Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-15 i Vanity Fair

1 Annie Leibovitz For this month’s issue, Vanity Fair’s Principal Photographer, Annie Leibovitz, shot Kelli O’Hara and Ken Watanabe, stars of the Broadway revival of The King and I (page 152). “It took three people to carry Kelli’s gown, which spanned five feet,” says Senior Photography Producer Kathryn MacLeod. “Once we saw her in full regalia, we realized we’d need a bigger set.” Leibovitz also photographed two V.F. Portraits (pages 144 and 170) and financier Mellody Hobson (page 172). 2 Michael Bloomberg In the V.F. Portrait on page 170, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg—or Mike, as he’s known around town—honors John Whitehead, who died in February. A former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs and deputy secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, Whitehead also headed the agency tasked with rebuilding…

In this month’s poll, Americans reckon with a complicated matter: our privacy versus our ever expanding, intrusive, and pervasive new technologies. (How pervasive? Well, 87 percent of us say people are “addicted” to their smartphones.) Despite the trickiness of the issue, to us it’s crystal clear: a majority of us are not O.K. with being spied on, but we also aren’t willing to pay to prevent that. Specifically: (a) Most Americans (53 percent) say that these new technologies are worth the loss of privacy. Yet (b) most of us hate the idea of anyone monitoring our own Websurfing habits. Still, given the opportunity to secure our privacy with even a small monthly fee, we’re (c) just not interested. By the way, most of us can’t identify “Don’t be evil” as…

JOYRIDE With its four swiveling seats, six digital touch screens, two LED displays, a laser projection system, and one very streamlined exterior, Mercedes-Benz’s latest advancement—the self-driving, hydrogen-electric F 015 Luxury in Motion— looks like nothing else on the road. Plus: it can travel 680 emission-free miles before fueling or charging. If this is the future of the automobile, we want a ride. —BRETTBERK All About Iris When Iris Apfel was a young woman from Queens, New York, starting out in the fashion industry, Frieda Loehmann, founder of the famed department store, took her aside: “She said, ‘You’re not pretty and you’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter. You have something much better. You have style.’ ” Apfel, now 93 and a certifiable icon, is the subject of Iris, a…

Mitt Romney’s fateful decision this January not to pursue the presidency for a third futile time deprived those of us in the bleachers of a rare-ish opportunity to watch a representative of the 1 percent in plastic action. It is not often we get to study how a scion moves, behaves, and simulates reflective thought under changeable conditions, and to discover what pops out of such a prize specimen when he assumes the commoners aren’t listening (as in Romney’s notorious 47 percent talk to millionaire donors, captured on video by a heroic bartender). Forsaking the citizenry to remain among his own kind, Romney can now rejoin his comrades and breathe a sigh of relief. Like celebrities, the very rich feel most comfortable and kin with each other—fellow members of an…

When I sat down to write Flash Boys, in 2013, I didn’t intend to see just how angry I could make the richest people on Wall Street. I was far more interested in the characters and the situation in which they found themselves. Led by an obscure 35-year-old trader at the Royal Bank of Canada named Brad Katsuyama, they were all well-regarded professionals in the U.S. stock market. The situation was that they no longer understood that market. And their ignorance was forgivable. It would have been difficult to find anyone, circa 2009, able to give you an honest account of the inner workings of the American stock market—by then fully automated, spectacularly fragmented, and complicated beyond belief by possibly well-intentioned regulators and less well-intentioned insiders. That the American stock…

Few families have stood the test of time like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. The Rockefellers—founders of the Standard Oil Company in 1870 and a wealthmanagement firm in 1882; philanthropists of vast generosity in both the arts and the sciences— are considered old money in America. But they are somewhat new-minted compared with the Roth schilds, a name in banking that commenced in the late 1790s and a family whose footprint is large and farreaching in art institutions all over the world. Three years ago, in May of 2012, the two dynasties came together in a deal that was quietly and poetically momentous. The deal was done by two remarkable men: David Rockefeller, who is now 99, and Jacob Rothschild—Lord Rothschild, fourth Baron Rothschild—who is 78. Two lions in winter,…

For a Broadway musical that premiered in 1951, The King and I is shockingly relevant. Strip the show of such classics as “Getting to Know You” and “Shall We Dance?” and what remains is the story of a ruler with a dictatorial bent who is grappling with Western cultural influences and is at odds with women who demand to be heard. The contemporary feel of The King and I is what persuaded Bartlett Sher to stage the revival that opens this month at Lincoln Center Theater. “Rodgers and Hammerstein are like Shakespeare,” Sher says. “You are engaged in very serious questions and at the same time have a good time.” Casting Anna was easy. Kelli O’Hara had played Nellie Forbush to rapturous acclaim in Sher’s revival of South Pacific at…

On January 14, 2015, after 19 days of clinging to the wall of the granite formation called El Capitan, above Yosemite Valley, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson completed the first free climb of one of the world’s most difficult routes— the smooth-faced 3,000-foot Dawn Wall. Caldwell is 36 and Jorgeson is 30. Both men are professional climbers. They have sponsorship agreements and tweet while in action—but they are also purists, who sacrifice for the love of nature, solitude, and technical challenge. They are real. The free climbing they performed on El Capitan is a method that uses anchors and ropes only as a security system to check their falls; the upward prog ress is entirely dependent on grip, courage, and balance. There is a more dangerous method of climbing, known…

John Whitehead was one of the greats of the Greatest Generation. Whenever his country came calling, he answered without hesitation. Before I knew John, I knew of him. When I first started working on Wall Street, in the 1960s, John was at Goldman Sachs, solidifying his status as one of the legends of finance. He hadn’t come from money: his family suffered through the Great Depression, like so many others. He enlisted in the navy during World War II, and on the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson he helped lead the first wave of the D-day invasion of Normandy. At the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, in the Pacific, John Whitehead was there. John’s sense of public duty never left him. He helped create a culture of philanthropy on Wall Street,…

Karl Lagerfeld, the ageless creative director of Chanel, likes to deadpan that he has lots of class, but it’s working class. And, boy, does he work. It’s what he enjoys doing most, apart from being with Choupette, his Sacré de Birmanie cat, who has two nannies and some 44,000 followers on Instagram. Since 2002 the fashion house has expanded to include a collection, Métiers d’Art, halfway between couture and ready-to-wear, that incorporates the work of Europe’s most cherished artisans. To show each new line, Lagerfeld chooses a location that has played a major role in the history of the company. For 2015 he put the spotlight on Salzburg, Austria. “I spent many summers there in the past, and I liked the idea of a place I knew so well,” he…

If we had to put a name on the times we are living in, we could do worse than calling it the Age of Money. I mean, you could rightfully say that every age is an age of money. This period is different, though, in that it seems to be about only money. Some of this is the result of seismic political shifts, such as China’s ravenous embrace of capitalism. Some of it comes from re-structuring in the ways of finance, and the resulting billions minted through venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds. There are the vast fortunes created by the digital revolution. And there is always oil. A friend sent an e-mail recently reminding me just how much a billion is: a million seconds are equal to a…

AGE: 26. PROVENANCE: Los Angeles. SPEAK EASY: Gerard grew up speaking three languages—English, German, and French. “My sister and I had the ability to switch into different languages. It worked in our favor.” PAYING HER DUES: Gerard booked her first commercial when approached on the street before attending U.C.L.A. “I thought, Oh, this is a good way to pay for school.” ON ACTING: “I was going to school because I didn’t trust my [acting] ability. But the more I did it, the more I fell in love with it.” BREAKING OUT: She had bit roles in The Social Network and Magic Mike, and is starring in Oscar winner John Ridley’s highly anticipated drama series, American Crime, which premieres this month on ABC. “I’ve worked with really good directors, but, to…

Will Forte seems so wholesome and unfailingly polite in person that you’d expect the former Saturday Night Live cast member of eight years to have roots in the Midwest, similar to his breakout dramatic character in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. But this good-natured 44-year-old hails from Northern California, with hearty family ties, a history degree from U.C.L.A., and a healthy dose of neurosis. This March, the MacGruber mastermind graduates to sitcom star with The Last Man on Earth—a Fox series he created about a temp worker who then finds himself in the titular premise. Come May, Forte will also appear alongside Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston in Peter Bog da no vich’s ensemble comedy She’s Funny That Way, as a playwright who unwittingly casts a call girl (Imogen Poots) to star…

Hello.” “Who is this?” (Wary.) “It’s me.” “Dad?” (Even more wary.) “Yes, it’s your father.” “What’s the matter?” (Panicked.) “Nothing, well, except—” “Oh God, it’s Mom.” (More panicked.) “No, your mom’s fine, apart from—” “It’s you. Where are you calling from?” (Suspicious panic.) “I’m trying to talk from home.” “Is the dog O.K.?” (Forgetful panic.) “The dog died last year.” “Oh, yeah. So, what happened?” (Irritated concern.) “Nothing, I just wanted to talk to you, see how you were.” “Why didn’t you just text? God, you frightened me.” (Accusatory self-pity. Adrenaline withdrawal.) “Look, I’ll text you later. Bye.” I still have a telephone with a curly cord on my desk. If it rings, and it does ring like an old telephone, it’s either my mother or the Vanity Fair office…

Women have stormed the top tiers of government, business, literature, and media, but when it comes to certain art forms, they’re still dancing between raindrops. We’ve yet to see significant numbers of female choreographers in classical dance or as maestros on the podiums of high-budget American orchestras. And while the dominatrix is much in play in the millennial psyche, the foundational whip-and-riding-boot roles— circus ringmaster, four-star general—are stubbornly masculine. Recently, the studios have been criticized for not hiring more female directors. Manohla Dargis in The New York Times made the point that sexism in Hollywood “works like a virus that spreads through ideas, gossip, and stories about women … and doubts about whether they can hack it in that male-dominated world.” Well, women directors have proved over and over again…

Once upon a time, Jimmy Cayne, now 81, had a lot to say about the sad fate that befell Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank he ran for nearly 15 years before its shocking collapse, in March 2008. In more than 20 hours of interviews with me that summer, portions of which later appeared in my book House of Cards, he blamed Wall Street competitors and an amorphous group of hedge funds for conspiring to take down the 85-year-old firm. He was especially angry about then New York Federal Reserve Bank president Tim Geithner’s decision to allow Bear’s competitors access to crucial Federal Reserve funding, permitting them to fight another day, while his firm was denied such funds and faced the choice of either filing for bankruptcy or being…

For the past 11 summers, the village of Sagaponack, on the eastern end of Long Island, has been the site of a Monday-night ritual hippie-ishly incongruous with the moneyed community of homeowners in this part of the Hamptons. At Sagg Main Beach, a flat, broad ribbon of sand dividing the Atlantic Ocean from Saga pon ack Pond, the crowds begin to gather near six P.M., when a small circle of musicians starts pounding out Brazilian music on drums and sleigh bells, and beachgoers cluster around to listen and dance and take in the sunset with a beer. Last September 1, at a drum circle near the end of the season, 32-year-old Peter Smith was hanging out with family and friends when he saw a face at once familiar and unwelcome.…

It’s an old gambit—slipping out of a hotel in the dead of night to dodge the bill. But it’s a bit tricky when you have an entourage of 60 people, a balance of more than $7 million, and a fleet of limousines and other vehicles waiting to collect you and your mountains of bags. That was the situation at 3:30 A.M. on May 31, 2012, when Princess Maha bint Mohammed bin Ahmad al-Sudairi reportedly attempted to make something of a run for it at Paris’s fivestar Shangri-La Hotel, in the 16th Arrondissement, where she and her retinue had occupied 41 rooms for five months. After a tense standoff that involved calls to high-ranking diplomats and officials, she was allowed to leave, whereupon she checked into the nearby Royal Monceau, owned…

Mellody Hobson has a long list of prominent fans whose adoration of her borders on adulation. “She has a grace and graciousness about her that is singular,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation, tells me. “She is remarkably unique. She’s a stunning person. I get a little nervous talking about her because the words are so flowery. But it’s truly how I feel about her.” Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook chief operating officer, who first met Hobson some five years ago because they were both board members at Eve Ensler’s V-Day organization, which combats violence against women, credits a comment Hobson made with inspiring her to write her best-seller, Lean In. “She said she wanted to be unapologetically black and unapologetically a woman,” Sandberg says, recalling that the comment helped…

I. The Unthinkable Commercial passenger service to space is a difficult proposition. To succeed, it has to contend with the pull of gravity, violent rocketpropelled accelerations, heavy vibrations, supersonic speeds and shock waves, vertical climbs, the lethality of the outside environment, and the problems of deceleration and heating during re-entry into the atmosphere. It has to do this safely, reliably, repeatedly, and perhaps profitably, while carrying ordinary passengers in ordinary clothes, who, if they are traveling point-to-point, will want to bring along ordinary luggage as well. We are far from that now. But by last fall, Virgin Galactic, a self-described “spaceline” founded by the flamboyant British entrepreneur Richard Branson and based in Mojave, California, was nearing the moment when it could offer rides to as many as six passengers at…

I couldn’t put down Bryan Burrough’s article on the Ebola outbreak in Dallas [“Trial by Ebola,” February]. As a resident of that city, I’m really impressed by all the people involved in the story, whether center stage or backstage. Judge Jenkins and Mayor Rawlings made it up as they went, and they did a damned good job. All of the epidemiologists, nurses, police, firemen, and Fort Worth cleanup-crew members are heroes. Thank you, Vanity Fair, for a great piece of history told in such a memorable way. STACY CLARK Dallas, Texas Though the picture Vanity Fair painted of Judge Jenkins in Bryan Burrough’s article was accurate, the criticism of the C.D.C. was unwarranted. The C.D.C. came in to assist Dallas County, not to take over. It is politically unwise for…

ERA Ancient Egypt AVATAR Ramesses II VOCATION Pharaoh. AVOCATION Erecting temples dedicated to himself. STREET CRED Led one-million-person army. BILLION-DOLLAR IDEA Start propaganda department. DISTINGUISHING FEATURE Uraeus headdress, prehistoric soul patch, crown. RESIDENCE Piramesse royal city. FAVORED ARCHITECTURE Sandstone human/animalhybrid spectacular. LOOMING NEMESIS The Nubians. SKELETON IN THE CLOSET Wore man makeup. PET PEEVE Rivers turning to blood. PREFERRED SNACK FOOD The blue-lotus aphrodisiac. HANGOUT Artificial bargerowing lake at Malkata. PICKUP LINE “Bring me to the daughter of Ptolemeus.” LITTLE BUDDY Queen Nefertari. ERA The Renaissance AVATAR Cosimo de’Medici VOCATION Banker and uncrowned monarch of Florence. AVOCATION Giving Donatello his big break. STREET CRED Impossible to assassinate. BILLION-DOLLAR IDEA Audit the Pope. DISTINGUISHING FEATURE Red chef’s hat, puffy tunic, gherkin. RESIDENCE Palazzo Medici Riccardi and a dozen or so country…

Stephen Daldry, the director of the two most prestigious imports on Broadway this season, met me for lunch at Frankie and Johnnie’s Steakhouse, the showbiz hangout and former speakeasy on West 45th Street. His acclaimed production of The Audience, starring Dame Helen Mirren as You Know Who, is playing on the same street, as is the revival of David Hare’s 1995 Skylight, which opens on April 2 at the John Golden Theatre, starring Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan as two embattled ex-lovers. Mr. Daldry is a man who knows what he likes. He scarcely glanced at the menu before ordering lamb chops medium, side orders of sautéed spinach and mushrooms, and a bottle of San Pellegrino. He’s a busy man who was soon to return to London to work on…

OCrackdown n a January morning this year, James Risen wrapped his navy wool coat tight against the cold as he walked into the front entrance of the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. He had fought for more than seven years, and all the way to the Supreme Court, to avoid this moment. Now that the day had come, he was in fact early and sat alone on a bench in the vast hallway outside U.S. district-court judge Leonie Brinkema’s courtroom. His lawyer Joel Kurtzberg ushered him inside. A pre-trial hearing in the matter of United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling was now in session. Noting that the government had subpoenaed Risen, Judge Brinkema asked him to take the stand shortly before 11 o’clock. He did so, sitting with…

David Fincher couldn’t sleep. The celebrated director of such films as Se7en, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was up late in the Four Seasons in Baltimore, where he was staying while shooting the pilot episode of the Netflix political drama House of Cards. Fincher is an executive producer of the series as well as the director of the pilot. He was pacing in his hotel room, thinking about the next day’s shoot, when he flipped on the TV and found himself watching the 1990 gangster/cop movie State of Grace, co-starring Robin Wright and Sean Penn, with whom she was then romantically involved. “I gasped. I hadn’t seen State of Grace in 20 years,” Fincher said. “It was amazing to see the evolution of this 23-year-old to…

Britt Robertson knows her life is about to change dramatically. “I go to the grocery store in my sweatpants now,” she says with premature nostalgia. “No one really knows who I am.” This May, Disney’s Tomorrowland—directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles)—will kick off the summer-blockbuster season. The film’s two leads? Arguably the most famous actor in the world, George Clooney... and the 24-year-old Robertson. Since she began acting, at the age of 10, Robertson has starred in two CW series— Life Unexpected and The Secret Circle—as well as the CBS science-fiction hit Under the Dome. But Tomorrowland promises to shift her career into a completely different gear. “When I got the role, it was the best feeling I’ll ever have in my life,” she says. Robertson lights up as she…

Too often, coming out entails shock, disapproval, or some combination of the two. Imagine Alison Bechdel’s feelings when her mother punctuated her dismay by outing her husband, Bruce, over the phone: “Your father has had affairs. With other men... And boys.... And then there was the thing with Roy.” Alison: “Roy, our baby sitter?!” Several months later, Bruce Bechdel was dead, struck by an oncoming Sunbeam Bread truck. (Suicide was never proved, though he had taken to leaving his copy of Camus’s A Happy Death around the house in the days prior to the accident.) Alison Bechdel, best known for her eponymous test for works of fiction—to pass which at least two female characters must talk to each other about something other than men—explored her relationship with her father in…

When faced with potential global annihilation, what can you do but laugh? So argues HBO’s upcoming comedy series The Brink, anyway. Premiering this summer, the series, from brothers Roberto and Kim Benabib and executive producer Jerry Weintraub, stars Tim Robbins as a skirt-chasing, booze-swilling secretary of state trying to stave off World War III with the unlikely help of a sleazy foreign-service peon played by Jack Black. Also on board are Orange Is the New Black favorite Pablo Schreiber, playing a navy pilot who deals drugs to make ends meet, and The Daily Show vet Aasif Mandvi as a sardonic embassy worker. It’s a motley crew tasked with ensuring that a Pakistani military coup doesn’t tip the world into chaos, which could make for a pretty tense, grim series. But…

In this new age of terrorism, “people have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.... Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed,” retired F.B.I. agent Max Noel told Bryan Burrough for his new book, Days of Rage, about the bureau and the radical underground bombers of the 1970s. Burrough, who leapt to fame as the co-author of Barbarians at the Gate, has written about the F.B.I. once before: in 2004’s Public Enemies (made into a movie of the same name starring Johnny Depp) he chronicled J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the gangsters of the 1930s. With that book, the challenge was getting a story that few of the characters were alive to tell. For Days of Rage, many of the subjects—both the…

What hat is your idea of perfect happiness? Making trails and building a tree house. What is your greatest fear? Lack of purpose. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Arthur B. Poole. Which living person do you most admire? Chuck Feeney (the James Bond of philanthropy). What is the trait you most deplore in others? An arbitrary contrarian. What is your greatest extravagance? Wine and reclaimed wood. What is your favorite journey? Solo motorcycle trip through Italy. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? All vetted, adequately rated. On what occasion do you lie? February 29. What do you dislike most about your appearance? A glum face in repose. Which living person do you most despise? Climatechange deniers. What is your greatest regret? Thinking I could build…