Vanity Fair articles from December 2004

Vanity Fair archives from December 2004

Runway Maneuvers.(Leonardo DiCaprio photographed by Brigitte Lacombe )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Krista Smith On a quintessentially crisp Southern California morning, Leonardo DiCaprio arrived at the single-runway Santa Monica Airport in his civilian uniform of choice-backward John Kerry baseball cap, blue jeans, T-shirt, and...

The Ballad of Rick and Johnny.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... David Kamp's "American Communion" [October], about the unique relationship between singer Johnny Cash and his producer Rick Rubin, was one of the most spiritually affecting tributes that I have ever read. What I found particularly inspiring was...

Secret Daggers.(House of Flying Daggers)(Movie Review)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Bruce Handy Will there be a more visually spectacular film this year than Zhang Yimou's gorgeous House of Flying Daggers? I doubt it, unless maybe Terrence Malick has a secret picture in the can, but chances are it wouldn't also be...

Surrendering to Love.(A Very Long Engagement)(Movie Review)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Bruce Handy Here's an idea that really shouldn't have worked: combine the romantic whimsy of Amelie with the literal gut-wrenching of post-Saving Private Ryan war movies. The result is A Very Long Engagement, a film in which shy...

GUILTY PLEASURE.(Movie Review)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Dan Beers Focking starring: Zoolander, Raging Bull, Rain Man, Yentl, and Gwyneth Paltrow's mom. Directed by: Jay Roach, the guy who brought you Mystery, Alaska. Can you focking wait? In theaters December 22, 2004. Meet the plot: A...

Hot Type.(new books)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Elissa Schappell Roar! Imagine eavesdropping on roguish photographer, writer, and African explorer Peter Beard as he beguiles his daughter with thrilling adventure stories of roping rhinos and tracking lions, and you'll have Zara's...

German Easels.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Daniel Kunitz The most recent crop of young German artists has galleries and collectors in an astonished buying frenzy. But Eberhard Havekost, who was born in Dresden and now lives in Berlin, was among the very first to arrive on...

Crimes of the Heart.(My Life with Bonnie and Clyde)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Elissa Schappell For true-crime fans, the discovery of Blanche Caldwell Barrow's prison diary, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (University of Oklahoma), is a boon. Blanche, the wife of Clyde's big brother Buck, was the sole survivor...

Voluminous Volumes.(Bibliography)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Jessica Flint There are pricey photo books. (For up to $30,000, special hand-sewn volumes, with actual prints by photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkin and Sheila Metzner, have been offered by publisher 21st.) There are precious...

Kissinger Declassified.(Henry Kissinger)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Christopher Hitchens Sometimes, in spite of its stolid, boring commitment to lying, a despotic regime will actually tell you all you need to know. It invents a titanic system of slave-labor camps, for example, and it gives this...

Vanity Fair Nominates Harold J. Smith.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Adam Laukhuf BECAUSE this Columbo of the international art scene has outsmarted the world's most sophisticated criminals for half a century, working with Scotland Yard, the F.B.I., and special police units to recover millions in...

A Dark and Busy Night; The night Martha slipped away to prison, the author attended the wedding reception of her publicist, Susan Magrino, as well as Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder's museum-mansion bash for Bob Colacello's biography of the Reagans.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Dominick Dunne I had hoped to say good-bye to Martha Stewart before she went off to serve her five months in prison, so I was pleased when I learned that we were both invited to the wedding of our mutual friend the publicist Susan...

Executives at the Gate; The men in line to run America's most powerful media corporations aren't fire-breathing, world-conquering moguls like their predecessors.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Michael Wolff At Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., if you're in the innermost circle, you refer to the 73-year-old Murdoch as "the old man." He's the all-knowing father of the media ages-and everyone else is unlearned, ill-equipped,...

Weapons of Self-Destruction; Heroic soldiers returning from Iraq seem to be prey to the same debilitating, potentially fatal illnesses that first became known as Gulf War syndrome and then afflicted veterans of Bosnia and Kosovo.
December 1, 2004... Byline: David Rose When he started to get sick, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ramos's first instinct was to fight. "I had joint pains, muscle aches, chronic fatigue, but I tried to exercise it out," he says. "I was going for runs, working out....

Indiscreet Sixteen; Sixteen-year-old Melissa Panarello's diary horrified her parents, became the talk of Italy, and made her an international literary star.(100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Holly Brubach Most teenage girls who keep a diary stash it away and grow up. Take it from a former teenage girl: this is just as well. One day years later, sorting through a carton in the attic, the woman, now a veteran of love,...

The Hand of Fashion; An Italian aristocrat whose fashion drawings made him the Avedon of illustration, Rene Gruau talked Dior into starting a couture house while refusing to be tied down himself.(Obituary)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Amy Fine Collins Ask any cultivated Frenchman to describe feminine elegance and sooner or later he'll mention the drawings of Rene Gruau, whose supremely stylized, exquisitely refined high-fashion goddesses (even naked they look...

The Danger List.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Michael Shnayerson Two days after 9/11, Hank Asher poured himself a wineglass-size martini and sat down to dinner in his mansion in Boca Raton, Florida. His houseguest, a former drug agent named Bill Shrewsbury, knew Asher well...

Scents and Sensibility; Concocting perfumes and creams in her London walk-up, Jo Malone broke all the rules of scent (coffee and lilies.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Laura Jacobs Jo Malone was born with a nose. Her early memories are snapshots in scent. Father: linseed oil on a paint palette, the starch of his crisp white shirts. Mother: Je Reviens perfume, Christian Dior's Diorissimo. Warmth:...

The Sorrow and the Pilates; Bikram yoga, Power Pilates, spinning, African dance: the author, a middle-aged Brit, spent a weekend facing total humiliation (and fighting locker-room phobia) in the health clubs of New York.
December 1, 2004... Byline: A. A. Gill Nobody told me I'd need a sarong. The girl at the desk with the open-heart-surgery scar down her impressively toned chest never mentioned it. She just looked at me with a touch too much wide-eyed surprise and said, "So...

Hostage to Fortune; After squandering his vast A&P inheritance, Huntington Hartford turned to drugs, then vanished from sight.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Suzanna Andrews The photographs and newspaper clippings, yellowed with age, lie scattered on Huntington Hartford's bed, reminders of a time long gone. There is Hartford with the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali at a nightclub in...

Paz Vega.(Brief Article)(Interview)(Biography)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 28, actor. PROVENANCE: Seville, Spain. TOO SEXY: Vega starred as Lucia in the Spanish import Sex and Lucia. "It was my first big role. That movie, the success was, for the director, for...

What if Paris Hilton were president of the United States?(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Henry Alford JANUARY President says of landslide victory, "It's all about the belly chain." FEBRUARY President brings troops home from Iraq to enlarge nation's dating pool. MARCH President awards...

Val Kilmer in the biblical sense.(Interview)(Biography)
December 1, 2004... Byline: George Wayne Val Kilmer has weathered two decades of Hollywood stardom, during which he acquired the notorious reputation of a brilliant yet difficult, often abrasive actor. Now his career has taken an ancient-historical turn: he...

The Sky's the Limit; Seven years after Titanic made Leonardo DiCaprio the object of global mania-and a $20-million-per-picture star-he has finally satisfied a longtime obsession of his own.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Evgenia Peretz Riding up an elevator in a no-frills office building at an unremarkable address, a short, middle-aged man looks up at the young guy in the backward baseball cap. "Haven't I seen you somewhere?" the man asks,...

Prime-Time Princess.(Brief Article)(Interview)(Biography)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Krista Smith At just 18, British-born beauty Mischa Barton has taken over prime time in Fox's deliciously over-the-top ensemble drama, The O.C. As Marissa Cooper, the privileged and complicated sexpot whose youthful angst plays out...

The Gossip Behind the Gossip; "What the hell does 'canoodling' mean, anyway.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Frank Digiacomo When pictures of Britney Spears wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words page six six six were published all over the world last year, they confirmed that a transformation had taken place in the gossip business....

Cash Only.(Walk the Line)(Movie Review)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Carolyn Bielfeldt Bob Dylan said of Johnny Cash, "He was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him." Willie Nelson called Cash "one of the original outlaws," and Kris Kristofferson saw him as "Abraham Lincoln with a...

Two Sons, One Destiny; While Joseph P. Kennedy relentlessly groomed Joe junior, his sterling firstborn, for the White House, his frail and "sloppy" second son, Jack, learned to draw on the best of his father's love and-with some brief help from a psychologist-shield himself from the control that went with it.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Cari Beauchamp Several months after his inauguration, in 1961, Jack Kennedy was relaxing at the family compound in Hyannis Port with his friend and distant in-law, Gore Vidal. "You know," Jack said, "I'm getting awfully tired of...

Eminem's World; Perhaps the most controversial musician of his generation, Eminem has pushed every possible hot button.(Interview)(Biography)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Lisa Robinson Eminem is standing next to the mixing board in the control room of a recording studio near 8 Mile Road in Detroit. He's dressed in a red warm-up suit, gray T-shirt, and white Nike sneakers. A patterned do-rag on his...

Louis Auchincloss; Over the course of more than 50 years, novelist and biographer Louis Auchincloss has established himself as one of America's pre-eminent chroniclers of New York's upper class.(Brief Article)(Interview)(Biography)
December 1, 2004... What is your idea of perfect happiness? A weekend with all my immediate family. What is your greatest fear? A painful terminal illness. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Cassandra. Which living person...

Over There, Over Here.(Editorial)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Graydon Carter You think getting into New York is a hassle? This is what it takes to get to Baghdad these days. First, there's the $630, 80-mile flight from Jordan. Dodging surface-to-air missiles, the pilot zigzags the plane into...