Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i Vanity Fair

Early in the film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, struggling writer Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy in a salt-and-pepper wig and worn-out clothes, crashes a book party at the elegant New York apartment of her literary agent, played by a deliciously snooty Jane Curtin. It is 1991, a time before Amazon.com, social media, Oprah’s Book Club, or any of the seismic forces that would hit the publishing world over the next 27 years. The odious celebrity-author complex, however, is already alive and well. In the center of the party, flanked by groupies and bellowing some self-aggrandizing comment, is best-selling novelist Tom Clancy, who has managed to achieve wealth and acclaim just as copies of Israel’s latest book, a biography of Estée Lauder, are gathering on the remainder piles. Clancy excels…

Being a journalist in a war zone used to ensure a measure of safety. Victims of conflict often viewed correspondents as messengers who could tell the world about their plight; combatants knew the grave repercussions of harming unarmed news crews. No longer. As social media has become the modern-day medium for history’s first draft, the line has blurred between seasoned correspondents and “citizen journalists.” Increasingly, those who attempt to cover conflict have become targets themselves. This hard truth became all too real with the death of Marie Colvin, targeted by Syrian-government troops seven years ago. As a feature film about Colvin, A Private War, is set to open in November, Marie Brenner writes about the legendary war reporter. A few days after Marie Colvin died, I arrived in London to…

Are you still considering a bid for the presidency? It wasn’t just something I was talking about with reporters and friends and colleagues. I was actually doing some work on it. But the primary reason I dropped it was because of this Fox deal. What did your family say when you told them? They high-fived each other. Will you rethink your decision in 2024? Right now I’m not doing it in 2020. I am running the company through 2021. I have made no decision about what I’ll do afterward. I have thought very little about it. Netflix spends $8 billion a year on content. In the 21st Century Fox deal, you essentially spent $71 billion to acquire a library. Why not just spend $7 billion a year and make 1,000…

What’s it like being C.E.O. of Uber, with all that attention? It’s quite literally like drinking from a fire hose. What have you learned? You’ve got to be quick on your feet, and you have to react—you have to keep building and not get distracted. Is Uber’s DNA harmful? Can it be fixed? I think that there’s a part of the DNA of the company that I very much want to keep—of absolute belief and taking on a giant and building a service that has never been built before. There’s an inclination for speed and execution at a size and speed that I don’t think any company can match. Is Silicon Valley receiving retribution for societal problems it initiated? I think there absolutely is a reckoning here. It might have…

I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back until they were destroyed.—Psalm 18:37 (motto of Israel’s clandestine counterterror squad) On a spring evening in late April, I traveled to a fortified compound in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The location is not identified on Waze, the Israeli-built navigation tool, and so, as far as my app-addled cabdriver was concerned, it does not exist. Then again, the same could be said for its inhabitants: YAMAM, a band of counterterror operatives whose work over the last four decades has been shrouded in secrecy. Upon arrival at the group’s headquarters, which has all the architectural warmth of a supermax, I made my way past a phalanx of Israeli border police in dark-green battle-dress uniforms and into a…

He is as cool as ever—the Mr. Spock of modern American politics, a man who can do the split-fingered Vulcan salute and intone “Live long and prosper,” a tribute to the television series that “Barry” Obama first watched growing up in Honolulu more than half a century ago. To visitors and staffers who call on him in his Washington offices, in the West End section of the capital, near Georgetown, the former president’s conversations are thoughtful and wide-ranging. As he works on his much-anticipated memoir (there is no firm publication date), he is able to toggle between timelines, free to choose among stories from his campaigning days for the Senate in downstate Illinois to Iowa vote totals, or from American demography to the state of global democracy. In his off-duty…

Time’s Up was purposefully started as a movement without one single leader. What inspired the change? There has to be someone who can help coalesce all of those voices and articulate it crisply and clearly to a broader group. We need a formal structure so that we can be as impactful as we need to be. How did you learn about the opportunity? I had a conversation with a group of women who said, “Take a look at this: You are doing this work already at the W.N.B.A. It is the same mission, but a different battlefield—and potentially more impactful.” Time’s Up has been vocal about Les Moonves, and has urged CBS to donate his still-pending $120 million severance. How did the organization conceive and coordinate this effort? This is…

How are you preparing to weigh the urgent desires of your progressive base—such as universal free college education—with the reality that most change in Washington is achieved through incremental compromise? I tend to think that we as a party compromise before we even get to the table. When you’re dealing with these insane people holding the country hostage on the right, you can’t go in with your end point. You have to go in with a strong position. If they’re trying to end Planned Parenthood, I don’t think we go in with “No, let’s keep Planned Parenthood.” I think we go in with “Let’s expand women’s rights to health care and have it guaranteed in every state.” I think we can compromise on our tactics and how we get there,…

TV helped exploit cheerleaders with the “honey shot,” selling sex in between plays. They call each other “girls,” even though they are grown women now, some of them grandmothers in their 60s. Few look it: most are lithe and fit from a lifetime of exercise. Early this morning they convened for a variety of fitness classes, including a “twerkout workout,” a “hot heels dance class,” and “cheer Zumba,” followed by a panel on the “Good, Bad, & Ugly” of cosmetics procedures. Now they are buzzing around a banquet hall set up in a club-seating deck on the upper level of Nissan Stadium in Nashville, home of the Tennessee Titans. There are nearly 500 former N.F.L. cheerleaders—Washington Redskinettes, Seattle Sea Gals, Chicago Honey Bears, Buffalo Jills, and the queen supremes, the…

“My name is Khalid,” he tells me, and I want to believe him. After all, he has traveled the world as royalty—the son of the king of Saudi Arabia, no less. Leading international investors know him as His Royal Highness Khalid bin al-Saud. He moved in an entourage of Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, his every whim tended to by uniformed housekeepers and armed bodyguards. A suave British-born C.E.O. handled his business affairs, and a well-connected international banker marketed his investment deals to a select few, leaving him to live a life of astonishing excess. Ever since he was a boy, he had been pitted against his royal brothers in an expensive game—to see who could “outdo the other one” in spending, he liked to say. Khalid was surely winning. He was…

THE ROMANOFFS The highly anticipated contemporary series, The Romanoffs, is set to premiere on Amazon Prime Video Friday, October 12 with new episodes released weekly, on Fridays. The Romanoffs is created, written and directed by nine-time Emmy award winner Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) and reunites 14 of Mad Men’s creative team. Featuring eight unique stories about people who believe themselves to be descendants of the Russian royal family, each episode takes place in a new location with a new star-studded cast. Set in seven countries around the globe, The Romanoffs was shot on location on three continents.…

“Ralph Lauren is such a great example of Americana.”—HILLARY CLINTON Ralph Lauren—the man who sublimated a certain American identity into style—celebrated his half-century career with a golden jubilee in Central Park. Vintage trolley cars ferried guests, in black-tie and ball gowns, from the park’s 72nd Street entrance to the Bethesda Terrace for a runway show and dinner. A lifetime’s worth of cultural icons—from Oprah Winfrey to Steven Spielberg to Kanye West—turned out to toast the Bronx-born designer. The dinner followed a show of the spring 2019 collection, featuring Ralph Lauren hallmarks like denim vests and cowboy boots along with velvet gowns and double-breasted tuxes. Pierce Brosnan, looking suited for a James Bond reprise, said, “It’s the bow tie, it’s the suit. It’s an emblem of that character and forever so.”…

Picture a man with an unquenchable thirst for celebrity, who gets into rows with everybody, who has a gift for punchy quips that make headlines; a man of undeniable charisma who so craves being the center of attention he wants to be the baby at the baptism, the bride at the wedding, and the corpse at the funeral. “While he is in the neighborhood,” one critic grudgingly concedes, “the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade!” We speak, of course, not of our current president but of Theodore Roosevelt, based on depictions from more than a century ago. As a presidential historian, I am often asked which of our past presidents might be best suited for…

FEBRUARY 6 SpaceX fires a Tesla Roadster out of Earth’s orbit. MARCH 23 Fatal Tesla crash raises questions about safety standards. APRIL 01 Musk tweets an April Fool’s Day joke about Tesla going bankrupt. Funny! APRIL 2 Says the car business is “hell”; sleeps in the Tesla factory. APRIL 16 Model 3 production is temporarily halted. MAY 2 Musk berates guy doing his job on analyst call. MAY 7 Makes his public debut with new girlfriend, the musician Grimes, at the Met Gala. MAY 23 Goes on a Trumpian rant about the media; proposes a Web site called Pravda, which he had already incorporated, to track the credibility of reporters and news outlets. JUNE 12 Tesla lays off 9 percent of its workforce. JULY 7 Musk dispatches help to a…

It’s right around the time I’m prattling on about racial diversity in Hollywood that Michael B. Jordan, the movie star, floors the gas pedal and sends his blade-like sports car ripping down the Pacific Coast Highway, a fast-forward jolt that turns Malibu into a kinetic blur of pink and blue. “Oh Jesus Christ!” I cry out. I grip the armrest and see terrible visions of us slicing a beach bum in half as he accidentally stumbles into the road or exploding into that white van that looks to be edging unexpectedly into our lane. “I got you,” Jordan assures over the engine roar. When he finally slows—imagine the Millennium Falcon after hyperspace—he turns to me and flashes that winning Michael B. Jordan smile, a dazzling display of superstar teeth that…

After lunch on March 1, David Solomon was standing at his desk in his 41st-floor office at Goldman Sachs, high above the Hudson River, answering e-mails and talking on his telephone headset. For the previous 15 months, Solomon had been locked in a competition with Harvey Schwartz, with whom he served as co–chief operating officer at Goldman, for one of the most coveted positions on Wall Street. One of them would be picked to succeed Lloyd Blankfein, the bank’s chairman and C.E.O., whenever he decided the time had come to step down. Suddenly, Blankfein yelled to Solomon from his office next door. “Can you come here?” the boss called. “I want to talk to you about something.” Solomon walked into Blankfein’s office, just as he had hundreds of times before.…

Matthew Weiner has written a lot of iconic television scenes. But a specific one has come to my mind frequently in the last year, while the media roiled with tales of women standing up to the powerful men they worked for. It’s from Season Four of Mad Men, when young superstar-in-training Peggy Olson confronts Don Draper in his office, angry that he’s accepted an award for an idea that she believes was hers. “It’s your job: I give you money, you give me ideas!” he says. “And you never say thank you!” a wounded Peggy replies. “That’s what the money is for!” he shouts. “I’ve been both of those people,” Weiner tells me, sitting in his production office, nestled in an Art Deco landmark in Hollywood. Dressed in a pale-blue…