Waiting for "Deep Throat:" A Look at Vanity Fair's June issue.

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Since the U.S. media have been falling over themselves trying to bat clean-up on Vanity Fair's big scoop in its July 2005 issue, announced on Tuesday, 31 May -- that the one-time number two man at the FBI and heir-apparent to J. Edgar Hoover, W. Mark Felt, now an ailing 91-year-old, was "Deep Throat," the anonymous source that helped steer the investigations of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into the bungled Watergate burglary that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard ("Tricky Dick") M. Nixon on 8 August 1974 -- and since I've yet to receive the July issue with my subscription, I figure it's high time for me to provide highlights from the June issue (No. 538) of Vanity Fair. Which I decided I'd had all that I could stand almost two weeks ago.

(ASIDE: I got a kick out of hearing Michele Norris get all flustered when interviewing her former boss at the Washington Post. Ben Bradlee, on the first hour of NPR's All Things Considered on Wednesday 1 June, if only because she normally doesn't get rattled. [Bradlee, of course, was then the editor at the Post who directed Woodward and Bernstein's investigations, resulting in the paper winning a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, a book by Bernstein and Woodward, All the President's Men, and an eponymous movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman -- with Jason Robards playing Bradlee -- based on said book.] She was noticeably nervous even before she admitted their employer/employee relationship, although she calmed down considerably shortly after this disclosure was gotten out of the way.)

I only paid attention to six articles this time around, two of which concerned celebrities; but at least one of those celebrity articles had the saving grace of also being about said celebrity's ties to organized crime.

• Angelina Jolie did not have sex with that man: Yes, I once again succumbed and read the cover-story puff-piece interview with (a disappointingly clothed) Angelina Jolie, as conducted by Nancy Joe Sales (pps. 154-61; 206; 209-11). This one took me longer to get through than most such articles do because I came to a screeching halt when I read that, when the interviewer and her subject first met, "we went on and on about how in love we are with our children until we both just about started lactating. 'He's made me a woman!' she said" (p. 157). Oh, and how neither woman thinks that there are any men "good enough" to serve as fathers to their children (ibid). Wonderful. Just what the world needs: more shitheaded, egotistical sons of bitches ruined for every other woman by their mommies.
  
  My memory of that dip in mother's milk eventually abated enough to allow me to read the rest of the interview. And boy, am I glad that I did. Because now I can state with confidence that, not only did Brad and Angelina not have sex, they didn't even have phone sex, and Angelina most certainly had nothing to do with Brad Pitt's wife Jennifer Aniston filing for divorce on Friday, 25 March (p. 206); although Angelina did allow that she and Brad were quite competitive on the rifle range while preparing for their new movie, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and that Angelina's favored weapon is the pump shotgun. (She didn't remember what Brad's rod of choice was, however.)
  
  Oy. Vey. Not that any reasonable person really expects anyone, much less a celebrity whose humblest purchase of Tucks medicated hemorrhoidal pads is dutifully recorded by some paparazzo or another, to offer details of their love lives for public consumption, one does yearn for the days of yore when a dignified "I don't wish to discuss my private life" or even a terse "No comment" would be the evasion of choice. These strained denials, particularly in an age when every big city has at least one store selling telephoto lenses and shotgun mikes and various and sundry other tools of the (spy) trade to anyone with a valid credit card, are ridiculous beyond words, and do nothing whatever to redeem the celebrity's image as anything other than a hypocritical, genetically-blessed, gonad-driven buffoon. No matter what kind of redemptive good works one may perform as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
  
  
• "She needs you and me, man/Like a fish needs a bike": I usually read James Wolcott's column in VF; June's, while good, was a bit below Wolcott's usual standard of excellence: he tackles the feminist outrage over Harvard president Larry Summers and editor of the Los Angeles Times's op-ed page Michael Kinsley ("Caution: Women Seething;" pps. 92, 94, 96,98), as well as the right-wing backlash to said outrage. Summers sparked off the resurgence of feminist anger in January when, at an academic conference, he publicly pondered that "perhaps 'intrinsic aptitude' helped account for the scarcity of women in the highest ranks of science and engineering, along with other factors" (p. 94), never mind the fact that The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story a couple months after Summers's outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease covering "studies of the new methods of teaching math in British classrooms that found girls closing the gender gap and even pulling ahead of the boys" (p. 96). Turns out that the brouhaha over Summers's remarks -- feminist outrage and an equally, if not more, outraged backlash against the feminists on the part of the secular and religious conservatives -- was more about Summers's overbearing personality (which had already caused Cornell West to decamp to Princeton University; although Wolcott mitigates this by observing that "Harvard is lousy with peripatetic rock-star professors;" p. 96) than any rational consideration of possible measurable differences between male and female intellectual abilities. Wolcott singles out George Will's editorial in the Washington Post for particular dishonor:
  
  "[Will] began his column with the O.E.D. definition of 'hysteria' to diagnose M.I.T. biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who hyperventilated when she heard Summers's remarks. 'My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,' she said afterward, adding that if she hadn't left the room she would have either thrown up or blacked out. Will pronounced Hopkins not only hysterical but delusional: 'Hopkins's hysteria was a sample of America's campus-based indignation industry, which churns out operatic reactions to imagined slights.' The erudite columnist neglected to include the etymology of the word 'hysteria,' from the Greek hystera, for womb, reflecting the ancient belief that women's emotional spasms were attributable to disturbances in their womb. He was, in short, singing one of the oldest misogynist put-downs in the book: the poor things can't help behaving irrationally -- nature just built them that way."
  
  -- p. 94
  
  Similarly, Wolcott reports, the contretemps between Michael Kinsley -- former editor of The New Republic and founding editor of the on-line magazine Slate -- and Susan Estrich, a law professor at the University of Southern California and campaign manager for Michael Dukakis's presidential run in 1988 (harkened to in Donnie Darko) over the dearth of female contributors to the L.A. Times's editorial page turns out to be grounded in their personal relationship (they were classmates at Harvard Law School). Estrich apparently quickly resorted to name-calling in her e-mails to Kinsley, and even "posited that Kinsley's medical condition -- Parkinson's disease -- might be eroding his mental capacity," prompting Kinsley to retort, "'If Susan wants to boycott media institutions that don't adequately reflect her progressive feminist values, maybe she should start by resigning from Fox News, where she is a commentator'" (p. 96). Oh, snap!
  
  Wolcott weighs in with the disclosure that he worked for Kinsley at Harper's Magazine in the early 1980s, opining that Kinsley's "managerial style was casual and collegial, not autocratic and rigid," but allowing that "just because it's Susan Estrich creating an almighty stink doesn't mean the stinker may not have a legitimate gripe;" Wolcott refers to the blog of Helena Cobban, a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, who toted up the number of male and female contributors to the Washington Post from 21 December 2004 to 14 February 2005: "Cobban counted only 26 female bylines out of 260 -- a measly 10 percent" (p. 96).
  
  Wolcott's column gains more weight towards the end, when he points out that:
  
  "The real war between the sexes is a class war, a war that will remain under the radar as long as the self-perpetuating media and political establishment maintain the fiction that the country doesn't have a class system, that they all got where they are on 'merit.' All you have to do is listen to most of them to know that isn't so."
  
  -- p. 98
  
  
• Bridging the humor gap between conservatives and liberals: Michael Wolff's column is also usually a "must" read for me; June's ("No Jokes, Please, We're Liberal;" pps. 106, 111-12) is no exception. Wolff kicks off his piece with a consideration of the sobering up of "formerly...stylish, witty, sharp-eyed" columnist David Brooks once he gained a corner of the op-ed page of the New York Times, and makes his case in the following terms:
  
  "Not to put too fine a point on it, but liberals, in their desperate quest to be taken seriously, are the new conservatives.
  
  "Conservative opinionists in the burgeoning right-wing media -- from Fox to talk radio to Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal editorial page -- are, on the other hand, often facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy, as well as aggressive and wrong-headed (that improbable creature Ann Coulter is all those things), as well as operatic (Terri Shciavo was an opera). As well as, on occasion, inebriated. (The character note of a liberal these days is sobriety -- no drinks, no carbs, no jokes. The conservatives run amok while the liberals are corporatized.)
  
  "Obviously, conservatives have reason to enjoy themselves, while liberals do not. But then, too, it may reasonably be the conservatives' sense of verbal sport, of going too far, of showing off, that's helped get them into the catbird seat. And, conversely, the liberals' dullness and depressiveness -- 'little constipated souls,' in the recent description of Ben Bradlee, who is from the liberal media's jaunty age -- that's contributed to their fate."
  
  -- p. 106
  
  Wolff goes on to call Slate a minor league bullpen for the New York Times, and opine that "The problem may be that we liberals are by temperament job seekers rather than entrepreneurs. We're just not outsiders" (p. 112). Which does not seem to bode well to a triumphal return of liberalism in U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
  
  
• Not of this world: John Cornwell, most notoriously the author of the 1999 book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, but also the author of Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact (2003) and The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II (2004), turns in an interesting and disquieting piece on Pope John Paul II's predilection for supernatural tomfoolery, ultra-conservative ideology, and packing the roster of saints with a title that oddly recalls a famous disco-era song by Hot Chocolate ("He Believed in Miracles;" pps. 116, 118-24). Cornwell points to "Poland's centenaries and jubilees, its cults and devotions to the Virgin Mary, and especially the icon of the Black Madonna" of Czestochowa (p. 118) as being the seed-bed of Karol Wojtyla's/Pope John Paul II's attachment to "mysticism," which was only reinforced after he was shot by a Turkish gunman on 13 May 1981: "His conviction that he had a direct line to God, and that he had been saved from death in order to fulfill a divinely ordained mission, appears to have fostered his extraordinary sense of certitude" (p. 122). Herewith a lengthy excerpt from Cornwell's article:
  
  "He visited the United States in October 1979, a year into his papacy. The crowds adored him, but his benevolent exterior on the television screens of the nation belied the sterner presence he exhibited when closeted with his bishops. In Chicago he lectured the hierarchy on their failure to denounce contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and divorce. He berated a congregation of religious sisters in Washington, D.C., for their failure to wear garb suitable for nuns. As he traveled around the world, he admonished Catholic leaders on the issues of secularization, the inherent dangers of liberation theology, the need to teach orthodox doctrine, and the dangers of enculturation -- the tendency to merge pagan practices with orthodox Catholicism in the developing world. On another visit to the United States, in the mid-1990s, he revealed to his academic hosts a powerful distaste for American-style democracy [emphasis added], which he associated with selfishness and materialism.
  
  "Early in his reign, John Paul showed his determination to pursue a policy of creating saints unprecedented in the history of the Church, and his enthusiasm for canonizations revealed a strong conservative agenda. But his saint-making was also inextricably linked to the intervention of the supernatural and the exercise of papal inerrancy. When a Pope declares that an individual is a saint, it is an act of infallibility.
  
  "A saint, in the view of the Catholic Church, is one who is in heaven, who merits public veneration, and before whom the faithful can place their prayers in confidence that they will find favor in the sight of God. There are two levels of sanctity: those pronounced blessed or beatified (worthy of a local following) and those pronounced saints (worthy of a universal following). John Paul's saint-making raised individuals and groups of individuals to beatification and sainthood in a way that was supposed to reveal heaven's endorsement of highly contentious trends on earth. This was exemplified by his breakneck beatification of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, founder of the controversial reactionary group known as Opus Dei, which had been espoused by the Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. On the other hand, John Paul rejected calls for the beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had been murdered by a right-wing-militia assassin while saying mass in El Salvador on March 24, 1980. Not since Thomas à Becket, the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered on the orders of King Henry II has there been a comparable case of obvious martyrdom. But John Paul, ever wary of left-wing clerics, especially the ones involved in liberation theology, which he had earlier seen as a front for Communistic infiltration of the Church, remained unenthusiastic about Oscar Romero's potential for sainthood.
  
  "Later, John Paul sanctified Pius IX, the Pope who had proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870. This was a beatification likely to send all the wrong signals to the clergy of the world. Pius IX, it has been claimed by the distinguished American historian David Kertzer, was party in 1858 to the kidnapping and inappropriate adoption of a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara. Pius IX used to play with the boy, hiding him under his soutane and calling out, 'Where's the boy?' The world was outraged; no fewer than 20 articles on the subject were published in The New York Times, and both Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and Napoleon III of France begged Pius to return the child to his rightful parents, all in vain.
  
  "At the beginning of John Paul's reign, there were about 11,000 saints in the records of the Church, 10,000 of whom had been subjects of established cults before the formal process for saint-making began at the end of the Middle Ages. John Paul created more than 1,000 blesseds and saints by the turn of the millennium; in other words, he made more saints than all the other Popes put together since the start of the formal process [emphasis added].... To make more saints faster, he even altered the rules, halving the number of miracles required for beatification from two to one."
  
  -- pps. 120-21
  
  Cornwell also notes that John Paul II was shot by Mehmet Ali Ağca on the feast day of the Fátima cult; when he read "the third part of the Fátima secret after he returned to the Vatican from the hospital, he was convinced that the prophecy made all those years ago [in 1917] had been about him" (p. 121). Cornwell explains further:
  
  "When Cardinal Angelo Sodano, secretary of state in the Vatican, finally read out an interpretation of the third part of the secret of Fátima to the world on May 13, 2000, he said that the imagery of the 'prophetic vision' was reminiscent of Scripture. The implication was that John Paul's central role in the Fátima cult was now an item of faith.
  
  "What did this mean for Catholics? The Fátima cult, with its secret, suggests that human history is not shaped by human beings taking responsibility for their actions in their communities and societies but rather by divine interventions mediated by Mary and endorsed by the Pope. The Fátima cult smacks mightily of the creed known as Gnosticism, which promises salvation through occult knowledge. In a memorable declaration made two years before he became pope, John Paul spoke of evil being beyond human responsibility and understanding. 'The evil which exists in the world,' he said, 'seems to be greater than ever, much greater than the evil for which each of us feels personally responsible.' Such a notion lends credence to a form of institutionalized denial of responsibility, with far-reaching implications for Catholic ethics, including the way in which the Church has understood and confronted the evil of child-molesting priests throughout the world, especially in the United States [emphasis added]."
  
  -- pps. 121-22
  
  Cornwell wraps up by sounding a hopeful note about the papacy of John Paul II's successor, Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was dean of the College of Cardinals and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the one-time office of the Inquisition: Cornwell observes that Cardinal Ratzinger distanced himself from the enthusiasm of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Angelo Sodano for the cult of Fátima in 2000, "saying that there are no hotlines to God" (p. 124). Based on what I've heard about the former Cardinal Ratzinger, I'm not so sure that I share Cornwell's optimism, but it would be nice if he were right.
  
  
• Shills for "Dubya" have a constitutional right to enjoy gay orgies too!: David Margolick and Richard Gooding weigh in with a cynical and intermittently amusing look at Jeff Gannon (née James D. Guckert), the "correspondent" for the cheering section for George W. Bush known as Talon News, funded and directed by Texas Republican activist Bobby Eberle, whose fifteen minutes of fame in January 2005 when Gannon "interpolat[ed] a line [right-wing talk show host] Rush Limbaugh had used on his radio program the previous day, attributing to the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, of Nevada, something that Reid had never actually said" (p. 165) when asking Bush a question at a press conference was spun out of control by a left-wing backlash that uncovered his second life as a gay male escort-cum-prostitute; this last bit caused many of his former defenders on the right to scurry away from him: not only was he swamped with "hateful, homophobic e-mail," but the lives of his mother and brother were threatened as well (p. 165). The article, "Wrong Man, Wrong Place" (pps. 162-65; 201-05) is a really frustrating, even infuriating look at just what it takes to become rich and famous in America these days, and leaves the reader with the queasy suspicion that, far from being drummed out of Beltway journalistic circles by his lack of journalistic credentials, unabashed lying about being in the Marines, equally unabashed lying about saying that he'd been in the Marines in the first place, and being a gay whore while doing good deeds for a notably homophobic administration, Gannon's career has very likely been made: give him another ten or fifteen years, and he could well have a promising career in politics, even, Founding Fathers help us, in the House of Representatives or the Senate. The only happy note in this piece for me was its recounting of a wickedly funny crack that Bill Maher made at Gannon's expense: "'He actually had two jobs -- one obviously was sleazy and shameful, and the other was a gay male prostitute'" (p. 165).
  
  
• "When the icepick stabs your eye like a flaming hot stye, 'at's Camorra...": Last but not least (particularly since this was the first article I read all the way through), the June 2005 issue of Vanity Fair has an excerpt from the just-published biography Sinatra: The Life by Anthony Summers and Robyn Swan, titled "Sinatra and the Mob" (pps. 188-201), complete with several photos, as is VF's wont. Contrary to "Old Blue Eyes"'s protests to the contrary over the years, he did know several wiseguys, among them Charles "Lucky" Luciano; in fact, Sinatra's grandfather, Francesco Sinatra, was born in Lercara Friddi in Sicily, a mid-sized town some fifteen miles east of Corleone, "a name made famous by The Godfather and in real life a community credited with breeding more future American mafiosi than any other place in Sicily" (p. 190): Lercara Friddi was also the hometown of Lucky Luciano, "described by one of his own lawyers as having been, quite simply, 'the founder of the modern Mafia'" (ibid).
  
  Since I've read elsewhere that many of the capos were a bit contemptuous of Sinatra, even though they patronized him, because he wanted so desperately to be like them, I was fascinated by this excerpt which dutifully trots out the origins of the "He made him an offer he couldn't refuse" speech (but not the horse-head-in-the-bed incident, which has also been tied to being a tweak on how Sinatra got cast in From Here to Eternity) in The Godfather and serving as a bagman to the Mob casinos in Batista-era Havana. Interestingly enough, the excerpt also makes prominent mention of Robert Ruark -- the Hemingway-wannabe author of two notoriously graphic novels of the Mau-Mau uprising and Kenyan independence, Something of Value (1955) and Uhuru (1962) -- in his days as a columnist for the New York World-Telegram, who broke the story in 1947 of Sinatra's role as bagman for the Havana casinos (pps. 197-98). The authors note:
  
  "Frank Sinatra never broke the thread that linked him to the Mafia. His closest Mob intimate for some time was to be Chicago's Sam Giancana, whom he would recruit to help John F. Kennedy win the White House in 1960. The association with both men backfired -- Sinatra wound up at odds with the Kennedys and lost his Nevada gambling licenses because of the involvement with Giancana. Yet the Mob connection endured. Two decades later, a photograph of Sinatra in the company of Carlo Gambino and other criminals featured in a Mafia profit-skimming trial, a case in which the singer himself was a suspect, though he was never charged. 'We've heard those things about Frank for years,' president-elect Ronald Reagan said in 1981, 'and we just hope none of them are true.' In 1985, Reagan awarded Sinatra the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, praising him as 'one of our most remarkable and distinguished Americans.'"
  
  -- p. 201
  
  Sometimes a long life, wealth, and friends in the right places are all that's needed to launder a reputation to, if not pristine whiteness, at least to ecru.
  

Oh, there's also a two-page photo spread of an infuriatingly fit, 80-year-old Tony Curtis with his current wife, an apparently fifty-something platinum blonde named Jill (who also looks damn fine for her age); Curtis is starkers, and is shielding his "naughty bits" with a pair of Yorkshire terriers. The photo is by Annie Leibovitz. The Yorkies seem like they're taking it in stride; hopefully this isn't a regular service that they're called upon to perform. In addition to providing a picture of the robust good health that may be found in one's golden years if one is blessed with good genes and troubles to take care of one's self, this "spotlight" reveals that Curtis's favorite director to work with was Stanley Kubrick; pretty funny, considering Kubrick's rep for aloofness and egomania.