EDITOR'S LETTER

FLYING HIGH

We've taken off! Vanity Fair is number one on Adweek's top ten of the hottest magazines in America, showing an increase in advertising revenues of 69.7 percent in a year when most other publications have got the glums. What's gratifying is that this magazine is produced not from marketing concepts but from the collective enthusiasm and flair of individuals who trust their own taste enough to believe it will resonate with their peers—and it does. In two years we've doubled our newsstand circulation. That's what advertisers have responded to—you. So now we're really soaring and the No Smoking sign has been turned off. Let's uncork the duty-free and tell you about the May issue's in-flight entertainment.

One thing you can always be sure of onboard Vanity Fair is a nice leavening of unacceptable foreigners. That haute bourgeoise blonde in the Parisian traveling ensemble who looks like the social-services director of Nantes has a personal history that would make your wig flip. She is none other than the notorious Madame Claude, who for twenty years ran a call-girl service so high-powered and sophisticated she makes the Mayflower Madam look like the Happy Hooker. Madame Claude was a sexual Professor Higgins, who transformed her girls from comely amateurs to polished sirens with social accomplishments that could fool even the elder Mrs. Grenville. So thorough was Madame Claude's academy that its graduates even married their clients. There's a clutch of internationally famous beauties about whom it is now whispered, "Of course, she was a Claude girl.'' Very few people saw the face of the woman who knew the secrets of the titled and influential. Claude made a fetish of her anonymity, preferring to exercise her power via the telephone. But now, on page 104, she tells her unsettling story to James Fox. And as she talks nostalgically of her days of glory before she was busted for tax evasion, a poignant undertow emerges. Playing Pygmalion was Claude's revenge against nature; her grueling perfectionism for others was an escape from her own imperfections. She longed to be beautiful, to be loved, and she never was.

Madame Claude's epoch ended at the time our next segment of social anthropology began. It is exactly ten years since Studio 54 opened its glittering doors in 1977, wiping out the exclusive bottes de nuit that were a Claude girl's showcase. You didn't need the classy murmur of upscale seduction at Studio, the music was too loud. It was the discotheque as pleasure palace, open to anyone beautiful enough or freaky enough to get past the velvet ropes. Steve Rubell, writes Brad Gooch in his exhumation of the ages of club culture on page 74, was "like a Mercury in penny loafers.'' This is the first time anyone has gone in such detail into the archaeology of New York's nightfolk. It's a compulsive study of the restless habits of the shadow people, the successive dynasties of the movers and the cocktail shakers who make it all happen after dark. If, like me, you're in bed at 10:30 with a throbbing Anita Brookner novel, this piece shows you what makes the night owls hoot.

No club that called itself hot could have refused entry to the characters actor Gary Oldman is making his name by playing. He was Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy, and now he's Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. Last month we ran extracts from Orton's diaries, and I urged you to go to the movie based on John Lahr's biography. This month, on page 96, Stephen Schiff sets Oldman in the context he deserves, leading a brave new wave of actors in the same way that Albert Finney burst out of the British cinema of the sixties. Sometimes, as an expatriate Brit, I despair of the enervating view of England as the land that time forgot, eternally chintzedout on cricket and cream teas. Which is why it's so refreshing when Oldman and company give us a slice of the real post-industrial thing—gritty, witty, and insolently young.

Meanwhile, back in the first-class cabin, that fabulouslooking honeymoon couple, perfectly matched in their to-die-for togs, are Mr. & Mrs. Calvin Klein (page 88). He has always been American style personified, and his new wife, Kelly, has the long-legged gloss you'd expect from his consort. We chose them for our May cover because everyone should look so good on the first day of summer.

See you at the spa,

Editor in chief