Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2016 i Vanity Fair

Michael Schulman’s “Becoming Meryl” [April] had me hooked from the get-go. While it is true that I engage myself in anything Meryl, I am tickled with how Mr. Schulman’s accounting took me through a full array of emotions as I read his article aloud to my partner. I experienced fist pumping, welling tears, hearty laughs, full-on goose bumps, and memories of my own moments of empowerment and humiliation born out of an unnecessarily harsh and deceptive divorce proceeding. TONI HENDERSON Elkhorn, California What a joy to re-experience a movie and a time in my life richly filled in with history. This is one of the best articles I’ve had the joy to read in Vanity Fair. Startling and lovely. HEATHER ROSE Kings Beach, California I have to admit I was…

“Four score and seven years ago: That was the start of the Great Depression. Everyone was laughing at us. We were a laughingstock! This won’t happen when I’m in charge. I beat Great Depressions all the time. All the time.” ➼ “Ask not what your golf club can do for you; ask what you can do for your golf club.” ➼ “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, which is only a problem for lowenergy losers like Jeb who have to hide behind their mommy’s skirt. It’s really pathetic. I feel sorry for him. I really do.” ➼ “Speak loudly and carry a yuge smartphone.” ➼ “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Then build it up again and pay me to do it. I’ve been saying it…

Overworked and underpaid, a clever young female assistant to a media overlord seeks justice in Camille Perri’s wickedly funny debut, The Assistants (Putnam). First-time novelist Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (Knopf), set in Ghana and the U.S., weaves three centuries of slavery and colonialism into the fabric of America. Arthur Lubow looks into the soul of the peerless Diane Arbus (Ecco). Paula Byrne brings J.F.K.’s adored little sister Kick (Harper) back to life. David Hepworth replays 1971, the dawn of rock gods, in Never a Dull Moment (Henry Holt). Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring (Penguin Press) looks at life for ordinary Palestinians during the occupation. Jennifer Gilmore’s wise and knowing novel, We Were Never Here (HarperTeen), is a heartbreaker. Juliet Nicolson’s A House Full of Daughters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)…

Wherever Alessandra Ferri goes, “Juliet follows,” the Milanborn ballet legend says. Ferri first embodied Shakespeare’s tragic teenager in 1984, when she was the nubile muse of the Royal Ballet’s choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. After Baryshnikov summoned the 21-year-old from London a year later to dance as an American Ballet Theatre principal, Ferri made her company debut as Juliet. And when Ferri, by then a mother of two, retired from A.B.T., in 2007, Juliet, naturally, was her soulful farewell role. But Ferri, still in proud possession of her impossibly arched insteps and preternaturally supple spine, admits she is a woman of “many returns.” In 2013, she resumed performing, and now, for one night only, Ferri, at 53, will reprise the part of the amorous Capulet for A.B.T. on June 23 at the…

Nwasn’t expecting drama on a routine visit to the eye doctor. But fortunately her doctor had a lifesaving insight for both her and her sister, K: “I think you have Wilson’s disease,” he told N after noticing strange golden-brown rings in her irises. Wilson’s is a rare inherited disorder—only one in about 30,000 people worldwide has it—in which the body can’t metabolize copper. Untreated, it can lead to fluid buildup, jaundice, neurological issues, and fatal liver failure. There was no surefire treatment until the mid-1950s, when a British doctor discovered two drugs that now go under the trade names Cuprimine and Syprine. Today these are the standard treatments for Wilson’s, and they must be taken for life. The sisters began taking Syprine in 1987. Their symptoms went away, and they…

I was lucky enough to spend 10 years as one of the Queen’s private secretaries, after more than 30 years in the diplomatic service at home and abroad. They were among the happiest years of my career, and it was a great privilege to watch the Queen at work and to appreciate how dedicated and well organized she is, and how her long experience in the job has helped her to deal with every kind of situation with calm efficiency. Her three private secretaries are responsible for arranging her program, acting as the link to government departments, and dealing with correspondence. When I was on duty with the Queen—every second week, and more often when she was away from Buckingham Palace—I spent about half an hour with her every morning:…

When the photographs marking her first birthday were released, last month, it was a rare glimpse of Princess Charlotte. Just 48 hours after she was born, on May 2, 2015, her father, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, packed up his family and drove 100 miles from their official residence, Kensington Palace, in London, to Anmer Hall, in Norfolk, where they have been enjoying a quiet country life ever since. Unlike previous generations of heirs, William, second in line to the throne, has chosen to raise his young family away from the glare of the spotlight, in one of the most remote parts of England. “It’s no secret that William doesn’t like the media intrusion into his life, and in the country he can escape,” says a family friend. “The Queen…

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ In 2007, Contributing Photographer Annie Leibovitz became the first American photographer invited to take an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This year, to mark her 90th birthday, the Queen sat for Leibovitz again, at Windsor Palace, and the resulting portfolio, “The Elizabethan Aura,” on page 98, includes photos exclusive to Vanity Fair. “The most moving, important thing about this shoot is that these were all her ideas,” says Leibovitz. “She wanted to be photographed with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren; her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh; her daughter, Anne, the Princess Royal; and her corgis. I was told how relaxed she was at Windsor, and it was really true. You get the sense of how at peace she was with herself, and very much enthralled with…

“This picture of a tiny Sunfish sailboat, just ahead of a massive squarerigged tall ship, appears on an old poster that still hangs in the basement of my father’s house on Cape Cod. The poster has always spoken to me. As I look back on it now, I see that it presaged much of what was to come—how, after a youth as a Sunfish racer, I was destined to return to the ocean, this time as a writer of history who told tales of the sea. “And, oh, what a backstory the photo has! It was taken in 1976 as a fleet of more than a dozen tall ships gathered in the waters off Bermuda for the start of a race to New York. With a photographer in a chase…

The Queen is a phenomenon: she is celebrated all over the world, without ever having done anything to court such fame. Her values are quite different—she sees herself not as a star but as a humble servant, first of God and then of her people. At 90, the Queen is the oldest monarch in the thousand years of the British monarchy. And she is our longest-reigning monarch. But that is not a record she ever sought—it is the result of her beloved father, King George VI, dying prematurely, aged 56, in 1952, when she was only 25. Since then she has devotedly fulfilled the promise she made to serve her country for as long as she should live. Britain has changed almost beyond recognition since 1952, but she has been…

‘I ’m leaving the company in two weeks,” Dick Costolo said abruptly, his face stricken, his fingers banging the wood-slab table before him. Costolo, the bald and lithe chief executive of Twitter, was sitting in the Waterthrush conference room on the 11th floor of his company’s headquarters, in the old Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart, in downtown San Francisco. As the words left his mouth, Costolo’s nine top lieutenants, his so-called Operating Committee, looked up from their iPads and smartphones, stupefied. Off in the distance, the F-Market tram could be heard screeching to a halt; Ubers were pulling over to deposit product managers at Twitter’s Art Deco lobby. In the cavernous staff commissary, there was the familiar din of conversation as programmers poured Bolivian coffee into black mugs with…

Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger’s, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie The Social Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That’s a modern definition that reduces the original meaning. Nor would I say he was the Steve Jobsian product genius, either. Anyone claiming as much will have to explain the crowded graveyard of forgotten Facebook product failures. Remember “Home,” the Facebook-enabled home screen for Android phones, launched with much fanfare at a Facebook press event in 2013, Zuck appearing alongside the C.E.O. of the soon-to-be-disappointed smartphonemaker HTC? Or Facebook’s misguided bet on HTML5 in 2012, which slowed the mobile app to a frustrating crawl? How about Facebook’s first version of Search, available in English only, mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female…

He seems an unlikely sort to make himself the center of attention—an actor whose calm or coiled restraint holds every eye in the room. Mark Rylance won a Tony in 2014 for his role as Olivia in Twelfth Night—commanding the stage with an imperturbable comic presence that not even Stephen Fry’s Malvolio could rattle. The play became the hottest ticket in New York. A year and a half later his expressive deadpan conveyed the cerebral machinations of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chancellor—the central character in the award-winning BBC Two series Wolf Hall. Earlier this year Rylance won an Oscar— best supporting actor—for his portrayal in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies of the Soviet agent Rudolf Abel, a man somehow wryly at peace despite the grim reality of his predicament. This…

On July 5, 1946, in a poolside fashion show at the Piscine Molitor, in Paris, a French showgirl named Micheline Bernardini (right) debuted a two-piece swimsuit by Louis Réard. The designer named the risqué apparel—made from just 30 inches of fabric— the “bikini” after the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. had begun nuclear tests just days earlier. This month, on the 70th anniversary of the suit’s unveiling, the Réard brand returns to the Piscine Molitor for a relaunch, which will feature luxe swim- and resortwear, including some itsy-bitsy and teeny-weeny favorites.…

We are living through what is surely a golden age of documentary film, and a remarkable new example is Life, Animated. You may tune me out if I tell you that this moving and profound film is in part an investigation of what it means to be human, and in part a meditation on narrative itself—I may tune me out—but that is true in the best, least precious way possible, so help me God. Directed by Roger Ross Williams, Life, Animated is based on the 2014 family memoir of the same name by the Pulitzer Prize–winning political journalist Ron Suskind. Both tell the story of how his autistic son, Owen, disappeared inside a neurological maze when he was not quite three years old and re-emerged, over a long period of…

Alejandro Agag has done a very impressive job establishing Formula E—a radical new motor-racing series for electric cars. A former politician and businessman, Agag, 45, launched his environmentally conscious endeavor in 2014, and it now has 10 events in as many countries on the racing calendar. “I felt that motorsports was moving away from its fans, who are more concerned with 21st-century issues such as new technology and the fight against climate change,” Agag explains. “So I thought there was a place for a new type of motorsport that would occupy that space.” Sponsors and manufacturers have been attracted not only by the new technologies involved in the cars but also by Formula E’s global television coverage. Approved and supported by the International Automobile Federation, Formula E has also provided…

In theaters this month with an allstar cast that includes Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Guy Pearce, the movie Genius arrives after an exceptionally long gestation. It started life as A. Scott Berg’s 1971 Princeton undergraduate thesis, about the book editor Max Perkins (played by Firth), who championed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, among other literary lions. Says Berg, “This one person changed the course of great American literature by working closely with authors to shape their manuscripts.” One of Berg’s professors suggested, “This is the first draft of a book.” So Berg moved in with his parents and spent seven years “blitzing away” on a Smith Corona portable typewriter writing a full-scale biography. Published by Dutton in 1978, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius became…