Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Vanity Fair

ANNIE LENNOX “I’m fascinated by people who devote their lives to breaking boundaries of self-expression,” says Scottish singer and activist Annie Lennox of performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose memoir, Walk Through Walls, comes out this month. In her V.F. Portrait, on page 154, Lennox observes what brings the artist such widespread appeal. “She shocks you, and wakes you up,” says Lennox, “as I imagine a Zen master might do.” BRYAN BURROUGH For “Field of Nightmares,” on page 64, Special Correspondent Bryan Burrough was thrilled to revisit a widely reported story—the saga of N.F.L. burnout Johnny Manziel—with the revelations he uncovered. “By the time I came along, some people who had always kept his secrets suddenly decided that they were no longer bound to do so,” Burrough says. “It’s a much…

How do you bring a brand to life? This is how architect Basil Walter approached the task of designing the space for the third Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. The Summit brings together leaders from across industries for conversations about the economic, technological, and cultural forces shaping the present and the future. Walter says his task is to transform the conference venue, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, from a workaday theater complex into an environment that reflects these lofty topics as well as the rich visual and journalistic traditions of Vanity Fair. It’s an end eavor that takes about a year from start to finish. Walter, who has also designed the Vanity Fair Oscar party for 20 years, begins by mining the magazine’s archives for photographic and…

A QUIET PLACE William Styron at home in Roxbury, Connecticut, 1972. The Confessions of Nat Turner had a profound effect on me as a white female teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., in 1968. I read it around the time I read Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver. Both books helped me to understand that, while violence is destructive, one couldn’t have been surprised when it was finally utilized by people who had been brutalized and subjected to slavery and exploitation. That’s what made Martin Luther King Jr.’s moment so powerful—he rose above; he transcended those basic human desires to strike back even when justified. He was the best among us. But I could see that Nat Turner was a hero to many. The book left me with respect for…

CLASH OF THE TITANS Roger Ailes fought hard to keep his job—but the battle turned into a rout. I. “Leave Him Alone” On the morning of July 6, James and LachlanMurdoch were on opposite sides of Sun Valley, Idaho. Lachlan was finishing a workout at the decidedly downtown Ketchum YMCA. James was hiking down a bike trail after attending an early-morning session at the annual Allen & Co. conference. Every July, the conference jams the small Friedman Memorial Airport with the Gulfstream jets of the world’s media and technology billionaires, who gather in the ski town to negotiate their own preservation. James and Lachlan had both attended the conference before, but they were always in the shadow of their father, Rupert Murdoch. This year was different. For the first time,…

Writer Leslie Bennetts must have felt plumb tuckered out after researching, assembling, and writing Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers (Little, Brown). Doing a biography of Rivers meant tracking a tornado for decades as it zigzagged across the country and back, a tireless whirlwind of creative destruction that spun sacred cows airborne and cleared a path for Kathy Griffin, Sarah Silverman, Lisa Lampanelli, and other oral assassins. Greenwich Village nightclubs, the Broadway stage, television, movies, the best-seller list, the home-shopping networks, the Manhattan social hierarchy: Rivers tried to conquer them all and mostly did, rebounding from failures and blood feuds that would have flattened most entertainers. Born in 1933, Rivers was a wisecracking wraith powered by a craving for acclaim, love, money, and…

Then Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel, on November 5, 2015. Back in the summer of 2013,before he became perhaps the biggest bust in the history of the National Football League, before the social-media firestorms and the mysterious rehab, before his hard-partying ways put him on TMZ more than on ESPN, Johnny Manziel already worried his parents. A scrambling, showboating quarterback with a knack for leading his Texas A&M team to fourth-quarter victories, 20-year-old “Johnny Football” had won the Heisman Trophy, college football’s highest honor, five months before—the first freshman to do so—and become an international celebrity, partying with Justin Bieber and Drake and appearing on David Letterman and other talk shows. He had come seemingly out of nowhere, an unheralded kid from the Texas Hill Country town of Kerrville, where…

GLORY DAYS A sampling of New Establishment opening pages throughout the years. As business and society have changed, so has the list. Compiling Vanity Fair’s New Establishment—the definitive ranking of tech savants, moguls, financiers, and entertainers, among others—requires an equally multifarious band of experts. This year, the names were selected by reporters from the Hive, V.F.’s new site covering Wall Street, Washington, and Silicon Valley; Dan Primack, author of Fortune’s Term Sheet, a scoop-filled daily newsletter that is required reading on Wall Street and Sand Hill Road; Kevin Roose, news director at Fusion; a crack team of reporters at HWD, V.F.’s new entertainment site; Krista Smith, the magazine’s executive West Coast editor; plus V.F. special correspondents Nick Bilton, William D. Cohan, and Sarah Ellison. Lists can be defined as much…

INSIDE A STYLE GURU’S FACTORY p. 94 THE BEST IN BOOKS p. 96 DONALD GLOVER p. 98 WHAT TO WATCH p. 98 AND MORE … HOT SPOT Located in tech entrepreneur Trevor Traina’s home, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, the Hirst Bar is the new drinking den for Silicon Valley visionaries, power brokers, and cultural leaders. For more, turn to page 94. SETTING the BAR The Hirst, San Francisco’s hottest new nightclub,” couldn’t be more exclusive— but the drinks are free. You’ve just got to be invited. It all started a few months ago, when tech entrepreneur Trevor Traina was hankering for a proper bar inside the six-story neo-Georgian mansion he shares with his wife, Alexis, and their two children, in Pacific Heights. After he bought a Damien Hirst spot…

PAUL WEARS A SUITBY LANVIN; SHIRT AND TIE BY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION. PASEK WEARS A SUIT AND SHIRT BY BURBERRY; SHOES BY ALLEN EDMONDS. Musical partnerships born on the first day of college orientation are lucky to last through winter break, which is reason enough to toast the team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who met as freshmen (and aspiring actors) in the summer of 2003 at the University of Michigan. What truly calls for the vintage stuff is that this December Dear Evan Hansen—their first musical based on an original story, inspired by a painful event at Pasek’s suburban-Philadelphia high school—opens on Broadway (with book by Steven Levenson). Pasek and Paul, both only 31, already have impressive credits (A Christmas Story, The Musical and Dogfight, based on the…

WALLS OF FAME Frank Pellegrino Jr. and patrons, photographed at Rao’s in New York City. When FrankPellegrino Sr. walked into Rao’s on a Tuesday night recently, wearing a black blazer, white shirt, gray slacks, gold bracelet, and signet ring, he led with his black velvet smoking slippers. He took a Chivas on the rocks off the bar, seated himself outside the restaurant’s front door on its small cement patio, at the corner of East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue, in Manhattan, and lit a Parliament 100, ready to greet his guests in style. As he has been doing five nights a week for the past 22 years as the co-owner of Rao’s, Pellegrino was entertaining at home. He didn’t wait long. A group of men arrived, and the first one…

Our rock’n’ roll lifestyle was passing the point of no return. The examples of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison—and more recently Gram Parsons, Nick Drake, and Tim Buckley— brought home the dangers of the road. We’d heard this story about so many musicians, it was almost part of the ritual. All around us, bands we knew were imploding, trying to live what they thought was the rock ’n’ roll high life. We saw them falling by the side of the road, but through a one-way mirror. We saw everything but ourselves. One night in 1976, I spoke to the guys about the possibility of bringing this phase of our journey to a conclusion; that we needed to look out for one another and get out of the line of…

THE RAND PACK By NICK BILTON The princes of Silicon Valley—including Kevin Systrom, Travis Kalanick, Evan Spiegel, and Jack Dorsey—have learned a lot from tech idol Ayn Rand. PHOTOGRAPHS BY VIVIEN KILLILEA (SPIEGEL), BRENT LEWIN/BLOOMBERG (KALANICK), DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG (DORSEY), OSCAR WHITE/CORBIS/VCG (RAND), ALL FROM GETTY IMAGES; BY MATT EDGE/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX (SYSTROM) At the moment, I’m completely absorbed with end-of-year projects at school,” the e-mail read. It was 2012, and I was working on an article about an innovative new app that was being used by a handful of high-school students in Los Angeles. It had never been written about before, and so I found myself tracking down its co-creator, a freshman at Stanford. Evan Spiegel was elusive. He wasn’t secretive or a jerk, but just had a lot of…

His presidency is winding down. A contentiou selection—fought largely over his rec ord and legacy—is about to be decided. With that in mind, Barack Obama recently invited the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to the White House for a long, personal, open-ended conversation. The meeting, arranged by Vanity Fair, took place in the president’s private dining room, just off the Oval Office. Doris Kearns Goodwin is no stranger tothese precincts. She has been in and out of the West Wing ever since 1967, when, as a 24-year-old White House Fellow, she worked closely with Lyndon Johnson during the last year of his presidency (and then afterward as he wrote his memoirs). She has earned a raft of literary prizes, including a Pulitzer, for books about J.F.K., L.B.J., Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore…

For some (many?), Instagram is a place whereanonymous commenters emerge from an online abyss to say nasty things about strangers. But, for Adwoa Aboah, the 24-year-old British model who founded the empowering account called Gurls Talk in 2015, after she checked out of rehab, the social network changed her life. “It makes me happier than anything, and it gets me up in the morning,” she says from behind the wheel of her Jeep Wrangler in Los Angeles, where she moved, post-treatment, from London for a fresh start. “It keeps me from going back to that dark place.” The @gurlstalk account is, she says, “a space that createsa trusting and loving environment—where you can realize there are tons of other girls that are going through similar things.” Aboah is refreshingly, even…

Dayle Haddon BECAUSE Canadian actress Dayle Haddon—a former model for Estée Lau der, L’Oréal, Max Factor, and Revlon—is making a bigger, more beautiful impact in her second act, as founder and C.E.O. of New York–based Women One, which is helping to educate girls and women across the globe, from Haiti to Kenya to Syria. BECAUSE WomenOne has served more than 2,000 girls worldwide through the creation of schools and holistic programs such as the one in Nanyuki, Kenya, that’s taking girls off the streets and providing them with food, health care, counseling, self-esteem workshops, school uniforms, and coding courses. BECAUSE by educating girls and young women, rates of S.T.D.’s go down, communities prosper, and the next generation can thrive. BECAUSE Haddon, who spent years in the glamorous swirl, now tends…

It’s so thrilling to go somewhere that’s completely unknown,” Travis Rice says in his new snowboarding epic, The Fourth Phase. The 34-year-old snowboarder and his crew of back flipping, high-flying friends spent four years conquering the most dangerous, untouched mountains across the globe, chasing virgin powder from the backwoods of Wyoming and Japan to the jagged remote peaks of Russia and Alaska—and capturing it all on film. The result, directed by Jon Klaczkiewicz, is as much a meditation on dying winters and melting snowcaps as it is on dudes with long hair and Technicolor snowsuits shredding mountains. Vignettes about the at mosphere and weather patterns are sprinkled between shots of snowboarders soaring above the tree line. “We’re looking at really global weather and using this natural cycle as a metaphor…