Editor's Letter

Falls from Grace

The country has not done badly on Bill Clinton's watch. Put aside the health-care fiasco, the philandering, the lying, and those way too skimpy running shorts. He balanced the budget, lowered unemployment, and brokered historic peace accords in Israel and Northern Ireland. During his administration the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased 166 percent. A little more than a year ago he had a lock on a secondor third-tier spot in the presidential record books. Then along came Monica, Linda, Lucianne, and the rest, and he found himself holding a one-way ticket to Buttafuocoville. As a figure of tabloid entertainment, this president is without peer.

Great promise leveled by a tragic flaw is a recurrent theme in this month's issue. Contributing editor Gail Sheehy spent six months assessing the Clintons' ever fascinating marriage as part of her report on the First Couple, "Hillary's Choice," which begins on page 136. Sheehy, who in past issues of V.F. has written groundbreaking stories on the Doles and the Dukakises, suggests that the president may have what therapists call a "narcissistic personality"— one that endlessly seeks admiration, especially from the opposite sex, in order to temper feelings of self-doubt or social inadequacy. And what does it say about a wife who glows when her husband is in purgatory? In the language of the 90s, Bill and Hillary have a lot of issues to work through.

Eight thousand miles away, in a fly-specked hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, another flawed original met an even sadder fate. Carlos Mavroleon was born into great wealth, was educated at Eton and Harvard, and spent the mid-80s making serious money on Wall Street. A decade later, he had become a documentarian, filming the carnage in war-torn Afghanistan. He had also gone native, converted to Islam, fought alongside the mujahideen rebels, and sunk into heroin use. Shortly after Mavroleon's mysterious death, V.F. dispatched the year's most acclaimed new journalist, Sebastian Junger, to find out how such a promising young man—whom Junger had met while covering the Afghan civil war—could have met such a tragic end. Junger's story, "Addicted to Danger," which begins on page 88, suggests that the wildness that made Mavroleon such an uncompromising romantic was the same trait that led to his death.

Although his fall from grace wasn't nearly so grim, the plight of Garth Drabinsky certainly has an epic arc to it. The co-owner and C.E.O. of Livent, Inc., Drabinsky had become the most admired and influential producer on Broadway—an impresario whose multimillion-dollar productions of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime, Show Boat, Fosse, and Parade transformed big-time theater. But, according to Suzanna Andrews's investigation, "The World According to Garth," which begins on page 146, four months after joining forces with Hollywood chieftain Michael Ovitz, who invested $20 million in Livent, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy; there were charges that Drabinsky had allegedly overstated the company's revenues by $63 million since 1996. In the meantime, Drabinsky has to watch as Ovitz, the master of flaw rehabilitation, has Hollywood twitching anxiously over his new partnership with young Hollywood (7/c/-manager Rick Yorn, who represents such stars as Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz.