Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2020 i Vanity Fair

After debuting as Jo March in the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Little Women, the actor, whose parents are Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, has gone on to work with Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood) and Gia Coppola (the forthcoming Mainstream). You may know her as Robin in the Duffer Brothers’ Netflix hit, Stranger Things. This August, Hawke puts out her debut album, Blush, which explores love and growing up. FOR THE GIRL who’s happiest at the Met Museum’s Temple of Dendur or bingeing classic movies, songwriting has long been a way of self-expression. “I would do it to tell a boy at school that I liked him or tell my dad I was sorry for having lied.” SHE DIDN’T WATCH the early seasons of Stranger Things. “I was…

IT’S EARLY ON a Sunday evening, and I’m watching as Julianne Moore’s face fills the frame in Tom Ford’s 2009 film A Single Man, her eyes generously lined and false eyelashes applied just so. My phone pings with an alarm for a video call. By now we have heard what Ford, a designer whose clothes telegraph sex appeal, has to say about looking good on-camera, and I allow him to direct my close-up. I stack a few books under my laptop and angle a lamp in an approximation of flattering light. It’s just a check-in with friends, but if this is the only way I am seeing them, I might as well put my best face forward. It has come to this. After years spent agonizing over the shape of…

ON MAY 26, I woke up to the news that an African American man named George Floyd, 46 years old, was killed in front of Cup Foods, an Arab American corner store located 12 blocks away from me. The owner of Cup Foods, Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, had received a call from one of his employees that an officer—who we all know now was Derek Chauvin—was killing a man in front of the store, the same man that another employee, moments before, had called 911 on. Over the next 24 hours, the solution Abumayyaleh proposed—calling the police on the police after a young clerk had already called the police—stitched itself into a human centipede of poor crisis management. Those 12 blocks have always felt shorter than the sprawl of Lake Street, where…

DURING THE FRAUGHT, emotional days after the killing of George Floyd, Viola Davis wanted, more than anything, to be out on the streets of Los Angeles, shouting, protesting, holding a sign. She wanted to join the thousands of others who flooded cities across the nation and around the world to call for justice for Floyd and all the other Black men and women unjustly killed by the police. “She called me and said she was going,” Davis’s close friend and neighbor, the actor Octavia Spencer, tells me by email. “I immediately talked her out of that.” Spencer and Davis were both concerned about putting themselves or their loved ones with health conditions at risk—and were acutely aware that due to systemic health care inequality, COVID-19 has a much higher mortality…

In the spring of last year, a former Green Beret named Michael Taylor was in between jobs when he received a call from an old friend. “Hey, we got a guy,” said the friend, a Lebanese businessman. “He’s close to us. He’s getting railroaded over in Japan. Is there something you can help us with?” Ali, the pseudonym Taylor gave him, wouldn’t provide any more specifics, not even a name. “It’s possible,” Taylor told his friend. But he would need a lot more information. The call wasn’t that unusual. Taylor had once run American International Security Corporation, a private military contractor specializing in risk assessment—and in spiriting people out of complex situations. Over two decades, he had established a reputation in certain circles for dramatic recovery missions conducted all over…

“I don’t like depressing stories. I don’t like depressing art,” says Danielle Steel, the gallerist and ultraprolific author of two new summer books, Daddy’s Girls and Royal, both out from Delacorte Press. “I like art that you look at and you feel good.” She splits her time between her San Francisco home and her Paris apartment. In Paris, where she spent months in pandemicinduced isolation, her penchant for mood-lifting environs has created an eclectic mix: a formal sitting room in which Japanese and Chinese antiques abut zebraprinted furniture picked out by an ex-husband; a bedroom brimming with small items that remind her of her children; and a desk, dotted with heart bibelots, where she spends much of her days writing on an Olympia typewriter. “The underlying theme in a lot…

HALF A DOZEN Top Chef contestants race through an empty Whole Foods store, wantonly sniffing produce with unmasked faces and grabbing jars with ungloved hands. Returning to cook in a crowded kitchen, they jostle each other and exchange sweaty hugs and high-fives. They’re prepping food for a restaurant crammed with patrons, who clink their glasses together, sample morsels from each others’ plates, and spray invisible aerosolized particles into the air as they chatter and laugh. This episode was filmed in Los Angeles last fall, months before the lockdown, when only scientists were familiar with terms like aerosolization. No one back then could have imagined that restaurants all across the country (including those of Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio) would soon be subject to an existential threat. On the screen, there…

“Ghislaine, is that you?” The woman making her way into the first-class cabin of a commercial flight from Miami to New York City was almost unrecognizable. Her attire, once stylish and attention grabbing, now seemed designed to deflect notice; her face, usually painted to perfection, was devoid of makeup. There was a hint of gray in her signature black bob, and her days of starvation diets and charity-circuit appearances seemed far behind her. Wearing no traces of her glamorous New York life, much of it once provided by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell could have been anybody. Or nobody. It was the spring of 2018, and it had been a decade since Maxwell’s former best friend and lover had served 13 months in a Palm Beach jail, with time free on work…

TEN DAYS OR SO after it happened, my throat began to hurt in a jagged way, as though I had swallowed a piece of glass. In the dining hall, I sipped ice water onto my tongue and then tipped my head back to let it run down my throat, because the act of swallowing caused the glass-edge to grind into me again. When I got really hungry, I did this with skim milk. The milk filled me up more than the water did. The assault took place just before Halloween of what was—using the English terms—my fifth-form year at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. In American terms, I was a junior. I have told this story, or some version of it, dozens of times since then. I have…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” —Emma Lazarus. Perfect happiness exists only in my imagination at the moment. Which historical figure do you most identify with? I don’t see myself in those who have come before me, rather I understand and am grateful that because of them, I am able to be who I am. Which living person do you most admire? My mom. What is your greatest extravagance? Clothes and food. What is your favorite journey? Any journey that takes me to some place new. Could be a restaurant, a country, a new part of town. It could be a book or an article, or a film. Also, any journey that takes me “home.” On what occasion…

This ain’t your granddaddy’s Perry Mason—though he might also enjoy HBO’s new take on author Erle Stanley Gardner’s iconic character. Beloved for decades on television in the form of Raymond Burr, the defense lawyer gets new life from The Americans veteran Matthew Rhys. A hard-boiled noir full of blood, sex, and profanity, this Perry Mason is both daring and artful in the manner of today’s glossiest prestige television. Joining Rhys is a rogue’s gallery of talent, including Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Juliet Rylance (The Knick), and Gayle Rankin (GLOW). The show is rich with period detail and a grim pathos that adds resonance to the courtroom intrigue—an engrossing eight-episode origin story that sets the table for future legal adventures. A Ghost From Our Past The clay transforms beneath Demi Moore’s…

THE PEOPLE WHO drive pop culture seem mystified by Republican women. Perhaps it’s simply that, by design, they seem to recede in plain sight—the Barbara Bushes and Nancy Reagans of the world, with their out-of-date hairstyles, monochromatic twinsets, and strings of demure pearls. Our biopics and investigative reports rarely delve into their psyche. So thoroughly do these women fulfill our ideas of a type that the mind glosses over them and moves on to the man they are invariably standing next to. For all that Hollywood and the mainstream media are supposed to be a hotbed of liberal propaganda, we pull our punches when it comes to the tales of handmaidens of conservative politics. If women’s suffrage anticipated a voting bloc comprised of women voting for women’s issues, the 2016…

821 FIFTH AVENUE, 17TH FLOOR The chauffeur opened the door, and Renée and Cecil stepped from the Bentley onto the burgundy carpeting, passed through the revolving doors of 821 Fifth Avenue, and found themselves in the hushed, elegant Belgian Art Nouveau lobby. A pair of doormen dressed like deserters from the Franco-Prussian War gave them the once-over. “We’re going up to Consuelo Barclay Churchill’s. I’m Cecil Pike,” Cecil announced. The older doorman checked a list in a leather-bound logbook before giving them a curt nod. “Seventeenth floor, Mr. Pike. Ivan will show you the way.” Even the doormen are snooty, Renée thought, as they were shown to the elevator by the younger doorman. She remembered walking past the building years ago when she first began house hunting in New York…

IT’S BEEN A YEAR for Charli D’Amelio. On May 2, a day after she turned 16—a milestone that she livestreamed from quarantine and commemorated with merch (a hoodie with a drawing of her, in glasses and a birthday hat, tongue sticking out)—she hit 50 million followers on TikTok. By the end of May, she’d amassed another 9 million. She had only been on the platform for 12 months. D’Amelio is a lanky teen with long dark hair and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. She lives with her parents and older sister in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her facial expressions recall a spunky cartoon, all big smiles and exaggerated winks. She often appears in sweats, looking like she’s hardly wearing makeup, and making comments on her dirty socks. Her dad, Marc,…

ON THE LAST FULL DAY OF HIS LIFE—OCTOBER 6, 1966—EDUARDO TIRELLA FLEW INTO NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, THE STORIED SUMMER COLONY OF THE COUNTRY’S OLD MONEY FAMILIES. He was met at the airport by Doris Duke, the richest woman in America, and they drove to Rough Point, her 10-acre estate on Bellevue Avenue—Newport’s Millionaire’s Row. Eddie, as friends knew Tirella, had just told intimates that after a decade as the artistic curator and designer of Duke’s estates in New Jersey, Bel Air, Honolulu, and Newport, he was planning to sever his professional ties with her, for good. Now, it was time to let his patron and constant companion know, face-to-face. The handsome Tirella, a war hero and Renaissance man, had just finished advising on a new Tony Curtis film, Don’t Make…

On the overcast morning of April 8, the day after New York City announced its highest one-day count of confirmed deaths from COVID-19 — almost 600 — Patrick Kearns, the co-owner of the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Homes, stood inside one of his chapels in Queens, struggling to keep his composure in front of six scattered people in masks trying to mourn. The man next to him in the open casket, one of the city’s thousands of probable COVID-19 deaths, had known Patrick’s father, Thomas, who ran the family-owned funeral business for decades before Patrick and his brother-in-law, Paul Kearns-Stanley, took over in the mid-2000s. Because the Kearns family knew the deceased, Patrick wanted to direct the funeral himself. It had been weeks since he’d led a service. As the…