Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i Vanity Fair

Q-TIP A Tribe Called Quest’s reunion album, We Got It from Here … Thank You 4 Your Service, was released in November; Q-Tip will release a solo album this year. “Get Up, Stand Up” —BOB MARLEY “The quintessential Wailers with the Peter Tosh sharp blade!” “Clampdown” —THE CLASH “So many to choose from; obviously they stood in protest to the gnarly, but ‘Clampdown’ was my fave of their direct protest joints.” “Stand!” —SLY & THE FAMILY STONE “ ‘Stand! There’s a midget standing tall / And the giant beside him about to fall!’ Need I say muthafuckin’ more?” “Rebel Without a “Rebel Without a Pause” —PUBLIC ENEMY “Unrelenting musically, lyrically … A voice of a generation at his loudest and most unforgiving.” BRITTANY HOWARD Alabama Shakes is currently recording their…

First, the envelope(s!), please. Later, a quiet refuge from all the drama. In a special studio set up by Vanity Fair and Instagram—at the magazine’s 23rd annual Oscar party, in Beverly Hills— photographer MARK SELIGER captured the starlight of that dizzying evening, when Moonlight, by the last surreal reel, had outshone La La Land…

I. Running Amok It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence. They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don’t live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important proj ect in the world: interplanetary colonization. Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important proj ect in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence.…

At 83, Nan Talese might just be the new image of having it all. She’s dressed in a black sweater, cozy black pants, and black ballet slippers, girlishly ensconced on her tufted leather couch with a manuscript she’s considering for publication by her imprint at Doubleday. She’s looking rather adoringly at her husband, Gay Talese—bestselling author, iconic charmer—who’s emerged from the top floor of their town house, in a three-piece bespoke suit as per usual, and is already commanding the room. The subject is the original residents of the house, on East 61st Street, a cast of characters that brings to mind a Billy Wilder movie. They included model Hope Bryce (with her blind dog), who was having an affair with director Otto Prem in ger. “I’d see Mr. Preminger…

If starlets are still expected to pay their dues in Hollywood, consider British actress Ella Purnell’s tab settled. To date, the 20-year-old has played a young Angelina Jolie, in 2014’s Maleficent, a young Margot Robbie, in 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan, and a young Keira Knightley, in 2010’s Never Let Me Go. “My agents tell me I can’t play the kid versions of these actors anymore, which is disappointing,” Purnell says from the house she shares with her parents, in East London. “I didn’t go to drama school, so I always liked saying to these incredible, successful women, ‘Teach me how to be you!’ ” Purnell had her first taste of leading-lady status in Tim Burton’s adaptation of the Y.A. novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a dark fantasy…

There’s a row of Victorian terraced houses on a side street in London’s Belgravia district, each projecting a dowdy respectability with its stone front steps leading to a pair of alabaster pillars and then a glossy black door. And at 9–11 Grosvenor Gardens there is a small, rectangular brass plate adjacent to the formidable door. Its dark letters discreetly announce: ORBIS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, LTD. By design, the company’s title was not very forthcoming. Orbis, of course, is Latin for “circle” and, by common parlance, “the world.” But “intelligence”—that was more problematic. Just what sort of international business information was the company dealing in? Advertising? Accounting? Management consulting? I SPY Christopher Steele, author of the controversial dossier on Donald Trump. For a select well-heeled set scattered across the globe, no further…

The list of men I admire in the movies is quite long. It goes from Lon Chaney Sr. to Gable to Tracy to Fredric March. It includes Robert Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Kirk Douglas, Lon Chaney Jr., Michael Douglas, Tyrone Power, James Garner, Burt Lancaster, Yves Montand, Colin Firth, Albert Finney, Robert De Niro, Robert Preston, Paul Newman, Peter O’Toole, Gregory Peck, Maximilian Schell, and Gary Oldman. My favorite movie actor is William Holden. On-screen, Holden is handsome, graceful, charming, and funny. He is tough and resourceful enough to handle himself in any type of predicament. In a range of films from Golden Boy to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Sabrina, from Sunset Boulevard to Stalag 17 and The Wild Bunch, Holden could do it all. I knew that…

Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor. The bold-faced lies, guilt-free immorality, blistering aggression, blithe refusal of introspection, and astonishing vulgarity that we now associate with our 45th president are key elements of a style created and refined by Roy Marcus Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and Donald Trump’s red-baiting lawyer. Cohn is at the center of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Tony Kushner’s masterpiece, which is receiving a glittering 25th-anniversary revival at the National Theatre in London this spring. Marianne Elliott directs an astonishing cast, with the irreplaceable (and irrepressible) Nathan Lane playing Roy. Thirty years ago I commissioned Tony to write Angels in America for my tiny theater in San Francisco, the Eureka. After Tony and I worked on the play together for a year,…

I. A Sensitive Boy Before the stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince Charles Philip Arthur George officially became public property. While his 22-year-old mother, Princess Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir was brought to the vast gilded ballroom by the royal midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Under the 46-foot-high ceilings—juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive throne draped in red-and-gold embroidered velvet— the infant was swaddled in white blankets and placed in a simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers who served his grandfather King George VI and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth. “Just a plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s private secretary. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he was being looked at by outsiders—but with great…

hey say if you love something, you should set it free. Not so in Stephanie Powell Watts’s powerful debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us (Ecco). “Love means never letting anything go, never seeing it stride on long confident legs away from you.” A modern recasting of The Great Gatsby in the American South, this timely novel sheds its green light on economic and emotional heartbreak and the spaces where the living meet the dead. Peter Heller’s latest, Celine (Knopf), also keeps its eyes on the prize, this time via the suspenseful story of a bourgeois Brooklyn P.I., on the hunt for a missing man and thrust into the raw scenery of Yellowstone National Park—wildly gripping in every sense. While we’re out there, Hannah Tinti takes us to…

omewhere in the world, right now, a literature major is struggling with an essay speculating about what happened to Nora after she walked out the door and left her family and frustrations behind in Henrik Ibsen’s classic play A Doll’s House. After 138 years (it was first produced in 1879), Nora’s exit remains the most famous door slam in theater history, and now Lucas Hnath brings his own scenario about Nora’s future to Broadway this month with A Doll’s House, Part 2. Hnath, 37, is known for wildly original plays such as Red Speedo (about doping), The Christians (about a mega-church), and Hillary and Clinton (yep, you guessed it), but has long wanted to write a sequel to a famous play. Ibsen’s work allowed Hnath to explore “how people couple…

On February 4, The New York Times published an article by Robin Pogrebin that asked the startling question “Is the Met Museum ‘a Great Institution in Decline’?” In the piece Pogrebin quoted George Goldner, a longtime curator in the Met’s drawings and prints department, who had retired in 2015. “It’s a tragedy to see a great institution in decline,” Goldner told Pogrebin. “To have inherited a museum as strong as the Met was 10 years ago—with a great curatorial staff—and to have it be what it is today is unimaginable.” (Goldner now serves as an art adviser to billionaire buyout mogul Leon Black, whose wife is on the Met board.) The article was “like an atomic bomb in the room,” says one former administrator at the Met. “You have to…

goes back to a book,” says Hilary Knight, “a sketchbook from the mid-20s. My mother had taken it to the circus, and it was full of drawings, circus acts, girls hanging by their teeth, which just fascinated me. I took this book when I was a little child and drew over my mother’s drawings, it so inspired me.” Add to that the musical Jumbo, in ’35, Adrian’s costumes for The Great Ziegfeld, in ’36, and Sabu from Elephant Boy, in ’37, and it was kismet! The child with the pirouetting pen would make drawing his own form of performance. Hence the title of the exhibition that opens on April 25 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center: “Hilary Knight’s Stage Struck World.” “Eloise was…