An Oscar-nominated role in Junebug, a singing-dancing hit with Enchanted, a part opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep in next month’s Doubt, then Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, and a big sequel, Night at the Museum 2: Amy Adams has got to be the fastest-rising star in Hollywood. Amazingly, she nearly didn’t rise at all. Michael Shnayerson hears about her run of canceled shows and dropped parts, her decision to quit the business, and her fiancé, actor Darren Le Gallo, who is handling Adams’s breakthrough like a true prince.
Read More
Raffaello Follieri had the love of Hollywood princess Anne Hathaway, the illusion of a Vatican imprimatur, an investment partnership with billionaire Ron Burkle, and entrée to Bill Clinton’s inner circle. It wasn’t enough for him. Now that the 30-year-old Italian entrepreneur has been jailed on fraud and money-laundering charges, the author separates the facts from the fantasy of Follieri and Hathaway’s high-flying life.
Read More
While much of America worries about foreclosure, John Paulson, who made $3.7 billion shorting subprime mortgages, has plunked down $41.3 million for a Southampton estate. Another just went (to Tiger Woods?) for $60 million. And Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman is building a vast compound in Water Mill. But, amid whispers about which Wall Street casualties will lose their summer spreads, the market for properties below $10 million is grim. Michael Shnayerson checks the real-estate temperature of the country’s most celebrated summer retreat to see if its mere mega-millionaires are about to take a cold dip.
Read More
Last summer, the Arctic lost more sea ice than ever before—nearly a half-million square miles, the size of Texas and California combined—devastating the polar bear’s frozen habitat. Yet, in February, despite a huge outcry, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proceeded with a $2.66 billion oil-and-gas-drilling-lease sale that some of his own scientists believe will further doom the U.S. polar bear. Visiting the Alaskan town of Kaktovik, the author reports on this new crisis.
Read More