Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i Vanity Fair

W ill there ever be a “right” time for Americans to talk about Vietnam? The nation’s involvement there began as an ill-considered but contextually understandable effort by Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to come to the aid of an ally, France, as it battled the restive, independence-hungry population of a land it had colonized, and to prevent the spread of Communism, which was then considered the most pernicious threat to the American way of life. But by the time John F. Kennedy was president, the French were well out of the picture, having been routed at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, and Vietnam was America’s headache. Cut to 1975 and the ignominious sight of evacuees being lifted by chopper from the roof of the U.S. Embassy…

IÔ t’s the best house in Montauk,” declares Manhattan and Southampton hostess Louise Grunwald: “I love, love, love it.” “It’s kind of perfect,” agrees J. Crew chairman Mickey Drexler, who for several years owned the former Warhol-Morrissey estate, next door. “Everyone fantasizes about owning that house.” “It’s completely magical,” says cosmetics heiress and entrepreneur Aerin Lauder. “From the second you turn in to the long winding driveway you feel like you’re in Africa or someplace far away. And then you see the driftwood sign with the name on it and you park your car and you walk down this little stone path through this wild garden that Miranda Brooks designed, and you’re greeted with Bloody Marys and the view of the ocean and dogs running everywhere. I always bring my…

H elping his mother with a recent move, Bruce Handy came across a paper he’d written as a high-school senior. The subject was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and at the end of the paper—to the question “What did you learn writing this paper?”— Handy wrote, “I learned that I would rather have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Already he was the smart aleck who would cut his teeth at Spy magazine. But more than that, his answer was prophetic, for Handy is now bringing out his first book, Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult (Simon & Schuster). It’s nothing less than a Golden Ticket into the Whipple-Scrumptious world of children’s classics, where mystical and marvelous surprises await. Handy (a contributing editor at Vanity Fair)…

Your recent article “The Lonely Heir,” adapted from Sally Bedell Smith’s book Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life (April), ponders when Prince Charles actually knew that someday he would become King. Prince Charles, at his father’s insistence, at age 17, attended Geelong Grammar School, west of Melbourne, Australia. He left Geelong in July 1966. In 1967 someone invited me to attend a conference at the Geelong Grammar School. The meetings were held in classrooms. I picked a chair desk at random, in the middle of the room. As I sat down, I noticed that carved into the desktop, along with many other names, was charles, rex. So, at least by 1966, Prince Charles knew that he would someday become King! BAYARD H. BRATTSTROM Wikieup, Arizona FOR THE…

The biggest thing to come out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival may not be a film at all. Carne y Arena, the festival’s first-ever virtual-reality experience, was created by Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (right) with his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, and producer Mary Parent. In a transformed airplane hangar, the art installation simulated the harrowing trek of real-life migrants crossing the Mexican-American border. Currently on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan, it will also be shown on both sides of Donald Trump’s proposed border wall: at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tlatelolco museum, in Mexico City. For more on the characters of Cannes, head to VF.com.…

This is a love story. It wasn't seamless, starry eyes at first light. There was a discovery, unexpected and shocking. There were moments of really getting pissed and the standard irritation that comes when one half of the whole kept leaving the suitcase in the hallway. But there were also moments of unplanned intimacy that is the only true kind of intimacy in a love story, soft touches and laughter and absurdity, because you need absurdity in a love story, since love is slightly absurd anyway, a feeling that, like eternity, is indefinable. Which leads us, on the surface at least, to the seemingly mismatched pairing of 35-year-old Serena Williams and her fiance, 34-year-old Alexis Ohanian. She is the beyond remarkable tennis player, although all superlatives are pointless. He is…

If Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a pathogen, just doing what’s in his nature, who’s responsible for letting him wreak havoc in the national bloodstream? Calling out the president’s most powerful enablers— six seemingly rational men, who must surely realize how dangerous and corrupt he is—SARAH ELLISON takes a long hard look at their motives for helping Trump gain, and hold on to, the White House B lame for the ongoing destruction wrought by the Trump administration will always attach to Donald Trump. But Trump cannot help himself. He is a pathogen, doing what pathogens do, and as surprised as anyone to have found himself replicating in the nation’s bloodstream. Equal blame will attach to a small group of experienced and seemingly rational politicians who knew exactly what…

One photograph makes it abundantly clear just how pres ent a small group of Goldman Sachs alumni has become in Donald Trump’s White House. From April 6, it shows a stonefaced Trump and his advisers in a “sensitive, compartmented information facility” at Mara- Lago, just after the president had given the order to launch cruise missiles at a Syriangovernment airbase. In the closely cropped picture, released by Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Twitter, 14 men and one woman are crowded tightly around a small table, their eyes glued to a closed-circuit-television screen. Three of the people in the picture—Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council and Trump’s chief economic adviser; Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; and Dina Powell, a deputy national-security adviser— are former Goldman Sachs partners, one…

KIERSEY CLEMONS AGE: 23. PROVENANCE: Pensacola, Florida. MILITARY BRAT: “I grew up everywhere because my dad was in the navy. I had to adapt to each environment.” GIRL POWER: “My family’s full of wild women. My grandma was a prima ballerina, so my acting stems from her.” FAST TIMES: Clemons spent her teenage years in Redondo Beach, California, acting in high-school plays—“My mom pushed me into doing musical theater”—and soon turned professional in L.A. “I had a routine for four years of just working at Abercrombie Kids and auditioning.” In 2014, she booked the cult classic Dope. “My life shifted.” BRUSHSTROKES: After two seasons on Amazon’s Transparent and a starring role in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, this month Clemons is Mimi Pastori in the coming-of-age tale The Only Living Boy…

h e first chartered jets came in low over the island of Great Exuma’s aquamarine waters that Thursday morning. Most of those who clambered down onto the tarmac were young and excited, anticipating a once-in-a-lifetime weekend adventure on the sparkling white beaches of the Bahamas. There would be rock bands, private villas, celebrity chefs, all promoted by the rapper Ja Rule and a gaggle of supermodels on Instagram. For tickets costing up to $12,000 apiece, the inaugural Fyre Festival, its organizers promised, was to be an ultrachic “Coachella in the Caribbean.” Shivi Kumar, a 33-year-old North Carolina sales executive, landed with a group of her girlfriends around six p.m. on a flight from Miami to celebrate a birthday. One or two of the group were already nervous. They had heard…

B ecause inspiring stories tend to have one thing in common: they defy the odds. What are the odds that, in 1982, a young Canadian-American woman named Regina Horst and a young man from Tanzania named John Chacha would cross paths at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia? What are the odds that they would get married? What are the odds that they would establish a school and medical center in a poor, remote, sometimes violent corner of Africa? What are the odds that this effort, under the rubric of the couple’s Teamwork Ministries, would take root? City of Hope is located in Ntagacha, in western Tanzania. Its Destiny Primary School today enrolls 450 students and is the No. 1 school in the area. Its new secondary school, named for…

W as Aubrey Plaza born with her left eyebrow poised a wee bit higher than her right? It does appear to be congenitally arched, just as her lips, at rest, seem always caught between a moue and a smirk. Her eyes themselves, never at rest, are among the most expressive on any screen right now: they throw shade; they scheme; they go blank with perfect deadpan timing; they widen with demented glee; they roll with a disgusted panache that would humble any mall rat, her pupils inscribing an arc as long and graceful as a Stephen Curry three-pointer. It’s the eyes especially that mark Plaza as the anti–Emma Stone, a Zooey Deschanel gone rancid, America’s best-loved manic pixie nightmare girl—a role she perfected for seven seasons as sulky April on…

Late last July, a swath of the Middle East from Saudi Arabia across Kuwait to Iraq and Iran was hit by a heat wave. As usual, it was caused by a powerful high-pressure dome that parked overhead, compressing and heating the upper atmosphere, limiting convection, and trapping the lower atmosphere below it even as the desert floor heated the air from the ground up. “Heat waves” are relative affairs—technically, they are merely multi-day deviations from whatever the local norms happen to be. They don’t count for much in places like Denmark. The Middle East is not as milquetoasty as that. In Kuwait, for instance, the daily average maximum temperature in July is around 112 degrees, a level that would trigger urgent warnings in the United States but that in Kuwait…