Sometimes things happen very fast at Vanity Fair. Kate Mailer’s appearance on our cover this month was one of those occasions.

It all started at a party for the PEN Congress in January hosted by Saul Steinberg. Norman Mailer stepped out of a trilogy of feuding novelists to tell me in a rapid aside that his play Strawhead, about Marilyn Monroe, was finally in workshop at the Actors Studio. “Who’s playing Marilyn?’’ I said. “My daughter,” he replied, vanishing back into the adjectival fray.

I had never been to the Actors Studio, but this seemed a good time to pay it a visit. The next night, along with two equally curious V.F. editors, I showed up at the Studio and immediately felt part of something rough but magical. “Hoffman.. .Feiffer.. .De Niro.. .Kazan..the girl on the door called out the names with reserved tickets. Mailer sneaked in at the back, and it was clear from his blissful expression that the president of American PEN had been reveling in a double life. Only the day before he had been on the front page of the New York Times in the thick of a fracas over his invitation to Secretary of State George Shultz to speak. Now here he was, like an adulterous husband, deserting the worthy delegates for the pulsing ghost of Marilyn Monroe.

And what a Marilyn! As soon as we saw Kate’s vulnerable, fresh, seductive rendition, it was clear she must be photographed. And it was also clear that the only photographer who should be allowed to do so was the one who had captured the image of the real Marilyn so memorably in his book, The Last Sitting. But would Bert Stem share our view of Kate? And would he be free? The workshop had only one more night to run, but fortunately Stem was in town and managed to catch the first act before leaving for a black-tie dinner. He called the next morning: “She’s fabulous!” he said. “Let’s do it!”

Kate was whisked to Bert’s studio, where hair and makeup awaited her for what was to be her first sitting. At the end of a long day of Marilynesque moues Kate still enchanted Bert. “I’ve seen so many people play her, but only Kate has caught her vulnerability and sensitivity,” he said. “The way her eyes narrowed, her sexiness. And she’s caught Marilyn’s energy too. The kid is really exciting.”

Later, when I went back to his book of the real Marilyn photographs, the opening paragraph seemed to give our April fool the final blessing. “The first time I saw her,” it reads, “was at a party for the Actors Studio, in New York City. It was 1955. A friend and I had been invited, and when we walked in, there she was, Marilyn Monroe.”

I think you’ll get the same feeling when you open Stem’s portfolio on page 58.

Maybe it was the Oscars that gave us acting on the brain this month, but Pete Hamill’s profile of Harvey Keitel on page 76 seems the perfect counterpoint to Kate Mailer’s beginner’s luck. Keitel is an actor’s actor who’s been busy building an impressive body of work and now is breaking through again. Almost a year passed between sittings for Annie Leibovitz’s two portraits of Harvey on pages 76 and 79.1 went on the first of these and met a Harvey half-humorously, half-genuinely besieged by the self-questioning that afflicted all the characters in Hurlyburly, the David Rabe play he was in on Broadway. “Is this how Isabella Rossellini feels?” he demanded of Annie as she set up her lights. “Why aren’t you wearing any socks?” Annie asked. “Einstein didn’t wear socks,” Harvey replied.

He talked mostly about the desire to work with material “that raises issues for me, raises sights,” something, as one of the Hurlyburly characters puts it, “to be serious about in this hurly-burly spin-off of prime-time life.” Now it’s clear from Pete Hamill’s interview that he’s found it, and that Harvey’s on a roll.

As, of course, are Dominick Dunne and Helmut Newton. I know all Palm Beach—from the Breakers to the Bath and Tennis Club—is waiting to see what V.F.’s star writer and photographer have singled out for close-up (page 68). I can only describe their report in Palm Beach parlance: “It’s rich, rich, rich.”

Editor in chief