Contributors

Osborn Elliott has been friends with Bishop Paul Moore since the 1970s, when Elliott was editor in chief of Newsweek. This month Elliott nominates Moore for the V.F. Hall of Fame, in part because the bishop helped him organize a march on behalf of Elliott's Citizens Committee for New York City, which supports 11,000 community groups. Today the two spend time fishing together in Stonington, Connecticut, where Moore keeps his boat at Elliott's dock. "On rare occasions," Elliott says, "we catch a fish."

"Hanging out with Ahmet Ertegun doesn't feel at all like work," says contributing editor Leslie Bennetts, whose profile of the Atlantic Records co-C.E.O. begins on page 96. "Whether he's going to a rock concert, an A-list dinner, or a black-tie gala, he has more fun than most people who are half his age." Part of Bennetts's interview took place backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in New Jersey, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards treated Ertegun like a brother. "To the baby-boomers who are afraid they're too old for sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll," she says, "Ahmet is a great inspiration."

Taylor Branch's 1988 book on the civil-rights movement, Parting the Waters, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book's sequel, Pillar of Fire, will be published next month by Simon & Schuster—and is excerpted in this issue. Branch, who has written for The Washington Monthly, Harper's, and Esquire, lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children,

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' It s been a crash course in Old Hollywood," says special correspondent Amy Fine Collins (right, with daughter) of her story on screen legend Claudette Colbert (page 112). The former art historian, who wrote about Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons last April, has read countless Hollywood biographies, watched hundreds of vintage movies, and is now something of an expert on the subject. "So many of the current Hollywood players don't know a thing about their history," she says. "As for the ones who do, they don't know much about anything else."

After attending Santa Clara University in her native California, contributing editor Dee Dee Myers headed straight to "the graduate school of the trenches"—Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign. She rose through the ranks to become Mondale's assistant press secretary for California. "It was a political disaster," she says of the ill-fated campaign, "but a good experience." Myers, who later served as President Clinton's first press secretary—and the first female presidential press secretary ever—lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Todd Purdum, Los Angeles-bureau chief of The New York Times.

Special correspondent Bob Colacello saw a lot of familiar faces while covering the d'Arenberg wedding for this issue— specifically, people he has written about in Vanity Fair. At the dinner, Colacello (right, with fellow guest Lucy Ferry) sat beside Barbara de Kwiatkowski, whom he profiled in 1992; he rode to Bourges with Cornelia Guest, whom he wrote about in 1988; and at the wedding reception he shared dessert with Sao Schlumberger, the subject of a 1993 article.