“VF pile” is currently an item on my to-do list. A chore, in other words. Current number of issues in the pile: two, a twelve-month low.

In order to afford anything advertised within, I would have to take a second job. As P. Diddy.

The cover of the Hollywood issue, in addition to genuine acting luminaries like Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett (who, it is worth noting, is shot in a dress that doesn’t work for her, and posed like those cheesy vanity-boudoir photos you can have taken for your husband where you wear a merrywidow and no underpants and kneel on a velour couch on all fours with a rose in your teeth while the photographer’s like, “Show me tiger! Shoooooow me tiger!”), also features genuine acting non-entities like Claire Danes and Kate Bosworth. Danes, I can forgive. My So-Called Life is ten years gone now, and I think she’s still riding a wave of goodwill for that that most likely should have broken by now — particularly given the wrecking of a certain pregnant home I might mention, but Billy Crudup is responsible for that, not Claire Danes, and while she’s made some questionable choices (and for the question “Stage Beauty in the what now?” I fear there is no answer), she can at least act. She’s not the wunderkind we all assumed ten years ago, but who is.

Bosworth is a total mystery. Kerry Washington, posed behind her, is seriously looking into the camera all, “Forget rings, I could act a moat around that shit, and I’m hotter.” And Kerry Washington is not wrong. If you measure star power in watts, Kate Bosworth is a votive candle. A votive candle that got knocked off the back of the toilet and into the bowl. At a party at Corin Nemec’s house. I liked Blue Crush, but she was like the charisma moon in that flick — any pretty light she gave off, she was reflecting from Michelle Rodriguez and that little firecracker who played Penny. Also, Beyond the Sea bombed. Bombed. Spanglish, released the same weekend and critically reviled, has grossed, to date, seven times as much as Beyond the Sea, if I’m reading these figures correctly, which I probably am, because…did you see it? Did any of your friends see it? Okay, did that one friend have to see it, like, for work or to review it or something? Yeah, thought so. And she played Sandra Dee, whose name is now synonymous, justly or not, with excessive primness. And and: Spacey vanity project. Bosworth has a Princeton acceptance in her desk drawer; I can tell you firsthand that’s not proof of any brains, but a cooked cabbage is smart enough to tell you how that shit is going to go. (Cabbage: “Badly.” Sarah: “I’m saying.”) And also and: She dated Orlando Bloom, the Clay Aiken of the Lord of the Rings movies. Or, if you want to go with a more fellowshippy no-secondary-sex-characteristics comparison, the Little Joey McIntyre. Sorry, Joe. I loved you in the New Kids ETHS. Anyone else think Joe McIntyre could take over Casey Affleck’s identity and nobody would be the wiser for, like, months, as long as he avoided hanging out with Ben?

…Anyway. My point: Orlando Bloom is a good-looking person, but as proof that he is actually an actual boy, chromosomally, I only have the word of the entertainment press. If he shaves more than once a month, I’ll eat my hat and yours too. …Wow, I’ve just rambled on about an actress whom I contend has no pull for a while, eh? I think my point stands, though. I don’t doubt that Hollywood needs that type of dish-faced, blank, inoffensively pretty woman to put in object-of-desire roles that don’t have that much more to them, but…eh. Either they want to jinx Bosworth, or a bunch of other, more interesting actresses who could knock Bosworth over by looking at her blew them off.

The “continued on page 16,482” thing. What is the logic here? That readers won’t find the next article as easily if you don’t front-load them all? That’s…kind of ridiculous, but okay. Here’s how you solve that problem: put the damn table of contents at the front of the book instead of burying it in fifty pages of Uma Flux For Louis Vuitton ads. And what is going on with those, if I may ask? Uma is not, in my opinion, an ugly girl, but she looks like they painted her face with nailpolish in those pictures. And whose idea was the Sunset At The Bikini Atoll backdrop? Someone got paid more than I make in a year for that shoot, and it’s ass.

Dominick Dunne‘s tireless defense of Martha Stewart is starting to feel co-dependent. Well…except for the “co-” part, because I don’t get the feeling Martha cares whether he takes her side. He’s like…you know when Morganna the Kissing Bandit charges onto the field and George Brett pulls a face like, “Oy. All right, kissy kissy. Uh…huh. Okay, that’ll do. Security!”? I feel like it’s like that with Dominick Dunne and Martha Stewart, and he’d tag along with Frederic Fekkai to visit her in jail, and he’d start talking and Frederic Fekkai would turn on the hairdryer, like, four words into Dominick Dunne’s sentence and he and Martha would try not to crack up while Dominick Dunne is yelling some shit over the Conair about Robert Kennedy Jr.…I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still read Dunne’s page every month and the fact that he’s finally off the Safra thing makes up for the constant self-congratulating about how he avenged Martha Moxley flap flap La Grenouille I am famous, tra la! I just really get the feeling that even the B-list Astors see him coming at dinner parties and brace themselves, and then they give him some studiously whispered tidbit about a sex-change operation and tell him someone across the room totally knows the whole scoop, so then he goes toodling over to another table and the Astors signal his next victim all “smoking patio, GO!” and everyone scatters and it’s kind of sad, in that druncle way.

The wasted talents of Bob Colacello. Okay, first off, I love Bob Colacello, but we have to back up a bit here to get into why. I have certain books that I think of as my “bedtime books,” because I always read in bed for a while before I go to sleep, but I don’t usually read anything new, because then I’ll just keep reading it and reading it and the next thing I know it’s five in the morning and I’m exhausted but I can’t put it down, so I generally try to read something I’ve read before in order to let my brain turn off. The bedtime-book roster doesn’t remain the same over time; currently it’s some Bill James and the cultural encyclopedia by the Ben Is Dead folks, and now and then I cycle in some William Poundstone because I’ve probably read Bigger Secrets more times than Poundstone himself has, but back in college, my most reliable bedtime book was Bob Colacello’s Warhol-years memoir, Holy Terror.

I have no idea why I even bought the book in the first place; I didn’t major in art history, I barely remembered Warhol as a public figure in my childhood…the dust jacket is long gone, because another reading tic of mine is to chuck the jacket immediately, but it must have promised lurid tales of the art underground, because I bought it, and I think I read it in, like, a day, and it is not a short book. And it delivered on the lurid tales, but it also gave a pretty good overview of Warhol’s Factory and what it was like to work in New York publishing in the seventies, and Colacello is a really good writer. And man, Glenn O’Brien was like the Al Gore of the Interview office, in that you’d probably never guess it to look at him now but he used to be a stone fox.

So, now that Colacello is a big-time Friend of Nancy, all he writes for VF is art stuff, which is pretty good (I might remember this wrong, but I believe he either wrote or was quoted at length in a profile of Ross Bleckner for VF back in the day which epitomized the reporting I do enjoy in the mag — dishy, but informative, too, so the dish had some weight, if that makes any sense), and profiles of other Friends of Nancy, like Nan Kempner in the current issue. In Colacello’s defense: I haven’t read the profile yet; I don’t doubt that it’s good, because again, he’s a good writer, in that his personality comes through, but without all the static you get with Hitchens and Wolcott et al. — it’s friendly, like you know and trust him; in the Warhol book, Kempner does come off as what my mother would call “a pistol,” so I’d rather read about her than…I don’t know, Lynn Wyatt. But the fact remains that I don’t love the Reagan association on Colacello’s part. I don’t think it has anything to do with his personal politics, although it might, but I think he’s just friends with these people, which is fine…I just don’t love it, and I think it’s a squandering of his talents to put him on the kind of story which, frankly, a lot of readers in my cohort are going to skip without a second thought, because they don’t have the history with Colacello’s writing that I do and they certainly don’t have any reason to give a tinker’s damn about a “social queen,” as she’s billed on the cover.

Maybe he doesn’t want to write about anything or anyone else; I can’t tell the man how to live. I just think it’s a pity. I mean, I understood why Paul McCartney felt he had to write that oratorio, too. I just didn’t think it was the greatest use of his time. Actually, that’s a dreadful analogy. Edith Wharton probably works better — how she wrote all those gardening and home-décor books, which garnered her quite a bit of fame at the time, but in retrospect you feel like she should have written more ghost stories instead, because you don’t care how to attach rose of Sharon to a trellis and you never will? Oh, right. Nobody under the age of eighty cares about Edith Wharton except me, so that analogy doesn’t work either. Here’s the salient point: Bob, write a book about Oliver Stone. I’d read it. Hell, I’d type it for you.

Supermodels. We’re…doing this, again? Really? We’re caring about supermodels? I mean, okay, we’re caring about the next top regular model, in America, but…aren’t we doing that in a sort of ironic post-caring “hee hee, prospective models are dumb” kind of way, rather than an actually-caring, taking them seriously as contributors to the culture, “cover of Vanity Fair” kind of way? I know we’re supposed to be caring about that one model whose boyfriend got eaten by the tsunami, because Oprah cared about her, even though nobody had ever heard of her before — which leads me to believe that the line between “model” and “garden-variety rheumy thin girl” is thinner than we’ve been told — and even though plenty of people with zits and big backyards had their loved ones eaten by that same tsunami, so I guess we care because she’s a model, but we don’t necessarily care about her as a model…

I tried to care about supermodels the last time. I pulled my caring weight. I even bought that book, Model, and read the whole thing, and it sucked, royally, and it sucked even more because it should have been really awesome, but no, it sucked so bad that when I lent it to Ernie and she read it and tried to give it back to me, the conversation decompensated in about five minutes all “here’s your book back” “no, you can keep it” “no, it’s your book” “no, seriously, keep it, I want you to have it” “no, seriously, it’s yours” “no, KEEP IT” “I don’t WANT it, TAKE IT” “NO” “TAKE IT” “NO” “HERE” “NO” “YES” “NO” “MMMBIP” “NNNNNEH” and I think we threw it out a nineteenth-floor window and it landed on Paula Abdul, like, listen up, Michael Gross. We do not care about the history of modeling. We care about the bad behavior of the models themselves. If you cannot open a window into the brattiness of the wasp-waisted, you are frittering away our precious time. The same principle applies to this cover story. There’d better be plenty of Linda Evangelistoid “I don’t get out of bed, period” nastiness on display, or I don’t care. Pretty is not automatically interesting. Ask Kate Bosworth.

I feel like I write this article every two years, wondering why I don’t just give up, complaining about the advertorial and how I don’t have time to care about rich people of whose existences I was blissfully ignorant before opening the magazine. But I think the appeal of VF, perhaps, is that I don’t have to care. I don’t move among these people; it’s not required that I give a shit about the Bloomingdales and whether Betsy likes the crusts cut off her sandwiches. And it introduced me to Joe McGinniss, which for a true-crime buff is a real boon, so I have them to thank for that. It’s only a buck an issue, after all, and yeah, maybe April 2005 is a little late to run a gee-whiz article on the Red Sox when it’s, like, a week before the title is up for grabs again, but I don’t have to read that if I don’t want to. And I don’t want to, unless it is accompanied by a big old picture of Curt Schilling that I can put on my bulletin board and throw things at while telling him and his bloody sock to shut up. …Nope, no such picture. That’s that, then.

March 21, 2005

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