Editor's Letter

A New Dawn and Pro Wrestling

This may have completely skipped your notice, but Vanity Fair has the distinction, if you can call it that, of being one of the few magazines not to have produced a "Special" Millennium Issue this year. You can chalk this up to laziness, incompetence, or just a general millennial ennui. I prefer the last explanation.

Recall the run-up to 1984 and the hand-wringing over Orwell's prediction of a regimented state being watched over by Big Brother. Aside from the Giuliani administration, that didn't really happen. And unless Y2K gremlins cause airplanes to start tumbling out of the skies on January 1, 2000, probably not much in our lives is going to change radically just because the date we're putting on checks looks like the opening graphics of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

Come the New Year, people will have the same drives and needs they've had for most of the last century, indeed most of the last thousand years. Our annual Hall of Fame, beginning on page 307, is a gallery of timeless human accomplishment. The people in it stand for excellence or inventiveness or the ability to overcome great odds. Granted, a hundred years ago we wouldn't have photographed, as we did this year, the stars of the World Wrestling Federation. (I say this, and I almost believe it: You could shut down Washington for a year and a majority of Americans would scarcely take notice. Remove professional wrestling from television for a night and people would be out on the streets turning over cars and setting them on fire.)

This issue is rife with the sorts of stories that work at any time. There is the tale of a great rivalry (David Margolick's report on the decades-old feud between former New York Times editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel on page 194). And one of a remarkable collegial bond (Richard Pyle's story on page 274 of the longtime quest to find the remains of four top Vietnam War photographers, including Life's Larry Burrows, whose helicopter was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1971). Just to make us feel bad about our own miserable surroundings, there is a fabulous apartment (art historian John Richardson's lower-Fifth Avenue loft on page 354). There is the chronicle of a life well led (Amy Fine Collins's profile of designer Pauline Trigere on page 344). And check out David Kamp's marvelous look back at Louis Prima and Keely Smith on page 348. They were the thing in Vegas in the 50s and, thanks to the Gap "Khakis swing" ad, have become the thing among young, nouveau lounge nuts today. Add in Carl Bernstein's profile of presidential hopeful John McCain and Bryan Burrough's story of a woman who took Hollywood by storm in the early 80s (she did it by phone—and not how you think) and you've got what I hope you will feel is a great end-of-the-year issue. Heck, it's so good, let's just call it our Special Millennium Issue.

GRAYDON CARTER