ARTICLES
C MAGAZINE
Hollywood wouldn’t exist without its historic movie theaters, many of which are facing existential threats in the era of streaming. Netflix’s role as the Egyptian Theater’s savior is an irony that has been lost on few commentators. In an early story on the restoration, Los Angeles Times columnist Glenn Whipp likened the streaming giant to a “destroyer of worlds.” Perhaps that was a bit extreme, he conceded, and then clarified: Streaming, for many in the business, is just the destroyer of movie theaters.” Read Blume’s story on the ongoing movement to save these theaters, while preserving a crucial part of Los Angeles’ history and securing the future of movie-going.
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ENTRAPMENT, CORRUPTION, MURDER AND JUSTICE IN GOTHAM
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The 1931 murder of call girl Vivian Gordon did not just provide salacious copy for newspapers across the United States. It also launched a wave of investigations that exposed virulent corruption all the way to the top of the city’s and state’s leadership, and in the process dealt a death blow to Tammany Hall, which had maintained a viselike grip on New York politics for a century. A new book, The Bishop and the Butterfly - written by biographer Michael Wolraich and reviewed by Blume for the Times - shows how the murder was also leveraged for political advancement at the highest levels - and reminds readers that corruption and opportunism amidst tragedy are evergreen presences.
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AN EPIDEMIC WITHOUT END: CHARLIZE THERON’S BATTLE TO HELP END THE HIV/AIDS CRISIS IN SOUTH AFRICA
TOWN & COUNTRY
Oscar-winning actress and producer Charlize Theron grew up in South Africa during the 1980s, amidst the onset of the AIDS epidemic, which still grips the country today. “I was around 10 years old, and people around me were dying and scared,” she recalls. “It left an impression on me from a young age that’s always been hard to shake.” In 2007, she founded the Charlie Theron Africa Outreach Program. Among the organization’s earliest initiatives: the dispatching of mobile health clinics in South Africa which offered HIV-prevention programs to young people. These mobile units were a start, but Theron says that she quickly realized that they were a “drop in the bucket.” Read Blume’s cover story on Theron’s expanding philanthropic organization, her UN work, and her other initiatives to battle HIV and AIDS, gender-based violence, and other crises in South Africa and beyond.
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JAPAN HAS BEGUN RELEASING NUCLEAR WASTEWATER INTO THE PACIFIC. HOW WORRIED SHOULD WE BE?
The plan to gradually discharge more than a million tons of treated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has deeply divided nations and scientists.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The order will likely come within weeks: Release the wastewater into the ocean. But this isn’t the kind of wastewater that flows from city streets into stormwater drains. It’s treated nuclear wastewater used to cool damaged reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, stricken by an earthquake over a decade ago. Japan claims that the wastewater, containing a radioactive isotope called tritium and possibly other radioactive traces, will be safe. Neighboring countries and other experts say it poses an environmental threat that will last generations and may affect ecosystems all the way to North America. Who is right?
Click here to listen to Blume talk about the Fukushima water release on ABC News podcast Start Here.
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STEALING GOD’S STUFF
He is best remembered as the author of the children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. But is E. B. White also the forgotten prophet of nuclear threat?
AIR MAIL
When Japan surrendered to the Allies in August, 1945, E. B. White—then a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker—was not among the giddy celebrators. America had indeed ended a global war with the atomic bomb, he wrote in an August 18 Notes and Comment column, but it had also instigated a “complete human readjustment.” Although the war had concluded just three days earlier, that conflict already belonged to another epoch. A new era of unfathomable peril had begun. Mankind was, he wrote, “stealing God’s stuff.” This column was the start of a decades-long campaign, waged in his essays, columns, and articles, to warn the public about the nuclear threat facing all humans.
As we teeter on the precipice of a renewed international nuclear-arms race, with the U.S. alone poised to spend more than $1 trillion on nuclear-arms development, deployment, and sustainment before 2046, White’s largely forgotten questions and arguments once again have real currency.
• • •
TRINITY NUCLEAR TEST’S FALLOUT REACHED 46 STATES, CANADA, AND MEXICO, STUDY FINDS
The research shows that the first atomic bomb explosion’s effects had been underestimated, and could help more “downwinders” press for federal compensation.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In July 1945, as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other researchers of the Manhattan Project prepared to test their brand-new atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, they knew relatively little about how that mega-weapon would behave. On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test code-named “Trinity,” the resultant blast was much stronger than anticipated. The irradiated mushroom cloud also went many times higher into the atmosphere than expected: some 50,000 to 70,000 feet. Where it would ultimately go was anyone’s guess.
A new study, released on Thursday ahead of submission to a scientific journal for peer review, shows that the cloud and its fallout went farther than anyone in the Manhattan Project had imagined in 1945. Using state-of-the-art modeling software and recently uncovered historical weather data, the study’s authors say that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation.
Click here to hear Blume talk about the Trinity study on NPR’s 1A podcast.
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COLLATERAL DAMAGE: AMERICAN CIVILIAN SURVIVORS OF THE 1945 TRINITY NUCLEAR TEST
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
The New Mexico site of the world’s first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity had been selected, in part, for its supposed isolation. Yet in reality, nearly half-a-million people were living within a 150-mile radius of the explosion, with some as close as 12 miles away. Many, if not most, of these civilians were still asleep when the bomb detonated just before dawn. None were given no advance warning of the test. Nor was any effort made by the US government to evacuate them beforehand or afterward. One survivor later recalled attending an official town-square announcement soon after the blast in Ruidoso. Government officials told gathered locals that “[T]here was an explosion at a dump,’” she recalled later. “They said, ‘No one worry about anything; everything is fine.’ Some people believed it, but others couldn’t imagine that a dump explosion would do this. They lied to us. I didn’t learn the truth until years later.”
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HOW STALIN’S CONTROL OF FOREIGN REPORTERS HELPED SHAPE RUSSIA COVERAGE TODAY
Despite hardships and constraints dating back to the Soviet era, Moscow has historically been a coveted assignment for foreign correspondents. But the costs can be high - both to the correspondents themselves, and to the record of the events they are covering.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A new book — “The Red Hotel” by former Moscow correspondent Alan Philps — documents the lives of Moscow-based Western correspondents between 1941 and 1945, chafing under Stalin’s control. The censorship tolerated and propaganda perpetuated in the Stalin era by some of the Western journalists helped the Soviets perpetuate immense cover-ups. Seven and a half decades later, in Vladimir Putin’s wartime Russia, reporters are an unwanted presence, as evidenced by the arrest and detention in March of The Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich by Russian authorities. “I have no doubt Putin is attempting to do what Stalin did,” says Philps. “The Red Hotel” is a prescient history, laying out the dilemmas, incentives and dangers that have faced generations of foreign journalists determined to report on one of the most powerful countries on earth.
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AMORAL TRAITORS? WAR HEROES? SURVIVORS? DEPENDS ON WHOM YOU ASK
Review of Ian Buruma’s “The Collaborators,” which takes on three complex, disparate figures with notably controversial war records.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
It sounds like a tasteless parlor game: What do a Dutch Jewish fixer, a gender-fluid Manchu princess and a lusty Nazi masseur have in common? At first glance, very little. Yet these three figures feature as the central characters in Ian Buruma’s new group biography, “The Collaborators.” What connects this trio, as Buruma presents it, is their outsize, self-delusional fabulism. That, and the fact that each figure — motivated by the prospect of personal gain and pure survival — collaborated with German and Japanese forces during the Second World War. Furthermore, all three — Felix Kersten (masseur to Heinrich Himmler and others in the Nazi elite), Yoshiko Kawashima (the dispossessed Manchu princess who spied for the Japanese) and Friedrich Weinreb (the “fixer” whose fellow Jews paid him to secure reprieves from deportation to concentration camps, and were instead betrayed to the German secret police) — also publicly cast themselves as saviors, serving noble causes and saving lives. The truth, Buruma says, lies somewhere in between. Read Blume’s review of “The Collaborators.”
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FORCE OF CHANGE: MARGOT ROBBIE AND THE FEMALE NARRATIVE MANDATE
Since its inception eight years ago, LuckyChap - a film and series production company co-founded by actor and producer Margot Robbie - has made female storytelling by female filmmakers its mission.
WSJ MAGAZINE
It’s hellishly difficult to get any film financed and made - but especially one helmed by female talent. Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap aims to help change that. Among the female directors with whom the company works: Academy Award-winners Emerald Fennell and Greta Gerwig. The company’s films have grossed nearly $300 worldwide. Yet despite its success, and despite the efforts of companies with similar mandates, inequality remains tenacious. Last year, fewer than a quarter of top-grossing films were helmed by women. Read Blume’s cover story on Robbie, Lucky Chap, and the status of gender parity in Hollywood in 2022.
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U.S. NUCLEAR TESTING’S DEVASTATING LEGACY LINGERS, 30 YEARS AFTER THE MORATORIUM
Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,054 atomic tests—costing more than $100 billion and taking an incalculable toll on humans and the environment.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
In the U.S.’s bid for nuclear supremacy during the Cold War, populations in the vicinity of test sites became collateral damage from radioactive fallout. Officials in charge of the tests also courted environmental and geological catastrophes, including possible earthquakes, tidal waves, dam breaks, and more. The decision makers “were cavalier by today’s standards,” says nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein. “Today, we say, ‘If you don’t know it’s safe, don’t do it.’ But back then, they leaned toward doing it anyway.” It was a question, he adds, of political priorities. Cold War leaders believed that testing was an existential necessity and that greater harm would come from not testing as the Soviets continued to build their own atomic arsenal.
On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the last U.S. test conducted - on September 23, 1992 - Blume looks back at the legacy of a half-century of nuclear testing, and what’s at stake with keeping the testing moratorium in place.
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How the Surrealists helped upend military camouflage and redefine modern battle.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Thanks to their longtime obsession with mimicry and visual deception, the Surrealists had been peculiarly well suited to military camouflage work, which became critical in WWII’s new era of aerial warfare. Surrealists around the globe promoted and advanced the art of camouflage and deception. In England, Surrealist Roland Penrose was instrumental in getting Allied forces to see camouflage as a weapon that could help turn an overwhelmed underdog into a victor. In Australia, Max Dupain became a member of the Sydney Camouflage Unit. In New York City, Arshile Gorky taught a camouflage course. Salvador Dali claimed to have unlocked the secrets of visual deception.
Here is the story of when the Surrealists went to war, how they used art to help thwart the fascist onslaught, and ultimately assisted in bringing Britain a desperately needed victory against Hitler’s armed forces.
Click here to listen to Blume talk about this story on NPR podcast ‘Museum Confidential.”
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TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY. THESE REPORTERS TRIED TO SAVE IT.
Book Review: ‘Last Call at the Hotel Imperial’
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Historian Deborah Cohen’s ambitious ensemble biography documents the intertwined careers, friendships and sex lives of four hugely influential correspondents and commentators primarily covering Europe in the lead-up to World War II. The book’s four stars — John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and Dorothy Thompson — hailed from provincial America, but took Europe by storm after World War I, and were unsparing in their coverage of the terror that Hitler was unleashing in the 1930s. In Hotel Imperial, grim reminders abound about the cyclical nature of history: how racial and economic resentments can lead to monstrous movements; and, above all, how human beings remain impervious to even the starkest of warnings.
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“UNPRECEDENTED, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.”
An interview with ‘The First Lady’ stars Gillian Anderson, Viola Davis, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
WSJ MAGAZINE
Before Eleanor Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House’s East Wing, from 1933 to 1945, the role of first lady was largely ornamental. Decorating, entertaining and keeping one’s opinion to oneself were the duties. Yet during the Great Depression and then the Second World War, Ms. Roosevelt reinvented what a FLOTUS could be—through her passionate activism, her extensive fieldwork and her writings and radio broadcasts, which reached millions. She also made unlikely and unprecedented moves in her personal life: “She was the first to move her lesbian lover into the White House in an adjoining bedroom,” says actor Gillian Anderson, who plays Roosevelt in the upcoming Showtime series The First Lady, which premieres on April 17.
The 10-episode series interweaves depictions of three first ladies, starring Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford and Viola Davis as Michelle Obama. The First Lady makes the case that all three women uniquely overhauled the position and helped define the eras during which each woman presided. In this features, the three lead actors discuss taking on each role on the eve of the series premiere.
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HOW JOAN DIDION BECAME CALIFORNIA’S PROPHET
Remembering the Sacramento native’s towering intellect - and how she brought the New York literati to heel.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Didion, who died on December 23, was a longtime Hollywood resident and player who managed not only to emerge with her literary reputation intact, but also made intellectual giants back East cower and genuflect. Aspects of her journalistic legacy must be preserved and practiced by her successors: her studious removal; her ability to tell huge stories in accessible, gritty detail; her cold and fearless call-it-like-you-see-it approach. Read Blume’s tribute to the late writer and reporter in this T&C essay.
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U.S. LAWMAKERS MOVE URGENTLY TO RECOGNIZE SURVIVORS OF THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB TEST.
The 1945 Trinity test produced heat 10,000 times greater than the surface of the sun and spread fallout across the country. Yet those living immediately downwind have never been officially acknowledged by the U.S. government or compensated.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The site of the July 16, 1945 Trinity bomb test in New Mexico’s desert had been selected in part for its supposed isolation. In reality, thousands of people were within a 40-mile radius, some as close as 12 miles away. Yet all those living near the bomb site were not warned that the test would take place. Nor were they evacuated beforehand or afterward, even as radioactive fallout continued to drop from the sky for days. Locals were told by the U.S. government that an ammunition dump had accidentally blown up, and that there had been “no loss of life or injury.”
Tomorrow, on September 22, a bipartisan group of members of Congress will introduce bills in the House and Senate to extend preexisting but soon-to-expire legislation to recognize and compensate Trinity downwinders at last. Read the history of the Trinity downwinders and their battle for recognition in Blume’s exclusive story for National Geographic.
Click here to listen to Blume talk about this story on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered.’
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FROM NAZI- AND FASCIST PARIAHS TO AFFABLE ECCENTRICS
How writer Nancy Mitford’s book The Pursuit of Love rebranded her family.
TOWN & COUNTRY
It was one of the most astonishing and disturbing literary rebranding efforts ever: in Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel, The Pursuit of Love, she recast her family - who counted among them hardcore Nazis and fascists - as harmless aristocratic eccentrics. The book is considered a classic, and has been adapted into a just-premiered dramatic series by Amazon. Yet few readers and viewers of Pursuit know the torrid history behind the family that inspired the novel, and how the book helped whitewash the Mitfords’ wartime activities and political extremism. Read more about this unlikely transformation in Blume’s September issue story on Pursuit’s genesis and the fraught legacy of the Mitford clan.
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Why journalists must continue investigating the Trump era.
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
Now, as in postwar 1945, many in this country are desperate to move on to the next chapter, and tempted to “escape into easy comforts,” as Albert Einstein once put it. Revisiting events of the Trump era—and of 2020 and early 2021 in particular—may, for many, feel like a traumatic prospect. As NPR’s Terry Gross said in a recent Fresh Air interview with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “Some people think we should just move on, [and say], ‘Let’s focus on the present and the future.’” The media appears to be moving on once again, too, and we are in danger of leaving major stories of the Trump era under-investigated and perhaps even forgotten. But moving on too quickly may come at an awful price. Read Blume’s story on how one post-WWII deep-dive investigation can help inspire journalists today to continue crucial documentation of the events of the past five years.
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THE SECRET HISTORY OF SLIM AARONS’S LIFE AS A U.S. ARMY WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
He became famous photographing high society, but the legendary lensman got his start in uniform, covering some of the deadliest fronts of World War II.
TOWN & COUNTRY
George “Slim” Aarons (d. 2006) was better known for donning a cravat and linen jacket than military fatigues. However, he got his start as a combat photographer in World War II, covering some of the war’s deadliest battles, spanning North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. He worked alongside some of the most famous journalists of the war, including Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and Ernie Pyle. And yet Aarons’s own wartime work -- which was arresting and heartbreaking — is surprisingly little known. For this story, Blume and her editorial team worked with U.S. Army archives to source and re-publish Aarons’s photographs for YANK magazine, and detail this formative, harrowing chapter in the photographer’s life.
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JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE OUT, IT PULLED YOU BACK IN.
An essay about being a New Yorker far away from home in the COVID era.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Like most New Yorkers I regard the proclamation that the city is over with indignation and disgust. Such prophecies are likely as old as the city itself, and they never bear out. I’m old enough to have experienced three waves of New-York-is-overism: the bankruptcy- and crime-ridden 1970s, the 9/11 attacks, in 2001, and the economic crash of 2008, which sent countless fainthearted finance types scurrying back to London, Stockholm, or Singapore, bellowing in chorus that the city was doomed. They were not missed.
Even though those of us who are now far away dread what we’ll find when we can come back home, we know there will still be a certain familiarity, that bedrock of New York character.
• • •
LONG AFTER THE BOMB, ITS STORY FINDS A NEW AUDIENCE
John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” - one of the first accounts of the true devastation in Japan - was read nearly everywhere in the world except Russia. Nearly 75 years later, that is changing at last.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In 1946, when “Hiroshima” was first published, American reporters correctly predicted that the Soviets would be hostile to Hersey’s story and attempt to suppress it. The Soviets believed that President Harry S. Truman had dropped atomic bombs on Japan to “show who was boss,” as the Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov later put it. The bombs, he stated were “not aimed at Japan but rather at the Soviet Union.” The United States’ own ambassador to the United Nations warned Hersey and his editors that pushing a Russian translation on the Soviets would be regarded “as making a threat toward Russia”— in December 1946, The New Yorker submitted its entreaty to the Soviet government anyway. Click the story link above to find out what happened.
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THE ELUSIVE HORROR OF HIROSHIMA
It’s hard to fathom the nuclear holocaust that laid waste to this now vibrant city 75 years ago.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
After the United States bombed Hiroshima with a nearly 10,000 lb uranium bomb on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was post-apocalyptic wasteland for many months. Now Hiroshima Prefecture is home to nearly three million people and is a major tourist destination. There’s a world-class museum documenting the event, as well as many monuments. Among them: the Genbaku Dome, one of the few structures left standing in the city center after the bomb fell and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Hiroshima’s leaders say they want the city to be regarded by the world in two ways: as a cautionary tale—a warning about the horrors of nuclear warfare—and as a phoenix that survived those horrors and resurrected itself, a triumph of the human spirit. Read Blume’s portrait of the city, 75 years after being the first city in history to be on the receiving end of nuclear attack.
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FROM HIROSHIMA’S DEVASTATION, A WRENCHING ACCOUNT OF THE HUMAN TOLL
John Hersey shook Americans by telling the story of history’s first atomic bombing from the survivors’ point of view - and getting behind sterile mass casualty statistics.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
What does it take to get people to care about a disaster that they haven’t experienced directly? Our apparent inability to see and feel the human toll behind mass-casualty statistics suggests that we are hard-wired for indifference. “When headlines say a hundred thousand people are killed, whether in battle, by earthquake, flood, or atom bomb, the human mind refuses to react to mathematics,” wrote Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune in 1946, describing Americans’ failure to comprehend mass death tolls throughout World War II. People “swallowed statistics, gasped in awe,” he added, “and, turning away to discuss the price of lamb chops, forgot.” Occasionally, however, someone can make the human mind react to the story behind the numbers—and the World War II journalist John Hersey was one of them.
• • •
WAR GAMES: HOW JOURNALIST JOHN HERSEY REVEALED A HIROSHIMA COVER-UP TO THE WORLD.
AIR MAIL
Nearly a year after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was still restricting access to the cities, making it virtually impossible for journalists—Japanese and foreign—to report on the bombs’ aftermath. The New Yorker’s John Hersey got into Hiroshima regardless, managed to interview several dozen blast survivors there, and wrote in excruciating detail about their experience as some of the only human beings in the world to ever experience nuclear attack. His story “Hiroshima” took up nearly the entire August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorkerand created an international furor. Not only did it depict the human cost of the bombings; it also revealed the truth about the bombs’ radioactive qualities, which the U.S. government had tried both to downplay and cover up. Hersey would later claim that “Hiroshima” wasn’t meant to be an exposé, but it turned out to be precisely that.
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2020 WILL END EVENTUALLY. DOCUMENT IT WHILE YOU CAN
A feature about preserving history-in-the-making, on both a grand and intimate scale.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A few weeks ago, a nerdy joke went viral on Twitter: Future historians will be asked which quarter of 2020 they specialize in.
As museum curators and archivists stare down one of the most daunting challenges of their careers — telling the story of the pandemic; followed by severe economic collapse and a nationwide social justice movement — they are imploring individuals across the country to preserve personal materials for posterity, and for possible inclusion in museum archives. It’s an all-hands-on-deck effort, they say. We are all field collectors now.
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IS JOY POSSIBLE IN TERRIBLE TIMES?
A personal essay on finding an unlikely source of solace during a dark, anxious era.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
These are not, on the surface, joyful times. Not in the slightest. Which is why The New York Times feels that you deserve some relief. Its editors asked 14 writers what’s bringing them joy right now, and here’s my answer: My family’s old Nintendo Entertainment System console, its black wires and controllers dangling like tentacles. It is a wonderfully junky, circa 1986 set, a prize scored in a fierce eBay battle against nine other aggressive bidders; the cartridges have to be jiggled into the deck at a weird angle to work at all. Played alongside a bottle of Cutty Sark and two tumblers, it’s always a curative diversion — not least of all because your hands are occupied, rendering you temporarily incapable of scrolling through the latest ghastly news developments on Twitter.
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HEMINGWAY’S HAPPY QUARANTINE WITH HIS WIFE, TODDLER, AND HIS MISTRESS
TOWN & COUNTRY
Last week, a letter supposedly written by F. Scott Fitzgerald—quarantined due to the Spanish Flu in 1920—made the social media rounds. In it, Fitzgerald states that he and Zelda had fully stocked their bar, and called Hemingway a flu “denier” who refused to wash his hands. This letter went viral.
The only problem? It was not written by Fitzgerald; its true author is Nick Farriella, who had written it as a parody for McSweeney’s earlier this month. However, for those of you who crave an actual Lost Generation quarantine story, you’re in luck. Please allow me to entertain you with the true story of how Ernest Hemingway was once quarantined not only with his wife and sick toddler, but also his mistress. He actually took quite nicely to it.
• • •
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DAVID HOCKNEY
A profile of the artist and his latest work.
WSJ MAGAZINE
Artist David Hockey sits in the center of his Hollywood Hills studio, wearing a gray suit and spring-green cardigan, aqua-colored socks and bright yellow glasses with his signature round lenses. Beneath his chair is an oversized oriental carpet, littered with stubbed out cigarettes. Tomorrow, he will return to his new home in Normandy, whose landscape is documented in Hockney’s latest outsized, multi-paneled panoramic work, to be showcased at the new Pace Gallery in New York City this month.
Hockney’s success, which came early in his career, has been stratospheric. Exhibitions of his work draw huge crowds at museums and galleries around the world. Over a million visitors viewed a retrospective of his work showcased at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Tate Britain and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. When his 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction in late 2018 for $90.3 million, it became the most expensive work of art by a living artist sold at auction. At 82, he continues to create and innovate. Read Blume’s WSJ Magazine profile on Hockney, in which he reflects on his career, opines on the insanely high prices his works command today, and predicts that the potential for global fame is coming to an end.
• • •
THE PROFANE ORIGINALITY OF ROBERT EVANS
A personal remembrance about one of Hollywood’s best-known producers.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Robert Evans always seemed to elicit a spectacular array of reactions in people: admiration, fascination, utter suspicion, repulsion, but rarely did anyone seem to feel neutral about him. There were, and remain, people in town who absolutely worshipped him. I was never one of them—all of my gods were in far nerdier industries—but I always liked the idea of him. He was undeniably original, a quality that he too prized in others. Read Blume’s remembrance of her own strange encounters with Evans, who died days ago at 89.
• • •
THE GLORIOUS TRAGEDY OF “DEADWOOD”
A profile of David Milch’s final magnum opus.
WSJ MAGAZINE
Fifteen years after its debut on HBO, Deadwood, the Western series set in a 1870s mining boomtown in what is now South Dakota, will reappear on screens tonight, this time as a feature film. The project carries a special poignancy; Deadwood creator David Milch—whose linguistic virtuosity has earned him countless comparisons to Shakespeare—was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015. This film, which was written and executive produced by Milch, presented the last opportunity to revisit the Deadwood world as envisioned by its original maestro.
On the eve of the film’s release, Blume sat down with three of the show’s principal cast members: Ian McShane (the murderous yet benevolent saloonkeeper Al Swearengen), Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood’s quick-tempered sheriff Seth Bullock) and John Hawkes (the frontier entrepreneur Sol Star) at HBO’s Santa Monica, California offices.
• • •
INSIDE FRANK GEHRY’S OVERHAUL OF L.A.’S MOST INFAMOUS CORNER
A profile of the colorful history of Gehry’s new development site.
TOWN & COUNTRY
To the casual observer, the southwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights Boulevard is just another West Hollywood strip mall. Among the occupants of the site: a McDonald’s, a dental clinic, and a bank with a curious zigzag of a roof. Nothing about this plot of land, 8150 Sunset Boulevard, indicates that it was once one of the city’s most notorious destinations—or that it is once again at the center of controversy.
For more than a century the story of Los Angeles itself has been reflected in this site, as it evolved from a fruit grove into Hollywood’s most decadent hotel, and then into its current incarnation as paved-over paradise. And now fate has new plans for 8150 Sunset: Architect Frank Gehry is poised, with developer Townscape Partners, to build a 333,000-square-foot project there, with gleaming towers, abundant commercial space, and residential units.
The Gehry complex will be built on what was once one of the most glamorous destinations in town: the site of the former Garden of Allah hotel, the Chateau Marmont of its time. Practically every major star and writer in old Hollywood had history at the Garden, from Tallulah Bankhead and Errol Flynn to Garbo, Dietrich, Sinatra and Cary Crant. The most important writers of the 30s and 40s also called the Garden home – including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, who placed chenille “welcome” mats on either side of her bed. Many relics of the Garden will likely be discovered again when the site is excavated. Read more in this Town & Country story on one of the most notorious and glamorous land plots in Hollywood.
• • •
A feature about controversial portrait walls in the #MeToo era.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Growing up, I clocked a lot of time at Sardi’s, the landmark restaurant in New York City’s theater district that is home to one of the most famous portrait galleries in the world. My grandfather, an attorney for artists, had a standing lunchtime reservation there, and he worked hard to ingratiate himself with Vincent Sardi—even, supposedly, handling some divorce work for the restaurateur. Still, these machinations did not earn him a place in the Sardi’s hall of fame. The Sardi’s caricatures, with their exaggerated features—depicting everyone from Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball to Oscar Hammerstein—weirded me out, but they also instilled in me a lifelong fascination with restaurant and hotel portrait galleries.
Even as a kid I knew that they were a coded map to power, and that having one’s picture up on the wall really mattered to a certain breed of adult. When management would move the pictures around (or, worse, banish one entirely) in accordance with the ebb and flow of their subjects’ successes, the reshuffling prompted all sorts of glee and schadenfreude among other customers. It was an idiosyncratic spectator sport.
These days, in the era of #MeToo, the musical chairs politics of such portrait galleries has accelerated, as scores of former masters of the universe have become pariahs overnight. Pictures of offenders have been hastily removed from restaurant and hotel walls across the country, leaving bare spots and dangling wires behind. Read more in this story about the famous portrait galleries around the world in this moment of upheaval.
• • •
A profile of the newly renovated - and socially aware - Menil Collection.
WSJ MAGAZINE
With a major renovation and a new drawing institute, Houston’s renowned Menil Collection is newly showcasing the eclectic tastes and social activism of its founders, Dominique and John de Menil. Both French by birth, the de Menils began collecting in the 1930s, acquiring a series of surrealist works when they were newlyweds and still living in Europe. During World War II, they moved to Houston – along with Dominique’s family’s oil company, Schlumberger Ltd.
Not only did they become famed art collectors – earning the moniker “the Medici of Modern Art” – once confronted with the racism of the segregated South, the de Menils became human- and civil-rights activists. The de Menils believed that their position came with responsibility. “What we do with our power—our overwhelming power—is…very important indeed,” John wrote to a friend in 1964. Their worldview was reflected in their private art collection. In 1960, they initiated a still-ongoing project titled The Image of the Black in Western Art, and nearly 25 percent of the Menil’s permanent holdings now consists of African works and works depicting black figures.
Founded by Dominique in the 1980s, the Menil Collection museum showcased this dedication within the broader de Menil collection, and the museum’s new stewards are now proudly displaying the collection’s historical works – along with new commissions. Read more in Blume’s exclusive on the Menil’s history and ambitious plans for the future.
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MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER IRVING PENN’S FIRST MAJOR PAINTING EXHIBITION
An exclusive advance look at the photographer’s previously-unseen paintings, and a rare interview with the artist’s son.
WSJ MAGAZINE
In 2017, when New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a major exhibition honoring the 100th birthday of the late photographer Irving Penn, its director, Thomas P. Campbell, cited Penn as “one of the most celebrated American artists of the 20th century.” The statement was an acknowledgment of Penn’s “uncommon virtuosity” with a camera, as Campbell put it, and his innovation in the darkroom, but also indicated that Penn’s oeuvre was more diverse than just his renowned photography.
On September 13, the Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York—which has long represented Penn—will reveal a little-known aspect of Penn’s work: his paintings, created during the final decades of his life, from the mid-1980s until his death in 2009. His archives contain more than 200 painted works, most never seen by the public, and approximately 30 will be shown at the Pace Gallery exhibition.
“My father always felt that when the time was right, [they] would come to the surface,” says his son, Tom Penn. “I think he knew about my passion for the work, and that I would bring it forward and let the world know it existed. And now is the time for the paintings to come into the daylight.” Read Blume’s exclusive feature on the upcoming exhibit, and this lesser-known aspect of the artist’s body of work.
• • •
A profile of Juilliard’s new president Damian Woetzel.
VANITY FAIR
Few people are truly inexhaustible, but Damian Woetzel appears to be one of those rare creatures. As a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet from 1989 to 2008, Woetzel’s exuberance and limitless energy was lavishly celebrated. “I loved to dance, and it was never enough,” he says. “I always wanted to do more. City Ballet had multiple ballets on a night. If there were three ballets, I’d want to do all three. One was not enough. Two was pretty good. Three? Wow. That would be my night.”
Before retiring from that stage at 41, Woetzel acquired a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He later taught at Harvard Law School and served on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Now 51, Woetzel has become the new president of Manhattan’s prestigious Juilliard School—the first former dancer to hold that position. In this profile, he gives a glimpse into his life, onstage and off.
• • •
A profile of designer Thom Browne.
WSJ MAGAZINE
Fashion designer Thom Browne walks into his office, trailed by his wire-haired dachshund, Hector – who, like everyone else on the premises, is clad in Thom Browne apparel (in this case, a tidy red sweater, not a suit). Mid-century furnishings have been placed with great intention throughout the space. As the staffers come and go, one gets the sensation of having been admitted to a benevolent cult, comprised of eager, immaculately-groomed, Ivy-league prepsters — with a surrealist twist.
One of the central curiosities about the entire Thom Browne enterprise: it is paradoxically restrictive and unbridled at the same time — a massive, seasonal exercise in restraint and release. If Browne’s headquarters represents the zany yet buttoned-up restraint of his operation, his fashion shows exude its fantastical release. Going from the Thom Browne studio to a Thom Browne presentation feels akin to teasing open an elegant clock and watching the springs explode out. The show scenarios vary wildly: one season, there was a nightmarish circus set, complete with models bound as mummies or sent down the runway adjoined in a Siamese twin suit; another presentation mimicked an elaborate, ghoulish funeral. At yet another show, models relentlessly hammered away at a wooden house frame for the duration of the show. Read more about Browne’s stylishly peculiar world here.
• • •
The latest work of feminist artist Zoe Buckman.
C MAGAZINE
Sunset Boulevard has long been synonymous with spectacle; now the street is getting spectacle with conscience. On February 27 – just in time for the Oscars – London-born artist Zoe Buckman will unveil her feminist installation Champ, a rotating 43-foot sculpture featuring a white neon uterus with boxing gloves instead of ovaries. The site choice was highly intentional, says Buckman: “The visual landscape on Sunset is saturated with billboard images of women; it made sense to juxtapose [Champ] against the sexual objectification portrayed there.”
Champ was conceived before #MeToo rocked Hollywood, but the movement has certainly made the work more significant. Buckman and the Art Production Fund, which secured funding for the project, found a willing partner in the City of West Hollywood, and throughout 2018, the Fund will host public programs and discussions inspired by Champ. “It represents many things that deserve protection,” says Buckman. “I’m really excited about taking it beyond an object, and making it into an opportunity for social engagement.”
• • •
A cover-story profile of actor Sarah Paulson.
TOWN & COUNTRY
It’s difficult to imagine anything that would intimidate Sarah Paulson. She’s an actress who seems to choose roles for their audacity, and she inhabits her characters fearlessly– whether she’s playing Marcia Clark in American Crime Story, a brutal salve owner in Twelve Years a Slave, or conjoined twins in American Horror Story. Yet when Paulson arrived on set for The Post, Steven Spielberg’s film about the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and the legal battle around the Pentagon Papers, Paulson admits that she began “totally freaking out.”
“These are arguably the most respected filmmakers and actors of their generation,” Paulson says. “That made it a very extraordinary place to be. It was a pinch-me moment.”
Paulson is having a lot of those moments lately. Following her Emmy-winning performance as Clark in 2016, accolades and offers have been cascading in. Over the coming year, in addition to The Post, she will appear in the all-female spy comedy Ocean’s Eight, the Netflix series Ratched (as Nurse Ratched, of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame), and M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming thriller Glass. She also recently signed on to the movie adaptation of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.
“It’s head-spinning,” she says. “But part of me is scared. I’ve got a window, as a woman of 43. Right now it’s cracked this big”—she holds her hands inches apart—“and I’m trying to keep it open with both hands, as wide as possible, for as long as possible.”
In this Town & Country cover story, Paulson talks with Blume about the view from the top, why character likeability is irrelevant, and how she will never bow to convention – in any aspect of her life.
• • •
A book review of Avedon: Something Personal.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Earlier this month, a few torrid details leaked about “Avedon: Something Personal,” a biography and oral history of Richard Avedon assembled by the photographer’s longtime business partner, Norma Stevens, and writer Steven M.L. Aronson. The New York Post’s Page Six gleefully reported on the book’s revelations about Avedon’s supposed love affair with film director and writer Mike Nichols, his disdain for Vogue editor Anna Wintour and his prickly relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy.
“Something Personal” is indeed saturated with gossipy revelations about Avedon’s private life and musings. Yet lest anyone grow indignant about the idea of Avedon as the subject of a tawdry tell-all, Stevens is quick to assure readers that this is a sanctioned exposé. Before his death, on numerous occasions, she recalls, Avedon had obliged her to write a memoir about him: “Be kind,” he reportedly told her, “only, don’t be kind—I don’t want a tribute, I want a portrait, and the best portrait is always the truth. Make me into an Avedon.” In other words, glamorous but unsparing.
• • •
An interview with writer Adam Gopnik.
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
Earlier this fall, Blume got an amusing call from the writer Adam Gopnik. He’d come to Los Angeles as part of the tour for his new book, At the Strangers’ Gate, and was making his way down the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Blume was stunned: first of all, it was high noon on a hundred-degree day—the town was absolutely baking—and second of all, he was walking, a rare activity among Angelenos. Luckily, he happened across Greenblatt’s, an old-fashioned deli on Sunset, and sought solace in some chicken soup and a corned-beef sandwich. All of these activities seemed to Blume evidence that Gopnik was a quintessential, incurable Manhattanite, far away from his natural habitat and relying on his New Yorker instincts for survival. In this story, Blume talked with Gopnik about the New York of his salad days, the attributes that make the city uniquely (and peculiarly) alluring, and how New Yorkers seem innately equipped to handle these unstable times.
• • •
A profile of actor Jeff Goldblum.
VANITY FAIR
Everyone has seen Jeff Goldblum in a movie. The Oscar-and Emmy-nominated actor has done it all: alien, dinosaur, and superhero blockbusters; urban comedies (both light- and dark-hearted); dramas; thrillers—the works.
He’s not designated as a comedian first and foremost, but Goldblum is a connoisseur of absurdity and often brings a perverse, languid humor to his roles. His funniness was apparent from the earliest days of his film career: in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), for instance, Goldblum plays a vapid Los Angeles actor at a party, informing someone—presumably his agent or manager—on the phone, “I forgot my mantra.”The cameo lasted all of two seconds, but the line has become one of the most oft quoted from the classic film.
Now 65, Goldblum remains relentlessly busy. In Thor: Ragnarok, out this month, he plays the immortal, game-obsessed Grandmaster; he’s also reprising his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm in next year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Factor in his regular jazz gig in L.A. and two kids under the age of three, and Goldblum would seem to be leading a sleepless existence. But he says he’s sleeping just fine these days, thank you very much. In this Vanity Fair interview, he talks about vice-free living, an unlikely early job (it involved jails), and how he repaid Woody Allen for that early-fame favor.
• • •
An interview with author Jim Shepard.
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
Jim Shepard is always funny in conversation—but never more so than when he’s imparting dark musings about the future of the country or about human nature in general. And he can often be found musing about these dark things, for he is, as he puts it, “resourcefully pessimistic.”
As evidence, he cites the title of his just-released book, The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics. Many of us nursing the bitter cocktail that is the Trump administration are familiar with this sentiment, but Shepard’s book has been decades in the making. There has always been something to despair about, he announces jovially: The title “reflects the sinking sense I’ve had following American politics since the late 1960s. It’s been an ongoing cycle of progressive and thoughtful people saying, Well, this is a new low, but we have something to look forward to—and then hitting a new low after that.”
An award-winning, seven-time novelist and professor of English and film studies at Williams College, Shepard has studied certain iconic, influential American movies, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Schindler’s List—along with “what they’re selling us”—for clues as to why this country keeps finding itself in the soul-crushing cycle of Icarus highs and lows. They provide, he concludes, a constructive road map. He pulled his book’s title from an anecdote about the 1974 noir film Chinatown, in which scriptwriter Robert Towne told director Roman Polanski that the dark ending was like “the tunnel at the end of the light”—much like the circumstances contributing to the déjà-vu political landscape Shepard sees now. He spoke with Blume about how movies both reflect and generate the circumstances that made the presidency of a creature like Donald J. Trump possible in the first place.
• • •
An exclusive feature on the new documentary revealing the rise and fall of Kevyn Aucoin.
VOGUE
On September 14 at 9 PM ET, Logo TV will air “Kevyn Aucoin: Beauty and the Beast in Me,” a documentary about the rise and fall of legendary make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin, who helped define the 1990s supermodel era and became the world’s first celebrity make-up artist. The film reveals, for the first time, extensive Camcorder footage Aucoin shot of his own life and times.
While documentary depicts the glamorous aspects of Aucoin’s life, it also showcases his deep background, both through Aucoin’s own footage and director Lori Kaye’s excellent reporting. Born in 1962 to an unwed, sixteen-year-old mother in rural Louisiana, he was given up for adoption and raised in a nearby town. He knew that he was gay by age six, and so did everyone else: in high school, his classmates tried to kill him with a pick-up truck. Aucoin dropped out. He eventually made his way to 1980s NYC and launched his career. Aucoin eventually documented on tape his reunion with his birth mother after tracking her down. She rejected him, and told him that he wouldn’t have been gay if she had raised him. But he had the unrelenting, heartbreaking support of his adoptive family, who quit their local church because it taught that homosexuality was a sin. “No one was going to tell me that something was wrong with my boy because he was gay,” his adoptive father tells Kaye in the doc.
Kaye’s access in “Kevyn Aucoin: Beauty and the Beast in Me” is astonishing, and apparently unlimited: everyone from the supermodels of the era to Aucoin’s birth mother spoke with her. The film not only depicts a now-vanished 1980s and 90s NYC, but also gives a surprisingly nuanced portrait of small town Louisiana, where pockets of tolerance thrive.
• • •
A profile of the Rodarte sisters’ debut film.
WSJ MAGAZINE
When Los Angeles-based fashion designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy are asked to identify the genre of their debut feature, Woodshock, their answer is decidedly noncommittal. “I’m not sure we should try to categorize it,” says Laura, and then ventures a try. “I would not describe it as experimental. It’s more of a non-traditional narrative, a drama.”
Producer Ben LeClair confirms that classifying Woodshock—which debuts this September at the Venice Film Festival —has proved difficult for the project’s entire team. “We’re reluctant to corner it or put it in a box,” he says. “It’s in a space all to itself.” Kirsten Dunst, who plays the movie’s main character, adds, “The film is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. There’s definitely a psychological element in a Polanski sort of way.” Read Blume’s WSJ Magazine article on the Mulleavy’s sisters’ idiosyncratic leap into filmmaking.
• • •
A profile of the idiosyncratic, historical Moroccan manse of Ambassador Frederick Vreeland.
VANITY FAIR
If Frederick Vreeland’s famous Marrakech estate has long been a private-jet-set enclave, the public now has its chance to get an inside glimpse. The property has just been put up for sale, with an asking price of $2 million. Like many of its guests over the decades, the earth-colored house (official hue: “Marrakech la Rouge”) has an outsized, idiosyncratic personality. The Vreelands commissioned Anglo-French solar architect Dominic Michaelis to create the building, with the instructions that it should be designed with an elaborate game of hide-and-seek in mind. “We insisted that it should be almost impossible to find one’s way around,” says Vreeland. “People had to be able to get lost.”
Invitations to this sprawling 12,000-square-foot desert fortress in the Palmeraie, outside Marrakech, have long been coveted by luminaries and pleasure-seekers on at least three continents. The Vreelands’ giddy entertainments and days-long house parties are the stuff of legend in certain circles. (The house sleeps 16, but, Vreeland notes, more guests can be easily stashed away on the myriad veranda-and-living room couches and chaises.)
Mick Jagger used to let his offspring ride the Vreelands’ resident camel, Jamila; the rock star himself could occasionally be compelled to hop on the animal’s back for a ride around the house’s camel-racing track, nicknamed the “Chamodrome.” King Hassan II took an interest in the house’s grand eccentricities. Society photographer Slim Aarons shot the Moroccan-door-shaped pool for his book Poolside with Slim Aarons. Read more about the home and the Vreelands’ world in this Vanity Fair story.
• • •
A profile of Los Angeles’ rare and antiquarian book scene.
T: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
As a historical journalist and biographer, my life is populated with dusty, out-of-print tomes; when I moved last year from New York City to Los Angeles, I carted along with me over 3,000 books. And I still want more.
But, as a shallow-pocketed writer, I am a nuisance presence in Los Angeles’s elite antiquarian bookstores. This doesn’t mean that I don’t covet their wares anyway. (One Mystery Pier Books item that tempts me to the precipice of theft: Cecil B. DeMille’s personal copy of “The Great Gatsby,” complete with linen box and DeMille bookplate — a bargain at $7,500.)
Within weeks of my arrival in Los Angeles last year, I had already hunted down a passel of the most eccentric rare and vintage bookstores in town. To my great pleasure, these stores offered a highly specific and often amusing glimpse into the soul and workings of my adopted city. Despite its richly deserved reputation for superficiality, Los Angeles is indeed a reading town, but with a uniquely transactional relationship to books, especially those that are remnants of bygone eras (Dynamite, anyone?). Read on to become acquainted with this world and its characters, many of whom are as colorful as those in the books they sell.
• • •
PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORIES: THE UNSEEN WORLD OF IRVING PENN
A profile of the photographer on the eve of his Metropolitan Museum retrospective.
WSJ MAGAZINE
In the summer of 1950, in Paris, the most unlikely party in town was happening in a walk-up on the rue de Vaugirard. After lumbering up six flights of stairs, one might be astonished to find that the destination was a former photography school, sans water and electricity, but no matter. Everyone in town made that trek, and there stood the world’s great models, artists, and intellectuals alongside mailmen, pastry chefs, and vegetable sellers. The host was photographer Irving Penn, then in Paris to document the full spectrum of the “human comedy,” as one of his mentors, creative director Alexander Liberman, put it.
Penn was an intense and quiet man, but had a voracious appetite for character. Everyone and everything intrigued him. Yet he was intensely private, and rarely turned the camera back on himself. On the eve of a major new Penn retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blume spoke with Penn’s family, collaborators, and collectors to create an intimate portrait of a man dedicated to shining the spotlight on others. She delves into his process and inspirations, documents his sleepless nights and curious portable studio, which he brought even to the wilds of Africa. The story is a glimpse into the life someone considered by the Met to be “one of the most celebrated American artists of the 20th century.”
• • •
A rare glimpse into the libraries of Grey Gardens.
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
A few years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that Grey Gardens was up for rent, I thought it had to be a bizarre joke: What kind of a sick twist would pay to spend time in the notorious cat-and-rot-scented squalor so memorably depicted in the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens?
It turned out Grey Gardens had long since been renovated back into a glistening private playground for the intelligentsia A-list. (My ignorance of this fact confirmed me as an intelligentsia C-lister, at best.) In 1979, the Washington journalist and social doyenne Sally Quinn bought the house with her husband, Ben Bradlee, the Watergate-era executive editor at the Washington Post; they lovingly restored the estate to its 1930s glory; there, amid the rose bushes and chintz chaise lounges, they entertained the gods and goddesses of the film and political worlds. More recently, they offered to share Grey Gardens by renting it to those willing to pay $150,000 a month for the privilege. (It’s now on the market for nearly $20 million.)
Sensing a now-or-never opportunity to get a firsthand glimpse of the place, I pitched a story on Grey Gardens and assailed Sally Quinn with a request to stay there. She kindly granted me a couple of days at the house. I fell in love with everything: the clawfoot bathtubs, the armada of wicker furniture, the elaborate butler’s pantry – but above all, the Beales’ incredible book collection. More than anything else in that storied house, the library gave me an intimate, voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of the people who’d lived there over the past century. Here is my story on those literary artifacts, now on sale with the rest of the estate.
• • •
FROM AMMAN, AN UNFINISHED ROLL OF FILM
A personal essay about an unlikely mentor.
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
When I was a 23-year-old grad student, more than anything, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. More specifically, I wanted to be Christiane Amanpour or Martha Gellhorn, or basically a female Edward Murrow, and — in my mind — the more alien the backdrop for my training, the better.
I chose Amman as my destination to learn the trade. This might not seem daring to some, but back then, the idea of an American girl setting up shop in the Arab world felt ballsy to me. To be fair, it was admittedly a relatively calm time in the Middle East. This was 1999, before the world had been rocked by 9/11, the 2003 Iraq invasion, the rise of ISIS, the devastating Syrian Civil War, and Trump’s proposed so-called Muslim bans. As Ernest Hemingway once wrote about attending a bullfight, it might be like “having a ringside seat at [a] war, with nothing going to happen to you.”
But when I got to Jordan, something did happen to me — or someone, rather. And with this person, I did something that seemed little and strangely sensible at the time, but suddenly, given recent events, seems extraordinary now, and also reminds me how far I was willing to go to become the reporter I wanted to be. I came away unscathed, but probably only because a tragedy abruptly cut short my Amman adventure before I could take things too far. This is the story of that summer, and the Arab man who taught me much of what I know about being a journalist today.
• • •
A profile of pioneering screenwriter Anita Loos.
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Anita Loos – one of early Hollywood’s greatest writers – helped invent the industry. Hell, she even helped to invent its inventors. She would pen some 200 screenplays and help turn Douglas Fairbanks, Jean Harlow and Audrey Hepburn into stars. During the Depression, she earned the then-astronomical sum of $1,000 a week at MGM. She also found time to write the best-seller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and to conjure up showstoppers for Broadway. For more than 60 years, Loos was revered, widely imitated, called a genius by geniuses — and yet never was nominated for an Oscar. Why?
In this story, featured in the Hollywood Reporter‘s Oscars-and-the-gender-divide issue, Blume speaks with experts about the life and legacy of Loos, and why female screenwriters still have a near-impossible time getting high-level recognition today.
• • •
A profile of actor Gillian Jacobs.
VANITY FAIR
Some women appear to have it all: brains, looks, talent, and wit. Actress Gillian Jacobs, 34, is among these rarefied creatures, but she is not above envy. She watched the launch of the HBO series Girls with mixed feelings. “At the time, I was on Community, and we were always fighting to stay on the air,” she recalls. “I was excited for Lena, but there’s also a natural jealousy.”
Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, which is just what Jacobs did: in Season Four, she joined the cast of Girls as the cult-favorite character Mimi-Rose Howard, arguably the most defiant and least needy female on the show. She now stars in her own Judd Apatow-created Netflix rom-com series, Love (which returns for a second season on March 10), as well as a slate of upcoming films (Dean and Magic Camp). Jacobs is quickly emerging as a patron saint of smart alecks and independent souls—even if her knees still sometimes knock and her teeth chatter during auditions. In this story, she talks about the advantages of having been an oddball child, her unlikely penchant for Hannibal Lecter, and marriage in the realm of millennials.
• • •
A profile of a defiantly independent heiress.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Part of the Times’s “Committed” series: 165 Years of Love (and War) in The New York Times Wedding Announcements.
“Shyness” was the diagnosis: After all, what else could possibly have caused Mary Landon Baker — heiress and socialite — to have left her fiancé, Allister McCormick, a fellow Chicagoan, at the altar so often in the early 1920s?
Newspapers around the world — including The New York Times, which referred to the would-be groom as “thrice jilted Allister McCormick” — delighted in covering the drama that unfolded between the two. In the end, nothing could compel Miss Baker to become Mrs. McCormick: not the Cartier sapphire engagement ring, nor the mountain of wedding gifts (valued at a reported $100,000), nor the thousand of well-heeled guests who showed up for the first wedding ceremony.
Called the “shy bride” by reporters, Baker appears to have been anything but: Throughout the 1920s, she went through lovers like General Sherman blazing a path to the sea and provided excellent copy while doing so. Read Blume’s account of Baker’s anything-but-shy adventures here.
• • •
SEARCHING THE RUINS OF ALEPPO FOR MY FRIENDS AT THE BARON HOTEL
A personal essay about personal history and landmarks lost to war.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Like everyone else in the world, these past few weeks, I have been aghast at the real-time horror-show unfolding in Aleppo. Last night, I watched a handful of videos taken by a man who was scaling what had once been the city’s streets: devastated is too light a word for the destruction there. Pulverized—that’s more like it.
Years ago, I spent some time in Aleppo, and as I watched the videos, I desperately scanned the landscape for surviving landmarks. And I found that I was irrationally searching, above all, for staff members of the Baron Hotel, which had been my home during my time there, and for the hotel itself. This is the story of my own poignant encounter with the Baron, and the cosmopolitan international world it once embodied.
• • •
A profile of designer and film director Tom Ford.
WSJ MAGAZINE
Fashion designer Tom Ford’s feature films depict catastrophic loss of control and the sheer misery that ensues. In Ford’s debut feature, A Single Man (2009), an English professor grapples with the sudden death of his lover. In his latest film, Nocturnal Animals, out this month, a young man endures the kidnapping and murder of his wife and daughter. Why does Ford keep returning to this theme of ultimate loss?
“It sort of preys on my mind all the time,” he says. “Because in the end, there is no control. You think there is. We try for it; we struggle for it. But I’m going to pull out of that driveway and get hit by a truck on my way home. That’s just life.”
Read Blume’s profile on Ford, published on the eve of Nocturnal Animal‘s release. Designated WSJ Magazine’s film innovator of the year, Ford muses on what drives him (“Money and success buy you the freedom to do what you feel is right. I push boundaries because I can.”), how he envisions his legacy, his experience as a new father (and how it erases suicide as an escape option), and more.
• • •
A profile of actor Ali MacGraw.
TOWN & COUNTRY
It may be easy to poke fun at Love Story, the 1970 film starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal as star-crossed lovers from different social stratas. The movie may be a tearjerker with some endearingly dated dialogue, but it also remains beguiling and stylish. Upon its 1970 premiere, Love Story became a runaway international hit; audiences around the globe sobbed in darkened theaters (“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” MacGraw tearfully told O’Neal in one of the film’s most-quoted lines). The Academy bestowed its approval: seven nominations, including best actor and actress noms for MacGraw and O’Neal. MacGraw, until then a virtual unknown with one starter film under her belt, became an icon of her generation.
Most starlets endure trials-by-fire in Hollywood, but with Love Story as a vehicle, MacGraw had a gilded ascent, protected and championed by Paramount chief Robert Evans and director Arthur Hiller, to whom MacGraw remained close until his death two weeks ago. In this story, she shares her recollections of the film’s director, its producer and stars, and how it changed all of their lives forever.
• • •
THE WHIMSICAL AND OLD-GUARD LOS ANGELES WORLD OF THE RODARTE SISTERS
A profile of the sister / design-team duo.
Bergdorf Goodman Magazine
At first glance, Rodarte’s designs – created by sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavy – might not summon images of Los Angeles, where the fashion scene has long been synonymous with yoga pants and denim cutoffs. But Rodarte’s rapid, almost astonishing ascent seems like a tale that only Hollywood could have conjured.
Since its 2005 debut, Rodarte has been worn by superstars like Michelle Obama, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton, to name a few. The Mulleavy sisters have also collaborated with members of the creative intelligentsia (Benjamin Millepied, Frank Gehry and Gustavo Dudamel among them) on films, ballets and operas, and they are directing their first feature film, starring Kirsten Dunst. Yet despite their status as serious American fashion auteurs, they’ve long resisted the almost gravitational pull to New York City, the industry’s center, and remain fiercely loyal to the City of Angels.
“California is just so ingrained in us,” Laura says. “In an hour, you can be in the desert, or on the beach, or in the mountains. It’s always been the thing we go back to. Nine times out of ten, in our collections, there’s an influence that came from being here.” In this story, the Rodarte sisters give Blume a tour of their private and beloved home city.
• • •
“RECALCITRANT, OBJECTIONABLE, AND CONSTRAINED”
A profile of actor Anjelica Huston.
TOWN & COUNTRY
It is lunchtime in Los Angeles, and I am waiting for Anjelica Huston in the back of Musso & Frank Grill, reputed to be the oldest restaurant in Hollywood. This is a treat for me: after all, Huston is one of this town’s most rewarding conversationalists: wise, blunt, whip-smart — and she has decades of Tinseltown gossip to impart. She first moved here in 1973, and by the 1980s had reached the Oscars strata, like her father and grandfather before her. She has since worked with Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen. Huston’s advantages and successes should inspire legions of envious detractors, but somehow she seems universally adored and admired. (“Oh, that’s not true,” she says later. “I’m sure bitchy things have been said.”) The Transparent star talks with Blume about her longtime connection to the LGBTQ community, the Hollywood icon she would have loved to seduce, and her unlikely talisman.
• • •
A profile of actor Joanna Lumley.
VANITY FAIR
Over the years, television has brought us Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, Mary and Rhoda. But in 1992 it spawned Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy and Eddy, arguably the most hilariously despicable comedienne duo of all time. Relentlessly drunk, self-obsessed fashion slaves, Joanna Lumley’s magazine editor, Patsy Stone, and Jennifer Saunders’s publicist, Edina “Eddy” Monsoon, took madcap satire to giddy heights and sleazy lows.
The series ran sporadically through the 90s and into the 21st century, and this month Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (written by Saunders) is being unleashed upon us all. (Cameos include everyone from Stella McCartney to Joan Collins to Jerry Hall.)
Yet if Patsy is sublimely soul-less, Lumley is her antithesis: a beloved activist (principally on behalf of retired Gurkha soldiers seeking the right to settle in Great Britain), a global traveler, and a wise soul; at 70, she is considered a national treasure in at least two countries. That said, she isn’t exactly vice-free, as she explains in her interview with Blume.
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A SECRET LIFE WITH THE MISFIT TOYS
A personal essay about an unlikely first job.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
During my sophomore year of high school, my parents gave me a choice: Play an after-school sport or get a job. In the end, it came down to vanity. After six long, terrible, socially exiled years of wearing braces on my teeth, the idea of dodging lacrosse, field hockey or tennis balls did not appeal to me. Employment seemed a reasonable act of self-preservation.
I can’t remember how I landed at Toys in the Attic, a now defunct toy store. I didn’t like children, and I detest dolls — I mean, I really hate them, especially the ones whose eyes roll shut when you tilt them backward. But the store’s owner gave me an after-school-and-Saturdays gig. I might have seemed an incongruous hire, but she had a gift for hiring employees with no affinity for the under-10 crowd. This is what I learned from my unlikely comrades there.
• • •
TOWN & COUNTRY
My friends and I decided to meet there at six o’clock. Under other circumstances, this hour might have seemed unchic, even geriatric, but these were unusual circumstances indeed. You see, this is the last week in which NYC’s Four Seasons restaurant shall remain among us—soon it will be stripped down, emptied. It will simply cease until it is chiseled into something else.
We had been hearing rumors that a great party had been going on there at the bar and restaurant, a days-long fête that was only getting crazier each successive evening, that half of New York was showing up, that it wasn’t to be missed. Like many great parties, this one had been entirely unplanned. It had simply started the way wild fires sometimes start: no one knows how. This is what went down that night.
• • •
IT WAS BILL CUNNINGHAM’S NEW YORK—WE WERE JUST LIVING IN IT
A personal remembrance essay about the photographer.
TOWN & COUNTRY
Legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who for decades covered events and street fashion, has died at 87. For many of his lucky subjects, getting photographed by him was like getting approval from New York itself—an earlier incarnation of the city that shimmered with eccentric glamour and a particular sort of individualistic ambition. Cunningham himself did not, at first glance, seem to exude glamour or ambition. Yes, he was spectacularly eccentric, but even the uninitiated could immediately deduce that Cunningham’s peculiarities were unaffected.
The more you knew about him—and everyone was always curious about this sweet, skinny man who darted around the corners of 57th St and Fifth Avenue and the ballrooms of the elite hotels with his 35 mm camera—you saw that he had an awful lot a lot in common with the city he documented. He was the city’s chief anthropologist and its mirror. Read Blume’s love letter to Cunningham – and the NYC that is vanishing along with him.
• • •
The Parisian cafes that Ernest Hemingway’s Lost Generation made famous.
WSJ MAGAZINE
By the mid-1920s, thousands of Americans were sending themselves over to Paris to take part in la vie boheme. The often-debauched cafes and bars of Montparnasse served as the heart and soul of the famous expat colony that grew there. Upon arrival, each expat picked his or her café affiliation carefully and was judged accordingly: each café was its own nation with its own rules – and once you became a citizen of one, you were expected to despise patrons of the others. The rivalries of expat patrons often paled in comparison to the black-hearted practices of the cafes’ owners, who regularly tried to sabotage one another. What follows: a brief guide – adapted from Blume’s new Hemingway biography, Everybody Behaves Badly – to the Lost Generation’s most notorious cafes and the low-grade war that raged among them.
• • •
IN DEFENSE OF PAULINE HEMINGWAY, ERNEST’S SECOND (AND MOST VILIFIED) WIFE
VOGUE
Not all publicity is good publicity, after all: Consider the case of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway. Married to writer Ernest Hemingway from 1927 to 1940, she may best be remembered as one of modern literary history’s most controversial home-wreckers.
Hemingway himself had a hand in ensuring that this would be her legacy. In his beloved Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, written after their divorce, he vilified Pauline and claimed that she had “murdered” his first marriage to the gentle, matronly Hadley Richardson through the “oldest trick”—namely by befriending Hadley to get access to him and then promptly seducing him. Pauline is remembered for other things as well, such as her wealth, which was reportedly a powerful lure for Hemingway when he first met her in 1925.
What gets overlooked, however, are Pauline’s own hard-earned accomplishments. At that time, she was a successful fashion journalist for Vogue, and few biographers have ever bothered to highlight exactly how good she actually was at her job. Nor have they considered how this professional savvy may have played a role in bringing about the eventual Pauline-Hemingway union in the first place.
As I was researching my upcoming book, Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, in which Pauline played an important role, I wanted to learn more about Pauline’s life as a reporter—but I found scant material in mainstream Hemingway bios. So my research assistants and I dug into the Vogue archives to learn more about her—and there she was, hiding in plain sight.
• • •
A personal essay about my hopeless affair with one of America’s greatest men of letters.
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
Last year, I confessed to my best friend that I had fallen in love with another man. When she heard this man’s identity, she knew I was in trouble.
“First of all,” she told me, “you’re married. And so is he.”
“I know,” I said miserably.
“Plus, he has a mistress,” she pointed out.
“Yes,” I conceded.
“And, you know,” she went on, “he also happens to be dead.”
I had to admit that it was all rather inconvenient, but I was smitten and there was nothing I could do about it. My new boyfriend: F. Scott Fitzgerald, oracle of the Jazz Age, author of the great American novel. This is how it went down.
• • •
THE FINAL DAYS – AND LAST PHOTO – OF HEMINGWAY’S GREAT MUSE, LADY DUFF TWYSDEN
TOWN & COUNTRY
Several years ago, I came across a photograph of young Ernest Hemingway sitting at a cafe table with a group of people, including one beguiling, fashionable lady. There was something about the way she gazed at the camera; she managed to be both demure and coquettish.
I soon learned that her name was Lady Duff Twysden, and that she had been the prototype for Lady Brett Ashley, Hemingway’s iconic femme fatale in his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. The image inspired me to write my upcoming biography, Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises (June 7, HMH).
Some time later, in the course of my research, I came across another powerful photograph, unearthed in the detritus of a long-forgotten estate. The image is undated, but it may be the last surviving photograph of Lady Duff Twysden, and this is the first time it has been published. Here is the story behind it, and of the final days of the woman who inspired one of the most glamorous female characters in modern literature.
• • •
An excerpt from Blume’s book, Everybody Behaves Badly.
VANITY FAIR
Read Vanity Fair‘s exclusive advance excerpt of Blume’s Hemingway biography, Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel gave a voice to the Lost Generation—often by lifting it directly from his affluent expat circle in post-war Paris. In Everybody Behaves Badly, Blume recounts the scandalous trip to Pamplona that inspired Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, and the characters from literature’s greatest roman à clef.
• • •
A profile of designer Rifat Ozbek.
T: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
Rifat Ozbek belongs to a small but special club that has no name, comprised of artists who walk away from the spotlight at the peak of their fame. The fashion designer had a devout following in the 1980s and ’90s, but about a decade ago, Ozbek felt the cycles had grown too demanding, and so took refuge in designing his holiday home in Bodrum, Turkey. There he began making decorative cushions with textiles from Central Asia and Uzbekistan and filling them with down and Turkish lavender. From that, Yastik, his line of exquisite pillows, was born. “I wanted to simplify my life and do one product: no seasons, no fit problems,” he laughs. Exciting new projects are now in the works, and the stage is set for his second act.
• • •
A personal essay about a New Yorker putting down roots in California.
C Magazine
My husband and I probably weren’t the most obvious candidates to move to Los Angeles. I am what people often describe as a quintessential New York character, for better or worse. Consider the evidence: I am invariably clad in black; I am addicted to my work; I am more inclined toward cheese plates than canyon hikes; I practically lived at Bemelmans and the 21 Club. But Los Angeles began to beckon us several years ago, and this year we made the leap. Read on to see the first impressions of a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker putting down roots in California.
• • •
“POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL” - AND BOY
A book review of Gloria Vanderbilt’s The Rainbow Comes and Goes.
The Wall Street Journal
That Anderson Cooper hails from Vanderbilt lineage belongs to that strange category of well-known but still-surprising trivia. His own career trajectory—a newsman who has for decades covered wars, famine and natural disasters, along with the occasional New Year’s Eve—seems so profoundly un-Vanderbilt-y. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt — a Studio 54 fixture and 1960s fashion icon — is in many ways a product of the Gilded Age, more Whartonian than Warholian. She hails from the now-extinct realm of dollar princesses and Newport “cottages.” For anyone who has ever wondered how Cooper relates to this heritage, a new book, The Rainbow Comes and Goes – a conversation between this famous mother and son – should provide some insight.
• • •
A profile of designer Madeline Weinrib.
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
It would seem the textile designer Madeline Weinrib was predestined for her line of work. After all, her grandfather founded the Manhattan design mecca ABC Carpet & Home, which he passed down to her father, and her grandmother was a skilled tailor. But Weinrib never saw it that way — not at first, anyway. “I didn’t even like carpets,” she recalls — perhaps a youthful inclination to go against the genetic grain. Instead, Weinrib became a painter. In her 30s, the family trade began to draw her in. Twenty years later, the New York native is considered one of the earliest pioneers of the now-ubiquitous bohemian, East-meets-West design boom.
• • •
A cover-story profile of Valerie Hemingway as she retraces her father-in-law’s steps in Paris.
Town & Country
In 1959, as Ernest Hemingway’s personal assistant (and later, daughter-in-law) Valerie Danby-Smith traveled to Paris with the writer to revisit scenes from his youth—the Paris of Joyce and Fitzgerald; the Paris of Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, and the Lost Generation; the Paris where “you could live very well on almost nothing,” as he later wrote. Valerie is a rare firsthand witness to the city through his eyes, for she shadowed him as he fact-checked the manuscript of what would later become ‘A Moveable Feast’ – his beloved Paris memoir which recently surged again to the top of best-seller lists. “I’ve gone back [to the city] many times, but I’ve not revisited it in that way,” Valerie told Blume. “It’s too personal and precious.” Yet she recently retraced that journey with Blume and gave us a rare glimpse not only into Hemingway’s early years as a writer, but also into the artist’s life and mindset just two years before his tragic death by suicide.
• • •
A profile of artist Francoise Gilot.
Town & Country
Pablo Picasso had a reputation for captivating and then subsuming his paramours—with one glaring exception: French artist Françoise Gilot. Just 21 years old when she met him, Gilot was a strong, definite presence. Her independence rankled Picasso, but it appears to have also worked on him like catnip. Throughout their nearly 10-year relationship, he liberally documented her image in paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Gilot did gradually become part of the Picasso machine, acting as assistant and archivist and bearing two of his children, but she never wholly succumbed to him. In her new book About Women and in this interview with Blume, Gilot reminds us that she was never in Picasso’s shadow.
• • •
A profile of actor Ralph Fiennes.
Vanity Fair
Ralph Fiennes must infuriate fellow actors who lack his range, which almost defies believability. Over the past 25 years, the English actor has readily conquered Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, and collaborated with Spielberg, Minghella, and Anderson. He has played sinister villains, idiosyncratic Lotharios, and earnest romantic leads. Considering his sprawling résumé, it’s hard to believe that he once doubted that he had the stuff to act in the first place. In this profile, Fiennes, eternally boyish at 52, talks about his affection for anachronistic turns of phrase, why he roots for the bad guy, and his teenage infatuation with Ian Fleming novels.
• • •
ABC NEWS’ GEN X WALTER CRONKITE
A profile of World News Tonight anchor David Muir.
Vanity Fair
News anchor David Muir knew he wanted to be a journalist by the time he hit double digits. Around fifth grade, he began broadcasting from inside a cardboard box in his family’s living room in Syracuse, New York. Soon he used his allowance to buy a cassette recorder at RadioShack and began to interview his sister’s teenage friends. Fast-forward three decades and his interview subjects have a tad more gravitas—Barack Obama, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates, to name a few. Since he became the anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, last September, the broadcast has edged out its competitors in ratings, placing Muir in the same pantheon as his newsroom heroes Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings. Now that he’s been at the helm for one year, Muir talks about life as a new breed of evening anchor, his embarrassing dearth of real vices, and tweeting during commercial breaks.
• • •
BARNABY CONRAD: AUTHOR, MATADOR, BON VIVANT, AND THORN IN HEMINGWAY’S SIDE
A personal remembrance essay.
The Paris Review Daily
The first thing that you learned about Mr. Conrad: he was charming and very appetite-driven. Two weeks ago, he died at the venerable age of ninety, having authored more than thirty-five books detailing, among other topics, his descent into alcoholism, the secrets of Hemingway’s Spain, and the hijinks of the international bon ton in midcentury San Francisco. He was a Renaissance man with a talent for dwelling at epicenters of rarified, exclusive realms: as one of history’s few high-visibility American bullfighters (while in Spain, he went by the name “El Niño de California,” i.e., the California Kid), the proprietor of a who’s-who nightclub, and also as an accomplished artist (several portraits of his famous friends hang in DC’s National Portrait Gallery). I was the last journalist to interview him before he died, and here is my remembrance.
• • •
THE WORLD’S BUSIEST CULINARY CEO
A profile of restaurateur Danny Meyer.
Vanity Fair
Do not use the word “empire” to Danny Meyer: it makes the hair on his arms stand up, he says. He’s happy to be called a humble restaurateur, thank you very much—despite being the C.E.O. of Union Square Hospitality Group and founder of an almost indecent number of James Beard Award–winning and Michelin Star–earning New York City restaurants. A maestro of high-low dining, Meyer also conjured up Shake Shack, the ever-expanding hamburger-and-fries chain that now sates cravings from Saudi Arabia to Citi Field. After “minor[ing] in the study of trattorias” during college in Rome, he founded the now fabled Union Square Cafe, at the tender age of 27. Successive hits included Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, and Eleven Madison Park (which Meyer recently sold to the restaurant’s chef and former general manager). Now in the works: a new café, two restaurants, and his first bar. In this story: a glimpse into Meyer’s frantically busy and delectable life.
• • •
A feature about how Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and the “Murricane” (aka Bill Murray) wrestled comedy away from Los Angeles and reclaimed it for NYC.
Vanity Fair
From a potential lead who died of a drug overdose to a marshmallow man suit that went up in flames, Ghostbusters looked like anything but a slam-dunk when Columbia Pictures made it. A feature detailing how Dan Aykroyd’s big idea led to an all-time comedy classic.
• • •
A profile of writer and journalist Gay Talese.
Vanity Fair
Gay Talese’s distinctive persona appears to have been more or less bestowed at birth. The Ocean City, N.J.-born writer began interviewing his peers while still a teen and went on to profile subjects ranging from opera singers to prize fighters over the next seven decades. To most, he likely seems the consummate insider (only Truman Capote might have had a fatter rolodex), but, as the son of Italian immigrants, he’s long considered himself an outsider—an “advantageous circumstance” that has proved been a key to his success. Often called a founder of the “New Journalism” movement and author of twelve books, Talese will soon release two new works, including a rewritten edition of his 1964 classic, The Bridge, about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. Though he politely deflects when it comes to talking specifics about the second project, he happily dishes about almost every other facet of life in this story.
• • •
VANISHING NEW YORK CITY: SAYING GOODBYE TO THE RIZZOLI BOOKSTORE
VOGUE
Rizzoli Bookstore will close its doors on April 11, and the writerly world of New York feels particularly under assault. There is a great and upsetting tilling of New York’s landscape happening at the moment—one that we all saw coming, but which feels worse in actuality than in anticipation. Bookstores, independent restaurants, sundry places of character: Many of these human-scale institutions are being swept off the board like those dime-a-dozen green Monopoly houses—and not with carelessness, but rather with calculated aggression
• • •
A profile of filmmaker Wes Anderson.
Vanity Fair
If anyone understands the importance of detail, it’s Wes Anderson. From The Royal Tenenbaums to Moonrise Kingdom to his new release The Grand Budapest Hotel, each of Anderson’s films showcases instantly recognizable, intricate diorama worlds, often stocked with preciously arranged camping tents, Crayola-colored portable record players, and pleasingly worn copies of National Geographic. Everything about his work signifies a man who likes things just so. All of which practically obliges one to wonder whether Anderson’s own life resembles a painstakingly curated vintage store. In this story, one of America’s great and most idiosyncratic film auteurs gives a glimpse into his world.
• • •
An exclusive look at the archive of Montgomery Clift.
Vanity Fair
The elegant Montgomery Clift once reigned as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men, best remembered as the star of iconic films From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Misfits (1961). But now it appears that he could have added “photographer” to his list of career credits as well; a long-forgotten trove of the actor’s personal photos has recently surfaced in the archives of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Bequeathed to the library soon after Clift’s untimely death in 1966, at the age of 45, the scrapbooks and portraits of fellow stars reveal Clift’s gift with a lens. The N.Y.P.L.’s treasure chest also houses previously unpublished photos taken of Clift throughout his life and career, including a nightclub snap of the actor at the Fairmont Hotel’s Venetian Room with Marilyn Monroe (the latter was looking particularly buxom that evening). The N.Y.P.L. and Clift estate have allowed Vanity Fair to publish these images for the first time.
• • •
HOLLYWOOD, HITLER, AND THE BANALITY OF EVIL
An interview with Ben Urwand, author of The Collaboration
Vanity Fair
We usually think of archives as being church-quiet places, but proverbial grenades often nestle among those dusty, long-forgotten papers—as evidenced by an explosive new book, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. After 10 years of intensive archival research akin to a high-stakes scavenger hunt on two continents, author and Harvard scholar Ben Urwand is tearing down the popular impression that the 1930s Hollywood community stood united in efforts to combat the Nazi regime. Quite the contrary, says Urwand, whose research reveals a shocking level of collaboration (or Zusammenarbeit, i.e. “working together”) between the German government and Tinseltown’s studios—many of which were famously headed by Jews. Blume spoke with Urwand, who was in Paris gearing up for The Collaboration’s upcoming official release. In this interview with Blume, Urwand discusses the Nazis’ sinister consul in Los Angeles, Hitler’s unlikely affection for Mickey Mouse, and what was really at stake for the Germans as they sought to control Hollywood’s portrayals of their country.
• • •
An interview with filmmaker Sam French.
Vanity Fair
Buzkashi–the national sport of Afghanistan–is essentially a lawless version of polo, played with a dead goat carcass instead of a ball. A buzzy new live action short film Buzkashi Boys—nominated for an Oscar—is poised to bring the often-brutal Buzkashi world to audiences around the globe. Directed by American filmmaker Sam French and produced by Canadian Ariel Nasr, the movie depicts the lives of two young best friends—a street urchin and a blacksmith's son—determined to defy their fates by becoming Buzkashi heroes. In this story, Blume talks with French about shooting a film amidst rocket fire, how to charm Afghan officials into granting police escorts, and the unlikely discovery he made on a Kabul road known as “Chicken Street.”
• • •
JACKSON POLLOCK’S REPORTED FINAL PAINTING YANKED FROM UPCOMING AUCTION
Vanity Fair
After a heated but inconclusive authentication battle waged over decades, it appeared that Red, Black & Silver—purported to be the last painting created by American master Jackson Pollock—was going to auction at last. The small, unsigned painting—long owned by artist Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s mistress during the last year of his life—was slated to be a centerpiece element in the auction, with its own catalogue. (Red, Black & Silver’s fraught biography was chronicled in Blume’s award-winning cover story that appeared in Vanity Fair’s September issue.)
But just before the work was supposed to go under the hammer, Phillips de Pury & Company removed Red, Black & Silver from a scheduled September 20th sale to further research its authenticity—a move that was in part prompted by this magazine’s reporting.
• • •
An award-winning cover story about the controversy surrounding what may have been artist Jackson' Pollock’s final work.
Vanity Fair
Jackson Pollock’s mistress Ruth Kligman said she watched him paint the painting, as a love token, just before his fatal 1956 car crash. But the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, whose members were close with Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, have questioned its authenticity. Pollock, Kligman, and Krasner are all now dead, but as Red, Black & Silver heads to auction, on the 100th anniversary of Pollock’s birth, Blume chronicled - in an award-winning cover story - the dramatic ongoing battle over what may have been an American master’s last canvas.
• • •
A portrait of a small town, fifty years after Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood made it notorious.
Departures Magazine
Fifty years after being immortalized in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the town still gives an intimate glimpse of one of literary history's most notorious locales. What’s brought me to town? I’ve been obsessed with Capote since reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s at 12 years old, and in the decades since I’ve devoured his books, plus the ones about him; I’ve made pilgrimages to all of his former New York City haunts. I’ve long wanted to get to the heart of his greatest accomplishment—and also to the source of his tragic public unraveling—and so on the eve of In Cold Blood’s 50th anniversary, which will inevitably spur a surge of interest in the book and its notorious creation, I’ve made my way to Kansas. The goal: to observe the long-term Capote effect on a community that’s borne an unshakable international scarlet-letter infamy thanks to the writer’s onetime presence.
• • •
A profile of photographer Mary Hilliard.
Departures
Hilliard is not a socialite; nor is she a philanthropist or an art collector. She might have been once, but she left all that behind long ago. Once a homemaker and wife of a banker, she embarked more than 30 years ago on a photography career (it was an act of “invention, not a reinvention,” she says) and, since then, has become one of New York City’s most successful social photographers. Name a dozen of the city’s most glamorous fêtes in the last three decades and Hilliard’s likely shot it, capturing everyone who is anyone, from the east side of Manhattan to the East End of Long Island. In many ways, she’s helped tell the story of New York. “You might get the others to take your picture,” says Aileen Mehle, the sharp-witted grande dame of society columnists, better known by her alias, Suzy, “but Mary’s the one who counts.”
• • •
A MANHATTAN NEIGHBORHOOD GETS A RAPID GENTRIFICATION. THIS IS THE BUILDING AT THE CENTER OF IT ALL.
A portrait of the Starret-Lehigh building in west Chelsea.
Departures
The Starrett-Lehigh building is home to some of the city’s chicest tenants. What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, the prewar behemoth was considered Manhattan’s equivalent of real estate Siberia—admired by architects but shunned by commercial tenants because of its location on the far-west periphery of the Chelsea neighborhood. The closest subway stop was (and still is) a good 15 minutes away by foot—no small consideration when glacial winter winds are blowing off the river. And once you arrived, the area was desolate. “In the old days, everyone left before it got dark,” recalls one 20-year Starrett-Lehigh veteran. In short, “no one would touch the building,” says real estate agent David Hollander. Read Blume’s portrait of a building and a neighborhood getting an abrupt new identity.
• • •
KEEPING SCORE: ONCE RIVALS, THE YUKAWA-CHAN PIANO DUO IS CLASSICAL MUSIC’S MOST EXCITING TEAMS
VOGUE
The electrifying telepathy between British pianists Rosey Chan and Cassie Yukawa has enthralled audiences since 2005, when the duo came together for their first joint public performance. But while the chemistry between the two seems innate, for many years rivalry, not collaboration, defined their relationship. They recall how frequently their childhood paths had overlapped; yet the girls had never exchanged a word, and gradually each became the other’s nemesis. Yet they eventually buried the hachett and formed a duet. In this Vogue story, Blume documents the duet’s rise: they now perform around the globe - from Carnegie Hall to Royal Albert Hall to venues in Dubai to Malaysia. The duo continues to energize the classical-music world and impress critics (“the yin and yang of perfection,” proclaimed London’s Sunday Independent).
• • •
GLOSSED OVER: WHY CAN’T MAGAZINES GET THE WEB?
Slate / The Big Money
The news coming from Conde Nast gets bleaker. Most of the headlines, of course, have been about the humbling of pet-project print magazines like Men’s Vogue and Portfolio; but the real story is about the company’s increasingly tortured relationship with the Internet. This week, the company laid off more than three dozen online staffers from its CondeNet division, which oversees its popular ‘destination’ Web sites like Epicurious.com and Style.com (as opposed to the online versions of the company’s print magazines). This follows the decision two weeks ago to cut back the print version of Portfolio to ten times a year, but fire most of the staff of the Portfolio.com, and curtail most of the site’s original content. According to one report, a Portfolio.com staffer asked a company executive why the website was being penalized for the magazine’s woes, and was told that Conde Nast is first and foremost a magazine company.
What is behind Conde Nast’s bellicose approach to the Web? Other traditional media outlets properly regard the Internet as both destroyer and savior, and have gone into overdrive to translate themselves into online brands. By axing up its online properties, Conde Nast is revealing its apparent online strategy: looking the other way while Jaws devours the back of your boat.
• • •
THE SO-CALLED ‘AMERICAN WOMAN’: 15 TRAILBLAZERS VOGUE LEFT OFF THEIR LIST
Huffington Post
Tonight's Met gala will celebrate the new exhibit "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity." In the lead-up to the event and exhibition, Vogue devoted many pages of its May issue to depicting various female American prototypes, including the "patriot," the "flapper," the "heiress," the "bohemian," and the "the screen siren." Critics have attacked the subjectiveness and narrowness of these categories. "The thinking person has to acknowledge that the whole idea of the American woman is silly," wrote author and law professor Katie Roiphe in a recent Financial Times article. "There is no American woman, only millions of assorted American women.” In that spirit, Blume offers a separate list of fifteen women who embody a quintessentially American sense of strength, resilient spirit, and crossed-frontiers.
• • •
HOW JOSEPHINE BAKER HELPED SAVE POST-WAR FRENCH FASHION
Huffington Post
Today most people remember Baker for her dances at the Folies-Bergère, in which she wore nothing but a string of bananas draped around her famous hips. Yet Baker served as a dedicated member of the French resistance during World War II: her undercover work apparently included smuggling secret messages written on her music sheets. The French government eventually awarded her the prestigious Chevalier of the Legion of Honor award for her hard work and dedication. She was also a seminal ambassador for some of France's most important - and struggling - design houses after the second World War: a now largely-forgotten fact. In this story, Baker’s son reveals the role Baker played in propping up an entire industry that nearly buckled.
• • •
THE JOYOUS ECCENTRICITY OF ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
A remembrance essay about the late designer.
Huffington Post
McQueen's death makes me wonder if there simply isn't a place in contemporary culture for such theatrical creativity anymore -- especially in an era in which fashion houses increasingly need to rely on corporate ownership to survive and thrive. McQueen's eponymous design house - founded in the 1990s - was sold to Gucci Group in 2000. Once part of an enterprise like this, the bottom line becomes more important than the line of the dress - and commerce usually trumps cleverness and ingenuity. It's all well and good if Lady Gaga trots around wearing your statement shoes - but unless the masses are following suit, you're toast.
• • •
WHY ‘MARRY MR. GOOD-ENOUGH’ IS DARK-AGES NONSENSE IN A MODERN DISGUISE
Huffington Post
It’s been a long time since I wanted to jab my eyes out after reading an article, but Lori Gottlieb’s creepy feature, “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” in March’s Atlantic had me reaching for the closest pair of scissors. Sadly, her story is not a feeble comedy routine, premised on the hackneyed portrayal of Woman as Man Trap. It’s Gottlieb’s universal plan for women to “have the infrastructure in place to have a family.” In her view, all heterosexual women “really want a husband (and by extension, a child).” Our purpose on the planet is to breed, and if we deny this fact, we are “being disingenuous.” What a curious decision for such a prestigious publication to perpetuate the stereotype that the American woman is really just a brain stem attached to a ticking womb.
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MOURNING J. D. SALINGER: AN APPRECIATION FROM A GLASS FAMILY DEVOTEE
A remembrance essay about the late author.
Huffington Post
Well, we hardly could have expected him to live forever, but I was still heartbroken to learn yesterday that reclusive author J. D. Salinger had died. I honestly believe myself to be one of his most dedicated disciples; while most of his readers outgrew him upon graduating from high school, I’ve held a candle for his characters well into my thirties. Many of today’s obituaries have remarked on how adolescents related to Holden Caulfield - the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye — as the angry outsider; my own empathy with Holden (and Salinger’s other darlings, the Glass children) had a somewhat gentler tenor. I found his alienation exquisite and comforting; it made my own teenage feelings of separateness feel hallowed and intelligent — and promising. Although Holden probably grew up to be a hot mess, I felt that the fact that I, as a sixteen-year-old, shared his suspicions and black humor and irreverence would inevitably position me as the sort of adult artist I someday hoped to become.
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An interview with Coco Before Chanel star Audrey Tautou.
Huffington Post
Before there was the formidable version of style grande dame Coco Chanel, there was another: a vulnerable, angry young woman, who'd been abandoned at a French orphanage by her own father. In an era in which a woman's ambitions could be realized only by advantageous marriages - an option not immediately available to the impoverished Coco - she decided instead to make her way in a man's world with the grit, ambition, and often the wardrobe of a man. It is this compelling version of Coco whom Tautou beautifully portrays in the film. In this story, I talk with Tautou about the rage and desire that propelled Coco Chanel to the pinnacle of the fashion world
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Huffington Post
In the September issue of Harper's Bazaar, the editors ran a cutesy feature titled 'What Would Coco Do?'. With the new film Coco Before Chanel due out this autumn, says the headline, "Bazaar wondered what the notoriously feisty Madame Chanel would say about the world after Chanel. So we asked [current Chanel designer] Karl Lagerfeld to channel the original fashion wit." One of these exchanges goes like so: Harper's Bazaar: Your clothing liberated women in the 1920s. Are you still a feminist? Lagerfeld-as-Chanel: I was never a feminist because I was never ugly enough for that.
This quip rankled me on many levels: as a woman, as a fashion consumer, as a writer for both adult and young women. It is a spiteful, irrelevant observation: one's appearance has nothing to do with one's relationship to feminism. In my mind, a feminist is any woman who believes that women - like men - have the right to determine their own individual destinies, barred neither by law nor cultural convention from doing so. I am proud to count myself in that category.
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THE WHITE HOUSE’S GREATEST AND MOST INCLUSIVE FIRST LADIES
Huffington Post
When the Obamas ascended to the White House earlier this year, many Washingtonians breathed a sigh of relief: after serving a grim eight-year sentence in the Ministry of No Fun, they were finally up for parole. The capital's social life was about to come alive again at last. Looking back over the last 220 years of American administrations, it's quite amazing how the First Couple - and the First Lady in particular - has set the social tone of Washington, and often that of the country and even the world. Last December, President-elect Obama pledged that, as a First Couple, he and Michelle Obama would "open up the White House and remind people this is the people's house." This special edition of Let's Bring Back will celebrate several of the White House's most inclusive hostesses. As a column (and soon a book!), Let's Bring Back celebrates rituals, curiosities, personas, and ideas from times past. Now that we are in an era of high-participation again, it seems like a good time to revisit some of the First Ladies who've welcomed the American public with open arms.
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An interview with designer Jason Wu.
Huffington Post
Last year at this time, you'd likely never heard the name Jason Wu. Sure, he's been designing clothes since the age of nine, and after his 2006 debut collection he became the darling of the Vogue and Bergdorf circuit. Yet Wu was hardly a household name. Then, on January 20, 2009, everything changed - and what a difference a day makes. First Lady Michelle Obama surprised the world - and Wu himself - by donning his now-famous one-shouldered, white goddess dress to the inauguration balls. The dress has since been promised to the Smithsonian as an artifact of American history, and Wu has been catapulted into the international spotlight. In this story, I talk with Wu about America's new first lady, his favorite Old Hollywood stars, and the item of clothing that no woman should go without.
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An interview with author Candice Bushnell.
Huffington Post
These days, Bushnell has become a cultural empire: on top of the six-season series based on her book Sex and the City, her fourth novel, One Fifth Avenue, will be released next week, and she's just signed a deal to pen The Carrie Diaries, a two-book young adult series about Carrie Bradshaw's teenage years. If stellar success has gone to her head, she does a good job of hiding it. When I meet with her to discuss these projects, at a private arts club in New York City called Norwood, Bushnell is a mensch, not a diva. She is punctual to the minute. Carrie Bradshaw was last seen swathed in Vivienne Westwood; Bushnell arrives in jeans, flipflops, and glasses. And here is the biggest surprise: While many of Bushnell's characters spend their lives in pursuit of men and their money, Bushnell herself is dead-serious about encouraging women to make their own money.
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LANDMARK FERTILITY CASES: LEGAL BATTLES IN STATE COURTS
ABC News
As reproductive biotechnology has become increasingly sophisticated over the last two decades, the nation's state courts have been inundated with complicated cases involving surrogacy, fertility, property rights, paternity and child support issues. Since the 1980s, when the earliest major cases brought these issues to the national consciousness, lawyers, parents, theologians and bioethicists have agonized over the legality and morality of enforcing contracts for the sale of babies. Blume details the landmark cases over the years.