Vanity Fair articles from May 2005

Vanity Fair archives from May 2005

Best Bette.(bar at Plaza Hotel)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Seven years into her reign as queen of New York City nightlife, club owner Amy Sacco is getting back to her roots. "This whole club thing," says Sacco, "was an accident. My background is restaurants." From the age of 13, the New Jersey native...

American Hopscotch.(Harry Benson's America )(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Byline: David Friend The United States has often been rendered most astutely by enlightened outsiders: Tocqueville, Hitchcock, Alistair Cooke. For the past 40 years one such canny picaroon has been in our midst-Scotsman and V.F....

Visionary Quest.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: A. M. Homes She was the first of her kind, a conceptual artist, a visionary with the sharpest of eyes; Elaine Sturtevant's works of art are appropriations, clones, replicas challenging notions of originality and authorship. In the...

Kung Fu Fever.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Bruce Handy It's hard not to love a film that features top-hatted gangsters dancing like a chorus line of Fred Astaires partnered with axes instead of canes. It's even harder not to love a movie in which, during a climactic duel, a...

GUILTY PLEASURE THE LONGEST YARD.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Anderson Tepper Starring: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Nelly, Burt Reynolds. Directed by: Peter Segal for Paramount. Huddle up: May 27. O.K., here's the play: Pro quarterback Paul Crewe (Sandler) and former college champion and coach...

Behind the Lens.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Patricia Bosworth Master cinematographer and longtime activist Haskell Wexler has always had a reputation for being a pain in the ass. He's won two Oscars in a dazzling career that includes Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, American...

Let's Get It On.(Let It Die)(Sound Recording Review)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Frank Digiacomo Her roots are in punk, her name sounds like a German metal band, and the title of her latest album is Let It Die, but don't get the wrong impression about Feist. This 29-year-old Canadian expat (real name, Leslie...

Light Bright.(John Wigmore)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Katie Sharer Art collectors with an appreciation for Minimalist design covet the light sculptures created by 34-year-old John Wigmore. Seen most recently in New York City galleries, the ethereal pieces, constructed of Japanese...

Sportswriting Superstar.(Shirley Povich)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: David Margolick It has been 33 years since Washington, D.C., had itself a baseball team. But when the new Washington Nationals took the field on April 14, it had been 81 years since the city had had a baseball team without Shirley...

Mix Masters.(Audiostiles, personalized music collection)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Dany Levy Who hasn't fantasized about putting together the best-music-of-all-time CD? You know, the kind that all your friends ask you to burn for them? If the only things standing in your way have been time, technological skill,...

Spoon's Full of Sugar.(Gimme Fiction)(Sound Recording Review)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Brian Raftery Spoon's 2002 album, Kill the Moonlight, was the sort of crackerjack rock record that reaches every conceivable benchmark of pop-culture cool-from NPR to The O.C. It was so good that the band even got a call from a...

ON THE DOWNLOAD.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Hustle & Flow, co-produced by John Singleton, was the most hyped movie at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The story of a Memphis pimp who dreams of becoming a successful rapper won the Audience Award and was sold for an impressive $9...

Blossoming Beauty.(scented candles, personal care products)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Christine Muhlke Yael Alkalay prefers to leave the skin-deep part to other beauty companies. Red Flower, her five-year-old line, focuses on generating the kind of glow that can come only from within. Her range of floral candles,...

Wit's End; Stand-up comedy has hit a slump, drained of the high-wire juice that once dazzled on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, in Las Vegas lounges, and at proliferating improv clubs in the 1980s.
May 1, 2005... Byline: James Wolcott "I've never wanted a man's approval before Johnny," Garry Shandling confesses to Jerry Seinfeld in Comedian, the 2002 documentary that shadows Seinfeld as he assembles a new stand-up routine from scratch and...

The Week of Living Glamorously; If the awards show itself fell flat, the author found plenty of entertainment in Oscar-week L.A. as even Michael Eisner and Liz Taylor made the scene.(Column)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Dominick Dunne It sounds braggy to keep saying it year after year, but Vanity Fair's Oscar party remains the No. 1 stellar event on Hollywood's night of nights. For those of us who like a little glamour in life's mix, it is the...

Vanity Fair Nominates Victor Navasky.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Christopher Hitchens BECAUSE someone had to keep the left flag flying, and when Victor Navasky took over the editor's chair of The Nation, in 1978, it had the sort of subscription list that could have been erased by a hard winter....

The Hot Zone; Golden statuettes and silver lighters, media moguls and supermodels, rap stars and athletes, Swank and Blanchett, Cruise and Cruz: at V.F.'s Oscar bash, Hollywood gives-and gets-the best show of the year.
May 1, 2005... Byline: Michael Hogan Vanity Fair has already written the book on Academy Awards parties, but even Oscar Night is going to need an update after this year's blowout at Mortons, in West Hollywood. It began with a seated dinner and ceremony...

Absent Hearts; When a third of the students have parents in the military, even football games at Fountain-Fort Carson High School are played in Iraq's shadow.
May 1, 2005... Byline: Buzz Bissinger The Department of Defense has identified 1,107 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following American yesterday: BATTLES, Michael Sr., 38;...

A Jazz Age Autopsy; Arnold Rothstein was the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim, the sinister gangster in The Great Gatsby.(Biography)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Nick Tosches Once upon a time, when New York City lived and breathed, there was a man marked for death, just like us all. His name was Arnold Rothstein, and he was the only God he worshipped, and he was a great and wicked man....

DANIEL CRAIG.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 37, actor. PROVENANCE: Chester, England. CONFIDENCE MAN: What got him interested in acting? "Dressing up and showing off... attention seeking, mainly, I think. It's a great way to get rid of...

What They Were Thinking.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Brian Frazer Prince Harry JANUARY 11, 2005 23% Dress up as giant panda. 25% Blow off party and see Million Dollar Baby in Leicester Square. 36% Wear swastika on arm and pretend to be Nazi. 10% Borrow...

Vanity Fair: The Missing Years.
May 1, 2005... Byline: David Kamp ELAINE: So you're directing pictures now, Mike. MIKE: Yes, Elaine. I've moved on from the ignoble limitations of stagecraft. I've completed a film with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. ELAINE: You...

Bed, Burbs, and Beyond; The plan: a lighthearted photo shoot with the cast of America's Sunday-night sensation.(Marc Cherry)(Interview)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Ned Zeman In retrospect, we should have seen it coming-what with the on-set rumblings about "frayed nerves" and "difficulty" among "the Ladies," and the crew's jokes about one Lady's "issues." In retrospect, it was all so obvious,...

The Last Onassis; After wresting control of her fortune from her father, Athina Onassis Roussel wants to claim her full legacy as Aristotle Onassis's granddaughter and sole surviving heir-including, some say, the presidency of Greece's most famous foundation.
May 1, 2005... Byline: Nicholas Gage I met Athina Onassis Roussel, the last direct descendant of the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, on a hot day in July 1999, when she was a tall, coltish, shy girl of 14. She was in Greece to attend the wedding of a...

Petra's Story; She was on a fairy-tale holiday in Thailand with her boyfriend, British photographer Simon Atlee, when last December's tsunami hit.(Petra Nemcova)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Leslie Bennetts It is March in Prague, but snow drifts gently through the frigid air, coating the city's ancient towers and spires with lacy shrouds of white. Famous for the way she looks in a bathing suit, Petra Nemcova is bundled...

Proud Harvest; Deep in the Tanzanian bush, David Robinson, the 53-year-old son of baseball legend and civil-rights hero Jackie Robinson, has exchanged his uneasy compromise with U.S. culture for a tribal adoption, an arranged marriage, and an economic crusade.(Biography)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Brett Martin One morning last year, David Robinson woke up early on Sweet Unity Farms, his 280-acre patch of land deep in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. At that peaceful hour, Robinson stood outside the mud-brick farmhouse and...

The Good Life Aquatic; The super-yacht business is booming, with moguls such as Larry Ellison and Paul Allen vying to outdo one another in size, submarines, missile-detection systems, helicopter pads, and aquatic cars- not to mention "paparazzi lights," Picassos, and Philippe Starck interiors.
May 1, 2005... Byline: Mark Seal Paul Allen's Octopus. Edmiston motions across the harbor to a 300-footer. "To paint a yacht like that is around $4 to $5 million," he says. "Of course, you don't have to do it every year." Most owners charter their...

Jack Welch; One of the most successful, and sometimes controversial, C.E.O.'s in corporate history, Jack Welch transformed G.E. into a global giant during his two-decade tenure.(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 1, 2005... What is your idea of perfect happiness? Suzy and a beach. What is your greatest fear? Losing someone I love. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Phoniness. Which living person do you most admire? ...

A Saint, More than Less.(Henry Grunwald)(Editorial)(Obituary)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Graydon Carter At a picnic in Beverly Hills the day before the Oscars, Norm Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., came over and gently told me, "Henry died." The news caught me so off guard, I didn't know what to say. And I...

Everything I Need To Know I Learned At Crossroads.(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... Frank DiGiacomo's article "School for Cool" (March) did not accurately portray the Crossroads School's true academic strengths or the community at large. Outsiders routinely label the school "progressive," but its true strengths are much more...

Hot Type.(books)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Elissa Schappell Welcome bulb-ilicious springtime with Jane Alison's rapturous novel Natives and Exotics (Harcourt), in which three generations of international transplants discover their true natures while those around them...

Homecoming Scene.(Faded Pictures from My Backyard)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Elissa Schappell There was something about putting together the pieces of people's lives, their characters, and their development from childhood to their present that seemed my natural calling," journalist, TV producer, and V.F....

Condesa Caliente.(Condesa DF)(Hotel Review)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Matt Tyrnauer Hotels in Mexico City are, in general, old-school, with the notable exception of Habita, a stylish place for the Prada-, Gucci-, and Galliano-ites who have been flocking to the Mexican capital, lured by a rich culture...

Fashion Heir.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Byline: Krista Smith "I used to be known as Tommy Perse-now I'm only known as James Perse's dad," says the man who delivered the eccentric Maxfield, the first high-end couture emporium, to Los Angeles in 1969. "I spent most of my life in...

Hot Tracks.
May 1, 2005... Byline: Lisa Robinson Unpredictable, unorthodox, unruly, unnerving, uncompromising, and not a moment too soon: this month, intense, heavy rock makes a welcome comeback. Well worth the five-year wait, Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth is a...