What Katie Didn’t Know

A look behind-the-scenes at the alleged 2004 search by the Church of Scientology for the next Mrs. Tom Cruise:

“Nazanin Boniadi, 25, who had not yet become the human-rights activist for Amnesty International and the actor she is today, was summoned in October 2004 to meet an important church official at the Celebrity Centre International, in Hollywood. She arrived to find the high-ranking Greg Wilhere, who, according to a knowledgeable source, told her she had been selected for a very hush-hush mission that would entail meeting dignitaries around the world. He added that if she succeeded she would be helping to make the world a better place. Thus began a month-long preparation process that entailed her getting audited every day and telling Wilhere her innermost secrets, including every detail of her sex life. Nobody who had been in a threesome, for example, would be considered—a rule that apparently eliminated one candidate. Since Boniadi was a gung-ho Scientologist who had already attained a level of O.T. V—beyond the Wall of Fire—she embraced the church’s motto ‘Think for Yourself’ and threw herself into every task she was assigned. Wilhere, meanwhile, had frequent whispered phone conversations with the person he called ‘the project director,’ says the source. Early on, he sent Boniadi to a photo shoot, which revealed that she wore braces and that her naturally black hair had red highlights. She was told that she had to lose the braces and make her hair one color to emphasize her ethnicity. It didn’t matter that she still had a good six months to wear the braces; they had to go. So did her boyfriend.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 26, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,191 words)

The Birth of Bond

The complicated birth of the big-screen 007. After several false starts, author Ian Fleming handed his character to two relatively small-time film producers:

“It is 1959, and Sean Connery is putting in time in a cornball live-action Disney feature called Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He’s the second male lead, billed beneath not only Albert Sharpe, the elderly Irish character actor in the title role—a kindly farmhand who sees leprechauns—but also the green-eyed girl, the ingénue Janet Munro. Though verily pump-misting pheromonal musk into the air, to a degree unmatched before or since by any actor in a Disney family movie, Connery is still a jobbing scuffler, not a star. He has no idea of what lies in store for him.

“The seventh of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Goldfinger, has recently reached the shops. But there are no Bond pictures yet. In London, a Long Island–born film producer named Albert R. Broccoli, known as Cubby, is still lamenting that he blew his chance with Fleming. The previous year, Broccoli had set up a meeting with the En­glish author and his representatives to talk about securing movie rights to the Bond series, only to miss the meeting to tend to his wife, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In Broccoli’s absence, his business partner, Irving Allen, let Fleming know that he didn’t share his colleague’s ardor. ‘In my opinion,’ Allen told Bond’s creator, ‘these books are not even good enough for television.'”

Author: David Kamp
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 19, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,863 words)

Obama’s Way

Lewis follows the president for six months—joining him for basketball pickup games, a trip on Air Force One, and inside a decision on how to handle Libya:

“Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute. The point of this particular meeting was for the people who knew something about Libya to describe what they thought Qad­da­fi might do, and then for the Pentagon to give the president his military options. ‘The intelligence was very abstract,’ says one witness. ‘Obama started asking questions about it. “What happens to the people in these cities when the cities fall? When you say Qaddafi takes a town, what happens?”‘ It didn’t take long to get the picture: if they did nothing they’d be looking at a horrific scenario, with tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. (Qaddafi himself had given a speech on February 22, saying he planned to ‘cleanse Libya, house by house.’) The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. ‘He instantly went off the road map,’ recalls one eyewitness. ‘He asked, “Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?”‘ After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, ‘I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 11, 2012
Length: 55 minutes (13,989 words)

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

An excerpt from Stross’s new book, which goes inside Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Silicon Valley startup incubator:

“The Kalvins are attempting an improbable thing, making a case for a nondigital product: ‘Having a physical product that you flip through and have on your coffee table and show your friends—it’s real­ly valuable! We’ve actually bought photo books for our friends and family. It sucks because you have to spend hours making them, finding the photos.’ Every dorm has to prepare one each year, pay a printer $20 a copy, and buy at least a hundred.

“Graham returns to his still-unanswered question: ‘Where does this expand?’

“A Kalvin suggests offering a book based on your personal calendar and Foursquare check-ins. Or your tweets for the year.

“‘You’re not serious, that people are going to print up tweets from last year?’ asks Trevor Blackwell, who is in his early 40s, about the same age as the other three founding partners. He too has a day job, as the chief executive of Anybots, the robot company that then shared its building with Y.C.

“‘Actually, I have a tweet book,’ says one of the Kalvins.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 10, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,153 words)

Fashion’s Most Angry Fella

John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career:

“Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild set out to change that dynamic. ‘John came back from Paris and went to the fashion houses here and said, “I don’t want to talk to the manufacturers—I want to talk to the person who makes the dresses,” ’ says de la Renta, who was working for Elizabeth Arden at the time. ‘For all of us, there’s a great debt to be paid to John Fairchild, because he’s the first one to put American designers on the map.’

“WWD began publishing personality profiles of the designers, elevating them to celebrity status, writing about their travels, vacation homes, and, in titillating fashion, love lives. As one veteran WWD staffer puts it, ‘Mr. Fairchild always likes to know, “Who’s doing the boom-boom?” ’ The newspaper covered society in cheeky and irreverent fashion. Rummage through the archives of WWD and W at the company’s Third Avenue offices and, even a half-century later, the ‘Eye’ columns are deliciously entertaining, filled with gossip and photographs of ‘the ladies who lunch’ and ‘Jackie O’—phrases coined by Fairchild. He is widely credited with coming up with such catchy phrases as ‘hot pants,’ ‘walkers,’ the ‘social moth’ (for Jerry Zipkin), and ‘the Cat Pack,’ a takeoff on the Rat Pack. Fair­child and his writers went for the jugular, proclaiming that ‘Jackie O is now Tacky O,’ criticizing her taste in clothes and announcing that her jewelry had become vulgar. Fair­child launched the popular trend of running flattering and unflattering photos of socialites with suggestive captions such as: ‘It is hard to believe that the matronly frump in the white wool dress is the same tightly coiled Gloria Vanderbilt of today. Gloria swears that her metamorphosis has nothing to do with surgery but simply weight loss.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Aug 17, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,633 words)

A Case So Cold It Was Blue

A murder of a young newlywed went unsolved for 23 years, until a cold case homicide unit picked up the file and found a missing clue.

“Sherri’s file perplexed Francis. The crime report stated that a swab had been taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm, but it was not listed in evidence and was not among the forensic samples that had been signed out by Moritt in 1993. It apparently had been misplaced sometime earlier. Where might it be?

“Francis knew well the steps in the evidence chain. Evidence recovered from the victim’s body would be held for a time in the coroner’s freezer, while the case was still active, and at some point would be gathered up and stored under the file number. What if the swab hadn’t made it from the freezer to the file? Francis called the coroner’s office. The swab was not on file, so they searched the freezers by hand.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 14, 2012
Length: 39 minutes (9,751 words)

Suddenly That Summer

This summer marks the 45th anniversary of “the Summer of Love” in San Francisco. A look at the movers and shakers in Haight-Ashbury in 1967:

“Joplin’s creative epiphany occurred after a friend of Getz’s gave her acid for the first time—slipping it into her cold duck—and they went to the Fillmore to hear Otis Redding. ‘Janis told me she invented the ‘buh-buh-buh-ba-by … ’ after seeing him,’ says Joe McDonald. ‘She wanted to be Otis Redding.’ Grace Slick salutes her 1967 co-queen (who died of a drug overdose in 1970), her soul sister in prodigious ‘swearing and drinking,’ by saying, ‘She had the balls to do her thing by herself. A white girl from Texas, singing the blues? What gumption, what spirit! I don’t think I had that fearlessness.’ Slick sadly regrets, ‘I was so Episcopalian that when I saw a certain sadness in Janis’s eyes I felt it was none of my business.’ If she could turn back the clock, she says, she would have tried to help her.

“Victor Moscoso says that 1966 was ‘when it worked. You’d walk down Haight and nod to another longhair and it meant something.’ Rock Scully adds, ‘We painted our houses bright colors. We swept the streets.’ The Grateful Dead all crammed into a house at 710 Ashbury; so did Carolyn Garcia, with Sunshine, her baby daughter with Kesey. Barely 20, Carolyn cooked every meal for that ‘boisterous, wonderful’ band, and she saw how ‘competitive to a fault’ Jerry was. ‘He would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and with these intricate fingerings—always wanting to excel, to be the best’ at the acid-fueled improvisations he now played, which he described as ‘something like ordered chaos.’ (Garcia died of heart failure in 1995.)”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 13, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,603 words)

Team of Mascots

Obama famously said he wanted a “team of rivals” in his Cabinet. Why that never happened:

“The way Cabinet officers relate personally to the president is—no surprise—often the crucial factor in their success or failure. Colin Powell had a worldwide profile and a higher approval rating than George W. Bush, and partly for those very reasons had trouble building a close rapport with a president who had lots to be modest about. Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, may have a Nobel Prize in physics, but that counted for little when he once tried to make a too elaborate visual presentation to the president. Obama said to him after the third slide, as one witness recalls, ‘O.K., I got it. I’m done, Steve. Turn it off.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 6, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,990 words)

The Devils in the Diva

Whitney Houston was destined to become as revered as her godmother, Aretha Franklin, before drugs and a toxic marriage caused her to hit rock bottom. A look at the pop icon’s rise and fall, and her final days, when it looked like Houston was going to make a comeback:

“[Clive Davis] enlisted Diane Warren to create songs for a new album. Warren tells me that she put herself in Houston’s mind when she wrote a song about struggle and rebirth, entitled ‘I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.’ As soon as Whitney heard the lyrics—’I thought I’d never make it through, I had no hope to hold on to I was not meant to break’—she told Warren that she’d written her life.

“But Warren and David Foster weren’t sure that Whitney had the vocal strength to sing it. In the end, she not only sang it, says Warren, ‘she sang the shit out of it.’ According to Gary Catona, 75 percent of Whitney’s vocal strength had returned by the time of her appearance at the American Music Awards in November 2009. When she came onstage in a white gown, singing the Warren song, the crowd leapt to its feet. ‘The buzz was: Holy shit!’ says Warren. ‘It was one of the best performances I’d ever seen. It was: Whitney is back!'”

Author: Mark Seal
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 16, 2012
Length: 36 minutes (9,017 words)

Young Barack Obama in Love

Excerpt from Maraniss’s new biography of the president. A look at Obama’s early twenties in New York, from the perspective of his girlfriend at the time:

“Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 Second Street in Park Slope. The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not ‘I love you, too’ but ‘thank you’—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world. They spent time cooking. Barack loved to make a ginger beef dish that he had picked up from his friend Sohale Siddiqi. He was also big on tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles. For a present, Genevieve bought him an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. They read books together and talked about what they had read. For a time they concentrated on black literature, the writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ntozake Shange.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 3, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,593 words)