Wayne - Anyone whos anyone the astonishing celebrity interviews, 1987-2017

CONTENTS

Vanity Fair is and TM Cond Nast. Interviews used with permission: Cindy Adams (February 2003); Dennis Basso (May 2004); Milton Berle (February 1994); Mr. Blackwell (May 1995); David Copperfield (February 1996 & November 2012); Tony Curtis (June 2002); Carrie Donovan (August 1998); Robert Evans (April 1999); Fabio (November 1992); Farrah Fawcett (October 2000); Sarah Ferguson; Duchess of York (May 2000); Carrie Fisher (November 2006); Helen Gurley Brown (June 2000); Bridget Hall (December 1995); Jerry Hall (May 1997); Charlton Heston (September 1994); Philip Johnson (November 1998); Eartha Kitt (June 2001); Kenneth Jay Lane (November 1996); Dolph Lundgren (June 1995); Kate Moss (January 1994); LeRoy Neiman (August 1996); Rgine (September 1996); Debbie Reynolds (February 1997); Geraldo Rivera (June 1997); Joan Rivers (March 2004); Francesco Scavullo (October 1997); Russell Simmons (October 2003); Martha Stewart (October 1994); Ivana Trump (October 1993); Ivanka Trump (June 2008); Kathleen Turner (April 2002); Donatella Versace (March 1994); Barry White (November 1999).

Interviews reprinted with permission, courtesy of The Daily Front Row: Ross Bleckner, Graydon Carter, Jackie Collins, and Anna Wintour.

Interview reprinted with permission, courtesy of R.O.M.E.: Sandra Bernhard, Bob Colacello, Marc Jacobs, Prince Federico Pignatelli della Leonessa, Tamara Mellon, Ian Schrager.

All illustrations 2016, Laura Baran

ANYONE WHOS ANYONE. Copyright 2017 by George Wayne. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition December 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-238009-8

Print ISBN 978-0-06-238007-4

This particular bit of genius is dedicated to Gem & Frenchy... Mum & Dad

Phillip, Janice, and Debra... brother and sisters.

G eorge Wayne and I arrived in New York about the same time. I came from Canada in the seventies, to write for Time magazine and valiantly tried to look like I belonged there. George came from Jamaica in the eighties to peer into the Mudd Club and almost immediately began looking like he belonged there. He learned quickly that writing about powerful people had a way of earning him, if not exactly their respect, then at least their attention. To this end he founded a magazine, which he called R.O.M.E. It was a deliriously lo-fi affair that leaned heavily on collage and might well have been called O.P.X.M.Other Peoples Xerox Machines. It might help for you to imagine the Internet on paper, photocopied and stapled together by the proprietor himself. Long before it was fashionable to cultivate a high-low sensibility, George was pioneering his with R.O.M.E. Society fixtures such as Jackie Kennedy and Lynn Wyatt shared pages with drag queens and club kids. Lists predominated. There was a lot of Andy Warhol and Grace Jones. With a circulation verging on three figures, he could afford to play fast and loose with the clearance of rights.

At the offices of Spy, which my fellow editor Kurt Andersen and I founded in the mid-eighties, George was a fixture. (I do recall that we went through a lot of copy paper on those days when George was hanging around the office.) Not a week, and sometimes not a day, went by when he didnt ask me for a job. For five years I politely rebuffed his advances. Then, on a hot July morning in Paris, a year or so after I had gravitated to Vanity Fair, I bumped into him outside a Karl Lagerfeld show. He was sitting on one of those stone stanchions outside the Louvre. He casually asked me for a job. It had become his form of greeting me and this time he said it more out of rote than with any conviction. And for one reason or anotheran admiration for his tenacity, or perhaps the mild Parisian morning airI said, Oh what the hell, and gave him one.

We thought it safer to keep him in the Q&A silo of magazine writing. He accepted the proposition and Georges column in Vanity Fair just sort of took off. To be on the office floor with him was to submit to the state of chaos that tends to swirl permanently around writers and photographers of talentor just those who are magnets for disorder. Someones apartment was always on fire (occasionally his). Someone was always drumming up or rehashing or resuming a blood feud (often with him). Someone was always storming out of an interview (almost always with him).

Outrage over the style in which George conducted his notorious Q&As was not uncommon. No topic was off-limits; on the contrary, the more off-limits the subject, the more it became the topic. We have to be a little controversial, he declared in one Q&A, or whats the point? In the analog days, before the famous took to blogs and Twitter to catalogue their wounded sensibilities, they wrote letters to the editor (or had their lawyers write them), and I received more than a few on the subject of Georges Q&As. What George never bothered to explain was that the mild but real indignities of fameautograph seekers interrupting meals, humiliating casting calls, the day the scripts stop showing upwere actually worse than the mischief he would create during an interview that the subject had consented to with eyes wide open. And with George there was never any question about what you were getting into. If you knew the game he was playing, you could play along, and after the initial shock wore off, you could be as candid as you liked and still come across as a pillar of discretion.

In an age when pop stars and spin-class addicts earnestly refer to themselves as survivors, George is authentically a member of that class. If you were gay and black and stylish in New York in the 1980s, the outlook ahead was anything but guaranteed: you werent exactly setting money aside in a 401(k). The Downtown that George celebrated for decades has been recast and repaved for the stroller set, and as long-term leases expired, the corner newsstand where R.O.M.E. was sold made way for an ATM, then a Starbucks, and finally a vacant, glass-walled high-rise. George is still in his apartment in Greenwich Village, still taking your measure from behind his ever-present sunglasses, and still reminding us that we could all use a bit more mischief in our lives before the age of the individual passes us by for good.

Graydon Carter

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

G W definitely believes that People magazine is the reason for it. People is the reason I live in New York City, and the reason Ive become a carnivore of pop culture.

The first time I lay my hands on a copy of the magazine, I was a skinny fifteen-year-old growing up on the British West Indian island of Jamaica. The nurse at the elitist West Indian boys boarding school I attended, Munro College (or Jamaicas Eton, as people often refer to it) in Malvern, was the one who introduced me to the glossy American weekly; it was my first taste of the documentation of celebrity culture. And it was at that moment, circa 1978, that I began to realize my lifes calling. For this shy, insecure boy in the bushes of Jamaica, the faraway world of PeopleBrooke Shields, Andy Warhol, Truman Capotewas something foreign and exotic to fantasize about.