NAKED MAIL

Letters

Annie's Hall

While I applaud most of your choices for the "1993 Hall of Fame" [photographs by Annie Leibovitz, December], four of them are quite disturbing. Why would you compliment Cindy Crawford for her gene-pool coup and her vacuous MTV show; Michael Crichton, a writer not fit to hold Don DeLillo's erasers, for "selling millions" of books about big lizards and the Japanese threat; Heidi Fleiss for being, simply, an arrogant whore; and finally Marky Mark, a desperately soulless media fabrication who cannot rap to save his pecs and will undoubtedly go the way of Vanilla Ice, Gerardo, and, uh, the dinosaur? The "Hall of Fame" deserves much better.

BRENDAN BARTH San Francisco, California

Frank and Sense

I am writing to applaud the publication of David McClintick's wonderful piece on Frank Sinatra's newest musical effort ["Sinatra's Double Play," December]. Though the vast majority of Sinatra's fans are not as fortunate as McClintick to have such a close association with "the man" himself, we can most certainly identify with the type of adulation that McClintick has for Sinatra's music. I myself cannot agree more with McClintick's simple yet eloquent explanation for Sinatra's timelessness.

MATTHEW J. FELKER Langhome, Pennsylvania

Going into Denial

In relation to Holocaust denial, Christopher Hitchens has unwittingly fallen right into the deniers' hands. The deniers are not revisionists. They are not trying to revise anything. They deny the reality of history. As I argue in Denying the Holocaust, deniers call themselves "revisionists" because they wish to garb themselves in a cloak of historical legitimacy. They want to be associated with earlier revisionist movements, some of which were once considered heretical and today are seen as mainstream. By adopting this name they are attempting to hijack respectable movements.

There is a great deal of legitimate revisionism that takes place within the field of Holocaust studies. As additional research is concluded and new documents are made available, we have amassed a growing body of details on the number of people murdered, the way in which the gas chambers operated, and the behavior of victims, bystanders, and perpetrators. Based on serious research we are continuously revising our understanding of what happened during that period we now call the Holocaust. The deniers are engaged in no such effort. They simply deny a reality.

DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT, Ph.D. Dorot Associate Professor of Modem Jewish and Holocaust Studies Emory University Atlanta, Georgia

Mort and Me

Mort Zuckerman says that my interest in being editor of the Daily News was primarily "to make a potful of money," which in his view made me "completely inappropriate" ["Letters," December]. In fact, as Mort knows, I was not that interested in editing the News even for potfuls of money. It was Mort who approached me to be editor, twice; both times I told him that if I made a success of the paper it would turn a worthless asset (thanks to Robert Maxwell) into a very valuable one and that I would expect to share in the improvement. I do not think any New Yorker would consider that "inappropriate" or unreasonable.

ANDREW NEIL Editor, The Sunday Times

London, England

Best of the Rest

"This letter is in regard to your magazine. " Good: that's our favorite kind. Much of the recent mail, for some reason, has been in verse, and much of that about Sylvester Stallone. (There were also some Bobbitt-relatedpoems, not every single one of which began, "There was a young woman from Venus. . . ") Here's one: "Oh, Sylvester Stallone, / Rememberest The Thinker.? / Do we like you so bronz-ed? / Or should you be pinker?" Well, readers will just have to decide for themselves. A professor of literature writes, "Stallone says, 'It's not iambic pentameters. . . . It's blank verse. ' Could you please tell dear Sly that blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. "

Opinion was all but unanimous regarding Demi Moore (December). Sure, there was a little unseemly grumbling about the "constant coverage" of our "demi-talented" "mascot." V.F. was told ("Give us a break," "NO MOORE.'") to "stop with the Demification of your magazine" ("Demity Fair"),that "Moore should be less," that it was all "MOORE than enough." One desperate note read, "One more of Demi and I will go mad. " Other readers seemed genuinely conflicted ("Any cover featuring her does not automatically elicit my interest").

Our fourth, fifth, and sixth Demi covers will go ahead as planned, but in deference to those readers with lower tolerance, Demis Nos. 7, 8, and 9 are officially in jeopardy. Happy now?

Other mail: "Do I hate Brenda?" asks one reader. "No. But Shannen (Doherty) makes me violently ill. " Several readers felt Dominick Dunne's piece on the Menendez trial was "totally biased" against the brothers. And this from someone who enjoyed Christopher Hitchens on Martha Stewart: "(Stewart) had an entire 'tumbril' appearance before 400 women of the Jewish Hospital Guild in Louisville, more than 30 percent of them Jewish. Without missing a beat, and with a slight reference to a staff mixup, she continued with her prepared program on Easter, the Easter basket, the home cUcor for the Easter holiday, and the all-important Easter meal. We were not amused. "

— GEORGE KALOGERAKIS

Letters to the editor should be sent with the writer's name, address, and daytime phone number to: The Editor, Vanity Fair, 350 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017. The letters chosen for publication may be edited for length and clarity.