UNDER A REHEARSAL piano in a studio on the MGM lot in Hollywood in 1952, Debbie Reynolds crumbled. She was in the middle of preparing for Singing in the Rain, which would be her first leading role for the studio, alongside Gene Kelly, and the first time she'd have to dance, really. She was 19 years old, had three teachers, and was spinning around eight hours a day. It hurt everywhere, she wrote in her autobiography 60 years later, "most of all my brain and my feet." She lay there, under that piano, until Fred Astaire materialized to coax her back up. She wasn't going to die, he told her. If you're not sweating, you're not doing it right. So she shot "Good Morning" from eight in the morning till eleven o'clock that night. When it was over, she collapsed. For days, she didn't get out of bed at her doctor's behest.
The studio had its own MD, who wanted to administer what they called a "vitamin shot"-amphetamines. Possibly, the same ones, Reynolds wrote, that "ruined Judy Garland." Since its inception, Hollywood has been the land where unrealistic beauty standards collide with financial pressure that hinges on its stars keeping thin, energetic, and always ready to make more hits. And there's always been a quick fix or two. Since Reynolds's era, the nature of the fixes have evolved from "vitamin shots" and "pep pills" to phen-fen to Adderall to clenbuterol-a medication used to treat breathing problems in horses. That's to say nothing of the extra-medicinal aesthetic boosts by way of CoolSculpting, injectables, and Brazilian butt lifts, which suck pockets of fat from one part of a body and insert them into another, in order to create a generation of Instagram-age Jessica Rabbits.
It should have been no mystery, then, that when the people of Hollywood started dropping dozens of pounds in a matter of weeks, it wasn't that everyone had suddenly started practicing moderation and logging 10,000 steps.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2022 - January 2023 من Vanity Fair US.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2022 - January 2023 من Vanity Fair US.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box
Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Another Country- Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France
Since James Baldwin's death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America's low-key, high-powered solicitor general, is holding the Supreme Court's feet to the fire
THE BILLIONAIRE'S SECRET
THE GERMAN INDUSTRIALIST KLAUSMICHAEL KUEHNE, BORN IN 1937, IS ONE OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, WITH MORE MONEY THAN KEN GRIFFIN, OR MACKENZIE SCOTT, OR FRANÇOIS PINAULT. WHERE DID HIS FAMILY FORTUNE COME FROM? THE NAZIS KNOW
GIVE AND LET GIVE
MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Party PLANNING
Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
