![]() (Being caught at the party scribbling into a notebook is a one-way ticket to expulsion, and so I spent a good chunk of time at each party quietly jotting notes in men’s-room stalls. The media are kept on a short leash as well. Celebrity handlers, bodyguards, and even agents are virtually nonexistent. section at the Vanity Fair Oscar party it’s not the easiest invitation to get, but once you’re in, you’re in the same room as everyone else. It’s not just that the room looks like the celebrity equivalent of the Milky Way as seen through the distortion-free lens of the Hubble telescope, but that these famous and wealthy and powerful guests are behaving in a remarkably relaxed way. Having covered the Vanity Fair Oscar party as a working journalist for 11 of the 18 years that it has taken place-and attended one year as a guest when I worked at the magazine as a contributing editor-I can attest that there are moments at the party that feel like a waking dream. When he asked the reason for her gratitude, Lewinsky replied, “Now there’s a dress more famous than my dress.” When Gwyneth Paltrow won the best-actress award for Shakespeare in Love that night and stepped up to make her acceptance speech in the pink taffeta Lauren gown that would set the media reeling, Lewinsky, who had dished about her infamous blue dress at the table, turned to South and thanked him. and takes place during the Oscar ceremony (shown on screens throughout the dining room), she sat with the actress Ellen Barkin and Hamilton South, formerly of Vanity Fair and then an executive with Ralph Lauren. Lewinsky provided just such a thrill in 1999, when she was invited to the Vanity Fair dinner and party and became the star attraction of the night. “These are people who enter your dreams occasionally, but you don’t ever expect to rub shoulders with them.” “You look across the room and you see Monica Lewinsky or Anna Nicole Smith or any number of people that you’re just dying to talk to and whose paths wouldn’t coincide with yours at any other point in your life,” she says. It’s this potential for unlikely, even odd encounters that makes the Vanity Fair party sui generis, says Anjelica Huston, who has been attending Oscar parties for decades, going back to Swifty Lazar’s annual event in the 60s and 70s. Jagger hadn’t fared well in Richards’s account of his life, and Maher says, “I remember telling him, ‘I’m on Team Mick,’ because I once worked with a heroin addict on a sitcom and it wasn’t fun.” “I had just read it, and we were comparing notes about how shitty it is to work with someone who’s fucked up on drugs,” says Maher, referring to Richards’s fabled heroin addiction. Before the night was over, Taylor Swift would have an intense conversation with her ex-boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal, who reportedly inspired at least one entry in her lengthy breakup-song canon Jane Fonda would commune with a group that included her brother, Peter, and Glee actress Jane Lynch and comic and HBO Real Time host Bill Maher would bond with Mick Jagger over the latter’s treatment in Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. Throughout the Tower bar and Terrace of the Sunset Tower Hotel, in West Hollywood, as well as the elegant structure that had been pitched over the hotel’s outdoor terrace and pool, moments like the Hanks-Bieber parlay were a dime a dozen. ![]() It was the actor’s way of saying, Don’t make too much of two guys making small talk at a party-even if those two guys are a teen heartthrob and, well, Tom Hanks. “Did you feel the Zeitgeist shudder-the tectonic plates of our culture shift?” he said in a mock breathless voice. “Don’t become a jaded professional actor.”Ī bit later that night, Hanks sounded amused when I mentioned to him that I’d observed his conversation with Bieber. ![]() “Stay grounded,” Hanks told Bieber, slipping into ironic-pompous éminence grise mode. As Bieber’s date, Selena Gomez, stood by, I watched the boy wonder listen intently to the two-time Oscar winner, who offered a bit of wisdom wrapped in his usual self-deprecating wit. A starstruck Justin Bieber, whose careful handling of his career suggests he understands the fleeting nature of fame, had sought out one of the wise men of the entertainment business and one of its biggest stars, Tom Hanks. It was February 27, 2011, and as I began my initial tour of the Vanity Fair Oscar party, taking a quick inventory of the famous faces in my field of vision-Larry David, Cameron Diaz, Mick Jagger, Anjelica Huston, Sacha Baron Cohen and his wife, Isla Fisher-I noticed a group of well-turned-out guests forming a loose perimeter around two instantly recognizable men. I’d just smoothed my tuxedo and taken a sip of my first martini when I saw them.
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