A few years ago, Tim Burton came out with a book called The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy, a book of extremely depressing little poems about children with oyster shells for heads and fins instead of arms and that sort of thing, and the kids get ostracized (and, in a couple of cases, eaten) by their peers and families. I have a head cold, and I feel like a character edited out of that book: The Girl With The Heaviest Head In The World. All day, I’ve felt like a sunflower. I tried to sit at my desk, and I tried to do chores, but every time, my head flopped over and I couldn’t pull it back up again, so finally I gave up and walked backwards over to the couch, dragging my sinus-impacted head behind me, and settled in for a good long session of feeling sorry for myself.

I lay there for a little while, draped in an afghan, channel-surfing listlessly, blowing my nose as infrequently as possible to avoid angering the tattered shreds of epidermis that remained between my nose and my upper lip, but I couldn’t work up a really good head of self-pitying steam until I spotted my unread copy of Vanity Fair‘s Hollywood 2000 issue. “Ahhhh,” I thought to myself. “That’ll do it.” Nothing gives me the sulks quite like an issue of Vanity Fair – or, as I like to call it, “The ‘Even The Most Pathetic Famous Person Is Better Than You, You Anonymous, Cover-Price-Paying, Not-In-Beverly-Hills-Living Sucker’ Monthly.” So much glossy hair! So many gleaming teeth and slavering adjectives! Semi-nude advertorial! Mean-spirited book excerpts about dead celebrities! Obsequious profiles of the useless wives of famous men! Oh, and true crime . . . but only as committed by the rich . . . or the good-looking . . . preferably both.

Vanity Fair seems to have a tripartite editorial mandate: build up the famous living, talk trash about the famous dead, and give the filthy rich a forum in which to accuse one another of mail fraud and restraint of trade. Salt the mix with Annie Leibovitz’s heavily air-brushed and frankly derivative photos, and presto! Instant feelings of inadequacy for the reader. And yet it’s irresistible, like a woman’s magazine that tells you all the things you have wrong with you before telling you how to fix them, except that VF doesn’t bother with the fixing part, and what’s wrong with you is that you don’t own a Rolex, and you have visible pores, and you’ve never married Hollywood royalty, or strangled a Palm Beach socialite and gotten away with it. Luckily for you, VF lets you look at those who have – beautifully chiseled stars of the screen, Lexus-driving pillars of wealth and power – while reminding you on every page that you have not, and probably never will. Let’s take a tour of the self-esteem-bludgeoning highlights, shall we?

After thirty-two pages of ads, all featuring various permutations of supermodels, scrubbed-looking fourteen-year-old junkies, and a woman getting married in a Burberry-plaid dress (whatever), we finally arrive at . . . the table of contents. More ads, for Prada and Gucci and St. John, in which Gina Gershon-after-chemo look-alikes stare out at us as if to say, “It’s only ugly if you can’t afford it, you PLEBES!” Calvin Klein. Hermes. Ermenegildo Zegna. I can’t even pronounce the names of most of these designers, and the ones I can pronounce I don’t dare pronounce, for fear that the Fashion Police will come to arrest me for uttering the gilded syllables while wearing a pair of ratty cords with a cigarette-pack-shaped rectangle worn through the back pocket. Oh, here’s Julianne Moore in a Coach ad. File that one away for later, folks, under “I” for “ironic.” Ah, and Mena Suvari is in a Coach ad too, which seems odd to me, but I guess once you marry a forty-year-old, you have to start accessorizing like one. Tiffany. Liz Claiborne. Profiles of the VF Oscar-party planners.

At last, an actual article, about the up-and-coming Hollywood class. The piece features short blurbs on the issue’s cover models: Penelope Cruz, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Marley Shelton, Chris Klein, Selma Blair, Paul Walker, and Sarah Wynter. Given VF‘s penchant for picking semi-knowns for the cover and thus dooming them to obscurity (Gretchen Mol, anyone?), I suspect that of the eight, five will have vanished without a trace in two years’ time.

More ads, and the letters section, and yet more ads. Then we come to a piece in which James Wolcott argues that Doris Day and Rock Hudson had a remarkable, uniquely modern chemistry, “the last holdouts of light sophistication.” VF has a penchant for ridiculous pronouncements of this type – photo essays on celebs and their silver cellphones, fantasias declaring Theda Bara the mother of modern cinema – and this one makes as little sense as any other. Wolcott cites a critic comparing “their bodies in bed to a pair of parked Cadillacs,” as if this proves his point, as if it means anything at all. Throughout the feature, we see movie stills of the two of them, Rock handsome and unaroused, Doris about as sexy as a pudding left out overnight (in several of the photos, she looks downright masculine). I enjoy the behind-the-scenes dirt VF digs up on the golden age of American cinema, but really – Doris Day? Hello. Nobody cares. Nobody has cared for quite a while.

Next, after more perfume ads, we find a book excerpt on the heady days in the seventies when Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey “The Midget” Katzenberg all worked together at Paramount. Evidently, all three of them did a lot of screaming and yelling. We also find out that Katzenberg was an essentially uncreative, ass-kissing grind, and that Katzenberg and Diller used to have hair. Not a lot of surprises here; I’d have preferred an explanation as to how these three men came into such power later on, in spite of behaving like infants much of the time, but I guess I’ll have to buy the book.

A spotlight on a Danish actress, from whom we will no doubt never hear a peep again, which I skipped, followed by an article on a guy related to the Bush campaign, which I also skipped because life is too short to slog through half a dozen quotes from Arianna Huffington if you don’t have to, followed by another spotlight on Lucy Liu. In her spare time, Liu plays the accordion.

Next up: a friend of Garbo’s reminisces about the famously reclusive star. VF calls the section “The Legend,” but I really think they should rename it “Obnoxious, Borderline Compulsive Behavior Which, Shone Through A Pane Of Fame, Becomes ‘Quirky’ And ‘Intense.'” Apparently, Garbo once sat through entire dinner with Mae West and didn’t utter a word; another time, she agonized over the purchase of a cream puff, and then felt all proud of herself for buying it on her own, and then sent a friend to intercept a woman she recognized so that she wouldn’t have to talk to the woman. In the world of famous people, that’s quaint, I suppose, but the world I live in, it’s just weird. And rude. Really rude.

Oh, look at Rita Wilson and her hair extensions. Look at Rita’s pleather top. Look at Rita’s perfectly capped teeth. Look at Rita’s semi-impressive fourth-tier career, which she achieved with NO HELP AT ALL from her husband. Nope, no help. None. Tom didn’t help her, not one bit. She didn’t need it, no sirree. Just ask Kate Capshaw, she’ll tell ya. Did it all on her own. And she definitely didn’t quit in a huff when Neil Simon got on her case or anything. She’s not a diva at all. Hey, I’m convinced.

Okay, not really.

Photos from various films in production. Whoop-dee-doo.

Michael Herr writes yet another screed on Stanley Kubrick. Would you like me to save you the trouble of reading it? Okay, I’ll break it down for you. Michael Herr knew Kubrick personally, and Herr posits that film critics who didn’t know Kubrick personally don’t have the right to say anything negative about Kubrick’s work. Because, you know, they might review films for a living and all, but they didn’t know Kubrick personally like Herr did. Herr also calls Eyes Wide Shut a masterpiece, and dismisses anyone who doesn’t agree with that assessment as a short-sighted imbecile. That’s the article. In the year since Kubrick’s death, I’ve read literally dozens of these pieces, and in all of them, the author snipes at the other people writing their remembrances of the director, drops an armful of names, gets defensive in advance about selling his story, and winds up by calling Kubrick a misunderstood genius. To all and sundry: enough already. Kubrick isn’t misunderstood, or a genius either, and testimony from one of his hundreds of production assistants won’t make me think he’s any less overrated.

Moving right along to the next book excerpt, which chronicles the brief, troubled marriage of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli. It reads like an installment of “Behind The Music,” what with Garland’s descent into alcohol and drugs. Also, the article has lots of photos of the unhappy couple and – wow, does Liza look like her dad. (That’s not a compliment.) Once again, mental illness is portrayed as merely a glamorous side effect of the Hollywood lifestyle, and Louella Parsons reports on Garland’s “nervous collapse” as if she’s taking the cure at a spa.

Bono is nominated to the VF Hall Of Fame. Why? Because, among other reasons, he gave his wraparound sunglasses to the Pope – yet another instance in which the famous can turn “inappropriate” into “chummy” and get away with it.

By this point in the magazine, my eyelids had begun to droop. The issue clocked in at a hefty 470 pages and weighed nearly as much as my heavy head, and I needed a nap to fortify myself. When I awakened, I fought my way through a profile of Dana Giacchetto, crooked money manager to the foolish stars who don’t check their bank statements, and I actually began to feel a little bit sorry for famous people. At least I know my friends like me, and not my name or my money or my coattails. At least I don’t have to defend myself against people like that.

A spotlight on Kirsten Dunst, and a list of famous people’s speed-dial lists (whatever), and a Q&A with Brad Rowe, who needs to lose the ego – I mean, what kind of third-generation photocopy of Brad Pitt goes around saying he has “a ridiculously low amount of body fat”? Like, shut up. A photo collage of Sundance attendees, just to remind the readers that a select few of the famous have brains and integrity too. And at last, the airbrush extravaganza begins. Julianne Moore, posed as an odalisque and called “resolutely ordinary in real life.” Right. With her Coach totes. Jude Law and his chest hair. Hilary Swank in a bikini and a leather duster. Tom Cruise, shot sitting down so he doesn’t look as short; Tobey Maguire, shot with stubble so he doesn’t look as young. The Redgrave women. Ashley Judd, unrecognizable in flapper-wear. The men of Shaft, past and present. George Clooney, looking almost exactly like Clark Gable. Mark Wahlberg, doing his Kevin Bacon imitation. Jennifer Aniston’s nipples, threatening to put my eye out. Demi Moore and her three kids, all naked. Catherine Zeta-Jones, cheesecake in the grass. Amazing what a costume designer and a wash of grey light will do. How did they choose who they’d include in the portfolio? What’s the theme? Oh, right. Good-looking and available. And thin. And rich. And good-looking. And young. Younger than me. Ugh.

Then we have a profile of “Whatever Happened To” Sue Mengers, seventies super-agent, and her falling-out with Streisand (answer: she went out of style), and a rhapsody on the subject of Kelly Lynch’s new house which we could never afford, and a walk down memory lane regarding Sweet Smell Of Success as the birth of the New York noir genre, and then the horoscopes and Eva Marie Saint answering the Proust Questionnaire, and then we’ve finished.

Americans have a strange relationship to wealth and fame, I think, because of the country’s roots in Puritanism. We don’t want the rich and famous to enjoy themselves too much, because we find that insulting, and yet we can’t look away. We keep buying Vanity Fair and InStyle because the spectacle fascinates us at the same time that it depresses us – and because, when you have a fever, nothing goes with your feverish dreams like the glossy, overscented fantasies in a VF article.

Only a dollar a month, for all that dish.
Good god.

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