City Desk » Vanity Fair

Our Morning Roundup: Social Climbing Edition

Juliana Brint — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:29:11 +0000

Vanity Fair's new profile of Sally Quinn is out, and it's chock-full of less-than-flattering details about the "star journalist [and] superstar hostess." The piece has plenty of details about Quinn's fraught relationship with the Bradlee family and her infamous final "The Party" column, but it's most notable for its digs at her much ballyhooed social skils.

Vicki Bagley, who Quinn wrote about unflatteringly during her days in the Style section, had this to say about her:

"She called us all social climbers. Well, a bigger social climber will have never been…. Sally was the very person she was writing about…. We were all doing things. We were all working. Sally wanted what we had, and she wanted to destroy us because we had it."

When Bagley found out Quinn wanted to buy her N Street house, she more than doubled the asking price, telling Ben Bradlee, "Sally will never live in this house unless you pay a premium."

In other social-climbing news: Vincent Gray is running circles around younger incumbent Adrian Fenty in the arena of social media, former Loose Lips columnist Mike Debonis reports on his new Washington Post blog. @GrayForMayor's 426 Twitter followers, for example, dwarf @Fenty2010's 79. "The mayor is young and tech-savvy, supposedly," Gray's New Media Director Ian Koski says. "But they seem to be a little behind."

DCist reports on the National Zoo's hope that 19-year-old male sloth bear Francois, who just returned from the Little Rock Zoo, will become more than just friends with 15-year-old female Hana.

In light of the Washington Teacher's Union's approval of the new, Chancellor Michelle Rhee-backed contract, WaPo columnist Robert McCartney hopes Rhee and the teachers can be friends.

Finally, happy 20th birthday to Moby Dick's, loyal friend of kabob-lovers everywhere.

Unintended Takeaway From Vanity Fair‘s Washington Post Article

Andrew Beaujon — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:47:52 +0000

This article about the Washington Post by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair: commenting on such things is Wemple's beat. All I could hope to add to the discussion is my belief that the photo of Katharine Weymouth on page 2 of this article is a Prince song waiting to happen.

Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light, Master of Self-Aggrandizement

Mike Riggs — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:27:43 +0000

Paul Cullum at Vanity Fair snagged a memo from Thomas Kinkade to the workers on the set of his direct-to-DVD, X-Mas bomb. The best parts parts of the memo (ranked as superlatives) after the jump.

Creepiest request:

6) Hidden details whenever possible, References to my children (from youngest to oldest as follows): Evie, Winsor, Chandler and Merritt. References to my anniversary date, the number 52, the number 82, and the number 5282 (for fun, notice how many times this appears in my major published works). Hidden N's throughout — preferably thirty N's, commemorating one N for each year since the events happened.

Request most likely to piss off Barbara Walters and Stanley Kubrick

4) Awareness of edges. Create an overall sense of soft edges, strive for a "Barry Lyndon" look. Star filters used sparingly, but an overall "gauzy" look preferable to hard edge realism.

Request most likely to remind viewers that Kinkade is a repressed teenage girl in a middle-age alcoholic's body:

11) Hidden spaces. My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc. The more we can feature these devices to lead the eye into mysterious spaces, the better.

Head on over to Vanity Fair's website to read the rest of the memo and Cullum's analysis.