Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2013 i Vanity Fair

If there is a more blighted community in the U.S. these days than the area around Waco, Texas, it would be hard to imagine. Waco, a city of just over 125,000 people, and its surrounding towns have had more than their share of disasters, both natural and manmade. Included in the mayhem are tornadoes (one in 1953 killed 114 and is considered the worst in Texas history); grisly murders (two girls and a boy, all teenagers, were found slashed to death by the shores of Lake Waco in 1982); cult raids (the F.B.I.’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound, led by David Koresh, in which 76 members, including children, were killed in the ensuing fire); plagues (the cricket onslaught of 2012, after which the ground was deep with insect carcasses);…

Eddie Izzard, the transvestite comic genius who sold out Madison Square Garden, met me for lunch at Marea, a mecca for Italian seafood on Central Park South, in New York. My favorite stand-up comedian on earth was in town on the eve of his Force Majeure World Tour. (Stops include Serbia, Nepal, Russia, and New Zealand, among 25 countries.) I was excited to meet him if only because there’s no entertainer like him. Looking fit and studious with a trim beard, and wearing specs, this innately charming, reflective man was dressed mostly in what he called “boy mode.” He was wearing jeans and a North Face top; his boots had stacked heels, and his nails were varnished jungle red. It’s amazing, I thought. Onstage or off, everything about Eddie works.…

Maybe a quick peek at the Taylor Swift mail? Just one missive, we promise. “I keep waiting for her to make that leap from being a quite talented, successful niche writer/performer to being a truly great artist, but [Nancy Jo Sales’s] interview [“Taylor Swift’s Telltale Heart”] indicated no such leap is imminent,” writes TC Peulausk, from Rome, Georgia. “Taylor Swift is 23, has traveled the world, and has been in a myriad of lifebroadening situations with interesting people, yet she is still writing and singing about a very small slice of life to a very narrow audience.” Meanwhile: “Excellent job on the Malala Yousafzai article [“The Target,” by Marie Brenner],” writes Kimberly Koppen, of Chicago, Illinois. “No offense to Ms. Swift, but Malala should have been your cover girl.” “Bette…

In Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, a crew of L.A. high-schoolers embark on a burglary spree in the Hollywood Hills. They target the homes of, among others, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge, Megan Fox, and Rachel Bilson. They thrill at their proximity to the celebs (yet bizarrely discard a love letter found chez Orlando Bloom). Their haul in designer loot is enough to make law-abiding fashionist as in the audience salivate. While pillaging Hilton’s house, the teen felons—four avaricious hotties and a nervy youth—marvel at the cushions bearing her face, enlarged and framed magazine covers featuring her, and a “nightclub room.” At Lohan’s house, their affectless ringleader (Katie Chang) experiences a quiet moment of satiety, having doused herself in the star’s perfume. One of her accomplices, a fame-hungry cynic…

David Margolick presents Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press). Nancy Jo Sales sparkles in The Bling Ring (It Books). Lily Koppel salutes The Astronaut Wives Club (Grand Central). Travis McDade fingers the notorious Thieves of Book Row (Oxford). Scott C. Johnson surveils The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the C.I.A. (Norton). The forgotten generation and its forgotten war rise in Richard Rubin’s The Last of the Doughboys (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Michael S. Smith, with Christine Pittel, deconstructs the alchemy of design in Building Beauty (Rizzoli). Anita Raghavan shows how today’s Indian-American business class rises and falls with the Galleon collapse in The Billionaire’s Apprentice (Business Plus). Oscar Goodman gets lucky in Being Oscar (Weinstein). William T. Georgis’s Make It…

Publisher, pundit, and scourge of the left, Andrew Breitbart put his incendiary muckraking into vigilante action, dispatching such liberal targets as ACORN and Anthony Weiner before combusting last year, at 43, from heart failure. The right-wing blogosphere is floundering without him He came, he saw, he conquered, he keeled over. To his legions of admirers and loyal consuls, the publisher, punditeer, and lightning rod Andrew Breitbart was an American Caesar cut down in his prime. A righteous fighter who brought the battlefield with him wherever he went, Breitbart feasted on the lily livers of liberals and burped in their faces, just for fun. A news junkie whose nonstop jags helped hot-wire the Internet for political agitation (first as Matt Drudge’s lieutenant at the Drudge Report, then at the Huffington Post,…

KATIE ASELTON AGE: 34. PROVENANCE: Milbridge, Maine. HOMETOWN GIRL: The former Miss Maine Teen now owns a home down the street from the house she grew up in, where she enjoys laid-back visits. “When I’m there, I’m not worried about what shoes I’m wearing and what my hair looks like—it’s just me.” CORE VALUE: After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Aselton made her first feature appearance in 2005’s The Puffy Chair, a film written and directed by brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, pioneers of the naturalistic “mumblecore” genre. Aselton and Mark Duplass got married a year after filming wrapped, and the couple now co-star in FX’s fantasy-football hit, The League, along with a cadre of comedic talent. “For me, it’s like going to funny camp; I get…

With arrest after arrest in a massive, seven-year insider-trading investigation, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is getting closer to the biggest fish of them all: Steve Cohen, founder of SAC Capital, the $14 billion hedge fund, who some regard as the most successful stock picker of his time. C.E.O.’s have fallen, lives and companies have been upturned, but Cohen has thus far escaped. BRYAN BURROUGH and BETHANY MCLEAN go deep inside Bharara’s probe—and SAC’s org chart—to reveal just how much blood is in Wall Street’s waters Twenty-five years ago Wall Street, and much of America, was transfixed by a sweeping set of insider-trading investigations centered on the greatest financier of the age, junk-bond king Michael Milken, of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Day after day, week after week, month after month, stories of…

When Oscar Pistorius—the South African “Blade Runner,” who overcame a double amputation to compete in the Olympics last year—shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day, the millions he’d inspired were faced with a shocking possibility: that their hero was also a killer. With Pistorius claiming that Steenkamp’s death was an accident, MARK SEAL delves into the murder case that has rocked the country, and the paths the couple took to that fatal night At four A.M. on February 14, Detective Hilton Botha, a 24-year veteran of the South African Police Service, was awakened by a phone call from his colonel. “Oscar’s shot his girlfriend,” Botha told his wife, Audrey, after hanging up. She didn’t have to ask who that was. “We all know Oscar,” she told me a month…

No matter how you drop a cat, it lands on its feet. "I’m a cat," declares Carla Bruni. "You know, cats don’t like to go outside. They actually drop their smell all over a place, and that becomes their place. So when you like with a cat, you actually live at the cas’s house." Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Bruni—singer-songwriter, model, and male fantasy extraordinaire—married in 2008, shortly after he was elected, knows that. All during their marriage he has resided at her house, in Paris’s 16th Arrondissement, with a living room filled with a piano and recording equipment. “You can’t leave a dog alone for a week—it suffers,” she continues. “A cat is not exactly the same. It suffers from leaving the house and likes to be alone…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? At sunset or under the stars on the dock of our lake house just being with my family and pals. What is your greatest fear? That we will have waited too long to save the earth from environmental catastrophe. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Cleopatra. Which living person do you most admire? Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot for advocating that girls be educated. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My competitive side, the one that keeps score. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Pettiness, arrogance, boorishness. What is your greatest extravagance? A midafter noon martini. What is your favorite journey? Any one that takes me home … and, of course,…

1 Maureen Orth Nearly five years have passed since special correspondent Maureen Orth first profiled France’s then First Lady, Carla Bruni, for Vanity Fair. “The French public loved her because she presented such an elegant image,” says Orth, who caught up with the former model and man-eater for “Carla on a Hot Tin Roof” (page 120). “The most fun part about interviewing Bruni—a female Don Juan, in her younger years—this time, was hearing her disquisitions about the virtues of marriage and motherhood.” 2 Laura M. Holson This month, in “Brad’s War” (page 90), The New York Times’s Laura M. Holson uncovers the astonishing story behind the making of World War Z, Brad Pitt’s $200-million-plus zombie movie and the latest blockbuster to experience belt-busting budget distensions. “As more directors experiment with…

A PANOPLY of ECCENTRIC BIOGRAPHICAL DATA RE: FILMDOM’S PREMIER POP AUTEUR With his film Star Trek into Darkness inaugurating the summer ’13 blockbuster season, and with the weighty responsibility of directing the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII, J. J. Abrams is surely worthy of an epic profile that would trace, in depth, his path from wunderkind screenwriter to prolific TV-series overlord (with the shows Felicity, Alias, Lost, and Fringe among his credits) to nimble filmmaker equally adept at handling battleship-class franchise fare (e.g., Mission: Impossible III) and deeply affecting personal material (e.g., Super 8). That is not, however, the business of this page. This page revives an approach from the first incarnation of Vanity Fair, from nearly a century ago, that posited that “the really vital and important thing[s]” about…

Our April cover featuring TAYLOR SWIFT prompted a mix of outrage and excitement on Twitter. Read closely to see what a certain teenage witch had to say. @DASHBOT I hope @SenRandPaul reads the Taylor Swift Vanity Fair issue out loud cause that would save me like, five bucks. @WASHINGTINA Ugh, Taylor Swift is on the @VanityFair cover this month? I’m gonna have to read it out of a brown paper bag like it’s porn. @MELISSA JOANHART Magazine headlines crack me up sometimes. Case&point;Vanity Fair this month with Taylor Swift but next to pic says “My Syrian Hostage Ordeal” @KVTKNITS After reading vanity fair I feel that I really want to teach Taylor Swift how to knit #dreamcelebrityhangouts @THEELF26 best part of @VanityFair’s article on Taylor Swift ‘She writes perfect pop…

All aboard!” Summer books are our ticket to escape. Khaled Hosseini’s sprawling family saga, And the Mountains Echoed (Riverhead), journeys from Kabul to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos. The lives of a divorced mom and her son intertwine with the mystery of a missing boy in Caroline Leavitt’s riveting novel Is This Tomorrow (Algonquin). Julie Kavanagh ships us into 19th-century Paris and into the boudoir of Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis, The Girl Who Loved Camellias (Knopf). Philipp Meyer’s far-flung novel The Son (Ecco) surveys the vast range of the American West. Jeannette Walls jumps off the memoir train and hitches a ride on the novel form with The Silver Star (Scribner). The hero of Abigail Tarttelin’s novel Golden Boy (Atria) is anything but precious. Kevin Kwan’s novel…

CITY SANDAL Sergio Rossi patent-leather ankle-strap sandal, $650. (sergiorossi.com) GRECIAN HOLIDAY Ancient Greek strap sandal, $230. (modaoperandi.com) COLORFUL CARRYALL Pierre Hardy cotton tote, $895. (pierrehardy.com) GOLDEN DAZE The Row sunglasses, $450. (lindafarrow.com) BAG OF PARADISE Marni leather parrot bag, $350. (bergdorfgoodman.com) A STEP ABOVE Paul Andrew Sphinx calfskin ankle-strap sandal, $890. (barneys.com.) DASH OF DARING Fendi Lycra studded 2jours tote, $3,590. (fendi.com) EASY ELEGANCE Giorgio Armani white tote bag, $2,880. (armani.com) GLAMOUR-PUSS Thierry Lasry black sunglasses, $475. (bergdorfgoodman.) GARDEN PARTY Aquazzura Mojito sandal in pink and red, $650. (aquazzura.com) SWEE T ’N’ SASSY Tabitha simmons Berite red-stripe shoe, $795. ((bergdorfgoodman.com) BLUE SKIES Cutler and Gross blue sunglasses, $500. (cutlerandgross.com) FLOWER BASKET Prada canvas floral bag, $1,995. (prada.com) A LEG UP Nicholas Kirkwood cream, silver, and black patent-leather heel, $735. (nicholaskirkwood.com)…

Act I: In Which Manti Te’o Is a Golden God The story is a classic of the genre. It opens on February 4, 2009—with an event that is, in the world of college football, the biggest day of the year that doesn’t involve tackling. This is National Signing Day, when the nation’s top high-school players officially commit to their chosen colleges. Among the most publicized and coveted recruits of 2009 is our protagonist, Manti Te’o, an explosive linebacker from the Hawaiian island of Oahu. That Te’o happens to be of Hawaiian-Samoan descent—and Mormon, to boot—burnishes his star appeal. One of the N.F.L.’s biggest stars, Troy Polamalu, of the Pittsburgh Steelers, comes from a long line of Samoans. Pacific Islanders routinely play at the University of Southern California (because of its…

The streets were slick with rain on April 13, 2012, when Damon Lindelof climbed the winding road to Brad Pitt’s hillside estate, overlooking Los Angeles. The 40-year-old Lindelof, a screenwriter and a creator of the hit show Lost, had been summoned by his agent to meet Pitt to talk about World War Z—the star’s film based on the 2006 Max Brooks novel—whose release later that year would be delayed. For months, Hollywood gossips had whispered about Pitt’s troubled zombie thriller. Key executives were fired. The movie was over-budget. There were rumors that Pitt, who both produced and starred in the film, had stopped speaking to the director, Marc Forster. Lindelof told his agent when he called, “I should see something, read a script.” “No, they just want to meet you…

Not since David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990–91) has a whodunit captured television audiences the way AMC’s The Killing has. Mireille Enos plays Sarah Linden, the complicated, obsessive detective driven to find the killer of a teenage girl in Seattle. Enos’s Linden is rarely seen out of a variety of bulky Fair Isle sweaters, of which the actress remarks, “I think they have two versions of each sweater, but there’s the ‘favorite one’ I wore for, like, four episodes—I hated that sweater by the end!” The Killing, which had the daring to take two full years to solve the murder, earned Enos an Emmy nomination the first season. “People love a thriller, but also there’s this rich character development, and because of the luxury of only working on one case for…

If there was a moment when our crisis in education reached a critical mass, it may well have been the date Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” went up on YouTube. In just 19 minutes, his wry but eviscerating presentation gave voice to what so many of us are living through: our schools are failing to recognize creativity; we’re misdiagnosing A.D.H.D. and overmedicating students; we’re failing to prepare the next generation for the challenges that lie ahead. It’s the most viewed TED talk of all time. This month, Sir Ken publishes Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life (Viking). “After the TED talk, people kept asking, Well, that’s all well and good, but how do I go about making the…

George Plimpton was the man who did it all, an aristocratic action hero whose adventures singularly defined participatory journalism. Whether swinging on the flying trapeze, boxing with Archie Moore, quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions, or playing percussion with Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, Plimpton, a collector of experiences, lived life in a full embrace. Plimpton!, Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s new documentary film, delivers an enchanting view into the life of the beloved, well-bred literary lion, who died in 2003. “He was an artist whose life was his greatest work of art,” says Bean. “A well-known storyteller, it seemed only fair that he tell his greatest story, that of his own life,” adds Poling. The film, narrated primarily by Plimpton himself, features archival footage and interviews with everyone from Hugh…

Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” asked Noël Coward in 1961, and were he around 52 years later he’d be asking the same question. For instance, when Americans were asked who they’d least like to sit next to on a plane, the very choices themselves—Kim Kardashian, Charlie Sheen, Richard Simmons, Chris Brown, Joan Rivers, and Mel Gibson—suggest that the Coward Theory still holds, and that the wrong people are traveling before we’ve even booked our seats. Similarly, the poll’s offered options in cross-country traveling companions (three teenagers, or three children under 10?) instead conjure soothing visions of Barcaloungers and unchanging time zones. But support for the theory extends even unto the answers. Nearly half of us Americans admit to stealing from hotels, soaps being by far the most coveted objets.…

Return of the boy king; a man and his ego; London’s little secret; unsolicited advice for Taylor Swift; and more I enjoyed reading the article “The King of New York” [by David Kamp, April]. It brought back many memories of the Tutankhamun exhibition. But one major event in the article wasn’t fully explained: taking the packed crates to Alexandria and putting them on the U.S.S. Milwaukee was not the Met’s original plan. At that time, I was an associate curator in the Egyptian Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art tasked with overseeing the packing of the 55 artifacts for the Tutankhamun exhibition. We had planned to fly the objects to the United States. But the date I arrived in Cairo, July 4, 1976, was the same day Israel Defense…

Before Midnight, from writer-director Richard Linklater, premiered to rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where 18 years earlier Before Sunrise, the first in a trilogy, made its debut and introduced us to the films’ indelible romantics: Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American tourist, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a Parisian student. In the first film, they meet on a train and decide to spend the day and night walking and talking in Vienna, only to part ways in the morning. In 2004, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy revisited the characters in Before Sunset, in which Jesse, now married, a father, and a successful writer, is on a book tour in Paris, where he runs into Celine, who’s living there. Before Midnight, which takes place nine years later, picks up in Greece,…

The end of the Second World War in Europe was celebrated in Britain on May 8, 1945. Winston Churchill, at Buckingham Palace, told an aide to get him a cigar, which he then lit before the crowd with a flourish. “They expect it,” Churchill explained. The story is told by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light (Henry Holt), the final volume of the “Liberation Trilogy,” his widely acclaimed history of the war in Europe. Atkinson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has written books on four American wars. His first, The Long Gray Line (1989), followed the West Point class of 1966—ravaged like no other by Vietnam. The new book begins on D-day and ends on V-E Day. Epic, set-piece battle sequences are balanced by deft portraiture. The Greatest…

CANDACENELSON It would be fair to say that Candace Nelson is to cupcakes today what Debbi Fields was to cookies in the 1980s. The Sprinkles empire, launched in April 2005 from a tiny modern storefront off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, was founded by Candace and her husband, Charles, who met in San Francisco while working in high-tech finance. After riding the dot-com boom through to its bust, Candace embarked on an enviable self-reinvention, enrolling at Tante Marie’s, a renowned pastry school in the Bay Area. “I baked from my home kitchen while my husband dutifully delivered my creations around town,” Nelson, now 39, recalls. But creating treats for special occasions proved a poor business plan because, by definition, special occasions were few and far between. So, Candace set out…

There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, California. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation. It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and C.E.O. had made him: to buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion—$300 million in cash and…

As the progeny of one of Hollywood’s most attractive and combustible couples, Kim Basinger (1998 Oscar winner for L.A. Confidential) and Alec Baldwin (winner of three Golden Globes and two Emmys for NBC’s 30 Rock and currently on Broadway in Orphans), Ireland Baldwin hit the genetic jackpot. Blonde, blue-eyed, and six feet two, the 17-year-old stunner has just signed with Two Management and IMG Models, but she is quick to admit that it took her years to feel sure of herself, even though she was a star volleyball player through her sophomore year. “I went through a lot in middle school, and you always try so many different looks and try to be so many different people. I finally realized I’m awkward, I’m lanky, and I’m going to embrace it—make…

The more than $1 billion value of the collection that the philanthropist Leonard A. Lauder has pledged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art should not blind us to the immense cultural boost it will give New York. This eminently imaginative donation will not only inspire other collectors to follow suit but also bring a new dimension to the Met, which has traditionally favored old masters and Impressionists over modernists. As the museum’s director, Thomas P. Campbell, announced, “In one fell swoop this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art.” The 78 works (33 by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, 14 by Fernand Léger, and 14 by Juan Gris) that constitute Lauder’s gift are the building blocks on which much of contemporary art is still based. In 1986,…

When I was a high-school student in Dallas, my math teacher Mrs. Bauer went to a conference and saw a demonstration of one of the first personal computers. She thought, These are going to be big. She enrolled in a night class in computer science so she could teach us how to use computers, even though she had to pay the tuition herself. Her dedication to bringing innovation into our classroom changed my life and launched a career I could never have imagined. How many of us had a teacher like Mrs. Bauer? Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way to support the amazing educators who work so hard to expose their students to the world around them? Well, we do, through DonorsChoose.org, which makes it easy to…

It should have all been happening by now. Had everything gone according to Ben Sprecher’s plan, Rebecca, the Musical would have opened on Broadway last November, a juggernaut loosed upon American theater. The show’s logo, a flaming, curlicued capital R, would have hung proudly above the marquee at the Broadhurst Theatre, on West 44th Street, and reproductions of the logo would have adorned the sides of city buses trundling up and down the avenues of Manhattan. On Saturdays, giggly packs of teenage theater-arts girls would have been spilling out of the matinee, belting out “Last niiiight I dreammmmt of Mannn-derley!” in imitation of Jill Paice, the pretty actress cast as the show’s nameless protagonist: a dowdy young English innocent recently married to the wealthy Maxim de Winter, and soon haunted…