Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-14 i Vanity Fair

1 Toni Bentley Author Toni Bentley is perhaps most famous for The Surrender, her memoir of obsessive love and sodomy. For this month’s issue, she contributed “The Thin End of the Whip” (page 108), on dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet and the woman who pledged her life to the 83-year-old mistress. “I came away thinking, These are the most civilized women I’ve ever met,” recalls Bentley. “There’s clearly more to the whip than meets the eye.” A stage adaptation of The Surrender opens this month in New York. 2 Buzz Bissinger Scores of hours of reporting, two weeks in Oklahoma, and one local barber were required to expose the full tragedy of student Christopher Lane’s senseless death and the three teens charged with killing him. “We as a country have to take…

Keri Russell is as preposterously all-American as she looks. Raised out West, the ex-Mouseketeer and Golden Globe–winning sweetheart of J. J. Abrams’s early-aughts, cult-favorite soap, Felicity, is today a mom who reads food blogs and makes sea-salt caramels for her kids. It’s precisely that freshness that gives edge to her Nadezhda, cover name Elizabeth Jennings—a ruthless and hard-boiled K.G.B. double agent on FX’s The Americans, set in Reaganera D.C. (It is the brainchild of former C.I.A. officer Joe Weisberg, brother of Slate’s Jacob.) Earning two Emmy nominations after its first season—the second debuts next month—the drama drew raves for its complex portrait of a sham marriage, posing the eternal question: When two agents are “spouses,” can they remain emotionally unentangled? Offscreen, Russell is a sunny, self-effacing goof who finds the…

On a recent afternoon in the heart of Hollywood, on Melrose Avenue, a small group of one-year-olds gather around a table. Not a normal-size table, mind you, but a teeny-tiny one, with teeny-tiny stools that they sit on for lunch. They wear clean bibs. Their food remains on plates and not on the floor. They drink juice out of real glasses, not plastic baby bottles or weirdly shaped sippy cups. “If you set limits around mealtime,” says the adult acting as master of ceremonies, “it is possible for babies to eat in a dignified way.” Dignity is what the esoteric parenting style being practiced here, called RIE—an acronym for Resources for Infant Educarers, and pronounced “wry”—promises both its wee charges and their parents. It’s a funny thing to have grown…

His dream was New York, not Hollywood,” says former talk-show host Dick Cavett, a fellow Nebraskan who was a writer for The Tonight Show in the 1960s, when the show was broadcast from Rockefeller Center, in Midtown Manhattan. “He felt sorry for people who were born here because they never had the thrill of getting on a train in Nebraska and knowing when they got off, they would be in Grand Central Terminal.” (Actually, Johnny flew to New York his first time.) Johnny Carson walked out from behind the curtain to host The Tonight Show for the first time on October 1, 1962, replacing Jack Paar, who had earlier replaced Steve Allen. In front of a television audience of eight million, old show business gave way to new: Carson was…

At approximately one P.M. on Sunday, June 9, 2013, a self-described paparazzo, who identifies himself only as “Jean-Paul,” parked his car across the street from Scott’s, a tony restaurant on Mount Street, in London’s Mayfair neighborhood. He had spotted Charles Saatchi—the wealthy advertising executive, champion of emerging British artists, and founder of the renowned Saatchi Gallery—dining on the terrace with Nigella Lawson, his wife of nearly 10 years and the author and television personality known by her own international brand, “the Domestic Goddess.” They were there, at Saatchi’s favorite restaurant, celebrating his 70th birthday. The couple, eating outside despite an overcast day with temperatures hovering in the mid-50s, tolerated the cool air to accommodate Saatchi’s chain-smoking habit. So, Jean-Paul—who insists that his real name not be revealed and who prides…

Although Yves Béhar is a creator of meticulously crafted objects, his hair is pure chaos. In a way, this tonsorial disaster is an apt metaphor for the tangled web of ideas that have exploded from the head of the lanky Swiss-born designer—resulting in some of technology’s most striking and memorable designs over the last two decades, including the One Laptop per Child computer, the Jawbone wireless headset, the Up fitness band, and the Ouya game player. It’s all the more impressive when one considers that, until very recently, design has taken a backseat in Silicon Valley, where the result has been either not much to speak of or products that mimic (usually badly) Apple’s signature absolutist ethos of stark simplicity. Béhar has gone in a decidedly different direction from that,…

They look as if they were emerging at dawn from a party, waiting to go home, these two apparently ageless, beautiful women. Consummate artists in front of a camera, they look at it as if they knew you—with a hint of humor at the imposition of the photograph. It is their first portrait together: Catherine Deneuve at 70 and Kate Moss at 40. Their separate images have illuminated the cultural landscape for decades—Deneuve with her great classic roles in the cinema, from the early Repulsion (1965) and Belle de Jour (1967) to the more than 100 other films she has made, and also as a living symbol of French style; Moss with her unparalleled domination of fashion, who turned modeling into a high art and became the chief inspiration for…

When I was a kid, I imagined a room in Manhattan filled with the most beautiful women in the world. It stood to reason that, in a city like New York, which pulled the superstar knockouts from every town in America, all those girls, as if following the logic of an algorithm, would concentrate at a single point in the space-time continuum. When I closed my eyes, I could see it: high in the air, bathed in light, filled with champagne flutes. I began to search for that room as soon as I arrived in the city—it was my El Dorado, a phantasmagoria forever just beyond the horizon. Finally, as in the way of a clanking old conquistador, I gave up, walked away muttering, No más, no más. Until a…

With a six-foot-five-inch liberal mayor and The Tonight Show being broadcast out of Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York will be experiencing something of a 1960s moment this spring. After two decades of conservative, developer-friendly leadership in City Hall, the incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, will, for many New Yorkers, mark a welcome return to Lindsay-era progressive leadership. And with Jimmy Fallon moving The Tonight Show from Los Angeles back to New York, the program will be returning to its Carson-era roots—and, by extension, to the roots of late-night television. Steve Allen, the first host, headlined the show in New York from 1954 to 1957. He was a comedian best known for his funny phone calls as well as his quick comebacks: Do they get your program in…

Picture the scene. It’s Saturday afternoon in the Middleton household. The atmosphere is heavy with expectation. All eyes are on the television, and occasionally the tension is broken with excited shouts of “Pass the ball!” or “Tackle him now!” It’s my grandmother, the leader of the Middleton pack, and we’re watching England play Ireland in the 1996 Five Nations Rugby tournament, a moment that will remain indelibly in my mind. Granny was incredibly, ferociously competitive—a gene which we have all inherited—and we would always worry she’d injure herself by getting overexcited. She was in her mid-80s at the time, but that didn’t stop her from having a crush on Jeremy Guscott, England’s heartthrob player of the 1990s. Rugby was a big thing for our family, and the focal point was…

DEFINE your Term A GEEK CAN ALSO BE: [A] A South American cowboy. [B] A performer who bites the heads off chickens. [C] A skinny male model. DO or DIET A trifurcated path that will teach you and yours how to lose weight and alienate people is on PAGE 74. LUPITA NYONG’O AGE: 30. PROVENANCE: Mexico City. CHILD’S PLAY: The actress, who had an international upbringing thanks to her professor–political activist father, has long shown a theatrical streak. “As a child of three, before I started school, I would tell this story to my mother about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate. So the world of make-believe was always, I think, in my life.” SCHOOL OF…

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EUGENE RICHARDS The day came up clear in Duncan on Friday, August 16. The night’s wind gusts of 30 miles an hour had calmed. It had rained maybe a tenth of an inch and then stopped. When the sun rose, at 6:53 A.M., the temperature was 64 degrees—the sweet cool of a summer morning in Duncan, just as it was in Marlow and Loco and Comanche and the rest of Stephens County, in southern Oklahoma. Jim Brasher wasn’t awake when daylight broke. He had lost his leg up to the knee in a farming accident when it had gotten caught in an auger, and the phantom pain had been particularly bad during the night. He hadn’t been able to sleep, so he moved to the oversize soft-cushion chair…

Having dutifully put in her ingénue time as “the daughter” (Brokeback Mountain), “the girlfriend” (Shooter), and “the secretary” (Entourage), Kate Mara has made the most of her opportunity to inhabit a fully formed character in Netflix’s House of Cards, which, last year, announced itself as the first television series specifically engineered to validate the concept of binge-watching. In case you’ve not yet plunged into the Washington drama, whose second season premieres this month, Mara plays Zoe Barnes, a D.C. cub reporter who tweets, hustles, and flirts her way past her hidebound fogy elders in deadtree media—a new-paradigm journalist on a new-paradigm TV program. “For me, personally, I love being able to hold a book or magazine in my hands, but I feel like the whole world has shifted, and Zoe…

Iam going to meet the most famous dominatrix in France. It is a gray but bright day as the taxi drives from Paris through the lush green fields of Normandy. It is late afternoon. I have been invited to dinner and don’t want to be late. The address I have been given is so abbreviated as to be comical: no numbers, no street, no postal code, just the name of the château and the province in which it resides. The G.P.S. is having none of it. I had asked in an e-mail a month earlier if I might observe one of Madame’s sadomasochistic rituals. I was told “no one observes, there are only participants.” I replied—what the hell—that I was willing to participate, imagining that I might be given a…

During the last years of his life E. E. Cummings made a modest living on the high-school lecture circuit. In the spring of 1958 his schedule took him to read his adventurous poems at the uptight girls’ school in Westchester where I was a miserable 15-year-old sophomore with failing grades. I vaguely knew that Cummings had been a friend of my father (the novelist John Cheever), who loved to tell stories about Cummings’s gallantry and his ability to live elegantly on almost no money—an ability my father himself struggled to cultivate. When my father was a young writer in New York City, in the golden days before marriage and children pressured him to move to the suburbs, the older Cummings had been his beloved friend and adviser. On that cold…

The Bronx-born actress-singer has been entertaining audiences on stage and screen for nearly 60 years. Here, the star of Broadway’s upcoming A Raisin in the Sun revival talks Oscar Wilde, virginity, and the incomparable magic of a live performance What is your idea of perfect happiness? I have no idea what perfect happiness feels like, but I am looking forward to the experience. What is your greatest fear? Walking into a room filled with friends and family singing “Happy Birthday” to me and I am completely naked. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Being judgmental. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Narcissism. What is your greatest extravagance? Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Virginity. On what occasion do you…

Novels about war-ravaged Africa have long been the province chiefly of male writers. Now Susan Minot brings us Thirty Girls (Knopf), a haunting portrayal of two women: Esther, an abducted teen turned child soldier, and Jane, the privileged white American journalist on a mission to capture the voices of these children. Bobbed, liquored up, and looking for danger, Flappers (Sarah Crichton) were both glamorized and demonized by 1920s society. Judith Mackrell toasts six of the era’s most extraordinary rebel girls. Here’s a touchy subject: Why are some cultural groups in America—such as the Mormons, Cubans, Indians, and Chinese—succeeding and amassing wealth while others (we know who we are) are not? Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld argue that certain traits—a sense of superiority, inferiority, and impulse control—make up The Triple Package…

A peacock pranced on the roof of Amshenski Dvor, a restaurant outside the town of Sochi, on Russia’s Black Sea coast. A couple of friends, Yaraslau Zauharodni and Konstantsiya Leschenko, had joined me for a dinner of grilled meat and sweet Caucasian wine. Yaraslau is the chief of the hockey competition for the Winter Olympics. Konstantsiya works for the Olympics, too, in information technology. I had met them both in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a few years before. Stagnant Belarus is not a place of upward mobility. My friends had new energy now, working for the Olympics. I had to confess a feeling of unease about what may lie in store for Sochi when the Winter Olympics begin, in February. The traffic may be terrible. The power may fail,…

THE MUSIC MAN Jimmy Fallon and his house band, the Roots, outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in New York City—the once and future home of The Tonight Show. THROUGHOUT, FALLON WEARS CLOTHING BY TOM FORD; SHOES BY CHURCH’S; CUFF LINKS BY TIFFANY & CO. VICTORIA’S SECRET MODEL ELSA HOSK, LEFT, WEARS A SWIMSUIT BY MARA HOFFMAN; SHOES BY CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN. VICTORIA’S SECRET MODEL LILY ALDRIDGE WEARS A SWIMSUIT BY ERES; SHOES BY MANOLO BLAHNIK. The ebullient 39-year-old who is ascending to the Tonight Show throne as it returns to New York next month couldn’t be more different from the aloof, urbane Johnny Carson, who forged that mythic (and warred-over) franchise. But, DAVID KAMP writes, given Jimmy Fallon’s infectious good cheer and the musical chops of his compadres, the Roots, NBC’s Studio…

Buried among the film credits on Gabriella Wilde’s IMDB Web page is an item that seems appropriate more for Burke’s Peerage than for a film-trade site: “Paternal granddaughter of the 2nd Baronet Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe and a descendant of Charles II, King of England, Ireland and Scotland, in turn twice great-great-great grandson of Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, and of Joan the Mad, sister of Catherine of Aragon,” it reads, just below the 24-year-old actress and model’s birth name, Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. Wilde is the daughter of the British businessman John Austen Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, and her luminous blonde-ingénue looks have helped her land a string of high-profile roles that are reprises of parts played by some of the most accomplished stars of the past. Her breakout was as Constance in the…

In 1974, Blondie pushed punk onto the New Wave dance floor and helped introduce hip-hop to the masses. Now, after 40 years, the band is as inventive and forward-thinking as ever. “We’re gonna re-establish ourselves in a way that we haven’t done in a while,” Debbie Harry says. Next month, she and her bandmates will release a two-disc package entitled Blondie 4(0) Ever, pairing one album of their greatest hits with another set of completely new tracks. “We’ve got this new music we’ve been playing, and it’s relevant, and important to me that people are saying the new music really fits in perfectly with the Blondie music that they know, and how interesting and beautiful it is that they fit together like that,” she says. “And we can do an…

The last season of Game of Thrones was tough on its beefcake contingent: Robb Stark (Richard Madden) caught the wrong bouquet during the famous “Red Wedding” scene, while Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) bid his right hand adieu somewhere on the road to King’s Landing. Happily, Jon Snow, played by the doe-eyed, ravenhaired English actor Kit Harington, remains alive and intact, though when we last saw him he had three arrows in his backside courtesy of erstwhile girlfriend Ygritte. It is a tribute to Harington, a more Byronic Adrian Grenier, and Rose Leslie, a Downton Abbey alumna who plays the “wilding” Ygritte as a medieval Annie Oakley, that theirs is the one romance on the show viewers sort of actually care about; we do hope the couple’s paths will cross, non-lethally,…

I met Steve Stoute in 1995. He came over one day, looked out at the Pacific Ocean, then at my house, and said “Scarface.” At the moment, I had no idea what Steve was talking about, but over time I came to realize that it was definitely a compliment. I hired Steve immediately. He became the president of urban music and an executive vice president at Interscope, and we took one incredible ride together. We also learned a very big and valuable lesson: how to harness the then undervalued power of hip-hop culture and push out. Then, one day, Steve came to me and explained that he wanted to start a new kind of ad agency, one that could take this powerful force in our culture to help some of…