Contributors

In decades of delving into the world’s darkness, Nick Tosches has found that only a few books describe the Mafia without romance or mythology, most notably a novel, The Day of the Owl, by Sicily’s Leonardo Sciascia. Tosches himself spent almost a year researching what lay behind the mythic aura of Hollywood-Mafia go-between Sidney Korshak for this issue. His 1992 biography of Dean Martin, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, will be a Warner Bros, movie adapted for the screen by Nicholas Pileggi.

“Bald-headed eagles are larger at age two than when fully mature. Just like most William Morris agents,” says Henry Alford, who draws parallels between birds and the Hollywood flock on page 288. After studying film at N.Y.U., Alford ended up working at a casting agency. “I was writing short, funny things and mailing them to magazines,” he says, “and then it happened”— he found himself with a career as a writer for Spy, Details, and GQ, among others.

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When he found a stack of old, cartoon-filled New Yorkers in a closet (his parents were the only people in Simcoe, Ontario, to have a subscription), 10-year-old Bruce McCall started obsessively drawing cars, airplanes, and anything else “that would get me the hell out of Simcoe.”

Now a VF. contributing editor, McCall explains his flight from Ontario in a memoir, Thin Ice, to be published in June by Random House.

“I’m surprised how unjaded I remain about Hollywood,” says associate editor Susan Kittenplan, who researched and wrote captions for this portfolio and for special issues past. Her love of show business dates back to childhood, when she produced plays in her parents’ Upper East Side living room, casting her younger sister as the cat or the scullery maid and reserving the more glamorous roles and directing duties (a budding Streisand) for herself.

After 25 years of profiling everyone from Larry Flynt to Ivana Trump, special correspondent Bob Colacello is generally unflappable, for which he thanks his alma mater, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service: “It forced me to deal with the powers that be.” But when he got an exclusive tour of the billion-dollar, soon-to-open Getty Center from architect Richard Meier, Colacello was completely awed by the white-maned High Priest of Modernism. “He kept track of every single nail!”

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The daughter of MGM studio head Dore Schary, Jill Robinson grew up with Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant as family friends. Her family was a Hollywood anomaly, however: her parents remained together and were so outspoken politically that a cross was once burned on their lawn. Now living in London, Robinson has just published her seventh book, the novel Star Country.

High-profile crimes have long inspired special correspondent Dominick Dunne’s bestselling romans a clef: A Season in Purgatory was based on the 1975 Martha Moxley killing, and the notorious Woodward murder provided material for The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. Now, as Dunne reports on the conclusion of the O. J. Simpson civil trial, that case has become fodder for his next, much-awaited novel, Another City, Not My Own, due out in November from Crown.

Illustrator Barry Blitt, whose cartoons have appeared in Spy and The New York Observer, says that even in the middle of the night he will wake up and put pen to paper. The last time he did it, he was horrified to discover he had drawn what looked like “Babe Ruth checking into a hotel with some pigs.”

Patricia Boswortll's acclaimed books on photographer Diane Arbus and actor Montgomery Clift taught her the art of biography. But nothing prepared the former model, actress, and magazine editor for the 10-year emotional journey of writing Anything Your Little Heart Desires, the story of her father, lawyer Bartley Crum, who defended the Hollywood 10 against the blacklist. The book, being published this month by Simon & Schuster, is excerpted in this issue.

Married to 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft and mother of a three-year-old boy, contributing editor Jennet Conant was fascinated to learn how the world’s most high-profile media couple—Jane Fonda and Ted Turner—have managed to carve out a private niche in their very public lives. But her interview with Fonda raised darker issues too: “It gave me chills to hear my childhood idol admit she wished she had done things differently,” Conant says.