Contributors

Special correspondent Bryan Burrough, who spent time in Silicon Valley for his profile of Oracle Corporation chairman and C.E.O. Larry Ellison, claims he was the "most overdressed person at every single meeting." After growing up in Temple, Texas, and attending the University of Missouri, Burrough moved to New York in 1987, and he admits that he prefers the more button-down environment of the East Coast, where there is "less emoting. Co-author of the classic Barbarians at the Gate, he is working on what he calls "a quasi business book," but won't divulge any further details.

Laura Jacobs, who compares the past and present faces of couture on page 138, learned about design from her father, a doctor. "He was very forward-looking," says Jacobs, a V.F. contributing editor, "and tried to buy me a miniskirt when I was in junior high. Conservative me refused." On other occasions, though, when father and daughter debated the cost of haute couture, the doctor would argue that a life could be saved for the price of a dress. "I'd say, with teenage vehemence, 'But it's art!' " As for her other subject this month, actor Rupert Everett, when Jacobs met him he was wearing sweats and a spanking white T-shirt—"and he looked perfectly haut."

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"Both of them have showed a lot of guts," says Washington editor Dee Dee Myers of Senators Russell Feingold and John McCain, who have united across party lines to push for campaign-finance reform and are nominated to the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame on page 100. Myers served as President Clinton's press secretary from 1993 through 1994, the first woman to hold that position, and still lectures regularly on politics. A native Californian, she returns west this month to marry New York Times L.A.bureau chief Todd Purdum.

Photographer David Seidner, whose portfolio of fashion's past and present opens on page 138, says his "first couture memory" is his mother— "she was wearing Norman Norell." Seidner, who is 40, began taking photos when he was 14, without any formal training, and a mere five years later he had his first cover assignment, for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Recently he completed his sixth book, based on his work shown at La Maison Europeenne de la Photographic, a new museum in Paris.

I ran away from law school as quickly as possible," says contributing editor David Margolick, who has a law degree from Stanford, "but it took me 18 years to stop writing about law." Before coming to Vanity Fair, Margolick spent seven years as a legal-affairs correspondent at The New York Times, during which time he published two books: Undue Influence, about the battle for the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and a collection of his Times columns, At the Bar. He follows his May roundup of baseball's top rookies with a report on the machinations surrounding David Westin's appointment to succeed Roone Arledge as president of ABC News.

While profiling Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross, the influential and controversial author of On Death and Dying, for this issue, Leslie Bennetts tried to summon some "spirit guides" of her own. "Kiibler-Ross says they'll manifest themselves if you're open to them," Bennetts says, "but so far I've had no luck. Drat." The unguided Bennetts was a reporter for The New York Times for 10 years, then joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in 1988. She lives in New York with her husband, New York-magazine news editor Jeremy Gerard, and their two children.

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The daughter of a onetime Ohio crime reporter, Cathy Horyn was inspired to be a journalist by her father's scrapbook of executions and bootleggers. After graduating from Barnard, she cut her teeth at several small papers before becoming fashion editor of The Washington Post and then a V.F. contributing editor. This month, she casts her eye on a woman of exceptional style: Donatella Versace. As for Horyn's own look, it's Zoran and Jil Sander in the city, paddock boots and khakis at her country home in Garrison, New York, where she lives with her 11-year-old son.

In line at customs, extremely frequent flier Christopher Hitchens finds that he is always the one asked to step aside: "It's the grown-up version of being asked by the teacher to wipe that look off your face. I never know what I've done wrong." The V.F. contributing editor, who assesses the state of airport security on page 58, says he has "no fear of flying, but I have a huge fear of missing planes."

The first record VH1 editorial director Bill Flanagan ever bought was The Beatles' Second Album, in 1964. Author of an acclaimed book about U2, U2 at the End of the World, Flanagan is also the creator of Storytellers, a live-performance TV series featuring singer-songwriters including James Taylor. He believes that Taylor should be the next recording artist to join Joni Mitchell, whom he profiles in this issue, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, contributing editor Marjorie Williams started her career in book publishing, joining Harcourt Brace Jovanovich at age 19, after dropping out of Harvard, an achievement of which she is proud. "It's probably the only thing," she says, "that will put me in a club with Bill Gates and Bonnie Raitt." Following stints at the Literary Guild and the Linden Press, she moved into journalism and The Washington Post, where her first major story was a two-part profile of former Reagan adviser Michael Deaver. Williams, who still lives in Washington, D.C., writes about author Michael Lewis on page 104.