VANITY FAIR

MARCH 1997 No 439

Features

LONDON SWINGS! AGAIN!199

The English capital is back, ablaze with a giddy energy and youthful style not seen since the 60s. The new wave is faddish, working-class, and brazenly nationalistic. In a special 25-page report, David Kamp surveys the kaleidoscope of London life, meeting Labour Party leader Tony Blair, pop-music sensation Oasis, swank Soho restaurateurs, Portobello Road filmmakers, and Savile Row enfants terribles, while David LaChapelle, Lorenzo Agius, and Michael Roberts snap the emerging icons.

SUCCESS AND THESEINFELDGIRL230

Her Seinfeld stardom has won her roles in upcoming movies by Woody Allen and Ivan Reitman, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus wants a life as well. The pregnant actress eats for two with Lloyd Grove, and shares her comic views on motherhood, her TV career, and a little accident with her Emmy. Photographs by Peggy Sirota.

RUNNING WITH THE BULLS234

Chicago's championship Bulls stand tall for Annie Leibovitz, as Susan Kittenplan spotlights basketball's version of America's team, led by the incomparable Michael Jordan.

THE SCION IN WINTER236

The enigmatic Michel David-Weill is trying to plot the future of his Lazard Freres banking empire and control feuding partners such as Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner. As Paris buzzes over David-Weill's own clash with his son-in-law and heir apparent, Suzanna Andrews gets an unprecedented audience. Photograph by John Stoddart.

EVERYBODY GOES TO KEN'S242

David Halberstam visits Ken Aretsky, who serves up effortless comfort along with cigars, Cosmopolitans, and steaks in the club-car elegance of his new saloon, Patroon. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

TO DIE LIKE A GANGSTA244

Son of a Black Panther and fiance of Quincy Jones's daughter, platinum-selling gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur had dreams of changing the world even as he waited for his death. Robert Sam Anson charts the inevitability of the bullets that killed him. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

O'BRIEN COUNTRY252

Bruce Weber and Christopher Hitchens spotlight Edna O'Brien, who revisits an Irish tragedy in her new novel, Down by the River.

EDGAR'S LIST254

Seagram mogul Edgar Bronfman Sr. is tracking billions in Nazi plunder, including the Swiss bank accounts of Holocaust victims, Ann Louise Bardach reports, and shaking the land of watches and chocolate to its questionably neutral foundations. Photographs by Nigel Parry and John Stoddart.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 30

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24

Columns

HOOKED ON EBONICS | 88

Christopher Hitchens cocks an ear to the Ebonics debate: rich idioms notwithstanding, Black English stigmatizes its speakers.

TOO LITTLE, TOO SLATE | 98

James Wolcott hits Michael Kinsley's Webzine, Slate, judging it more than a micro soft and written by an all-too-familiar cast of Harvard-New Republic-Beltway insiders.

DEATH, INCORPORATED | 110

Before she died last year, the doyenne of muckraking, Jessica Mitford, updated her classic 1963 expose, The American Way of Death, taking a second skewer to the U.S. funeral industry.

FERNANDA'S HIDEAWAY | 132

Bob Colacello checks out Park Avenue-bred bohemian-scholar Fernanda Eberstadt's latest book, a deft fictional portrait of the 1980s New York art world. Photograph by David Seidner.

THE LADY VANISHES | 136

Paranoid and profane, Madalyn Murray O'Hair rose to infamy as the head of American Atheists and then mysteriously disappeared in 1995 with her son, granddaughter, and more than $625,000. Mimi Swartz follows the unholy trail. Photographs by David Barry.

HONG KONG SURPRISE | 158

As England prepares to relinquish Hong Kong to China, Andrew Neil finds the island's billionaires fattening their golden geese, and its people keeping a twitching but stiff upper lip.

Vanities

BIG BEN | 179

George Wayne pulps Jarvis Cocker; Divine Comedy routine; revival of the hippest—Swinging London past and present.

Et Cetera

EDITOR'S LETTER: The last crusade | 50

CONTRIBUTORS | 54

LETTERS: Solid Goldie | 72

CREDITS | 283

PLANETARIUM: Go off the deep end, Pisces | 284

PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE: Howard Stern | 286