By Stephen Fried Vanity Fair February 1995 In the fall of 1993, the ominous letters and phone calls began to come in to Gerald Levin’s office on the top floor of the Time Warner Building in Rockefeller Center. There weren’t hundreds of them, but each was from somebody...
By Stephen Fried Vanity Fair May 1993 Buck Henry takes a bite of chicken hash and leans forward to speak above the restaurant din. “It’s like we’re part of a secret society, or a club of some kind,” he says. “People come out to that house for these parties, and a lot...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair January 1991 “A hostage situation”—that’s what the cops are calling it—has James Brady rolling rapidly in his wheelchair through the dimly lit third-floor corridor of the Capitol building. At his side—tight-lipped, nervous about being late...
By Stephen Fried GQ November 1991 The scene is like something out of a colorized Citizen Kane or some surreal awards ceremony. Actor Ray Liotta stands in front of a microphone and podium, shadowy from the light of a pin-point bulb, while, on the other side of the...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair April 1988 One thing you can say about Dr. Timothy Leary: the man has always had a talent for convincing himself that wherever he is is where it’s at. Tonight, for instance. Friday night at Helena’s, the private L.A. supper club backed by...
By Fred Schruers Rolling Stone October 2, 1997 A summer night in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a fine one. You can actually sit on your kitchen chair, instead of the stoop, and feel the breeze off Upper New York Bay. The streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district are...
By Fred Schruers Premiere November, 1987 This, William Hurt figured, was a sure bet. A seasoned fly fisherman, he had taken his four-year-old son, Alex, to his rural New York retreat for some ordinary angling with bait and a pole in a lake filled with perch and...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair April 1987 Among the keepers of the collective memory of Hollywood, the story goes that some kind of curse has haunted the lives of the people who appeared in Rebel Without a Cause. There was James Dean, of course, dead in a car crash...
By Ron Rosenbaum The Village Voice July 29 1971 Why interview Troy Donahue anyway? “Believe me, you won’t believe Toy when you see him,” the press agent tells me. “He’s a bearded hippie! And believe me he is fantastic in this picture. He plays Charles Manson! Actually...
By Jennifer Allen New York Magazine January 24, 1983 Arthur Miller is slouched in the drafty rehearsal hall on the top door of the New Amsterdam Theatre, on 42nd Street. Miller is tired to his bones. He lifts his round, black-framed glasses and rubs his eyes with his...
By Jennifer Allen New York Magazine April 9, 1984 It is three days before the Broadway opening of David Mamet’s new play, Glengarry Glen Ross, one day before the critics—“crickets,” he calls them—start to come, and there is nothing for the playwright to do but wait...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair October 1989 “I think maybe I’ve leaned too much on the clandestine thing,” Al Pacino concedes, a bit ruefully. “It was a phase I was going through.” It’s a phase he’s not entirely out of yet, at least stylistically. Tonight, for instance,...
