Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2014 i Vanity Fair

1 Marie Brenner The stories of personal tragedy that writer-at-large Marie Brenner uncovered while reporting “Danger in the Ring” (page 56) horrifed her. “What is the chance that two classmates, both in their mid-20s, could suffer—within months of each other—life-threatening events allegedly from the same birth-control device?,” Brenner wondered. “Were these young women adequately warned by their doctors about the hormones in NuvaRing?” 2 William Friedkin Even Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin envies the achievements of Tracy Letts, the subject of this month’s V.F. Portrait (page 94). “As a Tony Award–winning actor and a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, Tracy has reached the peaks of each profession,” Friedkin says. Unlike Letts, his frequent collaborator, Friedkin has been content writing and directing. “Michael Mann asked me to play Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter,” he…

In a VF.com exclusive, “FRIENDS WITHOUT BENEFITS,” Nancy Jo Sales wrote about the new SEXUAL POLITICS of Snapchatting, OVER-SELFIED TEENAGERS. Let’s just say it caused quite a stir . . . @JMECHNER Why can’t humanity just use the Internet wisely, like we did the wheel and splitting the atom and … OH. RIGHT. @ COLINSEILER I’m always wary of sky is falling profiles about TEENS AND SEXUALITY, but this Vanity Fair piece is frightening. @NITASHATIKU Nancy Jo Sales developed a super strain of MORAL PANIC @ROWANEVA This @VanityFair article on social media’s effect on American teens makes me want to MOVE TO SIBERIA. @RYANPBRODERICK I feel like even without social media *gasp* being a teenager a terrifying PSYCHO-SEXUAL NIGHTMARE @ANDREWPHELPS Social media is TERRIBLE and children are ruined forever @ALIEMARTELL…

Adam Klein assembles The Gifts of the State: New Writing from Afghanistan (Dzanc). Will Swift taps into t the Nixons’ marriage in Pat and Dick (Threshold). Rachel Joyce’s new novel is simply Perfect (Random House). Editor Dave Eggers bestows on us The Best of McSweeney’s (McSweeney’s). Sue Monk Kidd builds a best-seller with The Invention of Wings (Viking). Scott Stossel frets in My Age of Anxiety (Knopf). Chang-rae Lee’s moving new novel rides On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead). Rosemary Mahoney offers “dispatches from the world of the blind” For the Benefit of Those Who See (Little, Brown). Peter Richmond scores big with Phil Jackson: Lord of the Rings (Blue Rider).…

Out to LUNCH WITH JOHN GOODMAN Artie’s Delicatessen, a quite schleppy, welllighted place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was John Goodman’s lunch spot of choice when he visited town recently. “Looks like a place Ralph Kramden might stroll into,” he said when we met. “I’m just very comfortable here.” His sixth Coen-brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, in which he gives a brilliantly nutty performance as a heroin-addicted jazz player who can scarcely walk, was about to be released. “It’s a funny old game, isn’t it?” he said out of the blue. “What is, sir?” “Acting,” he replied. “Showbizzzzz.” In his gentlemanly way, he made the z sound like the hiss of a branding iron. But he has no taste for the life of the pampered in Hollywood—or even,…

Donald J. Trump has 2.43 million followers on Twitter, making him the 670th most followed person in the global Twitterverse. Last fall he was sandwiched there between Lonny Rashid Lynn Jr., better known as the Chicago-born hip-hop artist Common, and Alejandro Fernández, or El Potrillo, the Mexican singer. The Donald likes to tweet about his many triumphs and to re-tweet exhortations for him to run for president and save the country. On October 29, he re-tweeted a boast from his daughter Ivanka—who has more than 1.5 million followers—that the yet to be completed Trump International Golf Club, in Dubai, was voted by the International Property Awards “the Best Golf Development in the Middle East.” That same day, he revealed that his Virginia winery had been awarded the “coveted” Virginia Double…

BECAUSE when Hurricane Sandy hit the New York area, in October 2012, Knicks center (and N.B.A. champion and Olympic gold medalist) Tyson Chandler and his wife, Kimberly, helped organize relief efforts for the devastated community of Far Rockaway. BECAUSE the Chandlers, with the help of their church, Hillsong NYC, took diapers, formula, batteries, clothing, shoes, food, and cleaning supplies to Far Rockaway’s Action Center as part of the Rebound 4 Rockaway/Rebound for New York program. BECAUSE this partnership helped the Action Center meet the needs of up to 1,000 community residents—many of whom live below the poverty line. Helping those in need is nothing new for the couple: when Tyson played for the New Orleans Hornets and Hurricane Katrina struck, the Chandlers were instrumental in getting teachers back into their…

Felicity Jones, who is 30, grew up in the small town of Bournville, on the outskirts of Birmingham, England. “There’s a village green—everyone knows one another—and I would walk to school from my house.” At 13 she made her first television appearance, and while preparing for a degree in English literature at Oxford University, she acted in student plays and continued to take roles in TV series. After graduating, she was cast in several feature films, including Brideshead Revisited (2008), and she gained worldwide notice for her work in the largely improvisational film Like Crazy (2011), for which she won a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival for breakout performance. “I always felt like a magpie in terms of watching other people and learning from them,” she explains. This…

The first time Bérénice Bejo appears in The Past, you flash back to her Oscar-nominated role as Peppy Miller in the silent film The Artist: she is on the other side of a soundproof glass wall in the Paris airport, mouthing hello to her estranged husband (Ali Mosaffa), who has flown in from Iran to sign divorce papers. Aside from that clever nod to Bejo’s previous role in which she utters not a word, her character, Marie, has plenty to say as the volatile mother whose affair with the owner of a dry-cleaning shop (played by Tahar Rahim) has possibly fatal consequences. The Past is Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s first film in French and, like his acclaimed A Separation, deals with broken love and its ripple effects across generations. Bejo’s…

Tracy Letts wrote his first story when he was six, in Durant, a small town in southeastern Oklahoma. The story was called “The Psychopath.” It was about a man who hung himself while shooting himself in the head. His first-grade teacher, Mrs. Parker, was a prescient critic. Instead of sending him to a specialist she gave him an A-plus. One of the few monuments in town is a giant peanut, proclaiming Durant the home of the “World’s Largest Peanut.” Nevertheless, Letts hated his hometown: “I felt like an outsider. I was not popular—I was bullied,” he says. In 1983, 18 years old, he set out for Dallas, the nearest big city, to pursue an acting career. All he had was a headshot and an unimpressive résumé, but he toughed it…

T Bone BURNETT What is your idea of perfect happiness? Perfection is a second-rate idea. I would guess, however, that perfected happiness would be joy, the most intricate and mercurial of all sensations. The moment one recognizes joy, it flees. I’m not sure where Proust is going with this line of questioning, and I don’t want to be evasive, so I will say my idea of perfect happiness is the end of economics; we grow like flowers and fly like birds; the lion lays down with the lamb—a ridiculous idea. Which living person do you most despise? Walt Disney. What is your greatest regret? I regret all the books I haven’t read, the music I haven’t heard, the films I haven’t seen, the places I haven’t been, the people I…

AN OLD FRIEND WRITES . . . At this time of year it’s always a comfort to hear from old friends. I was in a particularly seasonal frame of mind when I received a letter from my well-known chum Donald Trump. “Admiration” is too mild a word to describe my feelings toward him and all that he has achieved, and all that he has, indeed, endeavored to overcome—the hair, the fingers … I won’t go on. I should explain that our relationship is one of gentle thrust and parry. “I just heard you are trying to put yet another ‘hit’ on me through writer William Cohan,” he said in the recent letter. “You’ve been trying since the terrible GQ cover story you wrote in May of 1984. After that, with…

AVALANCHE OF COLOR Best remembered for his stirring black-and-white images of 20th-century conflict, photographer Robert Capa also captured color pictures of postwar leisure in the mountains of Zermatt, Switzerland; Zürs, Austria; and other international ski resorts. In the new exhibition “Capa in Color,” at the International Center of Photography, in New York City (January–May 2014), bright and buoyant images of Europeans at play, which Capa shot for magazines such as Holiday and Collier’s, will be on display. From the stormy beaches of Normandy on D-day to the tranquil mountaintops of the Swiss Alps, Capa’s lens captured it all.…

Sylvie Ganter and Christophe Cervasel, co-founders of Atelier Cologne, a boutique perfume house, celebrate their newest shop, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and their latest love child, Collection Métal, made up of two fragrances: Silver Iris, which is distinctly feminine, and Gold Leather, which has masculine overtones. Also available is custom engraving on the handcrafted leather cap, which makes for a perfectly scent-sational gift. ($275–$295/200 ml.; ateliercologne.com) —LENORA JANE ESTES…

Horror has grabbed the country by the throat, with the low-budget likes of aranormal Activity and The Purge regularly breaking into the box-office Top 10, while cable’s highest-rated drama, The Walking Dead, leads a crowded TV lineup of witches, vampires, and other ghoulish fare Down to the Morgan Library I bat-flew one afternoon to pay homage to Edgar Allan Poe, the martyred saint of literary hacks, tattered soul of Baltimore, and interior decorator of the funeral parlor of American Goth, rich in velvet drapings and “blood-bedewed halls.” As the Morgan Library exhibition, “Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul,” reminded us, Poe was scorned in his time as a dissolute, disreputable vagabond of letters—a reputation that dogged him in posterity for decades—but his spirit had the last bitter laugh. High-low…

JUST FUR FUN Amy Adams, photographed at the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood. ADAMS WEARS A DRESS AND SHOES BY GUCCI, EARRINGS BY VAN CLEEF & ARPELS; JACKET BY MICHAEL KORS. Amy Adams can, and does, play anything, with a depth and range epitomized by her roles in two new movies: her sultry, foulmouthed con artist in American Hustle and her kindhearted documentary-film maker in Her. If there’s a throughline to her life, on-screen and off, it’s musical theater. In Santa Monica, NELL SCOVELL gets Adams talking, and singing, about her mustached co-stars, the many identities she’s assumed, and who she really wants to be A my Adams’s life is a real-time Broadway musical—now in its 39th smash year! She’ll sing for an audience of one, serenading her daughter with…

If Downton Abbey has a message (aside from the fact that you really can own too much silver), it is that life goes on. Matthew Crawley may end up dead in a ditch, but he leaves behind a baby boy for Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to raise. Sybil, Mary’s youngest sister, may perish after childbirth, but she has the good manners to make sure her baby girl survives. The tale of how these two tykes grow up and connive for control of Downton Abbey should make for an excellent Season 11, but for the moment all we need to concern ourselves with is Season 4, which starts on January 5 on PBS. There will be a few new characters, such as Cora’s rascally brother (played by Paul Giamatti) and Lady…

There are call girls, and then there is Christine Keeler, whose dalliances with a Soviet naval attaché and the British war secretary helped bring the government of Harold Macmillan crashing down in the early 1960s. Excellent fodder for a musical, especially if the composer has already shown what he can do with a clutter of dancing, singing felines. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has approached the scandal of Keeler and John Profumo from the angle of Stephen Ward, the swinging (remember, this is the 60s) osteopath who introduced them one weekend at Cliveden, the famed country estate of the Astor family, whose parties had drawn the likes of Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin. Stephen Ward, which opens in London this month, stars Charlotte Spencer as Keeler and Charlotte Blackledge as her…

New Year’s resolutions that might come in handy for anyone trying to make it as a fashion designer: One, I will obey my gut. Two, I will not copy others or follow trends. Three, I will not let the fashion press influence me. Giorgio Armani, a force to reckon with for nigh 40 years, has never needed such vows; they’re part of his DNA. His early collections hit the late-70s Zeitgeist with such precision that something fundamental about the clothes, which were tailored but relaxed and unfussy, got lost in the era’s minimalist chatter: the fact that Armani was as inspired by personal passions as he was by orthodox modernism. With time, though, it becomes ever clearer that the real throughline in Armani’s work is his lifelong romance with fashion…

An adopted son in one of Italy’s oldest and wealthiest clans, Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj can expound on the many glories and scandals in his family’s history. But now, in the view of some Roman aristocrats, including his sister, Princess Gesine, he has exposed the family to a distinctively 21st-century crisis—by having two children with his male civil partner. Amid the art treasures of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, JAMES REGINATO hears about family strife and love, as well as the latest threat to their shared inheritance In 2006, when Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj (Pom--fee-lee) held a reception to introduce his firstborn child, Emily, to his peers in the Roman nobility, the event was unlike any in the millennia-long annals of this unique and highly conservative aristocracy. Nothing about the setting…

THE DIRECTOR AND MS. FARROW I found your article on Mia Farrow [“Momma Mia!,” by Maureen Orth], in the November issue, both compelling and deeply disturbing. How is it that with such a questionable personal life Woody Allen is still so highly respected, with people lining up to both work with him and watch his movies? I find myself wondering: if it had been Mia accused of sexually abusing one of her sons and then going on to marry another son, would she have continued to have such a successful career? It is so sad to me that we live in a world where people accept this behavior. EIMEAR MORHAN Dublin, Ireland Is Maureen Orth’s “Momma Mia!” a strange ode to Halloween? Here, instead of a complex portrayal of two…

New year, new beginning. Whether you’ve committed to hiding a secret or telling all, or are still recovering from the news, Jane Isay’s handbook, Secrets and Lies (Doubleday), can help. For artists, the only upside to suffering is the work it sparks—Jessica Handler’s Braving the Fire (St. Martin’s Griffin) is a wise and encouraging guide to putting one’s grief on the page. In Cut Me Loose (Nan A. Talese), Leah Vincent shares the tale of her harrowing plunge into promiscuity and depression after being cast out of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family. The ever charming Gary Shteyngart’s achingly honest, bittersweet comic memoir, Little Failure (Random House), is a winner. Is the strange young woman abandoned to a Shaker community under mysterious circumstances really a vessel of God, or is The Visionist…

LACMA LIGHTS UP Gucci and LACMA joined forces to celebrate the relationship between art and film. This year’s honorees, David Hockney and Martin Scorsese, were fêted by Hollywood’s brightest stars and vaunted art-world contemporaries. The evening, co-hosted by Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio, raised more than $4 million for the museum. THE HOUSE THAT WALLIS BUILT Ferragamo presented the opening gala of the gorgeous, new Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, in Beverly Hills. The evening was co-hosted by arts patron and advocate Wallis Annenberg and philanthropist Jamie Tisch.…

There is a woman lying on her side. She’s in the corridor—naked, an odalisque, the size of a hefty hippo. She is made of fiberglass. And she’s pregnant—except she’s not quite pregnant. Her gravid stomach has been inverted, so instead of coming out it goes in, making a smooth white recess. People are standing and watching. Because a young woman, a fleshly, non-sculptural, real woman, is gingerly getting into the tummy and curling up into the fetal position, so her boyfriend (or agent or dealer) can photograph her. People queue up to lie, sit, crouch in the pregnant woman and get Instagrammed. And as the rest of us watch for a bit, we are all struck by the great question that contemporary art invariably poses: “Where would we put it?”…

When 24-year-old Erika Langhart—talented, beautiful, bound for law school—died on Thanksgiving Day 2011, she became one of thousands of suspected victims of the birth-control device NuvaRing. Elite army athlete Megan Henry, who survived rampant blood clots in her 20s, is another. With major suits against NuvaRing’s manufacturer, Merck, headed for trial, MARIE BRENNER asks why, despite evidence of serious risk, a potentially lethal contraceptive remains on the market CHEATED CHAMPION Olympic hopeful Megan Henry, who collapsed with blood clots after using NuvaRing, photographed near her family home in Roxbury, Connecticut. Karen Langhart never had the slightest doubt about her 24-year-old daughter Erika’s ability to organize meticulously every detail of her life. For months in 2011, Eri ka’s Thanksgiving plans had been locked in place. On November 23 she was set…

As one of Google’s highest-ranking women, Marissa Mayer became a Silicon Valley superstar, but inside the search giant her dazzle sometimes wore thin, with colleagues rebelling against her imperious style. In the wake of Mayer’s jump to run the struggling Yahoo, BETHANY MCLEAN asks whether she will be its savior or its next big problem. A year and a half in, the results are mixed By now the headline-getting series of events has become business lore. In the fall of 2011, New York moneyman Daniel Loeb, who runs the $14 billion hedge fund Third Point Capital, staged a raid on Yahoo, the well-known but struggling Silicon Valley company. After a brutal fight to depose the company’s C.E.O., he helped raid Google for one of its longest-serving and most famous executives,…

Since 1994, thousands of fans of Bikram Choudhury—whose eponymous brand of heated yoga gained devotees including George Clooney, Lady Gaga, and Jeff Bridges—have flocked to his teacher-training program. Some women in his orbit now say that Choudhury sexually harassed and even sexually assaulted them, and five are suing him. BENJAMIN WALLACE explores the guru’s journey from healer to alleged predator FOLLOW THE LEADER Bikram Choudhury directing a class Opposite, the license plate on one of Choudhury’s Rolls-Royces. Before she broke up with her boyfriend, quit her job, attempted suicide, and began using drugs and alcohol, before the nightmares in which Bi k-ram Choudhury takes her and some other women into a room and sets them on fire, the woman sitting across the table from me in a lawyer’s office in…

In 2011, after decades in which Silicon Valley had seemed to care no more hired Sir Norman Foster to design a vast new Apple headquarters. Frank Gehry. Google followed suit, along with Amazon, up north. As the tech what companies’ choices reveal about their cultures, their about its surroundings than about its clothes, Steve Jobs announced he had Facebook soon commissioned an equally massive building from industry finally turns its attention to architecture, PAUL GOLDBERGER explores workforces, and the shifting relationship between city and suburbs On Alpine Road in Portola Valley, a few miles southwest of the campus of Stanford University, where the flat suburban landscape begins to give way to the vistas of the Santa Cruz Mountains, there is an old wooden roadhouse called the Alpine Inn, where college…

Amy Adams wears a gown by Oscar de la Renta; earrings by Harry Winston; bracelet by Van Cleef & Arpels. Hair products by Serge Normant. Makeup products by Revlon. Nail enamel by Deborah Lippmann. Hair by Serge Normant. Makeup by Gucci Westman. Manicure by April Foreman. Set design by Mary Howard Studio. Produced on location by 3 Star Productions. Styled by Jessica Diehl. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Norman Jean Roy at the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood. Illustrations by Jerseynumber8/iStockphoto.com (snowflakes). For details, go to vf.com/credits.…