Vanity Fair articles from May 2004

Vanity Fair archives from May 2004

Surfing Safari.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Lisa Eisner I'm not a surfer. But I like everything about it. I mean, you live in California, you get into surfing. Anytime I can duck into a surf shop, I do. But they all stink. You know how hard it is to find a new, groovy...

Bright Russian.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: -laura Jacobs Balanchine's last masterpiece, Mozartiana, looks like a dance recital on a rococo cloud. Choreographed two years before his death, and veiled in black tulle, it strikes some viewers as a valley of shadows. I like to...

The Producers.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Krista Smith Six years ago, Palmer West and Jonah Smith met in New York while working on the independent film Speed of Life. "I had a theater degree from the University of Montana, but I learned very quickly that I wasn't a good...

Word on the Streets.(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Edward Helmore Since he's skinny, white, and from Birmingham, England, 25-year-old Mike Skinner, known as the Streets, is not well placed to affect the attitudes and poses of his black brothers in rap, so he doesn't try. Instead,...

Eccentric Treasures.(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Dana Levy Armed with an M.B.A. from Columbia, a keen eye for style, and a healthy love of consumption, 29-year-old Alli Abrahamson has brought some sassy class to Manhattan's refined Upper East Side with her new boutique, Selma and...

Tempting Trouble.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Leslie Bennetts For her marriage, in 1987, Solange Azagury-Partridge designed her own engagement ring, a round, gold dome with an uncut diamond sticking out of one side-"like a lump of crystallized sugar, murky and gray," she says....

Unsafe on Any Ballot; Democrats are furious that Ralph Nader, whose last presidential bid helped put George W. Bush in office, is running again.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Christopher Hitchens For me, it was all over as soon as it began. The day after he announced himself as a candidate for president on Meet the Press, Ralph Nader held a press conference at which he said, "I think this may be the...

Of Oscars and Verdicts.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Dominick Dunne In the upstairs rooms of the Old Federal Courthouse in Manhattan where Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic, with their lawyers, families, and friends, were sitting out the time waiting for the jury to return with a...

Dazzling Till Dawn; While critics called the awards ceremony flat, KRISTA SMITH can vouch that V.F.'s annual Oscar party had plenty of fizz, from some high-spirited betting at dinner to the arrival of those statue-wielding winners, to a pre-dawn run on cheeseburgers.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Krista Smith The lack of surprises at this year's Academy Awards didn't stop the 170 dinner guests at V.F.'s 11th annual awards-night bash at Mortons, in West Hollywood, from making a few friendly bets. Then again, the hobbits...

The Shriver Way.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Leslie Bennetts When Grandpa starts forgetting things, 10-year-old Kate is puzzled. Then one day he can't even remember her name. Their story-What's Happening to Grandpa?, the latest children's book from Maria Shriver-was inspired...

The Man Who Loved Grizzlies; For Timothy Treadwell, the grizzlies of Alaska weren't just the world's largest terrestrial predators.(Biography)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: By Ned Zeman He lived way out here, where it was just him and Alaska and to hell with everyone else. Here he was alone but never lonely, didn't even know what loneliness was. Soon everyone would be gone for the year, even the...

VANITY FAIR NOMINATES MOVEON.ORG.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: David Friend Because, in an era that pipes its political discourse through radio screeds, focus groups, and cable-TV cockfights, this husband-and-wife team have used their Web site, MoveOn.org, to embed U.S. citizens smack in the...

Country Souls.(Interview)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Lisa Robinson "I was shocked," says Loretta Lynn about her new producer, White Stripes leader Jack White. "I figured he was a rocker, but he's as country as you can get." In a pairing straight out of someone's rock dream, the...

BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD.(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Krista Smith age and occupation: 23, actor. provenance: Los Angeles. full disclosure: Howard-niece of oddball actor Clint Howard and daughter of a slightly better-known Howard, Ron-was a Vanity Fair summer intern. "I worked in the...

W. DeGroff Hinterhofer.(Editorial)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Permit me to introduce myself, readers. I am W. DeGroff Hinterhofer, as of this issue Vanity Fair's Public Editor-or, should I say, your Public Editor, for it is my job to serve as your advocate and hold this magazine accountable...

Dennis Basso, warm and fuzzy.(Interview)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: George Wayne He has draped Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Walters, and Diana Ross in fur, and along the way has become the most famous pelt man in America. On the eve of his fashion show in New York, Dennis Basso talks with our...

The Stepford Wives.(Movie Review)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Katie Sharer Just when you thought it was safe to move to the suburbs (as if that would ever be safe), those eerily perfect, permanently pressed, hauntingly vacant Stepford wives are back in theaters. In the Frank Oz-directed...

Neal Pollack Gets Married.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Neal Pollack The morning after, I woke early, the birds twittering like angels. Lying next to me, Roger snored, a thick stream of drool running from his lower lip to the pillow. He smelled kind of vile, like most men do in the...

The Path to War; Amid the smoking wreckage of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration took its policy goal of regime change in Iraq and began an 18-month campaign marked by miscalculation, bullying, and deception that would tarnish its credibility and turn the world's sympathy for the U.S. into fear and mistrust.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, David Wise The centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for an invasion of Iraq, the presentation that laid out the key pieces of intelligence the U.S. government had gathered about...

Michael Eisner's Mouse Trap; So, the showdown at last month's shareholder meeting pitted Disney's grasping C.E.O., Michael Eisner, against its folksy keeper of the flame, Roy Disney, and his fellow crusader Stanley Gold-while Comcast's top technocrat, Brian Roberts, planned a strategic takeover of the Magic Kingdom.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Michael Wolff On one side of Market Street in Philadelphia, at the Loews hotel, there's the Roy and Stanley show. Directly across the street, at the Marriott, you've got the frustrated, confounded Disney brass. The senior...

Miami Modern; Hotelier Andre Balazs, whose first development project in Miami was in 1997, is back on South Beach.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Matt Tyrnauer In 1991, a decade after Miami Beach's Art Deco district was given historic architectural status and saved from obliteration, the Raleigh Hotel, on Collins Avenue at 18th Street, was lovingly restored, and what had...

Make Room For Diddy.(A Raisin in the Sun)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Anderson Tepper When Langston Hughes wondered in 1951, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?... Or does it explode?," he could not have suspected that eight years later a Broadway play (and,...

Jane Goodall; Moving to Tanzania in 1960 to study chimpanzees, Jane Goodall changed the way we view both our closest genetic relatives and ourselves.(Interview)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: What is your idea of perfect happiness? Sitting by myself in the forest in Gombe National Park watching one of the chimpanzee mothers with her family. What is your greatest fear? That I shall be tortured and be a...

Neoconned: The Path to War.(Editorial)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Graydon Carter The astute reader will recognize the gallery of portraits, beginning on page 228, that accompanies what is the most ambitious special report ever undertaken by Vanity Fair. "The Path to War" is, at 22,000 words, also...

Gibson's Bible.(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Why this obsession with who killed Christ ["The Gospel According to Mel," by Christopher Hitchens, March]? I can't help feeling that those who share Mel Gibson's intense interest in this question, aside from a few academics whose...

Coffee Talk.(Coffee and Cigarettes)(Movie Review)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Bruce Handy Jim Jarmusch's new movie, Coffee and Cigarettes, comprises 11 modest vignettes, in each of which two or three people sit around talking in a cafe or bar as they enjoy one or both of the title stimulants. The cast...

Guilty Pleasure 13 going on 30.(Movie Review)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Punch Hutton Starring: Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Kathy Baker. Directed by: Gary Winick for Revolution Studios. Find your seat and grab your Junior Mints: April 23. Fade in: Like all girls about to be 13, Jenna Rink (Garner)...

Tubby Times.(Super Size Me)(Movie Review)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Bruce Handy If you thought The Passion of the Christ was a new milestone in the pornography of suffering, wait until you see Super Size Me, a documentary in which the director, Morgan Spurlock, attempts to shed light on America's...

Hot Type.
May 1, 2004... BYLINE: Elissa Schappell Spring is a-fling with tumbling pink and green monkeys! No, it's not an acid flashback-it's Essentially Lilly (HarperResource), queen of prep couture Lilly Pulitzer and Jay Mulvaney's guide for "colorful...