Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-14 i Vanity Fair

Wayne Lawson For more than three decades, executive literary editor Wayne Lawson has played a key role in defining Vanity Fair’s voice and steering its coverage of everything from art and music to crime and scandal, politics, and world affairs. His retirement deprives the magazine of a professional anchor and a beloved office raconteur. Hired in 1982 as one of six editors tasked with relaunching the title, he has edited some of the era’s most acclaimed and interesting authors and holds the distinction of being the only staffer to have worked under all four editors in chief. For the debut issue, Lawson edited Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and in his first year, he oversaw a two-part investigation of the trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus…

This is the 20th anniversary of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue, and to celebrate the occasion Annie Leibovitz, the originator of the now established foldout cover, was once again running the show. Leibovitz, whose new book of photographs is being published this month by Taschen, decided to forgo an imposed theme or an evocative location and let inspiration come from the actors themselves, dressed to kill, each with his or her own intrinsic magic. Owing to a spectacular year of distinguished films, many of them based on historical subjects, it was difficult to narrow the cover cast down to 12. Making her first-ever appearance there is America’s unimpeachable favorite, Julia Roberts, who will long be remembered for her Oscar-nominated performance in John Wells’s August: Osage County. On November 11, at 5th…

No one does propaganda better than the Hollywood dream machine, and no one did more to sell World War II to the American people than the iconic movie directors and former military men John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Mark Harris salutes their achievements and heroism in Five Came Back (Penguin Press), revealing how they transformed their experiences on the beaches of Normandy, at the fall of Paris, and liberating concentration camps into unforgettable art. Lisa Bloom’s Suspicion Nation (Counterpoint) is more than an indictment of the racist American justice system that failed Trayvon Martin—it also asks the question, Why do we continue to be bitterly divided over issues of color and gun legislation? Walter Kirn reveals his years of being conned by Clark Rockefeller,…

HAAS BROTHERS It’s been a dizzying rise for Simon and Nikolai Haas, 29-year-old fraternal twins reared in Austin, Texas. Just a few years ago, after relocating to Los Angeles, Simon was cooking in a vegetarian restaurant while Nikolai played drums in a band. Today they’re design-world phenomenons, the latest evidence of which is their marvelous handiwork at the new Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, a renovation of the historic 1927 United Artists building and theater, an ornate Spanish Gothic–style landmark commissioned by U.A. founder Mary Pickford. Alex Calderwood, the visionary behind the Ace Hotel group (who died in November), along with lead project designer Roman Alonso, of Commune, invited the Haas brothers to bring some of their magic to the property’s ground floor. Using graphite pencils on the freshly plastered…

DAV ID BENIOFF Co-creator of Game of Thrones, which will begin its fourth season in April A People’s Tragedy, by Orlando Figes “I’m 43 and I’ve never read a book about the Russian Revolution. It’s more than 900 pages, and when I see it on the nightstand I think, Well . . . I should probably play one more Scrabble move on my phone first.” CECILY BROWN Painter, whose next show will be at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris in the fall Swimming Studies, by Leanne Shapton “I thought I had no interest in competitive swimming, but Leanne Shapton, an artist who once trained to be an Olympic swimmer, makes the subject mysterious and compelling through her acute observations on the rituals and madness of training.” ELON MUSK Chairman of…

ORIBE Scarlett Johansson and Kim Novak “It’s all in the attitude! Amazing natural beauties with feminine allure and great sex appeal.” Oribe’s tip: Keep up sexy hair with Oribe Soft Dry Conditioner Spray. HARRY JOSH Penélope Cruz and Sophia Loren “Two exotic bombshells that Americans just can’t get enough of. For their hair, it’s all about volume.” Harry’s tip: Achieve bombshell hair with Harry Josh Dryer and John Frieda Luxurious Volume Fine to Full Blow Out Spray. T ED GIBSON Anne Hathaway and Judy Garland “I love both Anne’s and Judy’s chic pixie cuts. To pull off the pixie, shine is key!” Ted’s tip: Maximize shine with Ted Gibson Tame It Shine Lotion. RENATO CAMPORA Jessica Chastain and Veronica Lake “The sideswept look is as universally flattering and as elegant…

Illustration by TIM SHEAFFER Peter Bogdanovich met me for lunch at the downtown branch of the chic and fabled Cipriani, where all seems well with the world. Mr. Bogdanovich is a writer, film historian (his books on Orson Welles and John Ford are standard texts), sometime actor (he played Lorraine Bracco’s shrink on The Sopranos), and, more to the point, director of The Last Picture Show, the 1971 classic, widely considered one of the greatest American movies ever made. “You’ll be watching the Academy Awards ceremony?” I asked. “Oh, sure. Wouldn’t miss it! It’s a movie circus! You know, when Dyan Cannon was divorcing Cary Grant, she said he was crazy because he would watch the Academy Awards every year and yell at the TV screen. And I thought, What’s…

In 1894 (the story goes), Charles Erskine Scott Wood—West Point graduate, lawyer, anarchist, satirist, and poet—found himself in New York City with an opera ticket but without the sartorially required starched white shirt. So he put on a soft-silk shirt and stood in the lobby, loudly recounting in a fake British accent supposed social adventures with the Prince of Wales. Stores were promptly besieged with demands for soft-silk shirts. In 2010, when Vittorio Grigolo made his Metropolitan Opera debut, as Rodolfo in Puccini’s La Bohème, the Arezzo-born tenor was better known for crossover efforts, covering pop songs with operatic sheen. But, once again, confidence begat fashion. Grigolo’s experience and training ran deep, and his charisma was relentlessly energetic. That season he came into his own as an opera star. Having,…

Though he captured many of golden-age Hollywood’s greatest stars as the public had never seen them before—Marlon Brando taking out the trash, Elizabeth Taylor sunbathing, Anthony Perkins waxing his car—photographer Sid Avery slipped into oblivion, dying in 2002 without the renown he might have expected. MICHAEL CALLAHAN recalls Avery’s quiet mastery, his guileless charm, and his poignant final shot: a portrait of a new generation of movie talents Sid swore, to anyone who would listen, that he’d never asked Marlon Brando to take out the trash. Granted, Sid admitted he’d told Brando that his place was a pigsty and the actor needed to clean it up—the kind of blunt order people didn’t give to Brando, then or ever. But Hollywood is nothing if not a place of myth, and there…

AGE: 24. PROVENANCE: Aspen, Colorado. STATE OF MIND: The actress, the daughter of Hollywood veterans Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson—and granddaughter of Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren—is glad to say that she was reared out West. “People from Colorado have a lot of pride, even if they just lived there a couple years when they were young, like me.” GREY EXPECTATIONS: While she has already appeared in hit films such as The Social Network and The Five-Year Engagement, it’s her upcoming role as Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey that has people buzzing. Johnson doesn’t anticipate talking to her parents about the nitty-gritty of her role, though: “I think that I would love to have them experience it with me, but I can’t really do that, just because of what…

Photograph by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ Everyone hearts Ellen DeGeneres. I mean, what’s not to love? Let’s start with some basics from my point of view. She’s from the South. (So am I.) She cut her college career short to pursue her Hollywood dream. (So did I.) Her mom is a saint, and her most ardent supporter. (So is mine.) I read someplace that Ellen’s trademark is “bad dancing.” (My trademark is “bad singing,” so close enough.) You see, we have a lot in common. But that’s where our similarities end and my admiration begins (and I still have 300 words left!). Ellen’s probably one of the most recognizable and successful American stand-up comedians ever. She scored her own TV show, These Friends of Mine, in the early 1990s. In 1994, the…

It’s about how you deal with fear, how you respond to it, how you conquer it,” says Theo James of the movie Divergent, opening March 21, based on Veronica Roth’s 2011 novel of the same name. The 29-year-old James stars as Four (or Tobias), opposite Shailene Woodley’s Tris. “The movie’s set in Chicago in a post-global-war dystopian future, and I’m the male head of Dauntless, one of five factions,” James continues. A graduate of England’s University of Nottingham, with a degree in philosophy, and later trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, James wanted to bring “a quiet masculinity, a Paul Newman sense of a leader with stillness,” to the role. “Tris breaks the mold; she doesn’t fit into one category. There is a plot to wipe out ‘divergents,’…

Toby Stephens, best known in America as the villain in the James Bond film Die Another Day (2002) and as Edward Rochester in the BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre (2006), was born 44 years ago to British theater royalty. His parents, Dame Maggie Smith and the late Sir Robert Stephens, appeared often on the London stage together and in the 1969 film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Dame Maggie currently dazzles viewers as the Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey. Their son wasted little time in accepting the DNA he had been blessed with: “I played sports but never excelled. I was an O.K. student but never a great one. The only area where I felt I had a real talent was in drama.” He trained…

In 1934, Frank Lloyd Wright declared that Southern California’s “eclectic procession to and fro in the rag-tag and cast-off of the ages was never going to stop.” This was his way of declaring defeat; he had been trying to class up the joint by designing several homes in the area: the Hollyhock House and three other concrete-block Mayan-style houses, planned and built in the 1920s. They’re splendid examples of Wright’s mid-career style—and they’re all still standing—but they only added to the stylistic confusion of L.A. At the time, Los Angeles was exploding in all directions. The population had grown from 576,673 in 1920 to more than 1.2 million in 1930. Four hundred thousand of those people had arrived in the space of just five years. All those newcomers had to…

THE PALTROW AFFAIR Not to bore you with the details, but the whole Vanity Fair–Gwyneth Paltrow brouhaha began innocently enough at a routine morning editorial meeting last spring. We were reviewing assignments and batting around story ideas, and at one point I idly mentioned that I would be interested in reading something on Gwyneth Paltrow. In the course of the previous week, she had been named by Star magazine as the “Most Hated Celebrity” and by People magazine as the “World’s Most Beautiful Woman.” Speaking as a man—for that is the way I speak—I was in general agreement with People’s finding. Gwyneth Paltrow is, like her mother, Blythe Danner, a very beautiful woman. And, like many beautiful women, she’s been something of a constant in our own magazine over the…

I am the mother quoted in the last paragraph of Marie Brenner’s riveting and scrupulously researched article “Danger in the Ring” [January]. The Sony executive was my 31-year-old daughter, Shane. This story has an equally horrific second chapter. There are tens of thousands of young women who survive the initial contraceptive-related clotting episodes only to experience even greater peril during pregnancy for themselves and their unborn child. As Brenner makes clear, the ob-gyn community often passes out contraception like candy, without ever properly assessing obvious risk factors for clotting disorders in their patients. But even worse, they often lack the expertise to diagnose and treat the related fetal-clotting issues responsible for 20 percent of miscarriages and numerous other pregnancy issues, including stillbirth and maternal death. Shane suffered a deep-vein thrombosis…

Dave Itzkoff’s behind-the-scenes viewing of the making of Network is Mad as Hell (Times Books). John Cornwell unlocks the hidden history of confession in The Dark Box (Basic Books). Clever Girl (Harper) showcases novelist Tessa Hadley’s artful prose. Patrick Leigh Fermor rides The Broken Road (New York Review Books Classics). The stories in Adam Wilson’sWhat’s Important Is Feeling (Harper Perennial) blend humor with emotion. John Banville—under the pseudonym Benjamin Black—writes a Philip Marlowe mystery, The Black-Eyed Blonde (Henry Holt). Misty Copeland stages her Life in Motion (Touchstone). V.F. contributing editor A. A. Gill takes readers out to Breakfast at the Wolseley (Overlook). Sandra Lansky blabs her gangland girlhood in Daughter of the King (Weinstein), with William Stadiem. Terry Golway honors Tammany Hall in Machine Made (Liveright). Michio Kaku taps into…

GLOBE-TROTTING Jet-setters skipped St. Barth’s this past winter and said “Hola!” to Uruguay’s Punta del Este. (puntaviajes.com) HOTSHOT The best kamado-style cooker in the world. (biggreenegg.com) JUICE BOOST For body detox and rejuvenation, down a one-ounce shot of aloe vera, chlorophyll, or wheat grass. (organicavenue.com) HOLE IN ONE Gluten-free and vegan, a new breed of doughnut is creeping up on the cupcake craze. (fonuts.com; babycakesnyc.com) FOUL PLAY The politically incorrect game that everyone plays at dinner parties and over long weekends. (ccardsagainsthumanity.com) BLING RING Single earrings—such as an ear cuff or arrow—by Anita Ko. (anitako.com) PERFECT POUT Sinner Red—the most coveted shade from Poppy King. (lipstickqueen.com) MATERIAL GIRL Zilla iridescent clutches and iPad covers. (zilla.it; no6store.com) LIGHTEN UP Tracey Emin neon-light installations. (traceyeminstudio.com) OUT OF AFRICA One-of-a-kind pieces—purses, pashminas, coats,…

ALFONSO CUARÓN Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón splits his time among residences in London and Pietrasanta, Italy, pictured here. From this Mayan hammock, which looks out on a garden and beyond to the sea, Cuarón says, he “pretends to work but mostly naps.” This awards season he celebrates the critical success of Gravity, the space thriller starring Sandra Bullock, which has been nominated for an astounding 10 Oscars. Cuarón, nominated for best director, has proved to be the favorite in the race thus far. After the Oscars, he will shift gears and turn to television, where his next project, Believe, the series he collaborated on with J. J. Abrams, will debut March 10 on NBC.…

BREAKING BARRIERS The tech cognoscenti and science elite celebrated physicists and scientists at the 2014 Breakthrough Prizes, at the NASA Ames Research Center, at Moffett Field, in Northern California. The evening, co-hosted by Art Levinson, Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Graydon Carter, included a five-star meal by Thomas Keller and the French Laundry and a performance by Lana Del Rey. Don Mischer directed and produced the evening. The hangar was reimagined by a design team headed by architect Basil Walter and scenic designer Keith Raywood. DINNER BY DESIGN An intimate dinner in honor of industrial designers Sir Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson and U2’s Bono was held at the Beatrice Inn, in New York City.…

Why make movies? For someone who has been writing and directing and—to a lesser degree—acting in and producing them for 40 years, it is a question the continuing exploration of which is essential to maintaining the energy to forge ahead. Where did it begin? Only by rummaging through years of notes did it occur to me that the impulse to become a filmmaker started two decades earlier than I had even suspected, in the films my father shot with his latest-model 8-mm. camera in Kodak color. There was no sound, so when we gathered to view the unedited result all we heard was the wheezing syncopated clicks emanating from the projector, which served only to enrich the already hypnotic, dreamlike quality of the images. I would stare at these moving…

My books usually come from an edit of the work of a particular time. Or they are special projects. Most of them are pretty conventional. Big but not too big. I hadn’t thought about doing anything else until one day when the German publisher Benedikt Taschen came to me and said he wanted to publish my pictures in a limited-edition volume like the one he had made in 1999 with Helmut Newton. Helmut’s book was called Sumo. Benedikt said that Sumo was literally the biggest book, size-wise, published in the 20th century. I was intrigued. I had just finished making a special edition of very large prints, so I was feeling more open to this idea than I might have been in the past. Seeing those big prints had been…

Imagine, for a second, this: It’s 1959. You’re a girl, 15 years old. Your parents are bohemians before the category becomes a fashionable one. Your dad, Sol, born in Brooklyn, is first violinist for the Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra. First violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic too, and a Fulbright scholar. He once got into a fistfight over the proper way to play the dotted notes in Bach. Your mom, Mae, is an artist. A work of art, as well, so beautiful is she, and charming. Your godfather is Igor Stravinsky. He’s been slipping you glasses of scotch under the table since you turned 13, and his wife, the peerlessly elegant Vera, taught you how to eat caviar. Your house, on the corner of Cheremoya and Chula Vista at the…

Illustrations by ZOHAR LAZAR MAN-MAKER A term for a row of wooden boxes that height-challenged actors (see below) still stand on, even in the era of digital effects, to create the illusion of stature. As a budget-minded producer might say, “If it was good enough for Alan Ladd, it’s good enough for Tom Cruise.” A MICKEY ROONEY (ALSO KNOWN AS “A LITTLE CREEP”) Snarky slang for a slow, small dolly move, named after the five-foot-two-inch former MGM child star, who was once Hollywood’s biggest box-office attraction but somewhat less popular with film crews. One assistant director who worked with Rooney has called him “a nasty piece of work.” But the actor, now 93, can take comfort in having his name still invoked by young crews who may not have seen…

of FIVETHIRTYEIGHT THE INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE (IMDB) publishes a list of more than four million descriptive keywords, or tags (from “abusive boyfriend” to “Ziegfeld Follies”), associated with its index of films. We analyzed the data for the 503 films that have been nominated for best picture since the beginning of the Academy Awards, in 1928 (we included the 1929 finalists in our tally, though no official nominations were announced that year). Our goal was to identify those themes, motifs, and plots that have been most durable over the years—and those that have cycled into and out of fashion. The numbers tell the tale of the changing whims of the Academy, and the sort of society that it hoped to reflect. Oscar-nominated films involving marriage proposals peaked in the 1950s—and those…

The Endless Summer poster is 50 years old, and it hasn’t aged a minute. Kitchen-table project turned pop-culture phenomenon, the Day-Glo movie promo created by John Van Hamersveld for his friend Bruce Brown’s 1964 documentary is still selling the dream—on T-shirts, TV shows, beer bottles, and dorm walls. LILI ANOLIK looks back at the moment an iconic image was born, the social upheaval it presaged, and the surfer-dude-slash-designer whose life it changed The Endless Summer poster features the silhouettes of three male surfers, faceless, though you just know they’ve got to be beautiful, total hunk dreamboats with chiseled everything and hair, streaked blond and tangled with salt, falling gorgeously into cool blue stares, and teeth of such dazzling whiteness that to look at them is like looking into the sun.…

VANITY FAIR NOMINATES HUDSON TAYLOR AND LIA PARIFAX BECAUSE in 2011 this three-time All-American wrestler from the University of Maryland and his wife, a graduate of the George Washington University Law School, pooled their credentials and built bridges in order to found Athlete Ally, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “educating, encouraging, and empowering straight athlete allies to combat homophobia and transphobia in sports.” BECAUSE they selflessly took on this cause knowing it was the right thing to do. BECAUSE they have pursued their effort with dignity, creating an organization of dedicated advocates and enlisting more than 100 renowned athletes (including Andy Roddick, Greg Louganis, Martina Navratilova, D’Qwell Jackson, Yogi Berra, Megan Rapinoe, and Kenneth Faried). BECAUSE their work impacts on more than 100 colleges and universities (including Columbia, where Taylor…

The Wind Rises, director Hayao Miyazaki’s latest—and, he says, last—animated feature, has sparked controversy on many fronts. The film is the fictionalized story of airplane engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Mitsubishi Zero fighter, used in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Miyazaki, widely considered the greatest of animators—Spirited Away won an Oscar in 2003—is a pacifist, and his rich, sensitive epic film has raised the hackles of political conservatives in Japan, who want a return to militarization, as well as in the U.S., where any celebration of the design process of one of the most efficient killing machines of World War II has been questioned. “The film grapples with issues of war and peace, and Jiro’s world was moving in a dangerous direction, as ours is today,” says Miyazaki, adding,…

We can handle the truth, we Americans—or anyway 57 percent of us say we’d rather get the facts, straight up, than be lied to. Which is not to say we’re not also connoisseurs of lying, particularly when we’re educated. Sixty-two percent of Americans with no degrees say one should always tell the truth. Hmmm. Only 45 percent of college grads agree with that, and just 35 percent of postgrads. This is a poll, incidentally, that will hearten shamed cyclist Lance Armstrong. We are apparently able to forgive him far more than we are Richard Nixon or Bernie Madoff. Though not nearly as much as we are Bill Clinton, of course, who continues to earn the nickname Teflon Bill. And, finally, to whom are we lying? Why, our moms! But we’re…

The music played in arenas during basketball games can range from the Ramones to Queen, “Hava Nagila” to the theme from Green Acres. But the tunes the actual athletes listen to on their Beats headphones in the locker room are radically different and diverse. The Los Angeles Clippers’ Chris Paul likes Jay Z. The Washington Wizards’ John Wall favors rappers Lil Durk, Future, Meek Mill, and Rich Homie Quan. Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant is a fan of Jay Z, the Notorious B.I.G., and Nas. The Houston Rockets Chandler Parsons listens to Drake. The Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslem likes Wale (who performed at Haslem’s wedding last year). The New York Knicks’ Tyson Chandler loves Kendrick Lamar. The Rockets’ Dwight Howard has said he prefers Beyoncé to Britney and Bob Marley…

Ever since Michael Gross wrote 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, he has ruled the category of literature you could call Books About Big Buildings Where Lots of Rich People Live. His latest is House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address (Atria), which tells the story of the elaborate apartment house designed by Robert A. M. Stern and completed in 2008, before the crash, by the brothers Arthur and William Zeckendorf. Timing and an urbane, conservative design made it the biggest magnet for money and celebrity New York had seen in more than a generation, attracting buyers like Sting, Denzel Washington, Lloyd Blankfein, and Daniel Loeb. Gross recounts all the transactions, as if to remind us that architecture now is…

There’s nothing more beguiling than a style icon who hides in plain sight—just ask Garbo. Hollywood has few reticent stars these days, but one of them is Mameg, an elite, semi-secret conceptual-fashion boutique and cultural salon hidden away at the back of the Maison Martin Margiela store in Beverly Hills. Once a Presbyterian church, the space still exudes an otherworldly aura, with its proprietors, sisters Sonia Eram and Ari Bashoki, serenely presiding. Mameg’s collections include pieces by today’s greats—Eram counts Hussein Chalayan, Raf Simons, and Nicolas Ghesquière as close friends—as well as offerings from wildly inventive newcomers such as Japanese labels Cosmic Wonder and Eatable of Many Orders, and the German label Bless. Plus: installations by local artists lend the space a gallery-like atmosphere.…

Revlon Glam Two beautified powerhouses have collaborated on the launch of Revlon by Marchesa: The Red Carpet collection. A portion of the proceeds from the limited, five-part cosmetic assortment will go to Half the Sky, a partnership the charity’s philanthropic muse (and face of Revlon), Olivia Wilde, calls “the perfect fit.” From the cheeky Nail Appliqués Crown Jewel to the sexy Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick, it’s maquillage for a cause. ($5–$13; revlon.com) —CAT BUCKLEY Prêt-à-Vênsette Yet another scattered dash to the local makeup counter was the last straw for Lauren Remington Platt, who avers “the modern woman has grown” beyond brick-and-mortar salons. Enter Vênsette, her ondemand New York service with hair and makeup menus and specially trained artists (“our secret sauce!”), chez vous in 40 minutes. Fresh off a talk…

He is the snowy Beatles mop behind the lens of an awardwinning list—Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, No Country for Old Men, A Beautiful Mind—and has worked with moviedom’s greats: Sam Mendes, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Edward Zwick, and, in a near-25-year partnership, the Coen brothers. Joel and Ethan have collaborated with the Devon-born Deakins on 11 of their films, more than half their oeuvre, beginning with 1991’s acclaimed Barton Fink. And it’s a Coen collaboration he is at work on now, in Australia: Angelina Jolie directing the brothers’ adaptation of Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling biography of W.W. II hero Louis Zamperini. But even with Deakins’s trophy collection—three BAFTAs, his field’s highest lifetime-achievement award, the first C.B.E. ever given to a cinematographer—he has not yet won an Academy Award, despite 10…

Brrrrrrrring! Here’s a thing one notices when hanging out with Hollywood stylists for a couple of weeks: their doorbells ring a lot, day and night, 24-7. Messengers are constantly picking up or delivering boatloads of Dior or Valentino or Versace or Prada clothes, shoes, bags—you name it—or perhaps an elaborate arrangement of white roses as a thank-you from someone at Calvin Klein, or even a special present for the stylist herself. At the capacious Tribeca loft where I’m standing, the one owned by Leslie Fremar, stylist for Julianne Moore, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, and Scarlett Johansson, it’s like a hole in the earth has opened up and a funnel of luxury goods is pouring in. “We’re showered with presents,” says Fremar, a cucumber-cool brunette in a rose-colored mohair sweater, with…

Say what you will about L. Ron Hubbard, the notorious founder of Scientology. Despite his many flaws, or perhaps because of them, he was a true Hollywood visionary, a shady pioneer in the dark arts of packaging, branding, and synergy. In the 1950s, following a string of personal and professional failures, he spun his half-baked science-fiction fantasies into a best-selling self-help manifesto called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Then he repackaged his adaptation into a “religion,” with a killer third-act reveal, involving alien spacecraft, humanoid slaves, and an intergalactic warlord named Xenu. In the meantime, in order to establish multiple revenue streams, he branded a series of proprietary commercial tie-ins, among them “the E-Meter,” a Rube Goldberg gizmo said to “confront areas of spiritual upset.” By 1969, Hubbard…

For a century, movie heroines have given women new ways of looking at themselves—and at their lives. Think of Joan Crawford’s determined shoulders, Grace Kelly’s patrician cool, or the frank sensuality of Lauren Bacall. But while the studios once sculpted budding screen queens, as LAURA JACOBS writes, modern-era stars send a message all their own For almost a century the heroines of Hollywood movies have served as style templates for female fans. In the early days, most of these gals were aspiring Galateas, eager for sculpting, who’d worked their way west from hick towns, gritty cities, and vaudeville. They were not daughters of the Dun & Bradstreet set, because that set viewed acting as unacceptable for girls of gilded pedigree. (Both Katharine Hepburn and Grace Kelly, goddesses of the Main…

Could I have been wrong? Blushingly mistaken? In the May 2012 issue of this magazine (“Prime Time’s Graduation”), I mustered the argument with as much muster as I could scrape up that TV—since its inception derided as an idiot box, a vast wasteland, a glass teat, a cheap babysitter, a nurse for shut-ins, and a night-light for the lonely—had creatively matured and muscled up, pinning the movies to the mat of popular culture. Movies had become too factionalized in their appeal, with the blockbuster summer franchises pulling in the Comic-Con legions while the smaller, valiant, depresso indie films and latest epistles from auteurist darlings kept the candles burning in the shrinking parishes of cinephilia. It was now Mad Men, Downton Abbey, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead,…

The 14-year marriage of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng ended abruptly last year, after the News Corp. chairman came to believe his third wife had been romantically involved with a former head of state and with a prominent Silicon Valley executive. Talking to friends of the couple’s, MARK SEAL reports on the shifting power dynamics in the Murdoch household as Deng’s ambitions changed, and tackles the question now being debated: Who blindsided whom? The passionate note surfaced amid the flotsam of a shipwrecked marriage. It was written in broken English by a woman to herself, pouring out her love for a man called Tony. “Oh, shit, oh, shit,” she wrote. “Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He…

The great renaissance of animation (Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ratatouille, etc.) has come almost entirely from one now famous group of students at the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s. As students, they owed it all to Walt Disney, but as pros, many hit a wall at Disney’s studios. SAM KASHNER hears from a band of misfits who learned from the best and couldn’t give anything less PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ It was a staggering number. In November 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported that directors who had been students in the California Institute of the Arts’ animation programs had generated more than $26 billion at the box office since 1985, breathing new life into the art of animation. The list of…

Amber Heard, 27, is not just beautiful; she’s well read, consuming on average a book a week. “Reading keeps me sane,” she says. “Growing up, it was my escape, my alternative; it provided both rebellion and peace.” The older of two girls, she knew early on that if she was going to pursue a career as an actress she had to get out of Texas. “When I was 16, it became clear that I wasn’t going to fit in the machinery that was being provided for me.” Heard moved first to New York but quickly continued on to Los Angeles, where she was immediately cast on television and in film, with parts in Pineapple Express, Zombieland, and The Rum Diary (with Johnny Depp, her fiancé). This month she stars in…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? My five kids, my beautiful wife, Georgina, and my mother telling stories and laughing around the fireplace. What is your greatest fear? That I will compromise when I shouldn’t because it’s “good corporate advice.” Which historical figure do you most identify with? Spartacus. He led a rebellion against Rome. We did that on behalf of independent films. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My temper, although my five kids have kicked my butt so often I enjoy being docile. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Dishonesty. What is your greatest extravagance? Sailing through the sea, but Lord knows it’s the best place to escape. What is your favorite journey? My office to my house filled with kids.…