Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2013 i Vanity Fair

A HOTEL IN TEXAS, AND ONE IN D.C. It’s a staple not only of brainteasers but also of classic detective fiction: the “locked room” mystery. A crime—generally a murder—has taken place in a secure enclosure. There are few clues and no ready solution. It’s the sort of story that has long intrigued Vanity Fair’s Mark Bowden. When he was at The Philadelphia Inquirer years ago, he specialized in juicy crime mysteries—“dirtball” stories, as they were called at the paper. Reporters competed to get the best ones, if only because they were often billed over the masthead of the Sunday edition. Don’t let a throwaway description fool you: in the hands of a writer like Bowden, “dirtballs” are pure pleasure. In the December 2010 V.F., he reported “The Case of the…

WITH ANDREW SULLIVAN Illustration by TIM SHEA FFER Andrew Sullivan, whose renegade Daily Dish has made him one of the most influential bloggers in America, arrived a little late at August, a nice, welcoming bistro close to where he lives, in downtown Manhattan. “Sorry,” he apologized. “A blog waits for no man.” Having left the safe sanctuary of his freedom at the Daily Beast, he was in the frantic midst of launching his newly independent site, which quixotically refuses backing from both corporate moguls and advertisers. In search of perfect, enviable freedom, and a potential avatar of a media revolution, his Daily Dish will live or die by readers’ support alone. “It’s an insane time,” he said. “We’re sort of laying down the tracks as we’re driving the train.” He…

The Mailbag was brooding (the Mailbag doesn’t mind admitting) about just how to digest, analyze, interpret—heck, handle—all the Tai the Elephant correspondence (“Bruce Weber’s Adventures in Hollywood,” March). On the one hand, there was a lot of “Thank you for featuring Tai the elephant in your Hollywood Issue and wonderful online featurette!” and “Thank you so much for honoring an elephant. Animal actors are always forgotten and rarely recognized as being true actors.” But there were also those who felt that V.F. “let its intelligent and articulate readers down and can only lose readers by using exotic animals as entertainment within its pages” and “Poor Tai lives a wholly unnatural life with the constant fear of the bullhook.” So we sorted the yeas and nays into two piles, borrowed Mrs.…

Two friends overcome their differences in Joanna Hershon’s thought-provoking novel A Dual Inheritance (Ballantine). Robert M. Edsel commends the American W.W. II heroes involved in Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis (Norton). Susanna B. Hecht evokes the mad late-19th-century Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha (University of Chicago). Edna O’Brien returns to her roots in Country Girl (Little, Brown). Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen see the future in The New Digital Age (Knopf). Nathaniel Philbrick takes Bunker Hill (Viking). An estranged daughter seeks her mother’s true identity in Anna Stothard’s The Pink Hotel (Picador). Joseph Giovannini and Michael Moran show off the sleek minimalism of Shelton, Mindel & Associates: Architecture and Design (Rizzoli). Greg Bellow remembers his father…

It took nearly four years of begging before Venus Williams and Serena Williams allowed flmmakers Maiken Baird and Michelle Major into their insulated lives. The result of this unprecedented access is Venus and Serena, a new documentary that embodies the American Dream. The film is as much about the sisters’ unique relationship as their on-court exploits: we see them cook, sing karaoke, and dissect the trouble with marriage—namely, that they would no longer get to live together. They come across as confident when talking about their careers but aloof when the subject is anything more personal, such as family—especially their strong-willed father, who performs double duty as coach. It’s hard to name many other subjects about whom Bill Clinton, Chris Rock, and Anna Wintour would all sit for interviews, heaping…

The first major museum retrospective to honor the late A. Quincy Jones, the L.A.-based architect known for his midcentury modernist work, opens May 25 and runs through September 8 at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles. Jones was as well known for the glamorous homes he designed for clients such as the actor Gary Cooper and the art collectors Frances and Sidney Brody as he was for his commercial buildings, notably U.S.C.’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the Sascha Brastof ceramics factory, and the Warner Bros. Records headquarters, in Burbank. “A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living” will showcase a myriad of the visionary’s projects and will highlight his reverence for the outdoors. (hammer.ucla.edu)…

Punk put the “tense” into present tense, nailing itself into the now, never intending to be anybody’s nostalgia cruise. Rude, fast, scratchy, and frontal-attacking, its philosophy was “Out with the old, in with the spew.” To see Patti Smith spitting on the stage of the Bowery club CBGB in 1975, like an infielder releasing a gob of chaw, was to witness a new chapter opening in rock, androgyny, and deportment, a rough draft in action. Other bodily fluids would soon volley forth, more than any lone mop could handle, but there was also a clatter of bone rattling from punk’s hunger artists, who appeared to major in emaciation, as eloquently skeletal and skulled as Falconetti and Antonin Artaud in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Self-invention and self-annihilation yoked into…

No one disputes that near two A.M. on Saturday, February 18, 2012, a violent confrontation occurred inside Double Seven, a small, dimly lit V.I.P. lounge at 63 Gansevoort Street, in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. It is also generally accepted that Jeffrey Jah, one of the club’s front-man partners, invited two groups to share a single table, and that 47-year-old Adam Hock, a former co-owner of the Hawaiian Tropic Zone, in Times Square, punched four extremely well-connected young men in the face: Pierre Casiraghi, 24, second son of Princess Caroline of Monaco; Stavros Niarchos, 26, grandson of the Greek shipping tycoon; Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, 27, son of French fashion empress Carine Roitfeld; and Diego Marroquin, 33, a Mexican-born real-estate investor. And it is roundly agreed that Casiraghi was rushed to the hospital…

It’s late morning, and Peter Rudolph, the executive chef of Madera in the five-star Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Silicon Valley, is commuting from San Francisco to Menlo Park. The hotel opened four years ago on Sand Hill Road—a veritable venture-capital office park—near Woodside, home to many tech billionaires. Surrounded by three of the wealthiest Zip Codes in the country, its high-design interiors and higher-powered happy hours have given a county known for coding a new sense of cool. Halfway to the hotel, Rudolph pulls into Starbucks for his morning coffee. At the counter as he orders a tall Americano, Rudolph is surprised to see the word “Rosewood” scrawled in pen on the barista’s hand. Granted, he has just won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, but he is still…

Illustration by ANTONY HARE • “IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to find a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.” .. • “We can ONLY go to the CHÂTEAU over the summer because it takes a FULL WEEK to get the dogs out of quarantine.” • “First, my NANA died and left me her silver, then my mother died and left me her silver—it’s TOO MUCH SILVER!” • “We few ALL THE WAY to Boston and the nanny forgot to pack clothes for the kids. We can buy all new stuff, but still!” • “My wife doesn’t ask me how many cars I have, and I don’t ask my wife how many HORSES she has.” • “I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a massage in almost THREE MONTHS.” ..“Let’s move out of THE FOYER. It…

GROOMING BY ELAINE MADELON Here they are again, after all these years, the men who gave us indelible memories of Watergate in fact and on the big screen. Annie Leibovitz’s portrait could go right to a Broadway playbill promoting one of those evocative dramas about a championship season or some other shared triumphant experience decades ago. Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, the still-profane and rakish Boston Brahmin, who, as editor of The Washington Post, coached his eager young acolytes into the history books as they unraveled a scandal at the heart of the presidency and sent Richard Milhous Nixon out of the arena and into disgrace. Woodward and Bernstein, the unlikely partners in one of American journalism’s greatest investigative sagas, bring contrasting life stories to the reunion. Bob Woodward still carries the…

Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy. After so many years on the road, he would leave his rolling suitcase open on the floor of his hotel room and use it as a drawer. Dirty clothes went on the closet floor. Shirts he wanted to keep unwrinkled hung above. Toiletries were in the pockets of a cloth folding case that hooked onto a towel rack in the bathroom. At the end of the day he would slide of his worn brown leather boots and line them up by the suitcase, drop his faded jeans to the floor, and put on lightweight cotton pajama bottoms. Most evenings he never left the room. He would crank up the air conditioner—he liked a cool room at night—and sit on the bed, leaning back…

Synonymous with the 60s golden age of advertising, Bert Stern was the cultural provocateur who defined the creative revolution with his seminal Smirn off vodka ads (most famously, a martini glass set in front of a looming Egyptian pyramid). He was the first photographer superstar, and his Manhattan studio became a crossroads of 60s pop culture. His unshakable legacy: an obsessive love of the female form as seen in his conceptual imagery of Sue Lyon for his good pal Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, as well as Twiggy, Elizabeth Taylor, and—the apotheosis of the genre—Marilyn Monroe (“The Last Sitting,” comprising more than 2,500 photos, was shot for Vogue six weeks before her death, in 1962). “There’s nothing like a dame,” he says. “If I liked them, I just pushed the button.” In…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? When I’m sleeping. What is your greatest fear? Heights. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Picasso. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? That I give way too quickly. What is the trait you most deplore in others? That they don’t give way quickly. What is your greatest extravagance? Baden-Baden. What is your favorite journey? The drive to Baden-Baden. On what occasion do you lie? When it’s necessary. What do you dislike most about your appearance? My round shoulders. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My family. When and where were you happiest? Happiness seems to me a retrospective pleasure. Which talent would you most like to have? To play the piano. What is your…

ALMA MATTERS ’Bright college days,” sang Tom Lehrer long ago, “carefree days that fly.” Do they ever. And how easily we forget them. Most of us probably take a more generous view of the S.A.T.’s than we did in our school days. A majority of Americans consider them either a “necessary evil” or a “successful equalizer”; only a third of us regard them as a waste of time or a “failed ideal.” And a whopping 86 percent don’t care—one way or the other—if someone we know was a member of a fraternity or a sorority; as undergrads, most of us almost certainly cared—one way or the other—a great deal. It gets worse: two-thirds of us don’t know what state Northwestern University is in. And it certainly gets worse for those…

THE PAST TYCOON Thank you for your excellent and sensitive article on Merv Adelson [“Remembrance of Wings Past,” by Bryan Burrough, March]. Merv and I became friends more than 20 years ago when I taught him to scuba-dive in the Red Sea. He, along with then wife Barbara Walters and a group of distinguished friends, came to dive from my yacht. That yacht was later stranded in hostile waters of the Sudanese coast, and Merv and other guests had to be saved by the Israeli Air Force in a daring helicopter rescue. But that is not the story I wish to share about Merv. He is truly a very kind and caring man. Shortly after we met, my wife was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, which the Israeli…

Cheers to the dreamers, trailblazers, and outlaws. Like Somalian Hawa Abdi, who, against incredible odds, not only became a doctor but also opened a hospital and refugee camp on the outskirts of lawless Mogadishu, where she has, for more than 20 years, been Keeping Hope Alive (Grand Central). The Sultan of Smooth, Burt Bacharach, dishes with Robert Greenfield on the amorous dramas that inspired his hits in Anyone Who Had a Heart (Harper). Hardwood guru Phil Jackson, assisted by Hugh Delehanty, harnesses the power of Zen in Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (Penguin Press). While everyone cheers a likable winner, the bad boys have more fun. Eric Fischl, with Michael Stone, roars through the go-go, coke-fueled 70s and 80s New York art scene in Bad Boy: My Life on…

A Venetian gondola is made of 280 pieces of wood. The left side of the hull is longer by about nine inches. New Zealand is the last country to have been inhabited permanently by humans, though today they are outnumbered by sheep about nine to one. Australian businessman Clive Palmer is building a replica of the Titanic at a Chinese shipyard. It is scheduled to sail from Southampton, England, to New York in 2016. The residents of the volcanic Pitcairn Island are descendants of the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers and the Tahitian women who settled there with them. Zarafa, France’s first giraffe—a present to King Charles X from the viceroy of Egypt, in 1827—stands in the Museum of Natural History of La Rochelle, France. She lived in Paris in the Jardin…

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “When good Americans die they go to Paris.” Yet, apparently, the most stylish among them get their remains shipped back to the States, according to Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf s, a new documentary about one of New York City’s most esteemed and historic luxury retailers, Bergdorf Goodman. Written and directed by Matthew Miele, Scatter My Ashes should satiate the fashion crowd: practically every industry heavyweight—Marc, Oscar, Karl—makes an appearance. Still, the film goes beyond the typical runway drama and examines the big business of marketing stilettos, peplums, and gowns. As longtime film producer Jean Doumanian puts it, “Stores like this are necessary to make people want to aspire to bigger and better things.”…

Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby might not prove to be the summer’s subtlest movie, but it’ll surely be the headiest. What the Australian director did for Belle Époque Paris in Moulin Rouge! he’s now done for Jazz Age New York, which Fitzgerald himself characterized as a “steady golden roar.” In Luhrmann’s hands, the attempt by Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) to win back loost love Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) is set against a fizzing, sexy bacchanal influenced by Studio 54 in its heyday. DiCaprio’s Gatsby appears to have trace elements of his Howard Hughes in The Aviator and, in his ill-gotten gains at least, his plantation owner in Django Unchained. Mulligan promises to be more sensual than previous Daisys. For the film, which opens this…

BECAUSE he is one of my brothers, and actually the easiest one to be around. BECAUSE I like his politics, whereby the government should act on behalf of the greatest number of people, not merely powerful special interests. BECAUSE he is a rabid sports fan and, especially, a Yankees fan, and he has turned his son, Vance, into a sports nut, too. BECAUSE he’s an endless source of innovative fundraising ideas—from working with the New York City Marathon charity program to auctioning a walk-on role on 30 Rock—for the many causes he supports, most notably the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund. BECAUSE he is a great dad who has made sacrifices in his career and personal passions to raise three kids. BECAUSE he is a good husband. Billy…

Writing concisely about John Forté? That’s like serving scrambled eggs and trying to pass them off as crème brûlée. I call John my godson. I first met him through Ben Taylor, my son, who conveyed all the buzz: Brooklyn-born Forté had worked with the Fugees and recorded a tour de force debut solo album. But then, life changed things. A 14-year prison sentence, on drug charges, came down on him, and I got involved, convinced the punishment was hugely unfair. Soon, my daily routine revolved around working for his freedom. And with the help of friends and Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, John was granted clemency by George W. Bush in 2008. Since John’s release, after serving seven years, he has made up for lost time. Now 38, he performs…

AGE: 29. PROVENANCE: London. ROCK SOLID: Sumner may have spent her childhood on a farm, but she also grew up around fame—her parents are Sting and Trudie Styler. “I don’t know any other life; it’s my normal, but in the end he is just my dad.” ART WORK: Initially dismissing her theatrical aspirations as unrealistic, she reconsidered after taking an acting class while studying painting and sculpture at Parsons, in New York. “I had wanted to act since I was a kid, but I had a lot of shame attached to it. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t think it was ever a possibility.” HAPPENING SUCCESS: After appearing in four episodes of The Borgias, Sumner landed a starring role alongside Greta Gerwig in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, coming out…

MARTHA STEWART SPEAKS WITH TOM WAITS Illustration by ANDRÉ CARRILHO STEWART: Tom, it’s a delight to visit you in your garden. Let’s have a look at your—wait, what’s that sound? WAITS: My old mutt Sullivan. Other week he drank some funny creek water downstream of the hydro-frack. Been breath-in’ like a box bellows ever since. Don’t pay him no mind. STEWART: Oh, the poor thing. Now, let’s have a look at your sunflowers. They’ve . . . not done well. WAITS: Sunflowers don’t grow right in this sun. At least mine didn’t—came up and fell down, like a dray mule with rickets. STEWART: And all your hydrangeas are dead. WAITS: I’m the killer, Martha, but you’re the one who’s done time. STEWART: Oh, but I put that time to such…

Ever since Facebook’s ballyhooed, bungled I.P.O., its share price has languished, with Wall Street asking when the social-media giant is going to grow up and make money. From confidential reports, visits to the company’s sprawling campus, and interviews with its press-shy founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, and C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg, KURT EICHENWALD pieces together the largely unnoticed shift in Facebook strategy: new content, new algorithms, and new alliances, combined to power a marketing model that could have the rest of the world scrambling to catch up On January 15, inside Building 15 at the sprawling Facebook campus in Menlo Park, California, about 100 reporters, employees, and hangers-on packed a makeshift auditorium awaiting the arrival of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and C.E.O. of the social-media giant. Along the walls, enormous signs blared…

Americans should be the last people on earth to gripe about cultural imperialism, but I, for one, couldn’t help but feel a twinge of resentment when I heard that Australian director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) was shooting a new adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Shouldn’t this have been Sofia Coppola’s job, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s? Fortunately, according to Elizabeth Debicki, the 22-year-old Australian actress who plays Jordan Baker in the film, everyone in her country is forced to read The Great Gatsby in high school, just as we are, so I suppose F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel can now be considered a citizen of the world. Luhrmann is also a terrific director, so there’s that too. Gatsby, Debicki’s second film after an English-Australian comedy you’ve never…

That was New York—a burst of magic behind any door. You just had to be lucky, in the right place at the right time. I first met Paul Anka, the singer and songwriter, in 1957 at Paramount Records. I was young. He was younger. Fifteen, 16 years old. This was before his first song was released. The president of the label pulled me into an office to listen to it. And there was Paul, performing to a half-dozen suits. He was a sweet kid, baby-faced, singing his heart out in a nothing office in Midtown. But he had that thing—you could see it right away. The rock-star thing, the movie-star thing. Of all the great crooners of that era, only a handful survived: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Paul. He had…

1 Luca Dotti Luca Dotti was born in Rome in 1970. His mother, Audrey Hepburn, had married his father, psychiatrist Andrea Luca, the year before. “By falling in love with him, she fell in love with Rome,” recounts Luca, the author, along with journalist Luigi Spinola, of the forthcoming book Audrey in Rome, adapted for Vanity Fair on page 144. “The city is very much still in love with her.” 2 Tom Brokaw Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, counts himself fortunate to have been a White House correspondent during Watergate 40 years ago. “It was the greatest constitutional crisis in the history of the American presidency,” says Brokaw, whose Spotlight on Robert Redford’s forthcoming documentary, All the President’s Men Revisited, can be found on page 154.…

@VANITYFAIR’S hashtag-happy following sang the praises of our annual HOLLYWOOD ISSUE and OSCAR BASH—while some found themselves lost in the whirlwind of Bruce Weber’s “Adventures in Hollywood.” @IJASONALEXANDER Vanity Fair cover shot has EMMA STONE in bed w Ben Affleck & Bradley Cooper. BIG DEAL—like we haven’t all been. @SHEEWRITES BRUCE WEBER’S Adventures in Hollywood in this month’s Vanity Fair is phenomenal. Sometimes images can say so much more than words. @ALYS SAROSENBERG Vanity Fair both marginalizes women of color AND makes Emma Stone unrecognizable. @POPE STEVERINO Ben Affleck’s eyes keep moving on the cover of Vanity Fair giving me the creeps @NICOLEOCRAN Dying at Eddie Red mayne as FRED ASTAIRE in @VANITYFAIR’S 2013 Hollywood Portfolio! Hearts in my eyes. @JOHANNACOX What in hipster hell happened to Vanity Fair’s Hollywood…

The dubious lineage of Cath Fox, buccaneering heroine of Nicholas Coleridge’s seventh novel, The Adventuress, out this month from Thomas Dunne, goes right back to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Thackeray’s Becky Sharp. But her rise, through bedrooms and boardrooms, from a menial job in a boarding school to the apex of society, is a completely recognizable story of modern Britain. Writing with wicked brio, the author, who is president of Condé Nast International and a great observer and mimic, remains on just the right side of the line marked “off-color,” for it’s fair to say the end is not the novel’s only climax.…

Art director, fashion-brand consultant, and model Julia Restoin Roitfeld has recently launched a lifestyle site, Romy and the Bunnies, for new and expectant mothers. Herewith, her favorite things … HOME Where do you live London Terrace in West Chelsea in N.Y.C. Favorite art A photo from Sam Haskins, as well as a portrait of my baby by Marco Perego. Oh, and a nude pregnant portrait of me by Patrick Demarchelier. Sheets Belgian linen sheets from Restoration Hardware. Luggage Rimowa suitcases and a Samsonite mini carry-on trolley. Stationery I designed my own thank-you notes and got them printed by Alpine Creative Group. I also designed thank-you notes for my baby at crane.com—to thank everyone for the gifts she got. Favorite flowers White lilies and jasmine. Favorite gadget My iPhone 5. Favorite…

Compassionate and daring, ardently committed and uncannily dashing, British photojournalist Tim Hetherington had just achieved creative breakthroughs as a serious filmmaker and visual artist when he was killed in April 2011, at age 40, covering the Libyan civil war. Two years to the week after his death, HBO is airing Which Way Is the Frontline from Here?, an homage to Hetherington by his frequent Vanity Fair collaborator, Sebastian Junger, the author of The Perfect Storm and War. What Junger offers is incisive, transporting, and tender—a brotherly character study, using clips from Hetherington’s own short films, still photos, video footage, outtakes from Restrepo (Junger and Hetherington’s 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary about a U.S. platoon in Afghanistan), and interviews with family, friends, and Tim himself. We meet a man so dedicated to the…

In 1931, producer Samuel Goldwyn made Paris’s rising fashion darling Coco Chanel a million-dollar offer (equivalent to $15 million today): come to Hollywood to drape film stars, such as Gloria Swanson and Joan Blondell, in la mode couture. Inspired by that collaboration and the decades the designer spent dressing French actresses, Chanel’s Collection Avant-Première—a dramatic new lip line featuring 14 award-worthy Rouge Coco shades, from golden-beige Ingénue to deep-red Dialogue—was conceived to evoke Mademoiselle’s movie magic. ($34, chanel.com)…

I once dined with the Masai in the Serengeti. Seven thirty for eight, smart safari casual. I tiptoed up to the thorn enclosure, shook hands, smiled, talked about the weather and the flies and the children’s beadwork, admired the big lotus-bladed lion spears, and then my host said, “Shall we go through?” We went into the dining room, which was also the cattle pen, where dinner was standing with a tourniquet around its neck and a lad pulling its tail. A boy took a bow with a blunt arrow and shot a hole in the animal’s jugular vein, which spurted a river of blood dexterously into a long, bulbous gourd that had been cleaned for my benefit with cow’s urine. After about half a pint had been tapped, the tourniquet…

The writer E. B. White was particularly hot and bothered. He had reason to be. There was a heat wave going on in August 1948 as White walked into his room at the Algonquin Hotel—“halfway down an air shaft,” as he would later describe it—across the street from where he had toiled for The New Yorker 20 years earlier. For four straight days, the mercury in Manhattan would breach 100 degrees. There wasn’t time to be fussy about all of that; White had a job to do. A magazine editor named Ted Patrick had written, gently inquiring if the venerated writer, now firmly ensconced as a country squire in seafaring North Brooklin, Maine, would entertain returning to some of his old haunts in Gotham to write an essay about the…

TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD DAY ONE SUNDAY, 16 DECEMBER 2012: Seeking refuge from French tax laws targeting the wealthy, GÉRARD DEPARDIEU tells Le Journal du Dimanche he is surrendering his passport and has moved to Belgium. DAY TWO France’s socialist president, FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE, responds by launching a salvo of withering scorn, directed at both Belgium and Depardieu. The attack in Cahiers du Cinéma is particularly acute, noting that the only other Belgian movie star is the so-called “Muscles from Brussels,” JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME. DAY THREE Invoking the hitherto top-secret Russian/Belgian mutual-defense treaty, VLADIMIR PUTIN bestows Russian citizenship on Depardieu, greeting him with a parade in RED SQUARE bristling with Soviet-era military equipment. Putin warns that if France doesn’t issue an immediate apology he’ll cut off their natural-gas supply,…

The first thing she did with her newfound freedom was buy a pair of Roman sandals. Then she went to the barber for a pixie cut. And then she bought herself a gelato. Simple pleasures all, but as a princess on the lam in 1953’s Roman Holiday, an unknown actress named Audrey Hepburn made these pleasures indelible. She can cook and sew and keep house, the princess tells Gregory Peck, a newspaper reporter who’s onto her. “I just haven’t had the chance to do it for anyone.” He spends the day showing her Rome while secretly planning to report the story and have a scoop. He doesn’t report the story. He falls in love with her instead—just as the viewing public did—and protects this girl of doe-eyed grace and gravity.…

Her gaze is vivid, agile, alert, quizzical. In her frame there is a coiled and unpredictable energy. At 54, the Irish-born actress Fiona Shaw is most widely known as Petunia Dursley, in the Harry Potter movies, but in 2001 she was made an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her remarkable stage work. She was last on Broadway in 2003, playing Euripides’s Medea, and before that in a solo performance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, directed in both instances by Deborah Warner, her frequent collaborator. When Shaw evokes darkness or determination or deep-seated pain, as she has done in many of the roles she has played—Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Beckett’s Winnie in Happy Days—she manages to suggest a fearless grandeur as well…

I. The Climb On the morning of Sunday, October 14, last year, the Austrian parachutist Felix Baumgartner sat in a pressurized capsule at nearly 128,000 feet, floating over the wastelands of eastern New Mexico, preparing to jump out. A fragile helium balloon suspended him there in ultra-thin air, higher than jets can fly. For more than three hours he had been breathing pure oxygen to purge his blood of nitrogen against decompression sickness, or “the bends.” Like astronauts or the pilots of high-altitude reconnaissance airplanes, he wore a full pressure suit with the helmet visor down. For now the suit was defated, allowing for relatively easy movement, but Baumgartner disliked it nonetheless. The suit stank of rubber, and when inflated it hemmed him in. Baumgartner had never liked to be…

Seventeen seventy-nine was not a happy year for Houghton Hall. Two hundred and four masterpieces of art—the finest collection in Britain—were pried of the walls of this perfect Palladian palace, in Norfolk, and shipped to St. Petersburg. Catherine the Great, through her ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, had swooped in and paid the cash-strapped heirs of the estate £40,500 for the lot (a fortune at the time), pre-empting a sale auctioneer James Christie had been preparing. Indignation and alarm spread throughout the English nation. “Russia is sacking our Palaces!” porcelain-maker Josiah Wedgwood declared. In newspapers as well as on the floor of Parliament, the sale was condemned, and an (unsuccessful) public-subscription campaign to buy back the paintings was launched. Though most of the canvases were by Dutch and…