Vanity Fair articles from March 2006

Vanity Fair archives from March 2006

Vanity Fair's Tom Ford Moment.(Editorial)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Graydon Carter I should have known that inviting Tom Ford to oversee this year's Hollywood Issue would create a chorus of office lore many octaves higher than the shrill solos that form the usual monthly soundtrack. If I could boil...

Welcome to Tommywood! V.F.'s guest editor, designer Tom Ford, was going to give the 2006 Hollywood portfolio everything he had.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Jim Windolf By now you've seen the cover. There, between two of the loveliest movie stars of the moment, sits design genius Tom Ford, the man who rescued Gucci from oblivion, in an image captured by Vanity Fair's lead...

The Aruba Mystery.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2006... Bryan Burrough's article "Missing White Female" [January] offers a refreshing look at a story that has gripped America's cable-news networks for months. Mr. Burrough details the story behind the story as well as the story seemingly missed...

ART OPENINGS.
March 1, 2006... n The Annie Leibovitz-curated "The City," a student showcase from the South Bronx offshoot of N.Y.C.'s International Center of Photography, is featured at Artexpo New York (3/2-3/6). n A retrospective of French photojournalist Marc Riboud's...

LITERARY AWAKENING.(Jumel Terrace Books)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Duke Ellington wasn't the only one who took the A train-a whole generation of artists and writers went uptown and made Harlem their home. Now, decades after this Renaissance, the Sugar Hill section is humming again. On the quaint tree-lined...

REEL MUSIC.
March 1, 2006... n Michel Gondry directs Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a combination of the comedian's stand-up routines and musical performances by artists and bands such as Mos Def and the Fugees (Rogue Pictures, March 3).

Hot Type.(new books)(Bibliography)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Elissa Schappell Praise be! After the death of his lovely devil-may-care wife, a grieving Maine minister finds his faith rent asunder, his child ostracized, and his once devoted flock feeding wildly on gossip and suspicion....

Calling All Superheroes.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Elissa Schappell The next time some lit-crit nincompoop pronounces the short story dead and proclaims the novel to be the thing, one need only point out that Deborah Eisenberg has just published her seventh stunning collection,...

Morimoto N.Y.C.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Matt Tyrnauer Following his Iron Chef stardom, and a run as the executive chef at Nobu, in New York City, the stoic pro fryer and sushi laureate Masaharu Morimoto moved, somewhat unpredictably, to Philadelphia, where, in November...

THE ARIZONA INN.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Doug Stumpf We wanted to go hiking in the Tucson area's 75-degree, sunny winter days, but we didn't want to sleep in a tent. Then we heard that former editor of French Vogue Joan Juliet Buck prefers the Arizona Inn to the Hotel du...

Nostalgic Triumph.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: A. M. Homes Enoc Perez is an artist obsessed with love, with the intangibility of experience and all that is elusive or ephemeral. His is the palette of memory. At 38, the Puerto Rican-born Perez paints without brushes; his images...

Beyond Luxury.(luxury travel, accommodations)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Victoria Mather Luxury is fabulously cheap if you are extravagant. Spend a million taking a week at Lajitas, the 25,000-acre Texan resort ranch, and they will chuck in a private jet. Stay in one of the two penthouse suites at the...

Hot Tracks.(sound recordings)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Lisa Robinson, Lisa Robinson Who among us has not rolled our eyes as yet another movie astronaut takes off into the wild blue yonder to the accompaniment of Elton John's "Rocket Man"? Soaring, schmaltzy ballads or "quirky,"...

The Men's Club.(The Shave)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: John Brodie If the Beatles killed the barbershop in the U.K., then 1975's Shampoo put an end to those enclaves of bay-rum machismo in Los Angeles. Prior to that, Hollywood had had a thriving tonsorial culture. Larry Gelbart got his...

PERSONAL APOTHECARY.(Springdale Wellness Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Punch Hutton There's this fantastic little holistic health center, Springdale Wellness Services, in York, Pennsylvania, that specializes in all types of traditional Chinese medicine-most notably acupuncture and herbal remedies. But...

Kitchen Confidential.(Giada De Laurentiis)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: David Kamp It's not an affectation, the funny, oft commented-upon way that Giada De Laurentiis says "spaghetti": spa-GIT-tee, in quick, syncopated, Italianate syllables. The 35-year-old Food Network star spent her first seven...

The Next It Thing.(Stephanie and Jordan Schur)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Aaron Gell They seem an unlikely pair. She's an up-and-coming fashion designer, specializing in smart, feminine looks that are prized for their aura of chic refinement. He's the music-biz whiz who gave the world such fist-pumping,...

Choose Your Own Adventure.
March 1, 2006... SINGLE GIRL Home: New York City Job: Film publicist Romantic status: She's looking... Age: 30 COUPLE WITH COLLEGE-AGE SON Home: Montecito, California Job: He is a semi-retired money manager; she does...

Single Girl.
March 1, 2006... Wakes up at the Sunset Tower Hotel, formerly called the Argyle (8358 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood; 323-654-7100). Bonus: The landmark Art Deco hotel has amazing views of L.A., and it allows pets. The building is next to Hart Park, which has...

Couple with College-Age Son.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Arrive at the Beverly Hills Hotel (9641 Sunset Blvd., Beverly Hills; 310-276-2251). Bonus: No place like it. MORNING: Couple takes tennis lesson with Alex at the B.H.H. Son goes downstairs to the Fountain Coffee Shop, where Victor...

Single Guy.
March 1, 2006... Checks into Chateau Marmont (8221 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles; 323-656-1010). Bonus: His friends live in the nearby Hollywood Hills, and he can walk to Crunch Fitness (8000 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles; 323-654-4550) or 24 Hour Fitness (6380 W....

Young Couple with Small Children.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Punch Hutton Open their doors onto the patio at Shutters on the Beach (One Pico Blvd., Santa Monica; 310-587-1717). Bonus: Views of the Pacific Ocean, and the rooms, recently renovated by designer Michael Smith, are fantastic....

Country Makes Its Case.(Neko Case)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Michael Hogan If you loved Walk the Line but couldn't pick Kenny Chesney out of a sheriff's lineup, singer-songwriter Neko Case has the album for you. Case started out as a punk-rock drummer, then made a name for herself as an...

Journey of a Lifetime.(Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film)(Movie review)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Patricia Bosworth Champagne toasts are in order for the magisterial "Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film," directed by Ric Burns and co-written with O'Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb. As part of the American Experience...

WAITING TO EXHALE.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Bruce Handy 12-year-old boy asks his father what he thinks makes America the greatest country in the world. Without even thinking, Dad snaps, "Our elaborate system of appeals courts." That's an honest answer coming from a lobbyist...

THE SWINGIN' LOWER EAST SIDE.(Manhattan)(Directory)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Edward Helmore If it's what you desire, you can live on Manhattan's Lower East Side in a bubble of funky but chic lifestyle choices. It lacks for nothing but a pleasing view, and even this you can get from the high floors of the...

Kornering the Beauty Market.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Maria Ricapito Rebecca Korner grew up steeped, quite literally, in the family business, and she has the petal-soft skin to show for it. More than 100 years ago, her Eastern European grandmother founded her first spa in Europe, and...

Scoundrel Time; Part James Bond, part Bertie Wooster, Flashman has whored, drunk, and weaseled his way through 12 adventures set in British imperial times.(George MacDonald Fraser)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Christopher Hitchens In the last but one of his 12 novelistic gallops through history and imagination, Flashman and the Tiger, George MacDonald Fraser does something at least as daring as anything that his poltroonish hero has ever...

Dressed to Kill; From that macho, "Mission Accomplished" aircraft-carrier strut in 2003 to his recent "Plan for Victory" speech, at the U.S. Naval Academy, George W. Bush has used the military as no other modern president has done-for p.r. and partisan politics.
March 1, 2006... Byline: James Wolcott President Bush loves to get duded up and play G.I. George. Whenever his poll numbers dip below the equator or the War on Terror needs a mule kick, Bush whips out his Members Only country-club commando jacket with the...

Shadow Boxing; Billionaire indictments are a dime a dozen.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Dominick Dunne F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: the rich are different. And the very rich are very different. I have frequently had occasion to move in their rarefied world, and I never cease to find it fascinating. Fortunes today...

Is Time Warner Necessary? Trapped in an $80 billion bubble of dysfunction, Time Warner's leadership has been blindsided by Carl Icahn's attack.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Michael Wolff I've been talking about Time Warner, world's biggest media company, and its borderline personalities, its cockamamy synergies, its obdurate fiefdoms, about the very preposterousness of its existence, for half of my...

The Getty's Blue Period; The president of the world's richest art institution, the $9 billion J. Paul Getty Trust, Barry Munitz is on the ropes, with the press lambasting his tenure, California's attorney general investigating, and former Getty antiquities curator Marion True on trial.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Vicky Ward On an unusually hot day for January in Los Angeles, with the mercury hitting 90 degrees, Barry Munitz, the president of the $9 billion J. Paul Getty Trust, the world's richest art institution, was doing his best to...

The Good Shepherd.(Movie review)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Peter Biskind Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd is based on the improbable, stranger-than-fiction career of James Jesus Angleton, the C.I.A.'s head spy catcher for many years, and himself a possible K.G.B. double agent, as some...

Will Success Spoil Myspace? In two years, MySpace has become the most popular social-networking site on the Web, a virtual city of sex and youth culture, with its own celebrities, Casanovas, and con artists.
March 1, 2006... Byline: James Verini On the second level of a shopping mall in Costa Mesa, California, a short drive down the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles, is a nightclub called Sutra Lounge. Don't let the location fool you: to the partying...

Leaving Schmuckville; Like hundreds of Hollywood hacks, Zach Helm made a nice living as a screenwriter-and no one ever saw his work.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Jim Windolf Screenwriters were at the bottom even in Hollywood's early years. Studio boss Jack Warner called them "schmucks with Underwoods." Since then the industry has updated its view. Now they're considered "schmucks with...

Emile Hirsch.(Interview)(Brief article)(Biography)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 21, actor. PROVENANCE: Venice Beach, California. EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY: Hirsch, who played skateboarder Jay Adams in last year's Lords of Dogtown, stars in the upcoming Alpha Dog. "I play the alpha...

Oscar's Party.(Oscar Goodman)(Las Vegas, Nevada mayor)(Interview)
March 1, 2006... Byline: George Wayne Only in gangster-built Las Vegas could the highest elected official be a hard-drinking gambler and former defense lawyer for the Mob. But Mayor Oscar Goodman, often with feathered showgirls at his side, is leading an...

The Chameleon; Peter Sarsgaard, actor.
March 1, 2006... "Where have I seen this man before?" That's what a lot of people were saying to themselves on the way out of movie theaters last year after catching Peter Sarsgaard's remarkable performances in Jarhead (as a gung-ho Marine scout), Flightplan...

The It Girl; Sienna Miller, actress.
March 1, 2006... What was he thinking? But let's not get into that. It's all so common. Sienna Miller may command the attention of the tabloid press, but she's a bona fide actress-the daughter, in fact, of Jo Miller, London's acting instructor extraordinaire....

The New Heartthrobs; Jake Gyllenhaal, actor.
March 1, 2006... Jake Gyllenhaal famously lassoes Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain (2005), a film that's on the trail toward rustling up some Oscar gold. He brought to the part just the right mix of a cowboy's laconism and passion, which made his other two...

The Graduate; Jason Schwartzman, actor.
March 1, 2006... Jason Schwartzman is the least actorly actor ever. Everyone believes he's the character he's playing, whether it's the over-achieving extracurricular-activity genius Max Fischer in Rushmore (1998) or the slacker guitar technician in Shopgirl...

The Beauty; Camilla Belle, Actress.
March 1, 2006... Lots of actresses have lovely looks. Camilla Belle, at 19, has something more. Call it presence, or star quality, or whatever, but it's there, and it came to the fore in Rebecca Miller's The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), in which Belle played...

The Man's Man; Eric Bana, actor.
March 1, 2006... Eric Bana has the face and musculature of the ideal action-oriented leading man. As a former stand-up comic and sketch-comedy TV star in his native Australia, he also has the chops to play the kind of wisecracking, gun-toting hero that made...

The Goddess; Natalie Portman, actress.
March 1, 2006... With her precise performances in 2004's Garden State and Closer, Natalie Portman showed that she has arrived as an actress. With her work in the highest-grossing movie of 2005, Star Wars: Episode III-Revenge of the Sith, she held her own...

The Reluctant Star; Viggo Mortensen, actor.
March 1, 2006... Viggo Mortensen made a nice first impression when he appeared in Peter Weir's Witness (1985). Five years later he was toiling in the forgettable sequels Young Guns II and Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. He worked as a bartender and...

The Touch of Class; Patricia Clarkson, actress.
March 1, 2006... Patricia Clarkson shows great taste in the films she chooses-and if she were ever to appear in a bomb, there would still be the consolation of that husky voice. After a gradual breakthrough period during which she played intense,...

The Tempest; Angelina Jolie, actress, tabloid siren.
March 1, 2006... Those lips, those eyes, those tattoos! Angelina Jolie has the fierceness and beauty to match Hollywood's golden-age starlets, not to mention a cocksure swagger that recalls the rebellious leading men of the 1960s and 70s. Throw in the same...

The Warriors; Harvey and Bob Weinstein, self-made magnates, industry heavy hitters.(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... In 1993 the Walt Disney Company paid a reported $80 million for the Miramax Film Corporation, the New York studio founded in 1979 by Bob (the quiet one) and Harvey (the explosive one) Weinstein. Twelve years later, after the relationship had...

The Bird; Rosamund Pike, actress.
March 1, 2006... She made her film debut as the icy Miranda Frost in Die Another Day (2002). Playing a Bond Girl may prove to have been the most challenging work of all for Rosamund Pike, the Oxford-educated daughter of opera singers who has distinguished...

The New Tom Hanks-Jack Lemmon-James Stewart; Topher Grace, actor.
March 1, 2006... Topher Grace had a preppy upbringing in Darien, Connecticut, hometown of Moby, Kate Bosworth, and Chloe Sevigny (who babysat Topher when he was a kid). He was discovered in his boarding school's production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way...

The American Beauty; Reese Witherspoon, actress, producer.
March 1, 2006... With Legally Blonde (2001), Reese Witherspoon showed the world she was a comedienne as buoyant as she was bankable. With Sweet Home Alabama (2002) and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003), she proved her box-office clout was no fluke-as...

The Artist; Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor, producer, stage director.
March 1, 2006... Master thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman wins over audiences playing likable losers whose charming or puppyish surfaces conceal a deeply sad or twisted core. He has the imagination and attention to detail to make his performances absolutely real,...

The Centerfold; Taye Diggs, actor.
March 1, 2006... Taye Diggs is a throwback to the days when movie stars were all-around entertainers. He's a stage-trained actor who can sing and dance, as he proved playing Benny the evil landlord in the musical hit of the 90s Rent, a role he reprised to...

The Lone Gun; Nick Cave, singer, songwriter, actor, screenwriter, novelist, brooder.
March 1, 2006... It makes sense that the gaunt, stylish gloom-rocker Nick Cave, one of the great storytellers in song, would one day make a great movie. Now he has. In a mere three weeks, he wrote the script for The Proposition, a violent shoot-'em-up set in...

The Princess; Anne Hathaway, actress.
March 1, 2006... She was a delight as the Princess of Genovia in The Princess Diaries, the sleeper hit of 2001, and its 2004 sequel. But playing a squeaky-clean character in squeaky-clean comedies can have a dulling effect on an actress's career-just ask Julie...

The Crush; Max Minghella, actor.
March 1, 2006... Max, Max, Max, is this any way to start a career? Where are the lousy sitcom parts? The drunken-teen-on-a-campout roles in slasher films? The guest spots on cop shows as the troubled youth getting his ears boxed by an impatient interrogator?...

The One to Watch; Jamie Bell, actor.
March 1, 2006... Jamie Bell won our hearts playing the title character-a miner's son with a gift for dance-in Billy Elliot. Since then, completely out of keeping with the usual child-star career trajectory, which insists on either horrible films or jail time or...

The It Boy; Jonathan Rhys Meyers, actor.
March 1, 2006... Fans of the talented, pillow-lipped Jonathan Rhys Meyers have been waiting for him to arrive on a grand scale since he had a small but memorable part as the assassin of the hero in Michael Collins (1996). The Dublin-born Rhys Meyers has hooked...

The Knockout; Michelle Monaghan, actress.
March 1, 2006... After leaving her hometown of Winthrop, Iowa, Michelle Monaghan was studying journalism at Chicago's Columbia College and modeling to help pay tuition when she made a smart decision: to leave behind the idea of being a journalist and...

The Breast Friends; Pamela Anderson and Mamie Van Doren, blonde bombshells.(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... You know her from Playboy. She's got the kind of body a Sherpa could get lost in. Yes, Mamie Van Doren is a smokin' hot lady-and her young friend Pamela Anderson still makes men weak in the knees, too. They're two of a kind, the type your mama...

The Wild Honey; Joy Bryant, actress.
March 1, 2006... Born to a 15-year-old mother in the Bronx, Joy Bryant never let her circumstances keep her down. After earning straight A's in public school, she dreamed of better things and arranged to go to the Westminster boarding school in Connecticut....

The Kick; Michelle Yeoh, actress.
March 1, 2006... While Americans and Brits make a happy pastime of following the ups and downs of Aniston, Jolie, Pitt, Cruise, Holmes, Kidman, et al., Michelle Yeoh has been commanding the attention of the Asian press for two decades with a soap opera of her...

The Enhancer; Garth Fisher, M.D. One TV series; one informational DVD series; countless nips and tucks.
March 1, 2006... When they are young and pretty, they leave their hometowns in droves and they go to L.A. They land a part here, a part there, and a Screen Actors Guild card comes in the mail-or perhaps they find themselves in the airy offices of CAA or...

The Best Friend; Jennifer Aniston, Actress.
March 1, 2006... Jennifer Aniston is gorgeous and blessed with great comic timing, but above all she's likable. When she's on top, millions of people are glad for her. When she's in trouble, the millions sympathize. No matter what's going on-the divorce, the...

The Natural; Q'Orianka Kilcher, actor, singer.
March 1, 2006... Born in Germany, raised in Hawaii, Q'orianka Kilcher, who is part Peruvian Indian, took on a tremendous responsibility in agreeing to play Pocahontas. For one thing, she would be working for one of cinema's most poetic and ambitious directors,...

The Gentleman; Terrence Howard, actor.
March 1, 2006... As a young actor looking for a break in the mid-1980s, Terrence Howard made his own luck, talking his way onto an episode of The Cosby Show. He has played a number of sidekicks and lowlifes since then, making a big impression in Dead Presidents...

The Living Doll; Zooey Deschanel, actress.
March 1, 2006... Zooey Deschanel has been called "quirky" so often that she has come to embrace it, telling one interviewer, "If they say I'm quirky, I'm quirky. It's better than being boring." She loves flea markets and old screwball comedies. She plays the...

The One; Joaquin Phoenix, actor extraordinaire.
March 1, 2006... Most actors really are hams. Before achieving a level of fame that causes them to avoid attention (or, at least, to make a show of avoiding it), they crave attention and seek it out-and once they've got it, they revel in it. Joaquin Phoenix is...

The Boss; George Clooney, actor, director, producer, provocateur.
March 1, 2006... The second film he directed, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), made just about every major critic's Top 10 list for 2005, as did Syriana, in which he stars. George Clooney has shown his brains, talent, and wit in virtually every movie genre,...

Peyton Place's Real Victim; Fifty years ago, the novel Peyton Place shocked America with its tale of secrets, sex, and hypocrisy in a small New Hampshire town, becoming one of the best-selling dirty books ever, a hit movie, and TV's first prime-time soap.(novelist Grace Metalious)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Michael Callahan The summer of 1955 had not been good to Grace Metalious. A nine-week drought had left tiny Gilmanton, New Hampshire, bone dry, including the well in the back of the ramshackle cottage she'd sarcastically nicknamed...

The L.A. Kid.(David Hockney)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Ingrid Sischy Sometimes long-established artists are taken for granted, as has happened with David Hockney. Mistake. He may now be 68 years old, but he still looks like Dennis the Menace, and he remains one of the most fluent...

From Sneer to Eternity; Or: How some of the 20th century's more influential critics occasionally missed the big picture.
March 1, 2006... Byline: Mark Summers CASABLANCA "Not quite up to 'Across the Pacific'... but is nevertheless pretty tolerable." -David Lardner, The New Yorker, November 28, 1942. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY "In some ways it's the biggest...

Thunder on the Left: The Making of "Reds"; On the box-office coattails of 1978's "Heaven Can Wait", Warren Beatty seized his chance to defy Hollywood wisdom by making "Reds", a big-budget docudrama sympathetic to the Russian Revolution.(Biography)
March 1, 2006... Byline: Peter Biskind When one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's aides called Warren Beatty a "crackpot"-among other choice epithets-after Beatty had taken a few shots at the California governor not long ago, one thing the aide refrained from...

Dave Brubeck; Long before "Take Five" hit the million mark, in 1959, Dave Brubeck had established himself as an ambassador of jazz.(Interview)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... What is your idea of perfect happiness? All commitments fulfilled. What is your greatest fear? War. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Jesus. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? ...