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THE BOYS OF SPRING
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LIV FOR THE MOMENT I 130
In Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty,
Liv Tyler stole the Hollywood show. Kevin Sessums
looks in on the 19-year-old daughter of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler
and former model Bebe Buell, as Tyler and her new love,
Joaquin Phoenix, co-star in the soon -to -be -released Inventing
the Abbotts. Photographs by Herb Ritts.
BILLIONAIRE WITH A CAUSE | 136
Sir James Goldsmith has not only
the style and trappings of a Bond villain, but also the
global reach and ambition. Starting with an unprecedented
interview, Sally Bedell Smith explores the Anglo-French
buccaneer's financial coups, the loves of his tripartite family life,
and his passionate new political crusade.
HOCKNEY IN BLOOM | 144
Helmut Newton and Ingrid Sischy spotlight
the flower power of David Hockney's latest paintings,
now on view in London.
DEATH BECOMES HER I 146
The betrayals, violence, and paranoia marking Patricia Cornwell's rise to fame rival the dark visions that have made her one of America's highest-paid female novelists. Anticipating Cornwell's next best-seller, Judy Bachrach enters the crime writer's tortured world— and finds some real-life victims. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.
BEAU JUST | 152
David Halberstam heralds Ward Just's 1 1th novel, Echo House, which deftly captures the treacherous Washington world that Just abandoned after serving as a Vietnam War correspondent. Photographs by Jonathan Becker.
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA BALL I 156
Frederic Morton and Terry deRoy Gruber waltz into Vienna's most magical tradition, the tiara-studded annual Opera Ball.
CAMP LIFE ! 158
Making the rounds of the vast lakeside estates
of New York's Adirondacks that were built for such tycoons
as J. P. Morgan and Alfred Vanderbilt, Alex Shoumatoff
finds the "great camps" inhabited by wealthy Wasps, still haunted
by legends of old. Photographs by Jonathan Becker.
CONTINUED ON PAGE
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CLARE'S CONQUESTS I 170
In her forthcoming biography of Clare Boothe Luce, Sylvia Jukes Morris charts the brilliant calculations that propelled the dazzling blonde writer into the managing editor's chair at the 1930s Vanity Fair, into the arms of Time-magazine co-founder and editor in chief Henry Luce, and into Broadway lights with her celebrated play The Women.
Col
umns
ANGEL IN THE OUTBACK I 66
Christopher Hitchens checks out the intellectual muscle of Australian critic Robert Hughes, whose fight against pretension and political correctness in the art world continues with a new PBS series and book. Portrait by Arnold Newman.
WHEN THEY WERE KINGS I 80
A just-discovered video of Frank, Dean, and Sammy
shows James Wolcott why the Rat Pack still defines American
cool— in movies, clothes, and music. „
LORD OF THE RIM | 90
Will Barneys department store join its celebrated British counterpart Harvey Nichols in the hands of Dickson Poon? Edward Klein reports on the flamboyant Hong Kong entrepreneun who made a fortune catering to Asia's new luxury trade.
THE BOYS OF SPRING I 102
At the start of every baseball season, rookies vie for multimillion-dollar contracts and major-league glory. For 1997, David Margolick touches base with seven who could go all the way to Cooperstown. Photographs by Peggy Sirota.
Vanities
CUMMING AND GOING I 115
Vladimir Malakhov's Swan dive; Intelligence Report- a tale of four cities.
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EDITOR'S LETTER: "Good evening, Mr. Bond"
CONTRIBUTORS | 38
LETTERS: London swings | 54
CREDITS | 204
PLANETARIUM: Back off, Taurus | 205
PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE: Lena Home | 206
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VANITY FAIR
Editor in Chief GRAYDON CARTER
Managing Editor chris garrett
Art Director david Harris
Executive Literary Editor wayne lawson Executive Editor elise O'SHaughnessy
Deputy Editor george hodgman
Features Editor jane sarkin
Senior Articles Editor Douglas stumpf Legal Affairs Editor Robert walsh
Senior Editors aimee bell, matt tyrnauer, e. e. osborne
Fashion Director Elizabeth saltzman Photography Director susan white
Special Correspondents
DOMINICK DUNNE. BOB COLACELLO, MAUREEN ORTH, BRYAN BURROUGH
Writer-at-Large marie brenner
Special Projects Editor reinaldo herrera European Editor andre leon talley
London Editor henry porter
West Coast Editor krista smith
Assistant Managing Editor ann powell
Deputy Art Director Gregory mastrianni
Associate Editor susan kitten plan
Copy Editor peter devine Associate Copy Editor allison a. merrill
Production Director ellen kiell Photo Editor lisa berman Research Editor Patricia j. singer Deputy Research Editor john banta
Research Associates james buss, peter d. hyman, john kearney
Assistant Art Directors mimi dutta, julie weiss Art Assistant john dlxon
Vanities Editor riza cruz
Assistant to the Editor in Chief Liz welch
Editorial Business Manager mersini stratakos
Fashion Market Editors tina skouras. mary f braeunig
Photo Research Editor jeannie Rhodes
Photo Associate rebecca tttle Features Associate beth p altschull
Associate Style Editor kathryn MacLeod
Editorial Associates felice barash kaplan, dana brown, craig offman
Editorial Assistants kelly biren. john gillies, Patricia herrera,
GWENDOLYN HOLCOMBE, EVGENIA PERETZ, SARA SWITZER, KATHERINE WESTERBECK
Copy Production Manager dede demoss Copy Production Assistant martha hurley Art Production Associate Christopher george
Contributing Editors
JUDY BACHRACH, ANN LOUISE BARDACH,
LESLIE BENNETTS, CARL BERNSTEIN, H G BISSINGER. HOWARD BLUM.
ANDREW COCKBURN. LESLIE COCKBURN, AMY FINE COLLINS.
NANCY COLLINS. JENNET CONANT. BEATRICE MONTI DELLA CORTE,
RUPERT EVERETT, BRUCE FEIRSTEIN. STEPHEN FRIED. SUNHEE C. GRINNELL,
DAVID HALBERSTAM, EDWARD W. HAYES, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, CATHY HORYN. LAURA JACOBS,
DAVID KAMP, EDWARD KLEIN, MICHAEL LUTIN, BRUCE McCALL, ANNE McNALLY.
DAVID MARGOLICK. KIM MASTERS. RICHARD MERKIN. DEE DEE MYERS, ANDREW NEIL. WILLIAM PROCHNAU.
FIAMMETTA ROCCO. ELISSA SCHAPPELL, KEVIN SESSUMS,
GAIL SHEEHY, MICHAEL SHNAYERSON, ALEX SHOUMATOFF, INGRID SISCHY,
SALLY BEDELL SMITH, DIANE VON FURSTENBERG, HEATHER WATTS, GEORGE WAYNE,
MARJORIE WILLIAMS. JAMES WOLCOTT. TOBY YOUNG
Contributing Photographers
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. HELMUT NEWTON. HERB RITTS. SNOWDON, JONATHAN BECKER. HARRY BENSON. MICHEL COMTE, DAFYDD JONES. FIROOZ ZAHEDI
Contributing Artists tim sheaffer. Robert risko. Hilary knight, daniel adel
Contributing Editor (Los Angeles) wendy stark morrissey
Contributing Stylists lori Goldstein, kim meehan
Director of Special Projects sara marks
Paris Associate veronique plazolles
Director of Public Relations beth kseniak
Deputy Director of Public Relations aninac. mahoney
Public Relations Associate crissy kerr
Editorial Director JAMES TRUMAN
3 0 VANITY FAIR
MAY 19
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150 YEARS OF HISTORY AND ROMANCE
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VAMITY FAIR
Publisher MITCHELL B. FOX
Advertising Director nancy landsman berger Creative Services Director jean m. karlson Advertising Manager Leslie alphen picard
Jewelry /Watch Director linda s. kloner
Fashion Director david m golden
Retail Director shelagh nichols
Beauty Manager michelle kugelman
Corporate/ Automotive Manager karen landrud
Account Managers donna a Friedman, jay spaleta
Business Manager regina a. wall Executive Assistant to the Publisher randy j.cunio
Marketing Director warren j milich Marketing Manager suzanne fromm Marketing Manager melissa s. marks
West Coast Manager
RITA MORAN CHAVERS
Account Manager DONNA CAMPBELL
6300 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles. California 90048
Midwest Manager
PAMELA DOLBY
875 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 6061 1
San Francisco Manager
MARY TORCHIO
50 Francisco Street
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Detroit Manager
TOBY JONES
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Hawaii
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SYLVIE C. DURLACH-McKENZIE,
S& R MEDIA
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MIRELLA DONINI, MIA S.R.L,
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20121 Milan, Italy
Art Director megan mardiney
Special Projects Manager maura hogan Promotion Manager stacey Herman
Merchandising Manager carolyn chauncey Merchandising Associate julie shapiro
Senior Promotion Designer marlo hall Promotion Production Coordinator Christina woo
Vanity Fair is published by The Conde Nast Publications Inc.,
Conde Nast Building, 350 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017
Chairman s I newhouse jr.
Deputy Chairman-Editorial ALEXANDER liberman
President and CEO STEVEN T. FLORIO
Executive Vice Presidents
JACK KLIGER, CHARLES H. TOWNSEND, MICHAEL A. CLINTON
Executive Vice President-Chief Financial Officer ERIC c ANDERSON
Senior Vice President- Group Sales and Marketing CATHERINE viscardi JOHNSTON
Senior Vice President-Circulation peter a armour
Senior Vice President-Manufacturing and Distribution KEVIN G. HICKEY
Vice President-Director of Public Relations PAUL wilmot
Vice President-Market Research STEPHEN BLACKER
Vice President-Systems and Technology owen b weekley
Vice President-Editorial Business Manager LINDA RICE
Vice President- Advertising Business Manager PRIMALIA chang
Vice President-Human Resources JILL HENDERSON
Treasurer david b CHEMIDLIN
Director of Advertising Production PHILIP v. LENTTNI
Chairman-Asia-Pacific Bernard h. leser
President-Asia-Pacific didier guerin
32 VANITY FAIR
MAY 19
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Editors Letter
aGood Evening, Mr. Bond"
ith his billions, his Moorish Mexican hideaway with its own private army, and his cool, Anglo-French brio, Sir James Goldsmith is a char- acter right out of Ian Flem- ing—Ian Fleming by way of Thomas Nast. A former indus- trialist and a political icono- clast. Goldsmith, like any Bond villain worth his salt, appears constantly to be smil- ing. It is a brilliant and clearly calculated device: a smile gives almost nothing of the inner strategist away. And because there is always the threat that the smile will disappear, it is infinitely more menacing than a per- manent scowl. Goldsmith has an aversion to scorpions; his compound in Mexico is surrounded by traps to keep them out. And although he owned a major stake in Goodyear Tire & Rubber at one point, he has a phobia about rub- ber bands too. He has always had designs on the world, first as a buccaneering capitalist, later as a would-be en- vironmentalist. Bond-villain-wise, he has everything but the claw hand and the white cat.
In an age when most major business figures have beaten a hasty retreat from the tumble of public scrutiny, Goldsmith, now 64, continues to conduct his private and professional lives on an epically grand scale. His first wife, a Bolivian tin heiress, died five months after they were married. He present- ly has an ex-wife, a wife, a mistress, and eight children scat- tered about in five residences in four countries.
Goldsmith is both drawn to the press and repulsed by it. As is the press to and by him. He has had a particularly
stressful time of it with the British media la ly over his current passion, the Referendu Party, through which he is spearheading 1 crusade against the unification of Eurof When Vanity Fair contributing editor Sa. Bedell Smith first approached Goldsmith f an interview, he passed along the same coi; teous response he has given hundreds of joi nalists who have sought him out over the pi> two decades: sorry, but he simply doesn't gi: personal interviews. Smith discovered, ho* ever, that Goldsmith often answers his ov phone. By the time she reached him, she had talked to i merous members of his inner circle and had read both his published political jeremiads as well as the two biogj phies of him and every newspaper article she could flit "I think he's somebody who doesn't like to do things perficially, so he responded to that," she says. "And he sponds to persistence, because he's that way, too." Goldsmr heard Smith out and called her back later that same I to ask her to meet him in Paris.
Her report on page 136 is a candid look at one of I century's more colorful figures. He is certainly in a leagj with the subjects of Smith's two biographies— Williami Paley and Pamela Harriman— and of her previous profif for Vanity Fair: Gianni Agnelli, Stavros Niarchos, aj the Rothschilds. Goldsmith's opponents should bewaree that smile. For that matter, Sally Bedell Smith's is pn ty deadly as well.
^ffaC&iU,
Liv for Today
ON THE COVER Liv Tyler wears a lace bolero by John Galliano for Couture Givenchy. Skirt by John Galliano. Earrings by Sarajo. Hair by Peter Savic. Makeup by Jo Strettell. Hair products from Paul Mitchell. Makeup from Clarins. Styled by L'Wren Scott. Photographed exclusively for l.F. by Herb Ritts.
VANITY FAIR
Tyler, who as a child loved to dress | up in her mother's feather boas, casts > exotic spell, left, iri a sweater by Albe Ferretti and a hal ' top from the We: Costume Comp< \ L. A. Manicure! I Lisa Jachno. Ht tattoo by the Zi Beauty Center
ills Boston Paint llcacll San Francisco
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'Where, but in nature,
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Blake Kuwahara, designer
MAXFIELD. LOS ANGELES • TAKAS. MAYA NEW YORK TOLL FREE PHONE NUMBER 1 ! 8 4 EYEOTA
38 VANITY FAIR
Contributors
During his first visit to an Adirondack "great camp," at age six, Alex Shoumatoff fell in love. "She wore a checked hunting shirt— and she was a gii canoer. I got stuck on the other side of the lake, paddling into the wind trying to keep up with her." Now a V.F. contributing editor, Shoumatoff {above, right, contributing photographer Jonathan Becker) explores the world of the great camps for this issue— a lifestyle he understands well. In 1988, he "packed it in" a moved from Mexico City to the Adirondacks, where he lives with his wife and children in a house he built with the help of local craftsmen.
"It's been one
unbroken chain," admits
Sally Bedell Smith about
her recent work, "and it's
all been an accident." The
contributing editor's 1990
biography of William S. Paley
sparked her interest in
Edward R. Murrow's mistress,
Pamela Harriman. While
researching her book on the late
ambassador, Smith learned
the details of Harriman's affair
with Baron Elie de Rothschild,
who then figured in her
January V.F. article on the
banking dynasty. That story,
in turn, stirred Smith's
curiosity about Lord Jacob
Rothschild's close friend
Sir James Goldsmith, who is
her subject this month.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 46
tery season, you celebrate your love.
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When the cherry blossoms bloom,
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' s the cherry blossoms bloom in spring, they fill the air with a vibrant svmbol of renewal and rebirth. In Japanese culture, the gentle beauty of this flower has come to symbolize the renewal of love and friendship. This sentiment is perhaps most notably demonstrated by the cherry blossoms which grace the mall in Washington DC, a present from the Japanese government as a token of friendship.
Mikimoto, purveyors of the world's finest pearls, is proud to present the exquisitely designed and masterfully crafted pieces of the Cherry Blossom Collection. This limited edition collection gracefully conveys the highest affirmation of love: genuine friendship. Mikimoto invites you to begin your own tradition of acknowledging friendship with a gift from the Cherrv Blossom Collection"
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Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi will make personal appearances at select Lord & Taylor and Robinsons- May stores to demonstrate the versatility and appeal of Celanese acetate fashion fiber. Join Celanese acetate and Vanity Fair to meet Kristi and to preview an array of fashion collections made with acetate.
Wednesday, April 16
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835 North Michigan Avenue
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Nantucket Film Festival
Actors, writers, directors and film buffs will converge for the second annual Nantucket Film Festival, June 17-22, 1997. Honoring screenwriters and their craft, the festival zooms in on the art of storytelling in cinema. The event features films, panel discussions, staged readings and Q&A seminars. For more information, call (212) 642-6339.
Lonlrihiiiors
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3*
Because they were
Vietnam War correspondents at
different times, contributing editor
David Halberstam and his subject
this month, novelist Ward Just, never
met in Saigon. "All the ambitious
young men knew about all the other
ambitious young men. And everyone was
in awe of Just's reporting," then New
York Timesman Halberstam recalls about
his Washington Post rival's dispatches.
"He was someone I was intrigued by and
nervous about." The two finally had
dinner at La Coupole in Paris in 1966,
and Halberstam has continued
to admire Just's work.
Having investigated the murders of London designer Ossie Clark and Italian scion Maurizio Gucci, contributi editor Judy Bachrach is no stranger to the dark side of fabulous. But few stc caused such trepidation as her profile of celebrated crime novelist Patricia Con While reporting on the Cornwell publisi phenomenon, Bachrach was warned by two of her subject's friends to "watch on and to "inform my loved ones about the project I was working on."
"People today want to swing, but they can
only swing halfway now," says contributing editor
James Wolcott, whose column this month recalls
the days when men were men, women were broads,
and Sinatra's Rat Pack ruled the big rooms of
Las Vegas. A self-described "uncool, order-by-
L. L. Bean-catalogue kind of guy," Wolcott admits
that it would be fun to be that uninhibited, but
that he rather prefers "vicarious swinging."
In 1930s Vienna, Frederic Morton's
uncle was the only member of the fa who could afford to go to the famoi Opera Ball. Morton's grandmother I follow her son by taxi to the Opera House just to watch him ascend the wearing his top hat and tails. Ever si Morton (near left, with fellow guests ball) heard this story, he has wanted write about the grand event, which h on page 156, and though he immigrated to America as a child, he has never lef Vienna behind, revisiting the city for several acclaimed books, including The Fo Street, A Nervous Splendor, and Thunder at Twilight, continued on page so
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Lontributors
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 46
Since he was made a U.P.I, correspondent in Tokyo in the early 1960s, contributing editor Edward Klein has written on the business, politics, and culture of nearly every major Asian country. Now, with China in the spotlight, Klein profiles one of the many new overseas- Chinese entrepreneurs, millionaire former playboy Dickson Poon, who took an unusual tack with his interrogator during their first meeting, in Hong Kong's luxurious Regent Hotel. Wearing a diamond-encrusted watch, Poon kept feeding Klein with chopsticks, insisting he sample each and every local delicacy.
In 1980, British-born biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris came across a New York Times interview with Clare Boothe Luce that had been languishing in her "Interesting People" file, and thus began 15 years of work on the Luce biography excerpted in this issue. By the time of her death in 1987, Luce had become so candidly confiding that at times e Morris's husband, Edmund, found himself distracted from writing the second volume of hisr life of Theodore Roosevelt. "He'd be writing about the Interstate Commerce Act," recalls Mo "and Clare would drop by and start talking about one of her love affairs." Needless to say, the Commerce Act had to wait.
Interview editor in chief Ingrid Sischy,
a new V.F. contributing editor, spent her
first nine years in apartheid South Africa, where
television was banned and she saw only one
movie, Around the World in Eighty Days, before
her family moved to Scotland. A contributor
to books by Robert Mapplethorpe and V.F.
photographers Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts,
Sischy was the editor of Artforum and a staff
writer at The New Yorker, and is an artistic
director of the Florence Biennale.
Contributing editor Kevin Sessums
is working on the final chapter of
his novel, Porterhouse, which, he promises,
will be published "before the end of
the millennium." The characters are drawn
from the many eccentric people he has
encountered in New York City, where he has liv
for 21 years, and the French Quarter
of New Orleans, where he has an apartment
and spends much of his free time.
MAY 1 9 <
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A LEAP OF FAI
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A 25 YEAR CELEBRATION OF DANCE.
Center stage and on the edge.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. American Ballet Theatre. The Joffrey Ballet. Mark Morris Dance Company. Parsons Dance Company. Pilobolus. All touring nationally this year, these are just a few of the hundreds of dance companies bringing innovative works and new ideas to audiences across the country and around the world. In the past quarter of a century, dance in America has soared with an amazing spirit — from regional troupes just beginning to stretch their wings, to the most accomplished national companies expanding the boundaries of the art form.
The Philip Morris family of companies celebrates this innovative spirit as we mark our 25th anniversary of support for dance in America. It's just a part of our ongoing commitment to visionary individuals and pioneering organizations who enhance the quality of our world.
Supporting the spirit of innovation.
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Letters
Li
54
Finding myself still reeling after read- ing the "London Swings! Again!" feature [by David Kamp, March], I feel compelled to say how spot-on I thought it was. Your article clear- ly shows what an ex- traordinary place Lon- don can be. Top marks to the remarkably tal- ented David LaChapelle for his photograph of Alexander McQueen, and to Mr. McQueen— what a frock!
DAVID WATTS London, England
SO, VANITY FAIR man- ages to convince a bunch of hip, young Londoners that the best way to represent their "scene" is to dress up and perform like seals. They all looked pretty silly!
MARY-BETH LAVIOLETTE
Calgary, Alberta
NO WONDER Lord Marlborough blew his top in the lush gardens of Blenheim Palace. I believe, too, that aristocrats should behave like aristocrats and not like mere rich people.
JOYCE G. MILLER
Sumter, South Carolina
THANK YOU, VANITY FAIR. I now know what is cool in London. I think I will go and take a red double-decker bus down to the pub to show off my new hipness, only stopping off to smoke a couple of hundred fags, sing a couple of verses of "God Save the Queen," take some E, buy some fish-and-chips, and read a copy of the Times, trying not to trip over a 1,000 -year-old castle on my way. Party on, all you groovy lads and birds
I VANITY FAIR
Blueblood models
Iris Palmer, Honor Fraser,
Jodie Kidd, and Jasmine Guh
take a royal airing at Blenheh
Palace, the birthplace
of Sir Winston Churchill.
out there, we poor little Brits are so pleased that the great U.S. of A. has deemed us cool!
A. BELL London, England
SWINGING LONDON? Where have you been and what took you so long? And regarding Jarvis Cocker ["Pulp Fric- tion," by George Wayne, March]: Quasi- modo? How dare you!
CECILIA MOSTAGHIM San Francisco, California
Ebonic Plague
I WANT to express my delight in reading Christopher Hitchens's article "Hooked on Ebonics" [March]. I found it witty, informative, and thought-provoking. Ex- actly what I expect from my Vanity Fair. MATTHEW L. STOTTS San Francisco, California
I FOUND the lilting, oh- so-English treatise on Ebonics by Mr. Hitchens to be a fascinating cu- riosity piece, conveying both stodgy old-world sensibilities and contra- dictions which bordered on camp. His dismis- sive anti-Ebonics mes- sage is clear enough and is shared by many reasonable leaders who have voiced justifiable doubts, but the haughty tone in which he choos- es to denounce and be- little individuals who do not share his opinions betrays his own chutz- pah (translation in the Queen's English: colos- sal nerve) and ignorance. PATRICK J. WEN I Alamo, California
AS AN ENGLISH teacher who is often asked her opinion on the validi- ty of Black English, I I was thankful that Chris- topher Hitchens cap- tured the essence of this - hybrid of a language and its effect in this country— recognizing its merit on one hand, yet wary of its per- petuation in our culture on the other.
PAULA S. M. HORNE
Seattle, Washington
AS A BLACK AMERICAN MALE, I must] let you know that "Hooked on Ebonics" was first-rate.
KEVIN DARREN NASH Atlanta, Georgia
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS may have left England to get away from Margaret Thatcher, but many others are leaving there just to get away from the contemp- tuous nostril raising he practices so as- siduously. It is either amazing or amus- ing to watch how gleefully white com- mentators always go after black people as soon as they find a politically safe pretext: O.J., Marion Barry, Afrocen- trism, the old Cosby show, and now-' Ebonics. Like a pack of ravenous dogs,
MAY 19 9 7
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Easy rider: "Why shouldn't she
be a movie start, "Jerry Seinfeld asks about
his co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus as she
makes the leap from Seinfeld to movies.
" Who else are they gonna get?"
they take a little too much pleasure in reasserting the claims of righteousness.
TED S1LAR
Allentown, Pennsylvania
THE OAKLAND School District was not promoting the teaching of Ebonics but identifying a need for teachers, to un- derstand that this language does exist, in order to assist in the educational devel- opment of black children.
NANCY D. TOLSON Iowa City, Iowa
The Louis-Dreyfus Affair
I REALLY ENJOYED the article on Julia Louis-Dreyfus ["Success and the Seinfeld Girl," by Lloyd Grove, March]. Not only is she intelligent and funny, I think she is beautiful and has it all together. It was refreshing to hear that a successful wom- an such as Julia still drives her child to a nursery-school party and makes her fam- ily No. I in her life.
MINDI L. BRENNER Gardnerville, Nevada
I WANT TO SAY this to Julia: You have your priorities straight, baby! Having buckets of bucks is great, but at the end of a day, or a decade, a job well done can be most accurately measured by what kind of kids we've raised, not how much collateral.
SUZANNE CURRY El Dorado Hills, California
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS'S character oi Seinfeld is so refreshing because she': allowed to be as complicated and con tradictory as the guys. I doubt that Jer ry Seinfeld and his writers think o themselves as feminists, which make: the whole thing more delicious: unwit tingly, they've created the four moa gender-liberated characters on televi sion. Three men who kvetch, shriek and whine, and one woman who's nt Goody Two-Shoes.
SANDY ASIRVATHAJ*
Columbia, Marylam
i
Wolcott Redux
OH JOY, OH RAPTURE, somebody sla]* this smile off my face— James Wolcott i back at Vanity Fair ["Too Little, Tofo Slated March] and all's right with tin world! I haven't even opened thti month's issue yet; I'm still savoring see: ing his name once again gracing thi front of your magazine. Thanks for thl valentine, V.F. Welcome back, James.
L. ROHRElt Toluca Lake. Califon
SCHADENFREUDE being one of rm top-three emotions, I naturally exulten in James Wolcott's excoriation of Slatm Michael Kinsley's on-line magazine ftf nimrods.
ROBERT F. X. DRUR't Brooklyn, New Yol'l
IN HIS RECENT slamming of Slate ma|< azine, James Wolcott manages to lew a series of journalists whose writing are more different than alike (from Nidi olas Lemann to Kama Pollitt) with l single put-down: "oxygen depleters.' Other Slate contributors (including nrr self) fare no better. The guy can put o> a show, you bet, but his moves are ge: ting a little stagy, his takedowns increa ingly reminiscent of professional wrei tling matches (in cages). For his nex contributor's photo, I suggest that yo show him in purple tights, drenched i sprayed- on sweat and wearing a mask,
WALTER KIR! Livingston, Montai
'
VANITY FAIR
I AM THOROUGHLY enjoying Mr. Kit sley's on-line effort, Slate. He is tl most articulate voice of the resurgei left. Mr. Wolcott seems almost to ha\ his feelings hurt that Mr. Kinsley woul choose somewhere other than the norti eastern corridor from which to enligh en his followers. Come on, James, leai i
MAY 199
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The possibilities are endless.
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Letters
to use Slate rather than panning it for be- ing something you're not accustomed to.
MONTY BOTTOM Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
MY HAT IS OFF in appreciation to Rob- ert Sam Anson, for laying waste to the "glamour" of a gangsta's life and expos- ing its frayed truth ["To Die Like a Gangsta," March]. Gangstas— in the streets or in the studios— are doomed to shoot or be shot in the name of empty, worthless causes. Tupac saw his own light too late in the game to use his power over millions of loyal listeners and the media to make any changes worthy of remembrance.
JAMES TUVERSON Los Angeles. California
I HAVE READ SEVERAL pieces on Tupac Shakur's death, and yours was the only one to shed any light on the side of him that was a dedicated volunteer on behalf of children who are growing up on the streets as he did. People need to know that he cared about someone besides himself and his star status. He was about more than the "thug life."
JENNIFER A. CUPP
Smyrna, Georgia
FOR A YOUNG man who deemed him- self a "thug," the late Tupac Shakur also proved to be a scholar and (at times) a gentleman.
STEPHANIE F. LEGARE Rockville Centre, New York
I AM JUST ONE of those "pinkest of Caucasians" who discovered Tupac Shakur after the release of his hit "Dear
Mama." My advice to the American ! public is not to fear a few four-letter j words and to give this man a listen, j Only through understanding their world i will we ever be able to begin to heal the { anger in our nation's young black men. I
MELODY AYERS'I
Waterbury, Connecticut I
TUPAC'S IS A cautionary tale. Look and ; learn, lest you have to repeat his history, j
MILA K.UEFNER Hayward, Californail
AT FIRST I THOUGHT this would be an- ' other quasi-analytical, exploitative piece which the mainstream media like to chum out when discussing black culture ; and its icons. But you produced a feature'jlj that exuded intelligence, objectivity, and I class. While other magazines focus owL 2Pac, the would-be gangsta. you showed tj Tupac, the intellectual heavyweight andill philanthropist. (How many artists would ii spend four hours in a nightclub dancing 'i with a disabled woman?)
JOAN L. SMITH London. England;
ALTHOUGH I ENJOYED some of Tupac. Amaru Shakur's music, never once did l! feel sorry for him when he found himself in one of the many predicaments leading up to his death. When you play dirty you die dirty. But your article was so in-t tense, it made me look at him in a whok> new light. It humanized him, and I felt a tug at my heart as I read about all of the non-gangsta/thug things he did.
AMANDA ARMSTRONG New York, New YonVi
ROBERT SAM ANSON did not portra} Mr. Shakur as a devil, nor as an gel, but as a man with survival instin
VANITY FAIR
MAY 199
a film by Christopher Reeve
>*
GLENN CLOSE BRIDGET FONDA WHOOPI GOLDBERG ROBERT SEAN LEONARD DAVID STRATHAIRN
In the Gloaming
In the twilight of a lifetime comes reconciliation.
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MICHAEL FUCHS
The National Bestseller
"Beautifully told."
— The New York Times Book Review
ERRANDS
is the story of family and how the routines of life, the simple errands, mean more to us than we think.
By the author of ORDINARY PEOPLE
Ballantine Books
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Letters
Avraham Burg (left), chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist
Organization, and Edgar Bronfman Sr, president of the World Jewish Congress, at a nev
conference on Swiss hanks and Holocaust survivors, New York City, May 2, 1996.
who believed in himself even when ab- solutely no one else did.
I want to thank you, Vanity Fair, for not limiting the cultural and demograph- ic range of your readers. Be it Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Tupac, our world is not just black or white, it's life that loves and breathes.
SYLVIA V. HILLMAN
Phoenix, Arizona
Bronfman's Crusade
I HAVE TREMENDOUS admiration for Edgar Bronfman Sr. and the important work that he and others are doing ["Edgar's List," by Ann Louise Bardach, March]. To be witnessing, in 1997, the reverberations of the Holocaust makes me shudder. The recent revelations of Swiss complicity and deceit only deepen my conviction to bring up our two pre- cious sons to be proud of their Jewish identity and heritage.
JOANNE L. KLEIN Clinton Corners, New York
THOUGH THE NEWS of Swiss plans to construct a multimillion-dollar fund for Holocaust victims may hardly address the claims of survivors, it certainly proves that efforts made by moral entre- preneurs such as Edgar Bronfman finally do bear fruit, even if it takes the form of a symbolic gesture. At the very least, it validates the flip side of Mr. Bronfman's own contention that "timidity towards anti-Semitism encourages anti-Semitism."
RONIT SHEMTOV
Mansfield Center, Connecticut
WHEN BRONFMAN orders the Po1 to "get those damned nuns out of thet exactly what does he think he is cnr ing? Harmony? Tolerance? Respect others? Before Bronfman decries the: tolerance of others, tell him first to sl| exhibiting it himself.
CAROLYN EKSTF San Francisco, Califoi
I GO ABOUT my daily grind, enjoying erty in a way most of my ancestors co< only dream about as they were led. their death. I am a Jew and carry a f manent hole in my heart. This hole < never be filled: it longs for history, tice, and dignity. I will not be politic; correct when I say, Go get 'em, Edgl Get as much as you can, make thl sweat, hurt them in the only place til are capable of hurting— the pocketboc Do it on principle, do it for the shopke er in Poland, the tailor in Hungary, .J baker in Vienna! It is the only justice :| survivors will ever get. L 'chayim, Edg<
GABRIELLE ANNE LEVITCH FELLrVl Pembroke Pines, Flo
IN OUR WORLD today, amid starvatM and woe, 50 years after a war where involved sustained great loss, it see-< absurd to grovel for a thing as trivial money. Humanity is priceless.
60
VANITY FAIR
DEBRA WRIG Farmington Hills, Michi
CERTAINLY NO government should b efit monetarily from the crime of i century, and those who can prove ti to the money directly should get th just compensation. But the best aver for reparation would be a World Jew
MAY 19
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VANITY FAIR
Letters:
Congress committee that distributed re- claimed funds to Jewish causes around the world (for example, Holocaust edu- cation programs and the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe). The Holocaust should be remembered for what it was— the most inhumane slaughter of a group of people in histo- ry—and that in no way should be ob- scured by the cloud of money.
MARK SEGAL New York, New York
Bulls-eye
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ'S stunning photo cap- tured the soul and spirit of our very own Chicago Bulls ["Running with the Bulls," by Susan Kittenplan, March]. Two ques- tions: How did she get Scottie Pippen to smile? And where can I get the poster?
NANCY NEHLS NELSON
Naperville, Illinois
Hong Kong Affair
WITH REGARD TO "Hong Kong Sur- prise" [by Andrew Neil, March], every- thing is on target, but it's important to note that, while Britain has been around for 99 years, only after the turn- over was imminent did it try to imple- ment democratic reforms. Its words ring hollow. For Britain to suggest democra- cy when it suddenly served its interest is at best an example of that annoying British arrogance and at worst tossing a match into the village as it leaves.
The Opium Wars are a blight and a disgrace that will always be the legacy of Britain in China. That its "empire" was built on drugs eviscerates any lofty democracy path, a path it did not offer to the Chinese or Hong Kongers in the previous 90 -plus years. What was good enough for the home country and others in the rest of the commonwealth was not good enough for Hong Kong.
GARY ZUINAN Danville, California
YOUR STORY ON Hong Kong rightly makes much of the marriage between Cantonese hard work and British admin- istration, which was a major factor in the city-state's rise to wealth and prominence. But what of the Shanghaiese, who came from China's biggest city after the 1949 Communist takeover? They are generally regarded as being among Hong Kong's most savvy and shrewd entrepreneurs.
MARK GRAHAM Hong Kong
It's Your Funeral
JESSICA MITFORD rightly criticizes the funeral industry for exploiting the coni sumer ["Death, Incorporated," March] ii the name of fattening its coffers v/iliA outrageous profits. In fact, as a formei executive and a 30 -year veteran of til death-care industries, I believe she dij not come down on them hard enough In terms of nondeclinable fees, wflj kind of business consistently forces cul tomers to pay for services they do not use or want? It's time that we, as consumers refuse to accept the status quo. We neec to pressure the industry into eliminating these unsavory business practices.
DARRYL J. ROBERT!
Scottsdale, Arizoni
JESSICA MITFORDS article is singula) in its focus, in both its target and bias The only examples given to support hei opinions are of misconduct committee by Service Corporation International There is not a single example of mis< conduct by independent funeral direc. tors, or even other conglomerates. Art cording to Ms. Mitford's article, as a 1994, these other businesses made up 9! percent of the industry. I will concedn that there are disreputable companies ii the funeral industry. However, I would bet my life that the reputable compa nies far outnumber the disreputable onesi Ms. Mitford doesn't give businesses liku my family's a chance. Businesses tha: are a main support structure in thei communities. Businesses run by peoplir who will do anything to help a frienu or neighbor. Businesses that work ver: hard to provide what is most needed- compassion, support, and strength ii the worst of times.
SHANDRA NAUGHTO!1 Chicago, Illinoi
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The shock of
the Hughes: Eminent art
critic Robert Hughes,
photographed in his
SoHo loft, New York City,
February 1997.
ANGEL IN THE OUTBACK
Taking on the art establishment and the forces of political correctness- Ins latest blast, American Visions, accompanies an eight-part PBS series that airs this month-Australian-born Robert Hugh is the most successful, and unlikely, art critic of his time
of George Washington that
occupies the rotunda of the
Virginia State House. Done
by Jean-Antoine Houdon, it
has stood serenely in place
since 1792— a neoclassical
tribute commissioned by
Thomas Jefferson and plant- ed in the inner chamber of the Old Do- minion. People scurry by it on their daily errands, unsurprised and incurious at this marble effigy of the father of the nation. But holu the frame. Into the scene steps
I VANITY FAIR PHOTOGRAPH
a man who speaks with an intimate twang about the "legis-/av-ture of Vir- gini-a. " Taking a stance by the statue, he points out what is obvious but rarely re- marked—that this well-executed figure is unusual in being the precise size of a man. Adopting the tone of a contempo- rary reporter, he goes on to tell how Jef- ferson haggled with Houdon about the price, and gave up on the idea of a bronze equestrian hero in favor of the cheaper model. Switching from the pro- fane to the sacred, he demonstrates that the placement of the statue is exactly
analogous to the siting of a god in a Rt man temple. Finally, he draws the viewer eye to the marble lapel of Washingtoi jacket. There is a button missing, and sculptor must have taken some trouble execute the mistake. And here the c cept of a god is to be found in a del because it informs you "that the greai man is capable of a certain negligence in tenue and is not a stickler for protocol- democracy in dress, as it were."
Our guide is not some willowy aes-;j thete or desiccated guardian of an official j treasure-house. He too is built to human
ARNOLD NEWMAN
MAY 199
J
ENE'S BINSONS*
*^ § 2&U
REFLECTIONS OF MEN-
_
Hitche
^Perhaps not since Alexis de Tocqueville has a foreign spectator seen so much of the American game?
scale, if you care to imagine a brick out- house thus constructed. Robert Hughes is the most successful art historian, or ex- plainer of art, of his time. His latest book is American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Knopf). Its octuplet tele- vision version premieres this month on PBS. Like its chart-busting predecessor, The Shock of the New (1981), which dis- covered a mass audience for the subject of artistic modernism, American Visions is a history as much as a critique. The national canvas is unrolled, and the story of a people is related through its attain- ment in painting, architecture, design, and manufacture. It takes some kind of a polymath to conceive such a project. In an age of credentials and specialization, Hughes is a polymath of a distinct type. He has made amateurism professional. He is the marsupial critic.
Marsupials are known for three things. They can look at the world from an upside-down and antipodean per- spective without losing balance or pro- portion. They have creative pouches and pockets for live, wriggling births. And they are capable of great leaps and bounds. You could also say that they are an ancient presence in a very young and new society. The versatility of Robert Hughes is a product of both his rooted- ness and his deracination; perhaps not since Alexis de Tocqueville has a foreign spectator seen so much of the American game. Here is our resident Australian alien, scrutinizing one of America's best- loved painters, Thomas Eakins, and telling us why he was considered un- American in his time:
On one level, it [Swimming] is a wholly "classical" picture. Its scheme is Arcadian and virile— healthy bodies at play, in and out of their element—and its ancestry in- cludes Roman sculpture and the prints of bathing soldiers made after Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina. The figure lying on the rock is the Dying Gaul, reversed: a cast of this sculpture was in the Academy's col- lection. The broad stability of the triangu- lar composition reminds you of Poussin.
But Eakins got into trouble in the Philadelphia of the 1880s, not so much for his homoerouc underlay as for the candor of his modeling classes. Just as
| VANITY FAIR ismunfoncnB
you are thinking that this sounds like the oil-and-brush version of what happened to Walt Whitman, Hughes quotes from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, expertly con- trasts the differing "tones" of Eakins and Whitman with the buttocks of Donatel- lo's David, and reveals details of the odd but close friendship that sprang up be- tween the young Victorian -American painter and the venerable poet of the Civil War. "Only connect," said E. M. Forster. Or, as Hughes once put it to me, "I'm busy. They want me to update Tlie Shock of the New and take in postmodernism. Sounds easy? It's only like trying to shift a ton of shite with a shoehorn."
The marsupial achievement lies in pre- cisely this combination of qualities: the polished and the demotic. It used to be that America was young and brash but slightly insecure, and required the occa- sional reassurance of a high-culture Euro- pean critic, usually an Englishman like Lord Clark. Today, the United States is simultaneously swamped in mass popu- lar culture and uncomfortably stuck with a "toney" and plutocratic art establish- ment. It actually needs someone from a younger and more egalitarian society, both to challenge its vulgarity and to mock its elitist pretensions. Someone who knows the difference between Giot- to and Guernica and can freely quote Latin as well as filthy Australian limer- icks. Someone whose working title for his brilliant 1987 history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, was "Kangaroots."
Marsupials can contain contradic- tions. In that same shite/shoehorn preface to the second edition of The Shock of the New, Hughes wrote with distinct reserve about the medium that has made him famous:
By forming images meant to be slowly contemplated into merely narrative frames, and thus imposing the fast time of TV on the slow time of painting and sculpture; by eliminating surface, texture, detail and au- thentic color . . . and above all, by the brief attention span it encourages, TV— even in the hands of the most sympathetic direc- tor—cannot construct a satisfactory parallel to the experience of a static work of art.
Hughes was breezy enough when I asked him about this apparent irony.
"Yeah, well, odi et amo," he said in flu] ent street Roman about this love -hate relationship. "Telly demands movement. It's wonderful for comparing motif and! image. It's awfully good at iconography] And that's about it. But one can givd people intellectual entertainment witbj out being definitive. What I'm telling! them on the screen is to get off thd couch and go and see it for themselves.'lj This is actually the same injunction ha] has been issuing from his atelier at Timi since 1970. And he can be as critical oi his mass-market weekly as he is of the M boob tube. In American Visions he re-H lates with relish the story of the bogus "Helga" flap of 1986: the supposed disj covery of a job lot of "unknown" works by Andrew Wyeth. This turned out td] be a scam and a stunt, but not before,w as Hughes puts it,
everyone had been royally had, in a classid folie a deux, joined by the rest of the medial Time made Newsweek do it and Newsweea made Time do it, and neither could let goj And, of course, the publicity ensured than special exhibitions of the Helga paintings would be mounted, with great pomp, at tha National Gallery of Art in Washington bej fore touring the rest of America. But on J deeper level, the Great Helga Hype was thd natural outcome of fantasies about art and artists that had been brewing in American culture for years, spurred on by museumsJ the market and the blockbuster mentality with its overheated imagery of secret troves, 3 Unknown Treasures, Hidden MasterpiecesJ Gold of the Gorgonzolas, and the rest.
(It helps to read the above out loud,; bearing in mind Hughes's own encapsuji lation of the accent of his native Sydney, Australia, as "high in the nose, drawl-J ing, flat and brown.") He is at war on) two fronts, first against the neoconservaj tive art essayists like Hilton "Breath o» Hot Air" Kramer, who affect to thinli that all is barbarism and decay, and seoj ond against the posturing neophiliaca like Julian Schnabel, he of the thickly1 applied crockery, who bring the meretri- cious skills of Madison Avenue to bear on "the art market." Hughes has onl)| one non -marsupial attribute. The platyJ pus and the wallaby are not predators and do not slay. He, in bold contrast, is a good and consistent hater. When the pseudos meet the continued on page 7j
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Hitchens
* Robert Hughes can freely quote Latin as well as filthy Australian limericks.^
CONTINUED from page 6g greedies, and the philistines are in power, cultural desolation is the result. As he puts it with such scorn in American Visions:
At the opening of the decade in 1980, the three most expensive paintings ever sold at public auction were Turner's Juliet and Her Nurse ($6.4 million), Velazquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja ;$5.4 million), and van Gogh's Poet's Garden ($5.2 million). These prices seemed scandalous at the time— head- ine stuff. Eight years later, they would scarcely have been thought worth re- sorting. Pumped by its own fetishism, by millionaires competing in the auction 'oom like mountain goats clashing over sossession of a crag or a mate ... the narket went off the chart and then off the wall. ... In 1990 a Japanese wood-pulp 3aron named Ryoei Saito paid $82.5 mil- ion for van Gogh's portrait of his physi- :ian, Dr. Gachet, and, two nights after :hat, $78.1 million for Renoir's Au Moulin ie la Galette. That one man could spend wer $160 million (roughly the entire an- lual budget of America's National En- iowment for the Arts) on a brace of paintings sent the top end of the art mar- cet from obscenity into farce.
Only connect . . . Hughes doesn't al- ways take so long to find and saturate lis target. He can be pithy as occasion demands. "New Zealand? Great place :o visit, but you wouldn't want to spend i weekend there." At Time's elevator )ank, he once saw his boss and patron Henry Grunwald emerge in the compa- ny of Henry Kissinger. Glimpsing this sair of rotund Central Europeans in one rame, so to speak, he gaily cried, "If it sn't Tweedledum and Tweedledee!" The Vagrant and fastidious Rhoda Koenig Mice asked him if there had to be quite »o much flogging in his description of :onvict life in Australia: "Ah, well, /'see, darling, that was for the English narket. We wanted to do well in the rhristmas trade," and in American Vi- rions the following observation: "It is a ;urious fact that America, even though t is one of the most religious countries )n earth, has produced very little in the vay of original religious art." I'm still hinking about that: an apparently casu- il apercu that can be the outcome only )f a long engagement. (It occurs in the :ourse of a passage on Andy Warhol, in artist once much ridiculed by Hughes
/t AY 19 9 7
For art in America's sake:
John Singleton Copley's
Watson and the Shark, above,
and Jean-Antoine Houdon's
George Washington, details
right and below, are among
the works featured in Robert
Hughes's upcoming PBS
series, American Visions.
and now upgraded by this sternly ex- Catholic writer precisely because he did try to capture and employ the religious impulse. We used to disagree about this: Hughes today says with perfect generos- ity that he was wrong. "I've mellowed on him, and on the unwilled impudence of his cultural existence. I once thought he'd artificially constructed his own pro- file and I now think he didn't fake it.")
The great pre -modern confrontation between a certain kind of art and a certain sort of aesthetics came when Whistler sued John Ruskin. Ruskin had accused Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." In court, Whistler was asked how much he was charging for a certain picture. "Two hun- dred guineas." And how long had it taken him to execute the painting? "A couple of
days." "And for the labor of two days you asked 200 guineas?" "No. It was for the knowledge gained through a lifetime." Hughes might well have been on both sides of that controversy, because the snobs rallied to one party and the free -market forces gathered behind the other, and he believes that both factions are inimical to art. His own lifetime of experience in- cludes failing the first-year arts course at Sydney Universi- ty ("a course that a mono-cellular or- ganism could have I passed with ease"), wasting a bit of time in the discovery that he couldn't paint like de Kooning, and taking the first leap that every ambi- tious marsupial must make— the jump out of Australia.
"Australia is often compared to Ameri- ca as a young country with a frontier tra- dition. But actually we're very different. America was colonized in hope and we were colonized as a punishment. We don't have any 'Australian exceptional- ism'— the messianic idea that dooms Americans to endless disappointment. There's no stuff about being a city on a hill. We have no moral mission to other countries. Pragmatism and skepticism are what we have instead, and these are quite useful critical tools." And so they are. Reviewing John Singleton Copley's painting Watson and the Shark (1778), Hughes (who knows from sharks, having learned to sail off the Great Barrier Reef) can zigzag between Raphael and Jaws for his references, and hold the at- tention of someone who thinks of Don- atello as one of the Ninja Turtles. In dis- cussing New York City as a cultural arti- fact, he can discourse on the banal way that zoning laws led to skyscrapers, and then turn to a comparison between the step-back design of high-rises and the Mayan ziggurat. On his way through an elucidation of American Gothic he pun- gently minutes that Grant Wood was "a closet case if ever there was one." Occa- sional five-dollar words— "apotropaic" is
VANITY FAIR
Hitchens
* "It is,1' Hughes told me bluntly, "a shitty time artistically" ?
a favorite one— pepper the delivery like nuggets in an alluvium. One advantage of a marsupial upbringing is that, with its kookaburras and other exotica, it in- culcates an early familiarity with poly- syllabic words.
Hughes's Irish-Australian Catholic fa- ther died when he was 12, and he was immensely fortunate in having the Australian writer Alan Moorehead as a surrogate papa. (The title of Tfte Fatal Shore is an hommage to Moore- head's history of Polynesia, The Fatal Impact.) One day, as they were having lunch with the Australian painter Sidney Nolan, Moorehead turned to Hughes and said, "If you stay here another 10 years, Australia will remain a very inter- esting place, but you, meanwhile, will have become a bore." That was all the cue he needed. Following the lead of many other ambitious young Aus- tralians, Hughes went to London and wasted the 1960s in fine style, splashing his money up against the wall and be- lieving that drinking and wenching were a necessary part of the writerly life. ("I only got the first two bits right.") A marsupial underground magazine, Oz, which was the object of a celebrated ob- scenity prosecution, carried an essay by Hughes which recounted acid days and praised Theodore Roszak's book The Making of a Counter Culture for its de- termined revolutionary style. This feuil- leton is not represented in Hughes's fine collection. Nothing if Not Critical. Pho- tographs of the period show him in a Road Warrior pose as a roughneck bik- er. But before leaving he had undertak- en, at the ripe age of 24, a book called The Art of Australia. This work, which he now dismisses as juvenilia, has the same quality— of setting down a national narrative through art— that he has de- ployed with American Visions. From the Aborigines and the first convicts and warders, through the exploration of the outback, the perspective widens to take in Nolan's series on Ned Kelly and Gal- lipoli: the modern Australian traumas and rites of passage. "When I look at Nolan's first Kelly series," wrote Hughes, "I am reminded of an observation by Karl Marx: that the epic is the art form of an undeveloped society." This was
Portrait of the art critic as a young man: In his second year as Time's art critic, Robert Hughes takes in the Marlborough Gallery's Picasso show, New York City, October 1971.
good training. And Hughes was wise to return to his first love. After an immer- sion in the churches and galleries of Italy— also conducted under the aegis of Alan Moorehead— he was able to sober up, break his writer's block, and pick up work as an art critic for the London Sunday papers and for the BBC. Lord Clark himself took an interest in the young fellow, which meant that he came highly recommended to Time when it needed a new art critic. With the pa- tronage of Henry Grunwald, Hughes immigrated to New York in 1970 and completed his knight's move across the English-speaking world. "My Australian relatives used to use English cosmology without realizing its absurdity. They would refer to New Guinea or Indone- sia as 'the Far East' when of course it was the Near North." This trick of per- spective, putting him at a double angle to his adopted country, has served him well ever since.
Though American Visions can be read perfectly easily as a marsupial trib- ute to the vastness and variety of the American canvas, and to the huge inge- nuity and scope of the American imagi- nation, it is actually a warning against decline. Remember, says Hughes, that Boston is older than St. Petersburg. America's middle age is creeping in, un-
recognized. The galleries are ossifying.^ The art mart has become like the junk*, bond market of a decade ago. The cul- ture wars consist of more and more>| noise about less and less. No American^ network would have backed the series,' which was commissioned by the BBC| and— after a lot of arm-twisting on theij part of Hughes— by Time Warner. Gresham's law is working its dumbing-i down effect on television and the mov- ies. "It is," he told me bluntly, "a shit- ty time artistically." It has also, one gathers, been a shitty time for him per- sonally. He suffered from tenacious.] blues last year and plans to lie fallow] after this book. And then, perhaps, a memoir of his Catholic Australian up-d bringing. His thoughts are turning homeJ again as the prospect of Australia^ declaring itself a republic becomesd more real. "It's the only thing I agrees with Rupert Murdoch about. It's got tot) come. It would be the most terrible actJ of provincial abandonment if the BritsJ got rid of the monarchy before we did.' Against the swirls of fashion and the pressure of commodification and chi-i canery, Hughes has been urging Ameri-r cans to use their own eyes, form theiij own judgments, have the courage to de4| velop their own taste. I made him z\ present of Ralph Waldo Emerson's red mark, quoted by Edward Hopper in hiaj essay on Charles Burchfield:
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majes< ty. Great works of art have no more af fecting lesson for us than this. They teacl us to abide by our spontaneous impressior. with good-humored inflexibility, then mos when the cry of voices is on the other side Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what wt. have thought and felt all the time, and w< shall be forced to take with shame ou opinion from another.
By holding up a mirror of the Ameri can artistic past, from the classical t< the high modern, and by contrasting i to the current mediocrity, Hughes ha not tried to establish an orthodoxy o his own. Rather, he has sought to email cipate the public from received opinioi and thus, as a good critic should, t( work himself out of a job. D
VANITY FAIR
MAY 19 9
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WHEN THEY WERE KINGS
Back in the days when Vegas was dangerous and everybody smoked and drank, the Rat Pack ruled. Contemporary pop culture is
still under their influence-in movies, clothes, and music.
But as a recently discovered kinescope (and the only known existing
video of the boys performing live) demonstrates, no one
can touch the sharkskinned cool of Frank, Dean, and Sammy
present our hoodlum singer ..." With these words of mock homage, an astonishingly young and lanky Johnny Carson intro- duces Frank Sinatra to the stage of the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis, Missouri. The year is 1965; the event, billed as a "Frank Sina- tra Spectacular" and broadcast on closed circuit to theaters across the country, is a benefit for Father Dis- mas Clark's Half-Way House for ex- cons. Sinatra said. "Be there." and they
were there— Dean Martin. Sammy Davis Jr., Trini Lopez, Kaye Stevens, and an amalgamation of two different bands, in- cluding members of the Count Basie Or- chestra, conducted by a lean cat named Quincy Jones. Joey Bishop was listed on the original program, but had to bow out when he "slipped a disk backing out of Frank's presence," according to Carson, his replacement, who was only three years into his tenure as host of Tlie Tonight Show. A recently discovered kinescope of this bash— under the new
title, The Rat Pack Captured— will be screened this month at the Museum ol Television & Radio in New York and al the Los Angeles branch, and will also be broadcast later this year on "Nick al. Nite'"s cable channel. The edited %* minute version of the benefit— featuring! Frank, Dino, Sammy, and Johnny— repj resents the only known full-length video: of the Rat Pack in performance. (A two-volume compact disc exists of thd Rat Pack performing at the Villa Veniai club in Chicago in 1962— a gig they werei
^
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' TALKIN' TO ME, DADDY-O? From left, Peter Law Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra play it tough motional shot for ir 1960 Vegas cai i, Ocean's 11.
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strong-armed into doing by the mobster Sam Giancana.) The Rat Pack kine- scope, found in a closet at the Dismas House, is more than a historical curio. It has the glamorous wham of a champi- onship prizefight. It's an opportunity to catch three of America's greatest show- men in their tigerish prime (with Carson along for the ride), before they became total legends and turned into leather.
There's Dean Martin with his sleepy power, like a leopard in a smoking jacket, finishing his few songs with the words "I'd like to do some more for ya, but I'm lucky I remembered these."
says that the song he's about to perform makes for "a slight duplication here, but I don't think you'll mind too much," launching into his own rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin," which he con- tours and tattoos as if romancing for the first time. Dean amuses, Sammy is mahvelous, but only Sinatra, with his Manhattan-skyline voice, conjures a mood and a spell.
After Sinatra's set comes the usual Rat Pack foolery, some at Dean's ex- pense ("The only reason he's got a good tan, he found a bar with a skylight"), but with Sammy as the primary butt. The racial ribbing, though not as crass or
The excitement that this kinescope has sparked testifies to the unfading leg- end of the Rat Pack and their stream- lined influence on male bravado, which can be observed in everything from the resurgence of "bachelor pad" music and the cocktail hour to the nostalgia for the . Vegas of yore in movies like Casino and Bugsy, when the city still swung and the red lobbies weren't clogged with Mr. and . Mrs. Big-Butt America pushing strollers between the slots. The Rat Pack is the Mount Rushmore of men having fun. The designer Mossimo Giannulli keeps a large photograph of the Rat Pack in his Laguna Beach home, like an eternal
There's Sammy Davis Jr., a gleaming revolver of a man, belting out a maudlin Anthony Newley torch song as if he means it, goofing around with "I've Got You Under My Skin" ("it's a little lumpy, but you're under my skin"), demonstrating the latest go- go dances (the monkey, the jerk, the frug, the mashed potato), and, in a fi- nal tour de force, doing quick carbon copies of Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Mel Torme, Tony Ben- nett, and Dean himself. And then there's Sinatra, confident, not the Adam's apple on a stick he was or the barrel-chested belter he would become, cruising inside the luxury-limousine sound of the Count Basie band, not so much singing the up-tempo numbers ("Fly Me to the Moon," "You Make Me Feel So Young") as riding them home, his rabbit jabs providing the punctuation to his cagey phrasing and eased-off vow- els. Frank Sinatra has been called great for so long that it's easy to forget how great he is. Praise becomes platitude. At one point, alluding to Sammy's set, he
persistent as the kidding on the Villa Venice CD, conveys the edgjness of the civil-rights era Sammy men- tions something about get- ting Martin Luther King Jr.'s permission to appear. Dean lifts Sammy in his arms and says, "I'd like to thank the N.A.A.C.P. for this wonderful trophy." Sammy, who had converted to Judaism, is hailed as the only Jewish Muslim: Ir- ving X. What's interesting about the last segment, aside from the forced joviality of the racial horseplay, is Carson's sur- facing irritation as the buffoonery (de- liberately bad imitations of Jimmy Cagney, etc.) drags on too long. He feels extraneous on the stage, checking his watch and saying he has to catch a plane, and although he is not nearly the star at that point that Frank, Dino, or Sammy is, he isn't grateful to play stooge to the gods. We see in his broom- stick posture and sentry eyes the isolat- ed power that Carson would become. The show ends with all four wailing away at "The Birth of the Blues," with Dean taking a brilliantly timed pratfall just as he wings into his verse.
flame. "These guys are my idols," he told InStyle magazine. "They just cruised. They had this great group of people, love and friendship." The fact that the press keeps trying to manufacture fresh new Rat Packs— the acting Brat Pack of Judd Nel- son, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, and Rob Lowe; the lit- erary Brat Pack of Jay Mclnerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz— indi- cates the constant itch for a group energy, a moving amoeba of excitement, a scene. The term "Rat Pack" originally desig- nated not Sinatra and his flying wedge but an informal Hollywood social set re- volving around Humphrey Bogart and his pals. Nathaniel Benchley designed the letterhead of the group's stationery, which bore the loyalty oath coined by Bogart, "Never rat on a rat." Sinatra, who idolized Bogart, was a member in good standing, along with Judy Garland and agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar. After Bogart's death in 1957, Sinatra, with his natural charisma and inability to be alone (see Gay Talese's classic study in Esquire in 1966, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"), filled the social void and then some with his own Rat Pack, also known as the Clan- names Sinatra disavowed as inaccurate
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and uncouth. "There is no such thing as a clan or pack," he explained. "It's just a bunch of millionaires with common in- terests who get together to have a little fun." The members of this floating bac- chanal included Martin (with whom Sinatra co-starred in Some Came Run- ning), Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford, classy dames like Angie Dickinson and Shirley MacLaine, and supporting players like Sammy Cahn, Cesar Romero, Don Rickles, Milton Berle, and the director Lewis Milestone.
It never hit me until now that the Rat Pack formed during the same period that the Beats rolled onto the scene- Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and all those other sponta- neous bopsters. (Kerouac's On the Road was published in 1957, the year Bogart's Rat Pack gave way to Sinatra's.) At first the two outfits couldn't seem more bizarro-world apart, the Rat Packers showing the money in their sharkskin suits and slick grooming, the Beats bum- ming around in fleapit pads from Mon- terey to Morocco on the path to Buddha- hood. Yet both were a reaction to the suburban conformism of work-home- family in the Eisenhower era. The Rat Pack, like the Beats, disdained middle- class moderation in their pursuit of free- wheeling kicks. ("This [cigarette] ain't got no printin' on it at all," Dean Mar- tin muses in the Rat Pack video.) Like the Beats and their fictional alter egos, the Rat Pack were always in motion, nocturnal creatures partying in a perpet- ual Now. And like the Beats, the Rat Pack had their own special hipster lingo to winnow out the squares from the truly anointed, a code that sounds like something cooked up by Steve Allen in a jazzy frame of mind. Kitty Kelley provides a glossary in her 1986 biogra- phy of Sinatra, His Way: women were "broads," "bird" equaled penis (as in "How's your bird?"), "a little hey-hey" meant a good time, "clyde" was an all- purpose noun, and death was "the big casino."
Nice, France, August 1 1 (A. P.)— The sec- ond wave of Frank Sinatra's Hollywood clan hit the Riviera beaches as cane- twirling Sammy Davis Jr. danced down the ramp of a jet airliner.
"I would have been here earlier, daddy- ohs, but the hotel clerk in London forgot to wake me," Davis told waiting reporters and photographers.
-New York Post, August 11, 1961.
Personal hygiene aside, where the Rat Pack and the Beats parted company was
in their attitudes toward power in all its seductive guises. To the Beats— self- educated in the prophecies of William Blake and Eastern notions of nonattach- ment— the Pentagon, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood were all manifestations of Moloch. "Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity / Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God," Allen Ginsberg declared. (And this was before Pauly Shore.) While the Beats were content to woo nodding fields of young minds, the Rat Pack enjoyed the view from the penthouse suite, where sex and money were plugged into the same socket. With Sinatra as their king. their Pope, // padrone, the Rat Pack were a royal court, granting and receiv- ing favor. Seas of gawkers parted in hushed wonder when they crossed the lobby of Las Vegas's Sands Hotel, the casino which is the Xanadu of Rat Pack
fields wanted to tap into the electricity] John F. Kennedy was fascinated by Sina-i tra's chick action. It was at the Sands) where J.F.K., following a Sinatra perfor-j mance, was introduced by him at al friendly mixer afterward ("blowjobs onj the house"— Tosches) to Judith CampbellJ whom Sinatra later hooked up with! Sam Giancana, thus giving the Mob a direct mouth into the White House. It was Sinatra who triangulated Holly-] wood, Washington, and the Mafia. Thai Rat Pack sang "The Star-Spangled Ban-i ner" at the Democratic convention that year. Sinatra attended Kennedy's inaugu4 ration in top hat, cape, and swallow-tailed) coat. Then it all went black. The presi-i dent, fearful of bad publicity, skipped a visit to Sinatra's Palm Springs spread toj stay at Bing Crosby's instead, a snun that infuriated Sinatra. Marilyn Monroe,! rumored to have been having an affairii
6 It was Sinatra who triangulated Hollywood, Washingtor and the Mafia/
lore. The Sands was where they did their most famous engagements (the double live album Sinatra at the Sands, avail- able on CD, preserves the brassy ebul- lience), drawing the high rollers and their minked molls. Nick Tosches sets the scene in his 1992 Dean Martin bi- ography, Dino:
It was not just the dirty-rich giovanostri and padroni who were drawn to them, to their glamour, to the appeal of darkness made respectable. The world was full, it seemed, of would-be wops and woplings who lived vicariously through them, to whom the imi- tation of cool took on the religiosity of the Renaissance ideal of imitatio Christi. The very songs that Sinatra and Dean sang, the very images they projected, inspired lavish squandering among the countless men who would be them. It was the Jew-roll around the prick that rendered them ithyphallic godkins, simulacra of the great ones, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the teased-hair lobster-slurping Bimbo sapiens they sought to impress.
Not exactly how I would phrase it, but, hey, man, to each his own bird!
The ranks of Rat Pack wannabes weren't restricted to swarthy men and wives in lobster bibs. Elvis Presley's "Memphis Mafia" was a high-cholesterol Rat Pack. Heavy swingers in their own
with Robert Kennedy, tried to commii suicide at Sinatra's Cal-Neva Lodgea in Nevada, a favorite hangout of Gianj cana's, and succeeded a few days latea in Los Angeles. Sinatra, the Kennedys,;l Monroe, the Mob— for a few short years! it was a dizzying round of musical bedsJ Perhaps no book captures the dangerous! golden-nooky pop-myth glamour of tha period better than Norman Mailer's An American Dream, which begins with a reverie about double-dating with J.F.K.' and ends with a drive to Las Vegas] where the narrator phones his dead* sweetheart in Heaven, who tells him thafti Marilyn says hello. It's an honorary Ra& Pack novel.
In the first flush of Camelot, beforer- Marilyn Monroe overdosed, Giancana1 tried to arrange a hit on Castro, and J.F.K. was assassinated, Sinatra and pals! shot a caper movie for his production^ company that stands as the definitive photo album of the Rat Pack phenome- non, Ocean's 11. Other Rat Pack filmsji would follow, such as Robin and the Sev\' en Hoods, but this is the one with the essence de rat. Shot in 1960, Ocean's 11 was directed by Lewis Milestone, who* had earned his distinction with All Quiet on the Western Front and A Walk in the
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INTRODUCING A FRAGRANCE AS SOFT AND SENSUAL AS CASHMERE AGAINST BARE SKIN.
BLOOMINGDALE'S LORD&TAYLOR SELECT MACY'S
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uii before setting aside his taste and dig- City to baby-sit these overgrown delin- lients. At night the Rat Pack would per- irni at the Sands and make major hey- ;y until dawn, catnap, then slouch be- >re the camera. They look like sirloin in le atomic light of day, while Angie "»ickinson, reciting her lines off a blank jate in her mind as Sinatra's long- iiffering wife, is pure custard. The guys lay military buddies who meet to plan Hie great heist of all time, knocking out a jwer line in Las Vegas and hitting the iisino vaults during the blackout confu- |>on. (In an enlightened piece of casting, lammy drives a garbage truck.) I Incidental dialogue reflects the Ken- edy euphoria— and its cynical oppor- jjinism. Standing around in the game horn with pool cues and cigarettes, the ung swaps Playboy fantasies about what iey'd do with a big score. Sinatra sug- ;sts buying out the Miss Universe ageant, "and just sit around and talk to le girls, one by one. Find out how things are in Sweden." Why buy what pu could get for free? asks Peter Law- |>rd, who had married into the Kennedy Ian. The key, he says, is "turning money | to power. . . . Think I'll buy me some ')tes and go into politics." "I'm the one hat's going into politics," Dino ripostes. lis platform? asks Sammy. "Repeal the jtth and the 20th Amendment, take the pte away from the women and make pves out of them." "Hey, will it cost iiuch?" Frank asks. "Oh no, we've got jie price controls— no inflation on javes." Lawford, vainly trying to steer iem back to the big picture, reiterates rat politics is the real racket. "Pay off pur own party, settle for an appoint- ment. . . . Hey, fellas, do you have any ea how much money a man can steal if e was something like commissioner of iidian affairs? That's what I'll be, com- missioner of Indian affairs!" "That you'll ever be," Dean says, '"cause I'm gonna p secretary of the interior, and / won't opoint you." It's a disjointed scene, but le message is clear: money equals pow- t' equals male prerogative. Then they ■iit trading philosophy and gather round the pool table to plan their low- jch. low-I.Q. operation
ike Elvis Presley's Viva Las Vegas, ! Ocean's 11 is one of those dumbbell j. diversions that have achieved a perma- ;nt splotch in the rec room of pop cul- ire. It's a real 60s guy favorite, like Rio raw, The Great Escape, and (my own 'idefensible must-see) Hatari! Its cult stat- p has little to do with quality, more to
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flo with a high kitsch quotient that sticks ike chewing gum in the Mad magazine uf the mind. The schlock highlights in- I lude the blaring and much-imitated mu- sical score by Nelson Riddle; Sinatra re- eiving a backrub in his orange mohair iweater; Dino, backed by a jazz combo 'dig those crazy goatees), singing "Ain't lliat a Kick in the Head" to a trio of loned-sheep fans; and Richard Conte sking, as his doctor studies his X-ray. "Is It the big casino?" A perfectionist in the lecording studio, Sinatra didn't believe in 'indue strain on the movie set, breezing hrough as few takes as possible. After !7onte buys the big casino, suffering a peart attack as he crosses the street, other jnembers of the gang gather on the street !o share the news. Heads nod. Without mothering to change expression, Sinatra hen exits the scene as if heading for a andwich, and Lawford remarks, "He's aking it hard." Not so you'd notice! 'Vhat rescues the movie from utter ply- »vood is its comic anticlimax, when the 'cheme runs aground and the money 1 it- Tally goes up in smoke, and the Rat
off bis stripper wife with the words "You're just nothing but a bringdown anyway!" What the SCTV parody exu- berantly nails is the gee-whiz juvenile giddiness underlying the Rat Pack swag- ger and camaraderie. Their jive is not the genuine laid-back hip of jazz, but the loud tones and threads of lounge lizards trying to pass as jazzy. Most of the Rat Pack humor is corny, retrograde. The Rat Pack mystique is not about being in- nately cool; it's about wanting to be cool so much you give each other contact highs. "Oh, yeah!" It's white soul, with- out the soul.
The fascination with the Rat Pack ex- presses a longing for an everyday mas- culine style that's cool and crisp, with- out being James Bond swanky. The Rat Pack video was shot in 1965, before the hippie insurgence feminized men, fluffing their hair and softening the sharp cut of their wardrobes into more flowing lines. Even the slouchier postures of the Rat Packers (like Dean's modified John Wayne roll) carry more purposeful thrust than
is there, the look is wanting. A lot of the younger male stars, even when they dress keen, have junkie-dank skin and sticky, unwashed hair that would have made Sinatra in his prime drag them through a car wash to straighten out their clyde.
The razor-blade flair of the Rat Pack style gleams best in a time bubble or a deliberately retro fashion spread. It com- plements the overall style of the Kennedy- kaboom 60s; it jibes with the design and decor— tail fins, stand-up bars, African masks, breezeways, Mondrian rectangles, and curvilinear signs. The ladies in this bachelor paradise sported cocktail dresses and bouffants with enough hair spray to stop a bullet; when these walking powder puffs made small talk or indulged in dry laughter, they turned up their wrists just so. That's all Audrey Hepburn now. The natty extravagance of the Rat Pack look clashes with shopping-mall functional- ism— fern bars, family minivans, video rentals, and computer monitors casting gray death rays. Clubs have lost most of their dressy cachet; they've become day- care centers for night owls. (Only in the
ackers file out of Conte's chapel service icross the screen like a lost patrol— past he Sands marquee bearing their names. [Tieir walks have singular style, adding lp to an absurdist coda.
Years later, Ocean's 11 inspired one of he classic movie parodies, SCTV's Maudlin's 11," in which the StTFregu- ars trade finger-snapping slang with one mother ("Absopositively," "Bingo, din- ;o!") as they plan a heist with such vocal :nthusiasm ("Oh, yeah!" "Cool, man, :ool!") that everybody in Vegas knows he score. In a takeoff on the Ocean 's 11 itrip-club scene, the acerbic Bill Needle Dave Thomas) belts out the theme from Exodus, acknowledging the crowd's flat esponse with a surly "Thank you for hat great round of indifference," kissing
the nudist-colony droop of male hippies. When unabashed masculinity re- turned to pop culture, it did so with a vengeance, pumped up on steroids and so thickened that its meat-men (Conan the Bar- barian, Rambo) could barely speak, or, conversely, ranted like a neighborhood bully (Andrew Dice Clay). Rat Pack male-bonding infiltrates such revisionist guy pictures as GoodFellas (a rotting- carcass Rat Pack) and Tlw Usual Suspects (the twist being that the soulful gang leader is played for a fool by the Joey Bishop mascot, portrayed by Kevin Spacey). Quentin Tarantino's stuff has a perverse Rat Pack streak. But if the spirit
he comedy of try- ing to emulate a rich Rat Pack atti- tude in the downwardly mobile 90s is what animates Swingers, a modest cult hit written by and starring Jon Favreau. The movie, funny but acrid (burnt around the edges), has also spawned a spin-off book, a Swingers manual. Favreau plays Mike, a shlub strictly from Loserville who mopes over an old girlfriend and gets nowhere fast as an actor in Hollywood. He also M.C.'s at a comedy club on open-mike night. His best bud, Trent (Vince Vaughn),
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is his pep coach in cool. "You are so money and you don't even know it," Trent tells him again and again. (Vaughn based his characterization on the Rat Pack jargon he used to make up to amuse his actor-friends.) To get Mike out of his funk, Trent suggests they go to Ve- gas. "Vegas, baby, Vegas!" Grabbing the first cocktail waitress they meet, Trent spins her around and introduces her to Mike: "I want you to remember this face here. This is the guy behind the guy be- hind the guy." Their cover story doesn't translate into clout. They don't rule the blackjack table or command the hospital- ity suite, but end up in a trailer at dawn with the cocktail waitress and her friend; sex for both couples proves a non-event. It's clear that, for all their front, Mike and Trent are a couple of doobie-doobie- don'ts. They have jangly personas but lit- tle genuine personality, which may be the point of the film.
Back in L.A., Trent and Mike don't hold court in a conversation pit, as in Ocean's 11, but I video games and cruise dumpy bars ;■ ing for "babies" and "bunnies." Hi^ ii 'ten one bun- ny's number, Mike leaves so many an- noying messages that she finally picks up the phone and says, "Don't ever call me again." Mike and Trent want to be
I VANITY FAIR
MAKING A LITTLE HEY-HEY "artin, Lawford, Davis, nd Sinatra swing into full gear at a 1960 performance at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Rat Pack ruled the stage and the penthouse suites.
finger-snapping free with the ladies, but they lack the hard peanut shell of a Frank or a Dean— they're too sincere and eager to "commu- nicate." Whereas Sinatra described him- self as an "18-karat manic-depressive," these guys are passive -aggressive, finky rather than outrageous and flamboyant. Their fear, hostility, and fur trapper's ap- proach to women come out in pissy little gestures, such as Trent's tearing up the phone number of a woman he's just met, Mike's persistent phone calls and snide references to "skanks" (like he's some bonus). As with most passive -aggressives, it's hard to gauge how much of their be- havior is intentionally obnoxious and how much is self -centered cluelessness— a not knowing any better. Compared to manic-depressives, with their mighty mood swings, passive -aggressives operate out of a very tight but ambiguous pocket. The true godfather of these swingers is not Sinatra, but David Letterman, smok- ing a big cigar behind his deflector shield of nervous, impervious irony.
It could be argued that The Rat Pack Captured and the backhanded homage of Swingers augur a last hurrah. After all. Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford are dead; Frank Sinatra
has been ailing so long that public radio! ran a premature obituary on him in Feb-] ruary, which featured an extract from! Michael Ventura's novel. The Death on Frank Sinatra, and a plea not to flog us with "My Way" over the final credits on his life. The Sands Hotel was demolished! last year, to clear ground for a megaJ resort. The Vegas the Sands typified is it-i self extinct, the former sin capital emas- culated and deloused by theme parka and chain restaurants ("that Pirate of the i Caribbean horseshit," as Trent says ii | Swingers). In time the Rat Pack may be as forgotten as the Ritz Brothers.
But I doubt it. For baby-boomers, the! biggest chunk of the population, the Ken-1 nedy years will always exert a dark, sexyl undertow, in part because the deaths ofl Marilyn Monroe and J.F.K. still appear! mysterious, intertwined. The 60s still seem j young, dashing. They say you can't live in the past, but of course you can; that's prao-J tically all pop culture does now, is live inj the past. The past is a permanent tape! loop constantly being sampled and up- dated to create a new montage. Through the miracle of editing, Fred Astaire nowj dances with a vacuum cleaner, John Wayne sells beer. We're all Zeligs now.! "Let me swing forevermore," Sinatra sings in "Fly Me to the Moon." For better or worse, you got your wish, daddy-o. □
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With a fortune made catering to the extravagant tastes of his newly wealthy Chinese compatriots, Dickson Poon bought the glamorous London department store Harvey Nichols. Now the icily flamboyant British- educated Hong Kong entrepreneur has his eye on New York and the Pressman family's luxuriously chic Barneys emporiums
BY EDWARD KLEIN
[arly one afternoon last spring, the Hong Kongr- Chinese businessman Dick- son Poon entered the boardroom of the Black- stone Group, one of New York's premier investment- banking boutiques. The dark- paneled room was abuzz with bankers and lawyers dressed in Wall Street power suits, and Poon stood out in the small crowd. "He was wearing a Nehru jacket and a crisp white shirt," said one of the participants, "and he looked more Gucci than Ralph Lauren." Poon was accompanied by two im- passive Chinese- a Mr. Wan and a Mr. Lee— as well as by his American advis- ers. A few months earlier. Barneys had gone belly-up, and the Pressman family, which owns the chain of 13 terminal- ly chic shopping emporiums, was des- perately seeking an investor to bail it
Dickson Poon and his executive Raymond Lee arri at a press conference in Hong Kong on February 28 announce Poon's initial $2 million bid for Barneys. Bel Barneys on Madison Avenu
out. Its bankers at Blackstone had invited Poon for a bite of lunch and a dog-and-pony show.
Poon presides over a vast archi- pelago of designer-brand retail outlets throughout the Pacific Rim which cater to prestige-conscious Asian cus- tomers. He has also made a great fi- nancial success of his most recent pur- chase, Harvey Nichols, the fashion -for- ward department store in London, where Princess Di shops. What's more, Poon has been eager to establish a presence in the United States; back in the early 1990s, he expressed more than a passing interest in buying Bloomingdale's after its parent. Federated Department Stores,
had gone bankrupt. All in all, Poon and Barneys seemed like the perfect match. Yet, to most of the men in the room, Dickson Poon was a complete mystery. Almost six feet tall and rail-thin, he did not fit the stereotype of a powerful lord of the Pacific Rim. He was one of those Cantonese who looked as if they didn't have to shave, and he could pass for
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MAY 1997
A refreshing caress
acy's
Carolina Herrera
New York
Letter from Hong Kong
half his age, which was several weeks shy of 40. He spoke En- glish with echoes of a plummy Mayfair accent, but one could tell from his grammar that his thought processes were Chinese. What was most striking about Poon, however, was his personal manner: he exuded an air of enormous self-satisfaction, yet his face frequently turned red, as though he were blushing at his own audacity.
By contrast, Gene Pressman, who is the erratic talent behind Barneys' innovative fashion image, arrived at the meeting dressed in jeans, white socks, and loafers, looking like a street- wise tough guy. Gene seemed on edge. It was well known that he blamed his brother. Bob, who oversaw the company's finances, for Barneys' troubles. Some in the room could sense the seeth- ing sibling rivalry as Gene pushed the back of his chair up against Bob's in such a way that he wasn't looking at him.
"We were served the standard Blackstone lunch poached salmon and green sauce, and wild rice with currants and nuts," said the partici- pant. "And then the Blackstone guys told everybody what a great invest- ment opportunity Barneys could be.
"But we all knew that Barneys was a New York tragedy, a classic case of pride going before a fall," he contin- ued. "The Pressmans are one of the great Jewish merchant families of this century, and they run one of the most glamorous chains of luxury retaiJ stores in America. But in the past few years Gene and Bob spent money like drunk- en sailors, and it looked like Barneys might owe nearly $900 million to its creditors. The Pressman boys signed their names on loans worth more than S160 million, so their personal fortunes were at stake, too."
Poon had done his homework before coming to New York and knew all about the Pressmans' nasty legal dis- pute with the Isetan Co., Ltd., the Japa- nese department-store chain. He was es- pecially shocked by the story of how Gene Pressman had treated the Kosuge family, which owned Isetan. Pressman played golf with Kuniyasu Kosuge in Hawaii and then sweet-talked him into footing the bill for three new Barneys stores— on Madison Avenue in New
Bob and Gene
Pressman at their
opulent Madison
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by its completion
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push them
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Gene Pressman inquired. "We could meet in Hawaii." Poon turned to him and said, 1 don't play golf."
York, in Chicago, and in Beverly Hills a deal that resulted in the finan- cial eclipse of the venerable Kosuge clan and the end of its department-store hegemony.
As they rose to leave. Gene Pressman rushed over to Poon and said, "We real- ly should get together in a less formal setting."
Poon smiled but did not respond.
"Do you play golf?" Pressman in- quired. "We could meet in Hawaii."
Poon turned to Pressman and said, "I don't play golf."
"At that moment," said the partici- pant, "the difference between Dickson and Gene could not have been more striking. Gene was shameless, all over the place. Dickson was strategic, all con- trol. Later I realized that Dickson was in a win-win situation. If he got Bar- neys—great. But if it went to some other investor, such as Saks or Neiman Mar- cus, both of whom had shown interest, he would still end up becoming a major
player in America. . . . From now on, his phone calls are re- turned, and every retailer in the U.S. has had his investment bank pull a profile of Dickson from the computer. Everyone in the world of retail, fashion, and style would want to know: Who is Dickson Poon?"
VANITY FAIR
In Hong Kong, where I visited him this past winter, Dickson Poon's success and personal style have catapulted him to fame. He is considered part vi- sionary businessman, part pop icon. A few years ago, he was voted Hong Kong's Top Hunk by the readers of the South Chi- na Morning Post. Last year, a panel of business and govern- ment leaders assembled by the Sing Tao Daily named Poon Young Leader of the Year.
Stories about him appear in the entertainment pages of the boisterous Chinese-language press almost as often as they do in the business section. He got a lot of mileage from the recent news that one of his ex-wives, a kung-fu-movie star by the name of Michelle Yeoh, had been cast as Pierce Brosnan's next Bond girl. Sometimes the relationship between Poon and the press turns sour; last summer he sued Sudden Weekly for li- bel after one of its writers concocted a story claiming that Poon had cured him- self of cancer through a hasty conversion to Christianity. "If they made up some- thing and said Mr. Poon was sleeping with some starlet, we would expect that from the Hong Kong press," explained Kevin Ching, his attorney, to Hong Kong Life. "That's something you can laugh off. But not this."
Thanks to his talent for self -promotion, the highs and lows of Poon's life are as familiar to the six and a half million Chi- nese inhabitants of Hong Kong as the op- eras performed on Sundays in the Shang- hai Street Night Market. Everybody knows, for instance, that he was born with silver chopsticks in his mouth, and that he owns the exclusive Asian fran- chises and licenses for the retailing and distribution of such luxury brands as Chopard. Hermes, Bulgari, Polo Ralph Lauren, Guy Laroche, Warner Bros. Stu- dio Stores, Joan & David, Escada, Lau- rel, and Charles Jourdan. His holding company, Dickson Concepts, runs nearly 300 outlets and is listed on the Hong
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sng stock exchange, where it has a mar- t capitalization of one billion U.S. dol- ■s. Poon owns 5 1 percent of the stock. He races horses, drives a green Bent- /, and lives in a 3,000 -square -foot artment on the Peak, Hong Kong's ;ysical and symbolic summit. He is fa- aus for throwing Lucullan banquets, lere rich Chinese society wives, known tai-tais, gorge on caviar and tango the >ht away with their young dance in- uctors. A few years ago, to celebrate ; 10th anniversary of Dickson Con- pts, he rented the ballroom of the Re- nt Hotel, a sweeping, tinted-glass struc- ■e built on landfill in Hong Kong's sctacular harbor, and hired a chorus e of topless gweipos, Western girls, to rform for his guests, including the then ief justice. Sir Ti Liang Yang. Not everyone is impressed by Poon's imboyant way of life. Outside the Guc- boutique, where customers have to eue up for a half-hour before being al- ved inside, tai-tais swap cruel stories hind his back. According to one such e, which no one has ever been able to rify, his second wife, Michelle Yeoh, ts said to have broken two of his ribs th a few well-placed kung-fu chops ring a fight. She has denied this. Poon is aware of all the gossip, but jfesses not to care. During one of our er views he said, "We have our own es to live, and so long as we are hon- , let people say what they like. I don't sd to explain myself." But on another :asion he did just that. "If people say I e fast cars, that I liked to date beauti- women, that I like to party— what's ong with that for any young bache- s?" he said. "I see nothing wrong with it at all. In fact, I'd feel sorry for those io could have but didn't experience it, because they've missed out in life." Part of the anti-Poon talk is motivated envy, but part of the sniping is a reac- n to Poon's chilly personality. "He's s of those characters who makes an ini- I good impression," said a businessman o knows him well. "He's immaculate, owledgeable, and incredibly smooth, t then, when you go away and think 3ut him for a moment, your assess- nt changes. You realize that he's arro- it. He's the kind of person who, if you ite him to dinner, always has his secre- y call and ask who else is coming."
i Hong Kong, where there are reput- dly more millionaires per capita than nywhere else in the world, Poon does t yet rank among the truly mega- h— men such as Li Ka-shing and Lee
Shau-kee, real-estate developers in their late 60s, who are said to be worth more than $10 billion apiece. What makes Poon special is that he represents a sharp departure from these older, con- servative businessmen, who harbor a Confucian antipathy to ventures that stress the extravagant.
"Dickson and I were in the first gen- eration of overseas Chinese who went abroad for their education," said David Tang, who owns the franchise for Cuban cigars in Asia and is planning to open a Chinese-style boutique in America with the help of Marvin Traub, the former chairman of Bloomingdale's. "Back in the 1970s, during the last years of the Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese Communists incited locals to attack the British colonialists, many of our parents thought it better to send their children to school abroad. We were sent off to En- gland, America, Canada, and Australia. And it was said of those of us who came back that we had been 'soaked in salt water,' meaning that we had been im- mersed abroad."
Not long after their return, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agreed to hand over Hong Kong to Communist China by June 30, 1997, ending 156 years of British colonial rule and setting off a mad scramble by Hong Kong's wealthy families to accommodate to the new po- litical reality. Many of them sought to protect their assets by acquiring business partners among the influential "prince- lings" on the mainland, the sons of Com- munist Party bigwigs who control Chi- na's most prosperous enterprises.
They also moved a great deal of their money to foreign safe havens, acquired multiple passports, and began to hedge their financial bets outside Hong Kong and China. They have found investment opportunities in Taiwan, Singapore, and the West, especially in America. Indeed, overseas Chinese are fast replacing the Japanese as the most active Asian in- vestors in the United States.
Chinese entrepreneur Henry Cheng owns a majority interest in Donald Trump's massive development project on the abandoned West Side railroad yards of Manhattan. Most of the hotels in downtown L.A. have gone to Chi- nese owners, including the Regent Bev- erly Wilshire, the Biltmore, and the Ho- tel Inter-Continental.
The Chinese, who invented the idea of "face," or prestige, have also shown a keen interest in American status brands and properties. The Hong Kong-based Silas Chou is the financial muscle behind
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VANITY FAIR 93
Letter from Hong Kong
designer Tommy Hilfiger. Christina Ong, whose family owns a hotel-and-retail-store empire, has formed a partnership with Donna Karan, and Ong's husband owns a significant stake in Planet Hollywood. Hong Kong mogul Eric Hotung recently paid $6 million for the McLean, Virginia, estate of Senator Edward Kennedy, and Hong Kong Chinese have snapped up at least $50 million worth of luxury apart- ments in Manhattan over the past year or so. Savio Tung, despite his ambiguous- sounding name, is the Chinese head of U.S. operations of Investcorp, which has a controlling interest in Saks Fifth Av- enue. And, of course, some overseas- Chinese businessmen have tried to buy a piece of the greatest American trophy of them all— the Clinton White House.
"Now that Japan seems to be 'out* and China is suddenly 'in,' so is a phenome- non you might call Chinese chic," said Martin Lorber, a consultant on Asian art. "You can see it in everything from the swelling interest in Chinese herbal medi- cines, feng shui, and acupuncture to the appeal of the Chinese approach to archi- tecture. The most coveted furniture at auction these days is Chinese furniture of the Ming and early Ching dynasties. The trend is spilling over into interior decora-
tion and even fashion; Dolce & Gabbana and Prada are doing major Chinese things in their new spring collections."
For Dickson Poon, however, Barneys represents more than a passing fancy. It is his opportunity to establish a beach- head in America. "I hope to have a presence in the United States that is as important and dominant as the one I have in Hong Kong, the U.K., or any of our major subsidiaries," Poon told me. "Since the beginning of my career, I have always expected to be in the Unit- ed States. It has always been just a mat- ter of when."
( I was interested in quality merchandise
I from an early age," Poon said. "When
I I was 1 1 years old or so, my parents enrolled me at a public school in En- gland called Uppingham. My three old- er sisters were also attending British schools, and I used to accompany them and my mother on shopping expeditions to Harvey Nichols. When I became a teenager, I would prefer to buy one pair of Charles Jourdan shoes rather than two pairs of some cheaper brand."
While his British classmates spent their weekends going to the movies or dating girls, Poon was sampling the
shirts and ties at a haberdashery called Cecil Gee and acquiring a taste for the i good life. He made friends with young men who participated in wine tastings, and when he came of age, he started building his own wine collection.
"He acquired an irritating habit," said a friend. "I took him out to dinner, and he said, 'You don't know anything about wine.' Then he ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine. He was very grand, one of the grandest of the returnees."
When he was back in Hong Kong one summer during a school vacation, young Poon took a stroll in his family's garden with his father, who, like many Chinese businessmen, had arrived in the colony penniless and gone on to make a fortune, j His four Artland shops sold gold Rolexes and other watches to status-hungry local customers and Asian tourists.
"I said to him, 'Dad, I know you're ; successful, but I don't want to be like you,'" Poon said. "'I want to be more, successful than you. I want to control my own public companies around the world.' However unintentionally, I must' have hurt his feelings. But all he said' was 'Oh, that would be good,' or some> such soothing words."
After graduating from Occidental Col-
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ge in Los Angeles with a degree in phi- sophy, Poon spent the next two years jprenticing in his father's watch shops
Hong Kong and in the factories of le of his father's major Swiss suppliers, hopard.
"At Chopard, I learned how creative le can be in designing and manufactur- g watches and jewelry," he said. " so visited many watch and luxury- x>ds retailers throughout Europe, hey were so much more sophisticat- 1 than shops in Hong Kong at the me, where the owners kept a calcu- tor on the counter to figure out scounts. My concept was for an itremely upmarket shop concen- ating on the best brands in the odd, where customers wouldn't jj pressured into buying."
With a loan of $900,000 from s parents (his mother managed
r own stock brokerage), Poon laid ans to open an elegant, European - lyle boutique in the Landmark, the nciest shopping mall in Hong Kong. e wanted to call the shop Dickson /atch & Jewellery, but his father ex- ressed some serious reservations.
"He said, 'Perhaps you should con- ider not using your name for the
shop,'" Poon said. "'Call it something else so if it fails you can shut it and your name won't be hurt.' I realized then how he had supported me despite the little confidence he had in my concept." In February 1980, ignoring his father's advice, he opened his first shop, under his own name. He blitzed Hong Kong with a
At the end of his first year, Poon was outselling his father, who had been in business for three decades. At 24, he was a millionaire.
massive advertising cam- paign, including an eight-page spread in the South China Morning Post, which shocked many traditional businessmen. It soon became clear that he had tapped into a tremendous pent-up demand for brand labels by the newly emergent class of affluent Asian customers. At the end
of his first year, he had six shops in Hong Kong, three in Singapore, and one in Tai- wan and was outselling his father, who had been in business for three decades. He paid back his parents' loan, and at the age of 24 became a millionaire in his own right.
Sporting a long cigarette holder and the lofty attitude to go with it, Poon acquired the reputation of being a young man of high station who had a hankering for the lowlife.
His first serious girlfriend was Marjorie Yang, a Harvard Busi- ness School graduate and the oldest child of Yang Yuan-loong, a textile magnate who manufac- tured clothing for Polo Ralph Lau- ren, among others. Marjorie's father had a shady history; he had been con- victed of rigging a horse race and had escaped going to jail only by throwing himself on the mercy of the judge and claiming that he had terminal cancer. When he departed Hong Kong for the United States, where he lives today, he left the day-to-day management of his business to Marjorie.
She became one of the most powerful businesswomen in Hong Kong. In 1983
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Letter from Hong Kong
she introduced her boyfriend, Dickson Poon, to Ralph Lauren's partner at the tii le, Peter Strom. By then Poon had diversified his company into high fash- ion; he had extensive wholesale opera- tions, as well as a worldwide licensing agreement to make, distribute, and sell Charles Jourdan watches, lighters, and pens. But although many European de- signers were represented in Hong Kong, there were few, if any, Ameri- cans. He and Strom struck a deal that gave Poon the licensing rights to manu- facture and distribute Polo products and the franchise to open Polo Ralph Lauren stores, first in Hong Kong and
on the appropriate labels and products that our group represents, which finally achieves a promotion effect," he said. But it turned out he was no different from other men in the rag trade who have been attracted by the movies: he liked the glamour.
On a trip to Malaysia, Poon met 21- year-old Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng. a former ballet student and beauty- pageant queen, and decided to make her into a female Bruce Lee. He cast her as a martial-arts star in such action-packed Chinese -language thrillers as Magnifi- cent Warriors and Yes, Madam. Michelle insisted on doing all her own stunts.
Harvey Nichols, Poon's
London department store,
was a favorite resort of
Edina and Patsy, the shopping-mad heroines of the British TV series
Absolutely Fabulous.
then throughout the Pacific Rim. excluding Japan and Korea.
When Poon and Marjorie were wed, many in Hong Kong saw it less as a love match than as a business arrangement. In any case, the marriage lasted only a few years, though it did produce a daughter, Dee, who is now 14 years old.
n 1984, Poon bought the Crown Col- ony's Lamborghini dealership and went into the movie business. He claimed he was motivated by the promise of syn- ergy. "All the stars in my movies put
which earned her several dislocated shoulders as well as the title of the highest-paid movie actress in Asia.
For the next couple of years, Mi- chelle denied stories that she was ro- mantically involved with Poon. "I'm too career-minded to think about marriage," she said. "My image on-screen seems to indicate to me that if [men] go out with me they will get beaten up." But the weekly magazines weren't fooled by this subterfuge, and they were on hand to cover Poon's announcement in 1988 that he was going to marry Michelle.
It was Hong Kong's wedding of thei year. Poon took over the Regent Hotel and threw the most lavish party that the colony had ever seen. Marjorie, his ex^ wife, attended the wedding with Dee. who was one of the bridesmaids.
Soon, however, there were fresh ru- mors—this time of a serious marital rift between Poon and Michelle. Il was said that Poon was dating Miss , Hong Kong, Monica Chan. Whethei that was true or not, Michelle comri plained to one of her girlfriends, "Al'\ these little girls at nightclubs slip hirr their phone numbers, and I have tc watch him all the time. Every little hooker in Hong Kong is trying to takU him away from me."
"She told me that he was a difficul man," said another friend. "He didn't want her to be in movies and have hew own life. She got bored and fed up. Shi would go shopping virtually every dayj then come home with six bags anc throw them in the corner and cry."
After Poon and Michelle were di vorced in 1991, his two former wive^ became best friends. Meanwhile, Pook turned his attention to Pearl Yu, a 26- year-old Harvard-trained stock analysj from a grand family, which in Hon;: Kong meant they had been wealthy foi a couple of generations. It was a match' of almost royal proportions. To tan their 1992 wedding photograph, Poo>< chose Lord Lichfield, the portrait artia and cousin of the Queen's. An« le tout Hong Kong— from the chief secretary Sir David Ford t movie mogul Sir Run Run Shaw-* was invited to the ceremony % Union Church, where Pearl carni down the aisle wearing a figure hugging backless dress made b Herve Leger.
hen it came to business, then was no stopping Dickson Poor He invested $100 million o the mainland, building upscale shoj ping malls in Guangdong, Shangha Shenzhen, and Beijing. At the samj time, mainland-Chinese customers wei showing up in Hong Kong with pagt torn from glossy Western magazim featuring ads for Frette sheets, Rok watches, and Waterford crystal. Sorri of them carried suitcases stuffed wil money.
Poon had taken his company publ in 1986. And the following year, after 1 developed an interest in the Asian licer ing rights to S. T. Dupont, the world]
VANITY FAIR
MAY 19?
r. Jenkins foresees mutual victory/'
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leading manufacturer of luxury lighters, he bought the company.
"It was the first time that a Hong Kong company had acquired a French luxury company with French-government approval," he said. "And because of the high-profile nature of this acquisition. I became better known by leading bankers, which, in turn, presented us with more investment opportunities."
The next opportunity to come along was Harvey Nichols, the glamorous Lon- don department store on the corner of Knightsbridge and Sloane Street. Harvey Nichols epitomized Britain's post-Thatch- er plunge into conspicuous consumption, and the store was featured in the early- 90s British TV comedy Absolutely Fabu- lous, which starred a pair of shop-till- they-drop characters. Edina and Patsy, who would shriek "Harvey Nicks!"
Since Poon had made his fortune catering to Chuppies, as Chinese yuppies are called, it seemed only natural for him to take on Sloanes as well. He and his fi- nance director, a brilliant number crunch- er named Joseph Wan, arranged for a pri- vate tour of Harvey Nichols in early 1991.
"In walks Joseph Wan, and behind him what I thought was a 15-year-old boy wearing a Polo flag sweater and chinos," re- called a Harvey Nichols executive. "I determined that he must be the man, because only the boss would dress that way. He was fairly blunt
and straightforward. The whole thing lasted 45 minutes."
At the time, the British economy was in a slump, and Harvey Nichols, which had always been overshadowed by the nearby Harrods, was in the red. When Hong Kong investors learned that Poon was issuing new shares to cover the $90 million price tag for Har- vey Nichols, they dumped their Dick- son Concepts stock.
Poon was determined to prove his critics wrong. He stunned the British fashion world by firing Richard Maney. Harvey Nichols's popular American managing director, and replacing him with Joseph Wan.
Under Wan's management, $16 million was invested in a complete makeover of the store. Administrative offices were removed to another building, and selling space was expanded by 20 per- cent. Tougher concessions were negotiat- ed with suppliers. A new line of Harvey Nichols name -brand merchandise was un- veiled in the store's fashionable windows. To draw customers to the upper floors, Poon and Wan built a sumptuously stocked rooftop gourmet-food market and a spectacular restaurant. Their I catering director, Dominic Ford, formerly of the Man- darin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, hired Henry Harris, one of the chefs at Bibendum,
. people say I like fast cars, that I liked to date beautiful women, that I like to party— what's wrong with that?"
From top, Monica Chan, Miss
Hong Kong, one of the many
beautiful women rumored to have
been involved with Poon;
Michelle Yeoh — whom Poon turned
into a kung-fu-movie star and
married in 1988 — with Jackie Chan
in Supercop (1992); Poon
with his third wife, Pearl Yu,
a Harvard-trained stock analyst,
whom he married in 1992.
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VANITY FAIR
Sir Terence Conran's smart, 10-year-old restaurant in the old Michelin Building. Within a few years, Harvey Nichols was grossing more per square foot than any store in the world outside of Japan.
Poon was a frequent visitor to Lon- don. He owned an apartment off Bel- gravia Square and liked to partake of the city's freewheeling nightlife. "One time he called me up and said he wanted to take me to the Ritz Casino," recalled a former associate. "He said. 'We'll have dinner and gamble.' He was well known when we walked through the door of the Ritz Casino. He was drinking like crazy and playing baccarat. A minimum at the Ritz Casino was £25. I was betting £50. He was betting in £5,000 and £10,000 in- crements. He was down more than £20,000. and then he started reversing his fortunes. He ended up winning £10,000 to £15,000. Even though I thought he was drunk, he could play his cards skill- fully. Then he wanted to go out on the town. 'Let's have fun,' he said. 'Where can we go and have some fun?' "
From the start, Poon apparently saw Harvey Nichols as a stock play. In his prospectus for an initial public offering, he promised to exploit Harvey Nichols's reputation to the hilt. He opened a sec- ond store in the northern English city of Leeds, where he was granted a 125- year rent-free lease. And he envisioned two more Harvey Nichols stores in Britain and stand-alone shops through- out the Pacific Rim.
He also opened a 500-seat restau- rant on the roof of the Art Deco Oxo Tower, a London landmark on the
south bank of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge. When Tommy Hilfiger threw a Fashion Week par- ty at the restaurant in September, celebrities fought to get inside. In April of last year— shortly before he met for the first time with Gene Pressman— Poon took Harvey Nichols public. He kept
the real estate on which the store stood, and offered 49.9 percent of the shares for $224 million. The offering was sold out. Though some people com- plained that Harvey Nichols had be- come trendy and had lost a bit of its smart and stylish allure, they could not argue with the fact that, in five years, Poon had tripled his investment.
8y early March of this year, the battle over Barneys was coming to a head. After Poon completed his inspection of Barneys' books, he worked out a complex bidding strategy with his chief
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etter From Hong Kong
advisers -Raymond Lee in Hong Kong, Joseph Wan in London, and James Mill- stein, his attorney in New York. Then he called a press conference in Hong Kong and announced that he was making a $240 million cash offer for Barneys' business in America. The bid, which con- tained an undisclosed offer to assume certain of Barneys' liabilities, included a bit of sugarcoating for the various play- ers. Under Poon, Isetan would receive fair-market rent for the three Barneys flagship stores in America that it had fi- nanced. And the creditors got a commit- ment from Poon that he would open Barneys stores in Asia and split with them the value of future licensing
"Since the beginning, I have always expected to be in the United States. It has always been just a matter of when.7
revenues there ar in Europe.
For Poon, one major stumbling block had been the future roles of Gene and Bob Pressman. By all accounts, the Pressmans were in denial; despite their -"—
dismal financial rec- ord, they still expected that Poon or Saks or some other investor would al- low them to continue as Barneys co- C.E.O.'s. But Poon did not see himself as a passive investor, and in the words of a Poon business associate, there was still work to be done on "the education of Gene Pressman."
"The Pressmans have their own illu- sions," said this source. "Everybody was writing them checks based on those illu- sions. Now reality is setting in. . . . What this is all about now is helping the Pressmans save face. As crazy as Gene is, he has some important role to play."
In late March, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled that the Pressmans were liable to Isetan for $197 million in personal-loan guarantees and interest. The ruling could push Gene and Bob Pressman into personal bankruptcy
and it even raised the specter that they had obtained the loans by fraudulently hiding Barneys' operational losses. "We absolutely and completely deny that there was any kind of fraud at all," replied an attorney for Barneys. "To say that Bob and Gene's personal fortunes are at stake is totally ridiculous," one source told me. "Their father was clever enough to shel- ter all their assets and personal fortune in a bulletproof trust in 1982. . . . Besides, Isetan knows that the personal litigation will be resolved as part of the overall liti- gation with Barneys."
Even if Poon could work things out with the Pressman brothers, his offer came as a staggering disappointment to them, because it fell far short of what they had been hoping for. The lowball
While still in his 20s, Dickson Poon had a Polo Ralph Lauren franchise, Hong Kong's La dealership, and a budding movie b
In the meantime, the legal trench war- fare between Barneys and Isetan ground on. In yet another setback to the Press- mans, Judge Garrity denied Barneys' re- quest for a summary ruling that the leas- es held by Isetan on Barneys' three flag- ship stores were not "true leases." His ruling meant that Barneys and Isetan would have to go to trial to determine whether Isetan was, as Barneys claimed, its equity partner, or whether it was, as Isetan argued, its landlord and thus due crippling amounts of money in back rent. In the past year. Barneys had report- edly spent between $15 million and $20 million on legal fees and additional costs associated with the bankruptcy, and with the prospect of an expensive trial looming in the months ahead, sane voic- es began to be heard. Representatives of Bar- neys, Isetan, and the creditors were said to have held substantive discussions to see if they could avoid litigation and work out a united front for a sale.
\
bid was immediately characterized by the Pressmans and Barneys' creditors' com- mittee as dead on arrival, and they made no secret of the fact that they were hold- ing out for higher counterbids from Saks Holdings and Neiman Marcus.
To stimulate such bids, the Pressmans and their creditors were planning to ask Manhattan bankruptcy judge James L. Garrity Jr. to allow them to award a bid- der-protection fee to the investor who came forward with the first acceptable offer— a multimillion-dollar consolation prize if that offer were topped by another investor. Barneys was said to be hoping to attract between $450 million and $475 million for its American business plus an- other $200 million for the rights to its name in Europe and Asia. Outside ob- servers said that a total of $350 million was a far more realistic figure.
s for Poon, he pro- ► fessed to be philo- ■• sophical about the i whole thing. Since his marriage to Pearl, . he seems to be a a changed man. Pearl has given him a son I and a daughter, and she is expecting a <: third child. Poon no i longer behaves like a man who is desperate to prove i himself. And though it is altogether possi- I ble that he may be dragged into a bid- ding war with Saks and Neiman Marcus, I he seems to have a number in his head for Barneys past which he will not go.
The bidding for Barneys is likely to I drag on for some time. Saks, which com-r pleted a successful initial public offering: last year, is going through a strong turn- around. To many, it seems highly unlikely that Saks would come up with a bid so high it would dilute its share price. There- fore, all sides— Poon, Barneys, and Saks— are apt to be extremely cautious.
"But," Poon told me, "I can genuine- ly tell you there is more than Barneys in the United States that we are looking at. I am actively examining other properties. Barneys represents a unique opportunity for us, true. But whether it is Barneys or not, we intend to be around in the United States for a long time to come." D
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Sports
THE BOYS OF SPRING
As the season opens, big-league rookies
are dreaming of a career in the majors-and perhaps
even a lasting place in Cooperstown
BY DAVID MARGOLICK
mitri Young took out a met- al box and began showing off his prized collection of baseball cards of soon -to- be-famous rookies of years past. He is a rookie himself, about to become the start- ing first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals. He is just 23, and it wasn't so long ago he was only collect- ing cards rather than appearing on them. As someone who received a $385,000 signing bonus in 1991, Young has been able to upgrade his collection a bit in the past few years. Now he specializes
I VANITY FAIR
in rare rookie cards and has several highly coveted ones. The most interest- ing are what one might call his double- header cards, pairing two top prospects rather than featuring only one: Johnny Bench and Ron Tompkins; Rod Carew and Hank Allen; Steve Carlton and Fritz Ackley. On the brink of the major leagues, all got equal billing, but now the matches seem incredibly incongru- ous. Bench, Carew, and Carlton are in the Hall of Fame; what ever happened to Tompkins, Allen, and Ackley?
Predicting success in baseball is a primitive science, far less refined than in
PHOTOGRAPHS
PEGGY SIROTA
football or basketball. That, after all, is why the record books are filled with busted "bonus babies" and cameo ca- reers—"cups of coffee" in baseball lin- go—and sleepers, such as Keith Hernan- dez in 1974 and Don Mattingly in 1983. who came out of nowhere. There is no shortage of explanations: the widel} varying conditions of play, the different rates at which talent matures, injuries, or simply because, as the sportscaster Bob Costas put it, the skills baseball de- mands are "quirkier." Still, mavens sucl" as Allan Simpson, editor of Basebal America, predict that 10 or so rookie;
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Clockwise from left: in 1995, Dmitri Young slugged a fan who had yelled racial epithets; Todd Walker got $815,000 to sign with the Twins and now talks about buying an island; Bartolo Colon grew up on a farm in the Dominican Republic where mice ate his baseball jersey.
Most have yet to undergo the lobotomizing effect that fame has on major-leaguers.
could break away from the pack of about 150 this year.
Several have already made their big- league debuts, but under baseball's won- derfully arcane rules (concerning at-bats. innings pitched, and number of days on the roster), they remain "rookies." Not all are profiled here, because they are al- ready well known (Andruw Jones, who, at 19, became the youngest player to hit two home runs in a World Series game, for the Atlanta Braves, and who is a fa- vorite for the 1997 National League Rookie of the Year), were unavailable for interviews (Vladimir Guerrero of the Montreal Expos, Karim Garcia of the Los Angeles Dodgers), or had uncoop- erative agents (Scott Rolen of the Philadelphia Phillies). But Vanity Fair caught up with seven of them.
They are a reminder that, whether or not it still embodies America, baseball, more than any other major professional sport, mirrors it in its demographic di- versity. They fall neatly and almost pro- portionately into one of three groups: white, black, and Hispanic, with the lines occasionally blurred. All are young. They still live at or near home, still hang around with high-school friends, still refer to "Mom" and "Dad" a lot. still overuse such words as "awesome" and "outstanding." Most still talk with candor and authenticity, without strings of iocker- room cliches, having yet to undergo the
lobotomizing effect that fame, money, routine, resentment, and fear quickly have on many major-leaguers. Most put up the kind of outlandish career numbers in high school and college that never last' beyond the first few weeks of a season in the big leagues, where they all still have much to learn and much to prove, then prove all over again every week they play. Only time will show whether they will be super- stars or, like some famous rookies of years past, will turn out to be the latest "can't miss"s who do, sometimes spec- tacularly or tragically.
'0
The Throwback
xymoron" is not a word one finds in the lexicon of many ballplayers. But without exactly saying so, that's what Todd Greene, a catcher for the Anaheim Angels, says he is. "I'm a five[-foot]- nine[-inch] power hitter," says Greene, who in 1995 became the first minor- league player in a decade to hit 40 home runs in a season. "That kind of doesn't go in the same sentence."
Signed by the Angels as an outfielder in the 12th round of the 1993 draft for a mere $5,000, Greene has built a career out of defying people's modest expecta- tions. The 25-year-old native of Augus- ta, Georgia, is slow and, by professional standards, small. Late in his develop- ment, he had to learn to play baseball's
>';
most difficult position: behind the plate. Now Greene must compete with four I other catchers for a spot on the Angels. I But he could turn out to be a bonus I baby of a different sort.
Balding, and with his remaining hair i | closely cropped, Greene looks older than his years. He is, in fact, a throw-' back— or, as he tells me one day over: barbecue, sweetened iced tea, and a bas- ket of Sunbeam bread at Sconyers Bar- becue in Augusta, "a blue-collar-type > player." He works hard. He has never smoked or chewed tobacco. He is mar- ried to someone he began dating at 16. He carries a cell phone almost sheepish- ly, fearful of looking like a hot dog.
When Greene played behind his high-school coach's house, the "ball" would be a sock tied in a knot, so as to save windows. Those who saw him play for Evans High School still re- member his home run against Colum- bus, which reached the home-team high school's roof, 500 feet away. At Geor- gia Southern University, he hit another 88 home runs; only two college play- ers—Pete Incaviglia and Jeff Ledbet- ter— have ever hit more. Still, the scouts were skeptical. They said he had a hitch in his swing and could hit only with the more potent aluminum bat, banned in the majors.
In 1994, when Greene played in the California League, the Angels tried turn-
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ing him into a catcher. The transition was painful, literally— 90-mile-per-hour fastballs leave neophytes with hands ei- ther bloodied or numb— and embarrass- ing for someone accustomed to perfec- tion. After his first game, he told his wife he was quitting. But he persevered, learning not just how to catch curveballs but how to call games, placate umpires, throw out base runners, field foul pops, toss his mask, and maintain home plate and make it his. "I talked to Bob Boone [now manager of the Kansas City Roy- als], who was probably the best defen- sive catcher ever, and he told me he's still learning," Greene says. "If he's still learning, what does that mean I still have to learn?"
The Golden Boy
One day last winter in Shreveport, Louisiana, Todd Walker drives up to the local Ramada Inn in his black Pathfinder. He is wearing sunglasses, though it is a gray and cheerless day. That morning he met with one of the three financial advisers who help him manage the $815,000 signing bonus he got three years ago from the Minnesota Twins, plus the thousands more he col- lects from card deals and endorsements. "What is it you'd like to accomplish?" he asks me in businesslike fashion as I hop into the front seat.
If there is such a thing as a sure bet, Todd Walker is it. Late last season the Twins conveniently traded away their incumbent third baseman, clearing the way for him. "As of this point, it's my position to lose," he says matter-of- factly. For the 24-year-old Walker, the pieces have always fallen neatly into place. At six feet, he may not be so tall, but he is dark and handsome. (His brother is a model who has appeared in Glamour and Mademoiselle.) And he was born with a perfect swing. In his senior year at Airline High School in Bossier City, Louisiana, where Albert Belle Sr. was his hitting coach, he bat- ted .525. At Louisiana State University he played second base and batted in more runs (and hit three more home runs) than did White Sox outfielder Al- bert Belle Jr., now one of baseball's highest-paid players. Only seven play- ers were chosen ahead of him in the 1994 draft.
Walker is religious— he is active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and gave a tenth of his signing bonus to the First Baptist Church. But there should be plenty more to go around. When, while dining out with friends at a local
resort called Cross Lake, he mused about buying an entire island there someday, it did not seem like fantasy. "I get business cards thrown at me from every angle," he says.
Around Minnesota, the talk is not whether Walker will make the team, but whether he'll be Rookie of the Year and how far into the next century he'll hold the job. Walker says he'd like to stay put. But rookies, or at least some gilded rookies, already know
A year ago Hernandez
could not drive a
stick shift; now he owns
a Ferrari Spider,
a Mercedes S500, and a Land Cruiser.
the score— that, as Walker says, "if you're going to get twice as much money to go somewhere else you're ob- viously going to take it. The truth is, no one is loyal anymore. You go where the money is."
The Refugee
In Versailles, the celebrated restaurant in Miami's Little Havana, the wait- resses are fussing over 22-year-old Li- van Hernandez, the handsome, boyish pitcher the Florida Marlins signed in January 1996 for an astonishing $4.5 mil- lion, including a $2.5 million bonus, the most ever paid to a non -major -leaguer. But part of baseball's romance is the idea that enormous talent lurks in re- mote or exotic places— every baseball fan knows that Mickey Mantle came from Commerce. Oklahoma— and no place is more remote these days than Cuba, even to the 675,000 Cuban -Amer- icans, many weaned on baseball, who now live in Florida.
One waitress reminisces with him about life in Cuba, from which Hernan- dez, then playing for the Cuban national team, defected in Mexico in cloak-and- dagger fashion a year and a half ago. He fends off another, who urges him to eat some paella from a gargantuan plat- ter before him. "Six months ago he would have said, 'Give me another fork,'" says his agent, Juan Iglesias of the South Florida Sports Council.
Dazzled by Wendy's and Lay's pota-
to chips after a lifetime of privation, depressed over his separation from family, friends, and fiancee, worried about reprisals against his brother (also a star player and still in Cuba), crip- pled by his lack of English, Hernandez ate compulsively in his first year here, showing up at spring training, as The Boston Globe put it, "fatter than a Ha- vana cigar." Sent down to the minors for more seasoning, he struggled, de- scending to Double-A.
Hernandez rebounded by season's end, which was capped by a three- inning appearance against the Braves. And with a new agent, new Spanish- speaking baseball friends such as the Oakland slugger Jose Canseco and Marlin teammate Luis Castillo, and new women to admire— his fiancee is but a faint memory as he currently cov- ets two actresses in Spanish-language soap operas broadcast in Miami— he seems to have shaken off the blues and most of the fat. He now weighs 225, only 8 pounds more than he should. And he's picked up some English— "dancing," for instance.
Hernandez, who as a boy went to sleep with his bat and glove, already has the strut and style of a major- leaguer. Versailles is not a fancy place— ropa vieja goes for $6.85 plus tax— but for his visit there, Hernandez is wearing a Cartier watch with a gold band, a Versace ring, a gold bracelet and neck- lace, and a diamond stud. He also leaves a $20 tip for a $50 meal. All this from someone who, a year ago, had never used a credit card. He's already a fixture in chic South Beach and at Larios on the Beach, the Miami restau- rant owned by Gloria and Emilio Estefan.
A year ago Hernandez, who had al- ways ridden bicycles, could not drive a stick shift; now he owns a Ferrari Spi- der (for which he recently traded in his Porsche), a Mercedes S500, and a Land Cruiser. Why, I ask him, does he need three cars? "Because I like them and I didn't have them in Cuba," he replies in Spanish. "Why does someone have three women? You like to drive them differently."
To spur him on further, to show him "the fruits that grow from the tree of baseball," agent Iglesias takes Hernan- dez on periodic pilgrimages to Casa Canseco— Jose Canseco's lavish spread, complete with marble staircase, pet iguanas, and framed reproductions of figures from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in the sterile gated community of Wes-
M AY 19 9 7
VANITY FAIR
23
Clockwise from left: Oriole Bob Nelson, 1956, hailed as "the Babe Ruth of Texas," never hit a home run in the majors; the Dodgers' Karim Garcia is so famous in his native Mexico that he is swarmed by crowds there; left to right, Young, Garciaparra, Walker, Colon, Hernandez, and Garcia.
Ten rookies could break away from the pack of 150 this year and make their presences known.
ton, Florida, near Miami. But with the logjam in the Marlins1 starting rota- tion, Hernandez won't be living in any- thing similar soon. In fact, he'll be starting the season back in Triple-A.
Student of the Game
He's been playing it since he was six, but Mike Cameron, who could be the White Sox right fielder this sea- son, can't get enough of baseball. He's read all the books about the, Negro Leagues. He watches the highlights on ESPN again and again, looking for ways to improve his game. During his short fling in the majors in 1995, when Chicago played Cleveland, he ap- proached Dave Winfield, then ending his distinguished career as a home-run hitter, and asked him, "What makes you so good?" Winfield looked at him as if he were crazy.
Cameron is sitting where he spent most of his childhood, at least after his parents split up: in his grandmoth- er's house in a poor, black section of La Grange, Georgia, near the Alabama border. Just down Render Street is where he used to play ball with his friends, marathon games called only on account of darkness. With his grand- mother working the second shift in a carpet factory, he was often alone, giv-
ing him an independence and intro- spectiveness one doesn't normally find in 24-year-old athletes.
If there is a rap on Cameron, an 18th-round draft pick in 1991 who signed for a $24,000 bonus, it is that he's "good field, no hit." Before a game two seasons ago in Kansas City, Walt Hriniak, the peripatetic and controver- sial hitting coach, tried to change his swing, telling Cameron that as things stood he didn't belong in the majors. Later that day, on an 0-2 pitch, swing- ing as he always swung, Cameron hit his first home run, into the decorative foun- tain beyond center field. Given Hrini- ak's doubts, it was doubly delicious. "It was pretty soaked," Cameron says of the ball, which he fingered lovingly as we spoke. By now he's seen the moment 20 times on videotape.
Cameron proves that for profession- al athletes there can be a charming middle ground between unabashed con- ceit and cloying false modesty. With boyish enthusiasm, he says he's on the verge of being "an all-star-caliber play- er." And while he won't want a $10 million house, he says, a $2 million one will do. "I don't want to be too greedy and I don't want to be too low- key," he says.
A couple of springs ago Cameron
walked up to Gene Lamont, the White t Sox manager at the time, and declared,. "I'm going to be your right fielder in the* next two years." "I said it as a joke, buti it's really true now," he says. Even though: he'll be starting the season in Triple-A,' Cameron still hopes to meet Willie Mays, whose number (24) he was given with thei big club. He wants to ask him one ques- tion: " Wfiat made you so good?"
The Savior
Not so long ago Miguel Colon, whose^ hands have grown gigantic from a lifetime spent wrapped around ma-i chetes, begged his reluctant children, to help out on the farm he works on a few hilly acres in Altamira, a cross- roads hamlet in the northern Domini- can Republic.
"The way I'm going to help you," replied his son, touching his right side, "is with this arm." But he was talking about pitching, not about harvesting coffee and cocoa beans.
Only a few years later Bartolo Colon's prediction has come to pass. After z spectacular season in the Dominicar Winter League— where his earned-rur average, 0.21, was the lowest in league history— he is poised to play for the Cleveland Indians, thereby becoming the latest in the uncanny number o
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Sports
major-leaguers produced by this small Caribbean nation.
Baseball's luster may have faded to the North; during those crucial years when tastes are set for life, young American boys now play computer games and watch basketball rather than hit Wiffle balls. But here there is no ambivalence. Near the Colons' simple tin -roofed house, where baseball me- mentos and pictures of Jesus Christ hang on the flimsy walls, where mice once tore apart young Bartolo's fa- vorite jersey, three young boys toss around a battered ball the scuffed dark brown of a Dominican 20-peso note. The ragged outlines of an infield are only barely discernible; the wicked hops the ball takes off the pockmarked, gnarled ground instantly explain why so many Dominicans become great in- fielders.
Pitching in nearby Puerto Plata in 1993, the 17-year-old Colon caught the eye of the Cleveland Indians, who signed him for $3,000. In four minor- league seasons, he's compiled a record of 28-10; Baseball America called him "a comet hurtling toward the big leagues."
ntil
- The Proud One
23-year-old Dmitri Young
U smashed a crucial two-run triple for the Cards in the 1996 National League Championship Series, his most famous hit actually took place in the stands. It came in Wichita in 1995 when he pummeled a fan who called him a "fucking nigger." Officially, Young is contrite about the incident, for which he was suspended for 20 games. But probe a bit and he is still defiant. "You have your Goody Two-Shoes players, a lot of the white ballplayers, who say, 'Ah, just brush it off,'" he tells me. "But I was talking with Bob Gibson and Lou Brock about it," he continues, referring to two of the Cardinals' greatest black ballplayers, "and they said they would have done the same thing."
Young, who was watching All My Children when I arrived at his house in Camarillo, California (his subscription to Soap Opera Weekly fills him in on the episodes he has to miss for day games), is a collector. His living room is strewn with a few of his 3,000 minia- ture "Hot Wheels" cars. There is also his collection of baseball cards, includ- ing one on which he appears with White Sox star first baseman Frank Thomas; with interleague play making its debut this season, the Cards will
play the White Sox, so he can finally get Thomas to sign it.
In Montgomery, Alabama, Young made the high- school team as a 12-year- old and batted .584. As a high-school sophomore in California, he practically decapitated the opposing shortstop with a line drive hit as darkness fell upon the field. The next year, one of his home runs almost hit the batter (or the third baseman, or the pitcher, depending on whose version of the story you believe) in an adjacent diamond.
We walk into the Sports Fan-Attic, a memorabilia store in Camarillo run by
Players recall how Dalkowski's fastballs
tore an earlobe off
one batter
and gave an umpire
a concussion.
Young's high-school buddy Steve Dun- kle, where, symbolically enough, basket- ball cards are gradually usurping more and more space. But Dmitri Young cards, 63 different kinds, tracing his progress through the minors, take up a complete shelf. Many still sell for 25 cents. But if Young fulfills his promise the prices could quickly escalate.
Fulfilling a Dream
When 23-year-old, six-foot-tall Nomar Garciaparra booted a ball in his first game at Fenway Park last Sep- tember, all hell broke loose. "It was 'My God, he's terrible, what's he doing out there?'" he recalls with a laugh. In Boston, he quickly learned, the scruti- ny is harsher, the memories longer, the passions stronger.
The Red Sox have a glut of infield- ers, but on opening day Nomar Garcia- parra "Nomah Gahciapah" in Fenway- ese— will be at short. Sox fans took to him, a first-round draft pick in 1994 from Georgia Tech who signed for $895,000, during his brief time with the team, and given his pleasing person- ality, his easy intensity, his young Ted Williams looks, his surprising power, and his sure hands, they are likely to forgive his very occasional mistakes. Maybe.
Anthony Nomar Garciaparra— the An-
thony is for Anthony Davis, the former U.S.C. running back much admired by his mother; Nomar is his father's namei spelled backward— grew up in Whittier, California. (Though of Mexican descent, he speaks only a smattering of Spanish, which made the bigotry he encountered, at Georgia Tech that much more sear-' ing.) It was the game itself, rather than anyone who played it, that he wor-< shiped. For him, baseball cards werei strictly for flapping against bicyclo spokes.
From age six or seven, Garciaparra told people he would be a major-leaguer, i The only problem was size. "Mike Gal- lego was five eight," he recalls, referring to the utility player currently with the Cardinals, one of the smallest players inn the big leagues. "I would sit home andi pray, 'Just let me be five eight.' Andl when I reached it I was the happiest' man in the world. I told my body not to stop growing. And I still haven't toldl it to stop."
1
The Fastest Ever
aseball is always talking about 'can't1
miss' players," said former Cardinal?
catcher Tim McCarver, who ha&i spent decades watching the game, fromi behind either the plate or a micro-< phone. "I've seen a lot of 'can't miss'- players miss."
The list of famous disappointmentsi is long. There's Steve Chilcott, the onlyl player ever selected first in the draft (of 1966) never to play a single game in the majors (he was injured in the mi-i nors), for whom the Mets passed upi Reggie Jackson. There's Brien Taylor.' signed by the Yankees in 1991 for $1.55 million, only to ruin his arm in a bat. brawl. There's Bob Nelson, dubbed "the Babe Ruth of Texas," who in the' 50s failed to hit a single home run foi the Baltimore Orioles or anyone else. There's Paul Pettit, baseball's first $100,000 bonus baby, who because- of injuries, bad breaks, bad calls, andr bad relief in a single game has a careei mark of 1-2 rather than 2-1, a fact that gnaws at him nearly 40 years aftei he last walked off the mound. "I wish I had that more than anything else in the world," he said of that elusive second win.
But no player had more promise, oi fell more spectacularly, than Steve Dal- kowski, who, though only 57, now lives in a nursing home in New Britain, Con necticut, near the sandlots where, 4C years ago, he'd strike out 20 batters game, where scouts from 15 major-leagut
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After 34 years in the game Marlins manager Jim Leyland still can't predict success.
teams lined up to watch him. "No one could match your 110 MPH fastball, not Feller, Ryan, Seaver or Koufax," wrote Phil Rizzuto on a photo Dalkowski keeps by his bed. Debilitated by al- cohol, unable to formulate complex thoughts, Dalkowski is still capable of primitive eloquence. "I pitched the same as everyone else," he said quietly. "It just got there faster."
For some mysterious reason, since he was neither big nor strong, Dalkowski, who signed with the Orioles for $40,000 and a Pontiac in 1957, could throw a baseball faster than anyone before or since. Players recall how his fastballs tore an earlobe off one unlucky batter and gave an umpire a concussion, how errant pitches went through wooden backstops, leaving batters cowering and fans running for cover.
But Dalkowski had trouble with con- trol, both with baseballs and bottles. In one incredible performance, he struck out 24 batters, but he also walked 18. Still, he was about to reach the majors in 1963— he'd been measured for an Oriole uniform and been assigned a locker— when, after striking out Roger Maris on three pitches in an exhibition game, something snapped in his left arm while he was fielding a bunt. His career ended, followed by 30 years of drinking and dissolution that stopped
only through the intervention of a lov- ing kid sister.
Somewhere in Dalkowski's story lies a lesson for today's rookies, about the combustible combination of superhu- man talent, human weakness, pressure, and exploitation. Today, unable to focus very long or do much of anything be- sides snatch fragments of baseball mem- ories, he cannot say what that lesson is.
The Second- Cruelest Month
In early March, as spring training has gotten under way, the Atlanta Braves and Florida Marlins, two teams that could well compete for baseball's grand prize this season, meet in Municipal Sta- dium of West Palm Beach, Florida. Be- fore the game the clubs take turns on the diamond, where signs for local bar- becue joints, a hometown divorce lawyer, and an exterminator line the outfield wall. Two related but distinct sounds— the sharp crack of a bat against a pitched ball, the duller, more muffled knock on wood of grounders hit by coaches— fill the languid air.
On the surface, the atmosphere is easy. Opposing players greet one anoth- er—and managers greet umpires— like long-lost friends. Some stars, better- natured and more available than they will be as the season wears on, sign au-
tographs on the sidelines, part of chas- tened baseball's effort after the strike of • 1994 to atone to its fans. This time ofi year, no line drives are worth diving for; i even the fly balls seem lazier, and when they're beyond reach, outfielders toss up | gloves to stop them.
But to this year's rookies, it's time to produce. The Marlins' new manager, Jim Leyland, leans on a bat by thei cage, scrutinizing what he's got. Famed for his saltiness— local reporters must- now decide whether to clean up his lan- guage or sprinkle it with dashes and as- terisks—Leyland himself never made it past Double-A, and batted only .2221 down there. Thirty-four years he's spentr in the game and still, he admits, hei can't predict who will succeed and who' will fail.
"There are exceptions to the rule— my mom could watch Barry Bonds and see he would play in the big leagues- but for the most part no one knows for sure," he says. Scouts study raw talent on sandlots and high-school diamonds, and somehow extrapolate, prognosti- cate, from what they see. To Leyland, they are baseball's most valuable play- ers. "I don't know how the fuck they do that," he says with about as much wonder as any hardened baseball man can muster. "I'm glad I just have to manage." D
1 12
VANITY FAIR
MAY 19 97
~ 1 IHr ■*■
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RED DOOR
THE FRAGRANCE
Elizabeth Arden
Dayton's Marshall Field's Hudson's
I
Name: Alan Cumming, actor. Age: 32. Credits: Emma,
Circle of Friends, GoldenEye. Promoting: Romy & Michele s High School
Reunion, Buddy, For My Baby. Will you be overexposed when all
your movies come out? "I certainly will be in For My Baby. There are nudie
scenes. When I saw it I thought, Oh God, I'm in a soft-core film."
A typical career week: "I shot Buddy with Rene Russo. Then I went to
Vienna, playing an Austrian Jewish stand-up comedian who's
possessed." Tell us about Romy & Michele's High School Reunion: "I'm like the
girl in it, really, because all the main actors are girls. I snog
Lisa [Kudrow]. Oh, I always forget no one in America knows 'snog.'
To snog is to kiss." Were you the girl in Emnut! "I would be the
plain girl." And in For My Baby! "I'm the man, but I dress
like my sister. It's cold, wet, and upsetting. It's Basic Instinct
with Mary Poppins. " — michael musto
19 9 7
PHOTOGRAPH BY LORENZO AGIUS
VANITY FAIR
I I < .
t's a war of wits when Captains of the League of Liter- ary Superheros bat- tle one another for the best-seller list: Supersensitive Man SAUL BELLOW'S novel la Tlie Actual (Viking stars a detached middle- aged outcast whose gifts of observation ultimately land him with an old flame. Incred- ible Disappearing Man THOMAS PYNCHON'S Mason & Dixon (Holt) . conjures the insane and unpre- dictable lives of these two 18th- century British surveyors. Kvetch ^ Man PHILIP ROTH'S American Pastoral (Houghton Miff- lin) paints a portrait of a gentle, ordinary man unhinged first by the turbulent 60s, then later by his revo- lutionary terrorist daughter; and the Incred ible Hulking Genius NORMAN MAILER'S first-person novel Tlte Gospel According to the Son (Random House) imagines the inner life of Jesus Christ.
Also this month: GITA MEHTA'S Snakes and Ladders (Doubleday) is a beguiling look at Indian cul- ture 50 years after independence. A cub reporter is embroiled in in- ternational intrigue by a maverick C.I. A. agent and a spy lurking in his newsroom in Washington Post editor DAVID IGNATIUS'S A Firing Offense (Random House). A fledgling Su- preme Court clerk's screwup forces him to turn to his supposedly trust- worthy Beltway buddies for help in BRAD MELTZER'S completely absorbing first novel, The Tenth Justice (Mor- row). Journalist JON KRAKAUER re- calls his hellish ascent to, and near -fatal descent from, the summit of Mount Ever- est in the gripping real-life horror story Into Thin Air (Villard). In JOSEPH KANON'S historical romantic thriller, Los Alamos (Broadway), it's 1945, and the hermetic, bomb-loving denizens of a town that officially
VANITY FAIR
Two images from
Gianni Versace's Rock and Royalty:
left, a model dad (barely) in Versace Sport,
photographed by Bruce Weber,
and Nadja Auermann, photographed
by Richard Avedon.
Saddle shoes (and boi socks) were de rigueur in the heyday of Dick Clark's American Bandstand. New the long-running TV sock is commemorated in a book by Dick Clark
4 W-
■ -* - ■
From photographer Harry Benson's
book First Families, a 1978 shot
of Richard Nixon in the gardens of
La Casa Pacifica, his retreat
overlooking the ocean
in San Clemente, California.
doesn't exist are unnerved by a violent murder. PETE HAMILL'S eighth novel, Snow in August (Little, Brown), portrays the unlikely friend- ship between a nice Irish Catholic boy and a rabbi from Prague. ALAIN DE BOTTON combs Proust's oeuvre for insight into such matters as first- date sex and how to be an exem- plary host in How Proust Can Change Your Life (Pantheon). WHITNEY OTTO'S lyrical novel The Passion Dream Book (HarperCollins) flows from the Ital- ian Renaissance through the Harlem renaissance. Tumble Home (Scribner) is gifted miniaturist AMY HEMPEL'S col- lection of short stories and a novel- la. First Families (Bulfinch) highlights 40 years of pho- tographer HARRY BENSON'S ' intimate and lively snaps, ' such as Babs and Millie shar- ' ing a private moment. KEN EMERSON'S Doo-Dah! (Simon & Schuster) is a bio of American pop composer Stephen Foster, who wove together black and white influences to father such all-American campfire ditties as "Oh! Susanna" and "Way Down upon the Swanee Riv- er." JOEL ROSE'S on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown novel, Kill Kill Faster Faster (Crown), is the searing tale of > an ex-con turned script doctor. ROSEMARY ALTEA'S Proud i Spirit (Morrow) is a dizzying odyssey into the psychic realm. ROBERT HARBISON'S Thirteen Ways: Theoretical In- vestigations in Architecture (MIT Press) is a metaphysical
musing on the mean- ing and relevance oft architecture. In the dance spotlight, DICK I CLARK'S American Band- stand (HarperCollins)- showcases four decades of lip-synching bands, • compromising fasrH ions, and, oh yes, danc-v ing. Maxwell Smart; meets Bertie Wooster: in British funnyman HUGH LAURIE'S ripping spoof of the spy genre, The Gun Seller (Soho Press). And for those ■ who don't have to worry about dry-cleaning bills, GIANNI VERSACE'S Rock and Royalty (Abbeville) is a collection of photographs of the couturier's clothes modeled by the kings and queens of music and fashion. Long live the glam! — elissa schappell
' Mm
MAY 1
I
' *»• «*
Vlaiakhiiv Cocktail
Swan break:
Dancer Vladimir
Malakhov.
here would classical ballet be with- out its Russian wonder boys? In the 60s there was Rudolf Nureyev, a Tyger Bright who strived for symme- try yet wore snakeskin suits on TV (more than a little Lucifer in him). Next came Mikhail Baryshnikov, a grown-up putto with the Sun King's sense of privilege. And now, after a seemingly endless supply of Russian bottle blonds with big thighs, there's 29-year-old Vladimir Malakhov at American Ballet The- atre. Born in the Ukraine, trained at the Bolshoi Ballet school, and a teen sensation with the Moscow Classical Ballet, Malakhov is a White Night in white tights. With a I nod to millennial uncertainty, he is modest. In sync with cy- berspace, he is technically astonishing. Befitting ballet, he honors his ballerinas with unwavering concentration. In fact, he sometimes makes me think of a dancer we've I seen only in books: the exotic Vaslav Nijinsky. There's si a feral glow to Malakhov's perfection, a spectral light in his Eastern eyes, and then there's that leap— so floating, high, silent, still, we can almost hear his decision ... fi- nally ... to descend. This May, Malakhov's back in A.B.T. airspace for the opening-night gala, and then it's s I straight into the feathered void: Vladimir as Siegfried in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. -LAURA JACOBS
Elaine Kaufman,
restaurateur:
A Father's Kisses,
by Bruce J ay Friedman
(Donald I. Fine).
"It's very funny, but dark
humor. Bruce is clever, how
he spins his story—
you never know what is
going to happen. "
tight-Table Reading I
Simon J. Critchell,
president, C.E.O. ofCartier, Inc.: Collected Short Stories: Volume 1.
by W. Somerset Maugham
(Penguin). "Proof that human nature
does not change. I am also
nostalgic for the great
days of that empire on which
the sun never set. "
Ralph Steadman,
artist, cartoonist, writer:
My Uncle Oswald,
by Roald Dahl
(Knopf). "Dahl's most
scrofulous, indecent,
and disgusting piece
of squelchy prose. It is an
ingenious and disgraceful romp. "
David Sedaris,
author: Truth Serum,
by Bernard Cooper
(Houghton Mifflin).
"His intelligence is staggering
and never for one
moment do I doubt his
honesty. Best of all,
the book includes a rhesus
monkey."
1 18
VANITY FAIR
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Born into a world of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, Liv Tyler became a Hollywood sensation with Bertoluccis Stealing Beauty and is starring in the much- anticipated Ew^ngjheAhbotts Between takes, the most
7 • . ■ . 7 7/0 ^ J 7 ■ A ■ .77
'
sophisticated 19-year-old in America talks to KEVIN SESSUMS about her mother and ex-manager, former model Bebe Buell; her father, Aerosmiths Steven Tyler; and her new love and Abbotts co-star, Joaquin Phoenix
... -
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BY HERB RITTS
LED BY L ' W.
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iiv on iiii: eik;k
"l,iv is not pulling a sultry
power (rip witli you the way a lot
of very beautiful women
can— or hav e. learned how to do,"
says loin Hanks.
_A_*
/ ^ "^^^. jt he kind of stuns you when W ^f ^^B s^e walks through the
door, before she's ever said a word," says Tom Hanks. Like everybody else in Hol- lywood, he's talking about Liv Tyler. "There is no act going on with her," he continues, having cast the precocious 19-year-old as the female lead in his feature directorial debut, That Thing You Do! "She is not pulling a sultry power trip with you the way a lot of very beauti- ful women can— or have learned how to do." Tyler walks through the door to my room at the Chateau Marmont and, true to her amazing form, says not a word. She offers me a choice: in each of her outstretched hands is a crisp golden apple.
I hesitate. "Ever read that book by Eudora Welty?" I ask. Tyler silently lifts one of the apples to her famous lips and chomps off almost half of it in one giant bite. She shakes her head no. She chews.
"It's a group of interconnected stories titled The Gold- en Apples. There's one called 'Moon Lake,' about a sum- mer camp for orphaned teenage girls. There's a lovely line in it: 'All orphans were at once wondering and stoic— at one moment loving everything too much, the next folding back from it, tightly as hard green buds growing in, the wrong direction, closing as they go.'"
Tyler smiles and thrusts the other apple at me. I take it from her, and am startled when a yo-yo, hidden behind the apple and attached to one of her shockingly long fin- gers, suddenly unspools.
"Never have read that," she says, beckoning the yo-yo back. "I just finished reading Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote, though," Wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans, and tattered black Converse All Stars, Tyler plops down cross-legged in a velvet wing chair, throws a half-empty pack of Natural American Spirits on the cof- fee table, and tells me how much she loved the Capote book, about an exotic 13-year-old who discovers his long- lost father. She fires up a cigarette. "I know I shouldn't smoke, but they're so yummy," she confesses. "I started at 15. I'd hide them in my pantie drawers." "It certainly hasn't stunted your growth." "My major spurt of growth happened the second I stopped modeling," she says, remembering that couple of years be- tween 14 and 16 when she graced many magazine pages. "Are you still growing?"
"Goddamn it, I hope so. I want to be an amazon. My hands are bigger than most men's."
"You do seem to have filled out since Stealing Beauty," I say, referring to her breakthrough performance in that Bernardo Bertolucci film set in Tuscany, in which she and everything around her seemed a bit overripe.
"What do you mean?" she asks, taken aback. "My breas I'm wearing a pointy bra. I'm wearing my white poi: bra from Inventing the Abbotts, actually," she says, inv. ing director Pat O'Connor's upcoming film based or Sue Miller short story, in which Tyler plays one of