Editor's Letter

The Tight Stuff

Personal connections between writers and subjects in this issue are as thick las autumn leaves. And some are even thicker. You don't get much closer than Judith Newman's tie to Sumner Redstone, the energetic, 76-year-old Viacom mogul who owns Paramount I Pictures, Simon & Schuster, MTV, VH-1, and a slew of other big-league media properties. Newman and Redstone are related— yet they'd never met each other before she interviewed him for her profile on page 248. Newman started working on her story a year ago and turned it in this spring. I held on to it because I felt that, other than being a supremely well-run company, Viacom just wasn't going to be interesting to readers unless Redstone did something big. He called me in mid-August to ask if the story was ever going to run. I told him that I wasn't sure, that I couldn't think about it right then, because I was closing our October issue, but that I would call him the day after Labor Day and give him a definite response. Which 1 did. The answer was yes. As decisions go, this was an easy one: earlier that morning Redstone had announced his $37 billion merger with CBS.

Bruce Feirstein. He, the co-author of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche—surely one of the most clumsily ripped-olT book titles of all time, if you don't count Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff— has provided the short write-up for Annie Leibovitz's portfolio of four decades of Bond Girls on page 242. Feirstein, a V.F. contributing editor, knows a bit about the subject: he wrote the screenplays for GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and the upcoming The World Is Not Enough.

John Richardson, Vanity Fair's house art historian, is a little more than halfway through his acclaimed and monumental four-part biography of Picasso. He has taken a breather to produce a glorious memoir. The Sorcerers Apprentice, a breezy, picaresque jaunt through one of the great lives of someone currently living. What a wonderful time Richardson had: lunching with Georges Braque, attending bullfights with Jean Cocteau. And spending long spells in Provence with Picasso during the last 22 years of the artist's life. Richardson's colorful and evocative telling of those years appears on page 276.

Robert Hughes and fish on page 160. O.K., this is a stretch. Hughes, the legendary, Australian-born art critic for Time magazine, has been a lifelong fisherman. I don't mean to generalize, but all good people fish. It's just a known fact. And Bob, like all fishermen these days who happen to write for a living, has written a book about fishing. Except here, see, this is where Bob is different. His book A Jerk on One End is terrific. So terrific that you don't have to know a Rat-Faced McDougal from an Adams Irresistible (they're both flies) to enjoy it. I'm starting to sound like Cindy Adams, aren't I?

Then there's Jim Carrey and me. He's Canadian. So am I. So for that matter was Stephen Leacock, the great humorist whose words I paraphrased in my first sentence. What are the odds on all of this? Don't even ask. Spooky.

GRAYDON CARTER