EDITOR'S LETTER

GLORIOUS FOURTH

July Vanity Fair goes off with a bang. We're in a party mood with a vengeance. From Ron Reagan Jr.'s leap for the stars to Jerry Hall as Miss Liberty, we're singing a torch song for the Fourth.

As an expatriate Brit I find all this talk of Ellis Island rather heartwarming. After two and a half exhilarating years in this country, I no longer feel like an upscale wetback crawling through a tunnel in search of El Norte. In fact, to prove the point I gave birth to an American citizen in January (though we lumbered him with the name of the defeated Hanoverian king, George Frederick).

New York Harbor is an appropriate entry point for the American Dream. It serves to filter out the fainthearted. For the first year that you live here, New York tries to do you in. It is a process reminiscent of a Hell's Angels initiation ceremony. They beat you up and do terrible things to your denims, but if you persist in staggering to your feet, you finally get the key to the door. This is quite different from the genial malice of London.

It explains why New Yorkers love their city with a fierce pride. They are the ones who toughed it out, and so, clearly, want it very much. E. B. White wrote, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky." Editing V.F. I feel more than willing and definitely lucky.

O.K., O.K., I know New York's not America. Learning the American sensibility, I discovered, is not so much the mastery of cultural reference points as the subliminal absorption of space. The size of America permeates everything, particularly the way it thinks.

No president has grasped that better than Ronald Reagan. For him God is certainly not in the details, He's in the Big Picture (preferably the motion picture). Just as Reagan has succeeded in projecting himself as an emblematic American, in a different way his son is also emblematic. He's an instant celebrity in the age of celebrity, and he's the typical son of a successful father. He recognizes this with a disarming charm; "I've got one of those cheap kinds of celebrity," he told Stephen Schiff (see page 36). "No question about it. . .but the machinery feeds on that sort of thing." Actually, Ron may be selling himself short. He was pretty hilarious in his debut on Saturday Night Live. And, in a moment of exuberance for Vanity Fair, he repeats his frisky business of dancing in his underpants.

Apparently, the model for the Statue of Liberty was Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi's mother. At 225 tons she was clearly a heavy lady. Our style reporter, Andre Leon Talley, decided it was time the Lady of the Harbor was re-dressed. So some of the world's top fashion designers have made her something special for the Fourth of July (page 42). With Ellis Island on his mind, he chose the three leading models of wildly different ethnic origins—the all-American (i.e., Dutch, Irish, English, and American Indian) Jerry Hall, the Dutch-Japanese Ariane, and the Somalian-born Iman. In these clothes, anyone could jump the line at Immigration.

More fireworks! Get an eyeful of Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov on page 48. The two Kirov-trained heartthrobs bring their respective companies together for the first time, at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, this month, and they posed for a historic portrait exclusively for Vanity Fair. Baryshnikov has been steadily in the news here, but Nureyev has been out of the picture, in Paris, so we asked European ballet writer Julie Kavanagh to fill us in on the Sturm und Drang of his life as director of the Paris Opera Ballet. As you will see from her wonderfully detailed report on page 50, Rudi is still wreaking havoc.

All parties must come to an end, and Huntington Hartford's certainly has. The golden boy who inherited $90 million worth of A&P-stores stock is now a grubby recluse of seventy-five, preyed upon by hangers-on. Special correspondent Marie Brenner gained access to his decaying town house and writes an extraordinary account on page 86. It's a classic American tale of squandered inheritance—a girl habit, an alleged dope habit, and a bad-investment habit. Hartford, though money's victim, was by no means all bad. Single copies of his innovative Show magazine are now collector's items, and its roster of editors went on to leaven the best American publications. But "Hunt" was the man with the leaden touch—and even Show closed.

So brood on this modem morality play as you enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in July Vanity Fair.

Editor in chief