Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2013 i Vanity Fair

Since winning the National Book Award for his exquisite book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius—an expanded version of his senior thesis at Princeton—A. Scott Berg has established himself as one of our foremost biographers, reappearing every decade or so with a new blockbuster invariably hailed for its painstaking research, masterly storytelling, and cultural resonance. This fall, the Pulitzer Prize winner (for 1998’s Lindbergh) will emerge from sequestration with Wilson, a biography of the 28th U.S. president. And with the prescience that all truly great biographers possess, Berg discovered in Woodrow Wilson a figure who would understand Washington’s current state of affairs. In “A League of His Own,” beginning on page 68, Berg depicts a president facing a Congress no less partisan or obstructionist than the current one. Wilson, though, was…

My Stuff LOU DOILLON Musician and muse Lou Doillon, daughter of international icon Jane Birkin, has just released her first full-length album, Places, a compilation of beautiful, sweeping ballads. Herewith, the chanteuse’s favorite things … HOME Where do you live Paris. Favorite art museum The Musée d’Orsay. Sheets Caravane on Rue Saint-Nicolas. Luggage I’ve been traveling for 10 years with my Tracey Emin Longchamp bag. China I gather things from vintage stores, Caravane Emporium, and Astier de Villatte. Pets A bulldog. Favorite flowers Peonies and poppies. Favorite gadget My phone. Favorite neighborhood restaurant Le Square Trousseau. Favorite drink Grom (hot water, honey, lime, and rum). Favorite desserts Angelina’s Mont-Blanc, Toraya’s mochis. Favorite snack Organic veggie burger from Mamie Green or tacos at La Candelaria. INSPIRATIONS Who inspires you My uncle…

Political intrigue has taken a dark swoop ever since Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing waved farewell from the tarmac on May 14, 2006 (how did liberals survive the Bush era without it?), fading into the afterlife of cable reruns, boxed DVD sets, and fond mentions in Maureen Dowd columns. It’s as if this Emmy-bestrewn series, set in the White House, took TV’s last traces of Frank Capra idealism with it, leaving behind a Venus-flytrap jungle of power junkies and craven flunkies doing the bidding of turf warriors and vicious infighters running agencies that barely have names, only cryptic initials. Forget what you’ve seen on C-SPAN, the nonprofit public-affairs network and insomnia remedy whose static cameras portray the cog workings of government as a vast, multi-chambered drone machine, an ongoing civics…

TILDA SWINTON SPEAKS WITH BILL O’REILLY D’REILLY: So what wackadoodle picture are you in next? SWINTON: The Zero Theorem, directed by Terry Gilliam. D’REILLY: See, this is my problem with you, Swinton: You can act. You’ve got the chops. So why the hell don’t you do a picture that people would like to see, like The Bells of St. Mary’s with Bing Crosby as the priest? It’s perfect timing for a remake with you in the Ingrid Bergman nun part! SWINTON: Why not me in the priest part? D’REILLY: Har-dee-har-har, Swinton! I just don’t get it, I don’t. You’re a pretty lady. You’ve got the gams. Why the hell would you wear that—whatever that bizarre thing is you’re wearing? It doesn’t even have sleeves! SWINTON: This is a one-off piece…

Idris Elba—the British actor, D.J., and hip-hop artist raised in East London by his Ghanaian mother and Sierra Leonean father—is perhaps most famous for playing drug lord Russell “Stringer” Bell on HBO’s hit cop drama, The Wire. A decade after he left the show (and innumerable television and movie roles later), Elba will now flex his multi-talented muscles once again, in director Guillermo del Toro’s alien-invasion thriller, Pacific Rim, in which he stars as Stacker Pentecost, a commander charged with rescuing Earth from an impending apocalypse. The film hits theaters this month. “I’m not a massive sci-fi fan,” Elba confesses. Yet, he explains, del Toro’s talent drew him in: “It was about Guillermo. I’d seen his films—Pan’s Labyrinth was incredible. But Pacific Rim was a big, dense script where I…

The old lady played the quarter slots. She would roll up and down the rows of jangling slot machines in her wheelchair until she sensed a likely jackpot. Then she would feed quarters for hours, reveling in the anonymity of the Wind Creek Casino & Hotel, a high-rise, Vegas-style gambling establishment about an hour south of her hometown, Monroeville, Alabama. In the gaudy confines of the American Indian casino, she felt safe; nobody seemed to recognize her or give a good goddamn about that book of hers. That is how Harper Lee, the fiercely private author of To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, who had refused to give a substantive interview since 1964, spent her sunset years. Often at her back, pushing her wheelchair, was…

‘I read the script and thought, It’s got everything you want in it,” Ruth Wilson says of director Gore Verbinski’s Western, The Lone Ranger, in which she plays Rebecca Reid, opposite Johnny Depp’s Tonto and Armie Hammer as the title character, in theaters this month. “It was such fun, and it had heart and soul to it.” The 31-year-old, Olivier Award-winning actress (named best supporting actress for her portrayal of Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, and best actress for playing the title role in Anna Christie opposite Jude Law, both at London’s Donmar Warehouse theater) says of Verbinski’s film that she had “never done anything on that scale before. When I turned up to film in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they had built two fully functioning steam trains and five…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Watching seeds grow in the greenhouse. Drawing or reading or cooking. What is your greatest fear? That the Proust Questionnaire will continue to be used by lazy, overworked journalists for another century or so (since you asked …). Which living person do you most admire? Spencer Haywood, an American basketball player, once said that real stars are people who work in a factory and instill good values in their children. I admire sensible, kind people. They’re not often famous. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? How long do we have? What is the trait you most deplore in others? The susceptibility to ideology or tribalism. What is your greatest extravagance? Doing a fashion line. What is your favorite journey? It…

1 Gabrielle Giffords With recalcitrant Republicans in Congress having stood against any gun-control legislation, former U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords is fighting the filibusters through her PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions. “The N.R.A. leadership has built up outsize influence and stockpiled millions of dollars in order to serve the corporate gun lobby,” she says. In this month’s V.F. Portrait (page 98), Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, honors another advocate, three-term New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. 2 A. Scott Berg Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer A. Scott Berg spent 13 years—without assistants or researchers—writing Wilson, his forthcoming book, which is adapted in this month’s issue. In “A League of His Own” (page 68), Berg recounts Woodrow Wilson’s crucible, a cross-country trek to sell the American public on the League of Nations.…

Were it up to him, Willie Geist might not be on television today. M.C.-ing America’s mornings with boyish zip. Instead, he’d be blaring Big Daddy Kane in a two-tone beige van, its best days behind it, freighting pre-ordered liquor to the Garden State’s thirsty. It was his mother who persuaded him out of the post-college hooch-conveyance trade, shooing him off to interview for a real job, literally any job, while his father—CBS’s Bill Geist—served as occupational inspiration. Now the 38-year-old is the best reason to watch the Today show—the rollicking kid brother who happily jumped in as NBC’s good-time gang began to go off script. When Geist isn’t co-hosting the nine A.M. hour, he’s Joe Scarborough’s charming foil on Morning Joe, and he has written two humor books, including the…

Why Woodrow Wilson?” people invariably ask, when they hear I have spent the last 13 years writing a biography of our 28th president. The simple answer is that he was the architect of much of the last century and re-drew the map of the world. But my feelings for Wilson have always had more than a historical basis. It all started when I was 15 and read a book about him, which impelled me to hang his picture on my bedroom wall. I’m pretty sure I was the only kid on the block who did. In the 48 years since, my budding obsession has only grown. I’m hardly alone in my fascination. Franklin Roosevelt idolized him. Harry Truman called him “the greatest of the greats.” And when Richard Nixon moved…

Kerry Washington says she’s not Olivia Pope, the powerful fixer—and presidential mistress—she plays on ABC’s hit drama Scandal. But whether it’s her political activism, the way she inspires her colleagues, or the strategic savvy that made the show a Twitter sensation, Washington flashes more than a little Pope in her offscreen persona. DAVID KAMP explores the mind (and style) of the woman behind television’s complicated new heroine In real life, the hair is more tousled and less workplace-professional, with ribbony streaks of punkish orange mixed in with the natural black. The speaking voice is more singsong and girlish, half an octave up in register. The face, freer to smile, unburdened by crises personal or constitutional, is more beautiful still. Than? Given that it’s Kerry Washington being described, and that it’s…

Photograph by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ I often describe my recovery from being shot as a long, hard haul, but those words also describe the tough road toward keeping our communities safer from gun violence—and Mayor Michael Bloomberg is in it for the long haul. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, another political animal from New York with big dreams—albeit one who lost his bid for City Hall—nothing easy is ever worth doing. We can be thankful that Mike Bloomberg isn’t afraid of the hard tasks. When he might have focused on his own legacy and a post-mayoralty more about Bermuda than about background checks, he has instead chosen to work in partnership with gun owners like me and my husband, Mark, with sheriffs and police chiefs, and with veterans and moms and Americans…

The British collaborators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were both born in 1968, the Year of the Monkey in the Chinese zo-diac. “There’s some kind of simian connection,” says Hewlett. “We have a kind of monkey madness.” In 1998 the two artists started Gorillaz, a virtual band of animated characters, which went double platinum with its second album and has received a Grammy and six more nominations. Six years later they began working on Monkey: Journey to the West, an opera conceived by director Chen Shi-Zheng, based on a 16th-century Chinese novel about a monkey’s humbling quest for immortality. After runs in four cities around the world, including London and Paris, this big-budget, acrobatic spectacle will play in New York for three weeks this month as part of the Lincoln…

The splashiest new home in the Hamptons sits perilously close to the ocean dunes of Sagaponack, hard by Gibson Beach. In early June, workers were racing to finish the huge main house with its bulbous wings for its owner, hedge-fund billionaire David Tepper, 55. The next big storm may sweep it away, but Tepper, who made his fortune buying distressed stocks, has already rebuilt once, after razing the mansion that stood here before. He can do it again. All along the ocean dunes, from Southampton to East Hampton, Wall Street money is back in action, doing what it wants to do. Embattled hedge-fund mogul Steve Cohen has decided his new, $60 million home, on Further Lane, needs to be larger—seven bedrooms and 10,000 square feet are not enough. As for…

Audrey Hepburn is near and dear to those of us in the UNICEF family, so I was thrilled to see your cover story about her life in Rome [“Audrey’s Dolce Vita,” by Luca Dotti and Laura Jacobs, May]. A brilliant actress, fashion icon, and devoted mother, Audrey was also a fierce advocate for the world’s most vulnerable children. In the last years of her life, she traveled to more than 20 countries, lending her powerful voice on behalf of children struggling to survive. Her 1988 visit to famine-ravaged Ethiopia, for example, helped save countless young lives by shining a bright spotlight on the devastating toll of droughts plaguing the country. By the time she passed away, in 1993, Audrey had opened hearts and minds all over the world and inspired…

To London, for lunch with the Queen of England, or the next-best thing: Helen Mirren. “This isn’t your corner pub, you know,” she said when we met at the three-Michelin-starred Alain Ducasse restaurant at the Dorchester hotel. “We get proper food!” The sold-out run of The Audience, in which the actress achieves a mesmerizing portrait of the Queen, was coming to a close in the West End. The likable, sometimes regal, innately intelligent Ms. Mirren is more petite than one expects: five feet four inches (the same height, coincidentally, as the Queen). “But you’re not giving an impersonation of the Queen,” I said. “I’m a crappy impersonator, actually,” she replied. “But, you know, she lets portrait artists make of her what they will. So, I’m making just another portrait of…

AGE: 29. PROVENANCE: Manhattan, CITY GIRL: Diaz grew up in the East Village projects. “By nature of being in the city and being in that area, you grow up a bit quicker than other places.” PATH TO VICTORY: A graduate of the Professional Performing Arts high school, Diaz first gained cinematic notice in 2002’s Raising Victor Vargas, while she was enrolled in N.Y.U.’s undergraduate film program. “People will stop me on the street. That was 10 years ago, and the way people react to that movie is really special.” ON TRACK: Having just booked an upcoming guest spot on HBO’s Girls, Diaz has been making waves on the festival circuit in the award-winning Fruitvale Station, a raw biopic based on the last day in the life of transit-police-shooting victim Oscar…

After the fall of Colonel Qaddafi, in 2011, Libya had become an al-Qaeda-inspired, if not al-Qaeda-led, training base and battleground. In the northeastern city of Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, men in blazers and dark glasses wandered about the narrow streets of the Medina, the old quarter, with briefcases full of cash and Browning Hi-Power 9-mm. semi-automatics—the classic killing tool of the European spy. Rent-a-guns, militiamen with AK-47s and no qualms about killing, stood outside the cafes and restaurants where men with cash and those with missiles exchanged business terms. It was a le Carre urban landscape where loyalties changed sides with every sunset; there were murders, betrayals, and triple-crossing profits to be made in the post-revolution. The police were only as honest as their next bribe. Most governments were eager…

Earlier this summer, on what passed for a clear morning in Los Angeles, Tom Ford, director of marine programs at the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, went to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport to catch a ride up the Pacific coast in a Beechcraft Bonanza G36. (Clad in a plaid shirt and chinos, he seemed not to be related to the designer.) “What a totally sweet glass cockpit,” he told the pilot, who was donating this flight through LightHawk, a non-profit group dedicated to helping environmentalists document problems from the air. As Santa Monica drifted by below, its famous boardwalk and Ferris wheel appearing as though they were little pieces on a game board, the minuscule Bonanza headed toward the great blue ocean, which was gently undulating like a fresh…

Past midnight, on a recent Thursday, Simon Hammerstein was hosting friends at his notorious theatrical nightclub, the Box, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The group in and around his booth beside the stage included Jude Law and Ezra Koenig, the lead singer of Vampire Weekend. A sleight-of-hand magician worked nearby in the darkened room, astounding people with flashlit card tricks, while Hammerstein, in a dark suit and collared shirt, kept putting tequilas in friends’ hands, matching them shot for shot and occasionally swigging from a bottle. “At some point,” he said, looking around the club at the clusters of revelers, “the different, separate groups of guests will start mixing, breaking down. I love the way the boundaries dissolve. I love that about the Box.” At one A.M., the curtains parted…

When we last left D.E.A. agent Hank Schrader, portrayed by Dean Norris, he was seated on the pot in the midseason cliffhanger of AMC’s Breaking Bad. And a man parked on the pot will inevitably reach for the nearest reading material, for that is the American way. Rooting around, he retrieves a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—not the usual bathroom lit—reads the inscription, and receives a thunderbolt of recognition: “Heisenberg,” the meth-lab mastermind and elusive white shadow of mythic stature, is none other than his brother-in-law and fellow baldie, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who has played him for a sucker. This revelation sets up the last-act reckoning of Breaking Bad, which returns in August with eight episodes, the series finale written and directed by the show’s creator, Vince…