Gene Hackman’s Down-and-Out Start; Silicon Valley’s Most Vainglorious Villain; the Disappearance That Rocked Aruba

A special delivery from the Vanity Fair Archive View in your browser | Update your preferences Before he was a two-time Oscar winner with 79 movies to his name, Gene Hackman was "scrounging for any kind of role in '60s New York" alongside roommates Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, Richard Meryman wrote for Vanity Fair in 2004. Meryman talked with all three about living on talent and odd jobs—and about the friendship that kept them going. In this edition of the VF Archive digest, we remember Hackman in the 1960s, the great art heist of the 1990s—still unsolved to this day—and Gwyneth Paltrow's first VF solo cover in the early aughts. Twenty-five years later, it's still Paltrow's world, and we're just living in it. Don't miss her on this month's cover too. Before They Were Kings Scrounging for any kind of role in '60s New York, chasing girls, lending money to whichever of them was the most broke, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Duvall shared the risks, the rejections, and a fascination with the human drama. As they remember, stardom was unlikely—and irrelevant. R E A D  M O R E » Missing White Female A missing girl. A desperate family. A tropical island. The disappearance of teenager Natalee Holloway on Aruba became America's most tragic reality show. But behind the cable-ratings bonanza was a war of wills and cultures, as Natalee's mother, alleging an official cover-up, turned Aruba upside down to find out what happened to her daughter. Sorting fact from rumor, with new information from the police, Bryan Burrough cut to the heart of the case. R E A D  M O R E » Stealing Beauty The FBI was baffled by the costliest art theft in American history—more than $200 million in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others taken from Boston's stuffily exclusive Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Boston Herald reporter Tom Mashberg told how, more than seven years later, he found himself at the center of attempts to recover the stolen treasures, dealing with a Mayflower-descended master criminal, Myles J. Connor Jr., and Connor's former friend and nemesis, a petty crook named Billy Youngworth. R E A D  M O R E » Today Belongs to Gwyneth Gwyneth Paltrow was the über-It girl, her cool beauty and trendsetting power magnified by Hollywood stardom. Over lunch, Michael Shnayerson learned about the two hardest years of Paltrow's life—with the heartbreaking end of her engagement to Brad Pitt, her grandfather's death, and the cancer that threatened her father, Bruce Paltrow—and the reasons for her determination to make Duets, directed by her father, and Bounce, opposite ex-boyfriend Ben Affleck. R E A D  M O R E » Elon Musk's Totally Awful, Batshit Crazy, Most Excellent Year In 2020, the COVID-doubting, media-hating Twitterholic CEO became the third-richest man alive, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, and Tesla became the most valuable car company on the planet. Nick Bilton got inside the mind of Silicon Valley's most vainglorious villain. R E A D  M O R E » Get on the list Subscribe to our Hollywood newsletter for your essential industry and awards-season news, every day. Sign Up Now This e-mail was sent to you by VANITY FAIR. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, vanityfair@newsletter.vf.com, to your address book. View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe Copyright © Condé Nast 2025. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.