Contributors

"When Mark Fuhrman and I went out in public, most people treated him very well, but there was an occasional look of disdain," says contributing editor H.G. Bissinger, who profiles the former L.A.P.D. detective on page 114. "There's no gray area with Mark Fuhrman, just as there's no gray within Mark Fuhrman." Bissinger received the 1995 Crossroads Market National Lesbian and Gay Journalism Award for "The Killing Trail," his February 1995 V.F. article on gay killings in Texas, and is adapting the story for director Alan J. Pakula.

Contributing editor and former New York City Ballet principal dancer Heather Watts remembers first seeing Allegra Kent dance in 1970, when Watts was a student at the School of American Ballet. "Her heart-wrenching performance in Balanchine's Serenade changed my life," she says of the ballerina, about whom she writes on page 108. Watts {near right, listening to Kent) and her longtime dance partner, Jock Soto, are working on a cookbook for Riverhead Books.

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Sally Quinn, who became the first network anchorwoman in 1972, is an author, journalist, and Washington observer-at-large, and is working on her third novel. On page 120, she offers a personal glimpse of a journalism legend, Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, on the occasion of the publication of Graham's autobiography. Quinn and her husband, former Post editor Ben Bradlee, are vice-chairman and chairman, respectively, of the Capital Campaign for the Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C.

On page 54, contributing editor Michael Shnayerson examines the current publishing craze for memoirs written by attractive women and filled with accounts of drinking bouts, physical abuse, and sexual deviance. "The fuss seems to be stirred by our voyeuristic curiosity about the writer as much as by the writing," he says. Random House recently published Shnayerson's The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle.

"Clinton overcame doubts about his character not by answering the charges against him but by changing the subject to his record as president," says Jacob Weisberg, who predicts on page 88 the effect of all the president's scandals. After 10 years as a print journalist, Weisberg recently became chief political correspondent for the on-line magazine Slate.

When the bomb went off in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, writer-at-large Marie Brenner was on a ship in the Norwegian fjords. Watching CNN, she was stunned by the hysteria surrounding the security guard, Richard Jewell, whose nightmare she recounts on page 100. "Jewell's story has profound personal as well as legal dimensions," says Brenner. "It became the story of a remarkable— and very southern—friendship" between him and his lawyer Watson Bryant.

In London, Michael Roberts hit the set of Brian Gilbert's film about Oscar Wilde for his photographs on page 110. Roberts was drawn to the shoot by Julian Mitchell's script and by Stephen Fry, who portrays Wilde. "Fry is not just an actor," says the photographer, "he's a character." Next fall, Callaway Editions will publish Roberts's book of drawings, Jungle ABC, a "children's book for grown-ups."