meant Tom had been blacked out for almost three straight days. Yelling his name didn't work. Slapping his face didn't work. Tom was definitely alive but completely unrousable. Amy dissolved into fresh sobs from the hallway, something no one had time for.

[00:03:17] Millions of dollars, hundreds of jobs, and the fate of an American empire were at stake. And so John began the tense but methodical work of setting things right with the precision of a mafia fixer. First he ordered Amy to wash her face and pack the suitcases.

[00:03:37] Next he went to one of the brass-handled closets, searching for something he could not find. Amy watched him disappear with a sense of panic, but the next moment he was back, tugging a luggage cart behind him. He looked at Amy. Amy looked back.

[00:03:54] Both knew what had to be done, and neither were happy about it. It was no small feat getting the unconscious Thomas Kinkade, all six feet and 270 pounds of him, into the suite's luxurious jacuzzi bathtub.

[00:04:11] John ran the water as cold as it could go, hoping his buddy's nervous system was still functioning enough to register the temperature. He forced a bar of soap into Amy's hand, then gestured at Tom's urine-soaked genitals in a way that communicated, this is on you.

[00:04:27] Then he headed into the main room to find clothes which didn't smell like a ship's latrine. At some point during the forced bath, Tom's brain came partially back online. He was able to have a look at his own body, but not enough to be of use.

[00:04:46] He moaned like a feral walrus as Amy worked soap and cold water across his chest, eyes cracking open occasionally. Getting the linebacker-sized man into clean clothes was similarly challenging. His thick, fatty limbs were dead weight, fighting the fabric. Tom, I need you to help me here.

[00:05:09] John pleaded as he and Amy tugged at a pair of pants in tandem. The reply wasn't exactly English, but sounded suspiciously like, fuck you. About an hour had passed by the time they were able to load Thomas, one of the most famous living artists on planet Earth,

[00:05:30] back onto the luggage cart, which squeaked in protest. Amy manned the suitcases. As they rolled out of the Venetian-styled suite and down the endless carpeted hallway to the elevator, Frank prayed silently that the hotel lobby was still mostly deserted. The trio had an international flight to catch,

[00:05:52] and just a handful of hours remaining before the plane back to Thomas' astronomically successful Christian art empire left all three of them behind. Given what the newspapers back home had been running about Tom over the last six months, and the multiple lawsuits hamstringing the business

[00:06:12] John had built around the famed painter of light, the last thing any of them could afford was a single soul, or Thomas' wife, finding out about any of this. Nostalgia is a complicated, slippery thing. Today, in 2023, we broadly recognize it as a feeling,

[00:06:38] that potent, sentimental longing for days gone by, simpler times and happier memories, back when things felt easier for us personally. Until just a few years ago, it was a vibe experienced mostly by geriatric millennials, middle-aged adults, and tribal elders. You know, people who remember life before the internet,

[00:07:02] social media, and capitalism wrecked our brains. In this new post-pandemic world, however, it's not uncommon to find teenagers and small children communicating intense nostalgia, craving that now irretrievable time before historic plague and the return of fascism turned humanity into an anxious, trauma-riddled ball of chronically online nutters.

[00:07:27] Centuries before any of us were born, however, nostalgia was considered a mental disorder. Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer coined the official term in 1688, combining the Greek words nostos and algios, home and pain, to describe the overwhelming, emotionally exhausting fixation on something we no longer have access to.

[00:07:53] According to medical historians, it was regarded as similar to paranoia or post-traumatic melancholy and appeared often in medical records for soldiers or young women sent away from their homes for domestic servitude. Which isn't really surprising. Getting shot at and or forced into wage slavery

[00:08:14] far away from loved ones and all community is not great for anyone's psyche. And being consumed by nostalgia can produce seriously unhealthy, even unhinged or deadly behavior. Some people will, as one Spanish doctor put it in the 1700s, retreat into themselves, refusing to eat, experiencing heart palpitations,

[00:08:38] or finding themselves otherwise unable to function normally due to their excruciating longing for the past. Some people commit suicide, convinced death is better than living in a present which never lives up to the past. Some people become angry and violent, blaming an outside other, foreign refugees, for example,

[00:09:01] or trans people, for what time naturally does on its own. Maladapted people blame marginalized groups for uncomfortable changes so intensely they'll try to exterminate them. The Nazis loved leveraging nostalgia as a way to get average citizens on board with genocide.

[00:09:23] This tactic is still a favorite today amongst politicians all over the world. It's one of the simplest ways to get average people on board with killing, maiming or oppressing other human beings. Whenever you hear a person at a microphone saying things like,

[00:09:40] Remember when there were only two genders and men were men? You are listening to a Nazi nostalgia technique live on. When you see a person wearing Make America Great Again regalia, you're seeing Nazi nostalgia propaganda techniques getting merchandised.

[00:09:58] And when you see proud boys marching down a public road waving flags and threatening drag queens, you're seeing Nazis. Good times! This is a very long way of saying that nostalgia is powerful. Powerful enough to affect our daily lives. Powerful enough to kill.

[00:10:19] And in the case of today's subject, Thomas Kinkade, the most commercially successful artist in recorded history and legend of the evangelical creative community. Powerful enough to spawn a multi-million dollar empire, then bring it all crashing down into a pile of empty red wine bottles,

[00:10:40] broken dreams and utterly worthless prints of snow-covered cottages. Gary, drag Edward out of the gym and get him on this microphone. We're doing that thing where we stop competing for one episode and join forces to tell a very epic tale of human fuckery together.

[00:11:01] Also, this introduction was very long and I need a pee break. The following podcast contains adult themes, gritty details from true crimes, and naughty language. Listener discretion is advised. There's no time now. I began five years ago in secret, working all night every night right into the dawn.

[00:11:23] A thousand experiments, a thousand failures, and then at last the great wonderful day. She's alive. Alive! William Thomas Kinkade III was born into idyllic all-American bliss on January 19th, 1958, just outside Sacramento, California. The post-war baby boom was at its peak

[00:12:05] because working adults could buy homes to breed in for like a handful of fucking acorns then. Sputnik, the famed satellite which ignited the space race, had only recently been yeeted into orbit. President Eisenhower had just ordered the integration of public schools

[00:12:25] and both Barbie and the Beatles had yet to be introduced to the world at all. The country was about to enter a decade which would challenge the concept of the American dream and spawn uncomfortable questions about what our core values actually are.

[00:12:45] But that mildly chilly week in wintertime Sacramento, things were still placid and predictable. With plenty of sunshine to help William Thomas Kinkade Sr. and his wife, Mary Ann, welcome their firstborn son into the world. The pair were overjoyed.

[00:13:06] Another little boy, Patrick, would follow just a few years later, rounding out their good patriotic conservative family perfectly. William Thomas Kinkade Sr. was described as a lovable but unreliable janitor who made his living taking odd cleaning jobs.

[00:13:27] A sailing enthusiast, he poured most of his income into a banged up little boat he'd inherited. Willie had a captain's hat he'd apparently loved wearing, especially when drunkenly monologuing to his family about his dreams of one day sailing the Sea of Cortez.

[00:13:48] His boat wasn't fit for the open sea but he and the boys could still pretend on one of the area's many lakes. Mary Ann Kinkade, his wife, was a homemaker who doted on her two boys, taking care to shuttle their father off to bed when he arrived home

[00:14:07] from one of his odd jobs too drunk to stand, which wasn't so often in the beginning, but then it started happening every week and then most days and then all day. William Thomas Kinkade III's picture-perfect childhood of lake trips and warm family dinners

[00:14:30] dissolved like paint in turpentine once Willie finally sailed off for good in 1964, which is a nice way of saying he abandoned his wife and kids for booze. Tom, his eldest's preferred name, was just six when dad stumbled out the front door for the last time.

[00:14:53] The remaining Kinkades suddenly found themselves a broken family with no income, one of the only publicly broken families in their largely white Christian community of 1960s suburbanites. Overnight, Mary was tasked with supporting two growing boys and herself on a single income,

[00:15:17] an unenviable task for a parent in any decade. They downsized into a rundown two-bedroom rental, which Patrick Kinkade recalls as, quote, the slum of Placerville, California. While both Thomas and Patrick spent adulthood honoring their mother's hard work and sacrifice,

[00:15:40] both describe an anxious home life where furniture was sometimes repossessed. Tubs of cheap, donated peanut butter stamped with property of Eldorado County showed up in their nearly bare kitchen cabinet. Tom, old enough to remember clearly how much better things had felt before dad left,

[00:16:02] struggled in particular with the new reality, feeling angry as he watched happily matched sets of parents supporting his friends at school. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

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[00:18:38] He said food insecurity was such an issue that Tom was in high school before he learned he actually liked hamburgers. The bland pasty burgers he and Patrick ate at home were mostly oatmeal. That's how his mother stretched the little meat they could afford.

[00:18:56] It wasn't until dinner at a friend's house that Kincaid learned that other families used 100% beef and the revelation made him swear that one day he'd find a way to make a boatload of money.

[00:19:12] Young Tom turned to drawing as an escape from his anger and the anxiety of life near the poverty line. In middle school, he discovered other kids would pay him cash for unflattering caricatures of teachers they hated. His first taste of art as capital.

[00:19:31] Before long, he was studying painting with a local painter, eventually taking an apprenticeship with esteemed California artist Glenn Wessels, a teacher at Berkeley School of Art. Wessels saw real talent in Tom Kincaid and pushed him to enroll for college.

[00:19:50] Now it's worth mentioning here that Thomas transferred out of Berkeley after two years because he felt the school was, quote, too liberal in its values. It's fucking Berkeley, Tom. I mean... What did you expect?

[00:20:05] He transferred to a less progressive school in Pasadena where he started wearing a beret unironically. Every single day. Yes, this is true. He delivered pizzas, wrestled with poverty and aggressively pursued his high school sweetheart, Nanette,

[00:20:24] begging her to leave her current boyfriend and start a life with him while wearing a beret. According to Kincaid, he was painting a nude model at this school in 1980 when the face of Jesus Christ appeared to him on his page.

[00:20:43] He took this as a sign to become a born again Christian and that his purpose was to spread the word of Christ through his creations. God became my art agent, he said.

[00:20:56] We're going to skip over much of Kincaid's middle years because they've already been profiled with fawning breathlessness in dozens of magazines, his official biography and a devastatingly boring movie about his life called Christmas Cottage, co-starring Marsha Gay Harden. What you need to know is as follows.

[00:21:20] Tom finished school, published a book about sketching, got married, got a really weird job doing the background paintings for the bat shit 1983 film Fire and Ice, a cult fantasy flick about a dystopian ice age packed with shirtless barbarians and big breasted ladies in loincloths. Sounds incredible.

[00:21:43] But he became a kept man for a period of time, letting his wife Nanette support them both while he painted landscapes and sold them in the parking lot of a general store. He trademarked the name Painter of Light, a nickname he gave himself,

[00:22:03] even though it already belonged to an artist who died in the eighteen hundreds. He painted nostalgia, scenes from the peaceful childhood he wanted but never got. Scenes from the serene childhood you wanted but never got.

[00:22:21] Perfect slices of an America which never existed, dressed up in snowflakes and supernaturally glowing garden flowers. And most important, he became obsessed with the idea of merchandising his landscapes and nostalgia paintings because selling a painting only once wasn't cost effective enough for Tom.

[00:22:45] Which is how he ended up partnering with a local businessman he met while drunk at a wedding named Ken Rash. With $35,000 in startup capital from Ken's vacuum sales business, the pair started a mail order service selling decorative plates and limited edition prints of Kincaid's nostalgia.

[00:23:11] Kitchy paintings of snowy villages and little houses at sunset, using the name Media Arts Group. And the money came rolling in. Prints of his unchallenging, unoffensive and pretty pastel paintings were easy to sell to homemakers, churches, hotels, offices, you name it. The company leveraged Tom's Christianity hard,

[00:23:42] delighting moneyed evangelicals who wanted to collect art but looked down on the provocative and largely progressive art scene. He appeared on the Home Shopping Network, QVC and Christian TV shows to share his story of seeing the face of Jesus.

[00:24:02] And then pushed the idea that each painting was his way of trying to bring the peaceful beauty of God's love into every home in America. He licensed with Hallmark, landing his work on calendars, jigsaw puzzles, CDs of elevator music and even Walmart gift cards for Christmas.

[00:24:24] Plus, it turned out Tom was a virtuoso at turning twee art into a scalable product with multiple price points. See, Kincaid introduced the process of, quote, highlighting a revolutionary invention he framed as a desirable advance in the art world,

[00:24:44] which allegedly opened doors for unknown painters while making paintings more affordable for the average Joe.

[00:24:52] Sounds great, right? But it actually was a way for Tom to get paid a lot by having a wage slave with a paintbrush make a high def print of one of Kincaid's old paintings look like a real oil painting.

[00:25:11] They did this by adding globs of real paint to the surface. It's been described by art historians as, quote, a semi-industrial process in which low level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kincaid.

[00:25:28] The wage slaves were often from marginalized communities paid too little and made to use a paint by numbers technique.

[00:25:36] Add some white to a street lamp and section to add some pink to the sunset in section five, which in no way improved their artistic skill or help them build their standing as individual artists.

[00:25:51] The finished products were sold in Thomas Kincaid's signature galleries, a.k.a. shops that only sold Kincaid's works in malls across America.

[00:26:02] Consumers paid anywhere from 280 to thousands for these coloring book recreations, and they were told that they were buying a one of a kind Kincaid original, which was horseshit.

[00:26:18] While all the merchandising and paint by numbers fuckery was going on, Tom and his business partners were franchising Kincaid art galleries like they were McDonald's for the low, low price of like a quarter of a million bucks.

[00:26:35] Aspiring business owners could open their own Kincaid gallery, selling the most popular artist in the United States work. By this time, Kincaid had landed a contract with Disney and was painting Bambi and Snow White into limited edition landscapes that sold for a lot of money.

[00:26:57] Franchisees were plied with expensive wine, given inspirational speeches about the power of positivity and Christ to improve people's lives through art, and the blessing of being able to profit alongside Kincaid as he became the most commercially successful artist on the planet.

[00:27:19] What these investors were not told, unfortunately, was that Thomas would be competing with them directly for sales every time he got on QVC and the Home Shopping Network, offering the same prints his shop owners were but at a discount.

[00:27:38] They also weren't warned that the company had no plan to limit the amount of Kincaid galleries, or that Tom's paint by numbers manufacturing gimmick meant the artist's work would become so easy to counterfeit, anyone with a high resolution printer and a paintbrush could do it without getting caught.

[00:28:00] Which is, in case you're like Kimberly and are shit at math, a very bad long-term business model for gallery owners, but a very, very lucrative one for Tom, business partner Ken, and the other media arts executives.

[00:28:20] If reports are accurate, and they may not be, for reasons we'll get to later, Kincaid individually made around $53 million in sales between the mid-1990s and 2005.

[00:28:38] He took his business public in 1994 with a $110 million IPO, a bold move which scandalized the art world, in part because it was so brazenly money-hungry, and in part because the art being sold was so, at least according to critics, breathtakingly crappy.

[00:29:03] A Kincaid painting was topically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit to lure a defect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

[00:29:27] Joan Didion By showing light in the form of exaggerated highlights, fuzzy halos, and a hyper-luminescent shine on everything, regardless of where they are in the composition, he isn't revealing the true nature of anything.

[00:29:46] It's a bafflingly incoherent mosh-mosh of light, all impossibly existing in the same scene. This isn't just clumsy execution. This is an artist who cannot see. Simcha Fincher

[00:30:03] His paintings are a wishful and inaccurate rendering of what the world looks like, as if painted by someone who hadn't been outside in a long time. Susan Orlean

[00:30:15] Not that any of the critical feedback mattered to the American public. The supernatural glow of his paintings did pull viewers in, even if the effect was similar to an anglerfish drawing in prey.

[00:30:30] His idyllic settings of green pastures and little cozy homes did remind consumers of a certain age, and demographic, of a long-gone childhood.

[00:30:44] And most of all, because Kincaid never painted anything real, anything upsetting, or anything more controversial than a sleigh being pulled through snow by a pair of sexy horses, his work required absolutely nothing of the viewer.

[00:31:03] All they had to do was stare at it, safe in the knowledge it would never trigger any anxiety, worry, or deeper thought at all. The result was the sale of around ten million fucking paintings in the USA alone across two decades. Oh, my dick hurts.

[00:31:27] But behind the painter of light was a shadow. Boo! Excuse me? It's a little cringe. Why? But behind the painter of light was a shadow. Uh, writing transitions is hard, okay? We don't get paid for this. I know, honey. Just hold on. Try this. Okay.

[00:31:56] But there was a demon lurking inside Thomas Kincaid, and its stranglehold on white, Christian, evangelical hero Tom would destroy everything. Nailed it. Welcome back. Thank you. Should I tell them? About Tom? Yeah. Go for it. He was a drunk. That is not accurate.

[00:32:27] You're right. Thomas Kincaid was a terminal alcoholic. Because it was the 1990s and Kincaid was rich, this was in no way an obstacle for Tommy Tom. The number of famous artists to have been addicts is staggering,

[00:32:45] and alcoholism has long been America's most forgiven substance use disorder, so long as the afflicted addict stays functional. And for a long time, just like his father, Thomas Kincaid did.

[00:32:59] But like a snowball rolling downhill, as time went on, Kincaid's drinking problem and the shitty conduct attached to it got worse and worse and worse. It started with some light shenanigans.

[00:33:15] Business partner Ken Rash recalled that the night they first met with the Hallmark Company to establish their multi-million dollar deal, Kincaid hired two limos for after the meeting. One which took his wife Nanette back to their luxury hotel,

[00:33:31] and another which took he and Tom to a strip club, and then a bar, where Thomas bought drinks for the entire building and danced like a frat boy with a giant smile on his face. Fair enough. They were about to get American greeting card level rich.

[00:33:48] But as the years went on, Tom used business dinners and trips to get more and more hammered. Citing his Christian faith, for a long while Kincaid drank only red wine. Something about the blood of Christ or some shit. He bought cases of $200 per bottle Cabernets and Merlot,

[00:34:08] popping one or two at every occasion and finishing them both by himself. Though he had four daughters and an evangelical fan base to appease, his enthusiasm for strip joints and porn was well known by anyone who worked with him regularly,

[00:34:24] including the Kincaid gallery owners who hosted him for private events. At one such event, after a considerable amount of vino, Kincaid began loudly asking every man in the room if they were into tits or asses more.

[00:34:40] Something which did not sit well with the one woman in the room, who later testified in a deposition that his conduct was crass and juvenile. Another female worker at a similar gallery event would testify that a drunken Kincaid approached her, yelled that her boobs were great,

[00:34:59] then grabbed her tits in front of a room full of VIP buyers, humiliating her at work. Here's what Thomas himself had to say about that night. You've got to remember, I'm the idol to these women who were there. They're enamored with any attention I would give them.

[00:35:18] I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't recall what was going on that night. There's one story of Kincaid falling off a bar stool at a similar gathering, his wife Nanette rushing to help him,

[00:35:33] only to have her husband start screaming, fuck you in her face while brandishing a middle finger in front of everyone. On a separate incident, Tom got so housed with the group in Las Vegas that he started heckling Siegfried and Roy, the guys with the tigers,

[00:35:52] during their live show, pointing at the performers dicks and yelling codpiece over and over again inconsolably until he was subdued by, of all people, his mother, who had to endure the horror of what destroyed her marriage playing out all over again in her firstborn son.

[00:36:12] And then there was the whole pissing on things thing. A self-proclaimed naturalist, Kincaid stated it was healthiest for men to urinate outside and mark their territory like dogs, something he did enthusiastically any time he was drunk, which by his 40s was all the fucking time.

[00:36:36] And a serious problem given the whole pissing on private property is illegal in most places issue. He was ejected from a hotel for marking his territory in the elevator. He was ejected from another for peeing in the corner of a casino.

[00:36:51] He even got fined for pissing all over a statue of Winnie the Pooh while hollering, this one's for you, Walt, at the Disneyland hotel in Anaheim, which is not a cheap place to stay. Once the lawsuits from Kincaid's franchisees,

[00:37:09] some of whom lost their life savings because of Tom's oversaturation of the art market, started rolling in around 2005, the artist coped by switching from red wine to hard liquor, stirring in some pills just in case the booze didn't handle the job.

[00:37:26] Nanette, to her credit, did her very best to stand by her man. She staged his first intervention with Tom's brother and her daughters around 2009, weathering his explosive anger and rash of insults as he was dragged, literally kicking and screaming, to rehab.

[00:37:44] But the day Tom returned from his 30 days away as an inpatient, he fell off the wagon, getting blackout drunk in a matter of hours. Nanette told him then, get sober or lose your family. And so back off to rehab he went.

[00:38:01] In June 2010, Kincaid was arrested for driving drunk with a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit, landing himself in newspapers across California and the nation. Nanette and all four girls left. On November 20th, 2010, an unshaven, bloated and red-faced Kincaid

[00:38:26] stepped to the microphone in front of a gathering of faithful football fans at the Denver Broncos Stadium. He'd been commissioned that time to paint the arena for Evangelical quarterback and Christian star Tim Tebow's private foundation, and the artist was set to give one of his blandly inspirational speeches

[00:38:46] about nostalgia and God at its unveiling. But the audience that day got a glimpse of the angry, rapidly unraveling, wounded teenager trapped within Kincaid instead. I sneeze in public and make a headline. He growled, glaring. America's most known, most beloved artist shows up at Orange County Hospital.

[00:39:11] We throw an all-day kids event. We host an art contest. We gave art packages to all the kids. I talk to them about journaling their life, about creating something every day that makes a statement. And we sent word out to every newspaper,

[00:39:31] come down, come down, see this day of joy, this day of celebration. No one showed, but make one wrong step in public and they put it on the front page. Four weeks later, Kincaid was sentenced to 10 days in jail for drunk driving.

[00:39:53] At some point around this time, Thomas, now separated against his will from Nanette and their girls, but still very much legally married, started a sexual relationship with a young, dark-haired and brown-eyed woman named Amy Pinto Walsh. She was the one who called Kincaid's CEO, John Hastings from Italy,

[00:40:15] in a panic after one of their romantic rendezvous abroad went sideways. It should be mentioned that once Amy and John rolled Tom's drunk ass out of the hotel on that luggage cart, John found Tom's rental car covered in dents and damage

[00:40:31] because he'd been so drunk while driving, he couldn't stop crashing it. And Amy had been unable to convince him to let her drive. One month after John, Tom and Amy got back from the Italy incident,

[00:40:44] Tom was hospitalized with paralysis in his arms and legs due to toxic shock. He drank so much that he poisoned his nervous system into paralysis. Needing weeks inpatient to learn how to walk as his brain healed.

[00:41:03] Tom would be fine. He would be drinking and then all of a sudden, you couldn't tell where the boundary was. He would become very incoherent and start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff. One media arts group executive testified,

[00:41:18] All of this is, as anyone raised in the church will tell you, totally and utterly normal in the Christian subculture. But still very much at odds with the saved and upstanding mythos Kinkade sold and the alternative version of reality his empire was built on.

[00:41:38] On April 6, 2012, Amy entered Tom's Montserrino home and found Tom dead. He was just 54 years old. A smear of wintergreen paint was still on his fingertips. The coroner noted his toes were manicured and polished a glittering gold.

[00:41:59] The initial family and company statements on Kinkade's surprise death cited natural causes. And if you consider enough alcohol and Valium to kill a baby elephant natural, then it was true. But the artist's eventually publicized autopsy revealed an enlarged heart and liver

[00:42:17] damaged by years of substance abuse, as well as multiple areas of healed over trauma where he'd obviously hit his head or fallen down over the years. His mistress Amy quickly produced a handwritten note on a stained piece of paper reading,

[00:42:34] I, Thomas Kinkade, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath Amy Pinto Walsh $10 million in cash from my corporate policy, and I give her the house at 16324 and 16324 Ridgecrest Avenue for her security. The signature underneath rippled and skewed oddly and was almost certainly scrawled while very intoxicated.

[00:43:10] Amy claimed Tom wanted her to use the money to set up a foundation in his name. Tom's wife, four daughters and lawyers all said this was sus as hell. It seemed inevitable that a messy and humiliating legal battle was about to play out

[00:43:28] when on Christmas Eve 2012, a miraculous statement announced the issue was resolved amicably. No details of the settlement were ever released, but given Thomas' estate was worth around $60 million at the time of his death,

[00:43:44] it's safe to say that no one involved had to get a real job again unless they wanted to. William Thomas Kinkade III was ordered by the courts to pay several million dollars in damages and legal fees

[00:43:57] for defrauding multiple owners of his signature galleries a few years before he died. Testimony from the plaintiffs detail loss of homes, divorce, tuitions unpaid and bankruptcy,

[00:44:10] all as a result of putting their faith into what was sold to them as a man of similar faith devoted to God's word and good ethics. In the decades since his passing, this and the reports of his verbal abuse, drunken shenanigans

[00:44:26] and hypocritical conduct have trickled into public awareness, then been buried under a landfill's worth of Kinkade printed products including air fresheners, Christmas ornaments, umbrellas, throw pillows, lazy boy loungers and all those limited edition prints, which are now considered mostly worthless.

[00:44:49] Authentic and signed Kinkade paintings will still fetch multiple thousands of dollars, but his oversaturation of the market ended up causing the price of his work to drop substantially. Nothing in this story is to make anyone who does enjoy the work of Thomas Kinkade feel bad.

[00:45:07] It's okay to like kitschy twee stuff, just like it's okay to like easy cheese from a can better than an expensive hunk of brie. Nor is the purpose of this story to shit on the life and legacy of Kinkade,

[00:45:21] a guy who was clearly beloved by his entire family, even if he became too dangerous to love up close in person. Tom engaged in a lot of fuckery, but he wasn't a monster, just another middle-aged addict struggling with the agony of being alive.

[00:45:41] This story is just a reminder that when something looks perfect, whether it's a picturesque cottage made entirely of fragrant candy, or a heroic nostalgia role model saved by faith and touched by Jesus himself, it's essential to remember that everything and everyone has a shadow. Nostalgia, most of all.

[00:46:07] That candy cottage may have a murderous villain inside. That heroic role model may just be another fuck-up like you or me. And absolutely no one, least of all the outrageously rich, have their shit together. Every light has its shadow. Oh come on, that is kinda cring-