Spiegel Stuff: Trump’s Most Powerful Enablers, Inside the Making of The Sopranos, and More

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Trump’s Most Powerful Enablers, Inside the Making of The Sopranos, and More

Anniversary Special: 5 Memorable V.F. Features From Years Past
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A Toast to the Vanity Fair Archive!

We might be stuck at home battling a global pandemic, but Vanity Fair is still celebrating. One year ago, we brought over 60 years worth of cover stars, investigative deep dives, seminal profiles, and journalistic coups to the Vanity Fair Archive. Inside, subscribers can uncover every issue, every page of V.F., stretching back to its founding in 1913. Today, in honor of our archive's first birthday, we've rounded up stories still relevant to our current time—and unlocked them especially for you. For unlimited access to the archive, consider subscribing today.

How would the Sopranos, perhaps the most canonical American TV family, fare in quarantine? A look back at how the mob drama—now making its pandemic comeback—got made. But binge-watching and homebound social distancing aside, how exactly did we get here? In search of answers, we reexamine the enablers of Donald Trump, some still spinning his propaganda machine. Finally, a necessary lesson from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Reading it, you feel: They are alive; this happened."

The Enablers

If Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a pathogen, just doing what's in his nature, who's responsible for letting him wreak havoc in the national bloodstream, even before the novel coronavirus ravaged the country? Calling out the president's then most powerful enablers—six seemingly rational men, half of whom remain in office—Sarah Ellison took a long hard look at their motives for helping Trump gain, and hold on to, the White House.

An American Family

More than 20 years ago, HBO bought a pilot script for a show that no one—not creator David Chase, lead actor James Gandolfini, or any of the original cast—thought would ever get made. Then The Sopranos became perhaps the greatest pop-culture masterpiece of its time, a fearless series that transformed television, and is still being rewatched today. In 2007, with the story of Tony Soprano, mobster in midlife crisis, just nine episodes from a finale, Peter Biskind heard how it all went down, from the players behind the phenomenon.

The Disinformation Society

George W. Bush's reelection was explained as a red-state-versus-blue-state "values gap." But research showed a majority of Bush voters were misinformed about White House policies on the environment, Iraq, and terrorism. Instead of news, they got propaganda, disseminated by the right-wing machine, corporate broadcasters, and journalists who thought balance was reporting one side. Sound familiar? In an epilogue to his 2005 book, Crimes Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed how, decades after Reagan's FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, the media had hidden the real gap—between America's values and those of its government.

50 Years of Solitude

A little more than a half-century ago, Gabriel García Márquez—after yet another visit to the pawnshop—sent One Hundred Years of Solitude off to his publisher in Buenos Aires. Talking to Gabo's agent, Carmen Balcells, just weeks before her death, Paul Elie got the hidden history of a literary revelation.

Escape From the Twilight Zone

Long before he was in quarantine making "a pasta which you can hold in your hand," Robert Pattison looked to Water for Elephants for a professional break from the supernatural stylization of the five-part Twilight saga. But even on a remote Tennessee set he was besieged daily by crowds of his Twihard fans. In 2011, Nancy Jo Sales found the actor torn between gratitude for and despair about the fame that had engulfed him.

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