Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-14 i Vanity Fair

1 Annie Leibovitz The first time contributing photographer Annie Leibovitz shot Microsoft founder Bill Gates was in the 1980s. “He would keep wandering of to be with his computer, which was still something of a novelty to me,” says Leibovitz, who photographed Gates again—this time with newly appointed Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella—for “The Empire Reboots” (page 162). “Bill and Satya were so engrossed with one another that they hardly noticed I was there. They had a meeting.” 2 Sam Kashner In interviewing Jennifer Lawrence for “Both Huntress and Prey” (page 154), contributing editor Sam Kashner knew to expect her charmingly forthright persona. But following the theft of nude photos of the actor last month, Kashner saw another, lesser-known side. “As outspoken and irreverent as she is, she is protective of…

Thanks for another lush cover and great issue, particularly the feature on “Wearing Out the Carpet” [by James Wolcott, September]. Awards season used to be my favorite holiday—all the pretty dresses! But of late, I too have been left feeling empty by the parade of desiccated fembots wheeled out in aspirational haute couture. I’m certainly not buying it, or a strapless sequined mermaid dress either. So imagine my surprise when in the very same breath Vanity Fair took a potshot at one of the only female stars out there who seem to have any blood left in their veins [“The Impossible Interview”]. Imagine the feeding frenzy at the Oscars if someone dared to throw a steak down in front of those women. Jennifer Lawrence would be the only one not…

If you weren’t born into a certain social stratum, don’t miss The Social Climber’s Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile, the tongue-in-cheek manual from Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson, out this month from Penguin. Herewith, a few of their pointers to get you started. 1) “As Coco Chanel said, dress as you wish to be perceived. First and foremost, social climbers should look like they belong . . . anywhere.” 2) “As a rule of thumb, never be overdressed, for the simple reason that it will make it clear how hard you’re trying to be something you’re not.” 3) “The era when an accent could hinder your climb is fortunately behind us. Sounding as if you come from somewhere when you come…

Sophisticated,” “jaded,” and “cosmopolitan” are just some of the adjectives used to describe the music of Bryan Ferry, who in 1972 created the fashionable and musically adventurous rock group Roxy Music. “All of the above might be right,” says Ferry, who adds, “and I suppose ‘thoughtful’ might be a good one.” Ferry, who this month releases Avonmore, his 14th album of romantic and sometimes melancholy solo material, talks with Lisa Robinson about music, family, and the scene in London. LISA ROBINSON: When did you realize you had such a distinctive voice? BRYAN FERRY : I suppose when I was at college—that was the frst time I tried singing. I played in a band, and people seemed to like it. But I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and…

André Soltner, who was America’s first superstar chef before the battling celeb chefs of the Food Network were invented, very kindly agreed to meet before our lunch to teach me how to make an omelet The revered Soltner, who presided over Lutèce, in New York, for 34 years— his retirement, in 1994, was mourned on the front page of The New York Times— believes that to be a great chef you must be able to make a perfect ome let. On the other hand, I would be happy enough to be able to make one that didn’t come out as scrambled eggs. Born in Alsace, France, in 1932, Mr. Soltner is now one of the deans of the International Culinary Center, in downtown Manhattan, where he still teaches master classes…

Since its first episode, in 1988, the Australian soap opera Home and Away has been a heartthrob incubator, launching the careers of some of our country’s favorite hunks: Heath Ledger, Guy Pearce, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, and now 25-year-old Luke Bracey. The dirty-blond, green-eyed stunner and Sydney native was just out of high school when a successful television producer asked him to audition for one of his shows. Though he’d just made a deal to play Rugby for a local team, he agreed to read for the part. Bracey didn’t nab the role, but when the casting director from that series later called him to audition for Home and Away, he landed it. “I had to tell my dad I wasn’t going to be working as a builder for him…

KEKE PALMER AGE: 21. PROVENANCE: Robbins, Illinois. WONDER YEARS: As a pre-teen, Palmer begged her family to move to Los Angeles from Chicago, so that she could pursue film and TV acting. She still taps into her younger self when performing as an adult. “Children have much easier access to their emotions. I think that most of that—my natural child-like instincts—I have kept alive.” QUEEN BEE: Since her 2004 debut, in Barbershop 2: Back in Business with Queen Latifah, Palmer—whose big breakout came two years later in Akeelah and the Bee—regards the actress/musician/talk-show host as her professional fairy godmother. “She has been a huge part of my career from the moment I met her.” BROADWAY BOUND: After launching a BET talk show of her own, Just Keke, this summer, Palmer…

Logan Lerman has been working in Hollywood since he was four years old. He first got attention playing sons—Mel Gibson’s in The Patriot and Christian Bale’s in 3:10 to Yuma. As a teenager, Lerman grew into a title role, in the Percy Jackson franchise, playing another son—of the Greek god Poseidon. He pivoted from child star to young actor with the 2012 coming-of-age hit The Perks of Being a Wallflower, opposite Emma Watson, and now, at 22, he solidifies his place in Hollywood with the W.W. II drama Fury, out this month from Sony, with a cast that also includes Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf. Written and directed by David Ayer (End of Watch), Fury tells the story of a Sherman-tank squadron commanded by a rough-riding sergeant known as Wardaddy…

This month, two biopics about two 20th-century British disrupters arrive on-screen, starring two dynamic actors who both happen to be Brits. The Theory of Everything features Eddie Redmayne (Les Misérables) as the physicist and author Stephen Hawking, renowned for his revolutionary work on black holes and the big-bang theory; it is based on the memoir of his first wife, Jane Haw king, played by Felicity Jones. The Imitation Game stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Star Trek) as mathematician Alan Turing, who died by his own hand in 1954—two years after being prosecuted for his homosexuality—and is credited as the father of modern computing. The film takes place during World War II, when Turing—along with a team assembled by M.I.6, including Spotlight Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley)—broke Germany’s seemingly impenetrable Enigma code, a…

Mfather’s best friend, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, wrote him a poem for his 50th birthday that captures a certain gloomy truth in its opening lines: ROUND NUMBERS … Are misery to escape from: They’re so round. The roundest is 0, Next roundest 100, And neither experienceable. This year would have been my father’s 100th birthday, and it would have made him indecently proud to see it marked by productions of so many of the musicals that he and his partner, Betty Comden, wrote in their 60-year collaboration: a stage adaptation of their 1953 MGM movie, The Band Wagon, as part of the Encores! series at New York’s City Center; a live broadcast on NBC of their 1954 version of Peter Pan; the first Broadway revival of their 1978…

I t’s fair to say that Wen dy Whelan’s career at New York City Ballet—which began in 1984 and ends this month with her final performance on October 18—has been exemplary. She’s left a unique mark on works created by some of the best choreographers in the business: Balanchine, Robbins, Wheeldon, Forsythe, Ratmansky—it’s an impressive list. But, for a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., everything is on a golden plate. The artistic director decides when you dance, what you dance, and with whom you dance. Designers fit their costumes to your body. Choreographers create steps for you, and your paycheck arrives at the end of the week. The dancer’s biggest hurdle is to stay healthy and fit, and, of course, to work toward that elusive ideal of perfection. But right now,…

For a while now, the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley has been that Microsoft has lost “relevance”—perhaps the most withering indictment a tech company can sufer. The software giant still generates substantial profts and employs more than 100,000 people, but because its main business is essentially to service the computer needs of corporations, it’s beginning to have the earmarks of a utility. Microsoft missed the smartphone and tablet revolutions. And its attempts at innovation, such as the Bing search engine and Zune music player, failed to ignite the imaginations of frst or even second adopters. Fourteen years ago, Microsoft was the salted nut at the cocktail party—and Wall Street judged it to be the most valuable company on earth. This year it ranks fourth, behind Apple, ExxonMobil, and Google. The…

APOLIS California natives Raan and Shea Parton, aged 32 and 30 respectively, opened their lifestyle boutique, Apolis (Greek for “global citizen”), seven years ago in a burgeoning area of downtown Los Angeles referred to as the arts district. “It feels like a really small town in a big city,” says Shea. “It’s within a 10-mile radius of our many L.A. manufacturers.” Apolis adopted the “advocacy through industry” initiative and sells only items made in the U.S.A. or by one of their 10 trade partners from around the world. This is best exemplified through their popular “Market Bag.” Production of the tote in Bangladesh provides the local women with jobs and supports the small rural area of Saidpur—aligning commerce with economic development. The store also carries a wide range of home…

America the complicated. Defense lawyers down South are too often compared to Atticus Finch, but Bryan Stevenson, whose Just Mercy (Spiegel & Grau) chronicles his crusades for the rights of the oppressed and unjustly incarcerated, proves he’s deserving. Novelist Carolyn Chute, voice of America’s militia-building, weapons-stockpiling, homeschooling rural lower classes, fires off the deeply felt, scorchingly funny Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves (Grove). Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You (Ecco) reunites readers with the beloved, irascible failed sportswriter Frank Bascombe. With grace, wit, and derring-do, Jamie Malanowski revives the daredevil Civil War hero Commander Will Cushing (Norton). Cinephiles Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree co-author the story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object). Walter Isaac son hacks into the lives…

Bed of Roses This fall, four brands are turning to the romance and beauty of the rose for inspiration. Lancôme expands its iconic L’Absolu Rouge lipstick collection by adding six new rose-tinted shades, from the blush Amnésia Rose to the scarlet Grand Amour Rose ($30; lancome.com). Fragrance designer Terry de Gunzburg captures the striking scents and shades of Turkish red and damask roses in her latest floral fragrance, Rose Infernale ($210 for 100 ml.; barneys .com). As for skin care, Sisley introduces Black Rose Precious Face Oil, featuring the Black Baccara rose with hydrating, anti-aging effects ($235 for .84 oz.; sisley.com), while Tata Harper’s Moisturizing Mask uses rose-geranium and damask-rose essential oils to provide maximum moisture ($110 for 1.7 oz.; tataharperskincare.com). Luxe Elixir “Black-diamond truffles” from the Périgord region of France…

No matter what it says in the Constitution, all comedy teams are not created equal. Since the valiant days of antiquity known as vaudeville, there’s traditionally been a stooge and a straight man. The straight man, droll and understated, serves as a sounding board while the stooge works himself into a frantic state. The straight man is the schemer, the stooge the dreamer. The straight man gets the girls; the stooge gets the laughs. (For the sake of brevity, we’re limiting ourselves to male teams, but the husband-wife partnership of George Burns—wry, skeptical— and Gracie Allen—wide-eyed, pixilated— also fit the mold.) With Abbott and Costello, Bud Abbott resembled a racetrack sharpie while Lou Costello sputtered like a teakettle. In Martin and Lewis, Dean Martin oozed Neapolitan-crooner nonchalance as Jerry Lewis…

Looking at it one way, there was a certain twisted creativity to it It just isn’t every day that a high-school dropout and twice-convicted felon, your basic street criminal, as he was described, is the alleged mastermind of a crime that no one in law enforcement the world over had ever quite seen. Maybe it wasn’t the crime of the century, but it definitely was the crime of the century in Milwaukee. The city, known for beer, bratwurst, the Brewers, and frighteningly large portions at German restaurants, had never been a hotbed of headlines. But this made national and world news not seen since the days of the city’s own serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer The Milwaukee Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation put out dozens of officers and…

THE V.F. BAD-STYLE GUIDE Rhetoric, to certain unpleasant persons, is a powdered instant-outrage mix that simply requires the addition of one activating ingredient: the suffix-shaming. Just stir it in, and kaboom! The trouble with -shaming is that its users are overly besotted with its supposed power; they consider it an unanswerable J’accuse! whose mere deployment ends any argument in their favor. They are, naturally, wrong, and really ought to get over themselves. “You don’t care about Chris Christie’s politics— you’re just interested in fat-shaming him!” “Can we not laugh at the Doge meme? It’s a cruel, xenophobic exercise in E.S.L.-shaming.” THIS MONTH THE SHAMEFULNESS OF “-SHAMING” BANNED PRESENT PARTICIPLE: -shaming (in all its incarnations Using the -shaming formulation makes you sound like: (1) the insufferable undergraduate at the Thanksgiving table;…

In some ways, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder and first C.E.O., and Satya Nadella, a longtime employee who last February became the company’s third C.E.O., are alike. They are both engineers, and they are both businessmen. In the language of the Myers-Briggs personality test, designed to measure how people perceive the world and make decisions, they both strike others as NTs, meaning they are highly rational seekers of knowledge. So perhaps they’ll work together seamlessly to run Microsoft, helping it meet the huge challenges it now faces. Gates devoted most of his time and energy during the last six years to his $40 billion philanthropic effort, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but when Microsoft announced Nadella’s appointment on February 4, he decided to devote 30 percent of his time to…

On May 6, 2014, the sun was still high over Nice, France, when Hélène Pastor, 77, left L’Archet public hospital and was ambushed and murdered in a barrage of gunfire. She was known as Monaco’s richest woman, reportedly worth as much as $25 billion. But even before her murder, 2014 had been an annus horribilis for her. On January 26, her dashing son, Gildo, 47—co-founder, along with Leonardo DiCaprio, of a Formula E– style electric-car racing team, and owner of an electric-car consumer brand called Venturi— suffered a devastating stroke, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. A little more than a week later, Hélène buried her brother, Michel, known as “the Boss of Monaco.” His death, at 70, after a long illness, left her as the last…

In Beyond the Lights, Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Noni Jean, a pop diva literally and figuratively caught inside a gilded cage. For a raunchy music video, Noni writhes inside a golden harness; at an awards show, she shimmies down the red carpet in a peekaboo chain-link bodice. But thanks to the intervention of a good cop (portrayed by Nate Parker), Noni eventually liberates herself from the gaudy restraints of fame, revealing, Mbatha-Raw says, “the human side of the fantasy girl.” Both the Oxford-born actress and her director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, intend for Beyond the Lights to “change the conversation” about how the entertainment industry packages its female talent. “The culture has reached a new low for women,” Mbatha- Raw says. “There’s no more mystique. Everything is out there to be consumed.” To…

Shakespeare and Company, arguably the most famous independent bookstore in the world, occupies a prime piece of real estate facing the Seine in Paris, not far from the Latin Quarter, Place Saint-Michel, and Boulevard Saint-Germain. The river is just a stone’s throw from the front door, and a strong ultimate-Frisbee player could probably nail the south side of Notre Dame—halfway across the Seine on Île de la Cité—from one of the shop’s second-floor windows. The view is that good. Strolling up to the store’s early 17th-century building on a one-block stretch of Rue de la Bûcherie, with its small half-plaza in front, its weather-beaten bookstalls, its green-and-yellow façade, its hand-hewn, rustic-looking signage, can feel like entering a time warp to a quieter, older Paris—a little bit Beat Generation, a little…

We Americans have so much to be grateful for, starting, maybe, with God and ibuprofen. God runs away with the credit for our good health (if we have it), easily oulpolling lifestyle choices, genes, and doctors—the last by 56 percent to 4 percent. In the South, it’s God 70 percent, doctors 2 percent. (The matter of blame for bad health was not explored.) And more than half of us named aspirin/ibuprofen as the medication we’re most thankful for. An encouraging 82 percent of Americans feel that a handwritten thank-you note is (still) an important habit for young people to learn. Most of us reading this probably wonder why we know only the 14 percent who dismiss it as "an outdated and unnecessary gesture." Would that 82 percent take pen to…

This month, Cecilia Dean and James Kaliardos—who, along with Stephen Gan, co-founded the art-and-fashion publication Visionaire—debut their latest issue, in collaboration with conceptual artist John Baldessari. Available in three editions (Red, Green, and Blue), “Visionaire 64 Art” features a selection of black-and-white self-portraits of famous faces—from superstars Lupita Nyong’o and Drew Barrymore to supermodels Gisele Bündchen and Karlie Kloss—altered with embossed shapes and colors by Baldessari. (visionaireworld.com)…

American artist Rachel Feinstein is best known for her baroque and ornately fanciful sculptures. Her beauty is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, and she has been credited as the muse of her husband, painter John Currin. Her next exhibition will be mounted at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, in New York City, early next year. Herewith, her favorite things … INSPIRATIONS Favorite discovery Amalienburg, in the Nymphenburg Palace Park, Munich. Who inspires you My husband, John Currin. Necessary extravagance Getting eight hours of sleep every night and taking my Exhale class every morning. Favorite place in the world Mount Desert Island, Maine. Favorite charity Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Favorite works of art Krumau Madonna, in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; Apollo and Daphne, by Bernini, in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. Favorite exhibition space Versailles. Favorite…

JENNY SLATE The actress and comedian Jenny Slate traffics in the oxymoronic. Earlier this year, she made her mark in movies with … an abortion comedy; namely, the indiefilm critical darling Obvious Child. Last year, with her writer-director husband, Dean Fleischer-Camp, she concocted a Web series, Catherine, that might best be described as … wonderfully disturbing. And the voice she supplies to her most famous viral-video creation, the diminutive stop-motion-animated mollusk Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, is … adorably strangulated. (“Guess what I wear as a hat? A lentil”; “Guess what my skis are? Toenails from a man.”) In fact, it could be argued that Slate and Fleischer-Camp are the … audiencefriendly Björk and Matthew Barney With the publication of a second Marcel book imminent, Marcel the Shell: The…

Many journalists and commentators, including me, owe New Jersey governor Chris Christie an apology. We underestimated him. I remember the moment well. It was September 2011, three years ago. Christie was not yet famous for the performance art of jamming traffic on the approaches to the George Washington Bridge. I was, as usual, in the lounge of the Center for Irresponsible Journalism (C.I.J.), way up among the mysterious utility sheds on the roof of the Newseum, in Washington, D.C. (Yes, yes, I know. What next? A museum for accountants?) A few of us can be found there most days drinking Mad Cows (two parts mineral water to one part soy milk, with a sprinkling of kale) and deciding which conservative to gang up on next. Someone said, “What about that…

Over the past year, we’ve been celebrating our 100th anniversary as a magazine. And this month, to honor the Jazz Age incarnation of Vanity Fair, we are publishing a first-of-a-kind treasury, Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair (Penguin Press). The anthology show cases stories published in these pages from 1914 to 1936 by a murderers’ row of literary figures who were frequent V.F. contributors: from D. H. Lawrence to Colette, Robert Benchley to E. E. Cummings, Carl Sandburg to Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein to Jean Cocteau. The book provides an inebriating swig from that great cocktail shaker of the Gatsby era, comprising 72 classic pieces in which unforgettable writers offer their views on how to live well in a fast-changing age. Herewith, some excerpts. P.…

You wait for movie stars, but if it’s Jennifer Lawrence you don’t mind. It’s like waiting for a comet to come hurtling into view. She was due to arrive by the pool on the roof of L’Ermitage hotel, in Beverly Hills. When she finally got there, half an hour late, you couldn’t help but notice how young and delicate she looked, neither Hunger Games strong nor Silver Linings Playbook sexy, but young. She even breathed young, and in fact it was just before her 24th birthday. We met on a balmy afternoon in August, two days after Robin Williams’s suicide and a day after Lauren Bacall’s death, at the age of 89, in New York City. It was a bad week for icons, and Jennifer Lawrence was “feeling dark.” But…

Making a movie of Unbroken may be one of the biggest no-brainers in Hollywood history. Laura Hillenbrand’s World War II survival saga has been on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list ever since it was published, three and a half years ago. The story it tells is about as movie-ish as real life gets: in 1943, Louis Zamperini, a lieutenant in the Army Air Force and a star on America’s 1936 Olympic track team, was onboard a B-24 bomber that crashed into the Pacific; thanks to courage, smarts, and sheer will—the human spirit, as these attributes are sometimes called in movie trailers—he survived 47 days adrift on a life raft and another two years in a brutal Japanese P.O.W. camp. Yes, there were sharks and torture, but also unexpected…

Me being asked to write about Norman Lear is analogous to Bill O’Reilly being asked to write about Walter Cronkite. Yes, I made it political right away. Go ahead and scream at me on Twitter. But comedy and politics are precisely the elements that Norman Lear brought together when he set about the task of redefining the boundaries of television. Lear’s sitcom All in the Family —which ran from 1971 to 1979—is arguably the greatest scripted program in the history of TV. It deftly combined pie-in-the-face comedy with hard-core political themes, and, in my view, it remains to this day the finest educational resource for a sitcom writer, aspiring or established. When I watch a rerun of All in the Family (which is quite often), I am blown away by…

In February of 1972, I made a little contract with myself. I was three months from graduating from Mc- Master University, in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Originally, I’d been a pre-med student, but by junior year I’d switched to majoring in social work, in large part because it freed me up to be in plays with two friends I’d made at Mc Master: Dave Thomas, who was my year, and Eugene Levy, who was a little older. Nevertheless, as graduation loomed, I regarded the concept of making it in show business as far-fetched, as unrealistic as buying a summer home on Neptune. But Eugene, who was already living in Toronto and doing the struggling-actor thing, kept nudging me, telling me that I had real talent and would be a…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? The demise of the London Daily Mail. What is your greatest fear? Fear itself. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Dirk Stoat. He had no desire for fame. Which living person do you most admire? The Dalai Lama. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Self-criticism. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Lack of self-criticism. What is your greatest extravagance? My ex-wife, Alyce Faye Eichelberger-Cleese. What is your favorite journey? Home. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Physical courage. On what occasion do you lie? Most. What do you dislike most about your appearance? My cruel ears. Which living person do you most despise? Rupert Murdoch, destroyer of cultures. Which words or phrases do…