EDITOR'S LETTER

INTERNATIONAL DATELINES

The June issue has a series of torrid international datelines. V.F.'s correspondents have telexed their copy from as far afield as the steaming plateaus of the Central African Republic, the overheated crush of the Rome collections, and the uncharted wasteland of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Dateline: Central Africa.

The bizarre trial of the cannibal emperor,

Jean-Bedel Bokassa, is a great underreported story of overweening pride and its fall (page 60). He was one of the grands monstres of postcolonial Africa, now accused not only of cannibalism but also of mass murder and the theft of his country's treasury. Bokassa's most famous nonlethal display of excess was his Napoleonic coronation as self-appointed emperor in 1977, costing an estimated $25 million—one-third of his starving country's annual budget. He was a close friend of President Giscard d'Estaing of France, who Bokassa says shared his chief wife, the Empress Catherine. And the scandal in France over his gifts of diamonds to Giscard helped to topple the president from power. After Bokassa's flight to the Ivory Coast in 1979, a suspicious cold-storage room was found in his Bangui villa that suggested cannibalism. There was also an alligator-infested pool and a collection of lions kept to eat unwanted guests.

Alex Shoumatoff, who you may remember investigated the mysterious murder of primatologist Dian Fossey in September's Vanity Fair, attended Bokassa's trial, visited the infamous palace where a previous journalist had been tortured, and interviewed the Pygmies who live in the forested part of the country Bokassa's family comes from. After evading an attempt by a petit monstre to put him in jail, Shoumatoff came back with a riveting tale of greed, lust, corruption, brutality, and excess.

Dateline: Beverly Hills.

Stephen Schiff fingers the pulse of a fatigued gladiator: he finds Gore Vidal languishing in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, groaning "in that George Sanders accent,'' with only a new novel and an impending lawsuit against the Writers Guild of America to stave off the ennui (page 84). Schiff is clearly fascinated by the spectacle Gore offers of the answered prayers and unanswered aspirations that plague a literary lion at the end of a long bask in the limelight. He probes Vidal's legendary combativeness and comes up with a seductive new theory. "Vidal needs campaigns," writes Schiff. "Although he has written twenty-one novels and five books of essays and is certainly among the most famous living American writers, one senses in him a looming despair, the apprehension of opportunities missed, a destiny unfulfilled. For if the gods intended Gore Vidal to be a writer, he himself longed for something else: a career in politics, and someday, perhaps, the presidency of the United States."

Dateline: Rome.

There's a man in the Eternal City who keeps Nancy Reagan's vital statistics pinned up on his bulletin board. He is Valentino, fashion's Roman Emperor, and he has conquered the First Lady's private closet as surely as Caesar conquered Gaul. She may wear Adolfo in public, but when she has people up to the Second Floor of the White House for dinner, she likes to relax into a drop-dead Valentino. And so do all her friends. Which is why Valentino is making such steady inroads into the all-important American fashion market. On page 72, our newest contributing editor, Ben Brantley, whirls around fashionable society on the coattails of the dome-haired charmer with the canoe-shaped smile.

Dateline: New York.

Liza is wiser. And Bob Colacello should know. As a member of her running pack in the Warhol-Halston seventies, he saw Liza Minnelli when she wasn't. Burning the candle at both ends, she seemed to be trapped in a selfdestruct mode inherited from her mother. As she tells Colacello (page 54), "There was a while there when I felt like somebody had a gun on the party I was at and kept hijacking it to different places." Now, embracing the new bite-thebullet sobriety, Liza has kicked the "party drugs," saved her marriage, got her act together—and taken it to Carnegie Hall. Bravo.

See you in the front row,

Editor in chief