Vanity Fair articles from April 2007

Vanity Fair archives from April 2007

The Cultural Divide April.
April 1, 2007... 3 Singing sensations Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon perform scenes from three operas for the 40th Anniversary Gala of the Metropolitan Opera. DARING DESIGN David Bromstad, the newly minted design star on HGTV's Color Splash,...

A Life in Prints.(Florence Broadhurst)(Biography)
April 1, 2007... Byline: A. M. Homes More impresario than artist, Australian design pioneer Florence Broadhurst was a self-styled scene-maker, unconventional and original, re-inventing herself again and again. Born in rural Queensland, Australia, in...

CALLING ON KATE.(Reardon, Kate)(Interview)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... A sassy young Brit has just joined the circle of immortal manners matrons Emily Post, Abigail Van Buren, and Amy Vanderbilt. Former fashion editor, writer, and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Kate Reardon has culled advice on politesse...

The Good Life.("Privileged Life: Celebrating Wasp Style")(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Byline: John Brodie Every so often the tribe called Wasp pokes its grosgrain headband into the popular imagination-the Princetonians of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the suburbanites of John Cheever, and Thurston Howell III of Gilligan's Island....

BUNDLES OF CHARM.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Olivia Strand Designers might have taken things down a notch for spring, but jewelry-makers have decided that everything is more. The trend for necklaces is toward bundling-layers of materials and moods-and elegant excess. Some...

Hot Type.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Elissa Schappell It's Logan's Run redux! In Christopher Buckley's Boomsday (Warner Twelve), generational warfare erupts when the youth of America, ticked at the enormous Social Security debt baby-boomers have run up, propose they...

Raising a Glass.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Victoria Mather THE CLASSIC New York City BEMELMANS BAR The Carlyle The secret here is discretion and tradition. The murals of a fantastical Central Park, with picnicking rabbits, were drawn in 1947 by artist...

Private Lives.
April 1, 2007... Five years ago, word swept through town like a wildfire in Malibu about the Oscar Niemeyer house in Santa Monica. Who even knew there was a Niemeyer house in North America? Just in case you're not up to snuff on your midcentury cool, Oscar...

PUPPY LOVE.("Year of the Dog")(Movie review)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Bruce Handy Year of the Dog is bookended by Molly Shannon's smile, anxious and tight in the beginning, contented and relaxed at the fade-out-a trajectory that also describes Mike White's winsome movie, his first as a...

Songs with Polish.(Deborah Lippmann's music and nail product to release at a time)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Lisa Robinson Deborah Lippmann's ravishing voice evokes the lush life of smoky jazz clubs and a more glamorous time. On Vinyl, her extraordinary new CD, she also re-invigorates songs written by the Rolling Stones, the Police, Bon...

Natural Beauty.(Stella McCartney's new organic skin-care line)(Interview)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Emily Poenisch Stella McCartney's new organic skin-care line, Care, is purity perfected. "People expect luxury from their organic products," explains McCartney, "yet those two words are never linked. I eat organic food and live a...

TRANCE ENCOUNTER.(Janna Sheehan's new perfume line)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Judy Bachrach Janna Sheehan's new perfume line, Trance Essence, includes scents called Abbey Rose and White Rabbit and will be launched (along with a line of candles, Trance Aura) at a store in Ojai, California, called Bhavantu,...

Hot Looks.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Jessica Flint 1. Tuberose mingles with other fragrant blossoms to create a bouquet in a bottle for Michael Kors's eponymous women's perfume.... 2. Yves Saint Laurent's new Lip Twins duo has a fashionable case and built-in...

Holiday in Iraq; Over Christmas break, the author took his son to northern Iraq, which the U.S. had made a no-fly zone in 1991, ending Saddam's chemical genocide.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Christopher Hitchens Last summer, you may have been among the astonished viewers of American television who were treated to a series of commercials from a group calling itself "Kurdistan-The Other Iraq." These rather touching and...

Iraq's Mercenary King; As a former C.I.A. agent, the author knows how mercenaries work: in the shadows.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Robert Baer Last spring, in Los Angeles, I met with a producer and a screenwriter who were trolling for a good story to turn into a movie-specifically, a story about a pair of colorful adventurers, maybe mercenaries, who get into...

Caught in the Spin Cycle; When the selling of the war turned as sour as the war itself, Lewis "Scooter" Libby was in trouble.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Michael Wolff Around the corner from the trial of Scooter Libby, during a late-afternoon break, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, was telling me that the Republican Party is kaput. "The brand isn't just sick-it's dead. The...

City of Fear; Operating by cell phone, a highly organized prison gang launched an attack that shut down Brazil's largest city last May, with the authorities powerless to stop it.
April 1, 2007... Byline: William Langewiesche For seven days last May the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, teetered on the edge of a feral zone where governments barely reach and countries lose their meaning. That zone is a wilderness inhabited already by large...

Last of Breed.(David Douglas Duncan)(Obituary)
April 1, 2007... Byline: David Friend Though a Kansas City boy at heart, photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, 91, has been living near Cannes for 45 years, first drawn to the region by his pal Pablo Picasso. Duncan, renowned for taking classic...

Brits Behaving Badly; A tour of such New York British hangouts as Soho House, the Red Lion, and Tea & Sympathy left the author, an Englishman, blushing: what makes his fellow expats such a thoroughly annoying lot.
April 1, 2007... Byline: A. A. Gill This is a true story. A friend of mine, an English girl, moved to New York and, soon after arriving, romantically acquired a local boyfriend. Shortly after that they were both invited to a party. It would be, she was...

When Galanos Spelled Glamour; James Galanos cut a delicate swath through 50 years of fashion, whether designing Rosalind Russell's Hollywood chic or Nancy Reagan's White House elegance.(Biography)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Amy Fine Collins Tucked into the Hollywood Hills, off Sunset Boulevard, there is a compact white house, as inconspicuous as it is enigmatic. Except for one tiny paned porthole, it is unpunctured by windows. "To the neighbors this...

Kristen Stewart.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Krista Smith AGE: 17. PROVENANCE: North Hollywood, California. YOU FIRST GLIMPSED HER AS... Jodie Foster's doppelgaenger daughter in Panic Room (2002). "[Director] David Fincher does a lot of takes," Stewart says. "There was...

The Dog Groomer Keeps Blocking My Driveway!(Short story)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Nell Scovell I have to run up and down the stairs all day because the elevator in my town house is slow. We re-landscaped last spring and now only one of the five fountains is working. The screening was a nightmare:...

A League of His Own.(Interview)
April 1, 2007... Byline: George Wayne On Arrested Development, the now canceled show that had critics fawning, Will Arnett played the irascible George Oscar Bluth II. Now with sitcoms in his rearview mirror, he focuses on a number of projects for the big...

"Yes, Mr. President!"; Wielding new and wide-ranging executive-branch powers, George W. Bush has underlined the role of an exclusive club: the Cabinet members, West Wing staffers, and other official and unofficial advisers who help each president write the history of their day.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Todd Brewster Robert S. McNamara sits forward in his chair and wags a finger at me. "I will tell you what leadership is," he says, his crisp diction reminiscent of the press conferences he held during the Vietnam War. "It's Jack...

Leo Grande.(Obituary)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Amy Gross In l983, Leo Lerman was named editor of Vanity Fair, a job he'd wanted for 55 years. As the features editor of Vogue for 11 of those years, he'd exercised his innate taste, wit, curiosity, and talent for instant...

The Kremlin's Long Shadow; The sensational death of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium 210 in London last November, is still being investigated by Scotland Yard.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Bryan Burrough On November 1, 2006, after leaving their modest beige brick town house in the North London neighborhood of Muswell Hill, a petite 44-year-old Russian emigree named Marina Litvinenko took her husband, Alexander,...

The Power of Poiret.(Paul Poiret)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Amy Fine Collins For Andrew Bolton, co-curator with Harold Koda of "Poiret: King of Fashion," opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in May, the outre couturier Paul Poiret was "one of the most radically...

An American Family; Ten years ago, HBO bought a pilot script for a show that no one-not creator David Chase, lead actor James Gandolfini, or any of the original cast-thought would ever get made.
April 1, 2007... Byline: Peter Biskind To paraphrase the timeless words of Edward G. Robinson's Rico in Little Caesar, "Is this the end of Tony?" Well, that wouldn't be for me to say, and in any case, I don't know, what with plot points guarded as...

The Night of the Generals; The six retired generals who stepped forward last spring to publicly attack Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war had to overcome a culture of reticence based on civilian control of the military.
April 1, 2007... Byline: David Margolick By late 2001, briefing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was familiar territory for Lieutenant General Greg Newbold. As director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Newbold, a three-star in the Marines,...

Make Mine Ibiza! Ibiza's devotees-who include Kate Moss, Sean Combs, and the King of Spain-worship its crystalline beaches, 300 days of sunshine, and "anything goes" (we mean anything) attitude toward sex, drugs, and all-night revelry.
April 1, 2007... Byline: George Gurley On Monday afternoon, a plane flies over a nightclub called DC 10, which opens at eight a.m., and on the ground people look up, wave, and yell, "Welcome to Ibiza!" On Wednesday morning at five o'clock, 8,000...

PARIS.
April 1, 2007... What Friends toast Diane von Furstenberg and Michael Roberts with a swanky dinner party at Caviar Kaspia. When January 23, 2007. Who Francois-Marie Banier, Bob Colacello, Didier Grumbach, Katie Holmes, Cathy Horyn,...

LONDON.
April 1, 2007... What Roberta Armani and guests enjoy a private dinner at the Emporio Armani Caffe during Paris couture week. When January 23, 2007. Who Maria Buccellati, Brooke de Ocampo, Zani Gugelmann, Karen Groos, Princess Mafalda...

LONDON.
April 1, 2007... What Charles Finch and Chanel co-host the pre-BAFTA-awards soiree at Annabel's. When February 10, 2007. Who Naomi Watts, Dylan Jones, Cassian Elwes, Eric Fellner, Dan Macmillan, Alan Yentob, and more.

Helen Thomas; With acuity and unmistakable gumption, Helen Thomas has covered the White House since John F. Kennedy, a tour de force in the world of political reporting.(Interview)
April 1, 2007... What is your idea of perfect happiness? Fulfillment of personal goals and dreams. A lasting love. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Historic personalities who have great ideals for all mankind-Jefferson, Lincoln,...

All the Presidents' Men (and Women).(Editorial)
April 1, 2007... Byline: Graydon Carter Inasmuch as we attempted to impeach one president for trying to cover up a political espionage campaign, and another actually was impeached for trying to cover up an inappropriate sexual liaison with a consenting...