Vanity Fair articles from February 2005

Vanity Fair archives from February 2005

Lynn Collins.(actor)(Brief Article)(Interview)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 25, actor. PROVENANCE: Houston. HOO-HA: After auditioning for a minor role in director Michael Radford's adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, Collins landed the female lead (Portia) when Al Pacino...

What If ... What if your mother were appointed to the Supreme Court.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Henry Alford MONDAY Mom praises her work clothes: vertical folds and color black are slimming! TUESDAY Mom forgets to take her lithium, becomes erratic swing vote. WEDNESDAY Mom says she spent lunch...

Victoria Gotti: the godmother.(Interview)
February 1, 2005... Byline: George Wayne She grew up Mob royalty, but Victoria Gotti never allowed the family business to halt her rise in the field of journalism and the fickle world of reality TV. The poofy platinum blonde from Queens is transforming the...

Star Wars The Last Battle; Opening May 19, Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith is set on eight different planets, with an entire army of Wookiees and what promises to be the ultimate lightsaber duel.(Interview)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Namehere In February 1972, a skinny, little-known, 27-year-old filmmaker named George Lucas took a No. 2 pencil and some blue- and green-lined loose-leaf notebook paper and started writing a story treatment for a science-fiction...

The Man In The Hood And New Accounts of Prisoner Abuse in Iraq; Months after the Bush administration insisted to the world that the Abu Ghraib abuses had been halted, a 15-year-old Iraqi claims, he was detained for two weeks outside Baghdad, held under onerous conditions, sexually abused, then told his arrest had been a mistake.
February 1, 2005... Byline: Donovan Webster Last summer, at what they all called "the airport camp," outside Baghdad, few Iraqi detainees wanted to visit the bathroom during the morning shift. That was when, they believed, the Americans sexually harassed...

Works of Wonder.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Laura Jacobs "It's all your fault I got into this"-thus Alvin Ailey teased Carmen de Lavallade for having urged him to quit gymnastics for dance. "This," of course, turned out to be history. Ailey founded his visionary troupe in...

Sorcerer's Apprentice; Dramatic testimony, heavy irony, Hollywood gossip- the Disney trial brought all that and more to a small Delaware town, where C.E.O. Michael Eisner and former president Michael Ovitz played to a packed courthouse: longtime friends turned deadly enemies, now joined to defend Ovitz's hiring and $140 million firing against a lawsuit by angry shareholders.
February 1, 2005... Byline: Dominick Dunne In October, Hollywood came to Georgetown, Delaware, a one-street town two hours from Wilmington and a very curious place for this it-could-only-happen-in-Hollywood story to play itself out. The story has to do with...

Gaza's Grand Delusion; With Yasser Arafat gone and Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan approved by the Israeli parliament, is there hope for peace in the Gaza Strip?(Column)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Scott Anderson An Old Joke About Scorpions and Toads A scorpion comes to a river's edge and sees a toad sunning on the bank. "Excuse me, Mr. Toad," he says. "I need to cross the river, but I can't swim. Will you...

Nightmare on Sunset; They live in some of America's most exclusive enclaves, alongside stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay Leno, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, but the residents of Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, and much of Beverly Hills are in the grip of a crime wave.
February 1, 2005... Byline: Michael Shnayerson His guests had just sung "Happy Birthday" to his 18-year-old daughter when the host got word from a guest that a stranger was upstairs. A stranger wearing a ski mask. More baffled than anything else, the...

The X-rated Emperor; Launching Penthouse in 1965 to subsidize his painting, Bob Guccione turned graphic porn, muckraking journalism, and tabloid headlines into one of the greatest success stories in magazine history, the cornerstone of a multi-million-dollar publishing empire.(Interview)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Patricia Bosworth "I'm frankly amazed at my own optimism," says Bob Guccione, the 74-year-old pioneering pornographer and founder of Penthouse magazine. "Whenever I'm facing a crisis-and I'm certainly facing a crisis now-I just...

John Kenneth Galbraith; The author of nearly four dozen books, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, with his observations on public policy, has traced and shaped the course of 20th-century American history.(Interview)
February 1, 2005... What is your idea of perfect happiness? Freedom of thought, in a peaceful and economically benign environment, enjoyed with devoted friends. What is your greatest fear? Unquestionably, the continuing survival of the warmongers...

Unsolved Mysteries.(Editorial)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Graydon Carter Me, I'm in a kind of move-on, let's-wait-and-see sort of mood with regard to the events of the past year. Perhaps President Bush will become the "compassionate conservative" he once promised. Perhaps the Democrats...

Heir To Misfortune.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... Your article about Huntington Hartford ["Hostage to Fortune," by Suzanna Andrews, December] brought back a childhood experience to me. My father worked for the A&P on Amesbury Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He started with the company in...

Hot Tracks.(Music.)(Sound Recording Review)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Lisa Robinson L'amour, l'amour: just in time for Valentine's Day, some twisted love songs for some twisted times. On Before the Poison, Marianne Faithfull's chilling, elegant voice is surrounded by musical contributions from a...

Suddenly Single.(Honeymoon with My Brother)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Edward Helmore Four years ago, in what would turn out to be a stroke of good fortune, Franz Wisner got dumped at the altar. He held the wedding reception anyway-a surreal event, he says, at which he was "embarrassed, pissed off,...

Master Flash.(Andre Kertesz retrospective at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Aaron Gell If photographer Andre Kertesz was "an amateur," as he insisted throughout the seven decades he spent with a camera in his hands, one can't help wondering what that makes the rest of us. His work, the subject of a major...

Meet Me at the Modern.(restaurant at Museum of Modern Art: the Modern)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Restaurateur Danny Meyer, the man behind the perennial Zagat favorites Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, has partnered with the Museum of Modern Art to open the Modern. Located on the museum's first floor and overlooking the famous...

Hang 10.(Don James: Prewar Surfing Photographs)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... In 1936, 16-year-old Don James began chronicling the lazy, golden summer days he spent with friends along Southern California's coastline-from Malibu to San Onofre-with his father's folding Brownie camera. At that time, there were fewer...

Blueblood Nation.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Henry Alford This new book, Prep? About a kinda-wallflower-type girl who gets a scholarship to a big-deal boarding school in Massachusetts and tries to fit in? It is so, so cool-I am totally taking my copy to St. Barts for break....

Life in the Fast Lane.(Ralph Lauren 's automobile collection exhibited at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Amy Fine Collins Cars, Roland Barthes said, are today's cathedrals. Next month, Ralph Lauren will roll out at least 16 glorious reasons to be worshipful. From March through July, highlights of the designer's legendary automobile...

Extra Fresh.(skin- and body-care boutique)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Byline: Melissa Ceria Fourteen years ago, Lev Glazman and wife Alina Roytberg opened Fresh, a skin- and body-care boutique that won over customers with its natural and fragrant products, such as Milk & Rose Shampoo, Orange Chocolate Shea...

The Gay Divide; While America embraces gay-themed TV shows such as The L Word, Queer as Folk, and Will & Grace, real-life homosexuals are under political attack.
February 1, 2005... Byline: James Wolcott It's not what you do, it's where you do it. Flash a nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show, drop a strategically draped towel before ABC's Monday Night Football, and every self-appointed bishop passes gas on the...

"U Want me 2 Kill Him?"; After constructing a fantasy world of girls, spies, and villains in an MSN chat room, a lonely 14-year-old was found in a deserted alley with nearly fatal stab wounds.
February 1, 2005... Byline: Judy Bachrach Sometimes, as night falls over Greater Manchester, the ingenious adolescent returns to the place where he was stabbed last year, when he was 14. The boy is tall for his age, but slight, with olive skin, a long crooked...