Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-15 i Vanity Fair

The title of special correspondent Bryan Burrough’s dispatch this month, “Trial by Ebola,” says what it’s about. But it is the gripping, moment-by-moment detail in this rigorously reported, 8,000-word narrative that makes it memorable. Burrough’s story opens during those first panicky days after it was discovered that a 42-year-old Liberian national named Thomas Eric Duncan was suffering from the first case of Ebola hemorrhagic fever to be diagnosed on American soil. Duncan’s situation was covered in real time, and around the clock, by cable-television news shows. They followed every twist and turn of the case—from Duncan’s first visit to Dallas’s Presbyterian Hospital, where the disease initially went undetected, to his death less than two weeks later, and then to the discovery that two of the nurses who cared for Duncan…

Who wrote The Book of Love (Ecco)? This month, it’s Roger Rosenblatt; by interspersing romantic verses with personal and fictional vignettes, he composes a symphony of amore. In her novel The First Bad Man (Scribner), the magnificent Miranda July explores surreal galaxies of love, loneliness, sexual perversity, and motherhood. Mysteriously immune to the pandemic devastating her country, the heroine of Laura van den Berg’s marvelous Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) seeks the mother who abandoned her. An imperiled young immigrant is concealed within a truck stashed away with human cargo in John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), while a brother and sister run away from home to cross the Mexican-American border in Amanda Eyre Ward’s The Same Sky (Ballantine). Esther Freud builds a character out of Scottish…

CHANGING THE WORLD Esteemed guests were invited by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Graydon Carter to celebrate scientific achievements at the 2015 Breakthrough Prizes, held at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Northern California. VISUAL FEAST LACMA‘s annual Art + Film Gala, co-hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow and presented by Gucci creative director Frida Giannini, honored filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and conceptual artist Barbara Kruger.…

COS FOR ALARM No amount of riches or celebrity can stem the tide of Internet revelations of Bill Cosby’s predatory behavior. THIRTY YEARS LATER, THE COSBY SWEATER STILL RULES, chirped a headline at CNN Entertainment in September 2014, a month before the levee broke. The affable array of colorful novelty knits that Bill Cosby lounged around in as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on his NBC sitcom, The Cosby Show, became a symbol of American fatherhood in the Reagan era—traditional values with a twirl—and still held a cozy appeal decades on. Now we know that those sweaters covered a multitude of sins, not unlike the gaudy tracksuits of the gargoylish British entertainer Jimmy Savile, whose death in 2011 cast open the crypt of his prodigious sexual predation and pedophilia. “It was as…

For the longest time, Rosamund Pike couldn’t talk about the role that would make her an international film star. Though millions of people had read Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s phenomenal best-seller (over two years and counting on the New York Times bestseller list), many more would come to the movie not knowing the true character of the novel’s heroine, “Amazing” Amy Dunne. For many months, Rosamund had to keep that secret. At the beginning of the film, the first thing we see of Amy Dunne is the back of her head, just as Flynn had imagined it. (“When I think of my wife, I always think of her head … ”) One hundred forty-nine minutes later, when she turns around to look directly at us at the end of the…

They were all there: the powerful directors of New York’s leading art museums, the tough tycoons and tasteful socialites who fill their boards, the blue-chip gallery owners pretending to like one another, the brand-name artists whose prices, these days, go in only one direction—up. It was the social event of the city’s frenetic fall auctions season: a big black-tie dinner celebrating Leonard Lauder’s $1 billion gift of 81 Cubist masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prominent collectors from Europe (Plácido Arango, Lita Livanos) and California (Bob Tuttle and Maria Hummer-Tuttle, Bill and Maria Bell) mingled in the Met’s Temple of Dendur with the likes of Barbara Walters, Princess Firyal of Jordan, and former World Bank chief James Wolfensohn. The Estée Lauder cosmetics dynasty…

A few years ago I took my obstinate eight-year-old daughter to a training class at Second City, the famous comedy troupe, in Chicago. Like everyone else, I couldn’t help but notice that decades after its creation the place continued to train a shocking number of the most interesting comedians in the country—Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Amy Poehler, Steve Carell, Adam McKay, and on and on. I wasn’t hoping to make my daughter funnier. I just wanted her to learn to say “Yes.” That was all I asked of Second City: to fix my child. We would enroll together in an improv-comedy training class, and for the rest of her life, when asked if she would like to try a new vegetable or clean her room or be kind to her…

Few women in the world are more self-actualized than Erika Leonard, better known as E. L. James, the 51-year-old, dark-tressed British author who created a compendium of her sexual fantasies, called the book Fifty Shades of Grey, and watched in shock as the book and its two sequels (Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed) sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, making her more than $100 million. That is, few women except Sam Taylor-Johnson, director of the first film in the Fifty Shades trilogy (yes, there will be not one, not two, but three movies, provided that the first, which opens in theaters on Valentine’s Day, isn’t a colossal misfire). Like James, Taylor-Johnson, 47, is British. She’s also futzed with her name of late, after falling in love with…

What is your greatest fear? Running out of ideas. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Taking fucking forever. Can’t you see I’m waiting? What is your favorite journey? The Acela from New York to Boston, KLM from New York to Amsterdam. On what occasion do you lie? When telling the truth gives me a moment of joy but causes someone else a day’s worth of pain. What do you dislike most about your appearance? My nose. What is your greatest regret? That I didn’t keep a journal. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My brilliant wife, Alexi Ashe Meyers. When and where were you happiest? My wedding day, listening to my brother’s best-man…

Having been a self-published oral-history author for more than a dec ade, I looked forward to getting the inside scoop from Keith Gessen’s article on the battle between Amazon and Hachette [“The War of the Words,” December]. My conclusion now is: a pox on them all—publishing houses, Amazon, and booksellers. They seem to have forgotten that there are no spoils to fight over if authors don’t research and write the books in the first place. GAYE I. CLEMSON Capitola, California Mr. Gessen is too enmeshed with his publisher and agent to see the forest for the trees. The publishing industry has never adjusted to the fact that most Americans read and write. After all, it was created for a tiny, literate elite that could afford to buy books. For generations,…

People have said I’m not real rap or real hip-hop,” says this year’s four-time Grammy nominee Iggy Azalea, “but I don’t care if people think I’m pop or rap. Everyone interprets music differently.” The nearly six-foot-tall Azalea (born Amethyst Amelia Kelly) grew up in the small town of Mullumbimby, New South Wales, and was always inspired by rock and roll and rap. At 16, she told her parents she was going on vacation, traveled to Florida, and never went back. After years of struggle and disappointment, Azalea, now 24, had massive success last summer with her catchy, ubiquitous hit single “Fancy” and No. 1 debut album, The New Classic. Here, she talks with Lisa Robinson about fame, shoes, and sex tapes. LISA ROBINSON: Do you think it’s weird for a…

Among the most pleasant surprises of 2014 was the emergence of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO’s new Sundays-at-11-P.M. program. What promised to be a minor amusement—yet another fake newsman cracking wise about current events for half an hour— revealed itself to be something richer, with the Daily Show–trained Oliver and his writers devoting themselves to trenchant, long-form exercises in investigative humor. Last Week Tonight’s reports exposed the numbers-cooking flimflammery used by state lotteries and the Miss America Pageant to bolster their claims of supporting education, and used Oliver’s explicatory wit and innate showmanship to break down the nuances of such otherwise bone-dry public-policy subjects as net neutrality— no small task, especially given, as Oliver put it, that “the only two words that promise more boredom in the English…

The voters are furious at “Washington,” as they demonstrated once again in the recent midterm elections. It’s almost a tautology by now: People hate “Washington” because “Washington” has come to mean everything they hate. Washington is not the Lincoln Memorial or the Smithsonian. It’s the bitterness of the debate, the ugliness of the rhetoric, the stupidity of the political ads on television. Of course, as many have pointed out, the bitterness, ugliness, and stupidity wouldn’t exist if the voters didn’t respond to them. And the bitterness, ugliness, and stupidity seem slightly, shall we say, unhinged from any particular complaint about what the government does and does not do. Americans have turned all their substantive complaints into one big procedural complaint: Washington (or Obama, or Congress) spends too much time bickering.…

Ebola arrived in the streets of America just after seven o’clock on the evening of Saturday, September 20, 2014, when United Airlines Flight 822 touched down at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. The deadly virus was coursing through the bloodstream of a single passenger, a 42-year-old Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan, a chauffeur who had flown via Brussels and Washington, D.C., with plans to marry the mother of his 19-year-old son, a 54-year-old Dallas woman named Louise Troh. No one knew he had it, including Duncan himself, though he may have suspected. He had lied on his departure forms in Liberia, failing to mention the young Ebola victim, his landlord’s daughter, he had helped carry to a hospital. In Dallas, Duncan headed to Troh’s apartment, at the Ivy Apartments, a…

Iplay a spy called Charlie, who’s from a rich background—a horrible, horrible boy, but real fun,” Edward Holcroft says about his breakthrough role in director Matthew Vaughn’s new movie, Kingsman: The Secret Service. The film also stars Colin Firth, who plays an undercover agent recruiting for a Savile Row spy organization run by a tailor. “The agency’s so secret, no one knows about it,” Holcroft explains, adding that he felt honored to work with such esteemed co-stars. “Colin was very welcoming to us youngsters, and meeting Michael Caine, whose character runs the agency and the recruitment process, was like being thrown back in the realms of time to a movie legend.” Holcroft, 27, graduated in 2012 from Drama Centre London. For him, acting requires, he says, an “incredible inner selfconfidence,”…

For nearly every magnificent country-house estate in England, there was once an equally palatial residence in London; it was de rigueur during the 18th and 19th centuries for wealthy aristocratic families to maintain a metropolitan mansion, too. As a result of economic imperatives and the devastation of the Blitz, only a handful of examples of this building type remain out of the hundreds that once stood, and these have long since been carved up and converted into apartments, embassies, offices, clubs, and the like. Dudley House, at 100 Park Lane—the London residence of the Ward family since the 1730s—suffered such a fate, too, but thanks to a Croesus-like fortune originating in the Persian Gulf, it has recently been bought and restored to perhaps even more than its original glory. After…

When the French conductor Louis Langrée took charge of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, in 2003, he was a virtual unknown in the United States and the festival was languishing in the doldrums. Twelve seasons later, under Langrée’s baton, Mostly Mozart is all about thrilling juxtapositions, mixing old and new. “Mozart only composed contemporary music. We should never forget that,” the 54-year-old maestro says. A case in point was last summer’s closing program, which paired Mozart’s Requiem with Polyptyque, an intimate 1973 violin concerto by Frank Martin. Audiences, Langrée says, are “eager to discover new pieces, to be curious, to not only come for pieces they know. And that’s very Mozartean.” The festival would seem to agree: it has secured Langrée’s services through 2017. But New Yorkers don’t need…

AGE: 32. PROVENANCE: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. PLAYTIME: Jacobs has performed since childhood, when she was enrolled in an acting class. “The school called my mom and said that I had no friends and was talking to myself on the playground, and she should put me in some kind of extracurricular activity. I fell in love—it was like a fish in water.” TRAINING DAYS: The actress spent her youth actively involved in local theater before honing her craft at the rigorous Juilliard School. “When you meet someone else from Juilliard, you kind of lock eyes and do that solemn nod of ‘I know what you’ve been through,’ and it is an instant bond.” THE SHOW GOES ON: Jacobs’s big break came in 2009 with her lead role as Britta Perry on the…

Making Scents When David Seth, a peripatetic musician by trade, who always had a passion for perfumes, met architect Kavi Ahuja (who also goes by the name “Durga,” a Hindu goddess), they combined talents to create a unisex perfume house called D.S. & Durga. He creates the scents based on notes inspired by travel, lore, and music; she designs the bottles and packaging. The pair have a line of aromatics, called Hylnds, exclusive to Barneys New York, and their newest scent, Debaser (fig, iris, coconut milk, tonka, and dry blond woods), named after the song by the Pixies’ Black Francis, comes out in March. (50 ml. for $145; dsanddurga.com) —SUNHEE GRINNELL Rockin’ Eyes When it comes to mascara, be on the lookout for Eyeko. The London-based brand, founded by makeup…

Allen Grubman, the most powerful attorney in the music business, kindly invited me to lunch for what he called “a pleasant schmooze” at his Park Avenue apartment, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and as schmoozers go, the good-hearted, expansive Mr. Grubman surely has no equal. “Ask me anything!” he said when we met. But then he leaned in toward me and lowered his voice to a whisper, as if confiding something sacred. “You ever go to Barney Greengrass?” he asked. The celebrated deli on the Upper West Side is a homey New York institution, and I know it almost too well. “It’s the best!” he cried happily, and a bond between us was struck. He quickly disappeared into the bedroom of the apartment and in time returned with…

Some ski resorts are renowned for their pristine snow, extreme conditions, and champagne powder, others for their nightlife, wildlife, and charming mountain restaurants. Just in time for peak season, I’ve pulled together what I deem to be the very best of resort skiing in the world—from Europe’s chocolate-box villages, with their authentic alpine traditions, to the powder fields of the western United States. So it’s time to boot up, clip in, and make fresh tracks down the best slopes around the world. + SWITZERLAND ZERMATT I went here for the first time last year, lured by the Matterhorn (the silhouette logo for Toblerone). The village allows only electric cars, so there’s little traffic—just the occasional horse and buggy. SKI: National run is steep—great for carving turns. EAT: Have lunch in…

In the final dec ade of the Cold War, Slava Fetisov was considered the most celebrated ice-hockey player in the U.S.S.R. He was a member of the Soviet national team when it lost the fabled “Miracle on Ice” game to its American opponents, in the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics—and also when it won gold medals in the next two Winter Games. Fetisov became the first Soviet citizen in history invited to play in the National Hockey League, but it was not until 1989 that he was able to leave the crumbling Soviet Union to play for the New Jersey Devils and later join the Detroit Red Wings for back-to-back Stanley Cup victories. When he asked to take the Cup trophy with him on a victory-lap visit to Moscow and…

He’s the sex symbol’s sex symbol: four-eyed and beaky-nosed, pencil-necked-geek skinny, eligible for Medicare and then some, with a cranium as bald and gleaming as Kim Kardashian’s mons pubis. (Actually not quite that bald and gleaming. A silvery-white fringe circles the base of his skull like a fallen halo.) Not the stuff of which hunk-of-beef heartthrobs are typically made. Yet Jennifer Lawrence, as luscious a starlet as Hollywood’s ever produced, has it bad for him, is completely over-the-moon hot-for-his-bod gaga. In the November issue of this very magazine she sotto-voce’d to contributing editor Sam Kashner, “I worship Woody Allen, but I don’t feel it below the belt the way I do for Larry David.” In case you don’t own a TV—are one of those people—Larry David is the co-creator, head…

Anyone who bases a musical on a classic film should obey the maxim “First, do no harm.” Because for every A Little Night Music (hat tip to Smiles of a Summer Night) there is a Breakfast at Tiffany’s (closed in 1966 after four previews). So, when Cy Coleman, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green turned one of the zaniest screwball comedies of all time, Twentieth Century, into a musical in 1978, who could be blamed for thinking derailment was imminent? Credit to those three, who realized tampering with the 1934 classic, starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, could result in charges being brought before the court of Turner Classic Movies. The plot is the Phillips-head of screwball comedies, with bombastic and failing Broadway producer Oscar Jaffe wooing the melodramatic Hollywood star…

On the outskirts of Rome, high, mysterious walls flank the ancient Appian Way. When the gates to Gina Lollobrigida’s home of nearly 60 years swing open, a large, verdant property with white storks perambulating about is revealed. An elderly servant ushers visitors into the entry hall of the expansive villa, which is packed with Baroque antiques and art. Then a petite figure resplendent in emeralds magisterially descends the grand staircase: Gina Lollobrigida still knows how to make an entrance. “Terrible days,” she moans. “What’s happened to me is more incredible than film!” What has transpired in the life of the 87-year-old living legend once known as “the most beautiful woman in the world”? Some clues can be gathered from a series of headlines in the international press over the course…