Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2022 i Vanity Fair

EDIE SEDGWICK In As It Turns Out (FSG), Alice Sedgwick Wohl describes in intimate detail the short, explosive life of her younger sister Edie, from her abuse allegations against their father to her defining entanglement with Andy Warhol. BETTY GILPIN Through the 20 essays of Betty Gilpin’s All the Women in My Brain (Flatiron), the GLOW actor describes heartbreak and connection on and off set. “I tell myself I have found a version of it that is both cathartic and healthy,” she writes. “But maybe that’s a lie.” EDWARD ENNINFUL British Vogue editor Edward Enninful fell in love with clothes at his mom’s dress workshop in Ghana; in A Visible Man (Penguin Press), he describes his “all-consuming addiction to forward motion,” from moving to London to pushing for diversity in…

THE TRAILER FOR Bros, a new film from Universal that opens in September, will be cozily familiar to anyone who came of age in the peak era of Judd Apatow. It’s glossy, quippy, and shows off a stacked cast of comedy performers working in idiosyncratic harmony—and Apatow is in fact a producer. There’s a very 2022 twist, though: Every actor in the main cast is queer, and the central love story concerns two men. The film, the brainchild of guerilla comedian turned movie star Billy Eichner, is being heralded as a breakthrough for LGBTQ+ representation onscreen, both by outsiders and, with a wink, by the film’s marketing. Bros—which I have not yet seen but cautiously await—is only the highest profile of recent projects that have helped usher in a queer renaissance. Or…

AFTER ANDREW SEAN GREER won the Pulitzer Prize for Less in 2018, his agent issued a single warning. “Literally, she said, ‘You can’t write a sequel to a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel,’” Greer recalls. This month, he launches Less Is Lost, the sequel to Less, about an author named Arthur Less on a road trip across America. He joins four other Pulitzer winners and finalists who have recently done their own serializations. Of major prizes awarded to American authors of literary fiction, the Pulitzer has a particular gravitas, due in some combination to its institutional backing (Columbia University), its longevity (the first awarded to a novel was in 1918, more than three decades before the first National Book Award for fiction and more than 60 years before the Pen/Faulkner), and the…

“THE ONLY REASON you’ll ever need this is if you fall through the ice,” said Rachel Maddow, standing beside her pickup truck at an empty boat launch on a cloudy winter’s day. She tossed me something that looked like a cross between a bike lock and a telephone cord and told me to put it around my neck: safety picks. In a worst-case scenario, you’re supposed to pull apart the orange handle things, stab the ice in front of you, and claw your way back onto solid ground. “There’s 20 inches of ice out here, you’re not gonna fall through,” Maddow promised. “But just in case.” It was a Monday in early February, on Maddow’s home turf of Western Massachusetts. We met up in the parking lot of a frozen…

IT WAS AROUND 3 A.M. the first time they arrived. An unmarked, nondescript government-issued vehicle pulled up to the towering brown brick and blue glass building in downtown Manhattan known simply by its address: 75 Wall Street. The city that never sleeps was in that rare moment when the ostinato of car horns and rattling subway cars had been replaced by a deep, albeit brief, slumber. The agents stepped out of their vehicle and walked through the revolving doors of the 42-story building, crossing the shiny white oak floors of the lobby to reach the doorman on duty that night. It was 2021, in the midst of the second wave of the COVID pandemic, and the bottom 18 floors of “75,” which had originally opened as the Andaz Hotel, had…

Chris HEATH “KEYS TO THE KINGDOM,” P. 82 “When athletes don’t seem to have too much to say, I sometimes wonder whether it’s because the core of what they do is nonverbal, or whether it’s more that no one thinks to ask,” says Britishborn, Brooklyn-based contributor Chris Heath. “Lewis Hamilton has a remarkable story, one he is clearly still pondering himself. If you’re truly prepared to listen, he’ll tell you plenty.” Nicole CHAPOTEAU “ALL ABOUT EVE,” P. 136 “We shot on a beautiful farm estate in Cold Spring, New York. It was such a treat for me as I grew up in the area,” says V.F. fashion director Nicole Chapoteau, who styled Eve Jobs. “She absolutely loves clothes and wanted to try on everything, her playlist was epic, and she…

When visitors step into “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971,” they will see rare objects like Lena Horne’s gown from Stormy Weather, clips from buried blaxploitation films like Black Chariot, and home movies from the likes of Cab Calloway. “From the onset, there has been Black participation in cinema,” cocurator Rhea Combs says. The show has been five years in the making, says cocurator Doris Berger, along the way shaped by advisers like Ava DuVernay and influenced by research trips to the South of France, where the curators visited Josephine Baker’s preserved castle. “Regeneration” was sparked by the historic 2017 rediscovery of Something Good—Negro Kiss, a short clip from 1898 depicting two Black actors tenderly kissing, which will show beside Glenn Ligon’s Double America 2 neon work to create a dialogue between…

In a twist of 1920s hobnobbing, the Duke of Westminster’s Scottish tweeds helped inspire Chanel’s enduring use of the material—from the original boxy suits to Karl Lagerfeld–era hot pants to Virginie Viard’s feather-sleeve shift on the spring 2022 couture runway. Attention to detail is the common thread, as seen in this limited-edition eye compact, in four versions. Each shadow is stamped with a woven texture, and the tweed case by Maison Lesage artisans is the perfect little jacket.…

TRUE CRIME IS booming on a spectrum from pulp to procedural, but the best of the genre seeks to answer questions more complex than whodunnit. In No One Crosses the Wolf, out from Little A, Lisa Nikolidakis recounts her father’s murder of his girlfriend and her daughter, followed by his suicide, and traces a family history of psychological manipulation. Two other books, treading only slightly further from home, weave memoir into the headlines. Linda Kinstler’s Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, from PublicAffairs, unpacks the case that threatened to exonerate a deceased Nazi who’d served in the same unit as the author’s grandfather, while in Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta, from Knopf, the novelist Beverly Lowry juxtaposes her upbringing…

ON THE EVE of his retirement, the nation’s first Black justice and constitutional giant, Thurgood Marshall, took a moment to denounce the Supreme Court of the United States over its “radical” path of abandoning past decisions for no other reason than the court’s membership had changed. Owing to these shifts in personnel, Marshall charged, now “scores of established constitutional liberties” hung in the balance, the powerless were left defenseless, and the court’s own authority and legitimacy were diminished. “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall warned in 1991, in what turned out to be his final dissenting opinion. The dissenting justices in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the watershed case that discarded nearly 50 years of American jurisprudence protecting a woman’s right to terminate…

WHEN I MET Eve Babitz in the spring of 2012, she was living in a one-bedroom condo in a sun-faded building on a quiet block in West Hollywood. Entering was difficult, nearly impossible. Why isn’t easy to explain. There was, first of all, Eve’s radical strangeness. This sounds, I realize, like a polite way of calling her nuts, and she was nuts. (Huntington’s disease had been eating away at her brain for years.) But she wasn’t only nuts, and she wasn’t always nuts. There were plenty of lucid moments. The problem was the stench—black, foul, choking—that surrounded the condo like a force field. If intense fascination with someone is love, then I loved Eve. And the intensity of my fascination was what finally allowed me, six months after our first…

PALE PINK PLASTER decorates the exterior of Les Rhumbs, a villa in Granville, France, where the Dior family moved when Christian was a year old. Named after the compass rose, a starlike maritime tool depicted in a floor mosaic, the property instead attuned the future couturier to the floral kind—pruned in the garden or growing along the cliffs. It’s the wild variety that Dior Beauty has homed in on. Through a series of hybridizations, the next-gen rose de Granville is the jewel of the brand’s Prestige skin care, with active ingredients harnessed from stem to petal. This year, the house inaugurates a six-hectare garden devoted to the sustainable cultivation of these cosmetic powerhouses, powdery pink like the nearby Les Rhumbs (now the Musée Christian Dior). Organic farming practices make use…

THE EMMYS MUST be a frustrating night for network TV executives trying to get their 10,000 steps in—they certainly don’t get to walk to the stage much. “Even when broadcast shows do step more outside the box, it can be a challenge to fight the perception that cable/streaming is just cooler and more ‘prestige,’” says Justin Spitzer, who created the new NBC series American Auto. “The slogan ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO’ has translated into a lot of network writers’ empty trophy cases.” Broadcast shows can’t explore the dark side of human behavior like cable networks and streamers can, but surely a comedy Emmy or two should be doable? In 2010, when ABC’s Modern Family won best comedy series, executive producer Steven Levitan told the crowd, “We are so thrilled…

When LEWIS HAMILTON became a Formula 1 driver, success came quickly, but an easy sense of belonging did not. “I didn’t feel like I was welcome,” he tells me. “I didn’t feel like I was accepted. God knows how many of these drivers say: ‘This is not what a Formula 1 driver is. That’s not how you behave. This is not how you do it. Tattoos? No! A Formula 1 driver doesn’t have tattoos! A Formula 1 driver doesn’t have a personality—and piercings!’” Hamilton carried on regardless, doing things his own way, and it can’t be said to have worked out too badly. He is now one of most famous athletes on earth, even more so since Netflix’s documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive brought his sport to a…

IN HIS BEST-SELLING biography Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that the visionary’s youngest daughter, Eve, is the apple that fell closest to the tree—a “strong-willed, funny firecracker” who used to call her father’s assistant to make sure she was on his calendar. “I have zero recollection of that,” Jobs tells me over lunch. “I’m so sorry to let you down there. I have a recollection of going to work with him and drawing on this one whiteboard in his office that I believe stands there to this day, with all my little doodles on it. I would just subconsciously soak in all the beauty and gorgeous design around me.” I note that there’s an iPhone resting on the table between us and recording our interview. “It’s a beautiful reminder for…

HIGH ABOVE THE LIGHTS of Los Angeles stands the Mountain, impervious to the Hollywood power players and business tycoons plotting and scheming below. Many have coveted its 157 acres, but the Mountain has remained tantalizingly out of reach. Spanning a surface area bigger than 100 football fields, this grassy, lush mountaintop has been the prize—once valued at $1 billion—of Middle Eastern royals, A-list stars, and mega-moguls. Rihanna, Salma Hayek, James Cameron, Elon Musk, and others have made pilgrimages to the Mountain, for roving Oscar parties and charity balls. Yet the only creatures to make the Mountain their home are the deer that frolic nearby. At other points known as Tower Grove or the Vineyard, the Mountain of Beverly Hills is arguably the city’s most spectacular undeveloped parcel of land. For the…