CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Bowden

Pursuing General David Petraeus over the course of several months, contributing editor Mark Bowden simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. “He was mightily reluctant to cooperate,” says Bowden, “which surprised me, because he has a reputation for being so open to journalists. But once he determined that he couldn’t get rid of me, he became remarkably forthright and accommodating.”

The resulting profile, “The Professor of War,” begins on page 148. “What’s most impressive is how sustained his accomplishments have been,” Bowden says of Petraeus.

“His entire life story is of one outstanding performance after another.”

Nina Munk

When she began researching her article “The Met’s Grand Gamble” (page 166), contributing editor Nina Munk had had only limited exposure to opera. But after taking in dozens of performances, and conquering a stack of books on the topic, she calls herself “a fervent fan,” adding, “Perhaps that’s why I’m so disheartened by the problems facing the Met. If New York City can’t support a great opera house, what does that say about the state of high culture in America today?” Munk is at work on a book about the West’s crusade to end extreme poverty in Africa, spawned by her profile of economist Jeffrey Sachs in Vanity Fair’s 2007 Africa issue.

Raymond Meier

Shooting the landmark Metropolitan Opera House for “The Met’s Grand Gamble” was an eye-opening experience for photographer Raymond Meier. “I have long admired the building, and I jumped at the chance to photograph it,” he says. “Getting behind the scenes was a bonus. It was so great to see the inner workings of the Met, and to realize that they do everything on-site, from building the sets to making the costumes.” Meier is a contributing photographer for both Vogue and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. This is his first assignment for Vanity Fair.

Laura Jacobs

In her 15 years as a V.F. contributing editor, Laura Jacobs has profiled arbiters of good taste from Christian Dior to Emily Post. In “Grace Kelly’s Forever Look,” beginning on page 182, she celebrates the Hollywood star turned Monegasque princess, and offers a peek behind her perfect facade. “She wasn’t some femme fatale sex bomb,” says Jacobs. “She presented herself according to the mores of the day. She was something to aspire to.” A paperback edition of Jacobs’s second novel, The Bird Catcher, will be released in July by Picador.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 64

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 62

Marie Seal

Contributing editor Mark Seal has blown the lid off many salacious scandals for Vanity Fair, from Bemie MadofFs penchant for massage parlors to the story behind David Letterman’s affairs. In “The Temptation of Tiger Woods” (page 156), he delves into the golfer’s double life. “I kept thinking of Maureen Dowd’s great line in her New York Times column: Tiger ignored the obvious rule: Never get involved with women who have 8-by-10 glossies,”’ Seal says. “But the more I got to know Tiger’s mistresses, the more I saw that they were the result, not the cause, of his downfall.”

Douglas McGrath

In “The Seven Wonders of Preston Sturges” (page 134), Douglas McGrath expands on an essay he wrote about the filmmaker in A New Literary History of America. “You can see his influence on people like the Coen brothers and Larry David,” says McGrath, who, like Sturges, started out writing screenplays (he shared an Oscar nomination with Woody Allen for Bullets over Broadway) and progressed to directing his own scripts (Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, Infamous). He is currently at work (with the editor of this magazine) on a documentary about the legendary producer Jerry Weintraub.

Alan Brinkley

For his book The Publisher Henry Luce and His American Century, excerpted on page 108 (“The Time of Their Lives”), Alan Brinkley spent months trolling the Time Inc. archives for information about the life and trade of the company’s co-founder. “This was a great experience for me,” he says of writing his first major biography, “because it allowed me to describe not only Luce’s life but also the lives of his magazines, the histories of which are remarkable.” Brinkley, the Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia and formerly the university’s provost, has already started on his next project, a short biography of John F. Kennedy.

Austin Merrill

As V.E’s associate legal-affairs editor, Austin Merrill works with the magazine’s lawyers and fact-checkers to ensure the accuracy of the stickiest passages in each month’s issue. His experience as a wire-service reporter in West Africa, Merrill says, while vastly different from his current job, has been invaluable. “Time and again I’ve benefited from my own understanding of the reporting process as I’ve vetted the work of others.” An avid soccer fan, Merrill edits VF.com’s Fair Play blog, and will cover this summer’s World Cup.