Vanity Fair

Recently, I vowed never again to muse on Courtney Love in this column. The punky grunge diva has been iconized by every popular magazine this side of Seattle since she became a power widow. There was nothing left to say. OK, but I can't resist an angelic Miss World on the cover of June's Vanity Fair, the same magazine that accused her of shooting heroin when pregnant with daughter Frances Bean.Strangely, the new VF contains not a single mention of the 1992 article, which Ms. Love has viciously and repeatedly attacked as untrue, claiming it robbed her of all her happiness.

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be acquainted, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: CONGE Knowing when it's time to say goodbye is central to using conge (pronounced KON-zhay), sometimes spelled congee . The original sense of the word, back in the fifteenth century, is formal permission to depart. But the word mutated, as words will.

If women in Hollywood have made any inroads into what has always been a man's world -- and empirical evidence says they have -- you certainly wouldn't know it by picking up the latest copy of Vanity Fair.Outraged industry folks -- males as well as females -- say the magazine's current special issue on Hollywood is sexist and demeaning to women, who are largely depicted in suggestive high-fashion undergarments, or high-fashion designer-wear made to look like undergarments.A group photo of top screenwriters overlooks women altogether.

On weekday mornings, I'll post the most controversial, shocking and (of course) ridiculous stories for your reading pleasure. That way, when you walk into work, you'll be the master of witty conversation. National • The gift that keeps on giving: Trump's crazy letter to Vanity Fair . (Vanity Fair)  • Orwell was so right about everything: Thermal cameras in Boston show too much . (CBS)  • Glad I went to private school: Chicago public school bans homemade lunches . (Chicago Tribune)

Vanity Fair has joined the star-of-the-month club. Like Rolling Stone and other publications surrendering to the time-lapse 1990s, VF is now willing to lend its cover to ephemeral celebrities like Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. It no longer caters solely to the superstar set. For the September issue, Sandra Bullock is flashing her crocodile smile in the front window -- an appropriate reaction to being dubbed "Golden Girl" and "America's Sweetheart" after only three ordinary movies, "Speed," "While You Were Sleeping" and "The Net."

Costume dramas, let's face it, are often stuffy. Some, like Nicholas Nickleby (2002), are so overstuffed they can barely move. But even some of the better ones - 1995's Sense and Sensibility, say - are a bit too insistently high-toned. You feel you should put on a tie just to watch. Vanity Fair, the Reese Witherspoon costume drama, based on the William Makepeace Thackeray novel, doesn't have that problem. If anything, the film may be a tad trashy. Call it "Days of Our Victorian Lives."

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - Pete Rose, banned from baseball in 1989 for misconduct related to gambling, denied new drug and betting allegations raised against him by a former friend in the September issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Tommy Gioiosa, a former Rose housemate who went to federal prison for three years for cocaine trafficking and tax fraud, told Vanity Fair that Rose financed a cocaine deal, bet on baseball games and may have violated baseball rules by using a corked bat. Rose, appearing at an autograph show here on Monday, called the drug-dealing allegation "the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

HOLLYWOOD - In a town full of distinctive faces, Reese Witherspoon's stands out. Her pouty lips, saucy angularity and her contemporary sensibility are so singularly "Reese" that disappearing into a character - especially the 19th-century sort - can be a bit tough. Director Mira Nair, who hired the actress to play the calculating, corseted Becky Sharp in her film version of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, was taken with her portrayal of the super-perky class president candidate in 1999's Election, for which the National Society of Film Critics voted her best actress.

There they are in Vanity Fair (June), cute as cute can be, Mr. and Mrs. Slobodan Milosevic, sitting together curled up on the couch in their designer sweaters. He's got a hopelessly blank look on his face. Presumably, that's one of the tricks of the trade: Think bland and -- who knows? -- a guy can get away with, you'll pardon the expression, murder.Then again, that blankness verges on grimace: One gets the sense Slobodan Milosevic might be singing to himself the refrain of that old Pet Shop Boys song, "What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?"

It is grand to have illusions, until you find out they're illusions. That disheartening lesson comes in the November Vanity Fair, in Robert Sam Anson's report on Seymour Hersh's coming book on the Kennedys.Hersh burst into prominence in the late '60s when he revealed the massacre at My Lai, and it was only the first in an explosion of exposes: the secret bombing of North Vietnam, then of Cambodia; domestic spying by the CIA; the wiretapping of Kissinger's aides.Sy Hersh seemed to be someone to emulate.

DOMINICK DUNNE, 83 Crime writer Author Dominick Dunne, who told stories of shocking crimes among the rich and famous through his magazine articles and best-selling novels such as "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," died Wednesday in his Manhattan home. Mr. Dunne's son, actor-director Griffin Dunne, said in a statement released by Vanity Fair magazine that his father had been battling bladder cancer. In September 2008, against the orders of his doctor and the wishes of his family, Mr. Dunne flew to Las Vegas to attend the kidnap-robbery trial of O.J. Simpson, a postscript to his coverage of Simpson's 1995 murder trial, which spiked Mr. Dunne's considerable fame.

"A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win." - Gov. Sarah Palin, July 3, 2009 Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced today that she will play point guard for the WNBA's New York Liberty after leaving the governor's mansion. The governor wrote on her Facebook page that she chose to play for the Liberty "because they are all about the freedom that gives us the liberty to be the great country that America is."

I don't recall any photos of Marcia Brady wrapped in a bedsheet from my boyhood. But times change. Miley Cyrus, who won fame as the character Hannah Montana, is a child star in a fishbowl-media world. She isn't the first young pop star of the Internet age, but she's among the biggest at a time when blogs, photo-sharing and other new media have grown by leaps and bounds. It was ironic that the photo that touched off a cultural wildlfire for Cyrus last week was not an ill-gotten paparazzi shot posted on some dodgy Web site, but a portrait by the renowned Annie Leibovitz for the sophisticated culture periodical Vanity Fair -- a project the Cyrus family seemed happy to participate in. Once the photo was made public last week, of course, the wild world Web very much came into play, allowing the image to multiply like mushrooms and fanning the debate over whether it was artistic or exploitative.

Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus has defended her controversial photograph in Vanity Fair by saying, "it was supposed to be artistic." Her Disney bosses didn't see art but manipulation, calling it a ploy to sell magazines. Well, it was "artistic," even though maybe it wasn't all that original. Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz's imitation of an Old Master image of a sloe-eyed Cyrus wrapped in a white sheet isn't necessarily great art, but it has lots of historical precedent, both aesthetic and sociological.

SO, shall we expect to see Tom Cruise, his business partner Paula Wagner, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep yukking it up in costume and singing silly songs, in the wake of the disappointing opening of Lions for Lambs? Well, Miss Streep has just completed the movie version of Broadway's Mamma Mia! so there are colorful clothes and ABBA tunes galore in her future. I don't know that Tom, Paula or Redford are quite so lucky. They all had a lot of high hopes riding on Lions for Lambs, it being the initial Cruise/Wagner project out of their United Artists deal, and it is Redford's first directorial effort in seven years.

The Atomic Bazaar The Rise of the Nuclear Poor By William Langewiesche Farrar, Straus & Giroux / 182 pages / $22 Writing from Iraq for Vanity Fair last November, in a posting titled "Rules of Engagement," journalist William Langewiesche began with the Euphrates and enumerated the towns strung along it in Al Anbar province: Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. Of the last, he noted, "Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs.

What fun to find Vanity Fair refraining from its usual star worship. The gusher runs dry for Ralph Fiennes, the pale British actor who played such a convincing Nazi sadist in "Schindler's List." During his two-hour interview in the November issue, Mr. Fiennes is a model of chilly reserve: "Not that one expected a teddy bear," writes Leslie Bennetts. "Maybe an infinitesimal bit of charm, perhaps -- would that be too much to ask?" Indeed, Mr. Fiennes declines eye contact with the reporter, who is left to theorize about the murky depths lurking beneath the 32-year-old actor's "aristocratic exterior," depths that have electrified his performances -- in "Hamlet" onstage, in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show," in the futuristic "Strange Days."

Yes, Madonna has once again nabbed the cover of Vanity Fair, with a new promotional spin that features a pair of old staples -- motherhood and spiritual awakening. But the top cat of the March issue is an eerily photogenic creature named Jocelyne Wildenstein, who has recently been plastered all over New York, People, and other glossy magazines.Wildenstein is a walking argument against plastic surgery, with a face that has been manipulated into something rubbery and non-human, a tight, haughty, feline mask.

WHAT DID the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) go to the hospital for?" Answer: "The food!" This is in the Assouline book A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style, put together by super-WASP Susanna Salk. Amusingly, it has a foreword by a nice Jewish boy from West Hartford, Conn., one Steven Stolman, a fashion mainstay of Southampton, Long Island's Main Street. Inside are all those WASPs we've come to love - Babe Paley, Brooke Astor, Kate Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Lilly Pulitzer, Lee and Jacqueline Bouvier, Edie Bouvier Beale, C.Z. Guest, Ben Bradlee, George Plimpton, Gloria Vanderbilt, and guys from Harvard and Yale.

Back in 1998, Gretchen Mol appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair's September issue, wearing a nearly transparent white gown and looking about as alluring as humanly possible. The accompanying article (and one got the feeling it was the cover photo that prompted the article, not the other way around) proclaimed her the next big thing. In fact, it treated the 25-year-old actress as though she already were a major star. Eight years later, thanks to her winsome, absolutely unselfconscious performance as a 1950s pin-up queen in The Notorious Bettie Page, she may finally be living up to the magazine's hype.