Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2018 i Vanity Fair

VISIT Get Lost Out Here The turquoise waters and pinksand beaches of Bermuda are home to more than just beauty. They’re also home to a mystique that’s drawn adventure seekers, explorers and romantics to Bermuda’s shores for over four centuries. Bermuda encompasses 21 square miles of natural wonders, unique history and colourful culture. And with direct flights averaging less than two hours from major U.S. East Coast cities – including 90 minute flights from NYC – Bermuda offers a quick escape from the ordinary. EAT See You in the Sky Manhatta, from Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, combines sky-high views with the down-to-earth spirit of a neighborhood restaurant. Chef Jason Pfeifer cooks seasonal and soulful food inspired by French flavors, complemented by a wine menu deep in Burgundy. Perched…

“When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time,” writes Lucia Berlin in her second posthumous story collection, Evening in Paradise, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal.” The surreal feeling Berlin describes—the sense that time moves slower when one is in a new place, and that images take on new meaning—has a basis in science. The brain takes longer to process the unknown (visiting a foreign city, for example) than it does information that’s previously been banked (a day at the office, or watching Game of Thrones reruns). While new experiences seem to pass quickly in the moment, in retrospect they seem unusually drawn out. As…

If award shows had personas, the Golden Globes would be the one who comes early to the party, dressed to the nines, toasting champagne while it’s still light out. They’d spend the whole evening looking across the room, scanning for who looks hot, fresh, or interesting—before being poured into a car home, all the while trilling in a thick, difficult-to-locate, entrancing accent: “Fabulous, darling. It’s all fabulous.” Unlike the sedate Oscars (finishing a steak dinner before stepping into a limo, adjusting a bow tie in the rearview) or the insider-y Emmys (yelling invective into a phone, hanging up, and stepping back into a smiling conversation as if nothing has happened), the Globes are just there for a good time, smooshing together TV hopefuls and musical numbers and Oscar contenders in…

Walking around Debra Newell’s apartment, I can easily tell she is a woman of means. The furniture is high-end, the fabrics lush, and the closets—crammed with pristine garments and a designer-handbag vault—are grand enough to satisfy Carrie Bradshaw. Only the lights and cameras poised outside the windows remind me that this is the set of Dirty John, a scripted TV series based on the popular true-crime podcast of the same name. Dirty John was a sensation among true-crime enthusiasts when it first ran in 2017. Based on the reporting of the Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Goffard, it tells the story of Newell, a California businesswoman and single mom who fell in love with John Meehan, a seemingly charming man whose shady secrets eventually shatter her life. Listening to the podcast,…

Over a plate of double-egged fettuccine and two bottles of Antinori Chianti at our usual trattoria in Rome’s old city, the Vatican monsignor is gossiping about the late Pope John Paul II: how he wore Penhaligon’s aftershave from Harrods of London; how, as a bishop in Poland, the future Pope camped out with his philosopher friend Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Now he’s showing me how John Paul mockingly gave a discreet Nazi salute toward the backs of a departing group of German bishops. “When I raised my eyebrows disapprovingly at his antic,” says the monsignor, “he punched me hard on the arm. It hurt!” He’s my Deep Throat, my Sotto Voce, purveyor of unattributable whispers in Vatican cloisters. A middle-echelon member of the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the Curia, he gestures smoothly…

Natalie Portman films arrive like events—not in the box-office sense of a tentpole movie but as heightened moments in the craft of acting, all the more special for their rarity. Closer and Black Swan are two of my favorite films of this century, and both hinge on her fierce performances—uniquely intimate, emotionally complex, utterly absorbing. As Durga Chew-Bose writes in her cover story, there are few actresses who channel control and intensity the way Portman does. With Vox Lux, in which Portman plays a phoenix-like pop star whose young voice rises out of tragedy, she taps two live wires in the American Zeitgeist—the post-traumatic stress that follows an act of mass violence, and the culture of extreme fame. If A Star Is Born strips its lead, Lady Gaga, down to…

What to do with the #MeToo Men? There exists no disposal unit or form of excommunication for the Men of Disgrace in our culture, no island where they can be conveniently relocated, no hope of launching them into orbit, no Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew where they can thrash out their guilt, shame, anger, transgressions, and need to make amends in a safe, therapeutic environment crawling with camera crews. It is a wish expressed with long, exasperated sighs that accused harassers, bullies, and molesters should just go away and stay away, but that is not the American way. Once someone occupies a place in the celebrity eco-system, no matter how ant-sized, a complete fade to gray is a rarity. Knock them off their thrones, kick them out of the executive…

Very early in director Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama, Heat, before the film’s first seizure-like armed robbery, before those chilling hockey masks, before Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s dark duet, their cat-and-mouse hunt—before the famous diner scene, the stakeouts, Los Angeles’s fateful sprawl and hilltop hideaways—a girl, barely a teenager, is madly, fixedly searching for a pair of barrettes. They aren’t on the kitchen counter. She’s checked. Or under the sofa cushions, either. She refuses to wear the blue ones—they don’t match. “Mom!” she screams. “Where are my barrettes? … Mom! Pay attention! … Daddy’s gonna be here. I’m not gonna be ready! I can’t be late.” She begins to shake, choked panic forming in her throat. Her voice brittle, pained. Her brows taut like the arms of a…

Shortly before Fox News C.E.O. Roger Ailes was fired, in July 2016, after dozens of women accused him of sexual harassment, he delivered a warning to his boss, Rupert Murdoch. “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful, he is going to end up totally controlling Fox News,” Ailes said, a source briefed on the conversation recently recalled. “Roger was highly annoyed with Trump. He couldn’t contain him at all,” a high-level Fox staffer remembered. But now there’s a new boss in charge—sort of. His name is Lachlan Murdoch. In May, Rupert named Lachlan, his elder son, chair man and C.E.O. of “New Fox,” the slimmed-down parent company that will emerge out of the Murdochs’ $71 billion deal to sell most of their entertainment assets to Disney. Lachlan, 47,…

In Roma’s meditative opening scene, soapy water washes slowly across a tiled floor, periodically reflecting glimpses of the sky, a passing airplane. In two minutes—a lifetime in the fastpaced sensibility of Hollywood openers—the outside world of 2018 is scrubbed away. When the camera finally pulls back, it is to show a Mixtec woman named Cleo, played by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, the live-in nanny for a wealthy family in 1970s Mexico City. The film, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, draws heavily from his own childhood, new ground for a filmmaker whose previous projects range from the lauded but controversial Y Tu Mamá También (2001) to the space odyssey Gravity, which earned him the 2014 Academy Award for best director. In Roma, he tells the story of Sofia, played by…

‘Hey, Gary, how’s Donna Rice?” a beefy truck driver called out to the candidate in Dover, New Hampshire. “How’s Donna?” Gary Hart replied with a dyspeptic smile. How the mighty had fallen. It was December 1987, and this ruggedly handsome man who had been the Democratic front-runner in the 1988 presidential race was living his personal hell. I covered Hart’s sad, doomed attempt to come back, seven months after he had suspended his campaign in the wake of the feral stampede that ensued when Miami Herald reporters followed an anonymous phone tip. They staked out Hart’s Capitol Hill town house one fateful weekend and spotted him with Rice, who was a Miami model, a bit actress who’d had parts on Dallas and Miami Vice, and a pharmaceutical saleswoman. It was…

1 Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood (Custom House) By Karina Longworth From the force behind the podcast You Must Remember This comes a book exploring the glamour and misogyny of classic Hollywood through the stories of Howard Hughes’s female colleagues and conquests—among them, Katharine Hepburn and Jean Harlow. The business magnate and filmmaker reads as Old Hollywood’s own Harvey Weinstein. 2 Nothing Is Lost: Selected Essays (Knopf) By Ingrid Sischy The late writer and editor’s posthumous essay collection spans 30 years of reporting on culture’s biggest personalities, including artists (Robert Mapplethorpe, Jeff Koons), designers (Miuccia Prada, Calvin Klein), and the glittering stars of the big screen, ranging from a mature Elizabeth Taylor to a 22-year-old Kristen Stewart, whom Sischy lauded as one of her generation’s “few…

L.R.: You went to Nashville to pursue a recording career when you were only 19. Were you scared? K.M.: When I left my hometown, Golden, Texas, I went to Austin first, figured out how to live on my own, write songs, do my own shows. So when I got to Nashville, I jumped right in. I didn’t have a backup plan; I was super fearless. On your debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, you wrote about gay rights, drugs, and cast a cynical eye on small-town life. Was that really considered controversial? I have gotten that ‘rebel’ or ‘outlaw’ card, and I think partly it’s because I’m a woman. But it’s pretty inaccurate if you look at the roots of country music storytelling. These are just songs about real shit.…

Last winter, and into this spring, the Hugh Jackman–starring circus musical, The Greatest Showman, a charming mess of a movie that tried to turn arch cynic P. T. Barnum into a champion of social justice, beat all box-office expectations and made more than $430 million worldwide. At roughly the same time, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, starring a young up-and-comer named Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, was on its way to earning nearly a billion dollars. A musical and a big, broad comedy were dominating the multiplexes just at the time when the film industry was fêting and awarding its best of the year. Jumanji never stood a chance of making it into the gilded rooms where the trophies are handed out, but The Greatest Showman did, owing mostly to the…

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But who are the happy families of actors? Certainly not the Barrymores, though Drew survives, even flourishes, after the fire starter of her childhood. Perhaps not the Baldwins, Fondas, or Carradines, and definitely not the fictional Tyrones of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The Culkins, however, now well into their 20s and 30s, are another story, perhaps most reminiscent not of a dynastic Hollywood brood but of a fictional literary one: J. D. Salinger’s Glass family. Seven children, raised as performers, are each uniquely talented and yet reluctant to be famous, brutally aware of the trappings of celebrity and determined to find a peaceful path forward. Like the Glass children, the original Culkin seven—Christian,…