Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Vanity Fair

I just finished your Hollywood Issue—you knocked it out of the park! I read every word: loved Tom Brokaw’s piece, the investigation into Harvey Weinstein, the Eric Roberts profile, and the backstory on the Annie Leibovitz shoot—that was truly great. SHAUNEEN HENRICK New York, New York That wonderful story Tom Brokaw wrote about his first days in L.A. [“To Live and Dine in L.A.”] was really enjoyable. There was an ironic touch for me. I grew up in one of those houses in Brentwood that Brokaw describes, the ones built by Frank Capra, with the screening room where all the big stars would come to see movies every Saturday night. (We were “the Bel-Air circuit.”) My father was an agent, and my girlfriend’s mother was a stand-in for Katharine Hepburn.…

VANITIES…

1. Poetic Scents This spring, John and Clara Molloy, the husband-and-wife team of Memo Paris, launch a new fragrance label, Floraïku, available exclusively at Saks Fifth Avenue. The collection of 11 scents, based on floral notes, takes inspiration from Japan, from the haiku motif to the bento-box packaging. Consisting of three categories—Secret Teas and Spices, Enigmatic Flowers, and Forbidden Incense—plus two “Shadowing” accords to enhance or lighten any aroma, the perfumes feature bottle caps that double as traveling cases. ($350 each; saks.com) —SUNHEE GRINNELL 2. Less Is More Leading makeup artist Gucci Westman’s new beauty line, Westman Atelier, debuts at Barneys New York in April, with six simple, clean products. The packaging is minimalist, but the cosmetics are designed to make your complexion glow while actively improving your skin. ($48–$68; westman-atelier.com)…

This is strictly, sketchily anecdotal, so don’t strap me to the wall and drill for data, but listening to fellow liberal neurotic Democrats over the last year, I detect a sense of abandonment. Of Obandonment, to be more precise. Obama, Obama, where art thou? The Bat Signal scours the city night in vain for thee. Think of it, treasure the memory: A president who didn’t brag about himself. Who made it about “we,” not “me.” Who could lankily stride around the Oval Office without getting winded. Occupying the White House for eight years, Barack and Michelle Obama conducted themselves beautifully and irreproachably, elevating the national tone, embracing the once excluded, and leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue radiating an afterglow rare for presidents and first mates, second terms usually being brutal and…

In her 10 years on television, Murphy Brown shattered glass ceilings, battled alcoholism and breast cancer, and earned the ire of a real-world vice president for her decision to become a single mother. But there is one rite of womanhood that bypassed the fictional broadcast journalist. “Somebody asked me if I thought Murphy was ever sexually harassed, and the answer is no,” Murphy Brown creator, writer, and executive producer Diane English tells me. “What man would put himself in that kind of jeopardy?” An investigative reporter whose gender never seemed to hold her back, Murphy Brown made her television debut in 1988, just as a generation of professional women were testing the limits of their own real-life opportunities. The spiky newswoman, played by Candice Bergen, represented an aspirational character: a…

H e’s as lean and chill as a bottle of Lone Star. As stoic as a desert gecko. His southern charm, honed in his boyhood Amarillo, woos all comers. He is the largehearted celebrity portraitist Mark Seliger, veteran of publications such as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Rolling Stone. And next month Abrams publishes Mark Seliger Photographs, a 30-year retrospective of his attempts to bottle starshine. As the images here attest, Seliger’s talent lies in exposing new aspects of overexposed personalities by rendering their inner shimmer. Beyond his “technical and artistic skill,” says actor John Slattery, who has sat for Seliger several times, he stands out because of “his empathy, his emotional intelligence.” Seliger makes every photo session an encounter, his subjects coming away feeling he’s the long-lost pal they’d been meaning…

WILLIAM D. COHAN In “The Devil to Pay,” on page 110, Special Correspondent William D. Cohan examines billionaire Eddie Lampert’s controversial efforts to salvage Sears and Kmart—much-diminished brands that have faced particularly hard times in the Amazon era. “Lampert is an intellectual and a true believer,” says Cohan, to whom the retail mogul gave his first in-depth interview in 15 years. “An investor with a smaller mind probably would have pulled the plug already.” ANNIE LEIBOVITZ “A photo-essay can seem too intimate, but Lena was fearless about opening up her life for our photographs,” says Contributing Photographer Annie Leibovitz. For this month’s cover shoot, Lena Waithe, the Emmy-winning writer and actor, showed Leibovitz around her Los Angeles apartment, including her resplendent shoe closet. Leibovitz also photographed Jane Fonda for the…

RACHEL FEINSTEIN Artist “The Scott Walker Prom at the Royal Albert Hall with Jarvis Cocker.” “Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. I recently fell in love with it while listening to books on my Audible app at my studio.” “The Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory—I’m making a series of new sculptures with them in ceramic.” DAVID SEDARIS Author “Philip Guston paintings (all periods).” “The TV show Togetherness. The cast has remarkable chemistry, and the writing is terrific. So of course it was canceled.” “YouTube videos of people stealing packages off front porches and getting caught.” ISSA RAE Writer, producer, actress “Col3trane’s album, Tsarina— he’s only 18 and so dope!” “@Khadi, the funniest person on Instagram.” “The Trello app.”…

Clarice Lispector sparkles under The Chandelier (New Directions). Cleo Wade assembles the affirmations in Heart Talk (Atria). Leslie Jamison breaks the addiction-lit mold with The Recovering (Little, Brown). Michael Benson tells a HAL of a good story in Space Odyssey (Simon & Schuster). James Comey demands A Higher Loyalty (Flatiron). Diplomacy is on the decline in Ronan Farrow’s War on Peace (Norton). Jennifer Palmieri gets epistolary and empowering with Dear Madam President (Grand Central). Cherokee chiefs battle beneath John Sedgwick’s Blood Moon (Simon & Schuster). Shahriar Mandanipour’s soldier is haunted by Moon Brow (Restless). Richard Flanagan’s First Person (Knopf) features a spectral scribe. Michelle Dean culls the clever in Sharp (Grove). Steve Israel whips out the Big Guns (Simon & Schuster). William Vollmann is in No Immediate Danger (Viking). David Gahr’s Bruce Springsteen (Rizzoli)…

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER Shortly after winning Academy Awards on Sunday, March 4, Frances McDormand, Gary Oldman, Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell, Jordan Peele, and more of the night’s victors celebrated by joining Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones at her inaugural V.F. Oscar party, in Beverly Hills. Inside a custom-designed structure alongside the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Saoirse Ronan, Kobe Bryant, and Salma Hayek Pinault enjoyed the customary post-Oscars In-N-Out burgers; Angela Bassett, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Spike Lee caught up by the bar; Amy Adams and Elizabeth Banks hopped into a photo booth; Tiffany Haddish and Gal Gadot gave Frances McDormand celebratory hugs; and Thomas Keller served gourmet fried chicken and creamsicle truffles to guests coming off the Apple Music dance floor. When Allison Janney eventually made…

In your life, if you’re lucky enough, you are born during a moment in time when the world is ready for the change you’re bringing. So all that’s left for you to do is your work. If you are a child named Lena Waithe, you find your passion on the television screen, or, as you call it, your Third Parent. Your mother, knowing that in front of the screen you’re safe from the streets of Chicago, allows you unlimited watching. The Cosby Show and A Different World bring you beautiful people, families you understand, and lots of laughter. And because when your grandmother watches with you she controls the remote, you watch old reruns of The Jeffersons, Good Times, All in the Family, and realize as you watch these people…

I f America’s real-life political drama feels short on hope and a hero, we now have Priyanka Chopra. The dynamic actress stars on ABC’s hit thriller Quantico as F.B.I. agent Alex Parrish, perpetually gone rogue for the sake of humanity. “She’s a tough girl, living in a man’s world,” says Chopra of her character, “and she’s a leader in that man’s world.” The same could be said of Chopra, who broke barriers as the first South Asian woman to lead a prime-time network show in the U.S. But she was already a phenomenon in her native India. Chopra was crowned Miss World 2000 when she was 18, which she followed up with more than 50 films in Hindi, while steadily steering her talents toward Hollywood and an English-language music career that…

On a cold day at the end of January, I flew to Los Angeles for my first Vanity Fair cover shoot. Our subject had initially caught my attention through her television work—playing Denise, the wise, occasionally wiseass lesbian sidekick to Aziz Ansari’s Dev on the Netflix series Master of None—and then through her speech at the Emmys last fall, when she became the first black woman to be honored for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. “The things that make us different, those are our superpowers,” she said, accepting the award for an episode in which Denise comes out, a story based on her own experience. “The world would not be as beautiful as it is if we weren’t in it.” When I thought about the kind of person I’d…

AGE: 33. PROVENANCE: Los Angeles. GROWING UP: Washington waited to act, despite being the son of Denzel and Pauletta. “I knew every one of my father’s lines in Glory—I broke the VHS tape—but I hid my love of acting to make it as my own man. Football was the best route to obtain my independence.” He was signed by the N.F.L.’s St. Louis Rams in 2006. “I was in a whole other business, but I always wanted to dip into the arts. My parents were 100 percent supportive—my mom’s my biggest fan, my father’s tough love.” HBO: His on-screen break was in familiar territory, as wide receiver Ricky Jerret on Ballers, returning with a fourth season this summer. “I’m nothing like this guy, I swear, but it’s therapeutic playing Ricky—there’s…

“Taking a photograph of a singer on stage is the easy part. The hard part is gaining their trust,” writes Bruce Talamon in the introduction to his electrifying new book, Soul. R&B. Funk., published next month by Taschen. In the early 1970s, as a young black kid from Los Angeles, Talamon had plans to go to law school, but instead found himself backstage and front-row as soul, funk, and R&B entered the American mainstream. Capturing the infectious spirit of the decade from 1972 to 1982, the book features images of legends like Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, the Jackson 5, and more.…

If you’re not familiar with the extraordinary oeuvre of Mozambican writer Mia Couto, Woman of the Ashes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a good introduction. Based on historical events (with layers of magic realism, Achebe-style allegory, and folklore ladled on top), Couto’s ninth novel is the first in a trilogy. It tells the story of Imani, a 15-year-old girl who finds herself playing a pivotal role in a 19th-century culture clash between an African emperor and Portuguese colonialists. Couto treats his characters to a world of blazing specificity, and yet Imani is also a vessel for our more contemporary battles: “I wasn’t born to be a person. I’m a race, I’m a tribe, I’m a sex, I’m everything that stops me from being myself.” Imagine me and you: Curtis Sittenfeld has…

(1) Me fulfilling my squad goals with Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. They’re both so relaxed I quickly forgot about my nerves. (2) I bought this sweatshirt in support of local Baltimore writer Kondwani Fidel’s literacy campaign. (3) Meditation beads, because stress is real and centering is necessary. When I get to the studio I read for 20 minutes before I paint to quiet my energy, and I usually have these in hand. (4) I listen to podcasts during the day because it keeps me focused and, as the day progresses, I turn to music for company. (5) Letters from young students who had no interest in the arts, but are now excited by the painting of the former First Lady and are learning about portraiture in…

JANUARY 29, 2017: Ivanka posts a photo of herself in a metallic one-shoulder gown, and her husband in a tuxedo, with his hand placed on her behind, before they attended a black-tie dinner in D.C.—the weekend her father’s so-called Muslim ban went into effect. FEBRUARY 2, 2017: After months of a customer-boycott campaign and poor sales, Nordstrom announces it will drop Ivanka Trump’s eponymous brand. MARCH 29, 2017: The White House officially names Ivanka an adviser to the president, with her father saying in a statement that the administration was “pleased that Ivanka Trump has chosen to take this step in her unprecedented role as First Daughter.” APRIL 25, 2017: Ivanka sits on a panel with German chancellor Angela Merkel at the W20 Summit in Berlin, where she is met…

‘I’m on my way to a storage bin,” Jane Fonda laughs, in a rush. It’s early morning in Hollywood. And Fonda likes to get up at the crack of dawn. She’s looking for a few odds and ends as she decorates her new house in L.A. “[It has] an elevator and no his-and-her bathrooms,” she explains. “Just hers. I’m living by myself again and I love it. I have my health and my work.” She adds, “I never expected an old fart like me could last so long or be so lucky.” We’ve been friends forever. I started writing about her during the 1970s, when she was speaking out against the Vietnam War. In the intervening years, while collecting two Oscars (for Klute and Coming Home), she has become one…

Few people on Wall Street are as polarizing as Eddie Lampert, the billionaire majority shareholder of Sears and Kmart. His friends say he is reticent, while his critics find him aloof. His pals talk about his very high standards, while some observers say he is condescending, overly critical, and disengaged. Some people praise his determination and persistence, while others see only inexplicable stubbornness in sticking to failed ideas. “His critics will say he’s not really a team guy. He is a team guy,” insists Lampert’s close friend David “Tiger” Williams, a well-known Wall Street trader. “The Eddie I know works incessantly because he’s a ‘figure-it-out guy.’” Williams believes that Lampert is a target for criticism because he is “a very shy person” and avoids the public eye. But Mark Cohen,…

What is your current state of mind? Fired up, ready to go. What is your idea of perfect happiness? A taco truck on every corner. Which historical figure do you most identify with? The witches of Salem. Which living person do you most admire? United Farm Workers organizer Dolores Huerta. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Patience. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Smugness. What is your greatest fear? Steep cliffs. What is your greatest extravagance? Extra-virgin olive oil and my KitchenAid mixer (with pasta attachments). What is your favorite journey? Hiking the Inca Trail in Peru. On what occasion do you lie? Only when asked how much butter is in the piecrust. Which living…