VANITY FAIR’S 1984 HALL OF FAME

Photographs by Annie Leibovitz

It was a year when America checked out of the Betty Ford Center and was proud, proud, proud. Aging was hip (Bardot, Steinem, Loren, and MacLaine turned fifty), but aged was hipper (D.Y, Eudora Welty, Helen Hooven Santmyer, and Ronald Reagan). And though the president said that the country wasn’t hungry, Texaco ate Getty, Chevron ate Gulf, Mobil ate Superior, and the Arabs ate crow. Another baby boom began. Yuppies had puppies, and starry unwed motherhood was in (Jerry, Nastassja, Farrah). Miss Piggy married Kermit. Calvin Klein got into women’s underpants. Archbishop O’Connor shouted murder in the cathedral. She said Ferraro, the press said Zaccaro. Ferraro, Zaccaro, Ferraro, Zaccaro, let’s call the whole thing off.

This was the year when we had our fill of a man named Orwell. But there were others in 1984 we couldn’t get enough of. So Vanity Fair proudly revives its legendary Hall of Fame—fifteen men and women who amused, impressed, or surprised us for more than their allotted fifteen minutes of fame.

SAM SHEPARD Playwright and movie star (right) BECAUSE he’s an intellectual’s idea of a movie star and a movie fan’s idea of an intellectual. BECAUSE after writing forty plays and winning ten Obies and a Pulitzer he won an Oscar nomination for The Right Stuff, starred in Country, and lassoed the heart of Jessica Lange. BECAUSE he’s John Wayne with a brain.

URBANE COWBOY

PARTY SAVER, PARTY GIVER

MARIO CUOMOPolitician (above) BECAUSE in a year of dogmatic religious pronouncements the New York governor has made faith seem compatible with reason. BECAUSE in a profession where braininess is often a liability he has made speeches that showed the workings of a humming and agile mind and that made thinking a spectator sport. BECAUSE unlike Ed Koch he s not a crab.

PAT BUCKLEYMrs. William F. Buckley, Jr. (right) BECAUSE she is the Florence Nightingale of Park Avenue, nursing charities from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to the Hospital for Special Surgery. BECAUSE she is the best hostess in America, staging bacchanals to boost Bach, intimate dinners for Nancy Reagan and the National Review. And for the last seven years she has thrown The Party of the Year—the Costume Institute benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. BECAUSE she’s the only socialite we know who’s still married to the same man.

MAKING A SPLASH

DARYL HANNAH

Actress BECAUSE she was the bubbly in Splash, a movie so sweet-spirited it gave us new hope for famiy entertainment and provided an Aqualung for Walt Disney Productions. BECAUSE she puts a fresh spin on the all-American girl, combining correct politics with beach-bunny blondeness and giving us the navel display of the year. BECAUSE she looks devastating in tails.

GREG LOUGANIS Diver BECAUSE he's the Houdini of the high dive, with more perfeet scores under his Speedo string than entire teams of Romanian gymnasts. BECAUSE while his fellow Olympic medalists were enjoying tickertape parades and preparing for their enshrinement on cereal boxes, Louganis went hack into training, and emerged to set yet another record by winning his twenty-ninth national title. BECAUSE he lets his body do the talking.

EUROFLASH

ANDREE PUTMAN Decorator (above) BECAUSE in a six-year career she has established herself as the most exciting interior designer on either side of the Atlantic, recreating lost masterpieces of modernity from Mallet-Stevens chairs to Eileen Gray rugs, and transforming Morgans into the handsomest hotel in New York. BECAUSE she has turned plainness into ravishing style using spare forms, a black-and-white palette, and an understated mix of classical and modern to smooth the rough edges of high tech. BECAUSE in her hands checkerboards are no longer square.

KARL LAGERFELD Designer (left) BECAUSE he claimed fame with Chloe, put the fun in Fendi, resurrected Chanel, and this year launched his own label, much to the dismay of his onetime friend and longtime rival, Yves Saint Laurent. BECAUSE he has collected and discarded some of the most fabulous furniture in the world, starting the craze for Art Deco and moving on to hypermodern Memphis. BECAUSE he’s the only designer of any sex to sport a ponytail.

SWEAT AND TEARS

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN Rock star (above) BECAUSE while the Jacksons and Prince were making headlines this summer Springsteen rocked across the country’s arena concert stages boasting new muscles, Yankee Doodle colors, and the best album of the year, Born in the U.S.A. BECAUSE he is pop music’s rust-belt laureate, the troubadour of regrets and downward mobility, whose onstage ebullience transcends his gloomy lyrics. BECAUSE he’s not a druggie or a hippie or a drag queen—he’s a straight arrow who’s really straight.

JEREMY IRONS Actor (right) BECAUSE he is the eighties embodiment of a romantic hero we haven’t seen since the heyday of Leslie Howard—the debonair wimp. Punctilious, nervous, veddy British, and fatally alluring. BECAUSE this year he topped his recent acting triumphs in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Brideshead Revisited, Betrayal, and Moonlighting with a dashing, witty performance on Broadway in The Real Thing. And he survived Swann in Love. BECAUSE h6 is the toniest Tony winner in years.

THE RIGHT TOUGHS

RICHARD SNYDER Publisher (above) BECAUSE he's the book world’s samurai warrior—who has turned Simon & Schuster into the most glamorous publishing house in the country. BECAUSE by bringing promotional flair to the profession of gentlemen he has stormed the best-seller lists with writers ranging from Jackie Collins to Joan Didion. BECAUSE this tough guy is a closet intellectual.

DAVID MAMET Playwright (left) BECAUSE in Glengarry Glen Ross he harnessed our national obsession with real estate to create a raw and comic vision of life on the hustle—and the finest American play of the year. BECAUSE he has revolutionized language in the modern theater by turning Everyman’s expletives into dramatic poetry. BECAUSE he put the buzz into scuzz.

SEX AND SENSIBILITY

CYNDI LAUPER

Singer BECAUSE she’s the slapstick queen of MTV, boasting an accent that she and Geraldine Ferraro have made the surprise hit of the year. BECAUSE she inspired an essay in The Nation arguing that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was a secret feminist anthem. BECAUSE with all this depth around she’s not afraid to be shallow.

JANAT MALCOLM Writer BECAUSE with her books Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Trend Archivesshe has heroine the great explainer of Freudian mysteries. BECAUSE with sly, deadpan, scrupulous skill she turned the arcane intrigues of the psychoanalytic establishment into armchair theater. BECAUSE she has shown that shrinks can be as bonkers as anybody.

RICH AND SHAMELESS

DONALD TRUMPDeveloper (above) BECAUSE he parlayed the Brooklyn apartments built by his father into a metropolitan real-estate kingdom exemplified by the extraordinary Trump Tower, a glitzkrieg of marble, glass, and brass where millions shop and millionaires live, including Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and the Infanta of Bavaria. BECAUSE he asked Philip Johnson to create a castle on Madison Avenue complete with moat and drawbridge. And he owns his own football team. And he thinks he should negotiate arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union. And he’s only thirty-eight. BECAUSE he’s a brass act.

AARON SPELLING Producer (right) BECAUSE he is, for better or worse, the man most responsible for Television as We Know It, from The Love Boat to Fantasy Island, from Glitter to Hotel, from Burke’s Law to Charlie’s Angels, from Family to Dynasty. BECAUSE the bejeweled life-style he and his wife, Candy, have concocted is something out of a William Randolph Hearst fever dream: mansions, his-and-hers limos, private bowling alleys, private zoos. People don’t live like this anymore. Spellings do. BECAUSE he’s the Man with the Golden Gut.