Vanity Fair — it’s gone over the edge.
The Conde Nast magazine has excerpted “American Canto” by Olivia Nuzzi, who is now their west coast editor.
They’ve gone nutsy for Nuzzi.
Nuzzi was fired by New York magazine a year ago after she admitted to having some kind of affair with Robert Kennedy Jr while writing a profile of him.
It was a violation of journalistic ethics, and New York recognized that. Vanity Fair, under new editor Mark Guiducci, didn’t care.
“American Canto” will be released December 11th. It’s currently around number 4,000 on amazon.com
In the excerpt Nuzzi calls Kennedy “The Politician.” It’s clear she was, and still is, enraptured by him.
He’s even enraptured with himself. She says: “he desired desiring.”
Nuzzi says RFK Jr told her he had security issues and threats. She also intimates that doctors determined the famous “worm” in his brain wasn’t a parasite at all but it was too late to take back that story.
And this all in the excerpt.
So many things are wrong here: The Kennedy-Nuzzi affair, the book, the excerpt, the job. It’s staggering.
The writing is purple and overwrought. If this what to expect in Vanity Fair next from Los Angeles, well, the magazine had already gone off course It probably can’t come back now.
She writes: “I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.”
“Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a worm.” A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend.”
“I knew alcoholics. I had been raised by alcoholics. I did not know other types of addicts in the same way. The Politician had told me, talking about someone else, that all addicts were pathological liars. He was rarely as judgmental as he was about other addicts. I did not think to apply his assessment to him or to our relationship. I did not think to apply it even when he referred to me as an intoxicant.”
