I wasn’t expecting this, but it makes sense. Taylor Swift covers the April cover of Vanity Fair, and for her first VF cover story, Swifty has gone crazy a little bit. I think Swifty is used to friendly media outlets who only want to ask her about kittens and glitter, and Swifty is used to doing her dirty work (PR-wise) via unnamed sources in Us Weekly and People Magazine. So she tries to pull some similar moves, and she gets called out and it’s amazing. This is actually one of the funniest/most interesting VF cover stories in a LONG time. You can read VF’s extensive excerpt here, and here are some highlights:

On Tina Fey & Amy Poehler mocking her at the Globes: “You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people,” Taylor Swift says on the subject of mean girls in general and in response to an incident at this year’s Golden Globes, where Amy Poehler and Tina Fey mocked her highly scrutinized love life. “Because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’”

On her dating life: “if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people,” meaning Conor Kennedy and One Direction’s Harry Styles. Though she has gone out with some of the entertainment world’s most notorious bachelors, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas, and John Mayer, Swift says, “[t]he fact that there are slide shows of a dozen guys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with. . . it’s just kind of ridiculous.” As she sits drinking lavender lemonade in her “Tim Burton–Alice in Wonderland–pirate ship–Peter Pan” apartment, Swift continues, “It’s why I have to avoid the tabloid part of our culture, because they turn you into a fictional character.”

Whether or not she’s boy-crazy: “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”

A fascinating statement about how Swifty conducted the interview: “Although one of Swift’s rules is that she doesn’t go into the personal details of any of her relationships, she authorized someone to discuss them with [Nancy Jo] Sales.”

On Harry Styles: “He wore her down,” the source says of Styles, who allegedly “chased” Swift for a year. “He was all, like, ‘You’re amazing—I want to be with you. I want to do this.’” The relationship fell apart after he texted Swift to alert her of a picture on the Internet of him kissing a friend good-bye. They were “making out like with their hands all up in each other’s hair,” says the source. After Swift ended the relationship, he pursued her for the better part of a year until she finally took him back. “But the whole time she says she feels like he’s looking at every girl,” the source continues. And then when they were in London together he “disappears one night and after that it was like he just didn’t want to keep going.” Styles’s rep, Benny Tarantini at Columbia Records, said that all of Swift’s source’s claims are “undeniably false.”

On Conor Kennedy: “It was like a pendulum for her, swinging back and forth,” the source says of Swift’s exes, with all of whom age has been a problem. Conor Kennedy, 17 at the time, was “just like a two-month thing,” the source continues, and Swift “says he was awesome.” The source says, “She dated Jake [Gyllenhaal] and John [Mayer] when she was really young and they were in their 30s, and she got really hurt. So it was like ‘That hurt—this won’t. But then it did.’”

Did she buy a home in Hyannis Port? “People say that about me, that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like—that’s a thing that I apparently do. If I like you I will apparently buy up the real-estate market just to freak you out so you leave me.” Swift continues, “One of these things I say to myself to calm myself down when I feel like it’s all too much . . . If there’s a pregnancy rumor, people will find out it’s not true when you wind up not being pregnant, like nine months from now, and if there’s a house rumor, they’ll find out it’s not true when you are actively not ever spotted at that house.” But Sales reports that Swift actually did purchase the house. According to someone close to the situation, she had been viewing the property with her parents for over a year under the recommendation of Rory Kennedy. In November 2012, the Cape Cod Times reported the house had been sold to Ocean Drive LLC for $4.8 million. The company’s filing papers name a certain “Jesse P. Schaudies” of 13management—Taylor Swift’s management company. Schaudies did not return calls made to 13management’s offices, but according to the source, the Hyannis Port house was recently resold. “It was like a house-flip,” the source says. “A good short-term investment.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I love EVERYTHING about this article. It’s so genius. Nancy Jo Sales (the VF writer) has brilliantly captured The Swifty Machine. Taylor doesn’t want her fingerprints on some down-and-dirty Swifty-boating of Harry Styles, so she authorized her “friends” to talk sh-t about Harry and Sales makes that perfectly clear. Swifty talks a good game about “rumors” and such, but the truth is that she actually bought a home right next to her 18-year-old boyfriend of two months. She wants to declare criticism of her music and her person as “sexist” when she does nothing to further the feminist cause (in many cases, she even seems to hate the sisterhood, which is fine because she doesn’t consider herself a feminist).

As for the “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women” comment IN REGARDS TO TINA FEY AND AMY POEHLER. Too far, Swifty. Too damn far. Amy and Tina have done more for women in the industry and in life than you will ever know. All they did was crack a joke about how she liked jailbait like Michael J. Fox’s son!!! That’s it. And people laughed because IT WAS TRUE.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet, cover courtesy of VF.

Vanity Fair is exhausting. And not in the good way. I remember a time – not that long ago – when the Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue was one of the best parts of the awards season. VF would spend serious time on the Hollywood Portfolio, profiling not just the hot new talents of the year, but some of the grizzled Hollywood veterans, the character actors, the actors the critics adored, the surprises of the year. But the last five or six years, Vanity Fair has been trying to “fix” what wasn’t broken, and this year’s Hollywood Issue is terrible. I guess VF got tired of always being criticized for putting young white women on the cover so they made this cover… all white. But instead of a cover jammed with young talent, it’s just Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper and a washed-out looking Emma Stone in bed together. WORSE MENAGE EVER.

It’s one for the history books—more than 75 different stars were photographed for Vanity Fair’s 19th Hollywood Portfolio, shot by Bruce Weber as the famed photographer’s definitive tribute to the town. Enfolding Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, Amy Adams and Jonah Hill, Selena Gomez and Alan Arkin, Weber’s vision called for a variety of talent—of both the two- and four-legged variety. The cover: Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper (impishly smiling in a bear suit and a gorilla costume, respectively) flank America’s sweetheart Emma Stone. Oscar winner Affleck cemented his status as Hollywood’s in-demand director with Argo, which received seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture, while Cooper’s Silver Linings Playbook received eight nominations, including Cooper’s first for best actor. Youngest-ever best-actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis also appears on the cover gatefold along with Olivia Wilde, Kerry Washington, and Eddie Redmayne.

Weber’s wild(life) wit continues inside, as Les Misérables’ Redmayne and Bella Heathcote dance with a bear, tiger cubs make an appearance, and the most fawned-over participant in the whole production—Tai the elephant—mugs for the camera. Tai, who has her own IMDb page and several starring film credits, at one point walked through the soundstage at Hollywood Center Studios and began to perform some of her favorite tricks. Later that day she even gave Gomez a ride on her trunk.

Editor Graydon Carter wanted to do something different for the portfolio’s 19th year, so he called on Weber to create “Bruce Weber’s Adventures in Hollywood,” an ode to the city’s warmer side. Weber convened the shoots at various historic Hollywood locations—including back lots, soundstages, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Musso & Frank Grill, and the old Marion Davies estate. He shipped selected LPs and a portable record player to provide the right musical accompaniment for the assorted cast of Hollywood characters. When Weber was staging Quincy Jones and three of his beautiful daughters—Rashida, Kidada, and Kenya—Weber asked them to come up with a song they all knew so that they could sing together. Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” from the Thriller album, which Quincy produced, was their choice.

V.F. special correspondent Bob Colacello, who accompanied Weber on many of the shoots, observes that Bruce’s “magic kingdom . . . is more Cinecittà than Disney, a place where Old Hollywood glamour is filtered through the lens of postwar Italian neo-realism, and Norman Rockwell wholesomeness is given an antic Fellini edge.” Having spent decades watching the movie business, Weber finds the unexpected warmth among its stars. There’s an intimacy to these images that shows that Hollywood isn’t just about glamour. This year’s portfolio is a celebration of the friendships that thrive among the people who call it home.

[From Vanity Fair]

Yeah. They chose to profile Halle Berry instead of Quvenzhané Wallis. They chose to profile Olivia Wilde (WTF?!!?!) instead of Jennifer Lawrence or Jessica Chastain. They can’t profile Joaquin Phoenix or Phillip Seymour Hoffman from The Master – not when last year’s Best Supporting Actor nominee Jonah Hill is around! I can’t complain about Kerry Washington or Eddie Redmayne, because both of them did have a great year. But profiling them at the same time as VF gives Olivia Wilde space just seems… wrong. This seems like a Hollywood Portfolio put together by your mom.

Photos courtesy of VF.

The January issue of Vanity Fair is a theme issue, and thankfully, the cover isn’t featuring some dead celebrity or politician. The covers – there are three in all – feature current comedians and comedic actors dressed up as (some) dead celebrities. HUZZAH. Vanity Fair’s Comedy Issue was guest-edited by Judd Apatow, the writer-director-super-producer of such films as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and the soon-to-be-released This is 40. Meaning that one of the covers is devoted to the stars of This is 40, which is how Megan Fox landed her first Vanity Fair cover (she’s in This is 40). Yes, one of these things is not like the others. You can read Judd’s “Note from the Guest Editor” here, and here are some highlights from the issue:

In Vanity Fair’s first-ever comedy issue, writer, director, and producer Judd Apatow convened his most talented friends and idols to contribute, write, and pose for a 19-page Mark Seliger portfolio—as well as act incredibly dignified and businesslike in costume for three different covers. Included are the stars of Apatow’s This Is 40, dressed as famous figures of 60s- and 70s-era variety shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, with Leslie Mann in a bikini and body paint à la Goldie Hawn and Melissa McCarthy dressed as Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann; Paul Rudd plays your oily show host, and Megan Fox is an alluring bellhop.

A second cover features Jim Carrey dressed up as Evel Knievel, Maya Rudolph doing an ancient Egyptian like Steve Martin in his King Tut days, Will Ferrell as a corny cowboy, and Amy Poehler as a 60s go-go girl. Finally, Kristen Wiig plays Cher to Ben Stiller’s Sonny on a final cover alongside Chris Rock, doing a Nipsey Russell thing, and Jerry Seinfeld, decked out in a Nehru jacket.

Apatow is only the third guest editor—after Bono, who guest-edited the Africa issue in July 2007, and Tom Ford, who guest-edited the Hollywood Portfolio in March 2006—since Graydon Carter became editor of the magazine 20 years ago. Says Carter in his editor’s letter this month, “It can reasonably be said that the comedy industry is booming these days, in movies, on television, and onstage. And who better to oversee an entire issue on the subject than one of the great impresarios of the business? . . . Judd was a terrific collaborator, brimming with suggestions and infectious energy—precisely the sort of high-wattage, Hollywood-style enthusiasm that can alternately excite you and drive you a bit crazy.”

Conan O’Brien, Lena Dunham, Zach Galifianakis, Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner are just some of the legends past, present, and future that Apatow corralled for the Comedy Portfolio. Louis C.K. answers the Proust Questionnaire, and Jimmy Fallon stars in our Out to Lunch column.

[From Vanity Fair]

I can’t wait to read Louis CK’s Proust Questionnaire. You know that’s going to be good. And I am a big Steve Martin fan too (although I’d be willing to be he’s a bastard in real life). So… this will probably be a good issue. I think it was also a good choice by Judd to include so many funny women on the covers – but seriously, Megan Fox?

Covers courtesy of Vanity Fair.

Guess who covers the June issue of Vanity Fair? ANOTHER DEAD CELEBRITY. Dear God. Why does Vanity Fair keep doing this? And Marilyn Monroe is one of their favorites – it’s always Marilyn or one of the Kennedys, although they did put Elizabeth Taylor on the cover (just before she died) and Grace Kelly (when her stuff was coming up for auction or something). The whole reason for VF to devote yet another cover story to Marilyn Monroe is because “just before Marilyn Monroe’s shocking death, in 1962, photographer Lawrence Schiller hit the jackpot, capturing the world’s most famous blonde at her most seductive.” Basically, this Schiller dude has written a book about the “never before seen” photo shoot he did with Marilyn before she died. The problem? I’ve seen some of these photos before – they’ve been around for a while. Maybe Schiller is showing some never-before-seen pics, but the one Vanity Fair used online has been seen before.

You can read an excerpt from the VF cover story here – there’s nothing really earth-shattering, and most people with a passing interest in Marilyn already know this stuff. Like, Marilyn was really jealous of Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn had plans to stunt-queen her way into getting more press and attention than Elizabeth. Here’s a good Marilyn quote: “There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on.” She also allegedly told this dude, “I’ve always wanted a baby… Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child. Whenever it came close, my body said no and I lost the baby.” Which I swear comes from Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde.

Now, of course it’s interesting if you like Marilyn and you don’t mind reading the same old stuff about how she was a really screwed up person. But I have to wonder – why did Vanity Fair make the choice to put their Marilyn fetish on the cover yet again? It’s not like there aren’t several huge summer blockbusters coming out soon, with big-name stars who would love a chance at a VF cover. Why wouldn’t Michael Fassbender make a better cover? Or Kristen Stewart? Or Charlize Theron? Or Christian Bale? Or Anne Hathaway? Or even Channing Tatum? And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but if they were so hellbent on putting a dead celebrity on the cover, why not Whitney Houston? They have a story about Whitney inside – why not make it the cover? All I know is that I get so tired of Marilyn. Let that poor, tragic woman rest in peace.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.

I heard rumors about this cover back in February, and now we’re finally seeing it – Vanity Fair’s cover story on “The Women of Television”. Featuring a cover with Julianna Margulies (The Good Wife), Sofia Vergara (Modern Family), Claire Danes (Homeland) and Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary Crawford on Downton Abbey). I’m happy to say that I watch all of the TV shows represented on this cover. Unfortunately, for the inside pictorial, the Vanity Fair editors seemed to only prioritize boobs, not quality talent. Here’s another photo, featuring Emily Deschanel (Bones), Grace Park (Hawaii 5-0), Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife), Emmy Rossum (Shameless), Emily Van Camp (Revenge), Kerry Washington (Scandal), and Kat Dennings (2 Broke Girls). I’m telling you… all young, all booby.

Not, of course it’s nice to see diversity in at least ONE photo from Vanity Fair – even though they only managed three white women and one Latina woman for the cover. But inside, there’s an Indian woman, an African-American woman and a Korean-American woman. So… that’s nice. But it’s still incredibly ageist (I think Margulies is the oldest woman featured), and slightly out of touch. One of the biggest hits of the year is The New Girl – so where’s Zooey Deschanel? Where are any of the ladies from Mad Men? Or Game of Thrones? Or Mireille Enos from The Killing? Edie Falco? Laura Dern? Laura Linney? Glenn Close from Damages? Or Jennifer Carpenter from Dexter? Or Kyra Sedgwick from The Closer, arguably one of the best female characters on television? I could go on and on about the ladies that were left out.

Still… I guess I should be happy that Vanity Fair is doing such a gyno-centric television issue, right? And I should be happy that there are so many good parts for women in television these days. But the cause is not helped by just shoving random, young, scantily-clad ladies into a room, you know?

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair has released their March cover – their annual “Hollywood Issue”. I remember when VF’s “Hollywood Issue” used to feature really amazing actors who everyone was talking about – but it’s felt really subdued lately, right? I guess last year’s VF Hollywood Issue had some talked-about actors with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal and James Franco and all. Last year’s cover also featured Noomi Rapace, but she only got featured on the very back panel of the fold-out cover. This year’s (budget) Lisbeth Salander gets front-and-center on the main panel – Rooney Mara has arrived! As for the other girls, I barely recognized some of them. And did they seriously give Paula Patton that hairstyle?

In the first-ever Hollywood Issue cover shoot from Vanity Fair contributing photographer Mario Testino, a bevy of Hollywood’s most precocious beauties lounge across a three-panel foldout—including two new Oscar nominees. The Art Deco set was designed to evoke the all-white, Jazz Age interiors of English decorator Syrie Maugham, whose clients included Bunny Mellon, Elsa Schiaparelli, and the Duchess of Windsor; V.F.’s fashion and style director, Jessica Diehl, put the 11 cover starlets in pastel satin dresses and frothy feathers to lend a 20s and 30s boudoir feel. Across the panels are actresses Rooney Mara, Mia Wasikowska, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, Elizabeth Olsen, Adepero Oduye, Shailene Woodley, Paula Patton, Felicity Jones, Lily Collins, and Brit Marling. Mara and Chastain—both featured on the front panel—were nominated for Academy Awards in January, Mara for her portrayal of cyberpunk hacker Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Chastain for her supporting role in Tate Taylor’s Oscar heavyweight, The Help. (The Julliard grad also had starring roles in Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, and Coriolanus in 2011.)

[From Vanity Fair]

Should we talk about race? VF managed to feature two “women of color” on the cover fold-out cover, but a woman of color still can’t make it onto the front panel. Plus, it kind of feels like they just threw in Paula Patton for no particular reason, really. Is her career really that hot?

Here’s the VF interview with Rooney Mara. HER VOICE. She’s so bored and entitled. And yes, she’s SO HARDCORE that she only had photos of Thom Yorke on her wall. Of course.

Full VF cover – click to enlarge!

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.

First it was Rihanna and Lady Gaga infecting my Vogue. And now Katy Perry is on the cover of Vanity Fair. I feel like screaming “FOR WHY?” into a strong wind. But seriously, for why? Katy is a pop artist, and a middling one at that. She has boobs. She’s married to Russell Brand (where’s HIS Vanity Fair cover?!?), and did I mention, she has boobs? She also had a screwed up childhood. That’s about it. Ugh. Stupid Vanity Fair.

You can read the whole VF excerpt of Katy’s interview here. Here are some highlights:

On her multi-layered career: “My career is like an artichoke. People might think that the leaves are tasty and buttered up and delicious, and they don’t even know that there’s something magical hidden at the base of it. There’s a whole other side [of me] that people didn’t know existed.”

On her childhood: “I didn’t have a childhood,” she says, adding that her mother never read her any books except the Bible, and that she wasn’t allowed to say “deviled eggs” or “Dirt Devil.” Perry wasn’t even allowed to listen to secular music and relied on friends to sneak her CDs. “Growing up, seeing Planned Parenthood, it was considered like the abortion clinic,” she tells Robinson. “I was always scared I was going to get bombed when I was there…. I didn’t know it was more than that, that it was for women and their needs. I didn’t have insurance, so I went there and I learned about birth control.”

On her parents: “I think sometimes when children grow up, their parents grow up,” Perry says of her evangelical-minister parents. “Mine grew up with me. We coexist. I don’t try to change them anymore, and I don’t think they try to change me. We agree to disagree. They’re excited about [my success]. They’re happy that things are going well for their three children and that they’re not on drugs. Or in prison.” Perry’s mother confirms that she is proud of her daughter’s success, telling Robinson, “The Lord told us when I was pregnant with her that she would do this.”

On religion: “I come from a very non-accepting family, but I’m very accepting,” Perry says of her religious beliefs as an adult. “Russell is into Hinduism, and I’m not [really] involved in it. He meditates in the morning and the evening; I’m starting to do it more because it really centers me. [But] I just let him be him, and he lets me be me.” Perry says she didn’t stick with the mold growing up. “I have always been the kid who’s asked ‘Why?’ In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith. But I was always like…why?” she says. “At this point, I’m just kind of a drifter. I’m open to possibility…. My sponge is so big and wide and I’m soaking everything up and my mind has been radically expanded. Just being around different cultures and people and their opinions and perspectives. Just looking into the sky.”

Of her marriage to Russell Brand: Perry says that there is “never a dull moment” and that Brand has “never lied to me once. I trust him; there’s just a level of trust that we’ve built up.” When asked about the infamous photo Brand tweeted of her without makeup in the middle of the night, Perry laughs it off. “We were just messing around,” she says, “I didn’t really care. I mean, when I go to rehearsals I look like that. I’m every woman. It takes a village to make me who I am…. You don’t have to wake up looking like, you know, Gisele.”

On marriage and the press: “The press is just not your friend when it comes to a marriage,” Perry explains of her need for privacy in her relationship with Brand. “That’s why we didn’t sell the pictures of our wedding, and we got offered millions of dollars for them, millions.” Why not take the money and give it to charity? Robinson asks. “Well, I can always do that later for something else; maybe if I have a child,” Perry says. “But I’ve seen too much of it with other people—it’s the wrong kind of attention. It detracts from the reason why you exist. We wanted that moment to ourselves.” After ultimately showing a clip of her wedding video at the Grammys, Perry tells Robinson she did it “because I felt the moment was right and not forced. Russell and I had time to savor our moment privately first and then share it with people when we were ready, and not for a paycheck. I loved the idea, because I thought it was beautiful and artistically accompanied the song I wrote for him. Plus, it was Valentine’s eve!”

On the music, and her boobs: “I don’t care what people say about my relationship; I don’t care what they say about my boobs. People are buying my songs; I have a sold-out tour. I’m getting incredible feedback from my music.” But despite her immense fame, Perry never forgets what it took to get to where she is. “I don’t take anything for granted,” she says. “There are 500 other girls right behind me. And I know that, because I was one of them. I remember what it’s like to be someone who’s always trying to get there—sending out tons of e-mails … trying to connect with some person who could connect me with some other person. And I wouldn’t be working at this pace now if I didn’t truly know that fame is fleeting.”

On working and touring: “If the core, the honesty, my story, isn’t working, then all those bells and whistles aren’t going to work, either,” Perry says of staying focused on her music. “Sometimes I can be distracted by the glamour and the fabulousness. But my husband always reminds me to keep the core intact…. I just think I have to appreciate every day, every opportunity, work hard, and continue to evolve as an artist. I already know my future evolution, where I’m going to go. I mean, I’m touring in f-cking Indonesia, for crying out loud.”

[From Vanity Fair]

So, basically, this interview is for people who didn’t have the energy to read her interview in Rolling Stone last year, where she basically said all of the same stuff, only in a more interesting way.

Oh, and every time I hear about how much Russell Brand meditates, it kind of cracks me up. He has such an addictive personality – his addictions used to be drugs, alcohol and a daily multitude of random biscuits, and now he’s addicted to meditation. What happens when meditation won’t cure his itch?

VF cover courtesy of Vanity Fair online, additional photos courtesy of WENN.

*Click the image to see the enlarged cover.

After last year’s “pretty white girl” cover for Vanity Fair’s annual “Hollywood Issue”, the editors must have decided they needed some diversity. Thus, they made sure to put two actors of color on their fold-out cover. Well… one actor of color, and one mixed-race actress. It’s like VF is just placating their haters! Honestly, though, what pisses me off more than the consistent lack of diversity is the simple fact that Ryan Reynolds (ugh) and Jake Gyllenhaal (UGH) both made it to the front section of the fold-out. Seriously? Are those two considered the brightest of youngish actors? For real? Anne Hathaway and James Franco, I don’t have a problem with. Beyond those four, here are the rest of the people on the cover: Jennifer Lawrence, Anthony Mackie (yay!), Olivia Wilde, Jesse Eisenberg, Mila Kunis, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Andrew Garfield, Rashida Jones, Garrett Hedlund, and Noomi Rapace (YAY!)… with Robert Duvall in the back. I completely cosign Mila, Anthony Mackie, JGL, Andrew Garfield, Noomi, Jennifer Lawrence and Jesse Eisenberg (the last two are Oscar-nominated, after all). But Olivia Wilde? Rashida Jones? Garrett Hedlund? Ugh.

Anyway, VF hasn’t put up much of a preview, and there aren’t any good-quality photos from the portfolio hanging around, although there is this bad-quality image of Helena Bonham Carter as “The Changeling”.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.

Jesus. Christ. Vanity Fair’s obsession with all things Kennedy and all things Marilyn Monroe has already gone way, way overboard. And now this – yet another cover devoted to their journalistic necrophilia. Another Marilyn cover! And this time it’s all about her “secret diaries”. Ooh, scandal! What other NEW information could possibly be covered that hasn’t already been discussed and rehashed and masturbated to (journalistically!)? Vanity Fair excerpts from a NEW book about Marilyn, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment. So it’s Marilyn in her own words? Of course not. There’s still quite about to say about Marilyn, so Vanity Fair couldn’t help themselves. Did you know that she was BLONDE?!?

She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors. The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. A few blocks away, above Loew’s State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn—the one everyone knew—52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy.

When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, “Don’t do that. Just tell us what you hear. Don’t tell us how you feel.” Marilyn began to cry. Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, “As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated.” Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman?

Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36.

Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn’s possessions at Christie’s, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built.

Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.

“Complete Subjection, Humiliation, Alonement”

Marilyn began taking private lessons with celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg in March 1955, encouraged by the acclaimed theater and movie director Elia Kazan, with whom she had had an affair. “Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew,” she wrote to her analyst Dr. Ralph Greenson in the last and perhaps the most important letter found in this archive, “and believe me he has known many. But he loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with his teacher, Lee Strasberg.”

She was living at the Gladstone Hotel, on 52nd Street off Park Avenue, when she began working with Strasberg and embarked upon the psychoanalysis that was de rigueur for taking classes at the Actors Studio. Founded in 1947 by Kazan and directors Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, it was the holy temple of the Method—acting exercises and scenes that focused on sense memories and “private moments” dredged from the actor’s life. Throughout the late 1940s and through much of the 1950s and 1960s, the Actors Studio was the most revered laboratory for stage actors in America. Its membership (one was not officially a “student” but a “member”) included a roster of the most compelling actors of the day: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Rip Torn, Kim Stanley, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward—who all brought those techniques into film.

Strasberg, born in 1901 in Austria-Hungary and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a genius at analyzing an actor’s performance and a stern and often cold taskmaster. Short, bespectacled, and intense, he wasn’t, recalled Ellen Burstyn, “one for small talk.” For Marilyn, who grew up shunted from one foster family to another, not knowing who her father was, he became a beloved paternal figure, autocratic yet nurturing, and his acceptance of her as a private student bolstered her confidence and gave her the training to improve her acting, and turned her from a movie star (and punch line) into a true artist. But years later Kazan observed, “The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.”

Most important, this archive, far more deeply than the Inez Melson collection, made public in V.F. in October 2008, reveals a woman in search of herself, undergoing the harrowing experience of psychoanalysis for the first time, at the urging of Strasberg. The key players include Strasberg himself, her three psychiatrists—Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, Dr. Marianne Kris, and Dr. Ralph Greenson—and her third husband, Arthur Miller, whom she confesses to loving body and soul, but by whom she ultimately felt betrayed.

These poems, musings, dreams, and correspondence also touch on her great fear of displeasing others, her chronic lateness, and three of the biggest traumas of her shortened life: one buried in her past, and two that took place a few years after she began studying with Strasberg. But they also reveal her growth both as an artist and a woman as she manages to cope with memories and disappointments that threatened to overwhelm her.

In a five-and-a-half-page typed document, Marilyn looked back on her early marriage to James Dougherty, an intelligent, attractive man five years her senior. They married on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and in this document she describes her feelings of loneliness and insecurity in that hastily agreed-to union, which was less of a love match than a way to keep Marilyn—then Norma Jeane Baker—out of the orphanage when her caretakers at the time, Grace and Erwin “Doc” Goddard, moved away from California. (There has also been speculation that Grace wanted to remove Norma Jeane from her husband’s too appreciative eye.)

[From Vanity Fair]

Is any of this stuff new anymore? Not to me – but I read Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, which was one of the most interesting “biographies” of Marilyn ever written. Of course people will be interested in this because it’s “Marilyn in her own words” – but seriously, just let this poor lady rest in peace. She lived such a tragic life, and this mass fetish-ization has gotten out of control.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.

Ah, we knew this was happening, but it’s still interesting to see Lindsay Lohan on the October cover of Vanity Fair. VF just released some excerpts from their cover interview, and boy are they hilarious. Wait, did I say “hilarious”? I meant “creepy” and “Lindsay is a lying sociopath who will never take responsibility for anything.” Guess what, everybody? Lindsay has daddy issues! SHOCKING. She’s 24 years old and she still blames all of her problems on daddy, which, sure, whatever. Her dad sucks. But so do a lot of other dads. Oh, but wait – did I insinuate that Lidnsay has “problems”? I meant that Lindsay, in her own words, “never abused prescription drugs. I never have—never in my life. I have no desire to. That’s not who I am.” Sigh… it’s going to be a really long, cracked-out day, isn’t it?

“If I were the alcoholic everyone says I am, then putting a [SCRAM] bracelet on would have ended me up in detox, in the emergency room, because I would have had to come down from all the things that people say I’m taking and my father says I’m taking—so that says something, because I was fine,” Lindsay Lohan tells Vanity Fair contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales.

“I think everyone has their own addictions and hopefully learns how to get past them,” she says, in an interview conducted one week before her jail time began. “I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.”

Lohan was visibly upset when she spoke with Sales about Ali’s presence in the courtroom, calling it “heartbreaking” to see her sister cry. However, Lohan feels conflicted about her father’s unexpected appearance at the hearing, telling Sales, “The worst part of it is you turn around and you see your dad crying and normally you’d be, like, happy that your father’s there. But then he has to go and do an interview right after.”

Sales reports that Lohan thinks her career is far from over. “I don’t care what anyone says. I know that I’m a damn good actress. … And I know that in my past I was young and irresponsible—but that’s what growing up is. You learn from your mistakes,” she tells Sales.

Lohan adamantly denies rumors of drug abuse, telling Sales: “I’ve never abused prescription drugs. I never have—never in my life. I have no desire to. That’s not who I am. I’ve admitted to the things that I’ve done—to, you know, dabbling in certain things and trying things ’cause I was young and curious and thought it was like, O.K., ’cause other people were doing it and other people put it in front of me. And I see what happened in my life because of it.”

Lohan blames her troubles, in part, on hanging out with the wrong crowd, Sales reports.

“So many people around me would say they cared for the wrong reasons. A lot of people were pulling from me, taking from me and not giving. I had a lot of people that were there for me for, you know, the party.”

And when she first moved to L.A., Lohan says, “it was very go-go-go and I had a lot of responsibility; and I think just the second I didn’t have [structure] anymore—I was 18, 19—with a ton of money and no one really here to tell me that I couldn’t do certain things … And I see where that’s gotten me now, and I don’t like it.”

She says tabloids were her main source of news, and calls that “really scary and sad… I would look up to those girls… the Britneys and whatever. And I would be like, I want to be like that.”

Sales interviews several paparazzi, and reports that Lohan often cooperates with them for a fee, though Lohan denies this.

“If I called her up right now and said I’ll give you $10,000, she’d come right down,” a photographer tells Sales. “Once you’re famous, there’s always a way to make money,” another photographer says. “She might not be doing what she’d like to be doing, but she’ll always be Lindsay Lohan.”

Despite everything, Lohan is confident in her acting abilities and future: “I don’t care what anyone says. I know that I’m a damn good actress.”

She says she’ll do whatever it takes to fix her party-girl image.

“I want my career back,” she said. “I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies. And if that takes not going out to a club at night, then so be it. It’s not fun anyway.”

The October issue of Vanity Fair will be available on newsstands in New York and L.A. on Thursday, September 2, and nationally and on the iPad on Tuesday, September 7.

[From Vanity Fair (additional quotes via HuffPo)]

So, what can we say in summary? Lindsay denies being a pillhead but not a crackhead, and she doesn’t mention my theory that she abuses prescription drugs, illegal drugs and alcohol all in conjunction. She’s been in rehab four times for no apparent reason other than daddy issues, and her life was destroyed because she was on her own in Hollywood when she was 18 years old and because she was making lots of money for showing up to clubs. That’s it, basically. Nevermind that she was living in the Chateau Marmont when she was 16 years old and that her mother – never the bad guy, right? – enabled every crackhead move she made for the better part of a decade. Ugh.

By the way, after careful crackhead analysis, I really do think Lindsay’s boobs are implants, judging her on this photo below. She must have gotten them done before she went to jail.

Here are some more pics of Lindsay not being a crackhead yesterday:

Vanity Fair photos, by Norma Jean Roy, courtesy of VF online and USA Today.