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R O YA L

Queen Elizabeth and Princess By REINALDO S I S T E R S ! Margaret’s Unshakable Bond HERRERA

CAMELOT S I ST E R S !

The Tortured Rivalry Between By SAM Jackie O and Lee Radziwill KASHNER

}

M AY 201 6

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AMY SCHUMER! America’s

KID SISTER She’s Smart, Funny, and Loyal—So Why Is She Such a Lightning Rod?

By B R U C E Photos by A N N I E

H A N DY L E I B OV I T Z

“@VanityFair Magazine is doing really poorly. It has gotten worse and worse over the years, and has lost almost all of it’s [sic] former allure!”

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{ SISTERS!

H O L LY W O O D Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine’s Bitter Feud

By

WILLIAM STADIEM

LITERARY Family Memoirs by Susan Minot, Sloane

S I ST E R S !

Crosley, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie!

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120 128 137 Clockwise from top left: Lee Radziwill (page 128); Hot Type (page 76); Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret (page 92); the Willis sisters (page 96).

138 144 146

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MY SISTER, MY SELF Spanning the worlds of music, design, art, fashion, film, and tech, the high-wattage siblings in this issue’s 18-page portfolio share more than DNA and success. The sisters Haim, McCartney, Waterhouse, Lauder, and others explain the family dynamics. Essay by Laura Jacobs.

Photographs by Jason Bell, Julian Broad, Mary McCartney, Lauren Dukoff, Claiborne Swanson Frank, Douglas Friedman, and Williams & Hirakawa.

BOMBSHELL BLONDE By BRUCE HANDY The hottest comedienne in America, Amy Schumer has long relied on her roots: her sister as her sounding board, her high-school pals as her posse. But with both a new romance and a new cause in her life, she’s having to figure out fame—and boundaries—for herself.

Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

A DELICATE BALANCE By SAM KASHNER From childhood to Camelot, Jacqueline Kennedy commanded the spotlight, often eclipsing her younger sister, Lee Radziwill. A rare interview with Radziwill reveals much about the lifelong competition (and love) between the beautiful Bouvier girls, and the survivor’s own story of glamour, tragedy, and courage.

SHAKESPEARE’S LATEST SEX CHANGE Spotlight on Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew, which will turn that battle of the sexes upside down in Central Park. By Fiona Shaw. Photograph by Andrew Eccles.

DEGREES OF SEPARATION

By LISA BIRNBACH When the all-women Sweet Briar College announced last year that it would have to close, after more than a century, loyal alumnae charged to the rescue. And across the board, single-sex education appears to be thriving in 21st-century America.

From Bryn Mawr to Wellesley, a cheat sheet for nine of the country’s top women’s colleges shows why.

SEQUINS AND SATIRE Spotlight on Sara and Erin Foster, born into the culture they lampoon with their docu-style comedy series, Barely Famous. By Krista Smith. Photograph by Jason Bell.

DE HAVILLAND’S BUMPY FLIGHT

By WILLIAM STADIEM At 99, with a legacy of immortal roles and two best-actress Oscars, Olivia de Havilland is the only surviving goddess of cinema’s golden age. In Paris, the Gone with the Wind star reflects on her real-life role as half of Hollywood’s most famous sibling rivalry, and the reason she took off for Europe in 1955.

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58 60 Clockwise from top left: Lizzy and Georgia May Jagger (page 96); an illustration by Quentin Blake (page 73); Beyoncé and Solange Knowles (page 96).

62 64 67

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SUSAN MINOT From matching outfits to simultaneous kitchen tasks, a novelist explains that among four sisters it’s never a coincidence—it’s another dimension.

BARBARA BUSH Everything’s better with a partner in mischief.

A twin describes her essential reference point from womb to White House and beyond.

DEB FUTTER For two high-powered siblings, an early-morning phone call is part of the daily routine.

Naturally, one of them would just as soon keep the whole thing private.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE She abandoned the study of medicine and became a literary star, but her emotional anchor is a pharmacist: her glamorous, tough big sister.

SLOANE CROSLEY Growing up, the author was teased that she got left with the wrong family. It took a health crisis to show her how fully she belonged.

LILI ANOLIK Let’s hear it for the boys. A brother—even one twice as pretty as you are—can provide all the intimacy with none of the competition.

FANFAIR & FAIRGROUND 31 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF THE CULTURE Beloved illustrator Quentin Blake draws interest in a new book. Hot Tracks: 50 Cent. Hot Type: the best in books. Stock up on beauty essentials.

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P HOTO GR A PH S: TOP, BY MA X VA DUK UL /AU GUST; BOTTO M, BY I M E H A K PA N UDO SE N /GE TT Y I MAGE S. I LLUSTRATI O N © Q UENTI N BL AK E

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TALES OF SIX SISTERS

MAY 2016 No. 670

86 90

Clockwise from top left: the Kirke sisters (page 96); Sarah Silverman (page 166); the Haim sisters (page 96); Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland (page 146).

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AROUND THE WORLD, ONE PARTY AT A TIME Academy Award–winning producer Brian Grazer traded vows with Veronica Smiley in front of Hollywood’s finest friends.

COLUMNS THAT MITFORD MYSTIQUE

By JAMES WOLCOTT The six aristocratic Mitford sisters rocked mid-20th-century Britain in ways no Downton Abbey script could hope to rival.

Even after their deaths, the siblings’ sins and scandals keep the fires of Mitford mania stoked.

AND JUSTICES FOR ALL

By MICHAEL KINSLEY With its much-reviled Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court was simply upholding the Constitution. And as a political firestorm rages over a vacant seat, it’s worth noting just how uncontroversial the court’s long history has been. Illustration by Barry Blitt.

A MOST INTIMATE SUBJECT

By REINALDO HERRERA The most private of public figures, Queen Elizabeth relied for years on a direct phone line to the person who’d known her longest, and to whom she was still “Lilibet”: the late Princess Margaret.

ET CETERA 44 50 52 68 70 84 157 166 28

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PATH TO THE PALME D’OR Rendezvous with VF.com at the Cannes Film Festival for a week-long celebration of film and fashion on the French Riviera. Plus: go inside V.F.’s fête at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc for portraits of the glamorous guests.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM WITH A VIEW As a young writer, Jacqueline Woodson was consumed by the brilliance of James Baldwin and the ferocity of his prose. Now a National Book Award winner, Woodson recalls the novel that inspired her to write, when so many were struggling to survive.

TABLE FOR ONE Jesse Tyler Ferguson may play one half of a

Above, Aerin and Jane Lauder; below, Alana, Este, and Danielle Haim.

beloved (and groundbreaking) couple in the Modern Family ensemble, but now he’s stepped into his own spotlight. Head to VF.com for an interview with the actor starring in the one-man comedy Fully Committed, now on Broadway.

PHOTOGRAPHS THE KIDS STAY IN THE PICTURE Delve into the family albums of the stars of this month’s Sisters Portfolio, for some childhood shots of Haim, the Lauder ladies, and more.

P HOTO GR A PH S: TOP, CO URT E SY O F A E R IN A N D J A N E L AUDE R; B OT TO M, CO URT E SY O F E STE , DA N IE L L E , A N D A L A N A H A I M

VIDEOS FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS Watch Amy Schumer bust some myths about her friend Jennifer Lawrence and take a spin on Tinder for the first time.

TWISTED SISTERS What do sisters in the spotlight bring to family game night? A healthy dose of sibling rivalry. Watch Suki, Imogen, and Maddi Waterhouse compete—and cheat—in Twister and cards.

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CONTRIBUTORS

AIMÉE BELL

In her more than two decades at Vanity Fair, Deputy Editor Aimée Bell has overseen a number of special issues, on such subjects as Africa, the environment, the British theater, music, and young royals. For this month’s Sisters Issue, Bell, who has three younger sisters (and two younger brothers), edited “My Sister, My Self,” on page 96, along with Bruce Handy’s profile of Amy Schumer (“Bombshell Blonde,” on page 120), Lisa Birnbach’s report on all-women colleges (“Degrees of Separation,” on page 138), James Wolcott’s column on the Mitford sisters (page 86), and the five “My Sister” essays. Says Bell, “Having five siblings has made me an eternal collaborator.”

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

Annie Leibovitz is an ardent Amy Schumer fan—just ask Gloria Steinem. (When the two got together in San Francisco last month to discuss Leibovitz’s “Women” exhibition, Leibovitz pulled out her phone to show Steinem the Inside Amy Schumer sketch “I’m Sorry.”) “One of the first things Annie wanted to do when she heard about the Schumer shoot was include Amy’s sister and writing partner, Kim,” reports Senior Photography Producer Kathryn MacLeod.

“She recognized that they’re a team, and she knew she wanted to do a picture of the two of them, writing.”

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

P HOTO GR A PH S BY PAUL GI LM OR E ( L EI B OVI TZ ) , MI CHA E L LI O N STA R ( M IN OT ) , L A KI N OGU NB A NWO ( A D ICHI E) . I LL USTR ATI O N BY RI S KO

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the best-selling author of the novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah and, more recently, the essay We Should All Be Feminists (based on her much-lauded TEDx talk of the same name). She was raised in a close-knit family, with two sisters and three brothers. “There’s more teasing from [my brothers],” reports Adichie, whose “My Sister” essay, on her older sister Uche, appears on page 62. “But they also seem to more intuitively understand me, perhaps because I refuse to ‘perform gender’ in that way that girls are raised to do and boys are not.”

SUSAN MINOT

In “My Sisters,” on page 56, the novelist, poet, and screenwriter Susan Minot recounts how the sudden death of her mother, at age 48, transformed her relationship with her three sisters.

“In families, tragedy can draw you closer or send you apart,” she says. “For us, it flung us on top of each other.” Minot won the Prix Femina Étranger for her debut novel, Monkeys, as well as the O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize for her short stories. She is currently adapting her latest novel, Thirty Girls, for the screen.

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BARBARA BUSH

Barbara Bush writes in “My Sister” on page 58 about Jenna Bush Hager, her fraternal twin and a fellow member of what she calls “the small club of daughters of presidents.” (Their father is George W. Bush, who took the photo of the two that accompanies the essay.) Bush lives four blocks from Hager in New York and is C.E.O. and co-founder of Global Health Corps, a fellowship program that promotes equal access to health care in some of the world’s most underserved communities.

DEB FUTTER

Deb Futter is vice president and editor in chief, hardcovers, at Grand Central Publishing and publisher of the imprint Twelve. She calls her sister, nine years her senior and the subject of “My Sister” on page 60, her “role model.” “She made it possible, along with my parents, for me to feel that I could do whatever I wanted to with my career and that certainly gender was not going to hold me back.” Futter is the editor of Noah Hawley’s latest novel, Before the Fall, which comes out this month.

LAURA JACOBS

For her essay introducing this month’s portfolio, “My Sister, My Self,” Contributing Editor Laura Jacobs, who has three sisters, contemplates the universal club of sisterhood, from the slopes of Mount Olympus to the pages of contemporary fashion magazines.

“If each family is its own world,” Jacobs says, “a slew of sisters is like a secret society. That kind of complicity and support radiates from the 12 sets of sisters interviewed this month.”

MARY MCCARTNEY

P HOTO GR A PH S BY DE NI S F IN N IN ( F UT TE R ), M A RY M C C A RTN E Y ( M C CA RTN EY ) , GA SP ER TR IN GA L E ( J ACOB S)

With “My Sister, My Self,” photographer Mary McCartney found herself on both sides of the lens— behind it for her photo of hotel heiresses Lydia and Irene Forte and in front of it for a self-portrait with her sister, designer Stella McCartney. “I am definitely more comfortable behind the camera,” she says, “but having my sister there gave me the incentive to step into the light.” She is currently working with Rizzoli on a photography book, scheduled for publication in spring 2017.

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CONTRIBUTORS CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 46

LISA BIRNBACH

When The Official Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach began her investigative tour of nine all-women colleges for “Degrees of Separation,” on page 138, she “presumed that students who chose these schools didn’t get into coed colleges. And then I was ashamed of myself.” Her fieldwork left Birnbach enamored of these colleges and the unique goals that lead young women to them. “It’s not about escaping anything. It’s about making your academic passion your top priority in life.”

SLOANE CROSLEY

Author Sloane Crosley has a rule of thumb for writing about family, as she does in “My Sister” on page 64.

“There’s that great Coco Chanel quote about getting completely dressed and then taking one thing off,” says Crosley. “Similarly, with writing about your family, I think you should go for it, tell the story—and then consider taking out the most embarrassing or damning details.” Crosley’s most recent book, the novel The Clasp, comes out in paperback in June.

CLAIBORNE SWANSON FRANK

For “My Sister, My Self,” Claiborne Swanson Frank, the youngest of three sisters, photographed Jane and Aerin Lauder in New York. Though Frank has shot Aerin Lauder alone for several campaigns for her eponymous lifestyle brand, this was her first time photographing the two sisters together.

Frank also shot the Deane twins, both admissions directors at Sweet Briar College, for “Degrees of Separation,” on page 138. She is at work on her third book of photographs, Mother and Child.

P HOTO GR A PH S BY CL A I B OR NE SWA N SO N F R A NK ( F RA N K) , CA I TL I N M I TCH EL L ( CRO SL E Y ) , E L E NA SE IB E RT ( B I RN BACH)

LAUREN DUKOFF

When Lauren Dukoff photographed indie rock’s reigning sister act, Haim, for “My Sister, My Self,” she didn’t venture far from home to find her crew.

Dukoff grew up in Los Angeles with Ashley Furnival, who styled the shoot, and Sandra Ganzer, who did the Haim sisters’ makeup. “I enjoy supporting those you grew up with, who helped you get to where you are today,” says Dukoff, who describes the vibe on set as “a lot of sisterly love.”

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EDITOR’S LETTER

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hy don’t we take a break from Donald Trump and the dismaying hamster wheel of American presidential politics for one month? How about a special issue devoted to something occasionally adversarial, completely different, and yet utterly familiar? Sisters. Many of us have one, and a large proportion of the people on the planet are one. They can be the loves of our lives and the banes of our existence—often in the time it takes to boil an egg. In this issue we have enough sisters to staff a Tuscan nunnery. Deputy editor Aimée Bell, who has overseen a halfdozen or more special issues in her near quarter-century at Vanity Fair, guided the staff through this one. She comes highly qualified for the assignment: Aimée is the eldest of four sisters in a close-knit family of six children.

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uly 1 marks the 100th birthday of Olivia de Havilland, who will forever be remembered as Melanie Hamilton, the beatific foil to scheming, strong-willed Scarlett O’Hara in David O. Selznick’s 1939 plantation opera, Gone with the Wind. Regular V.F. contributor William Stadiem recently went to visit the actress in Paris, where she’s been living since the 1950s, far from the madding Hollywood crowd but never far from the affections of TCM shut-ins like me. De Havilland is one of only 13 people to win two best-actress Oscars. Indeed, as Stadiem points out in “De Havilland’s Bumpy Flight,” on page 146, she is “the last surviving female superstar of Hollywood’s Golden Age.” She is also, as Stadiem writes, one of the antagonists in “the most notorious family feud in the town’s history”—the other antagonist being her “unmentionable sibling,” actress Joan Fontaine. (They are the only sisters to have both won best-actress Oscars.) The ever discreet de Havilland has kept mum on the subject of her sisterly estrangement for a good 60 years. (The more voluble Fontaine, who died in 2013, was not as reticent.) I had been pestering them both for more than two decades either to explain the breakup or to just make up—with a Vanity Fair reporter in the room. Where I failed, Stadiem eventually succeeded, and de Havilland finally tells her side of the story, in pinpoint recollections that brim with sisterly love and affection—not to mention good humor. Closing in on a century, de Havilland, with her spry, elemental energy, remains astonishingly intact. God willing, she’ll pull off what she says is her next big project—living to 110.

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mong the most widely known sisters of the past century were Jackie Kennedy and her younger sibling, Lee, who was often referred to as Princess Radziwill following her marriage to Stanislaw Radziwill, an émigré who emerged in London from the mists of Polish royalty. Mention Jackie and Lee to anyone alive 50 years ago and you will elicit a series of snapshots from the scrapbook of the midcentury international jet set: the sisters, in Florence as young women, visiting art historian Bernard Berenson at his villa, I Tatti; in sleeveless summer dresses, pearls, and high heels, riding a camel during the First Lady’s goodwill 50

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tour to India and Pakistan; gossiping on the deck of the Christina, the yacht belonging to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, whom Lee was to bed and Jackie to wed.

In “A Delicate Balance,” on page 128, V.F. contributing editor Sam Kashner captures the glamour and the drama of Jackie and Lee’s relationship, including the tensions and competitiveness that sometimes frayed a close emotional bond formed during a difficult childhood with a raffish, alcoholic father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier.

Lee, as beautiful and alluring as ever, divides her time between New York and Paris.

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he Mitford sisters began making headlines in the 1930s and 40s largely for their forays into politics but also because there were so damned many of them. Jessica (who would become a V.F. contributor) was an ardent Communist; Unity and Diana were Fascists; Nancy was an accomplished novelist; and Deborah, known as Debo, became the 11th Duchess of Devonshire. The sixth, Pamela, stayed out of the limelight. She bred chickens. In “That Mitford Mystique,” on page 86, James Wolcott looks at the enduring fascination with the formidable daughters of Britain’s Lord Redesdale. “The Mitford cult,” he writes, “not only survived the 20th century but has made a spirited go of it in the 21st with no sign of becoming winded… Individual and group biographies … docudramas, documentaries, reminiscences, volumes of letters, and even a selfhelp title quench an apparently unslakable thirst for Mitford lore.”

With such a wide range of personalities and convictions, there seems to be a Mitford sister for everyone, no matter how sensible or misguided you may be.

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ven sisters who are the best of friends have the occasional squabble, which might result in a younger one shouting, “You are not the boss of me!” or “Who died and made you queen?” But, for the late Princess Margaret, big sister Elizabeth actually was the Queen, and very much the boss of her (as she was to tens of millions of other British subjects—let’s not even mention the Commonwealth). Despite what became a vast difference in status, the sisters shared a close friendship. In “A Most Intimate Subject,” on page 92, Reinaldo Herrera reminisces about his firsthand experience of this royal relationship. During his more than three decades at Vanity Fair, Herrera has facilitated stories about subjects ranging from controversial figures of high society (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor) to business tycoons (Gianni Agnelli, Baron Heinrich ThyssenBornemisza); from famous political figures (Ronald and Nancy Reagan) to equally infamous ones (Imelda Marcos, Manuel Noriega).

Herrera was a key wrangler for our 2003 Young Royals Portfolio, and for more than a decade he has helped produce the annual International Best-Dressed List for the magazine. Above all, he is the most congenial company you can imagine—it’s no surprise that the royal sisters liked having him around.

—GRAYDON CARTER MAY

2016

AN N I E L E I B OVI TZ

SISTER ACTS

LETTERS

FUN WHILE IT LASTED

Readers pine for a bygone decade and a bygone magazine; head-shaking at an elite prep school; what’s next for Jennifer Garner

ON SET

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hank you for taking me back to the genesis and sine holding up surprisingly well compared qua non of my rock ’n’ roll misspent youth [“Swinging with just about every on the Screen,” by James Wolcott, Hollywood Issue]. In August film of that razzle-dazzle The movie is worth a look—or a look 1966, my family steamed from the Hague to New York aboard ilk. back—for sunnier angles on Middle East oil the S.S. Statendam. Every night for a week I watched A Hard shenanigans, 1960s-style.

STEPHEN JERROME Day’s Night in the ship’s theater, virtually alone. I could not Los Angeles, California believe my good luck at having the Beatles to myself. By the end I knew every eyelash, crooked tooth, and boot scuff. The 60s British cultural invasion left an imprint on my DNA. I am TRUMP TALK now 60, but my enduring brand remains Anglophile hippie ust a shout-out to Graydon Carter (and Kurt Andersen). I have every chick. Your look back was pure joy for me. Toodle pip!

ROBIN GORNEAU Malvern, Pennsylvania

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s usual, James Wolcott’s column was a great read. No one turns a phrase like Wolcott, and his column is always my first go-to when I receive my V.F. each month.

But, as with so many look-backs at 60s pop movies, he neglected to include Mod-

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esty Blaise, from 1966, a spy caper directed

by Joseph Losey and starring Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp, and Dirk Bogarde.

A few years ago, I saw it again as a remastered print, at an American Cinematheque screening in Los Angeles. Its Überstylishness was pitch-perfect for the period,

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issue of Spy in my attic (other than the one in which my letter to the editor appeared, which is in a file drawer). I read every word, including the mouse type. I still call Donald Trump a short-fingered vulgarian and have since I first read of him in the magazine’s pages.

He was a worthy target, as the apogee of New York crude, tasteless social climbing.

It is shocking and terrifying to see the target he has now become. At least the early MAY

2016

P HOTO GR A PH © DAVI D HURN /M AGN UM PHOTO S

The Beatles—Ringo Starr, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney—with their makeup artists while filming A Hard Day’s Night, 1964.

LETTERS spadework has been done to prove that he has never been anything but a crass, fraudulent blowhard. Now he is the leader of the worst of American mobocracy, giving screaming voice to the basest impulses of our nation. I did not foresee his becoming a demagogue, but you saw his potential.

Thanks for your prescience.

LESLIE K. MILES Bethesda, Maryland

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ow I feel about Donald Trump was informed by the many articles Spy did over the years. I realize this request may be beyond your control, but is there any way the articles you did about him over the years at Spy could be made available to the general public? I think that people know him mostly from The Apprentice and not as the “short-fingered vulgarian” he really is! You recently referenced this in your editorial column. Maybe the old Spy gang could get together and write an article for Vanity Fair so that people can see past the wall of hair to the real Donald Trump.

MICHELLE MUECKLER Elgin, South Carolina

ST. PAUL’S SCANDAL

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ell, V.F. is certainly opening my eyes. Thanks to your articles “Dangerous Privilege” [by Todd S. Purdum, March] and “Tinder Is the Night” [by Nancy Jo Sales, September 2015], I now know how “elite” young people are comporting themselves at “elite” prep schools, colleges, and out on the town, on Wall Street and at other hot spots of the metropolis. Please: give me kids with bowling shoes and a Bud any day over these pack animals whose emotional lives run the gamut from bragging rights to bagging rites.

to avoid any responsibility for the sexually toxic environment there. Inexcusable.

NANCY ANDERSON Seattle, Washington

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our article on St. Paul’s School was riveting. I am a parent of three children who attended wonderful New England boarding schools, with $50,000-plus annual tuitions. These schools had a zerotolerance policy for most if not all infractions.

St. Paul’s elitism and lack of discipline regarding this case are astonishing. The head and faculty should be ashamed for knowing that this so-called tradition has been going on for years and not addressing it.

Sadly, the young lady involved was also bullied by her peers when she returned in the fall, and left. What ethical school would allow this?

“That in all the joys of life we may never forget to be kind.” … Really?

PAULA CARAFOTES

quite some time; however, I do agree that a 10-year marriage in Hollywood is an eternity.

Nonetheless, it is unfortunate to see them part.

Ms. Garner seems like a down-to-earth, genuine, and talented woman, and I’m looking forward to her new movie, Miracles from Heaven.

RONNA CLEMENTS Delray Beach, Florida

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respect Jennifer Garner’s candor about the end of her marriage. I can’t pretend to know Ms. Garner or the details of her situation, but my heart sank when she said her ex-husband is “the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous. He’s just a complicated guy.”

It might take time for her to see it again, but there is no reason why Ms. Garner herself isn’t the most charismatic, interesting, brilliant person in any room.

CAT MAYER Grand Junction, Colorado

Sutton, Massachusetts

JEN AND BEN

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enjoyed reading Krista Smith’s “The Open Road” [March], about Jennifer Garner. It’s a shame that Garner and Ben Affleck couldn’t make a go of it for the long term. They were the golden couple for

Letters to the editor should be sent electronically with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number to letters@vf.com. All requests for back issues should be sent to subscriptions@vf.com. All other queries should be sent to vfmail@vf.com. The magazine reserves the right to edit submissions, which may be published or otherwise used in any medium.

All submissions become the property of Vanity Fair.

A number of the letters included here originally appeared as comments submitted to VF.com.

More from the

V. F. MAILBAG

ANNE STERLING

I

am glad Owen Labrie’s new bucket list includes registering as a sex offender for life. I can’t believe that students are taught “self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship building and positive decision-making” in this environment. St. Paul’s needs to be transparent with this issue and address it directly.

NANCY KLEE Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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he repeated painting over of the “scoring wall” in the dormitory at St. Paul’s School is a perfect metaphor for its administration’s willful ignoring of sexual misconduct that has been going on year after year. The school’s rector, lawyer, and board president are circling the wagons

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This month the Mailbag is the grateful beneficiary of the largesse of V.F.’s loyal readers— photos, mock magazine covers, cartoons (original and otherwise), all this and more found its way to us. Also, suggestions. Especially suggestions. “[Madonna] so much deserves a new cover,” writes Marco Antonio, from Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

“Vanity Fair should run a cover photo of the cast of the movie Platoon,” says Hugo Rico Jr., of Orange, California. “If only you’d put [Jane Goodall] on the cover instead of Jennifer Garner!” writes Karen Wilson, from Seattle.

The enthusiasm was not universal. “Longtime subscriber” Sandra Garratt writes, from Palm Springs, California, to say she’s had just about enough: “I have to object to your constant covering of the vulgar Kardashians/Wests.” Speaking of vulgar, the Mailbag received a press release for a dating app for Trump supporters, boasting a “ ’uge” number of users. Make of that what you will.

Finally, Darrell Hancock, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, “enjoyed the two-page spread on Chiara Ferragni” (“Au Naturel Blonde,” by Derek Blasberg, photograph by Wayne Maser, March), but adds, “I note with interest that Chiara’s photo showed more skin … than any of the pictures in the first non-nude issue of Playboy. Will we soon be saying that we read Vanity Fair for the articles?” Well, not if you’re Sandra Garratt and the articles are about the Kardashians/Wests.

MAY

2016

I L L USTR ATI O N BY L E I LL O

Salem, Massachusetts

MY SISTERS

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“

They are my telepathic colleagues.

The M I N O T S I S T E R S by

SUSAN MINOT

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meet C at the airport after not seeing her for months. We are both wearing red pants, the same striped shirt, and nearly identical brown sandals. D and I speak on the phone: Where are you? In line for my latte. I’m in line at the post office. E forwards me a poem she likes. I have read it the night before. C, D, and E are my telepathic colleagues. In other words: my sisters.

If you have sisters—and I have three— you will begin, against your better nature, to believe in telepathic communication. It is not unusual to be on the phone—chopping Brussels sprouts—with a sister in Boston, also chopping Brussels sprouts. Over a lifetime your stories of synchronicity and coincidence pile up. But what is actually happening is an overlapping of souls.

Peoples’ characters develop in proximity to their siblings. (I have brothers as well, but for the purposes of this piece I’m speaking of the gals. My brother calls us the Varsity;

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the three of them, born in a similar row, the J.V.) Who would I be without my sisters?

Someone else entirely. No doubt I would be less accident-prone if I didn’t have C as an older sister. She was practical and cautious (read “worried”): It’s going to break, Susan!

You’re going too high! And the fact that she was monitoring the world of safety somehow allowed me to take risks. Still, it didn’t keep her from relating. In fact, quite the contrary.

August. Maine. We dock the boat after a picnic. I am six. It is low tide and the long ramp leading up from the float is nearly vertical. I have to lean forward, and when I finally make it to the top I find a wide gap where the railing has pulled away from the pier. Naturally, I lean into the danger of the water, 12 feet below, mesmerized, and fall through the space, landing in a splash.

My mother, still on the float and pregnant, as she was for most of my childhood (five children already), leaps in and drags me by

the life jacket. C witnesses the plunge and, not waiting to see the result, dashes back to our house nearby, changes into her pajamas (identical no doubt to ones that D and I had), and, shaken, puts herself to bed.

In the company of my sisters, I lose my keys, forget my wallet at the restaurant, leave my ticket on the counter. I am infantilized back to early youth, when someone else, i.e., Mum, was tending to our carefree oblivion. Our minds simply relax to the point where usual personal agency vanishes. We don’t remember where we parked, neglect to turn off the oven.

When siblings share a trauma—one could argue that childhood itself is a trauma—they will be either bound closer together or driven further apart. Our mother died at 48 in a car accident, leaving behind her husband and seven children between the ages of 7 and 21.

We were all in shock, moving together like stunned zombies. But it was in a group that we moved, and in a group that we huddled on the life raft together.

Though you come from the same place, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get along, or relate to one another. But if you do relate, your relationship might be among the closest that a human can have. My sisters and I do share many things: political beliefs, a worship of the temple of the movie theater, a facility with watercolors. We have the same voice and the same feet. We all have a compulsion to keep our hands busy—generally involving scissors, glue, string, thread, needles, Scotch tape—in a sort of mania which others might find obsessive, if not eccentric. Now, as we’ve gotten older, we are all planting flowers, preoccupied with our children, and interested in medical matters. My sisters and I are the opposite of squeamish. Stitches, purple bruises, swollen ankles—all are immediately shared, the more details the better. With 11 children between us, there is plenty of material. I spent the day in the E.R., one writes. It sounds, texts E, like the beginning of a poem …

In the cobbling together of becoming ourselves we have been more attentive to our differences—I am the only one who prefers cats to dogs, D is the best dancer—but we always loop back to that dimension only we inhabit. Lately, a seasoned constancy has been established. We can still punch into one another’s feelings as no one else, but we are more likely to bounce back.

We’ve had a long time to practice. It helps when you can read one another’s minds.

MAY

2016

E R I C P RI CE

Carrie, Susan, Dinah, and Eliza Minot in North Haven, Maine, 2008.

MY SISTER

“

“

We have our own, unspoken language.

The B U S H S I S T E R S by

BARBARA BUSH

I

discovered my best friend the moment we were born.

It is a household legend that when we were three my twin sister, Jenna, kicked the pre-school class bully in the shins. Jenna was a feisty, stout blonde with straight-cut bangs and a determination to protect her “people,” who at that moment were our classmates, and me.

Jenna is my point of reference. I’ve never known the world without her in it, minus one minute. Or without her next to me.

We’ve had a peculiar life—one that is extraordinary in scope yet ordinary in the dayto-day. And what a magical idea the universe had in giving each of us the luxury of a partner. We have always had a dinner partner, a dance partner, a partner in mischief.

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When we were young, that partnership revolved around play, as each other’s constant slumber-party guest, sous-chef, backup singer, or lead vocalist. We were never bored under the dome of Jenna’s expansive imagination, gathering sticky, fragrant honeysuckle for a gift on Mother’s Day, digging for buried treasure in our neighbor’s backyard, setting up a school, or playing pioneer, two barefoot girls lost in the unexplored woods … of suburban Dallas. We went on nature walks in the alleys and howled at the summer moon.

Jenna created such fantastical scenes with our dolls that Mom worried about her overactive imagination, until she read an interview with Toni Morrison’s mother describing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s similar habits as a child.

We love reading together, diving into a delicious book side by side. In seventh grade, James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis” was required reading, and we were devastated.

Devastated by the idea of two brothers, one strong and one “weak.” Whenever we would walk or run at two different paces, the slower of us would yell out, “Scarlet ibis,” and the faster would hold back so we could walk alongside each other again.

We are dancers, too. Our mom’s DNA taught us to love to dance. Each night, after showers but before bed, we’d line up in the hallway, the three Bush ladies, and belt out the Pointer Sisters’ “Fire,” or shimmy around to “Sugar, Sugar”—three tone-deaf Texans, two with soaking-wet hair, who loved to dance and smile.

We are loud and brash. On one of our first trips to New York City, in high school, Jenna turned her Metropolitan Museum of Art admission pin into a nose ring. Another time, Jenna put two jalapeños up her nose to make me laugh, only to burn the insides of her nostrils and shock the hell out of Jenna’s namesake, our lady-like 80-year-old Texas grandmother. Once, at a wedding, I rode Jenna’s back across the dance floor: I was the rodeo rider, she the horse. Immediately afterward, a thin, chic woman with short, slicked-back hair asked, “Now, why would you girls do that?”

Well, we did it to have fun. And to laugh, to laugh so hard you forget how old you are.

That’s what we’ve always done as the Bush girls. As adults, we still have slumber parties.

We have our own, unspoken language—a look that makes one of us fall on the floor laughing or the slight inflection in our voice that conveys everything. It is the ability to prod laughter and love no matter how much your heart might hurt. Someone who sees you exactly as you are and thinks that is enough. Someone who will walk next to you always so that there is no “scarlet ibis,” who hugs you just a bit too tight because in the back of both your minds you assume that’s how you snuggled in the womb.

Once, when we were 15-year-olds walking down the street in SoHo, a French tourist stopped and asked to take a picture of us, of “two New York sisters,” as he said. And, now, we are two real New York sisters, who still howl at the moon and go on nature walks on the West Side Highway. But we have broadened our pack—with Jenna’s two daughters, Poppy and Mila, who will learn to howl at the moon. And to partner up and dance when “Sugar, Sugar” plays.

MAY

2016

G EO RGE W. B USH

Barbara and Jenna Bush at home in Midland, Texas, 1985.

MY SISTER

“

“

We talk because there is no safer place in the world.

The F U T T E R S I S T E R S by

DEB FUTTER

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y sister and I speak on the phone every morning at 6:30. Sometimes we whine about the weather; sometimes we have a teary conversation about our mother’s condition.

Then there are the kids. And the boots we

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might buy: black or brown? Definitely black.

And the questions: “How do you hard-boil an egg again?” Sometimes we argue, especially if one of us hasn’t slept well the night before.

Why do we speak every morning? She has a hugely busy job as the head of a ma-

jor New York cultural institution (president, American Museum of Natural History), and I, too, work long and hard, in the publishing industry (vice president and editor in chief, hardcovers, Grand Central Publishing; publisher, Twelve). We talk because there is no safer place in the world.

In Freudian terms, I am an only child; my sister is 9 years older than I am, my brother 14. I spent a lot of time alone in our house when I was growing up, as both siblings were away at college. I snooped through my mother’s and sister’s jewelry boxes, talked a lot on the phone, read The Happy Hooker and Valley of the Dolls, and watched reruns of McHale’s Navy. When it was time for me to go to college, my sister perched on my bed while one of my friends and I sat on the blue shag rug, looking up at her, and told us that we needed to bring 21 pairs of underwear with us so we wouldn’t have to do laundry for three weeks at a time.

As I got older, we went through the advice phase—her advice to me, that is: “Do not marry that guy.” “Do not leave your job because your boss gave you a portable purple umbrella for Christmas.” And then the funniest thing happened: the older I got, the age gap became smaller. Now we have become exactly the same age. And I can offer advice and dictums, too: “We do not have to rank the courses at Thanksgiving.” “I like your new boyfriend.” And “I hope I die before you do.”

At this point, I need to say something: I am not even finished writing this and I can tell you every single word that my sister will hate in here. “Why do you need to tell everyone we speak every morning?” “Do you need to identify my place of work?” “Are you sure you want to admit that you read those books?” She is a very private person, even though she has a very public job. So I guess I will just point out to her that I never use her name once in the whole piece, and I’ll keep on writing, hoping she won’t be furious when she reads this, typeset, in a national magazine. I will also point out that a conversation about how to hard-boil an egg just isn’t that revealing.

My sister has my back. “Maybe that’s not your best look.” “You probably could have said it differently.” And I have hers.

Will she be mad I wrote about her? Maybe.

But she’ll get over it. Why? Because, in the end, there is simply no safer place.

MAY

2016

G EO RGE L A N GE

Ellen and Deb Futter at Barnard College, in New York City, 1989.

MY SISTER

“To be her little sister is to feel always that a firm cushion exists at my back.

“

The A D I C H I E S I S T E R S by

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

I

remember standing at the foot of the long stairway in our new house, too frightened to climb, everything big and unfamiliar, until my sister Uche silently took my hand and we went up together. I was 4; she was 15. It is my earliest memory of my attachment to her. But, according to family lore, the attachment started much earlier. I was a fussy baby whose nightly screaming was soothed only by her. Newly weaned, I would eat okra and liver sauce only if she fed me. “By the way,” she told me recently. “I ate

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all the liver—that’s why you didn’t grow tall.”

In my teenage years she was the glamorous big sister who was studying pharmacy at university and had a handsome boyfriend in a white car. I looked up to her. Her beautiful face, seamless grape-dark skin, the gap in her teeth inherited from our mother. I was in awe of her original style. She fashioned dangling earrings from parts of an abandoned chandelier and made bows for her shoes from old handbag straps. At the back of her notebooks were delicate sketches: dresses with

large sashes, lavishly shaped trousers. Sometimes she went to her tailor’s shop in the market and stood over the sewing machine to make sure the details were right. Many of her clothes were handed down to me. At 12, I wore ruched, fitted dresses when my agemates were still in little-girl clothes.

I was sometimes afraid of her quick temper, her prickliness. I hated domestic work, while she always cleaned with a sweaty zeal.

She often scolded me for not dusting the furniture. She was the tough one in the family—the unconventional girl. When she was in primary school, the neighbor’s son called her a devil, and she climbed over the hedge, beat him up, and climbed back home to continue her game of table tennis. That evening, the neighbors came over to report to my parents.

Asked to apologize to the boy, my sister said, “But he called me a devil.”

When she was at home from boarding school, she once sneaked into my mother’s wardrobe and took her high-heeled sandals back to school. They were promptly seized by a prefect. She told my mother about it more than 10 years later, describing the sandals in detail, laughing. She laughs easily and often. She sends funny jokes by e-mail and WhatsApp. She is the second and I am the fifth of my parents’ close-knit six children.

Because of the age gap, I came truly to know her as an adult.

I fled the study of medicine to become a writer; she is a successful pharmacist.

We have different tastes. She touches my natural hair and says, “What is this rough mop?” And I ask of her long, straight weave, “What’s that plastic horsehair?”

Still, we ask each other’s opinions of outfits and hairstyles. We have long conversations about my book events and her pharmaceutical conferences. We talk and e-mail often. I love to spend weekends with her, her wonderful husband, Udodi, who is like a big brother to me, and her 18-year-old twin daughters.

Now I recognize what I most admire about her: her transparency, the absence of layers, the bright, focused light that is her loyalty. There is an immense solidity to her. To be her little sister is to feel always that a firm cushion exists at my back. When our father was kidnapped for ransom, it was her steady voice that stilled my despair. “You work so hard,” she told me once, simply, matter-of-factly, during an unproductive period, and it made everything seem better.

She turned 50 in early March. “Don’t get me cards that say, ‘Happy 50th birthday,’ ” she told my siblings and me. “Just ‘Happy birthday’ is fine.”

MAY

2016

I VA RA E SE GE

Uche and Chimamanda Adichie in Lagos, Nigeria, 2016.

MY SISTER Sloane Crosley, right, with sister Dana and their father in Amagansett, New York, 1983.

“

We became friends, but we’re very different people.

“

The C R O S L E Y S I S T E R S by

SLOANE CROSLEY

M

y sister used to tell me that my parents weren’t my real parents. According to her, I was left on the doorstep by Gypsies who would one day return to the infamous Gypsy campgrounds of Westchester County to claim me. This is a common narrative told by older sisters of the 80s who, having put in multiple requests for a sibling, changed their minds once presented with a crying, pooping, attention-sucking vortex. But my sister really leaned into it. There were signs I did not share her blood. I had a unibrow and no one else did (this was before tweezers). Other women in my family had breasts and I did not (this

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was before puberty). When we took a vacation to Hawaii, she suggested I write my name in my underwear because no one would blink twice if another family claimed me. Once, I bought a pair of floral overalls that were deemed “something a Gypsy would wear.”

When I expressed a desire to return them, I was told, “Too bad. No backsies.”

I don’t remember being terribly upset by any of this. On the one hand, I longed for my sister’s acceptance. She was beautiful, smart, and popular, and she had the bigger bedroom. Come to think of it, all of that is still true. Her brain runs on cylinders mine doesn’t even have. She is kind and culturally

unpretentious, whereas my snobbery is more like the plume of oil we saw coming from the U.S.S. Arizona in Honolulu, forever leaking everywhere. On the other hand, her assessment of me as an outsider felt less like a theory and more like an observation. It confirmed my hunch that I was different. The arty one. The dorky one. The one who sits in her room writing stories and puffy-painting hieroglyphics onto jean jackets while listening to the Violent Femmes. Plus, our five-year age gap meant we never shared a school cafeteria or a ride home from a party. We didn’t know each other and we didn’t have to.

And then one night, when she was a senior in high school, I awoke to the sound of sobbing down the hall. I crept toward her door, arriving in time to hear her tell my mother that she was afraid she was going to fall asleep and never wake up. I knew she had been sick. Something was wrong with her abdominal region that surpassed the standard Eastern European Jewish fare that afflicted the rest of us. For months she grew worse, and for months doctors told her it was stress. Once her finals were done, it would be O.K. But it wasn’t O.K. She refused to eat during school for fear of the consequences.

By May she weighed 80 pounds. At long last, a specialist diagnosed her with an acute case of Crohn’s disease. He sent her straight from his office to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she stayed for almost a month.

This I do recall being upset by. And yet I know we both have good memories of Mount Sinai. Mostly this is because she was on drugs and healing. But it was also because I’d wheel her around the hospital’s atrium, talking about our parents, boys, our lives, the looming expanse of college. Telling a story, one of us would say, “And so I told my mother … ,” and the other would laugh and say, “Yeah, she’s my mother, too.” As she healed, we became friends and have been ever since.

But we’re still very different people. My sister reads Dan Brown, attends Pink concerts, and orders Philadelphia rolls. She favors bejeweled skull patterns and fabrics with a sheen in them. Never met a sheen she didn’t like. Collected, these small details paint a picture that I know is not quite accurate or fair. I suppose I could just delete those last images if I wanted to. I don’t puffy-paint for a living, but I do write for one. But eh—screw it, my love. I say to you what you told me to say to the Gypsies upon realizing you wanted to keep me after all: Too bad. No backsies.

MAY

2016

SISTERLESS The author with her brother, John Holodnak, in Los Angeles, 2013.

I don’t have a “ sister and have never

“

felt the lack.

The H O L O D N A K S I B L I N G S by

LILI ANOLIK

I

know what I’m telling you when I tell you I prefer male company to female.

Or, rather, I know what you think I’m telling you. You think I’m telling you I don’t like women. Now, if I were telling you that, you’d have legitimate cause for alarm since, chances are, a woman who doesn’t like women is generalizing from herself, from her own—obviously rotten—character. (On that many-tentacled monster of a franchise, The Real Housewives, “She’s not a girls’ girl” is the

M AY 2 016

sharpest barb one gaudy pretty can fling at another. It’s an insult, but it’s not just that. It’s also an indictment. It means you’re a traitor to your sex—without honor and beneath contempt, a kind of Uncle Tom of the Sisterhood.

Stray observation: Bravo is to this decade what MGM was to the 40s, the new home of the crise domestique, Andy Cohen our George Cukor, Bethenny Frankel and Lisa Vanderpump our Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell respectively.) I’m not, though. I’m telling

you I’d rather be around men. Not because I believe they’re better people, but because I’m a better person in their presence.

Really, it isn’t my imagination. I’m kinder, gentler, bigger-hearted, more alert to good points, more forgiving of flaws. In short, I’m a total sweetie pie. You know Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s smile: “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey”? That’s me and men, no joke. There’s a comfort between us, a natural and instinctive sympathy. Sexual tension, it seems, relaxes me. With women, the relationship is invariably fraught. I get competitive or self-conscious, feel a need to search out their weaknesses or worry that they’re searching out mine. (I’m the problem. Believe me, I’m fully aware. Or maybe I can lay this one off on my parents. Could distrust of the same sex be an inherited trait? My father: “Men? Why would I hang around with men? Men just want to steal your land and your women.”) An edge or strain is always present, only slight, easily surmountable—of my three best friends, two are XXs—but noticeable, there.

All this is a long-winded way of saying I don’t have a sister and have never felt the lack. I do, however, have a brother, John, two and a half years younger. I paid almost no attention to him growing up. And when he did register—a cheerful, not-too-bright little blond boy who loved Matchbox cars and Freddy Krueger movies and my mom—it was as an annoyance. But then my parents sent him to a private school, single-sex and strict, for eighth grade. He hated it. Became morose, recalcitrant, bitter, mean-spirited.

In a word, interesting. I took him to an afternoon showing of Dumb and Dumber at the Loews Chéri in Back Bay, closed now for more than a decade. It was the first time we’d done something alone together voluntarily. We’ve been tight ever since.

The sister-brother arrangement is, as far as I’m concerned, all upside: you get the sibling intimacy without the sibling rivalry. The relationship is straightforward—pure affection. I love John’s good looks. Would a younger sister have made it to 18 if she’d been twice as pretty as I? Highly doubtful. I love, too, his bad personality. It’s better than it was during his teenage years, though not by much. With his lacerating intelligence, his moods and malice, his dark humor, my brother, let’s face it, could be a mother. In fact, he could be our mother.

But that’s another essay entirely. www.vanityfair.com

VAN IT Y

FAIR

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THE 60 MINUTES/VANITY FAIR POLL

APOCALYPSE NOW

Which one of the following do you most fear will put an end to humanity?

10 Which type of person would you most want to have on your side in a post-apocalyptic world?

44%

9 Which one of the following do you think is the most reliable source when looking for clues about when the world will end?

THE BOOK OF REVELATION

38%

DOCTOR

SOLDIER 23%

THE PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS / 6%

DON’T KNOW

B R IN G H U M A

N S TO G ET H ER

55%

8 TEAR HUM ANS APA RT

A DEADLY VIRUS 20% 27% THE RAPTURE 5% ASTEROID

2%

33%

BIB

10%

14%

IT’S AN INTERESTING DIVERSION

3 If the world were

A

A

67% WITH MY FAMILY

RATS HUMANS CATS 5 DOGS

ER

www.vanityfair.com

23%

16% PRAYING

TICKS SNAKES

EH

FA IR

46%

IT’S A WASTE OF TIME

thinking about the end of the world—but, being Americans, we approach it with a can-do spirit.

AS

VANIT Y

BETTER LIFE

about to end, TELEVISION what would be the / NEWS REPORT 45% IT’S A SOURCE CARPENTER first sign?

OF ANXIETY TWEET OR FACEBOOK POST / 19% SERMON BY A RELIGIOUS LEADER / 9% Americans MASSACHUSETTS VOTING REPUBLICAN FOR PRESIDENT / 7% don’t much like NONE OF THEM, IT WOULD JUST HAPPEN / 16%

P

would you most want to have if you knew an apocalyptic event was coming?

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IT HELPS

LE / 29% MM GUNS 26% UNI AN I AM LEGEND / 23% TION D MED / 24% PLANET OF ICIN ICL E THE APES / 15% / 18 EA % ND IES LOT MAD MAX: S OF OF 13% FURY ROAD / 11% “HO GAS / 9% WT O” B ALC WATERWORLD / 9% ERS OOKS OHO ONA / 6% L/4 / 5% DR. STRANGELOVE LH % YGI ENE DAWN OF THE DEAD / 5% 7 PRO DUCT THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN / 4% S/3 Which one of the % following items HAVEN’T SEEN ANY OF THESE MOVIES / 19%

40%

What is your take on spending time thinking about the end of the world?

27% ME LIVE A

GLOBAL WARMING 34%

AV

If there were an impending apocalyptic event that threatened the existence of the human race, it would ...

31%

DEMOCRATS

7%

See the complete P O L L R E S U LT S. Go to VF.COM/ MAY2016.

2

15%

MECHANIC 4%

@vf.com

A NUCLEAR WAR

6%

5%

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON / 12%

THE MAYAN CALENDAR / 7%

REPUBLICANS

32%

FARMER

31%

the religious right, the Rapture remains a distinct possibility. Most Americans think the book of Revelation offers the best guide to what lies ahead. So it makes sense that a Bible is what we’d want alongside us in those final moments (along with our families).

But if we make it into a post-apocalyptic world, a doctor would be handy. As for what species it would be best to leave off of some future Noah’s Ark, 13 percent of us, perhaps wisely, cite our own.

6 Which one of the following is your favorite movie about the apocalypse?

1%

4 If you knew the world would end tomorrow, how would you most like to spend your last day on Earth?

18%

3%

On a new Noah’s Ark, which animal would you leave behind?

This poll was conducted on behalf of CBS News by SSRS of Media, Pennsylvania, among a random sample of 1,015 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone March 4–8, 2016.

Some low-percentage answer choices have been omitted.

MAY

2016

P HOTOG R AP HS F ROM T HE N ATI ON A L A RCHI VE S / NEWSMAKERS (BACKGROUND), FROM THE SCIENCE & SOCIET Y P IC T U RE L I BR ARY ( BOMB ) , B OT H F RO M G ET T Y I MAG E S

F

orgive us if we appear a bit jumpy—the coming elections seem to be filling us with apocalyptic dread. We know, we know: it doesn’t help to worry. Some of us, remember, were convinced that the Mayans believed it was all going to end four years ago. (Maybe we wish it had.)

It’s hard to separate the end of the world from politics. Republicans are inclined to see nuclear war as our final act.

1 Democrats wring their hands over climate change. For

FIRST-PERSON

The Photo That Changed My Life C A R LY S I M O N The celebrated singer-songwriter—and author, with a new memoir, Boys in the Trees— identifies a picture that sums up the Simon sisterhood

“

My sisters drew me into music at the age of five. Like little von Trapps, Lucy and I surrounded the eldest at the piano: Joey. She had taken lessons and could read those black dots on the two rows of five lines each. Those were, and remain, something of a mystery to me. Joey (Joanna) was used to being the queen, and the queen she stayed. She borrowed sheet music from the school library

and had excellent taste—and our voices suited the parts on the sheets. Lucy, the middle sister, with a very high voice, carried the melody like an angel. Joey was a perfect mezzo-soprano and sang the alto parts (eventually becoming a world-famous opera singer). Just by chance, I had a husky and very low voice. My husk spread over their clearer tones like fog muting the sharp edges of a cityscape. It was ‘good to be the glue,’ Joey told me. I went with it. Oh, what a trio we were.

“Lucy and I, high and low, went on to become a college sister act—the Simon Sisters. And one of Lucy’s songs, ‘Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,’ appears on my new album, Songs from the Trees, a companion to my memoir. Maybe it wasn’t just luck that our father was a terrific photographer who could so very personally witness this moment of origin: the first lesson from our eldest sister in the joys of harmony.”

Ê Want the backstories behind other unexpected images? Go to VF.com/unexpected.

Brought to you by the all-new 2016 Chevrolet Malibu.

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2016

P HOTO GR A PH BY R I CHA R D L . SI MO N

The Simon sisters: Lucy, 8, Carly, 5, and Joey, 11, in Stamford, Connecticut, 1950.

MAY 2016

3 1 DAY S i n t h e L I F E o f t h e C U LT U R E

Æ HOT TRACKS: CURTIS “50 CENT” JACKSON

p. 74

HOT TYPE: THE BEST IN BOOKS

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DRAWING INTEREST

I L L USTR ATI O N © 20 00 Q UEN T IN B L A K E

Sir Quentin Blake is best known for his whimsical drawings in Roald Dahl classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and countless others.

Now the beloved 83-year-old artist is the subject of a new book, Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination (Bloomsbury),

by Ghislaine Kenyon.

This illustration—from a poster based on the book The Rights of the Reader, by Daniel Pennac—captures the power of a page-turner.

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I L L U STR ATIO N

BY

QUENTIN BLAKE

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FAIR

73

LISA ROBINSON: You can look tough—that “I got shot nine

times” look—and then you have a really sweet smile. You’ve even described yourself as a “pussycat.”

50 CENT: That’s the two versions. I wasn’t even able to cuss in my grandmother’s house. Since she passed, my grandfather is that for me now. He still lives where I grew up in Queens, but also Long Island.

I moved him to a new place.

L.R.: So you obviously had enough money to buy him a house …

50 CENT: Oh, you know I ain’t got any money. [Laughs.]

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2016

P HOTO GR A PH © B RYA N S HE F F IE L D/CO RB I S O UTL I NE

‘

rowing up, I had to be two versions of me,” says Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson.

“I had to be aggressive enough to get by in my environment and then be my grandmother’s baby in the house.” Rapper, actor, entrepreneur, film and television producer 50 Cent was recently entangled in a variety of lawsuits he was unable to discuss. But in between court dates, he continued to promote his businesses—including Effen vodka, a new variety show for the A&E network, and the third season of the addictive TV drama Power. That show, which airs on Starz again in July, was co-created by executive producer 50 Cent, who acts in it and co-wrote and performs the main theme song. Here, he talks with Lisa Robinson about success, boxing, love, and Power.

L.R.: When we photographed you in 2005 for Vanity Fair’s Hip-Hop Portfolio, you had a lot of friends living in the Connecticut house previously owned by Mike Tyson. When you became successful, did you give jobs to your old friends?

50 CENT: I went from a basement apartment in Queens to a 50,000-square-foot house, and when you’re successful, it’s valuable to have people around who represent what was there before all the confusion started. But you know what happens? If you don’t take people with you, they say you left everyone behind. And if you get them involved in your businesses and provide an opportunity for them to better their life, they become someone who works for you. Then that taints the relationship.

L.R.: You portrayed a sleazy boxing promoter in Southpaw, and you’ve had some public disagreements with Floyd “Money” Mayweather. Are the two of you friends, and do you think he’s ever going to fight again?

50 CENT: Floyd and I are really good friends, but we argue like regular people argue. The difference is when we have disputes, it winds up on CNN or Instagram. I can cuss him out, call him names, say whatever I want to him, but he’s my little brother. Every fighter says he’s going to retire—what’s left when you fight the biggest, most highly anticipated fight? But I do think he’ll fight again.

L.R.: You dated Chelsea Handler, didn’t you?

50 CENT: Yes, for eight months. If you’re around her long enough, to know her is to love her. She has a captivating personality; she’s just totally honest—do you know how difficult that can be?

50 CENT L.R.: You’ve never been married—do you want to be?

50 CENT: I’m not sure. I do want the friendship that I think can be priceless, and if that’s what comes along with it, I’ll take that.

L.R.: Because Power and Empire are both successful TV shows with strong black characters, they got lumped together—with Power being considered darker, more dangerous.

50 CENT: The comparisons between those shows are really small. I don’t even like being classified as a black show. The movie American Gangster had Denzel Washington in it, Russell Crowe as the cop, and the poster had both of them on it. [Eminem’s] 8 Mile was a movie about the hip-hop world and it opened in about 3,000 theaters. But Get Rich or Die Tryin’ [the semi-autobiographical film that marked 50 Cent’s acting debut] cost $36 million; they gave me [director] Jim Sheridan, Quincy Jones did the score, and that movie was classified as a black movie— and it opened in 1,700 theaters. I guess all we needed was a white police officer. With Power, I wanted the poster to feature Joe Sikora—Tommy [the white character]—because this show is as diverse as New York City.

When we said that New York was a character, it is literally that. My goal is to make the show bigger and bigger and have everybody watch it.

L.R.: Your character, Kanan, appeared to have been killed last season. Do you come back?

50 CENT: I come back.

IN SHORT Simon Sebag Montefiore reminisces about The Romanovs (Knopf). Siddhartha Mukherjee splits The Gene (Scribner).

Hit The After Party (Riverhead), by Anton DiSclafani. Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert makes magic with 32 Yolks (Random House).

Nobody’s fool, Richard Russo, follows up with Everybody’s Fool (Knopf). Jonathan Fader goes for the win in Life as Sport (Da Capo Lifelong). Mark Haddon’s stories come together in The Pier Falls (Doubleday).

Neil Jordan’s The Drowned Detective (Bloomsbury) pulls you in. Julian Barnes clocks The Noise of Time (Knopf). Amy Rose Spiegel gets some Action (Grand Central).

Geoff Dyer traipses through the White Sands (Pantheon). Tom Vanderbilt tests the winds in You May Also Like (Knopf). Former Sotheby’s chair Simon de Pury bids on The Auctioneer (St. Martin’s). C. E. Morgan gallops through The Sport of Kings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Tim Samuels gets manly in Who Stole My Spear? (Century). Lisa Owens launches with Not Working (Dial).

Oscar Abolafia’s Icons by Oscar (Lannoo) is timeless. Barry Avrich’s Moguls, Monsters, and Madmen (ECW)—oh, my! – E . S .

he need to be part of a Tribe (Twelve), be it a gang, platoon, or club, not only gives meaning to our lives, V.F. contributing editor Sebastian Junger explains, but is essential to our psychological survival.

Also this month: The only survivors of the plane crash in Noah Hawley’s page-turner Before the Fall (Grand Central) are a poor painter

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and a rich child. In Zero K (Scribner), Don DeLillo, our most astute, ingenious, and idiosyncratic chronicler of contemporary American culture, envisions the future of death. Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon (Other) is a mesmerizing reimagining of George Eliot’s accursed marriage. A teen runaway links the remarkable stories in Michelle Latiolais’s She (Norton). Rana Foroohar focuses on American finance’s Makers and Takers (Crown Business). Andi Zeisler’s We Were Feminists Once (PublicAffairs) accuses the movement of selling out. Louise Erdrich’s LaRose (Harper) is a magnificent, sorrowful tale of justice, retribution, and love. Claudia Roth Pierpont’s American Rhapsody (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is winning. Contrarian David Rieff rejects historical memory In Praise of Forgetting (Yale). A loving family suffers with its legacy of depression in Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown). Frank Deford’s I’d Know That Voice Anywhere (Atlantic Monthly Press) is his highlight reel. Anthony Iannacci spotlights Hollywood Interiors (Monacelli). Joshua Prager pegs accomplishments to age in 100 Years (Norton). The history of the L.A. punk scene comes snarling to life in John Doe and Tom DeSavia’s Under the Big Black Sun (Perseus). Ah, family.

— ELISSA S C H A P P E L L

I

SOUND AND FURY IN SYRIA

n The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria (Liveright), V.F. contributing editor Janine di Giovanni recalls how “in Paris, just before the Arab Spring, I met the most elegant people who were proud to be flying to Aleppo to buy art and furniture.”

Di Giovanni knew Syria before it became a siege state, before “the recipe of warriors changed every day,” before what was once the end of the Silk Road seemed more like the end of civilization. The Morning They Came for Us moves from a cosmopolitan “bubble of parties” in 2011 to “the aftermath of a barrel bomb” today as di Giovanni observes slaughter and rape with the equal (if occasionally opposing and heartbreaking) empathies of war correspondent and mother. One day a young journalist named Steven Sotloff asks if she wishes she “hadn’t gotten obsessed with Syria.” Less than two years later ISIS would release a video of his beheading.

—LEA

CARPENTER

MAY

2016

PHOTO GRA PH S BY T IM HO UT ( B O O KS) , N EI L L E I F ER ( A L I) ; F O R DE TA I L S, GO TO VF.CO M /CR E DI TS

Muhammad Ali (bottom), during the 1966 World Heavyweight title fight, at the Houston Astrodome, from Relentless: The Stories Behind the Photographs (University of Texas), by Neil Leifer.

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ST Y L ED BY R E NE E F L UGGE ; F O R DE TA IL S , G O TO VF.COM /C RE DI TS

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A R O U N D t h e WO R L D, O N E PA RT Y a t a T I M E

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WEDDING BELLS Brian Grazer and Veronica Smiley exchanged vows in front of more than 200 friends and family members at Grazer’s Santa Monica residence. The bride wore a blush-colored custom-designed gown by Vera Wang; she later changed into a short white dress, also designed

by Wang. The groom wore Dior. For the newlyweds’ first dance, Paul Anka sang “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Toasts were given by Eddie Murphy, Bob Iger, Malcolm Gladwell, Graydon Carter, Willow Bay, and Grazer’s longtime business partner, Ron Howard. The evening, which was both intimate and jubilant, unofficially kicked off a star-studded week of celebrations leading up to the 88th Academy Awards.

—PUNCH

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P H OTO G R APH S

BY

JUSTIN BISHOP

HUTTON

MAY

2016

Don Rickles and Eddie Murphy

George Lucas and Ron Howard

Jeff Koons Veronica Grazer Oprah Winfrey and Bob Iger

The newlyweds.

Chris Rock

Lionel Richie

The wedding ceremony.

Arianna Huffington and Jack Dorsey

Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard

Marin Panunzio, Sage Grazer, and Hannah Jacobson

CRE DI TS HE RE

Jimmy Iovine and Liberty Ross

David Geffen, Brian Grazer, and Bryan Lourd

Brett Ratner and Les Moonves Paul Anka

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IN THE DETAILS

What You Should Know About

REBECCA MILLER

A PANOPLY OF ECCENTRIC BIOGRAPHICAL DATA RE: THE LIT AND FILM CROSSOVER STAR hereas Rebecca Miller SHE IS the daughter of the photographer took the fanciful route Inge Morath and the playwright Aron her previous crethur Miller. Through her parents, she ative endeavor, Jacob’s got to spend time as a child with the great New Yorker cartoonist-illustrator Folly—a clever, knotty novel narSaul Steinberg (whose famous series of rated by a housefly who hovers over paper-bag masks was shot by Morath), present-day Long Island but carries within him the reincarnated soul the novelist William Styron, and the sculptor Alexander Calder. of an 18th-century Parisian Jewish peddler—her new movie, Maggie’s SHE WAS baptized into the Catholic faith Plan, her fifth as a writer-director, but feels she has inherited her father’s is a more homespun affair: a narracultural Jewishness, particularly in her tively straightforward comedy about humor and “the way I mother.” a young college administrator who SHE LOOKS athletic but insists she was has decided that she wants to have hopeless at sports while growing up a child, whether or not she has a in Connecticut. She shivers at the life partner. Most of the action takes memory of field hockey: “the enthuplace in Greenwich Village, where siasm of the girls, how they used to Miller has herself raised two sons yell at you to run.” and a stepson with her husband, the SHE ONCE sublet an apartment in the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The film’s Village from the poet W. S. Merwin. main roles are played by actors also Maggie’s apartment in Maggie’s Plan, indigenous to the neighborhood: a tight space positively overrun with THE AUTHOR AUTEUR Greta Gerwig (in the title role), Ethan Hawke, and, in books, is essentially a re-creation of Merwin’s apartment.

Miller, a bravura performance that somehow melds the hereSHE USED to perform a party trick in bars in which she photographed in tofore unmeldable traits of Madeline Kahn and Tilda drew with her eyes closed, taking requests—e.g., “Draw New York City.

Swinton, Julianne Moore. Herewith, as Maggie’s Plan a woman who is strangely unnerving!,” or “Draw a makes its way to movie theaters, are some facts and woman who suddenly realizes the man she loves isn’t insights gleaned from a visit to the office (also in the Village) as smart as she thought he was!” These drawings were eventually of the polymathic 53-year-old filmmaker-author-professor-doodler. compiled into a book, A Woman Who (Bloomsbury, 2003).

SHE SUBSEQUENTLY became friends with the publisher of that book, KaSHE IS a graduate of Yale University and lived in an apartment ren Rinaldi, who wrote the story upon which Maggie’s Plan is based. above the famous New Haven pizza destination Sally’s Apizza. ANOTHER LONGTIME friend, Rachael Horovitz, is a producer on the movie; Her roommates were the future author Naomi Wolf and the future Rachael’s brother, Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), academic and critic Barbara Browning. served as its music supervisor; and Adam’s wife, Le Tigre front womSHE HARBORED no desire to make movies until she saw Fellini’s La Dolce an Kathleen Hanna, makes an appearance singing a gypsy version of Vita a short time after college. “It was all the things I was interested in, Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” words and pictures and music, put together in a sort of synesthesia, and SHE IS a big fan of ska and, with Adam Horovitz’s help, compiled a it really blew my mind,” she says. “It was actually very disturbing.” ska-heavy soundtrack that includes the original version of “Rudy, A HER FIRST films were audaciously experimental installations: looped rep- Message to You”—by Dandy Livingstone, not the Specials. resentations of her dreams (often featuring “my friend Barbara Brow- SHE AND Day-Lewis used to watch The Hills together. ning naked,” she says) that were projected inside sarcophagus-like THEY STILL enjoy an esoteric array of TV programs: the BBC Two miniboxes with Advent-calendar-style peekaboo doors. series adaptation of Wolf Hall, the Discovery reality show Alaskan SHE IS fond of the word “cuddle” “because it really is what it Bush People, and the History channel series Vikings. It was DayLewis who suggested Vikings’ lead actor, Travis Fimmel, for the crusounds like.”

SHE CANNOT abide the word “brunch,” and also harbors a peculiar aver- cial role of an amorous artisanal-pickle man in Maggie’s Plan. sion to the phrase “warmed through” when applied to reheated food.

SHE HAS bountiful curly tresses in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, yet chooses, against various hairdressSHE IS a pour-over coffee person, as ers’ admonishments, to clip the hair well as a half-and-half person. above her forehead into bangs.

SHE IS mistrustful of coffee-pod maLA DOLCE VITA— chines.

HER REASONS for having bangs are two“IT REALLY fold: (1) She finds them to be “tough SHE FIRMLY believes that perfumes and kind of sweet at the same time”; “have decades attached to them.” A and (2) “My husband really likes me whiff of a certain scent can send her to have bangs.” straight back to 1994.

—DAVID KAMP

BLEW MY MIND.”

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P H OTO G R A P H

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GASPER TRINGALE

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H A I R PRO DUCTS BY J O N ATH A N PROD UCT; MA K EUP P ROD UCTS BY CHA NE L ; HA I R A N D MA KE UP BY L O RA I NE A BE L E S; F OR DE TA I L S, GO TO VF. CO M/ CR E DITS

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JAMES WOLCOTT

THAT MITFORD MYSTIQUE

What explains the enduring fascination with the Mitford sisters, all now gone? Their oh-so-English mix of beauty, wit, and eccentricity—and their epic split over Hitler’s rise

HONS AND DAUGHTERS

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n those footloose days when I thought little of popping off to London once or twice a year to pad around Piccadilly and catch the latest shows, I found myself at a new musical called The Mitford Girls. Why I chose that concoction over so many other marquee-blazers remains a muddle and a mystery, my awareness of the Mitford clan and their fabled rap sheet being somewhat sketchy. Perhaps it was the Brideshead Effect that prompted me. The lavish miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac postwar romance, Brideshead Revisited—star-

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ring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, and Laurence Olivier— premiered within a week of The Mitford Girls’ opening in 1981, and the sumptuous trappings and muffled intrigues of the landed nobility made for a cultural moment that had everyone abuzz then and has endured, all the way up to Downton Abbey. Anyway, there I was. It was not an evening in the theater to bring Kenneth Tynan springing out of retirement. What I recall through the fogbank of jet lag is that the musical started off on a fishy note with the MAY

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Unity, Tom, Deborah, Diana, Jessica, Nancy, and Pamela Mitford at Swinbrook House, in Oxfordshire, England, 1935.

WOLCOTT six sisters (like the Andrews Sisters, times two) greeting the audience onstage with a harmonizing “Thanks for the Memory,” a song so familiar as Bob Hope’s sign-off that planting it here seemed like borderline larceny. Other numbers included piano-bar perennials (such as Cole Porter’s cheeky “Let’s Do It”), the entire score a pastiche of paste diamonds dressing up a script heavy on hubbub and girlish antics until things went darker in Act II, when Adolf Hitler made an appearance. The Mitford Girls ran only a few months, not simply because it was

Left to their own madcap devices, the girls formed a tribal bond, speaking their own slanguage and minting a clattering thicket of nicknames for their parents (Dad was Farve, Mum was Muv), one another (Unity was Bobo, Diana was Honks, Jessica was Decca, Deborah was Debo, and so on), their nannies, governesses, menagerie of pets, and anyone else who strayed across their radar. Although taken to extremes by the Mitfords, with their “shrieks of laughter and floods of tears,” as Nancy would later put it, this sort of upper-class twittering

THE MITFORD CULT NOT ONLY SURVIVED THE 20TH CENTURY BUT HAS MADE A SPIRITED GO OF IT IN THE 21ST.

creaky but because not even the Brideshead Effect in lilac bloom could salvage the Mitford mystique from looking spindly, dated, playedout—or so I halfway figured.

Wrong. The Mitford cult not only survived the 20th century but has made a spirited go of it in the 21st with no sign of becoming winded.

What was known as the Mitford Industry in its heyday has not slowed production, even after the deaths of the six sisters, as individual and group biographies (coming this September, The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, by Laura Thompson), docudramas, documentaries, reminiscences, volumes of letters, and even a self-help title (The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life, by Lyndsy Spence) quench an apparently unslakable thirst for Mitford lore. The Mitford sisters have become the stuff of myth, a glittering constellation no matter how much tarnish remains. Why? It can’t be just because the Bloomsbury cult ran out of gas.

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or the sake of clarity, not to mention sanity, let’s fill out the lineup card first.

Scion of an aristocratic family that traced its heritage back to the Norman Conquest, David Freeman-Mitford, who would become Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney, bestowed upon the world six daughters—in order of birth, Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah—and a son, Tom. They grew up in a series of country houses and cottages where their eccentricities and enthusiasms flowered like orchids. Only the son was formally schooled (owing to finances as much as to male entitlement—the Mitfords were socially privileged but not economically flush); the girls’ education was a more spotty, haphazard affair, with their mother and an array of governesses teaching lessons in reading, arithmetic, and French, leaving big blanks in the curriculum.

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was very common in the pre- and postwar eras among the smart set, as anyone who has waded knee-deep through the footnotes explaining nicknames, barnacled in-jokes, veiled allusions, and genealogical connections (who was whose idiot cousin) in the biographies and journals of the period can wearily attest.

What elevated the Mitfords above the prattle and privileges of their upbringing and put their reputation on a collision course with history was the fissure in the household between the two raging ideologies that would rip apart the 20th century: Fascism and Communism.

“When they talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups,” writes Mary S. Lovell in The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, “Unity would say, ‘I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,’ and Decca would say, ‘I’m going to run away and be a Communist.’ ” And so they did. Flighty as they might have appeared, the Mitford girls did not lack for follow-through.

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n 1933, Unity and Diana traveled to Germany as delegation members of the British Union of Fascists, whose chrome-domed leader was Oswald Mosley, with whom Diana was having an affair—both were married to others at the time—and whom she would later secretly marry in the home of Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels with Adolf Hitler among the guests. To many, Mosley resembled a knockoff version of Hitler, the black moon to Hitler’s black sun, but he possessed his own magnetic exertion. Decades later, Clive James, writing about a television interview with Mosley, observed, “As always, the streamlined head of Sir Oswald looked simultaneously ageless and out of date, like some Art Deco metal sculpture recently discovered in its original wrappings. Nor have his vocal cords lost any-

thing of their tensile strength.” Where Hitler had his Brownshirts busting chops and smashing glass, Mosley recruited his own paramilitary band of bullyboys, the Blackshirts, which the sainted P. G. Wodehouse would parody as the Black Shorts in The Code of the Woosters. Mosley wasn’t the demonic orator Hitler was. He lacked the infernal throb. Attending the Nuremberg rally on their 1933 visit, Unity and Diana saw Hitler in oratorical action for the first time, and he more than lived up to advance billing. The spectacle was spellbinding, the message drum-pounding.

Compared with the maundering walruses running England and Europe downhill, here was a man who had dynamized, industrialized, and mobilized a nation—destiny incarnate.

A year later, Unity, reborn in the spirit of fanaticism, alighted in Munich, took a German-language course near the Nazi Party headquarters, and put out her feelers for an opportunity to meet her hero. Didn’t take long.

In 1934, Hitler’s movements and routines were well known, and one of the frequent stops was a restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, which Unity staked out. They soon met—he couldn’t help but notice her—and into his orbit she was drawn. It wasn’t just that she was young, attractive, English, self-possessed, and shared his vision. Hitler was steeped in superstition, susceptible to portents, and here was Unity, who was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika and whose middle name was Valkyrie, in honor of Richard Wagner. (There was a family connection to Wagner and Bayreuth through her grandfather Bertie.) According to Unity’s careful tabulations, she met Hitler on 140 occasions, their flirty friendliness causing great distress to Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, who attempted suicide to swerve Hitler’s attention back her way, which it did. Braun was probably never in serious danger from Unity as a romantic rival. Unity was too uninhibited and tongue-flapping. Secrets weren’t safe with her, which would never do in the tense, pin-drop deliberations of the Nazi high command.

It’s become somewhat customary to contemporize Unity’s behavior as that of a groupie supplicating herself before a rock deity, a crush gone supernova, but Unity wasn’t content to pay homage offstage. She craved her own stardom. She snapped a Nazi salute before thousands at a Hitler Youth rally (for which Hitler awarded her a gold swastika badge that she swanked around in) and wrote an open letter to Der Stürmer, the scurrilous anti-Semitic propaganda rag edited by the surpassingly odious Julius Streicher, which ended, “We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English!

Out with the Jews!,” then added a PS in which she asked that her whole name, not her initials, be used. “I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater.” And as a Jew hater, what befell the Jews didn’t disturb a hair on her head. “We know she thought Streicher’s act in making Jews crop www.vanityfair.com

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WOLCOTT grass with their teeth amusing, and that she approved when a group of Jews were taken to an island in the Danube and left there to starve,” writes Lovell in The Sisters.

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espite Unity’s mad devotion to Hitler, she insisted that if Germany and Britain went to war she would commit suicide. She couldn’t bear the prospect of the two countries she loved shedding each other’s blood. This wasn’t a verbal pose. As I say, the Mitford girls had follow-through.

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Unity went to the English Garden in Munich, took the small pistol Hitler had given her for her protection, pressed it to her temple, and fired. The bullet lodged in her brain, but she survived—she had somehow bungled the self-hit. She was spirited off to neutral Switzerland, where her mother and Debo retrieved her and returned to England to an understandable firestorm of flashbulbs and tabloid snoops. Why was this little Fascista given such special, protective treatment? Despite her intimate proximity to Hitler and his trusted lackeys, Unity, brain-stricken, was not searched or questioned, even after her faculties somewhat recovered, thanks to the intervention of her father with the home secretary.

She would lead a placid, child-like half-life until the bullet residing in her brain led to meningitis and she died, eight years later.

Sister Diana wasn’t as lucky staying out of the clink. The outbreak of war led to a sweepup of the Fascists in England, and Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford (who had given birth to her fourth child weeks before) were arrested without charge and interned for security purposes. Interviewed by authorities

The Nazi divide made it impossible for the sisters to maintain a united front. As a teenager, Decca had etched a hammer and sickle into her bedroom window with her diamond ring, and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, was the antithesis of Oswald Mosley: “Mosley with a red flag,” as Laura Thompson puts it in The Six. So when Diana was finally released from prison, Decca petitioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose wife Clementine was a cousin to the Mitfords, to have her put back in.

“The fact that Diana is my sister doesn’t alter my opinion in the least.” (It was Decca who, when confronted with Nancy’s affirmation that “sisters are a shield against life’s cruel adversity,” riposted, “But sisters ARE life’s cruel adversity!”) Unlike many who start out on the Communist left only to sag sideways into religion or, worse, neoconservatism, she stayed put as an upright underdog defender. Immigrating to the United States in 1939 and making it her home base, Decca became an opponent of the Red Scare and a crusading reporter on civil rights, but her American reputation rested less on her political writings than on her best-selling muckraking book about the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, and her memoir Hons and Rebels. She became a doyenne of the Old New Left (the 60s radicals who had entered middle age), defying the stereotype of the aging dour lefty by fronting a band called Decca and the Dectones, who I’m sure whipped up quite an earful.

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f all the Mitfords, Nancy is the one who means the most to me. (Pam is the most inconspicuous and hence most uncharacteristic Mitford sister, though The House of Mitford informs us that she would “become well known in the poultry world” for

DEBO WOULD OUTLIVE THEM ALL AND GIVE THE REAL-LIFE ROMAN-FLEUVE OF THE MITFORDS THE CLOSEST THING TO

A HAPPY ENDING THAT IT DESERVED.

in prison, Diana was asked if she agreed with the Nazi policy on Jews. “Up to a point,” she replied. “I am not fond of Jews.” There were those who would later try to extenuate this remark. In The House of Mitford, written by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness, the authors deplore Diana’s statement. “One should never condemn a whole group in this way. Yet we have never seen anyone taken to task for saying they were not fond of, for example, Germans.” Given the context, this is remarkably obtuse, not to mention tasteless.

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importing “a picturesque breed of chicken” into Britain, and the poultry world doesn’t accept just anybody.) Nancy is the one with the lasting literary eminence—her comic novels (Christmas Pudding, The Blessing, Don’t Tell Alfred, among others) a staircase rising to the twin pillars of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, a conjoined classic of beauty, wisdom, acuity, humor, affection, and bruised worldliness, as close as one could get to Colette without cats underfoot—and her life is in many ways the most poignant in its final punc-

tuation. Unity toyed with evil, but after she put the barrel to her head, her life was a drawn-out anticlimax, her consciousness packed with clouds. Nancy’s romantic disappointment was an extended letdown leading to physical anguish. Falling in love with a French politician of Polish origin named Gaston Palewski, she moved to Paris so that the two of them could be together, and so they were, but they never married, and he was prolifically unfaithful, eventually marrying an aristocrat whose name @vf.com To visit James was an impressive mouthWolcott’s B L O G , ful: Hélène Violette de go to VF.COM/ Talleyrand-Périgord. The WOLCOTT. Horror of Love, the title of a biographical study of the Mitford-Palewski liaison by Lisa Hilton, smacks of melodrama, but it was a love unfulfilled. Suffering for years from headaches and other ailments, Nancy was diagnosed in 1972 with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the final six months of her life were a rack of pain. Diana, unrepentant to the last for her adulation of Hitler, would outlive Nancy by 30 years, proof that health and mortality are the most fickle monsters of all.

Debo, the youngest, would outlive them all and give the real-life roman-fleuve of the Mitfords the closest thing to a happy ending that it deserved. Treated as the runt of the litter by her older, splashier sisters, who nicknamed her “Stubby” because of her legs and “Nine” because that was the mental age Nancy said she was stunted at, Debo would grandly come into her own after years of feeling left behind.

(Wait for Me! was the title of her memoir about Growing Up Mitford.) At the age of 21, she married Andrew Cavendish, the second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. “An heir and a spare,” as the saying goes, and when Andrew’s brother, Billy, who was married to John F. Kennedy’s sister Kick, died in action during the Second World War, Andrew would become the 11th Duke of Devonshire, and Debo thereby the mistress of Chatsworth, a stately pile of 126 rooms with gardens covering more than a hundred acres, stables—the works. Quite the emerald spread. (It was used as a location for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) Debo, who would die at the age of 94, nipping Diana’s longevity record by a year, devoted herself to the preservation and promotion of Chatsworth, writing book after book on the estate, an entrepreneurial Earth Mother who named one of her memoirs Counting My Chickens, its cover showing her holding a big clucker. The buoyant aplomb of her reign at Chatsworth in her last decade as Dowager Duchess (her husband died in 2004) had a healing, redemptive grace, as if the spirit of Demeter moved through her to repair some of the damage done by her sisters’ association with destroyers and restore a portion of paradise. Reichs rise and fall, sisters shriek and sob, beauty fades, famous names come and go, and in the end ain’t nobody here but us chickens.

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MICHAEL KINSLEY

INDIVISIBLE Does “spending money” count as “free speech”? People on the left want to say No. They should really say Yes.

AND JUSTICES FOR ALL

Amid a battle over the Supreme Court, the author points out how few of the justices’ decisions have been memorable—and how rarely they’ve been notoriously wrong. Even Citizens United simply upheld a core national value

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or all the fuss about Supreme Court nominations, very few Supreme Court decisions are actually remembered by history, and even fewer are notorious for getting it wrong.

In fact, there are really only three: Dred Scott (1857), which upheld slavery; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld racial segregation; and Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld state anti-sodomy laws. It took the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott. Plessy v.

Ferguson was reversed 58 years after it was issued (in the most famous Supreme Court

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I L L U STR ATIO N

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BARRY BLITT

case of all, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka). It took only 17 years for the court to decide, in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), that it had made a mistake, and to reverse Bowers v. Hardwick.

Any others? Well, Bush v. Gore, which decided the 2000 election, would certainly be on my list of disgraceful Supreme Court decisions, but the circumstances were so bizarre that they are unlikely to arise again.

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KINSLEY sions will extend someday to Roe v. Wade (1973), the decision legalizing abortion.

Liberals hope that someday the Lousy Decision Hall of Fame will include Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which held that corporations (and unions) have the right to free speech under the First Amendment.

Already, Citizens United is probably the one Supreme Court decision since Roe that is despised by name, though these decisions are despised by different groups. For

speech? Ridiculous. Of course it is. The very act of spending money sends a message, like “liking” something on Facebook. Also, it takes money to “speak.” It’s precisely because people and organizations that have more money can speak more (more TV commercials, more lawn signs) and speak more loudly (perhaps a better class of political consultant) that the court’s conclusion in Citizens United bothers people so much. At the same time, no amount of money automatically translates into a certain amount of

IT’S DISAPPOINTING TO SEE LIBERALS

ABANDON THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH WHEN THE SPEECH IS SOMETHING THEY DISAGREE WITH.

conservatives, Roe v. Wade has become shorthand for the profusion of new, judgecreated “rights” in the 1960s and alleged liberal excess of all sorts. For liberals, Citizens United has come to represent the nefarious role of money in politics, which many feel has eroded if not destroyed our democracy. Money is blamed above all this year for Donald Trump, although Citizens United doesn’t apply to him if, as is widely supposed, he is a human being and not a legal fiction. More generally, big business will always be bigger than small business, and rich people will always have more money than poor people. Should that entitle them to more influence on the political process? (A further complication is that rich companies are owned not by rich people, by and large, but by pension funds, which are holding the money on behalf of the middle class.)

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oney isn’t speech” and “corporations aren’t people” are the mantras of Citizens United critics. Citizens United happens to be a group that wanted to distribute a documentary about Hillary Clinton. It had already been established, in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), that anyone has a First Amendment right to spend his or her own money advancing his or her own cause, including a candidacy for political office. Citizens United extended this right to legally created “persons” such as corporations and unions.

The First Amendment right of free speech is generally considered to be a liberal cause.

So it’s disappointing to see how quickly liberals abandon it when the speech is something they disagree with. Money isn’t

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influence over the political process. Arianna Huffington’s husband spent almost $30 million in a futile attempt to win a Senate seat from California. He lost and today, despite his marriage to and divorce from Arianna Huffington, his views on anything don’t carry a lot of weight. (“Not true, darling. Not true at all,” says Arianna. “I always consult with Michael before endorsing a Supreme Court nominee.”)

The analogy I like (as did the Supreme Court in its ruling) is to a newspaper. Suppose Citizens United were reversed and President Trump decided one day that he was sick of The New York Times. So he proposes a law setting a ceiling on the amount any individual or organization can spend putting out a newspaper. Constitutional? I hope not. But it’s hard to see the difference in principle between this and a law limiting the amount a corporation or union may spend promoting a political candidate.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the 5–4 opinion in the Citizens United case, spends much of his time swatting flies. The laws that Citizens United overturns specifically exempt media companies. What is a media company and why should a media company get special treatment? On the other hand, if media companies don’t get special treatment, the law even more clearly violates the First Amendment. For that matter, what is an “electioneering communication”? That’s what you couldn’t do within 60 days of an election (30 days for a primary) if you wanted to stay on the right side of the law before the court tossed the law out. “The First Amendment,” Kennedy wrote, “does not permit laws that force speakers to retain a campaign finance

attorney, conduct demographic marketing research, or seek declaratory rulings before discussing the most salient political issues of our day.”

You can’t deny that there’s a problem: big corporations and rich people do have too much influence, should pay more taxes, and so on. Can anything be done about this? Sure—even the Constitution is not immutable. If you don’t like something in the Constitution, you are not without recourse.

You can always try for a constitutional amendment. There are several out there now, addressing the unpopularity of Citizens United. Versions differ, but all of the proposed amendments aspire to overturn the Supreme Court ruling and re-install contribution limits in federal elections. I don’t know about you, but I get nervous when people start talking constitutional amendment. Who knows what else will sneak into the Constitution while everybody is looking the other way? You head to Philadelphia (for old times’ sake) with a pencil and a big eraser, intent on cleaning up this First Amendment mess and maybe, if there’s time, also using your eraser on the Second, with its “right to bear arms.” (I mean, what were they thinking?) You turn your back for a moment, just to remind yourself what’s in Amendment 19 (giving women the vote) or Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution (a nice one, enumerating when and where members of Congress can be arrested), and suddenly someone has run away with the 14th and it’s unconstitutional to make a salad without balsamic vinegar.

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nyway, you can’t easily amend your way out of the problems raised by Citizens United, as you can the problems raised by, say, the Second Amendment: Citizens United, unlike the Second Amendment, is not an out-of-date decision that needs to be rehabbed. It was a good decision. It was correctly decided. It is not in there by historical accident. It should not be reversed. The proper way to “fix” the problem that many people see is to change people’s minds, not to change the Constitution, which would require inserting language into the First Amendment that directly violates First Amendment values. First Amendment values say that if you want a more “level playing field” you must raise the low ground. You can’t level the playing field by lowering the high ground.

And the whole problem might be solved

by Stein’s Law (named for the late economist Herb Stein): “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” If enough people are enraged enough by the imbalance of political power caused by money, they will vote against big money, which will turn it into a negative. www.vanityfair.com

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THE QUEEN’S SISTER

PRINCESS PRIDE Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret and their corgis in the Welsh Cottage of Royal Lodge.

A MOST INTIMATE SUBJECT

Even after one became monarch and the other her subject, H.M. Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret retained a singular intimacy.

The author provides an outsider’s firsthand glimpse of what the sisters shared, and Her Majesty’s profound loss when that tie was severed

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REINALDO HERRERA

y sister and I” was a much-heard mantra on British radio during World War II. Listeners immediately recognized the speaker as H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England, and her sister as H.R.H. Princess Margaret, four years her junior. Though Elizabeth and Margaret were brought up in a simple and loving way by their parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, future King and Queen of England, theirs was no or-

dinary childhood. They were close-knit, rarely apart for long—“we four,” as the King would refer to his family.

But the particular closeness of Elizabeth and Margaret was beyond comparison with the relationship between any other siblings in the world. Elizabeth would, in 1953, become a consecrated monarch, Crowned Queen of England, ruler of about 130 million subjects on five continents. Margaret MAY

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THE QUEEN’S SISTER would at the same time become one of her subjects. And yet, despite this permanent distinction, they had a love, friendship, and conspiracy that were impressive to behold.

Princess Margaret had a telephone on her desk in Kensington Palace with a direct line to the Queen in Buckingham Palace, on which the two would gossip and laugh with each other daily. I never heard Princess Margaret refer to the Queen in public as anything but “The Queen”; in private she became “Lilibet,” her nickname since childhood, or, simply, “my sister.”

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met Princess Margaret in the late 50s at Ronald and Marietta Tree’s house in Barbados. Years later my wife, Carolina, and I had the honor to be introduced to the Queen.

The Queen was a star. You felt, in her presence, the power and dignity of a crowned and consecrated monarch. It did not matter what she was doing—feeding her dogs, having a serious talk, or just plain romping around—you never forgot she was the Queen. Princess Margaret, on the other hand, could have been anybody she wanted had she been born into any other family. She was a keenly intelligent woman, curious about art, religion, sex, and philosophy—and, of course, good gossip. Privately, she was also a wonderful mimic and actress and knew all the lyrics to popular songs and hated it when you did not. (A favorite musical was Call Me Madam.) In public, she could be stoic. For nearly five decades, she bore with great dignity the criticism and envy that people dared not show the Queen.

and Prince Charles, then about 27, who used to practice in the morning balancing his two-pound bearskin hat on his head so that it wouldn’t topple over during Trooping the Colour, the annual celebration of the Queen’s birthday, which was to take place the following week. In the evenings we played charades (though the Queen Mother and Carolina refused to participate, as they loathed the game), had great conversations, and danced a mean conga.

When Princess Margaret died, at age 71, in February 2002, the Queen lost her most

intimate companion. Margaret’s funeral was observed quietly with pomp at Windsor Castle on the 50th anniversary of her father’s funeral, and two months before her mother’s. I think it was the only time anyone ever saw the Queen show her emotions in public.

Never explaining anything to the world— what she feels, or why she does what she does—is part of her greatness. But for a few minutes that day, as she stood by the steps of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, watching her sister’s coffin being borne away, her eyes betrayed her.

PRINCESS MARGARET HAD A TELEPHONE ON HER DESK IN KENSINGTON PALACE

WITH A DIRECT LINE TO THE QUEEN IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE.

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n the mid-1970s, Carolina SIBLING ROYALTY and I were guests at Royal Margaret and Elizabeth, Lodge, the official resiphotographed by dence of the Queen Mother, Cecil Beaton on the near Windsor Castle. One Ministers’ Staircase, Sunday, the Queen and at Buckingham Prince Philip came by before Palace, 1946. going to church. Princess Margaret informed me, Carolina, and her cousin John Bowes Lyons—all Catholics—that we must be ecumenical and join the Queen for the Anglican service. Sitting in the royal box, next to the altar in the Royal Chapel of All Saints, I received from Prince Philip for the next half-hour a series of nudges in the ribs and commanding whispers: “Sit!” “Kneel!”

“Stand!”

After church, when we all returned to Royal Lodge, the Queen asked her mother, rather knowingly, “How’s Margaret this morning?” I suspect the Queen was wary of her sister’s moods. The Princess, meanwhile, was getting a good suntan on the terrace.

We were a small party. Among the dinner guests were the critic Kenneth Tynan and his wife, Kathleen; Princess Anne and her then husband, Captain Mark Phillips; MAY

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My Sister, She can be your fiercest defender, chief tormentor, psychic twin, closest As the high-profile siblings in this portfolio will attest, whether Silicon Valley

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confidante, or all of the above. She’ll push your buttons and steal your clothes.

C.E.O., fashion designer, or Hollywood star, she’s first and forever your sister

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B I R T H O R D E R : Kidada (42), Rashida (40). H O M E T O W N : Los Angeles. O C C U PAT I O N S : Kidada: “Designer, author, creative director.” Rashida: “Actress, writer, producer.” W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Kidada: “Music, childhood, sense of humor, the 90s, and respecting our very different personalities.”

Rashida: “Music, 90s memories, our parents.” W H AT D O Y O U F I G H T O V E R ? Kidada: “Philosophies of life.”

Rashida: “Communication, approach to life.” W H O ’ S B O S S I E R ? Kidada: “She would say me, and I think it’s her, but in reality we are probably equally bossy.” Rashida: “We are both bossy in different ways.

Although Kidada does call me ‘Baby Boss.’ ” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Kidada: “My sister is focused and practical and grounded.” Rashida: “She is a true original.”

Photographed by J A S O N B E L L in an Aston Martin at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City, California.

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he biblical story of the first brothers gives us the mortal clash of Cain and Abel, but when it comes to the first sisters, the book of Genesis is mum. Whoever they were, that alpha pair of XX offspring remains unnamed and unknown. It is Greek myth, with its love-struck forces of nature, that makes a specialty of sisters, breeding one fanciful sorority after another. Often they came in threes, like the Graces and the Fates (also the Gorgons, but we won’t go there). And then there were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), otherwise known as the Muses, the nine goddesses who inspire immortal accomplishments. John Milton called them “Sisters of the sacred well,” catching something of the inner sanctum shared by any set of sisters—their fathomless corporeal connection, the secrets that flow between them, a oneness that transcends. The déjà vu of sisters grouped in a photograph is a beguiling genetic echo chamber. As different as blossoms in a nosegay, as alike as bullets from a gun barrel, sisters have given history its romantic flourishes and its deep stings. In twos: the Boleyns and Bouviers. In threes: the Brontës, Cushings, and McKims of yore, the Kirkes and Delevingnes today. In fours: the doomed grand duchesses of the Romanov empire, mourned in perpetuity, and the preternatural Parker girls—Dorian Leigh and Suzy Parker blazing a trail as Paris models while their SIENNA & SAVANNAH MILLER reputedly even more gorgeous B I R T H O R D E R : Savannah (37), Sienna (34). H O M E T O W N S : Savannah: Stroud, England. Sienna: London. middle sisters, Florian and O C C U PAT I O N S : Savannah: fashion designer. Sienna: actress. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ?

Georgibell, chose hearth Savannah: “Our wonky family, motherhood, and everything.” Sienna: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” and home. Jumping to six, W H AT D O Y O U F I G H T O V E R ? Savannah: “Who is going to cook.” Sienna: “We both have a tendency there are the Mitford sisters. to be self-critical and fight when we feel the need to defend the other from herself.”

These blue-eyed Titanias of B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Savannah: “She is my voice of reason, my confidante, and the ultimate friend.

Northumberland, with their She never fails to entertain and amuse me and is the most loyal and constant thing in my life.

Cupid’s-bow lips and Hons’ In short, she is my other half.” Sienna: “She is the most steadfast, loyal, and loving creature on the planet.

Cupboard dialect, seemed She is elegant and funny and resilient. I love her like nothing else. We share a heart.” to have the Fairy Queen’s Photographed by J U L I A N B R O A D outside the Portobello Hotel in London.

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run of the world, a freedom that brought two of them to ruin. (See “That Mitford Mystique,” by James Wolcott, on page 86.)

Some sisters maintain the sacred well with relative calm, but for others competition ruffles the surface, the waters reflecting ambitions that are too close for comfort. Sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine sparred off and on, spurring each other to award-winning performances, the only sisters to have both won Oscars for best actress.

(See “De Havilland’s Bumpy Flight,” by William Stadiem, on page 146.) And the identical twins Ann Landers (“Ask Ann Landers”) and Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”), their syndicated advice columns dominating the field for decades, were competing oracles of wisdom who at times stopped speaking to each other. With Gypsy Rose Lee and June Havoc it was Burlesque versus Broadway. Enmeshed with Mom, who played one against the other, they were in constant discord.

That said, let no man dare criticize “Gyp” to June, or vice versa.

Even when the love is uncomplicated, the living mirror of a sister can be confronting. Couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland—each knew her sister to be the beauty, and each, after struggling with the comparison, went on to enlarge the boundaries of the beautiful. Indeed, sisters are often complicit on this subject, as their numbers in high fashion prove. One thinks of the great Callot Soeurs, a foursome, and of the Boué sisters, those two “seagulls of lace.” Taking their work for Rodarte to strange dark places, our Mulleavy sisters, Kate and Laura, might be called “nightingales of lace.” And where would the house of Fendi be without its five daughters, who in 1946 breathed forza vitale into their parents’ atelier, lifting the business into its future?

Graces, fates, muses. The women in this portfolio have faces that could launch ships. Some have dynastic pedigrees, which they wear with creativity and purpose. Some are building their own dynasties.

Collectively, however, these women put one in mind of the Pleiades, daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione. They were known as the “sailing” Seven Sisters and were likely named for a star cluster in the constellation Taurus, which guided navigation at sea.

(The elite women’s colleges of the East Coast would be christened “the Seven Sisters”; see “Degrees of Separation,” by Lisa Birnbach, on page 138.) Here we offer star clusters of sisters in full sail: shining their light in the firmaments of film, music, photography, design, and science; some navigating the tricky transition from ingenue “It” to the deeper achievements of adulthood; and at least one sister still hiding the sweater she pinched from Big Sis back in high school, — L AURA JACOBS more than 20 years ago.

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LOLA, DOMINO & JEMIMA KIRKE BIRTH ORDER: Domino (33), Jemima (32), Lola (25). HOMETOWN: N.Y.C. ANY BROTHERS? “Gregory! He’s a legend.” OCCUPATIONS: Domino: “Musician, doula/birth educator.” Jemima: artist, actor.

Lola: actor, writer. WHAT DO YOU BOND OVER? Domino: “Good music, reproductive rights, motherhood, T-shirts, childhood.” Jemima: “Our mutual frustration with our parents. Also songs.” Lola: “How annoyed we are at the other sister, how talented they are.” WHAT DO YOU FIGHT OVER? Domino: “Motherhood, parents, T-shirts, food, boyfriends.” Jemima: “How selfish they both are compared to me.” Lola: “With Domino—what she said she would do and then how she didn’t. With Jemima—what I said I would do, how I did it, but how for some reason she still thinks I didn’t.” WHO’S THE ALPHA SISTER? Jemima: “We’re all alphas.” BEST THING ABOUT YOUR SISTERS: Domino: “They keep me sane, make me laugh, and smell good.”

Photographed by J A S O N B E L L at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia, California.

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RUMER, SCOUT & TALLULAH WILLIS B I R T H O R D E R : Rumer (27), Scout (24), Tallulah (22). H O M E T O W N : Sun Valley, Idaho. O C C U PAT I O N S :

Rumer: actor, singer, dancer. Scout: musician, designer. Tallulah: illustrator.

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W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Tallulah: “There’s this shared camaraderie that they are the only two

human beings who have had the same experience with the same parents as you.” Scout: “We have a certain soul-deep connection that forms the main axis around which my life spins.” Rumer: “We almost have a secret language that we share, and we can make each other laugh like no one else can.” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R S : Tallulah: “Even when I garble out half a sentence, they still know exactly what I’m saying.” Rumer: “They continually inspire me every day to be the best version of myself.”

Scout: “They are my safety net as well as the trampoline that launches me into uncharted territory.”

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JANE & AERIN LAUDER B I R T H O R D E R : Aerin (46), Jane (42). H O M E T O W N : New York.

O C C U PAT I O N S : Aerin: style and image director at Estée Lauder and founder and creative director of Aerin. Jane: global brand president, Clinique. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Aerin: “Family memories, fun dinners, and beauty.” Jane: “Our parents, fashion, and beauty.” W H AT D O Y O U F I G H T O V E R ? Aerin: “We barely fight, but since I am the older sister I always used to tell her the party

was at my Barbie house!” Jane: “Since she is older she can be bossy, but her advice is usually good, so I tend to forgive her!” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Aerin: “Her dedication, passion, and strength.” Jane: “She is the funniest person I know. She is fiercely loyal and always supports me.”

Photographed by C L A I B O R N E S WA N S O N F R A N K at the Neue Galerie in New York City.

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(1) Mara sisters: actresses Rooney, 31, and Kate, 33.

(2) Knowles sisters: musicians Beyoncé, 34, and Solange, 29.

(3) Jagger sisters: models Lizzy, 32, and Georgia May, 24. (4) Miller sisters: Pia Getty, 49, H.R.H. Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, 47, and Alexandra Von Fürstenberg, 43; photographed by Herb Ritts in 1995.

(5) Obama sisters: First Daughters Malia, 17, and Sasha, 14.

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MADDI, SUKI & IMOGEN WATERHOUSE Suki: “Talking about our parents.” Imogen: “Funny things we have in common.” Maddi: “Music, clothes, dancing, singing, movies.” W H AT D O Y O U F I G H T O V E R ? Suki: “I used to fight with Immy about borrowing my clothes, but now she has things I like to borrow, so it’s a collective wardrobe.” Imogen: “When they eat my food.”

Maddi: “Clothes!” W H O ’ S B O S S I E S T ? Suki: “Imogen. She keeps me in line.” Imogen: “Probably me.”

Maddi: “Me.” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R S : Suki: “Immy can go anywhere and make people laugh.

Maddi is a badass.” Imogen: “We are genuine friends.” Maddi: “Everything.”

Photographed by J A S O N B E L L at Sunbeam Studios in London.

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B I R T H O R D E R : Suki (24), Imogen (21), Maddi (16). H O M E T O W N : London. A N Y B R O T H E R S ? Maddi’s twin, Charlie.

O C C U PAT I O N S : Suki: actor. Imogen: actor, model. Maddi: student, model. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ?

@vf.com To flip through CHILDHOOD PHOTOGRAPHS of the Millers, Waterhouses, and others, go to VF.COM.

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B I R T H O R D E R : Lydia (29), Irene (27). H O M E T O W N : London. A N Y B R O T H E R S ? “Charles! He’s the youngest.”

O C C U PAT I O N S : Lydia: bar and restaurant development at Rocco Forte Hotels. Irene: training and product development at Rocco Forte Hotels. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? “We chat about work mainly, discuss

and compare clothes and the interior design of our flats. And of course boys. And our mother.”

W H O ’ S B O S S I E R ? Irene: “Lydia! Definitely.” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Lydia: “She’s the person I can

share everything with.” Irene: “I can go to her for advice on anything. I really do look up to her.”

Photographed by M A R Y M C C A R T N E Y in the Kipling Suite at Brown’s Hotel in London.

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IRENE & LYDIA FORTE

ANNE, SUSAN & JANET WOJCICKI B I R T H O R D E R : Susan (47), Janet (46), Anne (42). H O M E T O W N S : Susan: Palo Alto. Janet: San Francisco. Anne: Stanford.

O C C U PAT I O N S : Susan: C.E.O., YouTube. Janet: associate professor, pediatrics, U.C.S.F. Anne: C.E.O., 23andMe. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Susan: “Hair.” Janet: “Discussions about our parents’ idiosyncrasies.”

Anne: “The experience of growing up surrounded by particle physicists. And our hair.” FAV O R I T E I T E M O F C L O T H I N G T O B O R R O W F R O M Y O U R S I S T E R : Anne: “I stole a sweater from Janet back in high school and I have been hiding it in my closet for over 20 years now!” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R S : Susan: “They are my best friends.”

Janet: “They are inspiring, fun, and luckily both have a great sense of humor!” Anne: “I just love being with them.”

Photographed by D O U G L A S F R I E D M A N on the Living Roof of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

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(1) Middleton sisters: H.R.H. the Duchess of Cambridge, 34, and Pippa Middleton, 32. (2) Herrera sisters: Carolina Herrera fashion executives Carolina Herrera De Baez, 46, and Patricia Herrera Lansing, 43. (3) Mulleavy sisters: Rodarte founders Laura, 35, and Kate, 37. (4) Hadid sisters: models Bella, 19, and Gigi, 21. (5) Jenner sisters: models and social-media icons Kendall, 20, and Kylie, 18.

(6) Williams sisters: tennis champions Venus, 35, and Serena, 34.

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TAMERA & TIA MOWRY F OR C R E DI TS, SE E PAG E 15 9

B I R T H O R D E R : Tamera is two minutes older (36). H O M E T O W N S : Tamera: Los Angeles. Tia: Gelnhausen, Germany. A N Y B R O T H E R S ? Tahj and Tavior. O C C U PAT I O N S : Tamera: talk-show host (The Real ), producer, actress.

Tia: actress, author, executive producer, entrepreneur. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Tamera: “Our children.” Tia: “We both work really hard to keep our character and integrity intact in Hollywood.” W H AT D O Y O U F I G H T O V E R ? Tamera: “To be heard and understood.” Tia: “Being misunderstood. Sometimes our differences can get in the way. We may look alike, but we are very different.” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Tamera: “Her drive to achieve anything she wants.” Tia: “I admire her patience and faith in God.” Photographed by J A S O N B E L L at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, California.

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ESTHER & BELLA FREUD B I R T H O R D E R : Bella (55), Esther (53). H O M E T O W N : London. A N Y B R O T H E R S ? “Quite a few beloved half-brothers.”

O C C U PAT I O N S : Bella: fashion designer. Esther: writer. W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Bella: “Our view

of the world, solving our problems, being scathing.” Esther: “Pretty much everything.”

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D I D Y O U S H A R E A B E D R O O M ? Bella: “Yes. Luckily for me, Esther told me stories every night.” Esther: “Bella always got the top bunk.” W H O ’ S T H E A L P H A S I S T E R ? Bella: “I threatened the bullies.” Esther: “I like stepping back into her glamorous shadow.” B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Bella: “She is always the person

I want to talk to most—she is so funny and tells the best stories. Whenever anything interesting happens, I want to tell Esther. She’s the person I trust most in the world; her company is the best I can think of. It’s always been that way.” Esther: “Her incredible wisdom and support. I can’t imagine my life without her.”

Photographed by J U L I A N B R O A D at Bella Freud’s house in London.

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ESTE, DANIELLE & ALANA HAIM B I R T H O R D E R : Este (30), Danielle (27), Alana (24). H O M E T O W N : Valley Village, California. O C C U PAT I O N S :

Este: “Bass player, rump shaker.” Danielle: “Guitar player, song slayer.” Alana: “Klutz by day, musician by night.” W H AT D O Y O U B O N D O V E R ? Este: “We all have a strong love of dancing.” Danielle: “It might sound a bit obvious, but music really did bring us together.” Alana: “Spending hours at Tower Records trying to one-up each other on who could find the best albums.” W H AT D O Y O U F I G H T O V E R ? Este: “What the best Bowie album is.” Danielle: “Who gets to sit shotgun.” Alana: “Who gets first dibs on whatever Danielle brings home from the vintage store.” W H O ’ S B O S S I E S T ? Alana: “We are each individually badass bosses.”

B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R S : Este: “They’re the two funniest people I know, and we have each other’s back no matter what.” Danielle: “Sister telepathy.” Alana: “Having built-in best friends.”

Photographed by L A U R E N D U K O F F in Altadena, California.

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B I R T H O R D E R : Mary (46), Stella (44). H O M E T O W N : London. O C C U PAT I O N S : Mary: art photographer.

Stella: fashion designer. B E S T T H I N G A B O U T Y O U R S I S T E R : Mary: “So many of my childhood memories star my little sis, smiling, goofing, pushing each other around, falling out, making up. We understand each other; we are there for each other—I would be lost without her.” Stella: “Mary is more like a twin to me than an older sister.

All my life she has been by my side. I can share everything with her without being judged.

Between her and me we make 100 percent of our mum, and that makes my heart warm. She is my best friend.”

Photographed by M A R Y M C C A R T N E Y in London.

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Thanks to her uncensored and deeply personal humor, Amy Schumer has become America’s hottest comedienne, with a hit movie under her belt and a viral sketch show going into its fourth season.

The downside: her new status as a lightning rod. Can funny survive fame, controversy, and even tragedy? BRUCE HANDY finds an unusually honest star struggling to stay fearless

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INCOMING! Amy Schumer, photographed in New York City.

F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO V F. COM/ C R E DI TS

SCHUMER WEARS A BODYSUIT

BY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION; SHOES BY RUPERT SANDERSON.

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Theory of Relatability

f Hollywood gave out trophies for agents, managers, and publicists, Schumer’s team would have won one last year, too.

Trainwreck built on the accolades and viral appeal of Inside Amy Schumer, grossing $110 million in the U.S. upon its release in July. Schumer followed the film with a well-received and decently if not spectacularly rated October appearance hosting Saturday Night Live and, a week after that, the premiere of her first HBO special, Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo, directed by Chris Rock. Throughout the year Schumer graced multiple magazine covers, looking genuinely sexy for American Glamour, which put her in a powder-blue dress and bra, and ironically sexy for GQ, for which she wore Princess Leia’s “slave” costume and seductively sucked C-3PO’s left index finger. (Inside the magazine she was photographed giving a blow job to a lightsaber.) In the spring she was a candidate to take over The Daily Show, a potential opportunity she ultimately withdrew from. In 2014, she canceled a book contract for $1 million with HarperCollins and, this past September, signed a new one, for $8 to $10 million, with Simon & Schuster. (The result, a collection of essays now titled The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, will be published in August.)

She was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and one of People’s 100 Most Beautiful. All of which went toward making Schumer the biggest breakout star of 2015, unless maybe you count BB-8.

“This sounds cliché, but she is so incredibly ‘relatable,’ ” Kent Alterman, the president of original programming at Comedy Central, said, employing a reviled but useful term of art in Hollywood. “To have someone that smart and talented but at the same time that relatable is rare. And I think partly what fueled her popularity so quickly is that what she had to say resonated for both men and women.

She kind of transcends gender—ironically, because a lot of her stuff is about gender. But it’s never alienating. It’s relatable to men and women simultaneously.” The ratings back Alterman up: the audience for Season Three of Inside Amy Schumer was 63 percent male, on average—just four points lower than the network’s norm.

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H A I R PRO DUCTS BY K ÉR A STA SE PA RI S ( S CH UME R) A N D M AT RI X ( CA RA M E LE ) ; M A KE UP PRO DUC TS BY CHANEL (C ARAMELE) A N D GI ORGI O A R MA N I ( SCHUM ER ) ; NA I L E NA M EL BY DE B OR A H L I P PMA N N ( SCHU ME R) ; HA I R BY KI M GUE LDNE R (SCHUMER)

ne afternoon late last fall, the writers and producers of Inside Amy Schumer were sitting around a long table in their Manhattan production offices punching up scripts for the sketch show’s fourth season. The staff has six female writers and four male writers—an unusual ratio for TV comedy, where most series are lucky to have one or two women on their writing teams.

Schumer is herself a writer and executive producer on the Comedy Central show, which premiered in 2013, and though another producer sat at the head of the table and appeared to be nominally in charge, the star guided the discussions and script revisions with a gentle, collaborative, but firm hand—modeling a positive female leadership style, as a business-school text might put it. She gave the writers space to get silly, even preposterous, as they pitched lines, before bringing the table back to earth, making a decision, and moving on to the next joke.

For instance, one of the male writers half-seriously pitched a line referencing a particularly rarefied genre of pornography. “That’s a thing?”

Schumer asked. Assured that it was, she paused as if mulling it over, then put on the sweet but brittle voice of a Jennifer Garner character: “Let’s not educate our audience about that.” The table laughed.

Not that Schumer, 34, is shy when it comes to human bodies and what can be done with and between them, and the many social implications thereof. She made a name for herself as a stand-up by being every bit as graphic and sexual as any male comic, while also bringing an anthropologist’s eye to the subject. “Are you that girl from the television who talks about her pussy all the time?,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus asks her in a sketch from Inside Amy Schumer’s third season, when Schumer, playing herself, stumbles upon LouisDreyfus, Tina Fey, and Patricia Arquette, also as themselves, having a bucolic picnic to celebrate Louis-Dreyfus’s official “last fuckable day” in Hollywood. “In every actress’s life, the media decides when you finally reach the point where you’re not believably fuckable anymore,” Louis-Dreyfus explains. “Who tells you?” Schumer asks innocently. There are signs, Fey says. “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline and then like 20 minutes later she was his mom in Forrest Gump?” And actors? “They’re fuckable forever. They could be 100 and nothing but white spiders coming out but they’re fuckable,” Fey says, pantomiming a hand job.

As cutting as that sketch was, it may not have been the season’s smartest or funniest take on Hollywood sexism. Another contender was a deadpan, pitch-perfect parody of 12 Angry Men, co-directed

by Schumer and shot in black-and-white homage to Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film, with a cast that included Jeff Goldblum, Paul Giamatti, Vincent Kartheiser, and John Hawkes as jurors trying to come to a unanimous verdict on whether or not Schumer is “hot enough” for TV. (“I definitely don’t think she’s protagonist hot,” insists

one juror. “But Kevin James is?” replies Hawkes, in the holdout Henry Fonda role.) The season opener approached Topic A from yet another angle: a fake music video titled “Milk, Milk, Lemonade,” which parodied hip-hop’s obsession with female booties (i.e., “where fudge is made”) with Schumer and a crew of dancers twerking and whatnot in front of a lascivious camera to lines such as “This is where her poo comes out… This is what you think is hot.”

The show’s blending of raunch and pointed satire (well, most of the time; the hip-hop sketch plays better and sharper than it maybe reads) has managed to amuse Comedy Central’s bro-centric audience while also winning the show a Peabody Award as well as last year’s Emmy for outstanding variety sketch series. Schumer’s smarts and frankness, along with an underlying sweetness, were equally essential to the success of her first feature film, Trainwreck, released last year, which she wrote and starred in for director Judd Apatow, playing a character named Amy loosely modeled on her stand-up persona, which is loosely modeled on herself—a female counterpart to the substance-abusing, commitment-phobic, potty-mouthed manboys who populate so much of contemporary film comedy.

To be sure, Schumer is not the first female comedian to work blue or acknowledge that, like most people, she enjoys sex, but few would be as forthright and unapologetic about it—as male, if you will—as she was last June, when she declared, while accepting an honor at Glamour U.K.’s Women of the Year Awards, “I’m probably like 160 pounds right now and I can catch a dick whenever I want. Like, that’s the truth. It’s not a problem!”

A N D MA RC ME NA ( CA RA M E LE ) ; MA KE UP BY E L A I NE M A DE L ON ( CA RA M EL E ) A N D A ND RÉ A T I LL E R ( SCHUMER); MANI C URE

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Still, a new sketch that I watched Schumer and her writers work on may put that to the test. It involved a group of expectant mothers getting together to boast about the masochistic extremes they’d be putting themselves through before and during delivery because, as the repeated refrain goes, “it’s better for the baby.” Sample dialogue: “Did you know you need extra calories while you breast-feed?

Yes, which is why, after my husband chews through the umbilical cord, I’m gonna braid it together with a Twizzler and just kind of gnaw on that as like a fun snack. It’s better for the baby.” The sketch was written by Jessi Klein, an executive producer and the show’s head writer. I’ll spare you the staff’s riffs on how to describe what a vagina looks like after birth; rest assured, they were funny.

The next sketch that came up at the table was written by Schumer and seemed to reflect the downside of her annus mirabilis. In it, she plays herself, getting coffee at a Starbucks, where the barista and various customers react to her celebrity. Someone wants to take a selfie, then grabs Schumer’s “boob” to be funny. Someone else asks for $100 “in small bills.” The barista, who confuses Schumer with “Fat Amy from the singing movies,” demands that she make a video and text it to the barista’s brother. The joke throughout is that, no matter how accommodating Schumer is to her fans, they turn on her.

“You’re a four,” someone tells her. “I was gonna pirate Trainwreck, but you’ve changed,” sneers another.

At the table, the writers took parts and read the sketch aloud, prefatory to punching it up. When they finished, Schumer joked that the line readings had been almost too hostile. “I think everyone played it like you hate me,” she said. “But that’s just inside you.”

Meaning the writers shouldn’t confuse their own loathing for her with the characters’ slightly less intense loathing. More laughs.

As the group began discussing the sketch, someone asked Schumer how much was drawn from real life. Pretty much all of it, Schumer said, although the sketch’s final interaction, where a woman who admires Schumer’s legs then begins eating one, was presumably metaphorical.

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“We Got into a Meatball Sub”

couple of weeks later Schumer and I met for an interview at her apartment, on a pleasant but nondescript block of the Upper West Side. It was well after dark. We met on the sidewalk after she pulled up in an S.U.V., driven home after another long day at the midtown production office. Her apartment, recently purchased, is at the top of several flights of stairs, and as we entered and she turned on the lights, she apologized for its being a mess, explaining that a girlfriend had crashed on her couch the previous night after a fight with a boyfriend. In Schumer’s words, “We got into a meatball sub and some scotch last night. Like, I’m not going to let her get drunk alone.” Which is exactly the kind of thing you’d hope Amy Schumer would say by way of introduction. But aside

from a casually strewn blanket, the apartment didn’t look like a mess to me—certainly not what you’d expect the “Amy Schumer” character’s to look like after a long night of female bonding. (No array of little airplane booze bottles. No empty trays of Double Stuf Oreos.)

The apartment, with its odd angles and eccentric layout, reminded me of the kind of funky-charming New York apartments that young single people somehow land in movies and TV shows but almost never in real life—a perfect pad for Holly Golightly or Rachel Green.

Schumer’s Emmy and Peabody Awards looked nice on the shelves.

I also noticed multiple framed pictures of Schumer and a gang of girlfriends. Their faces were even smiling from the cover of a throw pillow. “It’s all my friends from high school—these girls, these monsters,” Schumer said, with affection. “They’re afraid I’m going to forget about them. So, like, they keep buying me things, to remind me of them.” She said that she had made sure to introduce them all, seven in total, to Jennifer Lawrence, her newest friend. (The two had made headlines vacationing in the Hamptons with Schumer’s girlfriends over the summer.) She also said that a chunk of her afternoon that day had been devoted to wrangling tickets for the entire group to the premiere of Lawrence’s final Hunger Games movie, which was taking place the next night. “I was like, ‘I have to bring all my friends from high school.’ They”—Lawrence’s people—“were like, ‘Are you serious?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, if I go and don’t bring them, it’ll be an issue.’ ” I mention this because, as with the Starbucks sketch, Schumer seemed very consciously torn between who she had been for the first 30-odd years of her life and where work, fame, and opportunity seem to be taking her. She said that her schedule was fully booked through July, “things on top of things,” what with the sketch show, stand-up appearances, film work, events, fund-raisers, promotional obligations. She was grateful … but. “I love all the things that I’m doing,” she said, “but that all my time is accounted for? I’m not Joan Rivers, where I’m like, ‘A full calendar is happiness.’ I would love to do nothing, like waking up and not knowing what you’re going to do that day.” She sighed. “The other day I was so overwhelmed I left work an hour early and I just went and watched Labyrinth on my sister’s couch.” Labyrinth? The 1986 Jim Henson movie in which David Bowie played a goblin king with a wig that made him look like an evil blond mushroom? “It was a big deal in our house growing up,” Schumer said with a rare trace of sheepishness. “It holds up. I mean, the movie’s weird, but it just felt so good to just lay there, while it was still light out, and watch a movie.”

By her account, Schumer logs a lot of time on her sister’s couch.

Kim Caramele, who lives just 10 blocks from Schumer, is younger by nearly four years, is married (to Vincent Caramele, whom she met as a freshman at Pace University in Westchester; Amy was one of two witnesses at Kim’s courthouse wedding), and is not to be confused, not entirely, with the younger married sister named Kim in Trainwreck, who was played by Brie Larson. The real sisters get along better than

“Amy will always say what she thinks is important to say. That is why people love her,” says Judd Apatow.

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their movie counterparts, and have since they were girls. Amy was born on the Upper East Schumer with Side, but following a financial setback the famKim Caramele, ily moved to Long Island, where Kim was born her sister and where the girls were constant companions and co-writer, photographed growing up in various towns, including Rockin N.Y.C. ville Centre and South Hempstead; according to Kim, they even worked side by side as teenagers and young women in the same bars and restaurants, making their way from Turquoise, a boardwalk joint in Long Beach, to the Stanton Social, a scene-y Lower East Side restaurant where—if for some reason you want to—you can order Philly-cheesesteak sliders with truffleand-goat-cheese fondue. Amy and Kim remain constant companions, their only significant hiatus aside from college (Amy went to Towson University, in Baltimore) being the four years when Caramele moved to Chicago, where she worked as a school psychologist. But Schumer talked her into moving to New York to work on the second season of Inside Amy Schumer, where Caramele continues as a writer and producer (as does, in the latter capacity, her husband, Vincent). Kim was also a producer on Trainwreck and the HBO special, and the sisters have collaborated on a screenplay for a mother-daughter comedy, re-writing an original script by Katie Dippold (The Heat and the forthcoming Ghostbusters reboot); that project will star Schumer and Goldie Hawn and is scheduled to begin shooting May 23 with director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before, Warm Bodies).

Followers of Schumer’s Twitter and Instagram accounts, where she often posts pictures of herself and Kim, know Caramele as #roadmanager, a nickname she acquired when she worked for her sister in that capacity after she joined the staff of Inside Amy Schumer.

“I’d go to all her [stand-up] shows,” Caramele said. “I was really the liaison between her and the venues. I’d talk to the venue, make sure that everything was O.K., that she had everything she needed, that the house was opening on time. Which is funny, as one thinks back on it, because usually when you see people and their managers, they don’t look like me. I would show up in sweatpants and braids, and people would be like, ‘Who the fuck is this girl?’ I’d be”—she affected an angry, manager-y voice—“ ‘This stool doesn’t have a back and it should.’ And they’d be, ‘Uh, what … ?’ But it made sense because I wanted everything to go well because I love her and care about her.

It was a really natural protective thing for me to do.”

I told Caramele that it sounded as if she helped keep her sister on an even keel. Not exactly, Kim replied. “She’s not like this dramatic person who will call me with problems every night. She doesn’t call for emotional support. It’s more like if she tweets something or posts a picture of herself on Instagram sitting on a toilet, I’ll text her and be like, ‘Babe … ?’ And she’ll be like, ‘Sorry!’ She used to ask me, like, ‘Can I tweet this?’ And I’d be, ‘No!’ But now she doesn’t ask me and I just yell at her after the fact.”

RELATED NOTES

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Let Her Entertain You

F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO V F. COM/ C R E D ITS

chumer said she cannot remember a time when she didn’t want to be a performer. “As soon as I could make expressions, I was trying to make my parents laugh.” The way a lot of kids do, she and Kim enjoyed putting on family shows, along with their older half-brother, Jason Stein (now an avant-garde jazz musician, playing bass clarinet, which, as a primary instrument, is probably even rarer in jazz than the harp). But from the beginning Amy was committed to her craft. “My sister and brother liked to play characters that already existed, like Snow White, but I liked to make up my own characters, and I’d walk around as that character in the house, and people would ad-

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dress me as her. Madame Lavitchky was a big one. She was a fortuneteller. I would wrap my head and turn a glass vase upside down and I’d give readings to everyone, very dramatic. Like ‘Your husband’s going to die at war.’ Crazy shit.” Fans of her series and comedy specials have seen snippets of young Amy from old home-video clips, including a tag at the end of the HBO special in which a five-year-old Amy sings “Let Me Entertain You” with preternatural verve.

“She was a feisty young girl. She always had a sparkle,” said Chuck Schumer, the New York senator, who despite that avuncular observation is actually Amy’s second cousin once removed. He hasn’t been particularly close to Amy’s branch of the family, he explained, but “her father and I played stickball together,” which in New York is a sacred bond. (More on Amy and Chuck in a bit.)

The “Let Me Entertain You” job description and performance style haven’t changed all that much over the last three decades.

Adult-film stars aside, stand-up comedians are surely the most exposed of entertainers: one person, armed with only a microphone, trying to make a probably hostile and likely drunk audience laugh.

It takes nerve. And I think it’s fair to say that for female comedians in our stubbornly sexist society it takes even more nerve, or thicker skin. Schumer claimed she never felt fear or anxiety as a stand-up comic, even when she was starting out just after college, dabbling in open-mike shows while taking acting classes in Manhattan. (She had been a theater major at Towson; she’s since put her senior thesis, on the male gaze, to good use.) “I don’t experience it that way,” she said, referring to the fear of facing an audience. “Something’s wrong with me. I mean, you have to be delusional because you’re not good for a long time. But people just are nice and lie to you.”

Note: comedy-club patrons are generally not known for being nice or for masking their disapproval, so Schumer’s latter observation is probably a tribute more to a short learning curve on her part than to any forbearance from her early audiences.

In a credo-like essay she wrote several years ago for Cosmopolitan, titled “How to Be Ballsy—In Any Situation,” Schumer described a turning point in her stand-up career. In 2007, she had been a contestant on Last Comic Standing, the NBC summer reality competition, coming in fourth—her first serious national exposure. She and her fellow competitors then embarked on a three-month, 42-city tour. By her account it started well, but as the tour dragged on and moved from big cities into the hinterlands, she found she was bombing out with audiences.

She wasn’t sure why, and creeping insecurity only made things worse.

One night toward the end of the tour, I was in the middle of my set and I delivered this joke: “My boyfriend is always turning on the lights in the bedroom right before we have sex. I shut them off; he puts them on. The other day, he asked me, ‘Why are you so shy? You have a beautiful body.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, you are so cute. You think I don’t want you to see me. Awww.’ ” No laughter from the crowd. But this time, I didn’t just move on. I said, “You guys are wrong! That was funny.”

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FIRE DOWN BELOW hat assertiveness—confident Schumer, but naked too, in its bruised photographed insistence on getting her in N.Y.C. due—won the audience over SCHUMER WEARS and remains a hallmark of A T-SHIRT BY FROM PHOENIX Schumer’s comedy. “She WITH LOVE. has an unbelievable degree of confidence in herself. She definitely has the courage of her convictions, and she’s proven herself right so often,” said Alterman, the Comedy Central executive. But Schumer’s increased visibility and a probably inevitable post-success backlash among fans, the media, and colleagues and competitors in the entertainment industry have forced her to calibrate her public presence in a way she hasn’t had to in the past. “Amy’s not used to filtering herself,” Caramele said, but she’s being nudged into learning how.

For instance, Schumer apologized last summer on Twitter for an old joke of hers that had resurfaced on social media: “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.” The joke was criticized as racist, though when we spoke Schumer was repentant only to a point, falling back, in part, on the mea sort of culpa used by many comics when accused of being offensive: (a) their job is to push the envelope and accidents happen, and (b) a joke is a joke, and funny is funny (this is true as a scientific proposition but maybe less so as a social one).

“With that joke I remember thinking, Who should I use?”

Schumer said, describing how she came up with it in the first place.

“Like, it’s a formula. I got the wording of ‘consensual.’ I thought, You know what? Latin guys will be best. Because you can’t say black guys. I could have said white guys, I guess, but the choice was, like, arbitrary.” She added of the controversy, “I just think that’s selective outrage. It’s like, Well, wait. What about the jokes I made about AIDS and the jokes I made about black people? Those were O.K.? I’ve made a lot of jokes about white people.” She pointed out that she’d also listened to a lot of Jewish jokes over the years, and told some herself. “People feel how they’re going to feel,” she said, wavering between equanimity and irritation, adding, “I was just kind of like, I’m a comic. Like, can we just @vf.com skip this thing where I become famous and To watch A M Y then you guys look to burn me at the stake for S C H U M E R give something? Is there any way we can skip that?”

JENNIFER L AW R E N C E some I asked Judd Apatow, her Trainwreck direcunsolicited advice, tor and a stand-up himself, if he worried that go to VF.COM. Schumer’s new lightning-rod status would cause her to censor herself to the detriment of her comedy. He wasn’t concerned. “I think she is as fearless as ever,” he says. “She is smart and will make thoughtful adjustments now that a much larger audience is listening. Our friend Colin Quinn”—who played Amy’s dad in Trainwreck—“discussed the dangers C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 6 4

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“Amy’s not used to filtering herself,” says her younger sister, Kim Caramele (#roadmanager), but she’s being nudged into learning how.

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COMPARING NOTES Princess Lee Radziwill and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, photographed

by Benno Graziani in Conca dei Marini, Italy, 1962.

A Delicat

Jacqueline Kennedy was the First Lady and iconic widow lauded for her style and Both adored their dashing, ne’er-do-well father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, were and Peter Beard—and dealt with terrible tragedy. In a revealing interview 128

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e Balance beauty. More stylish and beautiful, in many eyes, was her sister, Lee Radziwill. drawn to the same men—including Aristotle Onassis, Rudolf Nureyev, with SAM KASHNER, Radziwill looks back at their deeply intertwined lives MAY

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orn to dazzle, they were the most famous sisters in the world, the Bouvier girls—Jacqueline and Caroline Lee. Jackie was studious, dark-haired, athletic, and reserved.

Lee—three and a half years younger—was light-haired, chubby, mischievous, adventurous. As young girls, they called each other “Jacks” and “Pekes.” “When I was seven and we lived in New York, I ran away,” Lee, now 83 and still stunning, once told Gloria Steinem. “I took my dog and started out across the Brooklyn Bridge… I didn’t get very far… It’s rather difficult to run away in your mother’s high heels.”

Raised in a 12-room duplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the sisters summered at the family estate, Lasata, on Further Lane in East Hampton. They adored their father, John Vernou Bouvier III, known as “Black Jack” for both his perpetual deep tan and his roguish reputation. A stockbroker and ladies’ man, he resembled Clark Gable so closely that he was often approached by autograph seekers. His relentless womanizing, heavy drinking, and diminishing fortune ended up derailing his marriage, to Janet Lee Bouvier, but he doted on his daughters, encouraging them not only to work hard but to “be the best.”

But there could be only one “best.” Lee loved her older sister, but she found it difficult to live up to Jackie’s accomplishments, such as winning equestrian prizes and earning top grades at Miss Porter’s School for girls, in Farmington, Connecticut. Jackie would grow up to be universally regarded as one of the most beautiful and stylish women in the world, but among those who knew both sisters, Lee was seen as being equally—if not even more—beautiful and stylish, with a keener eye for fashion, color, and design.

When asked if a love of beauty is possibly an inherited trait, Lee answered, “I think there’s a seed. If you do have it, and have the means to live that way, people who love beauty—we’re a tribe, really.”

I visited Lee in her sun-drenched apartment in April during the

“THERE’S AN UNSPOKEN RULE THAT IF YOU’RE

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GOING PLACES Greek Independence Day Parade—ironic, Jackie, flanked given her and her sister Jacqueline Kenby Lee and nedy Onassis’s connection to the Greek industrialist Gianni Agnelli, in Ravello, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Lee Italy, 1962. looked resplendent in tan slacks and a white sweater with a high, ruffled collar, her champagne- colored hair immaculately upswept into a regal coif. She is still alluring, still sensuous, and she still possesses a marvelous laugh. At one point she donned sunglasses as the sun moved brightly across her beautifully appointed living room.

Her longtime maid, Theresa, who had recently come out of retirement in Florida to help Lee, served us an exquisite luncheon of baked salmon on a small folding table in front of the fireplace. Once Lee accepted the fact that I was indeed doing a story about her, she said, “Please tell me this is not a story about my sister and me. I’m just sick of that! It’s like we’re Siamese twins!”

But it’s difficult to meet Lee and not think of her sister. Looking into her face, one has the uncanny sense of seeing Jackie’s face as well. She shares her sister’s widely set eyes and high cheekbones, although her features are more refined than Jackie’s, her coloring lighter. Truman Capote once described her eyes as “gold-brown like a glass of brandy resting on a table in front of firelight.”

One is struck by the Eastern influences in Lee’s living room, such as the kneeling ceramic camel, inspired, one guesses, by Lee’s celebrated trip to India and Pakistan with Jackie, in 1962. “Taste is an emotion,” Lee once said, and the emotion conveyed in her living room is one of peaceful refuge. As her friend André Leon Talley, the former editor-at-large for Vogue, told me, Lee is one who took to heart Diana Vreeland’s famous remark “Elegance is refusal.”

“The lack of clutter, the choices of things to put on the wall,” Talley said, “it’s all done with care and love of that objet, a sense of editing—editing her clothes and editing her friends and editing the menus for dinner. And she edits people. She edits herself. She edits her wardrobe. She edits her life.”

Perhaps the thing Lee has edited most carefully is her relationship with her sister and the Kennedys. “It’s the subject you never bring up,” Talley explained. “I mean, there’s an unspoken rule that if you’re friends with Lee you don’t talk about her sister at all.”

Lee realized early on that her father “favored Jackie… That was very clear to me, but I didn’t resent it, because I understood he had reason to … she was not only named after him … but she actually looked almost exactly like him, which was a source of great pride to my father,” Lee recalled in her 2000 book, Happy Times.

After a bitter divorce, when Jackie and Lee were 10 and 7 years old, Janet married the unprepossessing but wealthy investment banker Hugh D. Auchincloss. As she had been trained to do by her wealthy, social-climbing father, James Thomas Aloysius Lee, Janet married smartly—at least she did the second time around. Whereas Bouvier’s money had been depleted by a series of bad investments,

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late Gore Vidal once described his stepfather as “a magnum of chloroform,” but “Uncle Hughdie,” as Jackie and Lee called him, proved to be a steady husband to Janet and father to the girls. Lee in particular was enchanted by Hammersmith Farm: “To arrive there, as a child … was just a fairy tale,” she once reminisced to The New York Times. “It was good for my imagination.”

Nonetheless, the two girls were aware that they were coming into an established family and unfamiliar circumstances. “They were like little orphans,” the writer and socialite Helen Chavchavadze, who had been in the same class as Lee at Miss Porter’s, MAY

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Auchincloss’s fortune was nourished by Standard Oil. Janet moved with her girls to Merrywood, Auchincloss’s stately Georgian house with terraced gardens overlooking the Potomac River in northern Virginia, and they spent summers at Hammersmith Farm, his sprawling, 50-acre wooded estate in Newport, Rhode Island.

Suddenly thrust into a family with four step-siblings (Auchincloss had a son, Hugh, from his first marriage, to Maya de Chrapovitsky, and a son and daughter, Thomas and Nina, from his second marriage, to Nina Gore, who had a son of her own, Gore Vidal), Jackie and Lee were no longer the center of Janet’s fierce attentions. The

SIBLING REVELRY

been raised under similar circumstances in the houseLee and Jackie, hold of New York governor photographed by Peter Beard Averell Harriman, “You in Montauk, know, Peter, we both live and New York, 1972. do very well in this world of WASPs and old money and society… But you and I are not really of it.”

The normal sibling rivalry was not diminished in the sisters’ new circumstance, however. At Jackie’s coming-out party, at the Newport clambake club, in August of 1947, Lee found a way to steal Jackie’s thunder by showing up in a daring pink strapless dress sprinkled with rhinestones. (Jackie didn’t seem to mind, and in fact appropriated that dress for another debutante party.)

In their teens each sister developed her own style.

Lee, now slimmer and sleeker than her older sister, had more flair. She loved color, and she loved to be noticed. Jackie saw how boys flocked to Lee, admiring her fine-boned features and more feminine shape. (Jackie, though already a beauty, was bigboned and flat-chested.) One thing they did have in common, however, was a soft, whispery way of speaking. Lee’s voice was slightly huskier; Jackie’s had the breathy, little-girl quality of Marilyn Monroe’s, which belied her strong intelligence.

R

told Sally Bedell Smith, for the 2004 book Grace and Power.

“Jackie and Lee were very fused, the way sisters are when they haven’t had much security.”

After the divorce Bouvier had moved to a rather small, sunless one-bedroom apartment on East 74th Street. When his daughters visited, he would serve them dinner on a card table, as the dining room had been turned into a tiny bedroom for them. Their father’s reversal of fortune would leave the sisters with a lifelong awareness of their own financial security. According to biographer Sarah Bradford, Jackie once remarked to bandleader Peter Duchin, who had M AY

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The Grand Tour

ather surprisingly, after months of coaxing, Janet agreed to let 18-year-old Lee travel to Europe, in the summer of 1951, with Jackie—who had already lived in Paris, having taken her junior year abroad to study at the Sorbonne. The trip was Lee’s high-school graduation present, but it had another reason: as a consolation for Jackie after her mother and Uncle Hughdie had made her turn down Vogue’s Prix de Paris award for an essay she’d written that year. The prize was to spend a year working in Vogue’s Paris and New York offices.

With 21-year-old Jackie as her sister’s chaperone, and armed with Auchincloss letters of introduction to ambassadors and doyennes throughout Europe, the two young women made their way into the greater world, tootling around in a Hillman Minx.

What could have been more delightful for a pretty young girl in 1951 than to have been let loose in Europe? The two sisters kept a journal of their travels, illustrated with charming drawings and poems. Their reassuring letters to their mother (“We DO sew on all our buttons and wear gloves”) were belied by snapshots showing the girls in St. Mark’s Square dressed in slacks and sandals (Jackie) and a short skirt and ankle-strap shoes (Lee). “Look at us,” Lee later remarked to The New York Times about the half-century-old photographs. “How did those countries let us in? We look like two criminals arriving off the boat.”

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THE SISTERS CONTINUED TO HAUNT EACH OTHER’S LOVE LIVES “LIKE TWO TREES WHOSE BRANCHES KEPT

GETTING TANGLED UP.”

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Truths Universally Acknowledged

y marrying first, Lee had upstaged her older sister, but within two months of catching Lee’s bouquet, Jackie trumped her once more by becoming engaged to the most eligible bachelor in America, the dashing soon-to-be senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Not only was he extremely handsome, witty, and intelligent, he was very, very rich.

The wedding, held that September 12, was touted in the press as “the social event of 1953.” The gala reception, organized by Janet, was in Newport. Once again, Black Jack Bouvier had been invited

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as father of the bride. After years of disappointment and decline, he no longer cut a dashing figure, and on the big day he sulked half-dressed with a bottle of scotch in his room at the Hotel Viking, where, sadly, he got too drunk to walk his favorite daughter down the aisle. The honor fell to Hughdie Auchincloss.

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n London, Lee enjoyed an extraordinary social whirl, but the marriage was not particularly happy. For one thing, Canfield was quite a heavy drinker, and for another, the couple were unsuccessful in their attempts to conceive, according to DuBois. When Jackie visited her sister in London and Canfield asked her how he could hold on to Lee, Jackie answered, “Get more money, Michael.” When he demurred that he already had a good salary, Jackie explained, “No, Michael.

I mean real money.” But what finally ended the marriage was Lee’s affair with the émigré aristocrat Stanislaw “Stas” Radziwill.

Radziwill’s Polish family had been impoverished by the German invasion. Stas escaped to London at the end of World War II. Virtually penniless, he traded on nothing but his charm, his title (prince), and his wits, marrying a Swiss heiress and eventually earning a fortune in real estate. Bighearted, larger than life, sometimes imperious, he was well liked in London, and by the time Lee met him, he was married to his second wife, the heiress Grace Kolin. James Symington, then an attaché at the American Embassy, recalled in a phone interview the dinner party he gave for the Canfields, the Radziwills, and Lord and Lady Dudley on March 26, 1957. “I remember the date because it was a birthday party for my son. After their divorces, Lee married Radziwill, Grace married Lord Dudley, and Michael married Lady Dudley. It was quite a trio!”

Lee and Stas had their first child and only son, Anthony, less than a year after the wedding, and the marriage allowed her to flourish in a much grander style. She was now living a life that even Jackie might envy, in a handsome house at 4 Buckingham Place (near Buckingham Palace) and a 17th-century bakehouse called Turville Grange, on roughly 50 acres of gardens, stables, and a courtyard, an hour’s drive from London. She worked closely with the set designer Renzo Mongiardino to transform both houses into stunning showplaces.

Jackie was just 31 years old when she moved into the White House, becoming First Lady (a term she never liked, she said, because it always sounded too much like the name of a saddle horse). “They were our happiest years,” Jackie recalled. Kennedy was particularly proud of his wife and sister-in-law. His eyes brightened when he talked of Jackie, and according to photographer Cecil Beaton’s diaries, he once told Lee, “I love her deeply and have done everything for her. I’ve no feelMISTRESSES OF ing of letting her down, because I’ve put DISGUISE Lee and Jackie, her foremost in everything.” For the betphotographed by Ron ter part of six decades, Lee has remained Galella, while discreetly silent about her brother-in-law’s shopping on Capri, in Italy, 1970. conga line of paramours, which included

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ambassador. On the trip Lee met one of her heroes, the art historian Bernard Berenson, when she and Jackie were invited to drop in on him at I Tatti, his Florentine villa. Thanks in part to Berenson, Lee would have a lifelong fascination with art history, especially Renaissance art. “I felt like I’d met God,” she recalled.

After returning to the States, Jackie took a job, in the fall of 1951, as an “inquiring camera girl” for the Washington Times-Herald for $42.50 per week and managed to interview, among others, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Instead of going to Vassar like Jackie, Lee enrolled at Sarah Lawrence, but dropped out after three terms.

More exciting things were in the offing: she worked as a special assistant to Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and she married Michael Temple Canfield, beating her older sister to the altar.

On April 18, 1953, Lee wed the shy, handsome book-publishing scion, whom she had known and dated since she was 15. Auchincloss hosted the wedding reception at his stately Merrywood home, and Jack Bouvier—chastened by and envious of his successor’s wealth— gave away the bride. Auchincloss had slight misgivings about the marriage, though, not because of Lee’s youth at 20 years of age but because “he will never be able to afford her,” he confided to a friend, according to Diana DuBois’s book, In Her Sister’s Shadow.

Michael had been adopted by Cass Canfield, the wealthy and distinguished publisher of Harper & Row (which would become the Kennedys’ publishing house), but he was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the Duke of Kent and Kiki Preston. Kiki was an American adventuress who had first met the duke in Kenya, where reportedly she introduced him to cocaine. As a result of this thrilling rumor, young Michael assumed rather dapper English airs and dress, and—at six feet three inches, blond, and slim—he did cut an elegant figure. Lee later said that one reason she married so young was “I couldn’t wait to be on my own … and he was very bright and super-handsome.”

They moved into a tiny penthouse apartment in New York, which Lee delighted in decorating, but soon thereafter the couple decamped to London. Sent abroad to work in Harper & Row’s office there, Canfield was instead approached by the American ambassador, Winthrop Aldrich, to take the position of his special assistant, which quickly won the young American expats entrée to the best of London society.

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Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and Judith Campbell Exner.

The Kennedys were disappointed when Lee and Stas stayed in London and missed Jack’s inauguration because, the previous August, Lee had given premature birth to a second child, Anna Christina “Tina” Radziwill, which had left mother and infant in precarious health.

But there was something else brewing. According to John H. Davis, a Bouvier cousin, in his 1969 book, The Bouviers, Jackie’s “accession to the White House promised to magnify a problem [Lee] had had to cope with for some time, the problem simply of being Jackie’s sister. Although she was abundantly gifted herself … she had often been obscured by the shadow of her sister’s prominence, and now that shadow threatened to eclipse her identity.”

Nonetheless, Jackie’s two and a half years in the White House brought the sisters closer together. Overwhelmed by her new status and responsibilities, Jackie relied on Lee. “She had to travel a lot and liked to have me with her,” Lee recalled in Happy Times. “Apart from mutual affection, I think our strongest bond was a shared sense of humor.” Lee and Stas made frequent visits to the White House, Lee occupying the Queen’s Bedroom and Stas in the Lincoln Bedroom.

The couples spent three happy Christmases in Palm Beach together, with all their children.

Jackie hosted an early dinner dance in the White House for the Radziwills. Both sisters dazzled, Jackie in a white sheath gown and Lee nearly upstaging her in red brocade. Jackie, in fact, often consulted Lee in matters of fashion. Lee was more daring, and more European, in her taste, wearing the French designer Courrèges and smuggling Givenchy dresses into the White House because the president wanted Jackie to wear only American couture. “Lee was the first to be dressed in a Paris couture house, and not Jackie,” Talley explained. “Jackie loves Paris, but she’s as American as a sweater … but she’s not as American as apple pie.”

The fashion designer Ralph Rucci, who became close to Lee in 2000, agrees. “Lee has always been an original. Mrs. Vreeland said that Jacqueline Kennedy released style in this nation. Well, she had a great deal of assistance, and she had the best tutors. But Lee did it on her own. She understands clothes. Lee could put on a coat and will know how to turn her shoulder and her head and her arm and hold the coat so that it’s perfection.”

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Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds

ut Jackie’s spectacular success on a trip to Paris in 1961 turned Jackie, not Lee, into an international fashion icon. Kennedy famously introduced himself to the French press as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” and Time magazine christened Jackie “First Lady of Fashion.” In fact, Lee had been instrumental in selecting Jackie’s Givenchy wardrobe for this defining moment on the world stage.

It was the same story during the sisters’ historic state visit to India

and Pakistan, in March 1962, when more than 100,000 people lined the road as Jackie’s motorcade made its way slowly through New Delhi, shouting, “Long live Mrs. Kennedy,” as Lee sat silently beside her.

The sisters even rode a ceremonial camel, where they were perched sidesaddle in sleeveless summer dresses, pearls, and high heels. (One of Lee’s shoes fell off and was lost.) Lee was in front, holding the reins until Jackie ordered, “Hand me the reins, Lee,” according to Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s 2012 book, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, and she did.

The focus of attention was always on Jackie, who became aware of how Lee was being overlooked throughout their trip. Jackie was becoming “the most photographed woman in the world,” Cecil Beaton wrote in his diaries in February of 1968. “She is still the most photogenic person in the world, infinitely more so than her infinitely more beautiful sister, Lee Radziwill.”

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hat Jackie didn’t know at the time was that Lee’s marriage to Stas was disintegrating.

Stas took other lovers but remained devoted to Lee, even admiring her extravagance in spite of himself. “The little girl is very, very small,” he once confided to a friend, according to DuBois. “It is fantastic how much she costs to dress.”

Perhaps the glamour of her sister’s life encouraged Lee to find a way to, if not outdo Jackie, at least match her with a friend as worldly, influential, and charming to women as John Kennedy, but far, far richer: the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Socrates Onassis.

Lee described Onassis to talk-show host Larry King as “magnetic. [He] moved like a potentate, noticing and wanting to be noticed … an habitual cigar in his hand.” His estimated worth was $500 million, equivalent to more than $3 billion today.

When I asked if she had thought about marrying Onassis, she answered, “Who didn’t?”

At the time, Onassis was still involved with the opera diva Maria Callas, though Callas was married and their open affair had created a scandal in Europe. Former V.F. editor in chief Leo Lerman wrote in his diaries that Callas said, “I never disliked Jackie, but I hate Lee. I hate her.” Stas, with world-weary acceptance of his wife’s new relationship, was made a director of Olympic Airways, owned by Onassis.

Many speculated that Onassis’s interest in Lee had been enhanced by her connection to the White House. Jack and Robert Kennedy actively disliked and mistrusted Onassis, and Jack, according to Bedell Smith, told his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, that he considered him little better than “a pirate.” (Onassis had been sued by the U.S. government in 1955 for removing from the U.S. a fleet of ships he had bought and promised to keep here. He ended up paying a $7 million fine.) By the summer of 1963, Onassis’s friendship with Lee was being noticed: Drew Pearson wrote in The

“I THINK TRUMAN CAPOTE WAS IN LOVE WITH LEE, TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH HER. AND BECAUSE HE COULDN’T PSYCHOLOGICALLY HANDLE THAT,

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ST YLED BY VANESSA MOORE. LLOYD’S COAT BY MAISON MARGIEL A FROM ALBRIGHT FASHION LIBRARY; DRESS BY FENDI; BOOTS BY ARIAT. JUMBO’S GOWN BY MARIA LUCIA HOHAN; SHOES BY JIMMY CHOO. M C TEER’S SH ORTS BY DR IE S VA N NOTE N; PA NTS BY B OT TE GA VEN E TA ; S HO ES BY CHURCH’ S; HAT BY DI O R F RO M ALBRI GHT FASHI O N LI BRARY; COAT, JACKE T, AND SHI RT FRO M NEW YO RK VI NTAGE . HAI R PRO DUC TS BY KÉ R ASTAS E PA RI S; MA K EU P P ROD UCTS BY CHA NE L ; H A I R BY LUC A B L A N DI; M A KE UP BY B I RGIT T E. S ET D ES IG N BY P E TER GARGAGLI ANO . PRO DUC ED O N LO C ATI O N BY JANI NE DURHAM; FO R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

Washington Post, “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?”

Bobby Kennedy regarded Lee’s relationship as “a betrayal of the whole family,” recalled writer Evan Thomas, and Bobby hit upon the idea of luring Lee away from Onassis by asking her to accompany Jack on a European tour to Great Britain, Italy, Germany, and Ireland. Jackie was seven months pregnant and, having already endured one miscarriage, did not want to risk the travel.

The trip was another triumph as the president was met by threefifths of West Berlin’s population when he made his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in the Rudolf Wilde Platz, with Lee, not Jackie, by his side. “It was the most thrilling experience of my life,” Lee later recalled.

Afterward, Lee returned to London and to Greece, where she resumed her relationship with Onassis, though all was not perfect there. “I always thought Ari’s bathing trunks were too tight,” she said. “I told him so. I thought it was vulgar.”

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n August 7, 1963, Jackie gave birth to Patrick, who died 39 hours after being born. Lee received the news while cruising the Aegean with Onassis. She flew to Boston to attend Patrick’s funeral and to comfort her sister, who was plunged deeply into grief. Terribly concerned, Lee urged Onassis to invite Jackie aboard the Christina, his 325-foot yacht.

Jackie couldn’t face returning to Washington so soon after the loss of her baby. Concerned about appearances, Jack actually went down on one knee, their friend Martha Bartlett recalled to Sally Bedell Smith, to beg Jackie not to make the trip. But she was determined to go. In his journals, Camelot historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled hearing nasty gossip at a dinner at columnist Stewart Alsop’s about “how terrible it was for Jackie Kennedy to go off on the Onassis yacht.”

What many didn’t know was that Jackie was allowed to go on the cruise as an opportunity to persuade Lee not to marry Onassis, for the sake of the Kennedys, claimed Evan Thomas.

Onassis left the sisters alone for much of the trip, during which they exchanged confidences in their luxurious staterooms. Onassis mostly stayed in his own stateroom, making business calls and dining on lobster thermidor. Four weeks later, Jackie left the cruise, rested and restored to better spirits. As parting gifts, Jackie was given a diamond-and-ruby necklace, and Lee three diamond-studded bracelets. Lee wrote to her brother-in-law that she felt Jackie’s rubies outshone her “dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party.”

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hen President Kennedy was assassinated, at 6:30 P.M. London time, November 22, 1963, Lee was at home, at 4 Buckingham Place. She flew to Washington and stayed on in the White House after the funeral. To comfort her sister she left a note on Jackie’s pillow that read, “Good night my darling Jacks— the bravest and noblest of all. L.” But later Lee confided to Cecil Beaton that she “had gone through hell” trying to help her sister: “She’s really more than half round the bend! She can’t sleep at night, she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself!”

Jackie even slapped Lee across the face. Lee told Beaton that Jackie was “so jealous of me, but I don’t know if it’s because I have Stas and two children, and I’ve gone C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 5 8 M AY

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Director Phyllida Lloyd with Taming of the Shrew co-stars Cush Jumbo and Janet McTeer, photographed in New York City.

hakespeare’s witty “battle of the sexes” The Taming of the Shrew—an exciting and tumultuous play—gives most of the best lines to the tamer, Petruchio, a man who comes to “wive it wealthily in Padua.” If it is a battle of language, he has a Kalashnikov, and Katherina, the shrew, a peashooter. This summer the Public Theater will present an all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew for its annual free Shakespeare in the Park series, in New York City’s Central Park, commemorating the 400 years since Shakespeare’s death. But with no men in the cast, how will the sparks be seen to fly? Director Phyllida Lloyd (famous for her all-female assaults on Shakespeare on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Henry IV and Julius Caesar), has worked with the wonderful actresses Cush Jumbo and Janet McTeer before, and I long to hear the combustion of the vibrant Jumbo’s Katherina capitulating to the tall, lordly swagger of McTeer’s Petruchio.

“To be invited to the Park—the greatest free Shakespeare festival in the world—is a great honor, and I don’t take it lightly,” says Lloyd. “Our heroes and heroines stand before us! Our secret weapon? Some of the finest and funniest female clowns on the scene. We will be turning the play upside down.”

For me, the center of the play is the last speech. Katherina, once tamed, holds us with an aria of freedom through deference to husbands: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper.” It suggests it’s better to be in a marriage than out in the cold … Beautiful but complex. Well, that was then! We will, no doubt, be encouraged to draw new conclusions, —FIONA SHAW and that’s what theater is for.

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DEGREES of

PHOTOG RA P H BY D E IR D R E HA BE R M AL FATTO/ COU RTE SY OF THE A LU MNA E AS SO C IATI ON OF MOU N T H OLYOK E COLLE G E

Last year’s announcement that Sweet Briar College, its alumnae, who rallied to save it. But a question remained: Is the era of enrollment at such holdouts as Wellesley, Smith, Mills, and Bryn Mawr.

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SEPARATION a respected southern women’s school, would be forced to close galvanized all-female education over? The answer seems to be a resounding “No,” with rising LISA BIRNBACH provides a crash course in their radical tradition

GROUNDS FOR CELEBRATION The Laurel Chain parade at Mount Holyoke College’s commencement ceremonies, 2014.

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n what could be described as a huge breach of trust, on March 3, 2015, the president of the all-female Sweet Briar College, a 114-year-old mainstay of southern liberal-arts schools, announced that the college would be closing—for good—after graduation a few months later. Citing “insurmountable financial challenges,” he and his board voted to give up and bail out. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media covered it closely.

The public (many of whom had been unaware that a place called Sweet Briar still—or ever—existed) assumed that a college for women in rural Virginia meant … what? Iced tea on a porch? D.A.R. meetings in a columned house? Had women’s colleges officially become archaic in this post-feminist, gender-fluid, college-debt-laden era?

There was a time in this country when only daughters of privilege could go to college. For the most part this meant they would choose from one of about 230 women’s colleges, founded in the 19th and 20th centuries by progressive thinkers who believed that young women could and should be educated. These included the Seven Sisters; Catholic colleges, usually run by nuns; and a large number of teacher-training institutions.

The single-sex schools had tons of fun rituals and traditions. Students were well looked after—there were “dorm mothers” in most dormitories, and strict rules, including parietals (regulations about male visitation). That idyllic time went the way of sherry hours and date lounges in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1969 (when Princeton and Yale went coed) and 1997 (when Virginia Military Institute painfully admitted females), all but five men’s schools became coed. Many women’s colleges followed suit. By the mid-1970s, many of the brainiest young women who were headed to college or university chose to up the ante and apply to the former men’s schools, which were more competitive.

In the 1980s and 90s, as interest in single-sex education declined further, “there was a stereotype of a women’s-college student as an aggressive feminist,” explains Wellesley admission and financial-aid dean Joy St. John. “It was a niche choice for students who didn’t want to be with men, and it left a stigma.” But many leaders of women’s institutions also made a strong case for their schools.

They argued that, for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with the larger society, same-sex education continued to serve an important purpose for a significant subset of young women.

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BARNARD COLLEGE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK Founded: 1889.

Enrollment: 2,536.

Most popular major: Psychology.

Favorite tradition: Big Sub, an October event where a single 700-foot submarine sandwich snakes around campus on tables, and everyone can eat from it.

Gender policy: Barnard is a college for women and those who consistently self-identify and live as women, regardless of the sex assigned to them at birth.

Coed opportunities: Almost every student takes some classes across the street at Columbia, which went coed in 1983.

Equestrian program: No, but it’s a club sport at Columbia.

Distinguished alumnae: Laurie Anderson; Eileen Ford; Greta Gerwig; Zora Neale Hurston; Erica Jong; Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; Jhumpa Lahiri; Margaret Mead; Cynthia Nixon; Anna Quindlen; Joan Rivers; Martha Stewart; Jeanine Tesori; Twyla Tharp; and Suzanne Vega.

Barnard College has always benefited from its location in Manhattan, and always suffered from it. (Note: The author attended Barnard for one year.) Moreover, as an affiliate of Columbia University, Barnard enjoys a relationship that really no other women’s college has. Here is a school with feminist bona fides that is also 50 yards away from one of the great Ivy League research universities. Columbia students—men and women—can live at Barnard, and Barnard students can live at Columbia. Barnard students can join the Columbia marching band. Barnard students can join sororities at Columbia. Here, feminist-theory classes are packed as well. One student said to me, “What are all these guys doing here?”

President Debora Spar is an expatriate from the Harvard Business School. Does she think women’s schools are in trouble? It’s “higher education that’s in a crisis,” she tells me, reflecting on the unbearably high cost, the Silicon Valley focus on dropouts making fortunes, and the ubiquity of charts making fun of the starting salaries of liberal-arts graduates. “I don’t see the women’s-college piece as fraught. We’re living in a girls’ moment. Here they own the classroom. This generation of girls realizes that they can get stuff that their moms couldn’t.

They go out with confidence that Harvard girls don’t have.”

Ten seniors from all over the academic and geographic spectrum are sitting in an office waiting to tell their Barnard stories. Eva, a biochem major, says, “I came here because statistically you would succeed in life.” Rebecca grew up in the New York suburbs and didn’t want to go to college this close to home. But that became “the best decision I ever made. I love commuting by the Hudson River. I wrote my thesis on transportation.”

And here’s Emily, a shy, modestly dressed applied-math major from the suburbs, who chose Barnard because she needed to be at a college with “a sizable religious community. I needed Jewish MAY

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Which brings us to 2016. Today there are 42 all-female holdouts—including Sweet Briar, which was saved by the heroic efforts of impassioned alumnae. How are these institutions faring in the 21st century? Is there still a point in separating girls from boys in the classroom and on campus? Do the familiar tropes of horseback riding and lesbianism still apply? How are these campuses adapting to evolving definitions of gender and womanhood? Are these schools as rigorous as coed colleges? We did fieldwork at a representative sample—the five extant Seven Sisters; the second-oldest women’s college in America, which is a practical midwesterner; two southern charmers; and the Northwest’s only women’s college.

WHERE THE BOYS AREN’T Students during a lecture at Smith College, 1948.

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BRYN MAWR COLLEGE, BRYN MAWR, PENNSYLVANIA Founded: 1885.

Enrollment: 1,346.

Most popular major: Biology.

Favorite tradition: Lantern Night. Every fall, second-year students pass a lantern (representing knowledge) to the first-years in the Thomas Hall Cloister.

Gender policy: Bryn Mawr is a community for women, those who identify as women, individuals assigned female at birth who do not identify on the gender binary.

Coed opportunities: Bryn Mawr shares registration with Haverford (which went coed in 1980). The two together are considered “Bi-Co”; with Swarthmore they are “Tri-Co.” Some students also study at UPenn.

Equestrian program: A club team in conjunction with Haverford.

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Distinguished alumnae: Writers Renata Adler and Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt (Pat the Bunny); Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Greene Balch, founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust; Hanna Holborn Gray, first woman president of the University of Chicago; classicist Edith Hamilton; actress Katharine Hepburn; Lynne Meadow, Manhattan Theatre Club artistic director; and poet Marianne Moore.

President Kim Cassidy says, “We are experiencing another powerful moment for women’s colleges. More and more women are interested in them. At coed schools nationwide only 9 percent of women major in the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] programs. Here, though, that number is 25 percent.” Why does she think so many women’s schools disappeared in the last 25 years? “That was a time when people thought women weren’t discriminated against.” She pauses. “It’s hard for 18-year-olds to grasp that.”

Bryn Mawr feels like a political place in the sense of how committed its student body is. “Our students are socially engaged,” Cassidy continues. “One of our community @vf.com values is to make the world a better place.”

To see a slide If there are more serious students than Bryn show of FA M O U S A LU M NA E , Mawr’s, I haven’t met them. Michelle Francl, a go to VF.COM/ popular chemistry professor since 1986, refers to MAY2016.

Bryn Mawr as “the ‘scholarly sister.’ Our expectations are very high.” Students are proud that their professors publish, travel to deliver lectures, and are active scholars. Medoza, a graduating English major, who was born in Iraq, talks about the “liberal-arts holistic education. We’re looking at a tree from every angle.”

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life on campus.” (Barnard has a significant number of observant students Wellesley College’s of many religions from the New York annual hoop-rolling area.) And, she added, “I wanted a race: in 1968, small school with close relationships above, and, right, in 2014—the first year with my professors.” When I asked a trans man won.

Emily if she knew what she was going to do after graduation, she flushed brightly, looked down, and said, “I’m so excited! I’m moving to Detroit to live out my dream! I’m going to work for the Detroit Tigers, in their new analytics group!”

“I thought I’d hate it here because I had no girls as friends in high school,” confesses another student. “This is why you have to go to women’s colleges—to learn to be kinder to other women.”

HOOP DREAMS

An anthropology major, Farida, adds, “You don’t have to say, ‘What about the female perspective?’ ” Over coffee I hear, “My guy friends noticed my confidence—after one semester!”

“My mom noticed I was happier.” Bryn Mawr has a highly regarded honor code, which students can alter each year. It is student-run, as is the SGA, which here stands for Self-Government Association. Charlie is the president of SGA this year, and they—Charlie’s preferred pronoun—say, “We use it for social change.” (At the beginning of each semester at many schools, students now introduce themselves by name as well as their preferred pronoun.)

“You can sense how much people care about your success here,” proclaims a student. Professor Francl confirms that. “We’re attentive to preparing them for the transition to the next phase,” which often extends to their doctoral studies.

In order to graduate, Bryn Mawr students must pass a swim test.

sity in recognition of its graduate programs. Never mind the name; it is a cozy place where everything is for the delectation of the undergraduate women who attend it.

Professors are interested in their students. A magenta-haired student walks around with an infant in Moody Center. “Oh, that’s not her baby,” my table-mates say; the magenta-haired girl is babysitting for a friend. Patty O’Toole, the dean of students, says, “A pregnant student? Great. You want to go to school? Great.” This is not your grandmother’s Hollins.

Hollins can offer a worldly experience that many larger institutions can’t. The secret sauce is the intensely involved alumnae, who return to campus whenever they’re invited as mentors, and who provide internship opportunities to the students. It’s an irresistible combination: come for the good classes; stay for the cool summer jobs! Students have interned at major law firms in Washington and New York, Estée Lauder, the Republican National Committee, the Stonewall Community Foundation, the Library of Congress, PBS, and the National Dance Institute.

President Nancy Gray (known to students as “P-Gray”) says, “We combine the liberal arts with internships and value long-term learning. You will have friends for life, mentors, the old-girls network of support, and professional contacts,” she says. “We like to make your head an interesting place to live.”

Some students refer to Hollins as “the bubble,” a safe space removed from the world. “I often forget the need for guys when I’m here,” says one student, though another says, “My group of friends visit Hampden-Sydney and we tailgate at V.M.I.” One girl says, “I’m teaching my 10-year-old brother about consent.” A sophomore admits, “I still don’t get the whole women’s thing. My mom forced me to look here, but the students were so well-spoken, I wanted to be like them.” Yes, I’m told, “girls are rooting for one another, even the ones we don’t like.”

HOLLINS UNIVERSITY, ROANOKE, VIRGINIA Founded: 1842.

Enrollment: 750.

Most popular major: English.

Favorite tradition: Tinker Day, a surprise day in October, when classes are canceled and the community dresses in crazy outfits and hikes to the top of Tinker Mountain. Afterward, everyone eats fried chicken and chocolate Tinker Cake.

Gender policy: Hollins is a school for females and any who have completed their transition to female. The policy may be reviewed in the future.

Coed opportunities: Students can take classes at Roanoke College and several other Virginia institutions.

Equestrian program: Yes, and it’s a big deal.

Distinguished alumnae: Writers Annie Dillard and Lee Smith; Ellen Malcolm, the founder of Emily’s List; and photographer Sally Mann.

MILLS COLLEGE, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA Founded: 1852.

Enrollment: 867.

Most popular major: English.

Favorite tradition: Candle-lighting ceremony on the first night of orientation, culminating in incoming students writing their wishes on tags that are hung from a tree.

Gender policy: Mills educates self-identified women and people assigned female gender at birth who do not identify with the gender binary.

Coed opportunities: Students may take classes at U.C. Berkeley.

Equestrian program: No. Distinguished alumnae: Artist Jennifer Bartlett, voice of San Francisco Giants Renel Brooks-Moon, dancer Trisha Brown, and Dixy Lee Ray, the former governor of Washington.

Though Hollins is a small college, it renamed itself Hollins Univer-

For a college that isn’t well known outside California and the Northwest, you’ll see plenty of diversity at Mills College, the lone women’s college in the region. Fifty-one percent are students of color, and Mills

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Spotlight

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE, SOUTH HADLEY, MASSACHUSETTS Founded: 1837.

Enrollment: 2,215.

Most popular major: Psychology.

Favorite tradition: M&C’s—milk and cookies, delivered to residence halls Monday through Thursday nights, and every day during exam periods.

Gender policy: A women’s college where the only people who cannot apply are biological males who identify as men.

Coed opportunities: Mount Holyoke participates in the Five College Consortium, in which students at Smith, Amherst, Hampshire, and UMass Amherst may take classes at any of those institutions.

Equestrian program: Yes. Distinguished alumnae: Dr. Virginia Apgar (the Apgar score), poet Emily Dickinson, Connecticut governor Ella Grasso (first woman to be elected governor without having been married to a former governor), playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Wendy Wasserstein, and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins (first female Cabinet member; served under F.D.R. and Harry Truman).

“We are the oldest of the Seven Sisters,” outgoing president Lynn Pasquerella, class of 1980, says. “It was [founder] Mary Lyon’s mission to disrupt the hegemonic forces. We have always been committed to access and to social justice,” she adds. Holyoke is committed to women, but defines the term most C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 6 2 144

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he Foster sisters, Sara and Erin, are the co-creators and co-stars of Barely Famous, the VH1 docu-style comedy series that skewers the social norms of Hollywood. “The idea came from the fact that we grew up with lots of family members getting into reality TV,” Erin says, “and from day one we always knew we did not want to be a part of it.” Their father is the music producer David Foster (16 Grammys), who has been married four times.

Their mom, Rebecca Foster, was wife No. 2. Their first stepmother was Linda Thompson, previously married to Caitlyn Jenner (né Bruce), with whom she has two sons, Brody and Brandon Jenner, making Sara and Erin once removed from the Kardashians. Their second (and soon-to-be ex) stepmom, Yolanda Foster, appears on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and is the mother of models Gigi and Bella Hadid. In other words, the sisters are at the epicenter of the culture they lampoon so expertly in Barely Famous. (The acclaimed show returns this summer, with cameos by Kate Hudson, Cindy Crawford, and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, among others.)

With their blond hair, blue eyes, and bikini-ready bodies, the Fosters epitomize “Malibu Barbie.” But looks can be deceiving. “There were a lot of assumptions that we were raised a certain way,” Erin says. “Our dad was always really clear with us that he is rich and we are not: ‘If you want to be rich you should go do what I did, which is work really hard.’ ” And that is exactly what they are doing—Sara, 35, as a model and actress, and Erin, 33, as a writer and actress. Sara says, “Our parents are beyond proud that we never sold out once and created something together.” Although they have completely different personalities, the formidable pair complement each other perfectly. “We are on a show that pokes fun at reality television,” Sara admits. “But creating your own content is the hardest thing I’ve ever been a part of.” Erin chimes in: “I don’t think we are changing the world here, but — KRISTA SMITH we might be influencing a perspective.”

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ST Y L E D BY J E S SI CA DE RU IT E R; HA I R PRO DUC TS BY W E LL A P RO F E SS IO N A LS ; MA K EUP P ROD UCTS BY TOM FO RD; HAI R BY SASCHA BRE UE R; MAK E UP

BY SA M UE L PAU L; PH OTOG RA P HE D AT S UGA R NA I L; P RO DU CE D O N L O CAT I ON BY J O SH M A DS ON ; F OR DETAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C REDI TS

was the first women’s college to craft an admissions policy for any individual who self-identifies as a woman—back in 2014. The many men on campus are in graduate programs or are E.S.L. students.

The college is a gorgeous oasis in East Oakland, an area of a heterogeneous and partially gentrifying city. It feels separate—surrounded by tall trees and rich plantings—though students spend a lot of time in Oakland doing community service. “Social justice” is a phrase often heard at Mills; it seems to echo within classrooms and without.

Tess was uncomfortable at first about attending a women’s college, but Mills gave her a great financial-aid package. She became an econ major, minored in music, earned her B.A. in three years, and is earning her M.B.A. in her final year at Mills. She decided to try sports for the first time and became a super-competitive member of the crew team. “Mills has a history of making me try on shoes that are too big for me, and letting me fill them,” she says. “It’s been a huge transformation.” Sophomore Sophia, a psych major and ethnic-studies minor, is also on the team, having rowed competitively in high school.

“My dad says he’s never met a broke person who graduated from Mills,” Sophia says. Tech corporations come to Mills to recruit women, and Tess is heading to Amazon after graduation.

Sarah Swope teaches biology at Mills. In coed science classrooms, she says, “there’s a feeling that women are guests. We’re welcome, but we don’t want to be wrong, because then maybe we’ve proven that we really don’t belong. But at a women’s college the conversation is so much richer; we’re supposed to be here.” She is accompanied by about eight bio students. “Look around the room.

This is what a room of biologists looks like.”

Emma, one of the student biologists, says, “I think there is this common misconception that the decision to attend an all-women’s college is rooted in some antiquated belief about keeping men and women physically and sexually separated. From an outside perspective I can see how it may seem very quaint, or conservative, when in actuality the very existence of women’s colleges is quite a progressive concept. In a patriarchal society, how radical is it to create space for women and maintain it on this scale?”

Erin and Sara Foster, photographed in Los Angeles.

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THAT LADY Olivia de Havilland relaxes at her home in Beverly Hills, 1942.

The last surviving Golden Age screen goddess, Olivia de Havilland entered the pantheon as Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind, won two best-actress Oscars, then decamped to Paris in 1955. What made her walk out on Hollywood? Approaching her 100th birthday, de Havilland opens up to WILLIAM STADIEM about that enduring mystery, and about her side of the most notorious sibling rivalry in film history—with her sister, Joan Fontaine

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lthough the age of the celebrity stalker had not yet dawned, the normally unflappable Olivia de Havilland could not help being discomfited by the disheveled man with the dead eyes who would not stop staring at her. It was 1957. She was at a charity ball for the costumers union at Conrad Hilton’s sparkling new hotel, the Beverly Hilton. This one big gala would remind her of what she was not missing in Hollywood before she boarded one of her old flame Howard Hughes’s TWA Super Constellations and made the long journey back to Paris, where she had moved in 1955.

Hollywood, Olivia felt, had changed for the worse since her glory days, in the 1930s and 40s, and everyone was blaming it on television. America wasn’t going out anymore.

Its citizens were staying home and watching Gunsmoke. Olivia had just wrapped a Western, The Proud Rebel, with her old friend Alan Ladd and his son David. Petite and still perfect at five feet three, Olivia, then 41, was one of the few female stars whom Ladd didn’t have to stand on a soapbox to kiss.

Their new horse opera was a clear attempt to recapture the box-office magic of 1953’s Shane, but television was making such feats more a labor of Hercules than even of John Ford or George Stevens.

But who was this creepy man who wouldn’t go away? All Olivia could do was turn her back and protectively chat with her old friend William Schallert, the son of the longtime drama critic of the Los Angeles Times and one of many talented character actors who had been body-snatched, to borrow a term from that paranoid era, by television. (He would soon have several episodes of Gunsmoke to his credit.) “Suddenly I felt a kiss on the back of my neck,” Olivia recalls.

She was too polite to dream of calling security. “I turned around and it was that man.

He was gaunt. His clothes didn’t fit. But it was those lifeless eyes that troubled me. ‘Do I know you?’ I asked him.”

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CRACKING UP ry. Olivia doesn’t Below, Errol Flynn seem 99. Her face and de Havilland is unlined, her eyes while filming Dodge sparkling, her faCity, 1939. Right, de Havilland and bled contralto Fontaine, 1940s. soaring (only Orson Welles had an equally imposing instrument), her memory photographic. She could easily pass for someone decades younger. (Is 100 the new 70?)

The Flynn story provides some clue to the enduring mystery of why one of Hollywood’s biggest stars would chuck it all and move to France: a fallen medium, a fallen idol. For Olivia, there was a whiff of decay and disappointment about Hollywood, and the vicious, relentlessly competitive sniping of her Oscar-winning sister, Joan Fontaine, who may have been the biggest disappointment of all. After three best-actress Oscars between them, wasn’t enough enough?

Apparently not in Hollywood, where the de Havilland–Fontaine spat became the most

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America’s Expat Sweetheart

livia de Havilland told me this story when I went to see her last year in Paris, a little more than a month before she turned 99, on July 1.

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“It’s Errol,” he replied.

“Errol who?” Olivia genuinely didn’t know. And then she figured it out: Errol Flynn. Nearly 60 years later, she remains shocked by the moment. “Those eyes. They used to be so glinting, so full of life,” she remembers. “And now they were dead.”

In their day, Errol and Olivia had been the Fred and Ginger of action movies. From 1935’s Captain Blood to 1941’s They Died with Their Boots On, the Tasmanian devil and the Anglo-Californian ingénue made seven swashbuckling blockbusters. They were Bogie and Bacall, minus the offscreen romance. Or was it really minus, and not just Olivia’s legendarily discreet charm? Hollywood was still discreet, even in the 50s, simply out of fear of the snoops and scoops of Confidential magazine. There were no paparazzi allowed in Conrad’s new Hilton. If they had been, and they had seen Errol’s vampire kiss on Olivia’s neck, how the presses would have rolled.

Soon the bell tolled for the dinner, and everyone began filing into the grand ballroom.

Errol offered Olivia his arm. “Can I escort you to dinner?” No woman could refuse, especially the woman who had contributed the most to Flynn’s romantic mystique, Maid Marian to his Robin Hood. So into the Hilton ballroom they strode, giants of the earth, re-united at last.

“The moment we sat down,” Olivia recalls, “the table filled up with seven or eight beautiful young ladies.” Inspired by the attention, Errol came to life and turned on the charm. “Somehow I couldn’t help myself from being increasingly enraged that Errol Flynn was paying more attention to the other ladies at the table than he was to me,” Olivia says, still chiding herself for letting emotions overtake her. “Here I was, living in Paris, happily married to a wonderful Frenchman, two great children. Why was I having a fit of jealousy over Errol Flynn?” The two icons barely spoke for the rest of the dinner. “When the ball was over, I said good night and left in a cab by myself,” she says.

For the rest of her working life, Olivia would appear in only 10 more feature films and would increasingly keep Hollywood at an oceanic distance. Flynn would die two years later, in 1959, at age 50.

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(1) Vivien Leigh, de Havilland, and Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind, 1939. (2) De Havilland, with husband Pierre Galante and an unidentified man, greets Grace Kelly at the Cannes rail station, 1955. (3) Rex Harrison and de Havilland at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, where she helmed the jury.

(4) James Stewart and de Havilland, 1938. (5) De Havilland and Countess Jacqueline de Ribes learn a Greek dance on Santorini, 1955. (6) Laurence Olivier (far right), Leigh (second from right), and David O. Selznick (third from right) with de Havilland at the 1940 Academy Awards. (7) De Havilland, John Huston, and Bette Davis while filming In This Our Life, 1942.

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Joan, she says, would “put her little head on

CLAWS OUT Fontaine and de Havilland at the 14th Academy Awards, where Fontaine won best actress for Suspicion, 1942. Inset, the sisters at a party at the Voisin restaurant, in New York City, 1962.

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my shoulder and ask me to tell her a story.”

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notorious family feud in the town’s history.

For more than 60 years, it has been manna for a press eager to apotheosize sibling rivalry to dark and unheroic proportions. (Fontaine died in December of 2013 at age 96.)

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hen, as now, stars didn’t leave Hollywood—not American stars, anyway. Greta Garbo and Luise Rainer were foreign. Marlene Dietrich was never really there. Grace Kelly traded celluloid royalty for actual royalty—thanks, it should be noted, to Olivia’s second husband, Paris Match editor Pierre Galante, who inadvertently played cupid between Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco.

But Olivia didn’t come to Paris for a prince.

She came to get away. She didn’t want to become a princess. She wanted to be real.

But what could have been better than Olivia’s reality? She had been America’s sweetheart since the Flynn epics and pantheonic since 1939’s Gone with the Wind, a winner of two best-actress Oscars: To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). She is one of only 13 actresses in Hollywood history to accomplish this feat. Who walks out on that?

“I loved being around real buildings, real castles, real churches—not ones made of canvas,” she says. “There were real cobblestones. Somehow the cobblestones amazed me. When I would meet a prince or a duke, he was a real prince, a real duke.” She tells a story about flying from Paris to Algiers on the first commercial jet, the De Havilland Comet, with her Flynn-like cousin, the famed aviation pioneer Geoffrey de Havilland, for a lunch of couscous and ceremonially slaughtered lamb. Being abroad in the 50s, she discovered, was more interesting than being in Eisenhower’s America, especially with Olivia’s level of access.

Not that Olivia was fleeing to join the nouvelle vague. French cinema was indeed the cutting edge. The great films that were being made were being made in Europe, and in 1965, Olivia became the first woman to helm the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. But, she notes, without being abashed, “I never met Godard. I never met Truffaut. I never met Brigitte Bardot.” What was Paris without that?

Just fine, Olivia asserts. Her Paris was always Voltaire, Monet, Rodin—not Belmondo, not Delon, not even Chanel.

We met at the Saint James Paris, a château-like hotel, once part of an eponymous clubby global chain, where she was staying while her own maison, a block away, was undergoing repairs.

That circa-1880 town house— where she has lived since June of 1958—may be about the safest address in an increasingly jittery Paris: former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing lives next door, and there’s round-the-clock security.

Olivia greeted me and, as spry as a Himalayan Sherpa from more than five decades of climbing the five stories of her town house, led me up the Saint James’s answer to Gone with the Wind’s Tara staircase to her grand suite. The bed’s antique headboard featured Adam and Eve cavorting in Eden. A crisp assistant arrived with Veuve Clicquot and macarons from Ladurée. Olivia was dressed all in beige, a silk blouse and proper skirt with matching ballet slippers.

On subsequent days she would mix it up, wearing a slinky black silk Chinese cheongsam worthy of Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express. Olivia’s one nod to glamour was her jewelry, a triple strand of pearls and her striking earrings, a gold

whorl with a pearl at the center that evoked the hypnotic image Salvador Dalí designed for Spellbound.

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wasn’t American at all,” Olivia says, getting right down to deconstructing the myth of her as the girl next door from Saratoga, California, in the Santa Clara Valley, the “prune capital of America,” now part of Silicon Valley. She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of English parents. “I was naturalized right before Pearl Harbor,” she says, citing the date: November 28, 1941.

“Nine days later, I would have been classified as an enemy alien. I might have been sent to a camp.” Her father, though not a solicitor himself, ran a firm of 20 patent lawyers. Her mother was a choral teacher and occasional actress whose shining moment had been taking part in a command performance in Tokyo for the visiting Duke of Connaught.

“Mummy never told me until much later,” Olivia says. “She didn’t want me to know she had actually worked professionally, as opposed to the amateur theatricals I had been aware of.” Amateur acting was fine. Professional, well, had overtones of a fallen woman.

But the thespian gene ran in the family, and once it was unleashed, Olivia could not suppress it. “When I was five I discovered a secret box that contained Mummy’s stage makeup.

It was like finding buried treasure. I tried the rouge, the eye shadow, the lipstick. But I couldn’t get the rouge off. Mummy spanked me terribly. ‘Never do this again!’ she yelled at me, and ordered me never to tell my sibling.”

The sibling in question was Joan, Olivia’s baby sister, 15 months younger, to whom Olivia has been famously referring, if at all, as anonymously as possible for decades. They would grow up to be the only sisters to win best-actress Oscars. But before there was any inkling of a feud, the two were as cuddly and affectionate as any two siblings could be.

Olivia recounted how she adored playing big sister. Joan, she says, would climb into bed with her and “put her little head on my shoulder and ask me to tell her a story.” Olivia would spin fairy tales about rabbits and other creatures that riveted Joan, who was perhaps the first beneficiary of Olivia’s lifelong talent for animal imitations. (Even today, she loves causing a stir in dog-friendly Paris temples of gastronomy by driving the gourmet hounds to riot with her sotto voce barks and growls.) “Joan was sick and so depressed,” Olivia says. “The thing she loved most was her patent-leather cat, which somewww.vanityfair.com

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ll that perfect elocution paid off when Olivia, the star of the student theatricals, was discovered by an associate of the émigré Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt, who needed an understudy for the heroine Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934. Warner Bros. made A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a film the next year with Olivia, Dick Powell, James Cagney, and Mickey Rooney—Olivia’s big break. Jack Warner fixed on the 18-yearold actress as the new ingénue in his stock company of players. Olivia, the brainy A student, still looks back with regret about forgoing her coveted admission to Mills College, the Wellesley of the West.

By 1938, Olivia, at 22, had become a huge star, thanks to her pairings with Flynn in Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade. At 98 pounds, she was also anorexic, before anyone called it that. Mother and daughter came up with a diagnosis of Hollywooditis. “I wouldn’t wish overnight success on anyone,” Olivia says, the pain of the recollection not dulled by time. “You have no real friends. Everyone works endless hours at different studios, so far apart. Even on your own lot, relationships were formal, and often competitive.” Olivia lets out a sigh. “Jiminy Crickets,” she says, one of her favorite refrains.

Mummy had the cure: get out of the cellu-

loid Sodom and go to England. Joan remained in California, working tirelessly to catch up with her sister, notably snagging a small part in George Cukor’s The Women. Neither girl had ever been to their parents’ homeland. Mummy and Olivia sailed on the Normandie, “the most beautiful ship in the world,” Olivia says, in the spring of 1938. Unfortunately, Sodom had long arms. Although the trip was supposed to be a secret, Jack Warner tolerated no secrets.

Like many of the old moguls, he was a control freak with the mentality of a plantation overlord—hence his white-columned Dixie-esque manse in Beverly Hills. The latest (and destined to be the biggest) Flynn–de Havilland pairing, The Adventures of Robin Hood, was about to be released. How perfect that Olivia would be there, in the land of Sherwood Forest, to do publicity. Accordingly, a phalanx of press greeted the homecoming Anglos on the pier at Southampton.

The de Havillands were saved by a kindly purser who escorted them off the ship via steerage. Olivia hid in a ladies’ room until the press train took the thwarted reporters back to Fleet Street. In London, the 45-yearold Mary Pickford, who had also been on the ship, denounced the young star’s behavior as “unprofessional” and “regrettable.”

Olivia regretted nothing. She and Mummy enjoyed a wonderful grand tour of all of English lit’s shrines. In Stratford-upon-Avon, Olivia attended two plays every day, reminding herself that she too had begun her career as a Shakespearean actress and dreaming that she would become one again. But in the end, Olivia, ever the good girl and team player, did the right thing by Warner. She installed herself at the Savoy and invited the press to call upon her. “ ‘I’m all yours,’ I told them, and this time they were so grateful; they were adorable to me,” Olivia says. She returned to America on the Normandie, still 98 pounds but rested and with a perspective on the “reality” she craved. The Adventures of Robin Hood was a monster hit all over the world. It was—and is— impossible to imagine Maid Marian without thinking instantly of Olivia de Havilland.

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Life with Melanie

didn’t identify with Melanie when I first read the book,” Olivia says of her most famous role, in Gone with the Wind. She had read Margaret Mitchell’s book when it was first published, in 1936, and had not been impressed. “But when I read Sidney Howard’s wonderful script, Melanie seemed like a totally different character,” she says.

“In the book we saw her through Scarlett’s eyes, which created a negative impression. In the film the audience sees her through their own, unbiased eyes. Now, with the script, I liked her, I admired her, I loved her!”

Even so, she still dismisses any attempt to equate her with Melanie Hamilton. The woman who masterminded her own career (“Mummy was my guardian,” she points out, “not my manager”), dated Howard Hughes and John Huston, flew a plane, and broke the back of the studio system in her seminal 1944 lawsuit, which freed actors from perpetual contract bondage, is no Goody Two-Shoes, even if she was never a heller in high heels.

The hard part was not so much getting the role but getting Jack Warner to agree to lend her out to David O. Selznick. “Selznick had seen me in Robin Hood and thought I should be considered. One day George Cukor called out of the blue and said, ‘You don’t know me, but would you be interested in playing in Gone with the Wind?’ Naturally I said a big yes, and then he whispered into the phone, ‘Would you consider doing something illegal?’ It was all very cloak-and-dagger.”

Olivia drove her green Buick to the MGM lot but parked on the street. Then, following Cukor’s elaborate directions, she proceeded on foot to a secret glass door.

A man was waiting and he took Olivia to Cukor’s office, where she read for him.

“Wait,” Cukor said when she had finished.

He dialed Selznick. “You should hear Miss de Havilland read for Melanie.”

A date was set for the coming Sunday at three o’clock. Olivia drove herself to Selznick’s Southern Colonial mansion, on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills. “I wore a demure black velvet afternoon dress with lace cuffs and a round lace collar,” Olivia recalls. “We sat in this huge room in a bay window. The scene was between Melanie and Scarlett, and George read Scarlett. With his kinky hair and his rotund body and his thick spectacles, he was the most ridiculous Scarlett you could imagine. And he read with such drama, clutching the curtains. It was so comical. I found it hard to keep a straight face.”

Afterward, Selznick said, “I guess we have to talk to Jack Warner.”

Selznick did talk to Warner, to no avail.

So then Olivia talked to him, to even less.

“Jack said no. No. He said, ‘If you want to play anything, why Melanie and not Scarlett?’ But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to loan me out. No was no.” But Olivia wasn’t one to accept nos. She decided to go

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how had lost its voice. When you squeezed, it used to meow, but it broke. So I began meowing when Joan squeezed the cat, and she loved it and got better. She was so darling, with these adorable freckles on her nose and a ducktail of blond hair, cute as a button.”

The two girls were taken to California by Mrs. de Havilland as toddlers when their parents’ marriage started coming apart.

(Their father would stay in Japan and eventually marry his housekeeper.) Notwithstanding her globe hopping, Mrs. de Havilland remained properly English to the core. When Olivia wanted to know why Mummy insisted she and Joan sound British, Mummy’s answer was simple: “Because we are British!”

Olivia’s “cahn’t”s and “shahn’t”s initially got her a lot of playground abuse, but eventually all her classmates began imitating her. To balance her image as Miss Propriety, Olivia became the class prankster, specializing, naturally, in a wide range of animal imitations. “I started with turkeys and donkeys and worked my way on to horses, dogs, and cats. I was quite good,” she confesses.

GRANDE DAME

over Jack’s head and appeal to his wife, Ann, who was the only person in show business who could conceivably turn him around. “Ann was a beautiful, slim woman in her 30s whom I had barely met. I invited her for tea at the Beverly Hills branch of the Brown Derby. I had never taken anyone to tea before.” At the tea, Ann seemed to understand what a huge project this was and that it could only enhance Olivia’s value to Warner Bros. in the long run. She promised to help and she did. “I think we have you,” Olivia recalls Selznick saying in his greenlight call to her.

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livia talks about one of her favorite scenes from Gone with the Wind, the one in which Rhett Butler feels responsible for Scarlett’s miscarriage and breaks down in tears. Clark Gable cry? No way. “You can do it and you will be wonderful,” Olivia exhorted Gable. “It worked. And he was wonderful.” (Olivia admits that despite her many

teary roles her “tears didn’t photograph.

They just didn’t show up on film. They were constantly blowing menthol in my eyes.”)

The stakes were high for all involved and the pressure was intense. Leigh, Gable, and Olivia would try to defuse the tension by playing Battleship during the endless camera setups required by the new Technicolor process. (Victor Fleming, meanwhile, had taken over from Cukor as director.) To liven things up, the supposedly saintly Olivia adored playing devilish practical jokes. One scene had Gable picking Olivia up. On what it was hoped would be the last of a multiple series of exhausting takes, Olivia had a propman secretly strap her to an immovable lighting fixture. Poor Gable nearly had a hernia.

He couldn’t budge her. The set went wild in what was the biggest laugh in a very serious shoot, one in which everyone was aware that an epic was being created.

If the stakes were high, so were the rewards. On Oscar night, February 29, 1940, David O. Selznick gave a small pre-party at his house. Olivia, who didn’t have a formal

De Havilland,

date, was glad to photographed at her be going in this home in Paris by Annie Leibovitz, 1998. gilt pack, which included the film’s chief financier, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, who had escorted Olivia to the premiere in Hollywood. “He and David made the oddest couple,” Olivia says of this unlikely alliance between patrician Wall Street and nouveau Hollywood.

The other guests were Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier (who would marry later that year), Selznick’s wife, Irene, and Robert Benchley, the Vanity Fair and New Yorker wit.

During drinks the phone rang. It was an advance tip on who the winners were.

“David picked it up, and he intoned a list of names: ‘Er, yes. Vivien, Victor, Hattie,’ ” Olivia recalls. “My heart sank. David, who was clearly the happiest man on earth, rushed Jock, Vivien, and Larry into a waiting limo, and left right away. Nobody said a word to me. It was up to Irene to take the loser—me—and Robert Benchley to the Cocoanut Grove, where the event was. I was

to become a princess. She wanted to be real.

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Olivia de Havilland crestfallen.” (Like Olivia, Gable was nominated but lost.)

At the ceremony, Irene, Olivia, and Benchley were relegated to a little table away from the glorious high table where Selznick had assembled his team of winners, except for Hattie McDaniel, who had initially sat alone with her black companion, whom Olivia refers to as “her fellow.” Then Selznick decided it would look better for Hattie to be part of a larger group. “David moved them to a ‘mixed’ table. I think they were happier where they had been. No one uttered a word of condolence to me. I tried to do the English thing, stiff upper lip. But when Irene saw one single tear sliding down my cheek, she rushed me into the hotel kitchen. Next to this steaming cauldron of soup, I cried my eyes out. That soup turned out saltier than the chef had planned. I went home in one of David’s limos. All I could do was think to myself, There is no God.” After two weeks of misery, Olivia woke up to an epiphany. “My whole perspective changed. I realized why it was destined that I lose. I was nominated as best supporting actress, but that was the wrong category. I wasn’t ‘supporting.’ I was the star, too. That was just a ploy by David on behalf of Vivien. Hattie was supporting, and she was the best. Plus, it was wonderful that she should win. Once I understood the system, I didn’t feel horrible at all. There was a God, after all.”

That God would smile on Olivia in the decade ahead with two best-actress statuettes, not to mention two New York Film Critics Circle bestactress awards, plus countless other accolades.

Nonetheless, she had seen up close and personal how cruel Hollywood could be. The seeds of her eventual departure for Paris were watered by the tears she shed on Oscar night in 1940.

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On to Paris

here were offscreen heartbreaks as well.

Olivia admits to having been crazy about Flynn, notwithstanding his adolescent penchant for pranks, like planting a dead snake in her pantaloons. But Flynn was married. She was also very taken with Howard Hughes, on whom she developed a crush when she saw him dancing with Dolores Del Rio at the Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard one evening in 1939. Olivia was doing Wings of the Navy, a propaganda film that, along with her family connection to British aviation, gave her and air-obsessed Hughes common ground.

Hughes’s courtship was anything but consistent. He might take Olivia bowling one night, fly her to Santa Barbara for hamburgers the next, and then put on the dog, wining and dining her at Victor Hugo, one of the era’s temples of chic. Hughes had a fondness for classy, refined types, and Olivia was there to fill the void left when Katharine Hepburn, dubbed

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box-office poison, went back East while she regrouped for her comeback in The Philadelphia Story. Olivia speaks admiringly of Hepburn’s resurrection: “She had left town quite defeated. The industry was confused by what I would call her New England pride. Howard called it arrogance.”

Hepburn loved to fly, as did Olivia, who also earned a pilot’s license. Olivia’s passion for flight, ignited by Hughes, was perpetuated

by James Stewart, the future air-force brigadier general who seriously dated Olivia in the early 40s, until he was called to war. The man she may have fallen hardest for was John Huston, whose second feature assignment was the tall order of directing Olivia and Bette Davis in 1942’s In This Our Life. The two stars played rival sisters, competing viciously in love and life—close to home for Olivia. Although Davis, after Greta Garbo, was the female star Olivia admired most, Davis did anything but return the esteem. In the first of the four films they made together, the 1937 comedy It’s Love I’m After, Davis’s first take on Olivia’s acting was the insulting “What is she doing?”

So now it took Huston to play peacemaker, explaining to Davis that her impossible love for the married director William Wyler and Olivia’s impossible love for Huston, then locked in marriage to Lesley Black, made them two dames at sea on the same sinking ship. The analogy did the job. The stars bonded over their frustrations and became friends for life, eventually aging out of romantic leads into the Grand Guignol of 1964’s Hush …

Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

It is perhaps another commentary on her dim view of the business that the two men she married were neither stars nor moguls, but writers. Marcus Aurelius Goodrich—whom Olivia married in 1946 and divorced in 1952— was a Texan who was best known for his World War I battleship novel, Delilah. (With him Olivia had a son, Benjamin Goodrich, who died in 1991 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 41.) And then there was Pierre Galante, who, in addition to his Paris Match duties, also wrote military histories, including Valkyrie, the basis for the 2008 Tom Cruise movie (which Olivia says she did not see).

Olivia and Pierre met the first time Olivia set foot in France, in April of 1952, when she came as a guest of the Cannes Film Festival.

That year An American in Paris opened the event, whose awards were dominated by Marlon Brando’s Viva Zapata! and Orson Welles’s Othello. Olivia had initially refused because the festival denied her request for a second airline ticket, assuming, French-style, it was for her lover. When she let them know it was for her small son, Benjamin, the festival relented.

Hundreds of photographers turned out at Orly airport to greet her. She was escorted by her agent, Kurt Frings, and by a silent little Frenchman who later turned garrulous on her: Galante. The first words out of his mouth

were “Austrian wine is better than French wine.” (He never drank a drop.) Then he dared to hold her hand in a taxi from a lunch at La Colombe d’Or. The relentless journalist followed her to London and then to L.A., and then got her invited on one of society promoter Elsa Maxwell’s title-studded yacht cruises of the Greek Isles. They wed in 1955. In Paris the following year, Olivia and Pierre had a daughter, Gisele. (She would grow up to be a journalist, covering for Paris Match the glittering circuit that her mother had lost interest in.) With a Parisian husband and a newborn daughter, Olivia never looked back.

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Sister vs. Sister

he unmentionable sibling: the elephant in any room with Olivia de Havilland.

Olivia, who can have a wickedly understated wit, doesn’t believe in getting dramatic about it, but she still refers to Joan’s 1978 autobiography, No Bed of Roses, as “No Shred of Truth.” True to her meticulous ways, she has compiled an annotated rebuttal to what she sees as the book’s discrepancies and misrepresentations, which is ready to go whenever she might sit still enough to write her own memoirs. But, for the record, Olivia wants the world to know that she doesn’t look back in anger, only affection. “I loved her so much as a child,” Olivia says wistfully. Ever the lady, she has steadfastly refused to discuss her sister or their relationship since the 1950s.

Not so Joan. In a 1978 interview with People—a forceful blast of sua culpa meant to publicize No Bed of Roses—Joan flatly contradicted Olivia’s recollection of sibling tenderness, saying, “I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood.”

As Olivia tells it, the sisterly love began to evaporate when Olivia and Joan hit six and five, respectively, and began taking art lessons from a teacher who had a swimming pool on her estate. One day, on a study break, Joan, who was playing in the pool, beckoned to her sister, grabbed her by the ankle, and tried to pull her in. “She had never been rambunctious like that before, so it took me completely unaware,” says Olivia, who, as the Gablehernia affair demonstrates, certainly had her own rambunctious streak. Olivia was stronger than Joan suspected, so instead of pulling her big sister in, Joan ended up chipping her collarbone on the pool ledge and had to wear a cast. Olivia was punished for the incident, and her pool privileges were revoked. This moment of child’s play, Olivia says, became the genesis of cinema’s greatest sibling feud. (In her memoir, Joan situated the story a decade later, when she was 16 and Olivia 17, as if maturity would underscore the malignity of what she characterized as her sister’s intentional and dastardly deed.)

As the girls got older, Joan’s anger and physicality, as Olivia tells it, only increased. Joan MAY

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would slap her face, time after time, with Olivia turning the other cheek. When Olivia could take no more, she would pull Joan’s hair, and epic hairy tugs-of-war would ensue. Olivia concedes that Joan—who liked to complain that Olivia was an all-too-avid believer in the rights of primogeniture—resented wearing Olivia’s hand-me-down dresses and shoes; she would deliberately step on Olivia’s heels when following her up the stairs. In her People jeremiad, Joan turned Baby Jane on her sister, claiming that Olivia would terrorize her by reading the Crucifixion story from the Bible aloud.

“Our biggest problem was that we had to share a room,” Olivia says with a sigh, citing a cause that has launched countless sibling rivalries. She describes how Joan discovered she shared her sister’s gift for mimicry and began torturing her. Olivia couldn’t stand the maddening echoes and complained to Mummy, who advised her to call Joan “copycat” every time she repeated what Olivia said.

“Copycat,” Joan echoed her. For once, Mrs. de Havilland was at a loss for words.

The bickering sisters’ new stepfather, a local department-store manager named George Fontaine, didn’t rely on words. He was a dictatorial disciplinarian, whom Olivia still calls the Iron Duke, and he liked to beat the battling siblings. Fontaine gave them a choice of punishments—a tablespoon of cod-liver oil, which would make them throw up, or a whacking on the shins with a wooden clothes hanger. Once, when Olivia amassed 22 bruises on her legs, a staffer at her school intervened and warned Fontaine to cease and desist. It didn’t work.

Instead of bonding against their common enemy, the sisters liked nothing more than to entrap each other in one of Fontaine’s thrashings. At dinner Olivia would make faces that would force her sister to laugh and spit out her milk, leaving Joan to face Fontaine’s wrath. Mrs. de Havilland was ill for much of this period, often away in a San Francisco hospital, which left the girls without a protector. The two of them eventually reached the painful conclusion that it was time to get out of Saratoga. Olivia escaped into dramatics. Joan escaped even farther, to Japan, going to live with her father and his new wife in 1933. She attended an English-language high school in a Tokyo suburb and returned to California in 1934, only to find her big sister and sparring partner on the verge of stardom.

“Joan came with Mummy to opening night of Dream at the San Francisco Opera House,” Olivia says. “I didn’t even recognize her. She had bleached hair. She was smoking. She was no longer my younger sister. I advised her to go to Los Gatos High School and graduate. ‘I don’t want to,’ she told me defiantly. ‘I want to do what you are doing.’ ” It was as if Joan were clairvoyant, knowing how big Olivia would become before she actually got there. By the same token, Joan seemed possessed with the thought that she M AY

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too could have the same success. Olivia had no idea where A Midsummer Night’s Dream might take her. But when it did take her to Hollywood, she offered to use some of her new Warner Bros. contract money to pay for Joan’s tuition at Katharine Branson, a prep school for Bay Area debutantes seeking Nob Hill husbands. Again, Joan refused. “I want to do what you’re doing,” she insisted.

“I suppose the way I saw it then,” Olivia recalls, “was that I wanted Hollywood as my domain, and I wanted San Francisco society to be hers. I thought San Francisco was superior, I really did—the art, the opera, the clubs, the balls. I thought the sophistication Joan gained from her time in Japan made her perfectly suited for high society. But she wasn’t the slightest bit interested. ‘I want to do what you are doing’ was her mantra.”

Olivia was perplexed by the little sister’s insistence that she had to follow the big sister’s hard-earned career path, but she finally buckled to Joan’s intransigence. Yet she drew the line at sharing her name in Hollywood. “I gave her examples of younger sisters who changed their names and had the best careers,” Olivia says. “Loretta Young and Sally Blane, for instance. I even offered her an incentive: Change your name and you can come to Hollywood and live with me and Mummy, who was moving down to be my guardian because I was not yet of age. But she wouldn’t budge. She wanted to do it exactly as I was doing it, all by herself.”

Soon enough, a clairvoyant accomplished what Olivia had failed at. At a party at the house of British actor Brian Aherne, a licensed pilot whom Olivia had dated, a fortune-teller predicted that Joan would enjoy no success until she used a stage name. It needed to have eight letters and start with F. There she had it, right from her abusive stepfather. The fortune-teller also predicted that Joan would marry the host. Right again, despite the 15-year age difference.

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t first, Olivia did her best to help Joan make Fontaine a household name of its own. In the middle of filming Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick decided once again to try to spring Olivia from Jack Warner to make Rebecca with Laurence Olivier. Again, Warner refused. Selznick decided it was easier to switch than fight. “Would you mind if I take your sister?” Selznick asked Olivia. “She’s perfect.”

“He was very elegant about it,” Olivia says, with resignation about Hollywood realpolitik.

“I was losing a brilliant part, but O.K.” Olivia does her best to rationalize her loss. “She was really better for it than I was. She was blonde; Larry was brunette.” Rebecca—directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a noted aficionado of blondes—led to Joan’s first best-actress nomination. The next year, 1941, she got another one, for Suspicion, also directed by Hitchcock. She won, beating her sister, who had been nominated for Hold Back the Dawn.

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Joan and Olivia were sitting at the same table when Joan’s name was announced. As Joan wrote in No Bed of Roses, “All the animus we’d felt toward each other as children, the hair-pullings, the savage wrestling matches, the time Olivia fractured my collarbone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery.

My paralysis was total.” This was the only time a Hitchcock actor or actress would ever win an Oscar. The moment launched global headlines about “the war of the star sisters.”

Just as the sisters were reaching new levels of stardom, the tabloid and gossip press was at its cattiest. This was the era of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Much hay would be made of Olivia and Joan’s supposed spat at the 1947 Oscars, when Joan claimed that Olivia—who had won best actress for To Each His Own—nastily spurned her congratulations.

Olivia might have been justified, given Joan’s famously bitchy remark not long before about Olivia’s new husband, Marcus Goodrich: “All I know about him is that he’s had four wives and written one book. Too bad it’s not the other way around.” It didn’t help—both on a personal level and in terms of the prying press—that the sisters’ personal styles were so entirely different. “Joan had a lot of dash that men admired immensely,” Olivia says.

Among Joan’s high-profile romances were Prince Aly Khan, Adlai Stevenson, and, in another too-close-for-comfort chapter, Howard Hughes. Olivia, on the other hand, was never a staple of the society pages, and she knew it.

“I’m a simple person,” Olivia says. “I don’t have the flair, dash, and style of Joan.”

The following decade, when Olivia decamped to Paris and the sisters’ careers began to simmer down, the columnists, themselves becoming obsolete, mostly left the two alone.

Establishing their own non-Hollywood fiefdoms—Olivia in Paris, Joan in Manhattan— they settled into a wary détente. But when Mrs. de Havilland got sick with cancer in 1975, her final illness produced a new and vicious contretemps as to who was the most devoted child. While Joan was on the road with Cactus Flower, Olivia and her daughter, Gisele, stayed

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Olivia de Havilland to what, according to Olivia, her mother rosily described as “the upcoming celestial cocktail party, a reunion with everyone she loved, complete with martinis.” She dressed her 88-yearold mother up, gave her pedicures and beauty treatments, read to her from the Book of Common Prayer, and kept her spirits high until the end. “I called her the Last Empress of China,” Olivia says, still missing her today.

In No Bed of Roses, Joan wrote of attending Mummy’s memorial service at a little country theater near Saratoga, and exchanging no words with Olivia. With the book’s publication, in 1978, Joan settled this score, most viciously, in interviews, calling the funeral the sisters’ “final schism.” As ever, Olivia kept quiet.

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Love, Laughter, and Light

lthough she remains an American citizen, Olivia has made a big impression on her adopted country. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, when he awarded her the Légion d’Honneur, in 2010, gushed that he couldn’t believe he was in the presence of Melanie. Most Americans never equated Olivia de Havilland with smoldering sexuality, but here in France, things were always different. Pascal Négré, an old classmate of Gisele Galante’s, found his friend’s mother sexy in the most understated, but powerful, way. “She told this story of how she rejected John F. Kennedy when he was in Hollywood visiting Robert Stack after his PT-109 service days,” he says. “She said she was too busy and had to rehearse.

Poor J.F.K.!”

In her 60-plus years in Paris, Olivia has developed a huge network of friends, many of whom are connected to the American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V, where her readings of the Scriptures on Christmas and Easter have become annual events. Several years ago

Jackie and Lee

my own way and become independent. But she goads me to the extent that I yell back at her and say, ‘Thank heavens, at last I’ve broken away from my parents and from you and everything of that former life.’ ” Jackie tried putting her life back together, C ON T I N U E D F ROM PAGE 137

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she auctioned her huge teddy-bear collection, given to her by her friend the actress Ida Lupino, to restore the church’s grand façade. She is an honorary lifetime trustee at the American Library and has received an honorary degree in humane letters from the American University in Paris, where she helped settle a bitter student strike in the anti–Vietnam War 70s.

(After a long separation, Olivia and Pierre divorced in 1979, and he died in Paris in 1998.)

In 1999, her good friends Lee Huebner, the former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, and his wife, Berna, gave a huge Gone with the Wind party in her honor at UNESCO headquarters in Paris to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the film. “Her toast—‘Let us raise a mint julep to our stars on that great veranda in the sky!’—was typical of Olivia’s unique way with words,” Berna Huebner says.

“No star is more brilliant.” Olivia narrated Eric Ellena and Berna’s affecting documentary about art as Alzheimer’s therapy, I Remember Better When I Paint, in 2009, her most recent film credit, but hardly one she would ever acknowledge to be her last.

Olivia attributes her amazingly healthy longevity to “the three L’s—love, laughter, and light.” She does the Times crossword puzzle every day, a passion she developed as a teenager, and looks at every pain or symptom as a mystery to be solved and conquered, not a harbinger of doom. No one on earth is more positive. A lot of her precepts for perpetual health are those she learned in Camp Fire Girls, where her name was Thunderbird. She told her French doctor she plans to live to 110, which explains why she has been in no rush to write her memoirs. A terrific writer, she authored a memorable tribute to her friend Mickey Rooney in Time in 2014 that was a masterpiece of focused and powerful emotion, remembrance, and regret. Her book—should she write it—could be the last and best word on the Hollywood that, to this day, she epitomizes.

It might also offer the closing chapter on the Olivia-Joan saga. They were finally reunited, Olivia says, out of public view, with help from time’s winged chariot and their shared religious roots. Olivia was always mindful of her paternal grandfather, an Anglican priest in Guernsey, as well as her mother’s abiding faith in an afterlife. “Joan didn’t keep that faith,” Olivia recalls, “and I had dropped mine as well. Until my son’s illness. So when Joan was at a low ebb, I tried to explain to her how the Church had come back to mean a great deal to me. Despite what I call her ‘genuine disbelief,’ she joined Saint Thomas”—the Episcopal church on Fifth Avenue in New York. Joan had once baited Olivia by telling an interviewer, “I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she’ll be furious, because again I’ll have got there first!” Olivia’s official statement that she was “shocked and saddened” when Joan “got there first,” in December of 2013, belies a deep and enduring grief that no veteranthespian façade can fully conceal.

She remains as busy as ever. At our last meeting, she was in the midst of writing a thank-you address to last year’s Cannes Film Festival, which honored her, Jane Fonda, and producer Megan Ellison. Then she led me out to the Saint James’s grand stairwell atrium and did five sprightly laps around its perimeter. “One hundred ten!” she exulted, her plus10 version of the Italian toast “Cent’anni.”

As a going-away gift, she offered me those Spellbound earrings that I had admired, to give to my mother, who shares her exact birthday and has been a fan for 80 years.

Then she asked me cryptically if I love Paris.

At my inevitable affirmative, she presented me with a magnificent coffee-table book on the vanished glories of the city. “We’ll always have Paris,” Olivia said, bidding farewell with a wink to classic Hollywood and to her glorious liberation from it.

protecting her children and working to burnish the legend of her husband’s brief presidency by conjuring the myth of Camelot. But now it was Lee’s time to shine. She had always hated what had been written about her during the Kennedy years: “It was so limited, so … jet-set, empty, cold, and not true,” she told Steinem in an interview for McCall’s magazine.

“There were so many things I couldn’t do when my brother-in-law was president,” Lee whispered to me in her sun-drenched apartment. “Finally, I’m free.”

she would be nearer to Jackie and so her children could spend more time with their cousins.

Lee again turned to Mongiardino to transform the somewhat faded duplex into what many considered the most beautiful showplace in New York, choosing a dramatic, cherry-red velvet for the living room and placing an 18th-century “nursery” painting of a monkey shaking hands with a dog in the dining room. In the hall library she hung Francis Bacon’s 1962 oil painting Figure Turning, which Stas had acquired when he covered the reprobate painter’s gambling debts.

Lee began writing articles on fashion and culture for Ladies’ Home Journal. And when she became friends with Truman Capote, the mischievous, diminutive, and waspish writer, he noticed “her first-class

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The Truman Show

n 1964, Jackie bought an apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, just up from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robert Kennedy persuaded Stas to buy Lee a duplex at 969 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, so

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by Sarah Mierau; manicures by PAGE 101:

intelligence,” as well as her femininity. “I can’t think of any woman more feminine than Lee Radziwill—not even Audrey Hepburn.”

“Truman fell in love with me,” Radziwill reminisced, elegantly smoking a thin cigarette, a rueful smile playing across her lips.

“He thought there was nothing I couldn’t do, and that I must go in the theater and I would be the perfect Tracy Lord,” the heroine of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story, a role made famous by Katharine Hepburn.

“He would arrange it with such taste. He was convinced that I could do this.”

Stas “was violently against” her going on the stage, Lee recalled. “He said, ‘You have everything in life, a perfect life. Why do you want to go out and get criticized?’ ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Because I’ve always wanted to do this.’ ” Truman became obsessed with showcasing his favorite “swan,” as he called his society women friends, arranging almost every aspect of the production. In light of Lee’s acting inexperience, it was thought best to open for a four-week run in a small theater in Chicago. Lee “was very excited about it. Truman pushed and pushed, in spite of my husband being so against it.” Yves Saint Laurent was brought in to design all of Lee’s costumes.

Kenneth was flown in from New York to do her hair, and Truman was on hand to orchestrate the three-ring circus, coaching Lee and calming her nerves while dancing to his favorite records on a portable phonograph.

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Doctors kept coming by to give some of the exhausted cast and crew vitamin-B injections, probably the kind made infamous by Dr. Max Jacobson.

“So, all that didn’t help my nerves for opening night,” Lee remembered. Makeup man “George Masters was so excited that Rudolf Nureyev was coming, and Margot Fonteyn, he almost lost his mind. He did dye my hair blond, and he made me a nervous wreck by the time it opened. Then he spent the day on opening night dressing [to impress] Nureyev, in an absolutely snow-white suit. I sat in my dressing room waiting for him, until Rudolf came backstage and just held me in his arms. I was weeping.”

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ven though Lee had insisted on using her maiden name in the credits instead of “Princess Radziwill,” the four-week run was sold out, and the first-night audience was studded with the rich and famous. But one famous face failed to appear: Jackie, who was in Ireland at the time. Some have suggested that Jackie’s long trip abroad, coinciding as it did with Lee’s debut in The Philadelphia Story, was Jackie’s polite rebuke of her sister’s latest venture. Could she have been envious?

She once told writer Gore Vidal, “I’d love to act. Do you think it’s too late?,” and she’d thought of doing a studio screen test, but the Kennedys wouldn’t allow it. Jackie had become a kind of movie star in her own right, as

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Vidal later observed: “A silent star of unmade films, her face on every magazine cover almost to the end.” Whatever her true feelings, Jackie sent a pretty little mauve box to Lee on opening night with her wishes for good luck.

When the curtain was raised on the first night of the run, Lee found herself frozen with fear. “I remember so well,” she recalled. “The first scene opened with Tracy trying to write a letter. I could not move [my hand] to the end of the paper. I was totally paralyzed.” Though she looked beautiful in Saint Laurent’s dresses—the audience oohed and aahed after each costume change—she failed to command the stage. She explained to Hollywood columnist Dorothy Manners, “It is difficult for someone raised in my world to learn to express emotion. We are taught early to hide our feelings publicly.” The reviews were mostly bad (LEE LAYS GOLDEN EGG) with a few encouraging notes thrown in (MISS BOUVIER’S BRAVADO SHINES), yet the audience loved it and left the theater raving about her couture.

“I got terrible reviews,” Lee recalled with a small smile, “but I really believe they were written before the play opened.”

Despite the reviews, Life put a radiantly smiling, 34-year-old Lee on its July 14, 1967, cover, for an article titled “The Princess Goes on Stage” (with the pull quote “Girls who have everything are not supposed to do anything”). Diana Vreeland arranged a 10-page fashion story with Lee for the September iswww.vanityfair.com

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Jackie and Lee sue of Vogue, bringing in the celebrated photographer Bert Stern.

Lee made plans to appear in a TV movie, again at Truman’s insistence, in the title role of Laura, in a remake of the 1944 Otto Preminger classic starring Gene Tierney. Filmed in London for the ABC television network, it aired on January 24, 1968.

Capote, just coming off his great success with In Cold Blood, was at the height of his fame and influence. He wrote the adaptation, with TV producer and talk-show host David Susskind. Again, it was widely watched, fiercely criticized. One wonders in retrospect, however, if Truman’s urging Lee to jump unprepared into two starring roles was evidence of his conflicted feelings toward “the Principessa.” Ralph Rucci told me, “I think he was in love with her, totally in love with her. And because he couldn’t psychologically handle that, he had to hurt her, which is so twisted and unfortunate.”

Lee was offered other roles in movies and plays, but Stas had had enough. “He said, ‘I’ll never let you see the children,’ so I couldn’t do that,” she recalled. “What a shame, having gone through all that and now not being able to continue. A terrible shame.”

When asked by Gloria Steinem if she had pursued acting to become more famous than her sister, she answered, “Look, I am doing this to be myself, my own person, in a way I feel I’ve never been allowed to be… If one wants fame, I can think of easier ways of getting it.”

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t was four A.M. in New York on June 5, 1968, shortly after Bobby Kennedy had won the California primary for the Democratic nomination for president, when, according to Cecil Beaton’s diaries, Jackie saw the flashing light on her bedside telephone.

It was Stas calling from London. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she said to her brother-in-law when she answered the phone. “He’s won.

He’s got California!”

“But how is he?” Stas asked.

“Oh, he’s fine, he’s won.” But Stas again asked how he was, until he finally had to tell Jackie, “He’s been shot!” To the shock and consternation of the world, 42-year-old Robert Kennedy had been shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Once again, Jackie was plunged into grief, but now she was frightened for the safety of her children as well, telling a friend, “They’re killing Kennedys in America.”

Four months later, on October 20, 1968, Jackie married Aristotle Onassis. According to Rucci, she had not told her sister about her secret engagement, though it was leaked to the press. “Onassis told me,” Lee recalled.

“He begged me to come to the wedding.”

When Lee heard, she was devastated. Ac-

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cording to DuBois, she called Capote, saying, “How could she do this to me!” Though she put a brave face on it, saying publicly, “I am very happy to have been at the origin of this marriage, which will, I am certain, bring my sister the happiness she deserves,” it was a staggering blow from which their relationship would never completely recover.

To those who were shocked that Jackie had traded her legacy as America’s Widowed Queen to marry one of the richest men in the world—a short, bullish man reputed to be a pirate and a vulgarian—many observed that Ari was in fact immensely charming, keenly intelligent, with a deep knowledge of Greek mythology and human nature. Gore Vidal wrote, “Ari was more charming and witty than she, and in the glittering European circus, where, to her credit, she did not particularly want to shine, the word was, ‘What on earth does he see in her?’ ” What he saw in Jackie was the ultimate trophy—world-famous beyond Lee and Maria Callas, in need of his protection, and ennobled by her tragic history. By re-marrying, Jackie would be giving up her income from the Kennedy trust, so, like two heads of state, Jackie, through her representative, the Parisian-born investment banker André Meyer, and Onassis himself negotiated a dowry of $3 million cash, plus $1 million in trust for each of her children, and $200,000 per year for her in the event of divorce or his death, according to C. David Heymann’s A Woman Named Jackie. They were married in a Greek Orthodox wedding on Skorpios, Ari’s private island west of mainland Greece, which offered complete seclusion among pines, cypresses, and olive trees. Lee came to the wedding.

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ackie and her children may have been well protected in a sun-drenched paradise, but she and her new husband had very little in common. Leo Lerman recorded in his diary, “She will not sit in El Morocco with him and his three or four cigar-smoking Greek chums… Mrs. K likes ‘intellectuals’—Galbraith, Schlesinger—but this is not why he married her. He wants to display her; she won’t be displayed… Onassis is bored with Mrs. K.” A month after the wedding, Onassis returned to his former paramour, Maria Callas, according to Lerman’s diary.

Callas, still furious at having been thrown over for Lee and now for Jackie, tried to evict Onassis when he stripped naked after dinner at her Paris apartment and refused to get dressed. The opera diva called the police, who escorted him out, while she flung open the window, shrieking into the empty Parisian streets, “Shame on you! And on the anniversary of your second wife’s first husband’s death!” (It was November 22, 1968, five years after Kennedy’s assassination.) But she soon took him back, glee-

fully noting that “Mr. O is in constant torment—Mrs. O has nothing save the name, the fortune, and his wrath.” Onassis evidently complained to Callas about another reason for his marital unhappiness. Theater impresario Larry Kelly told Lerman, “Mrs. Kennedy won’t do it,” referring to Onassis’s Greek proclivities.

Blindsided by Jackie’s marriage, Lee managed, once again, to make a new life for herself. On Skorpios she met Jackie’s friend Peter Beard, the handsome photographer, diarist, adventurer, and wildlife advocate. Also a close friend of Stas’s, he was Kennedy-esque in his boyish charm and appeal to women.

(He even had Kennedy hair.) The affair essentially ended her marriage to Stas.

Beard moved in with Lee at her Manhattan apartment, and Lee rented a house belonging to Andy Warhol and film director Paul Morrissey, on a sprawling compound of five houses in Montauk designed by Stanford White. It was Peter who introduced Lee to the Warhol circle. Jackie was as enamored of Peter as Lee was. She had already had the dashing photographer tutor her children in art history. Thus the sisters continued to haunt each other’s love life, “like two trees whose branches kept getting tangled up, their shadows indistinguishable,” observed avantgarde filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

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Cleaning House

ee threw herself into the liberated 70s with abandon. She appeared on the cover of Warhol’s Interview magazine and hosted Mick Jagger in Montauk. Accompanied by Peter Beard, she joined the Rolling Stones on their 1972 North American concert tour. Capote covered the tour for Rolling Stone magazine, with Beard supplying the photographs.

Lee doesn’t dwell on regret, but if she has one, it’s that she wasn’t “brought up to have a métier.” Still determined to carve out her own identity, she launched an interiordecorating business and began to write a memoir. She made a pilot for her own talk show for CBS, Conversations with Lee Radziwill, in which she interviewed some of her friends—John Kenneth Galbraith, Nureyev, Gloria Steinem, Halston—but it was lost in the hard-news Watergate frenzy of the era.

In the spring of 1972, Lee set out to make a documentary about her childhood in the Hamptons, using her Bouvier aunt, Edith Beale, as the narrator. Peter Beard suggested David and Albert Maysles as “the perfect filmmakers for the project.” But she soon discovered that her Bouvier aunt and cousin, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, were living in squalor in their decaying, 28-room house near Georgica Pond, in East Hampton. Appalled by the dilapidated condition of their once splendid home and gardens—60 cats roamed MAY

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the filthy corridors—she enlisted Jackie to help save their house from being condemned. Lee recalled in Happy Times that the Maysleses “became so intrigued”—with the eccentric Beales—“they persuaded me to let them control [the movie] completely, making it a film solely on mother and daughter.”

Not surprisingly, what got left out of the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens (which spawned a Tony Award–winning Broadway musical and an Emmy Award–winning HBO movie) is the degree to which Lee spearheaded the rescue mission.

A filmmaker and friend of Lee’s told me that missing from the movie is “incredible footage—Lee with Big and Little Edie. She’s actually cleaning the house. But who got the credit for cleaning up Grey Gardens? Jackie.

But it’s Lee actually moving the refrigerator out of the kitchen. And Big Edie’s so excited to have her there. There’s this great part where she’s screaming to someone, ‘Lee! Lee’s here! My niece Lee’s here from Montauk!’ And Lee looks so beautiful.”

Lee’s divorce from Stas became final in 1974. He was heartbroken; his fortunes had dwindled considerably by then, and he had become a rather haunted figure. The following year, Onassis initiated divorce proceedings against Jackie. On March 15, 1975, however, before their divorce could move forward, he died in Paris; he was buried on Skorpios shortly thereafter. Jackie was in New York at the time of his death. It would take nearly two years before a settlement was finally reached with Ari’s daughter, Christina: $20 million in cash to Jackie and another $6 million to cover inheritance taxes, according to Heymann.

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n 1993, Lee’s son, Anthony, became engaged to Carole Ann DiFalco, whom he had met while both were working as producers at ABC News in New York. Carole, an intelligent, coltish woman from a colorful, blue-collar Italian family in upstate New York, is currently a reality-TV star on The Real Housewives of New York City. “I have to correct people when they say, ‘Oh, you’re married into the Kennedy family,’ ” she told me. “ ‘No, I married into the Radziwill family.’ It was a point of honor for me.”

Lee was in her 50s when Carole met her, and she often invited Anthony and his fiancée to her house in the Hamptons for Sunday lunches. Lee, Carole said, “was always gracious, even to her ex-lovers. She has that feminine quality that’s hard to put your finger on.

Men just fell at her feet. There is an elegant casualness that I don’t think I’ve seen since.”

Anthony and Carole were married in 1994, but in a cruel twist to a fairy-tale romance, the five years of their marriage were spent in multiple surgeries and agonizing treatments for Anthony’s cancer, which had been diagnosed in 1990 and which recurred just after their wedding. Carole recounted her years

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spent as Anthony’s wife and a close friend of Carolyn Bessette and John Kennedy Jr.’s in a searing 2005 book, What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love.

In June 1976, Stas Radziwill died of a heart attack, just 62 years of age, during a weekend party in Essex, England. On his death, it was discovered that his estate was essentially bankrupt, with nothing to leave to his children.

Five months later, in November of 1976, Hugh D. Auchincloss, once referred to as “the first gentleman of New York,” died from emphysema, having lost most of his fortune.

Earlier, Lee had sorted through old diaries and letters in the attic of her childhood home.

She was still hoping to use what she found to write her memoir. That’s when she discovered “One Special Summer,” the sweet, funny, girlish account she and Jackie had made of their first trip to Europe, in 1951, a lifetime ago. It had survived as an artifact, a testament to how close the sisters had once been, poised to make their marks on the world stage. Lee and Jackie agreed that they should publish it, just as it was.

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n 1979, with her romance with Peter Beard long over, and after relationships with the lawyer Peter Tufo and the architect Richard Meier, Lee came close to being married for a third time, to Newton Cope, a successful San Francisco hotelier. But just prior to the wedding, Cope suddenly pulled out. Apparently, Jackie was behind the dashed plans. Cope told Bradford that Jackie had her lawyer privately contact him and suggest that he settle $15,000 per month on Lee as a prenuptial. “I don’t think Lee would have thought of something like that,” Cope recalled to DuBois. “She wasn’t as money-hungry as Jackie was. Lee wanted to be taken care of, yes, but I don’t think she would connive in that way.”

Cope ended up feeling manipulated and bullied, according to DuBois, telling Jackie’s lawyer, “I am not buying a cow or a celebrity the way Onassis did! I am in love with this woman!” Cope, too, was surprised to see how Lee was intimidated by her big sister.

“Why the hell are you so afraid of your sister?,” Cope asked her one night after leaving a dinner party Jackie had given in honor of the couple. He later said, “It’s too bad Lee couldn’t get away from that sister of hers. Being just a few blocks away, it was like an unhealthy bond she couldn’t escape from.”

By now Jackie was a rich woman; the inheritance from Onassis had grown to $150 million, under the astute guidance of her trusted friend and new companion, BelgianAmerican businessman and diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. In addition, she also reportedly owned an estimated $40 million worth of art, antiques, jewelry, and real estate. Lee was still struggling, and in 1979 she sold her Fifth Avenue duplex and bought

a much smaller penthouse two blocks away, at 875 Park. Later, she would sell that apartment and be reduced to renting or buying even smaller apartments. She sold the Francis Bacon painting at Sotheby’s for $200,000, just before the booming 1980s art market; within a couple of years the painting was worth millions. Like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Lee was facing the prospect of a slow and steady fall.

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The End of an Era

ackie was relieved, then, when Lee married the filmmaker Herbert Ross (Footloose, Steel Magnolias) on September 23, 1988, and she hosted a dinner for the couple at her Fifth Avenue apartment. According to Bradford, she told a friend, “I’m happy for Lee, because between you and me Lee has stared into the jaws of hell.” The Brooklynborn Ross, who had started his professional life as a dancer and choreographer, was witty, expansive, and warm. Though their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, and many believed that Ross was bisexual, at last Lee seemed to have found both security and love, and in photographs with Ross she looks radiantly happy.

In early 1994, Jackie, then 64, was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and in a few short months it invaded her liver, spinal cord, and brain. With hundreds keeping vigil outside her building, she died at her home at 1040 Fifth Avenue, surrounded by her family, on May 19, 1994, Black Jack Bouvier’s birthday. On her deathbed, according to Bradford, she advised her children to “sell everything.

You’ll make a lot of money.” The auction, at Sotheby’s in 1996, reportedly netted more than $34 million.

When she’d first heard of Jackie’s illness, Lee rushed to her sister’s side. At Jackie’s death, she wept inconsolably.

But Jackie would leave a final reproach in her will, which transferred much of her holdings to her children, with substantial cash bequests and valuable mementos to family, friends, and employees—helping everyone, it seemed, except Lee, because “I have already done so during my lifetime.” Although the will set up $500,000 trust funds for Tina and Anthony, not even a memento was left for her sister. Lee must have been deeply hurt.

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n July 16, 1999, John Kennedy Jr., his stunning young wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, were killed when John, a novice pilot, became disoriented on their way to a family wedding in Hyannis Port. Soon after, Lee and Stas’s son, Anthony, succumbed to cancer.

Lee’s marriage to Ross didn’t survive, and they divorced in 2001. Through everything, Lee Bouvier Canfield Radziwill Ross has managed to endure. Perhaps that has been her greatest gift after all: to survive, and to www.vanityfair.com

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Jackie and Lee do so with grace and courage. “Did you see that small, fifth-century Roman head over the mantel?,” Rucci asked me. “She’s had it in her life for many, many years. It’s one of her favorite things because it looks like her son, Anthony, and that’s why it gives her comfort.”

Until recently, she divided her time between New York and her Paris pied-à-terre, on the Avenue Montaigne, though she admitted that Paris, too, has changed. “There’s a McDonald’s in the Louvre,” she exclaimed. She

Women’s Colleges

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 4 4 broadly: biologically female, or male identifying as a woman or as “other.” Does including trans men make an institution feel less like a women’s college? “Like any civil-rights movement,” she answers, “this is the right time” to advocate for those whose identities are unconventional. Pasquerella says approximately 5 percent of students identify as trans, with “about 10 students per year involved in hormonal therapy” in either direction. “I do talk about ‘sisterhood’ even if not all students identify as female.” The college was last in the news in 2015 when a student-directed annual production of The Vagina Monologues was canceled out of consideration for transgender students.

When you scratch deeper among students at Mount Holyoke, they talk about their friendships and inclusion. “It’s so cool; there’s a Muslim student on my hall whose roommate is a lesbian,” says one student.

“I had to get used to people saying hi to me,” says Briyana. “Even Yik Yak [the app known for anonymous criticism] is nice here!” As interim president Sonya Stephens says, “We’re seen as a friendly campus where women can flourish and excel, with enough support for people to succeed. Our friendliness is a big part of our resilience. Is that edgy enough for a women’s college in the 21st century?”

“I was the only girl in my physics lab,” Kat, a transfer student, said of her previous college. “I felt if I said something wrong

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dines with longtime friends, such as designer Carolina Herrera and her husband, Reinaldo, a V.F. contributing editor; Peter Beard and his wife, Nejma; designer Marc Jacobs; interior designer Nicky Haslam; filmmaker Sofia Coppola; and her closest friend and confidant, Hamilton South.

When I visited her in April, Lee was in a philosophical state of mind. The lease on her Paris apartment, a place she loves, was due to lapse in October. When I suggested that they should pay her to live there, she answered, “Yes, they should. But they won’t.”

“I feel like I’m in my own world, in the

world but not a part of it.” Lee no longer goes to the movies, which she used to love, because she feels that contemporary films lack both romance and mystery. She finds going to the ballet or theater “such a chore now—they go through your handbag looking for bombs.”

One thing she would like to do, however, is visit Mantua “to say good-bye to a favorite Rubens. I’d like to go this summer to say goodbye, but it will be so crowded, and I’d like to go with someone who knows more about the art. If only it could be Bernard Berenson!”

“It’s so close to the end,” she added, “closer than life is. I think you know what I mean.”

I’d be labeled stupid for the whole year. In 2013!” Now she’s double-majoring in neuroscience and computer science.

says another, and her friend says, “Me too!

I could be shut down.”

I asked students, “What made you choose an all-women’s college?” One bluenail-polished gender-studies major pointed out the very question proved I suffered from “internalized sexism and misogyny,” but in a very polite way. She said, “Like your college life is incomplete without guys?”

What about the rumored sizable lesbian population at Smith? Dean Shaver: “I tell people that if your daughter isn’t comfortable around gays and lesbians, don’t send her to any college in the Northeast.”

Smithies are assigned to houses, to which they become attached. “Smith is [one big] sorority,” I’m told. “But you become house proud.” The matching up of personalities must be done impeccably, because 50 percent of all students stay in their original house for all four years. Each student says that she lives in the best house.

After all is said and done, every 10 years, like all other colleges, Smith reviews its mission during the accreditation process, and in doing so it determines whether to remain a women’s college. But owning the engineering classroom, having dinner parties in your pajamas, and celebrating “Galentine’s Day” with Say Yes to the Dress marathons are part of the memories graduates will cherish.

SMITH COLLEGE, NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS Founded: 1871.

Enrollment: 2,500.

Most popular major: Economics.

Favorite tradition: At commencement, “Smithies” form a series of concentric circles in the quad and pass diplomas to one another; each graduate steps out of the circle when she gets her diploma.

This continues till no students remain.

Gender policy: A women’s college for self-identified females. Trans men can graduate.

Coed opportunities: Like Mount Holyoke (see page 144), Smith participates in the Five College Consortium.

Equestrian program: Students can take up to four equitation classes for P.E. credit.

Distinguished alumnae: Senator Tammy Baldwin; former First Ladies Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan; Julia Child; feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem; curator Thelma Golden; authors Madeleine L’Engle, Margaret Mitchell, and Sylvia Plath; Broadway director Kathleen Marshall.

Smith is known as a feminist college, as befits the academic starting points of both Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. President Kathleen McCartney says, “This generation is acutely aware of civil-rights issues, and Smith women regard women’s rights as human rights.” Deb Shaver, the dean of admission, says, “We’re not coed. And we’re not the real world—but neither is Harvard or Stanford. If you’re interested in beer and frats, go elsewhere. But if you’re interested in you, Smith is all about you. You’re the show. This is a selfish experience.”

A group of students are explaining why they love it. “I’m allowed to own my confusion,” says one. “I used to tiptoe in my life,”

STEPHENS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA, MISSOURI Founded: 1833.

Enrollment: 667.

Most popular major: Biology.

Favorite tradition: Vespers, a nonsectarian, “intentionally quiet” time held monthly in the chapel.

Gender policy: A college for women, but a transgender policy is being “looked at,” according to President Dianne Lynch.

Coed opportunities: Students may take classes at the University of Missouri, across the street.

Equestrian program: Yes. An academic program as well as a recreational one. You MAY

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ST Y L E D BY C L A I B O R N E S WA N S O N F R A N K ; D R E S S E S BY M I CH A E L KO R S CO L L E C T I O N ; B R I A N A ’ S S H O E S BY J I M M Y CH O O ; BRITTANY’S SHOES BY CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN; HAIR AND MAKEUP BY DAPHNE L ATHAM; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS

can major or minor in equestrian studies.

Distinguished alumnae: Actresses Tammy Grimes, Annie Potts, and Dawn Wells; Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick (when Stephens was a junior college); and broadcaster Paula Zahn.

Stephens, the second-oldest women’s college in the United States, has carved out a specific mission for itself, one that blends classroom work with practical experience. Many students are from the area—within the new normal’s highly desirable two-and-a-halfhour drive from home. This was once a school for daughters of the gentry. Now it focuses on preparing hardworking students for careers.

Majors include event and convention management, fashion communication, and musical theater.

Stephens is one of the most accommodating campuses for pets in America, and that’s not limited to cats and dogs. Students also share their dorm rooms with birds, gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters, lizards, mice, rats, sugar gliders, rabbits, and hedgehogs, and the school provides doggie day care for those who are in classes and labs. Some horse people board their own horses at Stephens’s celebrated stables.

The equestrian students are not training for the Olympics or their local classic horse show. “This is for people who want to work in the industry at show barns, or teaching and training,” says Sara Linde Patel ’02, the director of the program. One may pair equestrian studies with a minor, say, in small-business management, or education.

Under president Dianne Lynch, a journalist and Ph.D., there is a sense of calm and quirkiness that feels as safe and sound as a nice high school. In red Uggs when we meet (she wears red shoes every day in order to be recognized across campus), Dianne seems to know many of her 600 students by name and face. They call her by her first name.

I attend Vespers on the eve of exams.

Also known as “Stephens Unplugged,” it’s a monthly event, led by Dianne as the chill mom/cool aunt/mother superior. She collects all cell phones, hands out chocolates, and urges everyone to practice mindfulness for about 15 minutes. “Stay in the moment,” she urges. “Your life is chaotic and full of anxiety.” Then she dims the lights, M AY

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and many students lie down on the hard wooden benches. Some sleep.

SWEET BRIAR COLLEGE, SWEET BRIAR, VIRGINIA Founded: 1901.

Enrollment: 249; 350–400 expected this fall.

Most popular major: Business.

Favorite tradition: Founder’s Day, honoring Indiana Fletcher Williams, who established the school in memory of her only child, Daisy, who died at age 16. Every year, the Sweet Briar community walks together up Monument Hill, to honor the founding family. Bagpipes are played. At the top,

SWEET BRIAR SAVIORS Sweet Briar College’s twin recruitment directors, Briana and Brittany Deane, ’08, on the front patio of the college president’s house.

everyone places roses and clusters of daisies on Daisy’s grave.

Gender policy: “A college for women.”

Coed opportunities: Sweet Briar is part of a seven-college Virginia consortium which includes its brother school, the all-male Hampden-Sydney College.

Equestrian program: Yes. And let no mention of Sweet Briar omit the Engineers Who Ride. “Our engineering program proves that we are not a finishing school!” declares a horseback-riding engineering major.

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Distinguished alumnae: Janet Lee Bouvier, film critic Molly Haskell, actress Diana Muldaur, and novelist Mary Lee Settle.

Now wryly called “the most famous college in the country” by some Sweet Briar staff, within 24 hours of the announcement that it was shutting down, alums had masterminded a national campaign, which raised more than $28.5 million in pledges. Thanks to a mediation led by the Virginia attorney general and a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court, and armed with $12 million of #SavingSweetBriar money, the school never closed. Its Vixens (female foxes; the school mascot and what students are called) taught the board a lesson in financial management and loyalty.

Two people who were deeply affected by the bad news were Brittany and Briana Deane, identical twins who graduated in 2008 and practiced law together in Austin. On my visit, Briana wore a smart knee-length dress in Kelly green, and Brittany wore the same dress in shocking pink—the school colors!—with matching pearls. “We’ll never forget where we were,” one said, when they heard about the shuttering of their alma mater. “At our double desk in a law firm in Texas.” They were “among our first responders,” says Steven Nape, chief enrollment officer. They moved back to Sweet Briar to help in any way they could, while maintaining their legal careers. They were deployed as the co- directors of undergraduate recruitment, and together they tell the story of the college they love so much.

“It’s not ‘a women’s college, but,’ ” one of them says. “ It’s ‘a women’s college, and.’ People’s lives are dramatically changed here. This is the best fairy tale.”

Props go to new president Phillip Stone, 73, who is guiding the revived Sweet Briar with a protectiveness and zeal for the liberal arts. To help re-grow the student body, Sweet Briar is offering aid—even now—to every student. In a community this small, everyone counts and feels counted. During my visit, it felt as if everyone was on an evangelical mission. One Vixen told me that several of her friends at Sweet Briar transferred to other schools, but “we talk every day, and three are coming back.”

A French exchange student came to Sweet Briar, oblivious to the drama—she just wanted to study in the U.S. She liked it enough to extend her program and has

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Women’s Colleges learned a lot about southern style. She explains, “Not having a middle name means you can’t have a monogram.”

WELLESLEY COLLEGE, WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS Founded: 1870.

Enrollment: 2,344.

Most popular major: Economics.

Favorite tradition: Hoop rolling—a race in which seniors roll tall wooden hoops into Lake Waban while wearing their commencement robes. It used to be said that the first one into the water would be the first to get married.

In the 1980s the legend became that the winner would be the first C.E.O. Today, the winner is predicted to be “the first to achieve happiness and success.”

Gender policy: Women and those who identify and live as women may apply.

Students who transition while at Wellesley may stay and graduate.

Coed opportunities: Students may take classes at M.I.T., Olin College of Engineering, and Babson.

Equestrian program: No, but there is an equestrian club.

Distinguished alumnae: Former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, writer and director Nora Ephron, actress Ali MacGraw, Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”), and newswomen Cokie Roberts and Diane Sawyer.

“I’ve never locked my door. I leave my laptop in the dining hall. It’s a privilege to feel so safe,” a music major at Wellesley tells me. When Adeline decided to come here,

Amy Schumer

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 2 6 of speaking out publicly about sensitive topics when he was promoting his book [The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America], and he said, ‘You can say whatever you want if you really mean it.’ I think Amy is brave and she means it. She will always say what she thinks is important to say. That is why people love her.”

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her high-school friends asked, “ ‘Why are you doing that?’ That made me defiant. I’m not here to escape men. I want to join the cohort of powerful women who’ve attended a women’s college.” Another senior confides, “People here were people I wanted to be like. I didn’t feel that way about other colleges.” Wellesley, the richest sister, has a way about her.

“Micro-aggressions eat away at you,” Irene Mata, professor of women and gender studies, tells me. “You have this time at Wellesley to build up your strength, and then you have lifetime relationships with your peers and your professors.”

Phil Levine, an economics professor, admits that his students tend to be perfectionists. “They work so hard, sometimes I tell them to relax.” Most choose one night a weekend to go out. “ ‘A night out’ is hanging out and talking.”

One student reported that she’d had a great weekend. Another looked at her and said, completely straight-faced, “It’s my duty to tell you you can’t have a good weekend because of a man.” The Bechdel test, Wellesleystyle. And yet, Wellesley doesn’t feel like a feminist hotbed; it feels like a place for women who are happy with themselves. A surprisingly large number of seniors I met had not figured out their post-graduation plans by February—and seemed utterly unperturbed by it. They’ve read articles such as The New York Times’s “How to Succeed? Go to Wellesley.” The message of their imminent success has been received and they are calm. They’ve survived Wellesley’s tough grading policy.

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ome closing thoughts: Spending time at these campuses was not what I had imagined. The richness and intimacy of

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“Torn and Screaming”

chumer’s career intersected with a stubborn American sickness on July 23, 2015, when John R. Houser, a 59-year-old mentally ill drifter who had legally purchased a .40-caliber semi-automatic pistol from a pawnshop, opened fire inside a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, that was showing Trainwreck. Two young women were killed, and another nine people were wounded, before Houser shot and killed himself. His journal, which Lafayette police released in January, revealed that he had been inspired by the mass shooting in June of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.

Schumer was in Los Angeles the night of the killings, still doing publicity for Trainwreck, then about to enter its second week of release, when she noticed “a million” missed calls from her publicist on her phone. “I was laughing before I called her back, because I thought it was going to be like a sex tape

these students’ experiences are enviable and inspiring. As a college-guidebook writer and a mother of college students, I have not heard so many students talk about appreciating their educations. These young people are studying bespoke curricula—with professors and deans collaborating to make their goals more attainable.

According to the Women’s College Coalition, the first thing you should know is that admissions numbers are up at almost every women’s college this year. Some are at historic highs. “Enough generations have passed,” Wellesley dean Joy St. John says.

“We’re post–Title IX, Beyoncé calls herself a feminist, and now it’s a plus factor, a savvy choice for their careers, for being leaders.” I wondered whether being separated from men gave women a false sense of confidence that would diminish when they competed in the wider world. But not a day goes by at Stephens or Barnard where a woman isn’t in charge. Not a day goes by without the explicit or implicit message that “this is your turn, aim high, and we will support you.”

Many students pointed out that college lasts all of 120 weeks of one’s life—a reminder of how fleeting and precious the experience is. It’s also a scold to those who think “giving up men” is real deprivation, when the exchange—feeling empowered and getting an excellent and customized education—is immeasurable. Academically, these schools are as rigorous as the top coed colleges, if not more so. Therefore, when the conversation begins with “The only thing I knew was I didn’t want a women’s college,” as Hannah, a Wellesley senior, recalled feeling at first, it ends with “These are the only four years of your life that don’t have to be coed.”

[had surfaced] or something. So I was kind of laughing, like ready to … ” Schumer paused.

“And then she told me there had been this shooting.” Schumer paused again, her eyes moistening. “It really … I don’t know. It’s like when the Dark Knight shooting happened, and in Paris. The idea of people trying to go out and have a good time—you know, like looking forward to it?—I don’t know why that makes me the saddest.” She was crying now, but speaking in a steady voice. “So my publicist told me. And then I put on the news. I was by myself in a hotel, and I was just like, I wish I never wrote that movie.” She knew intellectually that she had nothing to do with the shooting, but friends who reached out and tried to comfort her, telling her the shooting wasn’t her “fault,” only made it worse. “I just felt helpless and stupid,” she said.

Soon she felt angry too. She contacted the victims’ families and made donations on their behalf. She also vowed to work toward ending MAY

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gun violence and begin educating herself on the issue. Her cousin the senator reached out to her. “I got a call,” she said, “and he was like, ‘Amy, this is your cousin Chuck.’ And I said, ‘I hope this is you asking me to help with guns.’ He laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s what this is.’ I was like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s do it.’ ” “It was clear to me she was a true believer,” Senator Schumer said. “She was smart.

She was knowledgeable. She really cared.

This wasn’t just something to advance a career.” The two Schumers have started a campaign, Aiming for Change, to build support for the legislation the senator has introduced that would close background-check loopholes for gun purchasers and help eliminate “straw purchases” by middlemen. You can’t help thinking, Good luck with that. Amy, who has also filmed a video for the group Everytown for Gun Safety, said she is well aware of the odds against her but seemed more concerned with the stakes. “Every event I go to, you see the same people, and they’re wearing a button of their kid, or kids, or their mother, or someone who died and didn’t have to. And they’re like, ‘Thank you. Please keep going.’

Because, unfortunately, someone with some celebrity brings more attention to it than a politician.” That is demonstrably true by one measure: Twitter followers. As of mid-April, Amy had 3.95 million followers to Chuck’s 134,000—a near-30-fold difference. So far, their campaign has consisted of two press events and a hashtag, but, the senator said, “Amy is invaluable.”

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he next time I saw Schumer it was a freezing-cold day in February. She was shooting Inside Amy Schumer on a soundstage at a tumbledown studio in the distant reaches of Brooklyn. Rumor had it that the studio had been home to numerous porn productions in the 1970s and 1980s. “We hope it was just the 70s and 80s,” Schumer said. She was directing a new sketch, a surreal sitcom parody. It begins as a barely exaggerated take on the fat-husband-hot-wife genre (see: The King of Queens, According to Jim, The Flintstones) and ends when Schumer’s next-door-neighbor character, again “Amy,” stops getting laughs from the otherwise easily amused studio audience and, as a consequence, is dragged off by a pair of what the script described as “Hun-

ger Games style peacekeepers” while the show within the show carries on without her. “Offscreen,” the stage directions read, “we can hear Amy being torn apart and screaming.”

She had had a very busy two and a half months since I’d last seen her. She’d caused a stir by posing nearly nude for Annie Leibovitz for the 2016 Pirelli Calendar; been nominated for a Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a comedy for Trainwreck (she lost out to her pal Jennifer Lawrence, for Joy); appeared at a gun-violence event at the White House; inadvertently told the world that her relationship status had changed when she Instagrammed a picture of herself in front of the White House with her sister, her brother, and her boyfriend of less than two months standing, Ben Hanisch, a furniture-maker (“We’re in love,” she told me, but declined to reveal how they had met, saving that story for her book, though she did say he had barely known who she is and had seen stand-up only once in his life); been accused by several comics of stealing jokes (accusations subsequently rescinded); begun a standup tour of arenas, her first as a headliner (her brother’s trio opened for her on several dates, probably confounding her rowdier fans); had Inside Amy Schumer picked up for a fifth season by Comedy Central; and been cast in her first “serious” film role, in Thank You for Your Service, a drama about veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, written and directed by Jason Hall, who previously wrote American Sniper. (The new film started shooting in Atlanta in March.)

Having received numerous death threats thanks to her public musings that the Second Amendment might not 100 percent require arming lunatics, Schumer had also acquired a bodyguard since I’d last seen her. Burly if not quite Dwayne Johnson–size, he stood outside her spartan, cold trailer—the heat wasn’t working—while we talked and she ate some microwaved, not very appetizing-looking eggs for a late breakfast. Cable sketch comedy is not a glamorous world.

The day before, she had shot the pregnancy sketch that I’d seen her and the other writers working on. She had Instagrammed a photo of herself wearing a prosthetic belly, which prompted gossip sites to speculate that she and her new beau were already thinking of

having a baby. She hadn’t seen those reports but laughed about them when told. “It’s all fucking crazy,” she said, it being her public omnipresence. “I feel like right now I’m going to crack down and keep myself more private for that reason. Which feels, you know, kind of counter-intuitive as a comic. But I don’t know—it seems necessary.”

I

played armchair psychiatrist and brought up the endings of the Starbucks sketch, where the Amy character is eaten alive, and the sitcom sketch, where she’s dragged off the set and torn apart. Were these expressions of someone who felt that the world was shining too bright a light her way, that maybe she was losing her sense of self in the glare?

“That’s not a major theme this season,” she said, shrugging off the idea. “You’re witnessing the two sketches where it came up.

And we’re really sensitive to that, because nobody’s like, ‘Tell us more about what it’s like to be a famous person!’ But there is that too. It’s like my experience now is of a normal woman, who’s 34, who’s in a relationship, and then I’m also still a pretty newly famous person, and that’s what I want to talk about onstage.” She mentioned Jerry Seinfeld, surely the richest stand-up in the history of the art form—give or take Bob Hope—who still does observational jokes on normal-guy subjects such as doughnut holes and HungryMan dinners. “What’s he supposed to do [for material]?,” Schumer wondered. “ ‘Private jets—right, you guys?’ ” Clearly not. But for herself, she added, “I want to be honest about what’s going on with me”—she flies private, too—“and not be like, ‘I’m still just like you!’ I don’t know. I’m trying to navigate it honestly and figure it out.”

She needed to have hair and makeup done for the next sketch, so I left the trailer and went back to the soundstage, where the crew was shooting a sketch that the star herself doesn’t appear in. It looked to be a dark, savage, and very funny critique of the law, passed

by Congress in 2005 and signed by President George W. Bush, which protects gun manufacturers from virtually any liability when their products are misused in, say, mass shootings.

Whichever way life seemed to be pulling her, whatever the stresses and pitfalls, Schumer was going to keep talking.

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165

PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

Sarah

SILVERMAN

With a recent Screen Actors Guild nomination under her belt, the comedian, actor, producer, and writer reveals whom she looks up to the most: her sisters

W

hat is your idea of perfect happiness? Belly laughs,

talent would you most like to have?

Piano. No, drums. Piano. What is your current state of mind? I’m

great ideas, time with loved ones, time alone, kisses, and sleep.

What is your greatest fear? Losing my mind; becoming senile and masturbating in public; not being funny anymore. Which

in the bath, sitting Indian-style, typing this on my phone. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? More

historical figure do you most identify with?

stamina. (I’m a fragile flower.)

Lucy. (Not the comedian, the first known caveman.) Which living person do you most admire? My dad, Phil Donahue, Lizz Winstead, Cory Booker, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lena Dunham, my sisters.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? I’d like my dad to be healthier and my mom to be aliver. What do you consider your greatest achievement? My grandchildren. If you were to die and could choose what to come back as, what would it be? Fonzie.

What is your most treasured possession? Ooh, for sure my mind and strong human body. Where would you like to live? I just want to be able to live out my

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I’m often self-centered. I’m unadventurous.

And I sleep too much. But in my defense, I have a very active dream life and I have to be there a lot. What is the trait you most deplore in others? People who use their religion as a shroud to justify hatred and bigotry. And loud gum chompers. Equally. What is your greatest extravagance? I take a bath every day.

Which living person do you most despise?

That shit’s negative and I willn’t answer it. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “Willn’t.” What is your greatest regret? I wasted some years letting my art take a backseat for love. That was a choice I made because at the time I didn’t know better. I learned that love doesn’t always ask for those sacrifices.

More simply and most important, I learned that only I am responsible for my own happiness. So, the great news is I know that now. But I suppose I wish I knew it when I was 30. When and where were you happiest? I’m hoping it’s ahead of me. Which 166

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final years with other elderly comedians in good comfort and care. Who are your favorite writers? Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks, Michael Sheen (find his essay on Dylan Thomas and try not to get a boner), Lena Dunham, Harris Wittels, Patton Oswalt, Miranda July, Tom Robbins, Thomas Jefferson, E. E. Cummings. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Jesus? Who are your heroes in real life? Fred Rogers, Michael Sheen, my dad, and my sisters. What is it that you most dislike? Malice.

And, again, the loud chewing thing. How would you like to die? This must be the same answer every time! Does anyone say drowning? I’d like to drift off at a very old age surrounded by loved ones and funny friends. The last thing I ever saw my nana say on her deathbed was a joke. What is your motto? “We’re in outer space.”

BY

RISKO

MAY

2016