Innholdsfortegnelse for Jan-15 i Vanity Fair

When the good people of Britain opened up their Sunday Times one morning in November—actually, they didn’t even have to open it—they were treated to what the editors knew was a delicious scoop: the private details of former prime minister Tony Blair’s 21-page consulting contract from 2010 with PetroSaudi, an oil company founded by a member of the Saudi royal family. Blair, it turns out, had been receiving roughly $66,000 a month for his services, along with an additional 2 percent of any deal that might result from his working his connections. There’s nothing technically wrong with former leaders spinning their Rolodexes to bankroll their retirement. What makes Blair’s arrangement noteworthy is the fact that he was brokering his access on behalf of the Saudis even as he continued to…

Paul Ryan doesn’t care for “politics or politicians.” He says so in his recent book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea. He prefers the ordinary folks of his childhood in smalltown Wisconsin. It must have been sheer selflessness that propelled him into Congress at age 28. As chairman of the House Budget Committee (and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2012, who is eyeing 2016), Ryan has to deal with politicians all day long. Yuck! But there is one politician who escapes Ryan’s censure: “The one exception was Ronald Reagan. I knew about him mostly because my dad thought his story was so inspiring… An Irish guy who … had overcome a childhood of modest means and adversity and become president of the United States.” Ryan Sr. “would often see…

Albert Brooks. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Larry David. The best comedic actors play broad and real simultaneously, coming across as both larger than life and all too human. Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer pull off this same magic trick every week in Broad City, which returns for a 10-episode second season on Comedy Central in January. Broad City’s first season is full of moments that are insane … and yet make total sense. In one episode, Ilana whips off her shirt and bra to encourage onlookers to take out their cameras so Abbi can find her stolen phone. The shot of Ilana doing a weird topless dance in Central Park is “pause the screen” funny. Thanks to their creators, Jacobson and Glazer, the characters Abbi and Ilana are believable and consistent. And…

Broadway, Hollywood, and Las Vegas have been cross-pollinating for decades, so a show with roots in all three camps was probably inevitable—thus Honeymoon in Vegas, a new musical based on the 1992 film comedy about a young couple whose wedding plans are waylaid by a lovelorn gangster. The show opens in New York this month with Rob McClure, Brynn O’Malley, and Tony Danza re-creating roles played onscreen by Nicolas Cage, Sarah Jessica Parker, and James Caan. The book is by Andrew Bergman, who also wrote the movie, while Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Bridges of Madison County) contributes songs that aim to find the sweet spot between vintage musical-comedy tunefulness and Rat Pack–style ring-a-ding-ding. This all sounds nice. But what both you and I really want to know is: how…

Merkel was also an insatiably curious person and a secretly avid follower of West German politics. She often fantasized about the West. She and her mother, Herlind Kasner, had a pact that if they could ever freely travel to West Berlin they would go to the famous Kempinski hotel and eat oysters. “Back then I knew exactly what I was going to do at 60—go to the police station here in the West. That’s where you gave them your G.D.R. passport, get a West German one, and then you could travel to America. That was my clear plan. But then it all came to pass a little earlier.” Angela Merkel’s father, Horst Kasner (nicknamed “Red” for his political beliefs), raised his and Herlind’s three children to be very tight-lipped. “Her…

I am pretty sure I will never get a better character name than Japonica Fenway,” says Sasha Pieterse of her role in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, based on the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel. “She is super off-the-wall and basically very damaged on the inside—she’s a runaway and a cocaine addict.” The 18-year-old actress grew up under brighter circumstances, as the only child of acrobatic dancers. “My dad threw my mom around for a living,” she says. Born in Johannesburg, Pieterse (pronounced Pee-tur-suh) moved with her parents to Las Vegas when she was three. By the time she was five she was working consistently as an actress. Best known for her work on ABC Family’s long-running teenage drama series Pretty Little Liars, Pieterse says, “I grew up on that…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Wow, these are big questions! Happiness, as I’ve experienced it and observed it in others, seems to be random—some of us are happy fairly regularly (I am, mostly), and some of us not as much—but there seems to be no clear explanation as to why. It comes and goes at unexpected moments, too. The graph of happiness doesn’t even seem to match what is going on in our lives. Or maybe it does and we don’t know it. Money—is there a connection between money and happiness? It takes away a world of worries and anxieties, but are rich folks all happy? Are you kidding? Donald Trump is ALWAYS scowling. That said, it’s hard to be happy if you don’t know where you’ll sleep…

PATRONS OF THE ARTS Musician Joni Mitchell and artist Mark Bradford were the honorees at the Hammer Museum’s 12th annual “Gala in the Garden,” in Los Angeles. The event, which supports the institution’s nationally acclaimed exhibitions and free public programs, was generously supported by Bottega Veneta. TOASTING A CLASSIC Images from Chanel’s “The Little Black Jacket” global exhibition are showing in seven cities. Photographers, designers, friends, and muses fêted Karl Lagerfeld at Balthazar following the New York City debut. FUNNY BUSINESS Comedian and host Seth Meyers, along with environmental media powerhouse Discovery Communications, presented an evening filled with laughter as champions and supporters of the Natural Resources Defense Council came together in New York City to raise money for environmental and health initiatives.…

When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history. Comparing the gross domestic product of different economies is very difficult. Technical committees come up with estimates, based on the best judgments possible, of what are called “purchasing-power parities,” which enable the comparison of incomes in various countries. These shouldn’t be taken as precise numbers, but they do provide a good basis for assessing the relative…

Never such innocence again,” Philip Larkin wrote in “MCMXIV,” his iconic poem about World War I. The Great War changed many things and left legacies such as indirect fire, automatic weapons, a renewed German will. It also changed literary tradition, leaving modernism rising in its wake. A select set of writers who emerged from that conflict became celebrated for their gift of turning slaughter into poetry and prose. Now, a century on, there’s an elegant echo: a new literature emerging from a new fight. Like their predecessors, these men are veterans, some having served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan over multiple years. They grew up in war, so it’s no shock they’ve decided to try to understand what it means. Homer said of war that “it would take a…

CURTIS SITTENFELD, who has known Kemper since college, reveals what lies behind that adorable image Ellie Kemper is having a moment. Back in her hometown of st Louis, on the swank campus of the John Burroughs School, where Kemper attended grades 7 through 12 before graduating in 1998, the famously adorable actress is receiving a tour of the new performing-arts center from the headmaster. Most of the tour proceeds calmly—a few current students eye Kemper without comment—but eventually a girl in cowboy boots, a North Face coat, and a retainer approaches to apologetically announce what a huge fan she is. Kemper cheerfully engages the girl—“one redhead to another,” as Kemper puts it—and soon the actress has been swarmed, mostly by bright-eyed, long-haired girls in leggings. “Hi, you’re awesome,” one says.…

Come Christmas, New York dance-lovers have three traditional choices: the Rockettes, George Balanchine’s Nutcracker, or Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. About 70 percent of the Ailey programs include Revelations, the late choreographer’s gospel masterpiece, of which a high point is “Fix Me, Jesus,” the pas de deux danced most frequently by Glenn Allen Sims and his wife, Linda Celeste Sims. Linda, a New Yorker, joined the 32-member company in 1996; Glenn, from New Jersey, started a year later; and they were married in 2001, on January 5, Ailey’s birthday. They have performed “Fix Me, Jesus” nearly 2,000 times, and they have been cast in some 130 of the troupe’s 250 other ballets—as a couple in about 40 of those. Among Us, the last work choreographed by Judith Jamison, that giantess…

Work in progress It seems somehow fitting that James Patterson, the advertising Mad Man turned impresario of the global thriller industry, spends his summers perched high above the Hudson River in Westchester County, halfway between Don Draper’s Ossining and Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, where the Headless Horseman once roamed the roads by night. Perhaps no author in literary history has more seamlessly melded commerce and creepiness to create an international brand, one that has transformed a wide swath of the publishing industry and given Patterson not only a Rockefeller’s river view but a Rockefeller’s bank account to boot. With 305 million copies of his books in print worldwide, Patterson is the great white shark of novelists, a relentless writing machine who has to keep swimming forward in order to feed,…

Lmost zombie Americans, I tend to zone out once tucked inside an elevator. For us introverted chaps, the slide of the closing doors can be like the lowering of eyelids to begin meditation, the cue to attend to the white noise within and without. Or, if one is in a more sociable frame of mind, it can be a bitsy opportunity for mindless chitchat in which the mouth forms words while the mind drifts elsewhere. Ideally, an elevator ride offers brief entry—a bracketed interval between points A and B—into what the authors Orvar Löfgren and Billy Ehn called “the secret world of doing nothing,” which served as the title for their engaging study of everyday ethnography (2010). It’s a tiny packet of “me time,” a momentary prelude when one waits…

Every day before going on location Bradley Cooper recited the six pages of exercises. They had been pieced together by his speech coach, Tim Monich, to further reinforce a Texas accent and dialect that Cooper knew, if it didn’t come to him automatically, would rob all credibility. In a film such as this, and a role such as this, the most challenging of Bradley Cooper’s career, there was no margin for error. Don’t get it right, don’t do the movie. There are many Texas accents in Texas. This particular one, because of all the places the reallife character once lived, had parts West Texas and country Texas and home-on-the-range Texas, a little bit southern, a little bit western, a little bit shitkicker, with idiosyncratic inconsistencies, and yet poetic in its…

THE AFTERLIFE Former British prime minister Tony Blair during a visit to Los Angeles, 2014. The citizens of Kazakhstan celebrated the 20th anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union, which had been achieved in 1991, in a variety of ways. In December 2011, the country’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, unveiled a model of the Arc de Triomphe in the Kazakh capital, Astana. At around the same time, but in a different spirit, oil workers occupied the central square in the western city of Zhanaozen, where they had been on strike for months to protest for higher wages and better working conditions. Kazakh police fired on the unarmed demonstrators, killing at least 15 and injuring scores of others. Nazarbayev, with his authoritarian tastes, has been the president of Kazakhstan for as long…

As the old Market Church bells tolled in Hannover last October 3 on German Unity Day, commemorating Germany’s re-unification, Angela Merkel walked briskly over the cobblestones and paused at the entryway of the church to greet a few members of a children’s choir, dressed untraditionally in red sweatshirts and black pants. She herself was in her chancellor-of-Germany uniform: a brightly colored jacket, simple necklace, black pants, and low heels. She had TV pancake makeup on, but her sensible-matron look—cropped, softly colored blond hair, little lipstick is always carefully calibrated to appear as if she were wearing no makeup at all. Only a couple of security guards could be seen anywhere in the church; there was no fanfare like the playing of “Hail to the Chief,” and, going up the aisle,…

"sanity Returned" Pierre omidyar’s office in Honolulu occupies the second floor of a low-slung and unassuming commercial building, accross from a park and When Omidyer is a row of simple restaurants, and when Omidyar is in twon, the billionaire founder of eBay often Walks from his office to his favorite lunch spot, a place that he prefers not to have named, partly because he loves it and partly for reasons of security. One morning in June 2013, just days after the first stories based on Edward Snowden’s classified-document trove started appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, Omidyar received a call there from the Washington Post Company’s chairman and C.E.O., Don Graham, who wanted to talk to him about buying the newspaper. The two had recently exchanged messages about…

Performance a big big success,” wrote the great American dancer Jacques d’Amboise in his journal entry of December 11, 1964. “Karinska’s costumes—Rouben’s set—production a tremendous triumph. Mrs. Kennedy and John John and Caroline there—Allegra [Kent] danced pas de deux very well—Balanchine after said it was the best dancing I had done—Karinska said a friend asked her what was in the costume that made me stay in the air—‘Love.’ ” It was a big big year, 1964—a triumphant year for George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, and the company they’d founded in 1948, the New York City Ballet. January sailed in with a momentous windfall: in mid-December of ’63 the Ford Foundation had announced that nearly $6 million of its $7.7 million dance budget would go to N.Y.C.B. and its School of American…