Did Michael Lutin's USA horror-scope stick in Vanity Fair's Uranus?

Michael Lutin

One of the minor mysteries of our time is why Vanity Fair dumped its esteemed and popular astrologer Michael Lutin back in 2007. For nearly 25 years he wrote for the mag: his monthly Planetarium page nimbly balanced seership and edgy wit to please reader hopers and staff cynics alike: then he was gone without explanation - such bad manners! He was the one stargazer who impressed those of my friends who think my studies in astrology a sign of lunacy.

Lutin himself appears to have been nonplussed by his apparent dumping, judging by a message he left on his Where's The Moon? site in 2007:  "I can't personally answer the thousands of people wondering what happened to the VF Planetarium so all I can say is maybe you should ask them [the mag]." Thousands? And yet not one letter published in VF on the matter. There's journalistic democracy for you.

Lutin now can be found on the Huffington Post and one of his postings last year perhaps contains a clue to the reason for his departure: do remember, if the first and second parties do not explain, a third party is entitled to speculate.

Back in 2006 Lutin wrote an alarming piece for VF titled Special Alert: Horoscope USA. Alas, it failed in many respects to be as breezily optimistic as its editor Graydon Carter never was while Bush was in power. Lutin, as latterday Nostradamus, foresaw a parlous and dark future for America: "We've gotten fat and we've gotten lazy," concluded Lutin. "So don't blame George Bush [as Graydon Carter did every month - MA's note] or Bill Clinton or any of the elected officials in Washington. A country gets the leaders it deserves, and when we're ready to rise from the ashes of a fallen empire, we will find the leaders to help us do so. It will happen, but not in 2008. We have to go through the Pluto transit first."

Now I notice that Lutin used his Huffington Post blog to tell us of his problems in getting the piece published in VF in the first place, though he was a contributing editor. Was the article too dark? He writes: "That's what my editors at Vanity Fair thought when I submitted the piece... [it was] finally published... after it had been thoroughly edited 'for size'." Ah, does he mean toned down? Censored? His quote marks. Lutin adds: "Just as the issue was going to press, I told them how important I believed the piece was, and they should drop out my regular column if space were the problem, and replace it with the Horoscope USA. They did, but afterward I received a note from the editor-in-chief [Carter], saying, 'I hope you're wrong.'"

With evident relief, Lutin writes: "Thank God for the Huffington Post. Now I can say what I've been trying to say for going on three years," before regaling readers with more talk of revolution in the Cancerian US as Pluto does its worst in Capricorn, despite Obama. I am sure Carter would not have wanted to read in his glossy: "People are funny. Just before the catastrophic explosion, they get lethargic, apathetic and goofy, almost catatonic, crippled by shock into denial... "

Is it possible Obama-adoring Vanity Fair let their very own John Dee go because they preferred a toothpaste smiley view of the future, expected to be reinvented in 2008? Would they have preferred Lutin to spin some upbeat guff for their Pluto-fearing readers? Aren't stargazers just expected to be giggly? I don't think VF has ever replaced Lutin: one hopes the magazine is not getting, er, "goofy, almost catatonic, crippled by shock into denial."

Anna Wintour and the curious case of the exorcism

Can it be true that US Vogue editor Anna Wintour wanted to have an exorcism conducted in her office after seeing The Devil Wears Prada? This is what one well-informed Arcatiste tells me. The "exorcism took the form of a fumigation and redecoration. And she asked her friend, the photographer Eric Boman (Blahnik by Boman) to hang some of his tastefully bland photos on the walls.

"Anna thought Eric's photos were very soothing and hoped they would change the decor a la blamange. She told Eric she wanted all traces of 'that bitch' exorcised for an eternity!" This is thought to be a reference to the infamous Miranda Priestley character played in the pic by Meryl Streep, plainly modelled on Wintour.

However, novelist and famed gosser Frances Lynn has something further to add: "I hear Anna Wintour asked Eric Boman to hang his soothing snaps on her office walls AFTER the exorcism ... she wanted a complete New Look."

Can anyone shed further light on the precise nature of the exorcism? Was it anything like this:?

Michael Gross and the furious Social Empress of New York

Is it the case that the uncrowned "Social Empress of New York" has waved her sceptre and decreed that a book she finds either embarrassing or inaccurate or both should be ignored by Anyone Who Cares What She Thinks? That it should in effect be allowed to die by ordained silence? Who knows?

The Empress in question is Annette de la Renta, the book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, and its author the legendary, the inescapable, Michael Gross. His oeuvre includes non-fiction bestsellers Model and 740 Park.

Mrs de la Renta is the wife of the - omg!, gimme the grandest-sounding adjectival phrase, please - multiversal fashion designer Oscar. They are among the society Caesars and Cleos of America (NY in particular) - with the tragic ends missing, respectively. Apparently. They're so huuuuuge that even American Vogue editor Anna Wintour over-arches her back into an ageing stoop as she scrapes about in their presence. Not even the newly refurbished Hubble telescope can fully capture their social enormity. There isn't a lens big enough!

So, when this goddam writer Gross produced his sensational NY museum history book, which does not portray Annette (the sometime guardian of the late Social Empress of New York Brooke Astor's estate, and a trustees board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in an entirely approved light, all hell broke loose. Museum types raged for and against Gross' book: indisputably, Gross had hit a raw nerve about a national institution. And Annette threatened legal action - she could sue yet in the US or turn libel tourist.

Suddenly, promised book reviews did not run, scheduled interviews did not appear. All this in the Land of the Free. No writ has been served as I write.

Was she offended by the stories about her and her late, wealthy philanthropist mother Jane Engelhard or was she aggrieved by Gross' impertinence in delving into Oscar's well-known sexual past? Or all of the above?

Annette de la Renta is rich enough and powerful enough to hire the best lawyers to speak on her behalf. I spoke with Michael Gross about the affair. (If you want more background, read Jesse Kornbluth's excellent report, click here)

Michael, my dear. You're imagining that sections of the US media have banned coverage of your book, aren't you? You've got sensitive?

"No. I did a fascinating interview with Daphne Merkin, a celebrated writer, for a publication-day story on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's web site, that has still never appeared. I also know of at least one reporter who has received a warning letter from Mrs de la Renta's lawyers saying the book is 'full of misinformation' and another, at another newspaper, whose story on the book was killed by an editor who said that they would cause the book to be withdrawn and/or corrected and the newspaper would be left 'holding the bag.' I also know of several reviews that were scheduled and then mysteriously postponed. I hesitate to be more specific since I fear that the reporters and editors who have filled me and my publisher in on what's been happening (or more precisely, not happening) might themselves be at risk of retaliation."

You're saying the New York elite have closed ranks against you in defence of their Empress?

"I know that the New York elite - call them the 4,000 - love to know and discuss things no one else (ie, the public, the great unwashed, the NOCD types) knows. Much of what is in my book is no surprise to them. Many of them were my sources.

"That said, I suspect that the core issue here is not this or that nugget of revealing information but rather something larger and perhaps more threatening, my exposure of two things: the way things really work behind-the-scenes in a great American cultural institution - which no one involved wants revealed - and the picaresque saga of Jane Engelhard, whose riveting life story still has holes in it, despite my attempts to fill them, but which is nonetheless told in full for the first time in Rogues' Gallery. Both she and her daughter have battled every attempt to shed light on this saga - battles referred to in the book."

Is this just about the de la Rentas - or have you also upset the cultural snobs by telling the unauthorised and all-too-human story behind a national treasure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

"The sad fact is that the sort of people who create and sustain historical repositories like the Metropolitan do not want their own histories, or those of the institutions, revealed. Otherwise, why would they repeatedly obstruct researchers and make a mere book like mine into an object lesson, a warning to any who might think of following a similar path of crumbs?"

I understand the de la Rentas' friend Anna Wintour made her feelings known ....

"I ran into Anna Wintour at Graydon Carter's Monkey Bar shortly before the book came out. We have 'crossed swords' before, beginning when she was the editor of British Vogue and began an interview by instructing me in no uncertain terms that I was not to refer to her as Nuclear Wintour, so I was not surprised when she gave me a look I can only describe (by paraphrasing a designer) as 'standing in a strapless dress next to an open icebox.'"

As Kornbluth writes of the matter: "A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended." If Annette de la Renta's legal threats are intended to chill interest in Gross' book, then they may well have succeeded for now.

But would it not make more sense, and be more in keeping with the freedom-loving spirit of the US, if she published a statement of rebuttal for all to see? What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book to obscurity, and with the acquiescence of a generally gutless American media. Tina Brown - when will you become the mouse that roared?

For a great read, order a copy here.
Michael Gross website

Graydon Carter Short Story: God's Big Bang

Graydon Carter's Lothario reputation has inspired me to write a piece of fiction, titled God's Big Bang, based on his legendary hotel fucking, as reported by Rupert Everett.

Graydon Carter took in a deep breath and lost three of his five bellies - just enough to catch sight of his vast manhood from a vertical perspective, standing to attention the way Toby Young didn't in Graydon's presence when the little scamp was researching his book at Vanity Fair.

"That goddam son-of-a-bitch," growled Graydon thinking of Toby as he let out a vast gale of air and lost sight of his organ. For a moment his enormity quivered at the fear of deflation.

"Oh Graydon, Graydon, look at it! Bring it over here before you lose it," bellowed the awed blonde in the hotel four-poster, usually purple-shiny with the latest Eva Mendes De-luxe Duvet which had been carelessly cast to the floor.

"My God! Who's that?" barked the mighty editor-in-chief as he caught sight of a strange looking man in the bedroom. "What the - ?"

"There's no one there but you, honeybunch" said Blondie lightly. "It's just you're looking in the mirror."

For a moment he thought he had spotted the ectoplasmic effusion of a ghost, all cottoned up about the head. Then he realised it was just his own hair, a vast, proud luxuriance, the like of which once dreamt about by elderly periwigged gentlemen grandees of Louis XIV's court.

"Oh, Graydon, it's gone!"

He breathed in again, losing an impressive four bellies this time. But, alas, the combination of Toby Young and the imagined ghost had caused his blood to surge from his cock to his cheeks. All he could see now was the rolling result of one too many dinners at Gotham's finest restaurants. He knew choler was bad for the blood pressure.

"Ah, fuck it," shouted the man who had written diatribes against George W Bush every month in his women's magazine for eight years with no discernible effect. "Come over here and give it a rub."

Blondie sighed a little, and then spun out of bed on her pert naked buttocks. A scream followed and then the poor girl lay unconscious on the carpet. She had landed on the Eva Mendes De-luxe Duvet which proved slippery underfoot.

"That's great," said Graydon to himself. He swaggered over to the lifeless form of his inamorata and couldn't feel a pulse. "Fuck!" He began banging her chest with his fist, like they did in ER, causing the floor to tremble with each blow. The actor in the room below lay in his bed wondering how the old boy upstairs could keep up such a pace - the thought stirred him and he started thinking again of another man who had once lost his dental crown on the actor's cockring.

Mercifully, Blondie came round in Graydon's arms - he had mistakenly felt her Cartier Love Collection watch, not her pulse - "Hello God, I must be dead," she whispered, struck by Graydon's resemblance to the image of the Old Testament sky god she'd seen on a biscuit tin once. Graydon scowled, "Don't ever fucking say that in front of Hitchens - he's crazy about his atheism," he snarled.

"Oh, Graydon, it's up again," she whinnied. "Come here and do me."

The actor in his bed could only marvel at the resumption of banging above. "It must be Viagra," he bitched as he stroked his cockring. "It takes me at least an hour to recover."

'Graydon Carter an amazing fuck' - Rupert Everett

Miss Marple has a big cock

Rupert Everett, currently triumphant in play Blithe Spirit, has this to say of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter: "I was once staying at a hotel and I was in the room directly under his. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this. The screams coming from the woman were some of the purest sounds of pleasure I'd ever heard. And there I was sitting alone in my room unfucked. Suddenly it all made sense. That messy hair of his that I always thought was buffoon hair was buffoon hair hiding a monster cock."

For more of this tasteless porn click here. The interview is on the Daily Beast - edited by Tina Brown, former VF editor and not a noted pal of the Miss Marple lookalike giant cock-cunter. I wonder whether this tribute will not imperil Rupes' contributing editorship of VF. I always said the magazine is essentially vulgar.

Graydon Carter denies he's an amazing fuck, click here.