Editors Letter

Close Encounters

Los Angeles is a town one industry wide and four generations deep—a city still so young that everything, and everyone, is connected to everyone and everything else. For instance, Annie Leibovitz and director Cameron Crowe, whom she shot for this year’s portfolio, both worked at Rolling Stone in the early 70s.

Jill Robinson, whose story on director Roman Polanski’s unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl from the San Fernando Valley begins on page 150, knew most of Polanski’s crowd in that druggy, oversexed Hollywood of 1977, when the crime took place.

Her father was Dore Schary, who ran production at Paramount from 1948 to 1956. Jill grew up with other children of Hollywood royalty, including Jane Fonda, the subject of Jennet Conant’s profile on page 210. Robinson’s son, Jeremy Zimmer, an agent at UTA, is listed in “The Hollywood Universe,” on page 282, a three-page foldout Who’s Who of moviemaking.

Senior editor Matt Tymauer, who with associate editor Susan Kittenplan assembled the chart, is also a child of Hollywood. He lived in Brentwood, where composer Meredith Willson and Betsy Drake, Cary Grant’s ex-wife, were neighbors. Director John Badham, also listed in “The Hollywood Universe,” introduced Tymauer’s mother to his stepfather, Robert Van Scoyk, a respected television writer and producer.

Patricia Bosworth is the daughter of Bartley Crum, the stalwart, liberal lawyer who defended the Hollywood 10. Her memoir of her father, due out from Simon & Schuster this month, is excerpted on page 236.

Dominick Dunne’s family is into its second Hollywood generation. His daughter, Dom⅞ inique, was a gifted actress and his son Griffin, long an actor and producer, has just directed his first feature, Addicted to Love, starring Meg Ryan, Matthew Broderick, and Kelly Preston. Dominick, who has been part of the Hollywood firmament since the late 50s, gave Joel Schumacher, the director of Batman & Robin (spotlighted on page 354), his first break in the movies—as a costume designer for Play It as It Lays, which Dominick produced.

In what is presumably the final installment of Dunne’s incomparable coverage of the O. J. Simpson case, the name of L.A.P.D. detective Philip Vannatter appears once again. Vannatter also makes a cameo in Robinson’s story as one of the officers gathering evidence against Polanski.

Nick Tosches spent much of the past year preparing his story on Sidney Korshak, the lawyer for the Chicago Mob who, for most of the last half-century, moved easily among the famed and powerful of Las Vegas and Beverly Hills. Tosches’s sprawling, brilliant profile was missing only one thing—Korshak, who died last year, had not had a decent photograph taken in almost 40 years. Dominick, who knew and liked Korshak, thought he had a picture of the lawyer taken at a birthday party for Denise Minnelli at Luau in 1966. He dug it out and the photograph opens Tosches’s story on page 172. The photo credit alongside it reads: Dominick Dunne. A small town indeed.