Vanity Fair Magazine

The New York Times has posted a preview of the Book Review's lead review from this week: Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter on Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.'s George Plimpton oral biography, George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals — and a Few Unappreciative Observers. (An oral biography of George Plimpton: Capital idea!)

It's hard finding just one thing to quote from the long, admiring review, which takes into account a man with a long, admirable life, but here's one little nugget.

Per Mr. Carter:

I remember getting a call some years ago from a television casting agent looking for a patrician type to play an editor who liked to go shooting rats in Central Park. I asked the agent if she had approached anyone else. As it happened, she had. Lewis Lapham said it was beneath him. George Plimpton agreed to do it, but he had a scheduling conflict. So she ended up with me. And the show went off the air within the year.  read more »

Even though the election and economic crisis have pushed the Iraq war off the front—or even the first dozen—pages of newspapers, the December 2008 issue of Vanity Fair features an article by Seth Mnookin in which he reports on life inside The New York Times' Baghdad bureau. The story is not yet online, but it's full of interesting points, including details of "internecine warfare that once wracked the bureau." Update: November 4, 2008: Here it is: The New York Times’s Lonely War.

According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year.  read more »

One more addition to Graydon Carter's stable: longtime Atlantic writer and Blackhawk Down author Mark Bowden is dropping his exclusive contract with The Atlantic and signing a two-story-a-year contract with Vanity Fair.

In a landscape where there are no available media jobs, and there's virtually no mobility in the market, Mr. Bowden appears to have written his ticket. He told The Observer that after six years on contract at The Atlantic, it was a decision that largely came down to money.  read more »

An up-and-coming writer named Brad Pitt has a piece on Vanity Fair's Web site in which he nominates Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, to the magazine's "Hall of Fame." (Not, it should be noted, to the magazine's Best-Dressed List: International Hall of Fame.)

Mr. Pitt offers this bit of press criticism in citing Mr. Roth for the list:

At the heart of the group's effectiveness: meticulous field research, which creates an incontrovertible record of human-rights crimes, coupled with hardheaded advocacy. As The Village Voice noted, this is where the real investigative journalism of our times is getting done.

In October 2006, Mr. Pitt wrote Esquire's cover story about the drug war, green building, and the ultimate diaper-rash cream.

 

Maybe the heat's just getting to us, but is there something odd about the logo for Vanity Fair's VF Agenda Web site, where readers (presumably of all persuasions) can get "the inside story" on everything the magazine cares about.

OK, fine, keep moving.

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair's Power & Politics blog posted a satire of The New Yorker's now legendary Barry Blitt cover of Barack and Michelle Obama as flag-burning, Osama bin Laden-honoring terrorists. In VF's version, drawn by illustrator Tim Bower, John and Cindy McCain are portrayed as their own worst caricatures: The presumptive Republican nominee for president is seen hunched over a walker, while his wife is juggling various prescription pills. On the wall is a painting of George W. Bush; in the fireplace, the Constitution.

But to several commenters—you know, those scourges of civilization—on VF.com, the cartoon was a little too similar to one by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's David Horsey that ran a week earlier. In it, the McCain's appear on the cover of The National Review, he's drooling in a wheelchair (mumbling to himself, "Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran"), she's pouring prescription pills into her hand. On the wall is a painting of Dick Cheney; in the fireplace, the Constitution.  read more »

"It's really easy to get killed in Iraq," says Phillip Robertson, a freelancer who covered the war for Salon and wrote the introduction to the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His driver's car was totaled, but Salon paid for a replacement. "No one has ever been killed because of me," he says. "And I'm very, very proud of that. There have been repercussions because of my stories but I can look you in the eye and say no one has been seriously hurt because of me."  read more »

On the afternoon of June 2, Wolf Blitzer was talking to Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum about his 9,647-word piece about Bill Clinton.

“Some people who work for him now say that he seems to be angry all the time, angry when he gets up in the morning and angry when he goes to bed at night,” Mr. Purdum was saying.  read more »

What do you do if your magazine was embroiled in a possibly manufactured controversy over its allegedly sexualized photos of a minor? If you're Vanity Fair, you make fun of the whole thing, of course.  read more »

As you may have already read, Miley Cyrus is totally embarrassed by the semi-topless (back view) photos printed of her in this month's Vanity Fair. In a statement put out by her publicist, Ms. Cyrus, age 15, said, "I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed... I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about."

Representatives of the magazine responded that during Annie Liebovitz's shoot, "Miley's parents and/or minders were on the set all day... Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley."

This isn't the first time a star has felt stung by VF. Dewey ingenues like Lindsay Lohan and Paul Wolfowitz have complained of being misquoted and beloved icons like Courtney Love and Paris Hilton blame the magazine for their subsequent vilification. Here, a look back in anger, denial, and occasional admission.  read more »

Each New Year brings with it the obligatory slate of resolutions. And like some college-level sociological experiment, each New Year also brings with it a slate of stories about what famous people have resolved to either quit—smoking, say—or begin—usually something kind of boring, like marathon training or French classes. True to form, WWD recently called some executives in the magazine world to ask them what they hope to accomplish, respectively, in 2008.

Vanity Fair honcho Graydon Carter, who also happens to own a restaurant famous for its tony, truffled mac ‘n’ cheese, is working towards “less food, more exercise.” Meanwhile, Mr. Carter’s publisher, Edward Menicheschi, wants more-or-less the same thing, though he was slightly more specific, aiming to “cut back to four nights a week at the Waverly.”  read more »

Lindsay Lohan’s mother, Dina, was partying Tuesday night at the Tropicana Zone in Times Square.

“I’m doing a reality show; if you asked me two years ago, I’d be like, ‘You guys are smoking crack! I’m not doing this!’ But now I realize that I have no choice. I have to fix it for my little kids, and I have to fix my life,” she explained, while two ambiguous video-camera crews, complete with blinding lights, swirled around Ms. Lohan, 45, and her touchy twenty-something male friend, who was smiling behind strangely-appropriate dark sunglasses.  read more »

When Michael Wolff started shopping his biography of Rupert Murdoch, he opted to go with a "high six-figure" offer from Doubleday instead of taking the risk of having his previous publisher, Harper Collins, put out the book. (Mr. Murdoch's News Corp. owns Harper Collins.)

But these days Mr. Wolff has emerged as something of a sympathizer—at least with Mr. Murdoch's ambition to own The Wall Street Journal.

In The Times:  read more »

MemoPad is reporting that the Bono Vox guest-edited July issue of Vanity Fair, with its theme of Africa, will up the ante on that whole "collect-'em-all" cover trend:

"Sources close to the title said it could publish as many as 20 different covers, all shot by Annie Leibovitz."

Insiders seem to be telling MemoPad good things about Bono's editing abilities, though we can't help but wonder what's going on between the lines here:  read more »

Vanity Fair has a profile of John McCain in which he says of Hillary Clinton:

"People underestimate her political intelligence and her antennae. She's not her husband--no one's her husband. But she's good. And I like her. I know you're not supposed to say that, but I do."

In a wrap-up of 2008 candidates, The Fix speculates about whether Barack Obama will announce his candidacy around MLK Day.

In a fun little web-based popularity contest on Huffington Post, Hillary beats Obama, McCain and Giuliani. (Also, Mike Bloomberg loses to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.)

A former U.N. ambassador joins the race for Yvette Clarke's City Council seat.

Michael Chertoff defended new homeland security funding formulas and says that NYC won't be shortchanged.

Karol Sheinin learned that she doesn't have to be on the same airplane as her luggage and doesn't feel safe flying.

The top investigator in the Albany County DA's office is reinstated. For now.

The Brennan Center wonders what rules the state Senate will pass when their current ones expire on January 15.

Greg Sargent finds more evidence that something pretty big was amiss with that "John Kerry eats alone"story.

Jerry Nadler hopes to read more this year, while the guy behind Streetsblog hopes to convince drivers "to stop honking their f--ing horns so much."

Ben says thank you.

And pictured above are two guys who share an interest in member items: Joe Bruno and Andrew Cuomo.

-- Azi Paybarah

At today's luncheon for the American Society of Magazine Editors, on the second floor of The Princeton Club and starring the former editors of Spy magazine, a Q&A session got complicated.

Susan Morrison--a former Spy editor, and so friendly with former co-worker Graydon Carter, and now an editor at the New Yorker--made a wee gibe about a new piece by Christopher Hitchens, which was just published in Mr. Carter's magazine, Vanity Fair. That piece explains why women aren't funny.

Salad and chicken and a roll were served, as well as a fluffy cheesecake.

The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar was seated at a table with Conde Nast's director of public relations, Maurie Perl. Mr. Carter was talking about how it was difficult to grow up, and become friendly with people, and still manage to make fun of them. It was easier when we were young, he was saying, and when you're older, you find people are people.

Rachel Sklar had her hand up and, in preface to her question, made a seque comment about women being people too.

She wanted Graydon Carter to tell her why Vanity Fair had published the article that Mr. Hitchens had written.

"You just proved my point," Mr. Carter told her, according to people who were present. He meant that she was humorless.

And so Ms. Sklar had inserted herself into the big feminist bear-trap Mr. Hitchens had set. (The game, which dates to at least the mid-70's, is traditionally played like this: You write an article like that, and those who humorlessly complain are then treated as the proof in the pudding of the article. Which doesn't of course make the complainers any less humorless.)

(Oddly enough, the game doesn't work on black people.)

"And I really wanted to hear him talk about why he published that because he's sitting up there as an arbiter of All Things Funny," Ms. Sklar explained later.

Graydon Carter didn't know who she was. They weren't friends. They'd never worked together. "Who are you?" he asked. She told him she'd already written about the Hitchens piece and offered to send him some links. He wanted to know if she was funny for the Huffington Post.

Ms. Sklar called the Hitchens piece "ungood."

Mr. Carter did not in the end answer her question.

Kurt Andersen entered the fray. Someone present noted that people had gotten that look where they're looking at the floor and smiling in an interesting way.

Mr. Andersen asked Ms. Sklar, what was Mr. Carter supposed to do? If a columnist wrote a piece, and if he's supposed to kill it....? Ms. Sklar said she had thought that editors evaluated pieces before they ran.

After the exchange, the next questioner wanted the Spy alums to talk about Separated at Birth, a feature in which pictures of two or more unlikely people who are found to carry some noticeable physical attribute are juxtaposed.

"I always thought we'd bond over being Canadian," Ms. Sklar said later, via Google Chat, of Mr. Carter. "Oh well."

Annie Leibovitz, the grand dame of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone covers, was the one facing flashbulbs. The other morning she gave a private press tour of her new show at the Brooklyn Museum.

"Walk slowly. Watch your cameras," she said. Microphone booms swung through the air, nearly knocking the photos off the wall. "Careful, we have lots of time," she said as she was followed.

Ms. Leibovitz has recently been profiled in Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She has a new book, "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographers Life, 1990-2005," and a retrospective of her work that will travel the world.

"It was time to look back at my work," Ms. Leibovitz said. She wore a faded black button-up shirt, tapered black jeans, and heavy work boots. "It was like being on an archeological dig finding these pictures," she said.

One entire wall was snapshots of her family at the beach, her parents in bed, her children wet with afterbirth in the delivery room, and hotel rooms with rumpled bed sheets, Susan Sontag included.

On another wall Donald Trump sat in a sports car and a hugely pregnant Ivana sported a gold lame bikini on the stairs of a gigantic jet. A portrait of Colin Powell in full military regalia hung near the Clintons on election night.

Ms. Leibovitz said the idea for the exhibit "came out of a moment," when she faced the deaths of Sontag and her father, plus the birth of her twins, by a surrogate mother.

On one wall Sontag battles cancer in a hospital bed, another shows her being wheeled on a gurney to a private plane in Seattle to be air-evacuated to a hospital in New York. A small print in a corner shows Sontag's corpse at a funeral home. She is dressed in Italian silk.

In "On Photography," Sontag had written: "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have.""

With every photo, regardless of the narrative, it's clear that sometimes Ms. Leibovitz was an intruder in her own life. The exhibit, which gives such a remarkable window into Ms. Leibovitz's private world, also shows the limits of that view.

Ms. Leibovitz said that she enjoys how her magazine assignments create a sense of history, but that her personal work is her strongest work, in fact because she is know to her subjects.

"Most people don't like to have their picture taken," Ms. Leibovitz said. "They have to confront themselves." Every photo involves problem solving. "It's never easy."

And with that, Ms. Leibovitz left the room, accompanied by two women in black suits. "I mean, you wouldn't expect anything less," said a reporter, who wore a sticker that read Panarama. "She's a living legend." — Kaija Helmetag

The photographs of 9/11 hold an unparalleled, monumental power over us.  read more »

The Eight Things You Need to Know About Hollywood  read more »

I very rarely hear from anyone I write about, though Neil LaBute is an exception.  read more »

New Yorker fashion director Michael Roberts is moving over to Vanity Fair, according to a press release just issued by Conde Nast today.

Full release after the jump.  read more »

—Gabriel Sherman

This from the comments section beneath a recent post on the sudden spate of street construction around Freddy Ferrer's home:

"A bunch of us 'managerial appointees' in DOT had fun ordering the tearing up of the pavement outside Vanity Fair's offices back in '96 or '97 on the same day that its issue containing the article asserting that Rudy was sleeping with Cristyne hit the newsstands. We never told City Hall we were doing it, however, maintaining plausible deniability for the big boys downtown. I think that day we tore up the block where Graydon Carter lived, too. Both the magazine's and Carter's streets were due for repaving, and we just, er, pushed them up the priority list a little. I doubt Bloomie's people have the same bal... um, chutzpah, frankly..."  read more »

News of the coming Vanity Fair story broke August 4, 1997. Can anybody over at DOT check this out for us?

In January, FishbowlNY attempted to crack the complex economics of Vanity Fair's writer-payment system:

We don't know how much Peter Biskind gets paid to write for Vanity Fair. Or Fran Lebowitz. Or Sebastian Junger. Or Michael Wolff. But we can guess.

Admirable guesstimates of contributors' individual salaries followed.

Well, guess no more: A writer can stand to make roughly $10 a word for a 1,500-word essay in Vanity Fair. Oh, plus a trip to Italy, bringing the value of that essay to $17,725.

Alas, those figures (well over five times industry standard) don't apply to actual writers for "in-flight magazine of the Gulfstream jetset" (not so lucky, Jim), but to winners of this year's Vanity Fair Essay Contest.

The topic: What is on the minds of America's youth today? (The word "nothing" repeated 1,500 times is unlikely to win.)  read more »

Bloggers and Livejournalists, the deadline is Sept. 30, which means the winning essay won't be running in the What is on the mind of America's magazine editors today? issue of Vanity Fair.

—Matt Haber

On May 31, when Vanity Fair broke the biggest media secret of the past 30 years-that Deep Throat, th  read more »

The invitation- my invitation-to the relaunch party for Radar magazine arrived in the form of Martha  read more »

Wednesday 23rdTechnically speaking, it's spring (even though we're still sleeping under flannel she  read more »

Several days before Oscar weekend, I was in a studio executive's office discussing a script.  read more »

It's the most wondrous time of the year … again!And what else truly heralds the start of the holid  read more »

Letter from America: 1946-2004, by Alistair Cooke. Alfred A. Knopf, 503 pages, $35.  read more »

What We've Lost , by Graydon Carter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $25.  read more »

Hand on the hip of her Alberta Ferretti gown, her proud chin jutting out from that pixie face, Reese  read more »

Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print , edited by David Wallis.  read more »

Graydon Carter, the star-struck bon vivant editor of Vanity Fair magazine, has crossed a line that n  read more »

"I'm very moderate by nature," Sam Tanenhaus said by telephone from his home in Westchester, two day  read more »

Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda , by John Keegan. Alfred A.  read more »

Boy, you go to the beach for a few days in August and while you're there, news happens, the lights g  read more »

The Storyteller , which arrives in stores this week, is an engaging, funny novel about an aspiring a  read more »

Even hard-core Vanity Fair readers come up blank when pressed to remember the last time the monthly  read more »

The meritocracy has been around for nearly 60 years now, but the moral claims that were made for it  read more »

"I O.D.'d on The New York Times ," said Clyde Haberman, The Times ' Metro columnist, of his recent o  read more »

Men!  read more »

Near midnight, Pacific time, on March 23, actor Ryan O'Neal pulled Dr.  read more »

"Hello?  read more »

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People , by Toby Young. Da Capo Press, 329 pages, $24.  read more »

Seven Pulitzers. They didn't expect that haul even within The New York Times.  read more »

It ain't that easy," said Artie Shaw.The onetime King of Swing's frustrated cry resonated in the chi  read more »

Ten years ago, a red-hot Tina Brown left Vanity Fair   to become the editor of The New Yorker .One  read more »

LOS ANGELES–And so, once again, the Oscars are upon us.  read more »

A friend, eyeing the front-page headline chronicling the sudden death of former First Dog Buddy, sig  read more »

On Monday, Sept.  read more »