Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-15 i Vanity Fair

TIC-TAC-WHOA The author (top left; center; bottom right) and others in stills from “Hysterical Literature.” I ’m in the backseat of a car on my way to Brooklyn on a beautiful spring day to meet two people I have never met, and to take part in a most unlikely experiment. The e-mails organizing this affair—I had talked to no one in person—had only one specific request: that I wear something with “easy access,” so I slipped on a black, ankle-length mermaid skirt and high-heeled suede boots. And no panties. I press the buzzer and climb a few steps to meet Clayton Cubitt, a photographer and filmmaker, and his partner of 16 years, Katie James, the “female assistant.” They are both very attractive—Clayton, dark, chiseled, and tall, and Katie, languid, soft,…

GADOT WEARS A TOP BY DONNA KARAN NEW YORK; PANTS BY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION; SHOES BY MANOLO BLAHNIK; JEWELRY BY HARRY WINSTON. When asked if there was a prophetic moment in her childhood, one that pointed to the empowered women she has played in her accelerating movie career, Gal Gadot, who was born in a suburb of Rosh HaAyin, Israel, says, “I don’t remember this, but my mom told me that when I was three they threw a party on the rooftop of the house. They put me to bed, and I heard people coming into the house and no one came to me. I went to the rooftop and took a hose and I started to spray water on everyone, just to get attention.” “Gal” (which rhymes with “all”)…

CARBON COPIES Two clones of the polo pony Raptor, photographed at Crestview Farm, in Aiken, South Carolina. When the world’s most important polo championship went into overtime in 2006, the audience looked to Adolfo Cambiaso to break the tie. Then 31 years old, Cambiaso had already led the winning team at the Campeonato Argentino Abierto de Polo—known as the Palermo Open—five times before, earning himself a reputation as perhaps the best polo player in history. Three minutes after the starting bell, with the score still tied, the gifted Argentinean galloped down the field to swap mounts. Throughout the fierce game, Cambiaso had relied heavily on his favorite horse, an agile chestnut stallion with a bold white face named Aiken Cura, and he wanted to let the champion rest. As the…

JUMP STREET Channing Tatum, photographed on the back lot at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, California. THROUGHOUT: TATUM WEARS A SHIRT BY JAMES PERSE; PANTS BY ALLSAINTS; SHOES BY BALLY. Whereas the big losers in the computer hack that rocked Hollywood last fall included Amy Pascal, Scott Rudin, Sony Pictures, and Kim Jong Un, one of the winners, as far as I can tell, was Channing Tatum. Amid the blizzard of e-mails that showed some of movieland’s key figures as two-faced, snarky, and mean—that is, entirely unlike their red-carpet personas— Tatum’s leaked missive showed his back precisely like his front and his inside exactly like his outside—the same bighearted, fun-loving, victory-dancing guileless kid you know from the screen. He’d been writing his producers at Sony after the opening numbers came…

CASTING STONES A demonstrator at a pro-Palestinian rally throws a rock toward riot police during a protest in Paris, June 19, 2014. ‘How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République?” That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois…

THE PARTY’S OVER Joanne Woodward, youngest daughter Clea, and Paul Newman at a party for Paul’s 50th birthday at La Cave Henri IV restaurant, New York City, January 26, 1975. The first clue something was wrong was the change in the label. It was still playful and lighthearted, radiating a message of goodness and giving on the packages of food products sold by Newman’s Own Organics, the allorganic spin-off of Newman’s Own specialty foods. The old label had pictured movie star Paul Newman in an American Gothic pose beside his daughter Nell, who had co-founded and run Newman’s Own Organics alongside her father’s larger company. Blonde and beautiful, with her father’s famously striking blue eyes, Nell shared his love of food, philanthropy, and the outdoors. So it was strange when,…

HELP IS ON THE WAY . . . For the beleaguered middle class. Except that it isn’t. And shouldn’t be. In 1984 the governor of New York was Mario Cuomo, father of the current governor. The elder Cuomo, who died on New Year’s Day 2015, will be best remembered for his keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, in San Francisco. It is the most famous political speech of our time not given by Ronald Reagan. It was an eloquent defense of traditional American liberalism as preached and practiced by presidents from F.D.R. to Adlai Stevenson. (What? You say Adlai was never president? That’s not how my mother remembers it.) Cuomo’s theme was “a tale of two cities,” although the metaphor got away from him and sometimes it was…

50 CENT’S JACKET AND VEST BY JOHN VARVATOS, SHIRT BY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION, TIE BY BURBERRY LONDON, HAT BY WORTH & WORTH BY ORLANDO PALACIOS; GYLLENHAAL’S COAT AND VEST BY BRUNELLO CUCINELLI, SHIRT BY EIDOS NAPOLI; FUQUA’S VEST AND PANTS BY EIDOS NAPOLI, SHIRT BY JOHN VARVATOS, WATCH BY ROLEX. Southpaw is in one sense an old-fashioned fight film, a melodrama about a troubled champ looking at the downside of his career through blackened, swollen eyes; minus cussing and a hip-hop soundtrack, the movie could have starred John Garfield or Wallace Beery. As light heavyweight Billy Hope—even the name has old-school zip—Jake Gyllenhaal seethes and twitches with a bottled-up intensity that is similar to, yet worlds away from, the slow-burn creepfest of last year’s Nightcrawler (for which, it says here,…

CORGIS AND BESS The royal corgis, gathered around their royal mistress, are nearly as synonymous with continuity as the Queen herself. I. “A Private Matter” At the Wessex Vale Crematorium, on Bubb Lane, in the Southampton suburb of West End, mourners gathered on Friday, September 5, 2014, for a memorial service in honor of Leila Kathleen Moore. She had died the previous month, at the age of 87. The cover of the program for the service bore Moore’s picture, a faded color snapshot that shows her in middle age. There is a beaming smile on her face, but she is not looking at the camera. She is looking down upon the pair of tawny-eared, white-pawed Pembroke Welsh corgi puppies cradled in her arms. The London newspapers made no mention of…