Vanity Fair articles from December 2007

Vanity Fair archives from December 2007

A Convenient Target.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... I applaud Evgenia Peretz for exposing some of the true villains of the 2000 election ["Going After Gore," October], those supposedly esteemed journalists who so obviously favored the aw-shucks flash of George W. over the true substance of Al...

The Cultural Divide December.
December 1, 2007... 03 For the first time, the ceremony to award the Turner Prize for contemporary art is held outside London, at the Tate Liverpool. The short-listed are Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson, and Mark Wallinger. (12/3; tate.org.uk) 06...

Hot Type.(Book review)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Elissa Schappell Ho ho ho. Hugh Hefner's Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds (Chronicle) is a bunny hop through the history of American desire, from the blonde and bosomy bombshells of the 1950s to the sun-kissed and bushy-tailed...

IN QUICK ORDER.(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Anna Wintour exalts the Stylist: The Interpreters of Fashion (Rizzoli). Lorenzo Ottaviani says "Salute!" to the vintage posters of Travel Italia (Abrams). Photographer Terry O'Neill plays Sinatra: Frank and Friendly (Evans Mitchell). Rich Blake...

Hot Tracks.(Buyers guide)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Lisa Robinson Music doesn't usually last, but when it does you just can't get rid of it. While new music is out or expected soon from Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, Britney Spears, and the Wu-Tang Clan, the...

Remote Control.(Truth or Consequences, New Mexico)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Edward Helmore Many places seek to enhance themselves with art, but few are so compellingly kooky as Truth or Consequences. This desert town of hot springs and 1950s-era billboards, on the banks of the Rio Grande 150 miles south of...

Achievement of a Lifetime.(Kennedy Center Honors)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Todd S. Purdum It will turn 30 years old on Sunday, December 2, but the Kennedy Center Honors is, more than ever, the hottest ticket in Washington. Created by the filmmaker George Stevens Jr. to uphold John F. Kennedy's dream of an...

MONTREUX'S MUSIC MAGIC.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Julian Sancton At the Montreux Jazz Festival in December 1971, on the quiet shores of Lake Geneva, a blazing fire consumed the casino during a performance by Frank Zappa, inspiring Deep Purple's song "Smoke on the Water." The...

GRECIAN FORMULA.(Barbara Shaum's Greek sandals)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Olivia Strand Didn't make it to Patmos last summer? Fake it with a few visits to the East Village, where Barbara Shaum has been crafting custom Greek sandals since 1961. Long a favorite of designers and style insiders, she's done...

Private Lives.(Thompson Beverly Hills hotel)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Marshall Heyman Drive down Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills after nine on most nights and there's zero going on. But 36-year-old hotelier Jason Pomeranc is hoping to change that faster than you can say "Polo Lounge" with the...

Elle du Jour.(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... "I wanted a face for the woman I dress," Yves Saint Laurent said in 1978 when he made his break into the world of beauty. The following year he created a sensation as models blazed down the runways in YSL Rouge Pur Lipstick No. 19-a radical...

IT'S A WRAP.(Aveda's lokta-wrapped, gift boxes)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Jessica Flint Natural-products company Aveda is giving back this holiday season with an initiative that benefits Nepal, the world's 12th-poorest country. Because rapid deforestation has wreaked havoc on the region's beloved...

LONDON.(Mark Birley memorial in London, England)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... What Mourners gather at St. Paul's church in Knightsbridge for the memorial of Mark Birley, the founder of Annabel's, the most famous nightclub in the world. Who Lady Weinberg, the Duchess of York, Peter Blond, Lord and Lady...

LONDON.
December 1, 2007... What After showcasing opulent floating designs, Alasdhair Willis and his Established & Sons team host cocktails and dinner at the subterranean P3. Who Amanda Sharp, Matthew Slotover, Gwyneth Paltrow, the Honorable Angad Paul, Alannah Weston,...

LOS ANGELES.
December 1, 2007... What Friends, artists, and aficionados celebrate Samuel Keller at the stunning home of Michael and Eva Chow. Who Benedikt Taschen, Tierney Gearon, Honor Fraser, Stavros Merjos, Jeremy Strick, Irving and Jackie Blum, and more.

On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part II; Continuing his quest for a healthier, more handsome Hitch, the author puts himself in the hands of four experts.(Christopher Hitchens)(Personal account)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Christopher Hitchens In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London's Bohemia. His literary magazine The New Review was published...

Generals, Gadgets, and Guerrillas; The age of the media gadget is here, with Apple steamrolling the big distributors.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Michael Wolff It's the age of the media gadget. The gadget is the culture. Possibly it's just the age of the iPhone-iPod-iTV-iCar. But I don't think so. I think Steve Jobs and Apple are merely the sharpest promoters of...

The Verdict is Missing.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Dominick Dunne They say one of the items O.J. was trying to get back was the suit he wore to court the day he was acquitted of murder. O.J. calls it his lucky suit. Apparently, Phil Spector wanted to borrow it. -Jay Leno I had...

Rockettes Around the Clock.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Laura Jacobs They're as lovely as Ziegfeld girls, as leggy as showgirls, as apple-pie as pom-pom girls, and they inhabit a surreal realm between A Chorus Line and a halftime band (only with T-straps instead of tubas). They make...

Showdown at Fort Sumner; Two years after Paramount purchased DreamWorks, Hollywood is transfixed by one of the nastiest breakups ever.(Company overview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Bryan Burrough There was a time, not long after Sumner Redstone came to Southern California four years ago, when the world must have seemed rosy and new and full of hope. At 82, an age when peers were dead or lying in retirement...

Interactive Man.(Ed Schlossberg)(Interview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Evgenia Peretz Stylish, cerebral, and reticent, Ed Schlossberg was something of an enigma when he married Caroline Kennedy, in 1986. Twenty-one years later, after he's designed hands-on exhibits for some of the country's...

Waiting for the Plague; Every 48 years or so, in the remote Indian state of Mizoram, hundreds of thousands of acres of bamboo bloom, touching off a plague of rats and devastating famine.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Alex Shoumatoff Some time ago, my attention was caught by a bizarre item buried in the back pages of the Montreal Gazette. It was about a small, remote state in the northeastern corner of India, wedged between Myanmar (formerly...

Francois Pinault's Ultimate Luxury.(Interview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Vicky Ward On Friday, June 8, 2007, the thousands of art aficionados who had made the pilgrimage to the 52nd Venice Biennale experienced what felt like a miracle: after endless days of rain, just as the parties and art shows were...

Majoring in Crime.
December 1, 2007... Byline: John Falk On the morning of December 17, 2004, Betty Jean Gooch, a librarian in the Special Collections Library at Transylvania University, in Lexington, Kentucky, was preparing for her 11 o'clock appointment with Walter Beckman, a...

Bardem Code.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Peter Biskind Robert De Niro made him do it. Become an actor, that is. Javier Bardem, 38, first thought his place might be in front of the camera after seeing Raging Bull when he was a child. The Canary Islands-born Bardem comes...

The Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola; The Coppola with the hot new movie isn't Sofia.(Youth Without Youth)(Interview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Bruce Handy Visiting Francis Ford Coppola one day this summer on his impossibly picturesque 1,650-acre estate in the Napa Valley, where 235 of those acres are planted with grapevines whose fruit was ripening in the noontime sun-the...

A Taste of Fame; For a brainy model with a hot new cookbook, marriage to a literary superstar creates opportunities-and problems.(Padma Lakshmi's Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet)(Interview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Nancy Jo Sales She walked the red carpet that night with Helen Mirren and Queen Latifah and the ladies of Wisteria Lane. It was the 59th Primetime Emmys, and although she wasn't there for the reason she'd always envisioned-her...

When Washington Was Fun; The grand hostesses are history, the president would rather be in bed, and there's a price tag on every evening these days.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Maureen Orth Red Fay, undersecretary of the navy under John F. Kennedy, was a charming bon vivant, a great pal of the president's, and the uncle of my roommate at Berkeley in the 60s. So it was my great good luck, on my very first...

Jasper Johns; Having grown up in Allendale, South Carolina, a setting in which "there were no artists and there was no art," Jasper Johns came to New York in 1949 and changed the course of American painting with his imagery and iconography.(Interview)
December 1, 2007... What is your idea of perfect happiness? I am not strong on perfection What is your greatest extravagance? a frugality that seems to confuse people who work with me What is your current state of mind? something like very...

Giovanna Mezzogiorno.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Krista Smith AGE: 33. PROVENANCE: Rome (birth) and Paris (much of childhood). HIT THE SMOLDERING-LATIN JACKPOT by... landing the female lead in Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera (based on the novel by Nobelist Gabriel...

Seven Crucial Years.(Paul McCartney and Al Gore)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: David Kamp Paul McCartney, 1969-1976 1969 Relations grow chilly with longtime professional partner John Lennon. 1970 Broken and bearded, retreats into arms of loving blonde wife, Linda. 1971 With Linda, sets out on homey, crunchy...

PHILIP ROTH'S CHRISTMAS FAIRY TALE.(Short story)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Craig Brown I HADN'T SEEN Snow White in 40 years. The last time I set eyes on her she'd been lying helplessly prostrate on my sofa, trying hard to impress her teacher with her impudent, beseeching breasts. Her energetic rump spoke...

Million-Dollar Bumpkin.(Larry the Cable Guy)(Interview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: George Wayne Larry the Cable Guy, 44, was raised Dan Whitney on a pig farm in Pawnee City, Nebraska. Years later, the tongue-in-cheek, catchphrase-driven stand-up star who propelled the various Blue Collar Comedy incarnations to...

Mommy's Being Famous Right Now; To Julia Roberts's kids, her latest on-screen incarnation-Tom Hanks's socialite co-conspirator in the new Mike Nichols film, Charlie Wilson's War-is "Cuckoo Mommy.(Interview)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Jane Sarkin, Krista Smith Tucked away on a quaint street near the beach in Venice, California, sits a modest, Craftsman-style house. There are no 40-foot hedges, no long driveway, and no butler or live-in help. We ring the bell,...

Tate-a-Tete; How many art-world stars can fit in a single room.
December 1, 2007... Byline: A. M. Homes Who's Who of artists and collectors gathered in New York last May to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the American Patrons of Tate. Founded in 1987 with an endowment from Sir Edwin Manton and a mandate to acquire North...

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush; The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Joseph E. Stiglitz When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties....

L.A. Noir.(on Gerald R. Ford's photograph in Los Angeles, California )(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: David Friend Gerald R. Ford died a year ago December, at age 93. To honor the 38th president, his White House photographer, David Hume Kennerly, has compiled Extraordinary Circumstances, a photo homage to his former boss. In...

Art's New Superpower; A few years ago, names such as Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhang Huan might have drawn blank stares from Western collectors.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Barbara Pollack With his closely cropped hair, ever burning cigarette, and trademark round eyeglasses, Zhang Xiaogang has become the face of Chinese art, an unlikely rock-star figure at the head of a mania sweeping auction...

Act of Atonement.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Ned Zeman Score one for the writers. When Ian McEwan's best-selling novel Atonement entered the film-adaptation factory, soon after its publication, in 2001, it faced the standard de-lousing process: its nonlinear structure was...

Richard Prince's Outside Streak; Young artists may dream of being Richard Prince, but the 58-year-old former Time Inc.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Steven Daly One evening this past summer, a ferocious electrical storm swept through the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Residents cowered in their homes as thunder shook the area with alarming violence; at around seven p.m. a...

Pride of Lions.(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Elissa Schappell This month the New York Public Library celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Library Lions, which honors remarkable cultural figures in the fields of literature, art, the performing arts, history, and science....

Portraits of a Marriage; At 36, eager to settle down and have a son, Picasso married the beautiful Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, who embraced the role of Mme.(Pablo Picasso)(Excerpt)
December 1, 2007... Byline: John Richardson Excerpted from A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, by John Richardson, to be published this month by Alfred A. Knopf; (c) 2007 by John Richardson Fine Arts Ltd. Picasso's first visit to Rome, in...

Those Bright Young Faces.(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Byline: Norman Jean Roy Ah, to be young, gorgeous, and coming of age on East 65th Street in Manhattan. Meet the young ladies of New York's private all-girls' schools-the real things, caricatured by Gossip Girl on the CW channel. But it's...

California Dreamgirl; When Denny Doherty died, in January, Michelle Phillips became the last of the Mamas and the Papas, the 60s foursome that made hippie sexy and topped the charts for almost two psychedelic years before breaking up.
December 1, 2007... Byline: Sheila Weller When Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty spoke on January 18, they did as they'd done for 40 years: "We made it a point to keep things very professional and not... slip back," Michelle says in that arch, bemused way...