Vanity Fair June 2013

If there is a more blighted community in the U.S. these days than the area around Waco, Texas, it would be hard to imagine. Waco, a city of just over 125,000 people, and its surrounding towns have had more than their share of disasters, both natural and manmade. Included in the mayhem are tornadoes (one in 1953 killed 114 and is considered the worst in Texas history); grisly murders (two girls and a boy, all teenagers, were found slashed to death by the shores of Lake Waco in 1982); cult raids (the F.B.I.’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound, led by David Koresh, in which 76 members, including children, were killed in the ensuing fire); plagues (the cricket onslaught of 2012, after which the ground was deep with insect carcasses);…

1 Maureen Orth Nearly five years have passed since special correspondent Maureen Orth first profiled France’s then First Lady, Carla Bruni, for Vanity Fair. “The French public loved her because she presented such an elegant image,” says Orth, who caught up with the former model and man-eater for “Carla on a Hot Tin Roof” (page 120). “The most fun part about interviewing Bruni—a female Don Juan, in her younger years—this time, was hearing her disquisitions about the virtues of marriage and motherhood.” 2 Laura M. Holson This month, in “Brad’s War” (page 90), The New York Times’s Laura M. Holson uncovers the astonishing story behind the making of World War Z, Brad Pitt’s $200-million-plus zombie movie and the latest blockbuster to experience belt-busting budget distensions. “As more directors experiment with…

Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” asked Noël Coward in 1961, and were he around 52 years later he’d be asking the same question. For instance, when Americans were asked who they’d least like to sit next to on a plane, the very choices themselves—Kim Kardashian, Charlie Sheen, Richard Simmons, Chris Brown, Joan Rivers, and Mel Gibson—suggest that the Coward Theory still holds, and that the wrong people are traveling before we’ve even booked our seats. Similarly, the poll’s offered options in cross-country traveling companions (three teenagers, or three children under 10?) instead conjure soothing visions of Barcaloungers and unchanging time zones. But support for the theory extends even unto the answers. Nearly half of us Americans admit to stealing from hotels, soaps being by far the most coveted objets.…

Eddie Izzard, the transvestite comic genius who sold out Madison Square Garden, met me for lunch at Marea, a mecca for Italian seafood on Central Park South, in New York. My favorite stand-up comedian on earth was in town on the eve of his Force Majeure World Tour. (Stops include Serbia, Nepal, Russia, and New Zealand, among 25 countries.) I was excited to meet him if only because there’s no entertainer like him. Looking fit and studious with a trim beard, and wearing specs, this innately charming, reflective man was dressed mostly in what he called “boy mode.” He was wearing jeans and a North Face top; his boots had stacked heels, and his nails were varnished jungle red. It’s amazing, I thought. Onstage or off, everything about Eddie works.…

A PANOPLY of ECCENTRIC BIOGRAPHICAL DATA RE: FILMDOM’S PREMIER POP AUTEUR With his film Star Trek into Darkness inaugurating the summer ’13 blockbuster season, and with the weighty responsibility of directing the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII, J. J. Abrams is surely worthy of an epic profile that would trace, in depth, his path from wunderkind screenwriter to prolific TV-series overlord (with the shows Felicity, Alias, Lost, and Fringe among his credits) to nimble filmmaker equally adept at handling battleship-class franchise fare (e.g., Mission: Impossible III) and deeply affecting personal material (e.g., Super 8). That is not, however, the business of this page. This page revives an approach from the first incarnation of Vanity Fair, from nearly a century ago, that posited that “the really vital and important thing[s]” about…

Return of the boy king; a man and his ego; London’s little secret; unsolicited advice for Taylor Swift; and more I enjoyed reading the article “The King of New York” [by David Kamp, April]. It brought back many memories of the Tutankhamun exhibition. But one major event in the article wasn’t fully explained: taking the packed crates to Alexandria and putting them on the U.S.S. Milwaukee was not the Met’s original plan. At that time, I was an associate curator in the Egyptian Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art tasked with overseeing the packing of the 55 artifacts for the Tutankhamun exhibition. We had planned to fly the objects to the United States. But the date I arrived in Cairo, July 4, 1976, was the same day Israel Defense…