Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i Vanity Fair

Thank you for taking me back to the genesis and sine qua non of my rock ’n’ roll misspent youth [“Swinging on the Screen,” by James Wolcott, Hollywood Issue]. In August 1966, my family steamed from the Hague to New York aboard the S.S. Statendam. Every night for a week I watched A Hard Day’s Night in the ship’s theater, virtually alone. I could not believe my good luck at having the Beatles to myself. By the end I knew every eyelash, crooked tooth, and boot scuff. The 60s British cultural invasion left an imprint on my DNA. I am now 60, but my enduring brand remains Anglophile hippie chick. Your look back was pure joy for me. Toodle pip! ROBIN GORNEAU Malvern, Pennsylvania As usual, James Wolcott’s column was…

Sir Quentin Blake is best known for his whimsical drawings in Roald Dahl classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and countless others. Now the beloved 83-year-old artist is the subject of a new book, Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination (Bloomsbury), by Ghislaine Kenyon. This illustration—from a poster based on the book The Rights of the Reader, by Daniel Pennac—captures the power of a page-turner.…

For all the fuss about Supreme Court nominations, very few Supreme Court decisions are actually remembered by history, and even fewer are notorious for getting it wrong. In fact, there are really only three: Dred Scott (1857), which upheld slavery; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld racial segregation; and Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld state anti-sodomy laws. It took the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott. Plessy v. Ferguson was reversed 58 years after it was issued (in the most famous Supreme Court case of all, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka). It took only 17 years for the court to decide, in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), that it had made a mistake, and to reverse Bowers v. Hardwick. Any others? Well, Bush v. Gore, which decided the…

One afternoon late last fall, the writers and producers of Inside Amy Schumer were sitting around a long table in their Manhattan production offices punching up scripts for the sketch show’s fourth season. The staff has six female writers and four male writers—an unusual ratio for TV comedy, where most series are lucky to have one or two women on their writing teams. Schumer is herself a writer and executive producer on the Comedy Central show, which premiered in 2013, and though another producer sat at the head of the table and appeared to be nominally in charge, the star guided the discussions and script revisions with a gentle, collaborative, but firm hand—modeling a positive female leadership style, as a business-school text might put it. She gave the writers space…

In what could be described as a huge breach of trust, on March 3, 2015, the president of the all-female Sweet Briar College, a 114-year-old mainstay of southern liberal-arts schools, announced that the college would be closing—for good—after graduation a few months later. Citing “insurmountable financial challenges,” he and his board voted to give up and bail out. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media covered it closely. The public (many of whom had been unaware that a place called Sweet Briar still—or ever—existed) assumed that a college for women in rural Virginia meant … what? Iced tea on a porch? D.A.R. meetings in a columned house? Had women’s colleges officially become archaic in this post-feminist, gender-fluid, college-debt-laden era? There was a time in this country when…

Imeet C at the airport after not seeing her for months. We are both wearing red pants, the same striped shirt, and nearly identical brown sandals. D and I speak on the phone: Where are you? In line for my latte. I’m in line at the post office. E forwards me a poem she likes. I have read it the night before. C, D, and E are my telepathic colleagues. In other words: my sisters. If you have sisters—and I have three— you will begin, against your better nature, to believe in telepathic communication. It is not unusual to be on the phone—chopping Brussels sprouts—with a sister in Boston, also chopping Brussels sprouts. Over a lifetime your stories of synchronicity and coincidence pile up. But what is actually happening is…

Iremember standing at the foot of the long stairway in our new house, too frightened to climb, everything big and unfamiliar, until my sister Uche silently took my hand and we went up together. I was 4; she was 15. It is my earliest memory of my attachment to her. But, according to family lore, the attachment started much earlier. I was a fussy baby whose nightly screaming was soothed only by her. Newly weaned, I would eat okra and liver sauce only if she fed me. “By the way,” she told me recently. “I ate all the liver—that’s why you didn’t grow tall.” In my teenage years she was the glamorous big sister who was studying pharmacy at university and had a handsome boyfriend in a white car. I…

‘My sister and I” was a much-heard mantra on British radio during World War II. Listeners immediately recognized the speaker as H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England, and her sister as H.R.H. Princess Margaret, four years her junior. Though Elizabeth and Margaret were brought up in a simple and loving way by their parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, future King and Queen of England, theirs was no ordinary childhood. They were close-knit, rarely apart for long—“we four,” as the King would refer to his family. But the particular closeness of Elizabeth and Margaret was beyond comparison with the relationship between any other siblings in the world. Elizabeth would, in 1953, become a consecrated monarch, Crowned Queen of England, ruler of about 130 million subjects on five…

Born to dazzle, they were the most famous sisters in the world, the Bouvier girls—Jacqueline and Caroline Lee. Jackie was studious, dark-haired, athletic, and reserved. Lee—three and a half years younger—was light-haired, chubby, mischievous, adventurous. As young girls, they called each other “Jacks” and “Pekes.” “When I was seven and we lived in New York, I ran away,” Lee, now 83 and still stunning, once told Gloria Steinem. “I took my dog and started out across the Brooklyn Bridge…. I didn’t get very far᠁ It’s rather difficult to run away in your mother’s high heels.” Raised in a 12-room duplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the sisters summered at the family estate, Lasata, on Further Lane in East Hampton. They adored their father, John Vernou Bouvier III, known…

Although the age of the celebrity stalker had not yet dawned, the normally unflappable Olivia de Havilland could not help being discomfited by the disheveled man with the dead eyes who would not stop staring at her. It was 1957. She was at a charity ball for the costumers union at Conrad Hilton’s sparkling new hotel, the Beverly Hilton. This one big gala would remind her of what she was not missing in Hollywood before she boarded one of her old flame Howard Hughes’s TWA Super Constellations and made the long journey back to Paris, where she had moved in 1955. Hollywood, Olivia felt, had changed for the worse since her glory days, in the 1930s and 40s, and everyone was blaming it on television. America wasn’t going out anymore.…

I discovered my best friend the moment we were born. It is a household legend that when we were three my twin sister, Jenna, kicked the pre-school class bully in the shins. Jenna was a feisty, stout blonde with straight-cut bangs and a determination to protect her “people,” who at that moment were our classmates, and me. Jenna is my point of reference. I’ve never known the world without her in it, minus one minute. Or without her next to me. We’ve had a peculiar life—one that is extraordinary in scope yet ordinary in the dayto-day. And what a magical idea the universe had in giving each of us the luxury of a partner. We have always had a dinner partner, a dance partner, a partner in mischief. When we…

My sister used to tell me that my parents weren’t my real parents. According to her, I was left on the doorstep by Gypsies who would one day return to the infamous Gypsy campgrounds of Westchester County to claim me. This is a common narrative told by older sisters of the 80s who, having put in multiple requests for a sibling, changed their minds once presented with a crying, pooping, attention-sucking vortex. But my sister really leaned into it. There were signs I did not share her blood. I had a unibrow and no one else did (this was before tweezers). Other women in my family had breasts and I did not (this was before puberty). When we took a vacation to Hawaii, she suggested I write my name in…

“My sisters drew me into music at the age of five. Like little von Trapps, Lucy and I surrounded the eldest at the piano: Joey. She had taken lessons and could read those black dots on the two rows of five lines each. Those were, and remain, something of a mystery to me. Joey (Joanna) was used to being the queen, and the queen she stayed. She borrowed sheet music from the school library and had excellent taste—and our voices suited the parts on the sheets. Lucy, the middle sister, with a very high voice, carried the melody like an angel. Joey was a perfect mezzo-soprano and sang the alto parts (eventually becoming a world-famous opera singer). Just by chance, I had a husky and very low voice. My husk…

The need to be part of a Tribe (Twelve), be it a gang, platoon, or club, not only gives meaning to our lives, V.F. contributing editor Sebastian Junger explains, but is essential to our psychological survival. Also this month: The only survivors of the plane crash in Noah Hawley’s page-turner Before the Fall (Grand Central) are a poor painter and a rich child. In Zero K (Scribner), Don DeLillo, our most astute, ingenious, and idiosyncratic chronicler of contemporary American culture, envisions the future of death. Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon (Other) is a mesmerizing reimagining of George Eliot’s accursed marriage. A teen runaway links the remarkable stories in Michelle Latiolais’s She (Norton). Rana Foroohar focuses on American finance’s Makers and Takers (Crown Business). Andi Zeisler’s We Were Feminists Once (PublicAffairs) accuses…

In those footloose days when I thought little of popping off to London once or twice a year to pad around Piccadilly and catch the latest shows, I found myself at a new musical called The Mitford Girls. Why I chose that concoction over so many other marquee-blazers remains a muddle and a mystery, my awareness of the Mitford clan and their fabled rap sheet being somewhat sketchy. Perhaps it was the Brideshead Effect that prompted me. The lavish miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac postwar romance, Brideshead Revisited—starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, and Laurence Olivier— premiered within a week of The Mitford Girls’ opening in 1981, and the sumptuous trappings and muffled intrigues of the landed nobility made for a cultural moment that had everyone…

KIDADA & RASHIDA JONES BIRTH ORDER: Kidada (42), Rashida (40). HOMETOWN: Los Angeles. OCCUPATIONS: Kidada: “Designer, author, creative director.” Rashida: “Actress, writer, producer.” WHAT DO YOU BOND OVER? Kidada: “Music, childhood, sense of humor, the 90s, and respecting our very different personalities.” Rashida: “Music, 90s memories, our parents.” WHAT DO YOU F IGHT OVER? Kidada: “Philosophies of life.” Rashida: “Communication, approach to life.” WHO’S BOSSIER? Kidada: “She would say me, and I think it’s her, but in reality we are probably equally bossy.” Rashida: “We are both bossy in different ways. Although Kidada does call me ‘Baby Boss.’ ” BEST THING ABOUT YOUR S ISTER: Kidada: “My sister is focused and practical and grounded.” Rashida: “She is a true original.” Photographed by JASON BELL in an Aston Martin at the…