A Big Anniversary in the Penny Press!

As impossible as it is to believe, Vanity Fair is 100 years old. And yet I must believe it, for there’s Graydon Carter telling me so in his “Editor’s Letter” opening this extra-big anniversary issue, pompously holding court as he’s done so inimitably for what feels like most of those 100 years. Carter headed the team that’s recently put together the truly spectacular book Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age, and the experience has put him in a gently woolgathering mood. He ranges his wind-baggy rhetoric over the century in question, stretching from the birth of modernism to the birth of the Internet, and he reflects wistfully on Frank Crowninshield, the man who gave the magazine its recognizable form. “A Yankee born in Paris and educated in Rome, Crowninshield – known as ‘Crownie’ to intimates – was cosmopolitan to his bones.”

Crowninshield died two years before Carter was born, but that slight bar to intimacy doesn’t stop Carter from calling him “Crownie” for the remainder of his opening remarks. Thankfully, those remarks are brief, although they’re hardly the end of the issue’s woolgathering. No: Carter has commissioned ten essays for the occasion – one writer per decade, and readers unwise enough (as I was) to read them straight through will get a very rocky start. The 2000s are covered by somebody named Bill Maher (a quick Wikipedia search reveals that he’s a TV talk show comedian, and a quick YouTube search reveals that he’s an imbecile) in what amounts to the transcript of an unconvincing Catskills stand-up routine. The 1990s fare far worse: their emcee is talentless egomaniac vanity publisher Dave Eggers, who’s very nearly Carter’s match for insinuating that a vast stretch of time’s main purpose is to sit still while he, the Great Man, reflects upon it. The 1980s – lucky in this as in all things – get Kurt Anderson, and things pick up from there: Lorne Michaels writes about the New York of the 1970s, Robert Stone about the turmoil of the 1960s, Jan Morris about greeting Edmund Hilary when he descended from summiting Mount Everest; Daniel Okrent dares to be dark about the 1940s, Laura Hillenbrand and A. Scott Berg do fine historical turns on the ‘30s and ‘20s respectively, and – in a neat twist that works better than it should – Julian Fellowes (he of “Downton Abbey” fame) eulogizes the 1910s.

And some of the magazine’s standard players are here like clockwork (one can’t help but wonder what kind of piece Carter would have extorted out of Christopher Hitchens – and to miss seeing it), including James Wolcott writing at the top of his game about the peccadilloes of some of TV’s celebrity chefs, including the nationally-disgraced Paula Deen:

Deen’s trademark dishes, such as her bread pudding made of Krispy Kreme doughnuts cut into cubes, recall the grand tradition of good-ol’-boy cuisine that helped Elvis Presley keel over at Graceland. Rich in sugar, flour, and nostalgia, they slow down the metabolism and thought processes, inducing a semiconscious sloth bliss state that is deaf and blind to the entreaties of Barack and Michelle Obama as they extend a head of broccoli as America’s last hope. A true American entrepreneur, Deen excelled in playing it both ways, promoting a diet conducive to diabetes and then pushing diabetes medicine.

Also in this issue, Sarah Ellison, in a well-balanced piece about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, swerves just slightly to get in a little well-deserved dig:

The U.S. government has tried to decapitate his organization, which has only made him a martyr. No one is talking, as they were when he was free to mingle with the outside world, about his thin skin, his argumentative nature, his paranoia, his self-absorption, his poor personal hygiene, his habit of using his laptop when dining in company, or his failure to flush the toilet.

Hee.

The curious thing about this special anniversary issue of Vanity Fair, in fact, is how ordinary it is – it serves as the best possible reminder of just how extraordinary the magazine always is, month after month. An old (one might almost say intimate) friend of mine alerted me to the customary VF pattern a long time ago, and the magazine has stayed true to that pattern ever since: the fluff and “Hot Type”-style flutter is always quartered in the front half of every issue, and the meat in the back half – and so it is here, with the longer, jump-cut articles after the half-way mark tending to be the highlight of the Table of Contents. Certainly that’s the case in this issue, where we get “What Lies Beneath,” a great piece by William Langewiesche about the vast, unmapped underground of New York City – the waterways, the subways, the sewer system, and how all of it fared during the pounding of Hurricane Sandy. He specifically disavows urbane-legend rumors of giant albino alligators, the killjoy, but even so, the piece is superb – we can only hope it’s the prelude to a book.

Criminal film directors, the royalties of two different countries, the idle obscenely rich right here in the United States, plus great photography throughout – special issue or no special issue, it’s a feast. Crownie would have been proud.