THE PAST TYCOON

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In rough waters with Merv Adelson; when memories collide; not for the faint of heart; an influx of tweets about the Hollywood Issue; and more

Thank you for your excellent and sensitive article on Merv Adelson ["Remembrance of Wings Past," by Bryan Burrough, March], Merv and I became friends more than 20 years ago when I taught him to scuba-dive in the Red Sea. He, along with then wife Barbara Walters and a group of distinguished friends, came to dive from my yacht. That yacht was later stranded in hostile waters off the Sudanese coast, and Merv and other guests had to be saved by the Israeli Air Force in a daring helicopter rescue.

But that is not the story I wish to share about Merv. He is truly a very kind and caring man. Shortly after we met, my wife was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, which the Israeli doctors suggested could best be treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York. Merv heard of our situation, and without a question or a comment other than "Get her on a plane—I will take care of the rest," he personally saw to everything, thereby saving her from a very terrible fate. He then flew our four young children to join us and stay at his beautiful homes in Bel Air and Aspen.

Everyone who met him during those wonderful years, diving and exploring the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, got to know him as a friend who spoke to crew and captain at eye level. He became part of our family forever.

HOWARD ROSENSTEINHofit, Israel

MOMMIE DEAREST?

'The Gore They Loved" [by Judy Balaban, February] reminded me that my mother also loved my half-brother Gore Vidal, her first child. It also reminded me that my artsy, bohemian mother, Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds, had enough real-time, real-life detractors without Balabaris observation that, "as Gore remembered it, there was nothing about him at any age that Nina ever deemed worthy of her support." Balaban overlooked the fact that out of our mother's divorce settlement with my father, Hugh D. Auchincloss, she set aside a trust fund for Gore Vidal that will vest in my father's children a year after Gore's death.

"In the spring of 2011," Balaban writes, she and Gore "reminisced over dinner one night" and she told the 85-year-old author to skip retelling his feuds with other men and focus on "friendships with interesting women." In defense of Gore Vidal, in the spring of 2011, he could barely sign his own name.

Regarding Balaban's allegations of maternal homophobia, my mother's head and heart, generically, only bothered to break life down into boys and girls. Howard Austen was Gore's companion for more than 50 years in what my mother referred to as "the family's only successful marriage."

Halfway into the piece, still not through with our mother, Balaban writes that by 1957 "the only really new thing in her life was her addiction to morphine."

Gore was the only person I ever heard accuse our mother of morphine addiction. I never heard the registered nurse accuse Nina of a morphine habit. From the 1930s until my mother's death, in the 1970s, the nurse was on unofficial call for my mother. Her professional diagnosis: "Your mother was a terrible drunk."

N. A. STRAIGHTWashington, D.C.

JUDY BALABAN RESPONDS: As I wrote near the start of my article, I knew Gore Vidal for more than 50 years but never met his mother. All that I knew about her came from Gore himself who had written about her in his memoirs and who spoke of her again to me as we discussed his various lifelong relationships with women. Still, it is not uncommon for half or even whole, siblings to have entirely different feelings and memories about the same parent, and to find those conflicting opinions painful. lean imagine it was difficult for N. A. Straight to read again the recollections of her half-brother Gore about their mother, Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds.

#VFLETTERS

@VANITYFAIR'Shashtag-happy following sang the praises of our annualHOLLYWOOD ISSUEandOSCAR

BASH—while some found themselves lost in the whirlwind of Bruce Webers 'Adventures in Hollywood."

@|JASONALEXANDER

Vanity Fair cover shot has EMMA STONE in bed w Ben Affleck & Bradley Cooper. BIG DEAL—like we haven't all been.

@SHEEWRITES

BRUCE WEBER'S Adventures in Hollywood in this month's Vanity Fair is phenomenal. Sometimes images can say so much more than words.

@ALYSSAROSENBERG

Vanity Fair both marginalizes women of color AND makes Emma Stone unrecognizable.

@P0PESTEVERIN0

Ben Affleck's eyes keep moving on the cover of Vanity Fair givin me the creeps

@NIC0LE0CRAN

Dying at Eddie Redmayne as FRED ASTAIRE in @VANITYFAIR'S 2013 Hollywood Portfolio! Hearts in my eyes.

@J 0 HAN NACOX

What in hipster hell happened to Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue this year?

@NIKARAJOHNS

You know you made it if you get invited to the @VANITYFAIR Oscar Party

@ERIKTLA

In a just world @VANITYFAIR would have their own network. And a bi-weekly dinner party at my place.

@RYANBKOO

ANG LEE shows how a post-Oscar meal is done.

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Straight implies that because—by the spring of 2011, when we decided to do the piece—Gore was 85 and his signature was frail, his memory and cognitive skills were also impaired. I never had this impression. In fact, that night we went from dinner to a play about Panamanian general Manuel Noriega. Afterward, Gore spent about a half-hour reminding us and the playwright about other nuanced political interpretations of the general's famous surrender. So while I agree that—as with many older people—Gore's signature had become shaky, and that age had slowed him to some extent, his mind and memory were not impaired until 10 months later, after he entered the hospital with pneumonia.

Finally, when Gore was discussing his mother's "support," I was writing about friendships and relationships. Thus we were defining "support" in emotional terms, not financial ones.

VINTAGE TARANTINO

I saw Pulp Fiction on its opening weekend and was blown away ["Cinema Tarantino," by Mark Seal, March], It became one of my very favorite films. At work the next day, one of my co-workers asked me if I had seen the film. "Yes, yes, yes!," I replied, and told him that he must see it as soon as possible. The following Monday, I asked if he had seen it yet. He said, "Yes, sort of."

"What does that mean?"

"I guess I never mentioned my needle phobia. Well, all was good until the big needle scene with Uma Thurman."

He fainted, the houselights went up, a doctor was called, and he was taken out of the theater. He eventually saw the rest of the film and loved it.

I laughed out loud when the article mentioned that the same thing had happened at the New York Film Festival.

JAYNE HAAS

Dade City, Florida

MOCA IN THE MIDDLE

In "How Do You Solve a Problem Like MOCA?" [March], Bob Colacello tries to whip up controversy by characterizing the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art as "rivals" in both the article's text and the caption accompanying photographs of the two institutions.

In one sense all cultural institutions are rivals in that they all call upon a limited number of affluent people to fund them. But trying to set up an adversarial stance between these two museums would be akin to saying that the Metropolitan Museum is at war with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

LACMA is an encyclopedic museum, like the Met, with extensive collections ranging from Indian art to European paintings and sculpture. It is not a museum of contemporary art, like MOCA, although it does collect contemporary art. It may well be that LACMA'S director has a misguided focus on little but contemporary art, but his institution's 50 years of collecting paints a very different picture.

GEORGE BACON New York, New York

I was pretty disappointed with your article on Megan Ellison ["Caution: Heiress at Work," by Vanessa Grigoriadis, March], It sounded like a gossip piece straight out of Us Weekly or People. The author repeatedly attributes quotes with such phrases as "a source with knowledge of the situation" and "a source close to the situation," not to mention multiple "industry sources." I like my articles with a dose of cold, hard evidence, with quotes from real people, thank you very much! In comparison, however, I absolutely loved the piece on spec scripts ["When the Spec Script Was King," by Margaret Heidenry], Full of history and real quotes from real people—this is the kind of article I like to see from your magazine!

AMRIT KHALSA Espanola, New Mexico

BODY TALK

In her article "Caution: Heiress at Work," why did Vanessa Grigoriadis feel compelled to describe Megan Ellison as being "pretty, but a bit overweight"? Ellison's weight is completely irrelevant.

Clearly, Ellison is trying to forge her own path in the face of her father's larger-than-life persona and her enormous inheritance. Give her credit where it is due, and critique her accomplishments or lack thereof—not her personal appearance.

CHRISTINA ORBAN-LA SALLE Sleepy Hollow, New York

A SPEC IN THE CROWD

I was pretty bored with this month's issue until the article about the spec script ["When the Spec Script Was King," by Margaret Heidenry, March], Now I know why the studios are churning out so many repeats from the past, and my distaste for all they represent has solidified. My hat is off to the winters and actors who manage to make something original, let alone meaningful, in that world.

BREANA WHEELER London, England

IT HAPPENED IN HOLLYWOOD

Vanity Fair deserves an honorary Oscar for this year's Hollywood edition. This annual issue is as much a part of awards season as the Academy Awards themselves, and Bruce Weber outdid himself. In the past, the format has been altered from time to time, and each year I longed for the standard portfolio of artists to which I had grown accustomed. This year, however, was a welcome change. Bravo!

TRACY FRENCH Murray, Kentucky

Correction: On page 286 of the March issue ("When the Spec Script Was King"), Evans Ziegler's name was misspelled.

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MORE FROM THE V.F. MAILBAG

The Mailbag was brooding (the Mailbag doesn't mind admitting) about just how to digest, analyze, interpret—heck, handle—all the Tai the Elephant correspondence ("Bruce Weber's Adventures in Hollywood," March). On the one hand, there was a lot of "Thank you for featuring Tai the elephant in your Hollywood Issue and wonderful online featurette!" and "Thank you so much for honoring an elephant. Animal actors are always forgotten and rarely recognized as being true actors." But there were also those who felt that V.F."let its intelligent and articulate readers down and can only lose readers by using exotic animals as entertainment within its pages" and "Poor Tai lives a wholly unnatural life with the constant fear of the bullhook." So we sorted the yeas and nays into two piles, borrowed Mrs. Mailbag's cooking scale, and weighed them. The nays registered 6 ounces, the yeas 5.5.Are there any sous-chefs out there who can decide whether that's statistically significant?

More on the Hollywood Issue—and more divided opinion: "If I wanted Vogue, I'd have purchased Vogue," says Mary Rose Keller, of Escondido, California, who is apparently not a fan of fashion ads. But Margarita Unson, of Murrieta, California, notes that "stars may be out in the constellations at this time of the year, but only Vanity Fair can make them align like this." Is there nothing we can all agree on? There is. And Raul Fernandez Jr., from Kirkland, Washington, has pinpointed it: "I do wish you will one day include at least a mention or picture of the one and only BETTY GRABLEl" (Better make that "has pinup-pointed it.")

Before we let go of the Academy Awards, it's worth noting that this year V.F. received some especially fine requests for tickets to the post-Oscars party. A medley: "I know that it is very last-minute, but I thought I would try"; "I know this is a long shot but... "So, can I have an invite?"; "I am writing to you on behalf of Mr. Piotr Listerman— Russian A-list celebrity, famous TV star, and author of numerous books popular among the readers"; "I recently read about the Vanity Fair Oscar party and am wondering ... "; and, charmingly, "In light of my quarter-century of unwavering support..."

Finally, some missing Bad Boys ("Charmed & Dangerous," by Laura Jacobs, March), helpfully supplied by readers: "Cannot believe you did not include Errol Flynn!" (Betsy Ballenger, Palmyra, Virginia); "Hugh Grant" (G. M. Malliet, Washington, D.C.); and "Matt Damon! Matt Damon! Matt Damon! Russell Crowe! Russell Crowe! Russell Crowe!" (Sheila F. Smith! Sheila F. Smith! Sheila F. Smith!, Sacramento, California). One selection we got very right, according to Shirley Higginbotham, of College Station, Texas: "The real Bad Boy is on page 282: Bogart, in all his heart-stopping glory."