Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2019 i Vanity Fair

WATCH 25th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® on TNT & TBS Celebrate the SAG Awards Silver Anniversary on Sunday, Jan. 27, as some of today’s leading actors are honored for the year’s outstanding film and television performances. For the only entertainment industry awards that focus solely on actors, ballots are cast by nearly 121,000 SAG-AFTRA members. Find out their choices right when they do, during the 25th Annual SAG Awards® on TNT/TBS. Don’t miss the 8 p.m. (ET) beginning to share the surprise when a secret few of their peers disclose their personal take on the show’s signature, “I Am an Actor” stories. Watch for the Awards, and stay for the camaraderie, the fashion, and the unexpected things – be they provocative, humorous or heartfelt – that pop out of…

That olfactory feeling, scent—our time machine. Smells implicate us, conjure memories: home, a kitchen, cardamom. Winter’s first snow. The linen closet, cracking open a library book, summer vacations and the briny sulfur of the sea. Smells are “sweet as oboes,” wrote Baudelaire or “corrupt, and rich.” There’s the ambushing kind, the passer-by who smells like an old love. Sandalwood, vetiver, plum. While our scent palette is a portal to the past, perfume—the cloud we spritz and walk toward, expectant—offers escape and identity. An invisible shroud that lingers like a calling card: She was just here. Dreary late winter is the perfect time to be transported. D.S., from D.S. & Durga, offers warm saffron and gardenia, while Tory Burch’s Fou de Toi, inspired by the memory of powerful love, brings a…

the WATCHDOGS California representative Devin Nunes’s late-night jaunt to the White House to swap information pertaining to the Russia investigation may not have been the first sign that a Republican Congress had no intention of holding Donald Trump accountable, but it was certainly the starkest. For two years, G.O.P. committee chairs have shielded the president, refusing to launch investigations into things like his tax returns or his sticky business ties, or even whether his trade war can be justified on “national security” grounds. Unsurprisingly, Representatives Elijah Cummings, Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, and Richard Neal—who will chair the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, the Financial Services Committee, and the Ways and Means Committee, respectively—see things differently. Most have said they will investigate…

DURING the 1980s, Donald Trump had strutted across the American landscape, boastful, flamboyant, the Liberace of real estate. But by the early 90s, he was so over-leveraged that when one piece after another of his holdings did not perform at a high enough level to service his massive debt, the whole jerry-built empire began to totter. He bankrupted both Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and was close to losing the heavily mortgaged Mar-a-Lago. “Trump loved Mar-a-Lago so much that he was willing to do almost anything to hold on to it,” says his former Palm Beach lawyer Paul Rampell. Trump petitioned the town to build eight homes on the 17-acre property, but was so disliked in the resort community that he…

LAURA DERN EMERGES FROM THE PITCH DARK. She is 19 years old, dressed as Sandy Williams in a pink short-sleeved dress, a hydrangea of blond bangs protruding from her forehead. It’s 1986 and Dern has appeared in several commercially successful films, including Mask, but it’s David Lynch’s Blue Velvet that functions as a debutante ball for a woman who was born Hollywood royalty. Under normal circumstances, it might feel tiresome to explain that Laura Dern is the daughter of Bruce Dern (himself a great-nephew of Archibald MacLeish) and Diane Ladd (herself a cousin of Tennessee Williams), that she is the goddaughter of Shelley Winters and one of the only actors working today with Coppola-level California roots. But these are not normal circumstances. Because Dern’s childhood, a swirling mass of famous…

BRETT KAVANAUGH’S ALLEGED SINS WERE HARDLY ORIGINAL. AND HIS HIGH-SCHOOL HIGH JINKS WERE NEVER MEANT TO BECOME PUBLIC FODDER. FOR DECADES, AN ARISTOCRATIC OMERTÀ HAS BOUND GEORGETOWN PREP BOYS TO SECRECY—OR ELSE It’s late October, homecoming weekend for Georgetown Prep, class of ’83, the one that Brett Kavanaugh made famous, featuring P.J., Squi, Timmy, Tom, Tobin, Mark Judge, et al. Earlier today, the Hoyas football team gave Kavanaugh, sporting a bright-red baseball hat, a hero’s welcome. Victory was in the air. Prep, as it’s known, was in the middle of trouncing Episcopal, 24–6. Kavanaugh had finally clinched his seat on the Supreme Court, after all those ridiculous attacks on his character. Now, the alumni have gathered in a generic, brightly lit room at Pinstripes, a sprawling restaurant and bowling alley…

The Atlanta Jackknife, the St. Louis Ballroom, the Philly Fast Backwards. These roller-skating styles evolved out of their respective cities, with the help of hip-hop and custom wheels, to form a transcontinental culture for black skaters—who still encounter rinks that are segregated by insidious dress codes and music rules. And the culture is under threat. About three American rinks close every month, taking with them a gathering place and a sense of community. Phelicia Wright (far right) says skating for her is like church. “If you lose yourself in it,” she says, “you come out feeling brand-new.” Wright and her children are among the star subjects in United Skates, a new documentary by Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown. The frst time the directors saw a stream of skaters performing Nutcrackers—a…

I. THE GUN TOWER On the morning of May 11, 2008, a U.S. Army private second class named Matthew Warren Brown died of a single gunshot wound to the head while manning a watchtower at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. Brown was 20 years old. He was a skinny, all-American kid, a bit aimless but affable and unassuming. He was a good guy. You could see it in his face. At his funeral back home in Pennsylvania, some 200 people showed up. In the aftermath of Brown’s death, army investigators created files about the circumstances. The bullet that killed him was fired from his own weapon, an M4 carbine. He was working the six a.m. shift, alone in the watchtower by the fortified main gate to the base. The…

The most dire diplomatic crisis of the Trump administration, or maybe just the weirdest, began without much notice in November 2016, some three weeks after the new president was elected. An American working at the U.S. Embassy in Havana—some call him Patient Zero—complained that he had heard strange noises outside his home. “It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV,” the diplomat told ProPublica. Zero discussed the sound with his next-door neighbor, who also worked at the embassy. The neighbor said, yeah, he too had heard noises, which he described as “mechanical-sounding.” Several months later, a third staffer at the embassy described suffering from hearing loss he associated with a strange sound.…

After the Cannes premiere of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, the entire auditorium burst into applause and almost everyone turned to the seat occupied by the person whose face was projected on the 19-by-8-meter screen: Polish actress Joanna Kulig, who sat with her face buried in her hands. Three years after his drama Ida became the first Polish movie to win the Oscar for best foreign-language film, Pawlikowski has returned with Cold War, a desperate love story shot in monochrome, set in a divided postwar Poland and co-starring Kulig. “She has an aura and light,” says Pawlikowski, who wrote his new film with the actress in mind. On camera, Kulig’s power is in her range: the part of Zula, a country-girl ingénue, spans 15 years and innumerable transformations, which Kulig navigates…

Meghan Markle will never, in all likelihood, be Queen. But among the many benefits of marrying Prince Harry and becoming Duchess of Sussex is that she and Harry will have their own domain, a special relationship with the 53 Commonwealth countries, in many of which Meghan’s mixed-race American background will be an asset. On her intricately planned 16-day tour of a few of these formerly colonized territories in the South Pacific, her first trip as an H.R.H., she ruled with her characteristic, almost magical mix of micro-management and moments of authenticity, exhibiting the type of spontaneous human interaction with which the royals have long struggled. In Sydney, she fell to her knees to greet a wheelchair-bound 98-year-old war widow, and in New Zealand, she directed underlings to distribute petits fours…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Playing around in my studio by myself, discovering the possibility of new ideas. What is your greatest fear? A world destroyed by science-denying mediocrity. Which living person do you most admire? Sir David Attenborough, John Prendergast. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Self-doubt. What is the trait you most deplore in others? To place faith over facts. What is your greatest extravagance? Never starting the day before noon. What is your favorite journey? From the first note in music to the last. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Being right. On what occasion do you lie? If it buys me time to explore my ideas. What do you dislike most about your appearance? What too much delicious food…