Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-15 i Vanity Fair

“Impressively prescient. . . . A book as a box of chocolates.” —associated press “Fantastic.” —publishers weekly “Delightful.” —booklist NOW in Paperback…

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ For “Rihanna’s Solo Act,” on page 138, Contributing Photographer Annie Leibovitz traveled to Havana to photograph the Barbados-born superstar. “Annie and Rihanna have a special connection,” says Fashion and Style Director Jessica Diehl. “Even through throngs of hundreds of spectators and fans, they were completely at ease.” Leibovitz also photographed Bartlett Sher, resident director at Lincoln Center Theater, for his V.F. Portrait, on page 150. MICHAEL LEWIS Earlier this year, the New York Public Library unveiled its $2.15 million acquisition of the private papers of New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe. In “The White Stuff,” on page 176, Contributing Editor Michael Lewis mines this remarkable trove to construct an original portrait of Wolfe’s rise to literary stardom. “I met Tom Wolfe 25 years ago,” says Lewis. “I never presumed…

FLAME WAR Does Tinder inspire emotionless encounters? Emotions run high. The photo of our nation’s best and brightest huddled over their smartphones waiting to bag their next score is profoundly sad [“Tinder Is the Night,” by Nancy Jo Sales, September]. To think this generation sidesteps the delightful frisson that has fueled the arts from Romeo and Juliet to the Twilight saga. Slow down, live a little, love a little; dare to savor the stomach-churning anxiety and soaring bliss that have intoxicated the world forever. Elite ladies of the metropolis: those who emerge only into the pale-green light of dating apps are salamanders, not men. ANNE STERLING Salem, Massachusetts I enjoyed reading your recent article on Tinder. It did a great job of exploring the many double standards around dating, sexuality,…

Philippe Halsman and Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Yvonne Halsman, from Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book (Damiani), a new, facsimile edition that brings the classic 1959 photo book back into print. Eye Spy Glamour WARBY PARKER, the five-year-old eyewear company that has become the go-to brand for millennials and grandparents alike, has set its sights on the jet set with its latest collection. Thea, a limited edition of three different frames—Lovett, Grace, and Penrose—comes in two shades (Jet Black and Red Canyon) and is hand-trimmed in a stainless-steel accent that has been triple coated in 24-karat gold. How chic! Inspired by the ancient Greek golden mean—the notion that true beauty lies in proportion and balance—W.P. picked as its muse the Titan goddess of light, who was said to have given gold its…

MOTORMOUTH Eichner, photographed in New York City Belligerent, neurotic, and raised in an outer borough, Billy Eichner—or at least his performing persona—is what native New Yorkers were like before the advent of Internet wealth, matcha, and the High Line. Since 2011, the comic has channeled his gonzo energy into the Funny or Die– produced TV series Billy on the Street, in which he stampedes up and down Manhattan’s avenues, microphone in hand, desperately demanding answers of passersby to such urgent prompts as “Do you think Jennifer Hudson peaked too soon?” and “Dinklage versus Patinkin?” Equally beloved by comedy’s Old Guard (e.g., David Letterman and the late Joan Rivers) and new (e.g., Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler, on whose Parks and Recreation he had a recurring role), Eichner enjoyed his first…

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM @VANITYFAIR ONLINE FEATURES HOTEL HAVANA By RON BEINNER As diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba cool off, tourism is heating up. Explore the best places to spend those Havana Nights in the city’s time-honored hotels. IT’S YOUR FIRST LOVE, CHARLIE BROWN By DARRYN KING Next month, Charlie Brown and his gang re-unite for The Peanuts Movie. As the beloved comic strip comes to the big screen, meet the original voice behind the Little Red-Haired Girl, the ultimate symbol of unrequited love. A MOVABLE FEAST By MICAH NATHAN Fried chicken on the Champs-Élysées? VF.com explores the new taste for southern food in the City of Light and foresees the next American dishes to catch on. GAME, SET, MATCH By KATEY RICH Visit the set…

The myriad vulgarities of Donald Trump—examples of which are retailed daily on Web sites and front pages these days—are not news to those of us who have been living downwind of him for any period of time. I first encountered Trump more than 30 years ago. Back then he was a flashy go-getter from an outer borough eager to make his name in Manhattan real estate. Which he succeeded in doing in the only way he knew how: by putting his name in oversize type on anything he was associated with—buildings, yes, but also vodka, golf courses, starchy ties, and even a sham of a real-estate school. Most people who own private planes include their initials as part of the tail number. Not Trump. On his campaign jet, a Boeing…

It’s been the greatest year of my life, but also, it messed with everything there is to mess with,” says Sam Smith, 23, about his enormously successful debut album (In the Lonely Hour). “It was draining and challenging,” he adds, “but nothing that a little therapy and a few hugs from my mum couldn’t sort.” The London native, who won four Grammys and has sold more than eight million albums with his soulful voice and sad songs (including the No. 1 hit “Stay with Me”), talks with Lisa Robinson about fame, romance, landing the James Bond theme song, and singing while standing still. LISA ROBINSON: How did you react to being called “the male Adele”? SAM SMITH: Every artist is always going to be compared to someone, so to be…

Patti Smith, the poet and shaman of punk rock, kindly met me for a late lunch at six p.m. Omen Azen, a favored hangout of hers, is close to her home on Macdougal Street, in SoHo, New York, and this American icon, whose first album, in 1975, Horses, revolutionized the music scene, had just returned from an extensive tour of Europe with her band. She told me in her unassuming way that the biggest audience she played to on tour was about 110,000 at the Glastonbury Festival, in England, the smallest, about 40 kids she read poetry to “in a field someplace in Poland.” Yet it’s as if she became a rock star by accident. “It’s a mystery I’ve never solved,” she said. “What is it that drives me to…

December 12 (circle the date, baby) will mark the hundredth anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth in a humble little manger in Hoboken, New Jersey. To remind the rest of us cats that it’s Sinatra’s century, we’re just living in it, comes James Kaplan’s Sinatra: The Chairman (Doubleday), the avidly awaited follow-up to Frank: The Voice (2010), the first volume of Kaplan’s compendious biography of the crooner turned kingpin. As its title suggests, Sinatra: The Chairman covers the conversion and consolidation of vocal genius and stardom into cultural and political power, with plenty of dames on the side. It charts the rebound of Sinatra’s ailing career after his Academy Award–winning performance in From Here to Eternity to his final repose near Palm Springs, where he is rumored to have been buried…

Exclusively from the Vanity Fair Archive World-renowned photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Anton Bruehl, and Edward Steichen have helped to define our culture through their celebrity photography in Vanity Fair. Collect timeless artistry with five exquisite portraits of some of the most notable talents of their times—Louis Armstrong, Louise Brooks, George Gershwin, Katharine Hepburn, and Leslie Howard— available now as a collectible set from the Vanity Fair Archive. Own the collection: Visit condenaststore.com/vflimited E-mail commercialsales@condenast.com This special portfolio is assembled in a custom linen box that may be displayed flat on a coffee table or bookshelf, or the individual prints can be framed for wall display, as shown above. Frames not included.…

Are Americans creatures of habit? Maybe, if it’s bad habits we’re talking about. And, being Americans, we’re pretty proud of that; or anyway we show a magnanimous understanding and acceptance of our foibles. Our go-to bad habit appears to be gluttony: far and away the habit we most want to conceal (we claim) is “eating something fattening.” And if we could get away with anything, with no bad consequences, it would be overeating. How appropriate that we needed two questions, instead of the customary one, to confirm that. In a related question, the thing we most want to hide from others differs according to gender. More women (33 percent) say it’s their body; more men (26 percent) say it’s their credit-card statement. (An equal number of men and women—2 percent—say…

AGE: 28. PROVENANCE: Vancouver, British Columbia. CLASS ACT: The Canadian ingénue studied English literature at McGill University, in Montreal. She then moved to New York City, in 2009, where she attended the Neighborhood Playhouse for theater training. “Behavior matters more than words.” FRESH AIR: The actress’s big break came in the 2013 Sundance darling Breathe In, alongside Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, and Amy Ryan. “It was the best introduction to professional acting that I could have hoped for. The cast wasn’t populated with jaded people; everyone was excited. To enter the business with that sort of energy was so lovely. It set a high bar.” ON FIRE: She’s also in AMC’s series Halt and Catch Fire, which is set in Texas’s “Silicon Prairie” in the 1980s. “It’s about ego and…

LYNN W YATT In the categories of “best”—etiquette, dressed, dinner-party companion, living-room décor, and so forth—this Texan doyenne is tops. WILLIS & GEIGER JACKETS The now defunct American expedition-supply company practically outfitted the 20th century, designing clothing for Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. (ebay.com, if you’re lucky) CHRIS CRAFT Mahogany-hulled powerboats, designed and built starting in the 1920s, gave way to primarily fiberglass and metal bodies by the late 50s. (chriscraft.com) ANYTHING BY DONALD ROBERTSON If you haven’t started collecting the fashion illustrator’s pieces, you’re already behind. From his canvas paintings and clothing to eyeglass cases and pillows—people can’t get enough of the Instagram star’s work. (donaldrobertson.com) LE MARTINIQUE WALLPAPER It’s what lines the halls, and the walls of the coffee shop, at the Beverly Hills…

Bartlett Sher is my dear friend and the younger brother I always wanted. He also happens to be a genius. He grew up in a large, loud, crazy Catholic-Jewish family in the San Francisco of the 1970s, and that has informed everything he has ever done in the theater. He thrives on spontaneity, looseness, and occasional insanity, and then, because of his acute intelligence and vigorous Jesuit education, he creates order and sense. He can throw a whirling dervish out of whirl, to quote from a Rodgers and Hammerstein show he hasn’t directed, and will then re-assemble the pieces so that the dervish will whirl more effectively than ever. Most people who go to the theater don’t really know what a good director does. They assume a show is well…

One morning almost exactly 10 years ago, Kelly Rutherford, a willowy blonde TV and movie actress, then 36, got up early, and, per ritual, led her Australian cattle dog, Oliver, into her Range Rover and headed down from her Hollywood Hills home to the Beverly Hills flats— the charming, intimate lower flats, between Charleville and Olympic. That’s where, after her birth in Kentucky and a spell in Arizona, she’d spent some happy years of her youth, as the responsible oldest child of a glamorous woman who’d had her children very young and been a model for Bill Blass, but then endured a hard divorce and ended up scrambling. In that admittedly “notwhite-picket-fence family—but whose is?,” as Rutherford puts it, there was love but not stability, and teenage Kelly, in the…

An unapologetically irreverent, iconoclastic, and stylistic synthesizer, Peter Saul, at 81, is a beloved if curmudgeonly father of Pop art. In November, New York’s Mary Boone Gallery features his newest paintings based on “historical classics,” including Rigaud’s full-length portrait Louis XIV, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus. In these spirited re-interpretations, Saul is looking at the classics, he explains, according to his “will or whimsy. I let the subject guide me”—and that’s an understatement. His work is steeped in art-historical reference with influences ranging from “Smokey Stover” comics and the pages of Mad magazine to the paintings of Francis Bacon, Paul Cadmus, and George Tooker. The result of the uncorking of this artist’s id is unruly and imaginative: cartoony mayhem, hilarious brutality, social commentary…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? I don’t know about perfect, but a creamy scoop of green-tea ice cream comes fairly close. What is your greatest fear? There’s no point living at my age with many ingrained great fears. Though I do have that dream that I walk out onto the stage nude. Does that count? Which living person do you most admire? Pope Francis, who left the Vatican to wash the feet of non-believers. Which talent would you most like to have? It’d be nice to be what they call a Renaissance man. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? Oh my. I don’t know. What is your greatest regret? I once argued with my father about why he let the government put us all in internment…