Independent (London) - June 6, 2007 <http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2619132.ece>
How Bono made Africa the focus of several Vanity Fair covers
First, it was The Independent. Now Bono has guest-edited the world's glossiest magazine. David Usborne tells the inside story of Vanity Fair's Africa Issue - and how its 20 stunning covers were created
By David Usbourne
For a moment, it seems that Graydon Carter, the veteran editor of Vanity Fair, has lost the plot. What could have possessed him to say "Yes", when a rock star from Ireland asked if he could kidnap his magazine for a month and dedicate almost all of its pages to Africa? The hair has always been a bit bonkers - it is a spectacular grey bouffant - and now maybe the mind is following. Vanity Fair chronicles celebrity and the hi-jinks of the rich and over-pampered. It is more concerned with the goings-on in Malibu, rather than Mogadishu.
A visit to Carter's corner office in the Condé Nast tower above Times Square this week was reassuring. The result of this one-off hijacking of the magazine is the July issue that hits newsstands on Friday, and advance copies are lying across his desk.There is not just one cover for the Africa special, but 20. You are meant to buy the cover you like best.
Befuddling, to be sure. A few months ago, Carter, 57, caught his competitors and critics by surprise by opening a restaurant in the West Village of Manhattan, just around the corner from his house. He says, by the way, that the venture, called the Waverly Inn, is doing awfully well. "It's the most natural extension of the magazine."
Carter is proud of the issue and more or less confident it will be a success. Pay closer attention and perhaps he has reason. The guest editor of the Africa special is Bono. Otherwise employed as the lead singer of U2, he long ago committed himself to attacking our complacency towards Africa and its suffering. The cover pictures aren't half bad either, all taken by Vanity Fair's Annie Leibovitz, perhaps the finest portrait photographer in the world.
Moreover, there were precedents for this. Once a year, Vanity Fair publishes a special Hollywood Issue to coincide with the Oscars - and for the last two years there have also been Green Issues, with its contents almost entirely given over to investigating the subject of global warming. And it's not the first time Bono has edited a mass- market publication. Last year the singer sat in the editor's chair at this newspaper for a day to help promote the Product (RED) campaign for Africa. Carter took a look at what he had done with The Independent and thought, well, why not?
There were other considerations. Bono was shooting for the July issue of Vanity Fair, always a very thin month in magazine and newspaper publishing. "It's a horrible month, all the 'J' months, they are horrible," Carter explains. "You can floss your teeth with those issues." He also knew that whatever cover they went for, it couldn't be an African landscape, and it would need a famous face, or two, with some connection to Africa. Bono had the connections to land them. "He had a reservoir of fascination and goodwill that would help us a lot."
And it did, eventually leading to the multiple covers we are reproducing, exclusively, today. Each of the 20 people who agreed to be photographed by Leibovitz was chosen because of his or her own interest in the African continent. They include world leaders and politicians (George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama and Queen Rania of Jordan), musicians (Jay-Z and Bono), entertainers and artists (Chris Rock, Madonna, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle and Maya Angelou), philanthropists (Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates) and a sports icon (Muhammad Ali.).
The premise is a visual chain-letter, a photographic discussion between these people about Africa. Each person is featured on one cover, but appears in a supporting role on the next in the series, the message being passed from one personality to the next. Obama listening to Cheadle, Ali to Obama, Queen Rania to Ali and so on. "There is only one photographer who could do this," Carter says. "If you see the miles she logged - it was something like 47,000 miles over a six-week period." Mostly, Leibovitz couldn't actually take the two pairs together for each cover, so they were joined using photo- montage later on.
It was also a daunting challenge for the magazine's production people. When they told Carter that printing 20 different covers for a single issue was theoretically do-able, he had another request. He wanted the magazine to be distributed to retailers in bundles of 20, with one of each version in all of them. The danger otherwise was that a WH Smith in Liverpool might get only Brad Pitt covers, while another would be landed with 100 Obamas. That meant hand-collating every single box. That could work too.
But Carter asked for still more. Would it be possible to send extra copies of, say, the Buffet cover to his native Omaha, and of Bush to Washington DC? (And very few of Bush to Britain.) That they couldn't do.
The inclusion of Bush might seem a particular surprise, given Carter's track record of harshly criticising the US President in his monthly "Editor's Letter", particularly over the war in Iraq.
But the selection of the cover faces fell to Bono - and he argued strongly for the inclusion of Bush. "We talked it through and he said Bush's record in Africa is really good." The Bush administration, indeed, has quadrupled aid to Africa over the last six years. Four years ago, Bush also pledged $15bn (£7.5bn) to fight Aids in Africa and later promised $1.2bn (£600m) to combat malaria in 15 countries where the disease is most prevalent.
In truth, Carter, for all his sniping at this White House, could probably have landed Bush for the issue. "I have much more access with the Bush administration than I did with the Clinton administrations, or the Hillary campaign now. They are much more controlling than the Bush administration, in a strange way." But, as with almost everyone else on the covers, it was Bono himself who signed the President up, through his contacts with Karl Rove.
One person not on the covers, you might notice, is Tony Blair, who in recent weeks has toured the continent, trying to burnish his Iraq- damaged legacy partly by focusing minds on what he has done while in power for Africa. "His name never came up," Carter reveals flatly.
Carter finally agreed to the collaboration at the turn of the year. He knew that it would mean producing something a bit like The Independent's (RED) issue, but also distinct from it. "I thought we will have to look at this differently and take advantage of what we have that a newspaper doesn't have and there were things a newspaper has that I don't have."
A newspaper, because it is composed and published in the space of 24 hours, by definition has more immediacy. Built over a much longer period, the Africa issue would need to possess a much longer shelf life. "The strengths of the magazine, if we were going to use them, were that we have great storytellers and we have great photographers and we've got a great bench here that can find anybody in the world." The mission was to convey the drama of the continent.
Bono paid his first visit to Condé Nast HQ in New York in January. Carter, he admits now, was nervous. He had invited a New York Times writer to interview him and Bono about the project, but got cold feet at the last minute and cancelled. "I was worried about what happens if we somehow weren't on the same page on this."
As it happened, there was a glitch almost immediately. Bono arrived with dummy covers of how he imagined the issue might look and he had made one very particular and rather startling change. He wanted to rename the magazine, just for July, Fair Vanity. Carter wasn't impressed. "I didn't quite get it, but I jokingly said, 'OK, sure, if you let me to change the name of your band to 2U'. It took about an hour and a half to get that out of the way. But after that, it was very smooth sailing." What has emerged is an issue with 15 per cent more editorial pages than would be typical for July.
Bono and Carter deployed some of the magazine's best writers to the continent. Christopher Hitchens writes a piece from Tunisia about the country's success in confronting the threat of Islamic terrorism from within its borders, five years after suffering a devastating terror attack by the forces of al-Qa'ida, while Sebastian Junger files from Chad about China's increasing presence on the continent, the impact of its hunger for oil and its influence on Africa's politics and conflicts, including Darfur.
There are guest writers, too, including Kenya's Binyavanga Wainaina, who writes about his country's struggle since its political implosion in the 1990s, Bill Clinton writing about Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu talking to Brad Pitt.
This was hardly time off for Carter. "Having a guest editor on anything is not less work, it's more work," he says. "Just ask Simon [Kelner, editor of The Independent]". But that is not to say Bono was a slouch. "He didn't phone it in. He read every single word in the issue and made lots of great editorial suggestions. There are things that he decided not to put in and he was completely correct and that he wanted us to pull. They were mostly matters of tone. I remember a couple of sentences in the piece by Hitchens that he thought would cause Christopher trouble and he suggested Christopher take them out and Christopher took them out. He was completely involved, by email or by phone."
Carter believes that the timing of the Africa issue is perfect, as it was when he published VF's first Green Issue at the same time that Al Gore's film about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, arrived in cinemas.
"If you read this issue, the first thing you come away with is that you would like to get on an airplane and go there, which, considering that none of the pieces are travel stories, is quite remarkable. And I think that you come away with an understanding of the richness of Africa after this - that it's more like the West than most of us think," Carter says.
He and most of his staff in New York also took part in an experiment described in an article by Spencer Wells, the head of the so-called Genographic Project. Wells asserts that everyone on this planet can trace their origins all the way back to the first 10,000 human beings on Earth, who belonged to one tribe in Africa before they began their migrations by foot, in search of food, to other parts of the planet.
Wells took swabs from Carter, Bono and almost every staff member of the magazine to identify which "haplogroup" they belonged to, both on their mothers' and fathers' sides. A haplogroup indicates by which route your ancestors travelled out of Africa to the rest of the globe. The masthead in this issue identifies the haplogroups attached to each staff member. Coincidently, those for Carter and Bono on their fathers' sides were almost identical. "This sounds almost corny," Carter says, "but there is something somewhat moving that everybody comes from the same 10,000 people in the same African tribe."
The suggestion that Vanity Fair turning out a do-gooder issue for Africa is somehow incongruous makes Carter - recently returned from hosting a celebrity-packed, paparazzi-jammed party at the Cannes Film festival - bristle a little. He denies that his magazine is obsessed with matters of celebrity. "Fame," he insists, "is a minor part of what we do, but it's the part we do on the cover. If you look at a regular issue, you never see a second movie star story in the issue."
And there's a good reason for a global title putting movie stars on the cover. "The only international language right now is movies. Every country has its own music stars, or their own literary stars or their sports stars right now, but movies go around the world. Outside world leaders, the only international currency are movie stars."
And we should not be surprised that Vanity Fair should concern itself with Africa. Carter and the co-ordinating editor for the issue, Aimee Bell, looked back at the last 10 years of the magazine and found a surprising richness of stories on the continent - as many as 30 major pieces. "So it's not like this is the first time we have ever discovered the continent. We have probably done half as many African stories as we have European stories in that time, so that's a lot. I was shocked at how many African stories we have done."
Did Bono prove himself a good editor? "He has the instincts of a great journalist," confides Carter, "but I am not sure if he'd have the patience. He'd be a much better editor of a daily newspaper actually. He's, like, standing up all the time and jumping around."
In the meantime, Carter can only wait to see if the issue - "per page, one of our most expensive" - sells or not. "Hopefully it doesn't fall flat on its face. I want it to do well," he offers.
Helping it along are agreements with retailers to give it conspicuous promotion, including in Britain with Harvey Nichols, Selfridges and WH Smith.
At least if it does flop, both Bono and Carter will be able to find solace turning their attention to their other jobs: singing - and arranging the seating at the Waverly Inn. (Yes, Carter does that every day.)
Vanity Fair's special issue about Africa goes on sale this Friday.
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Vanity Fair: between the covers
* Vanity Fair was established by Condé Nast in 1914 under the editorship of Frank Crowninshield, who championed the bright young things of the jazz era. Thomas Wolfe and DH Lawrence provided literary contributions, Picasso and Brancusi were featured from the art world, and photography bright-lights Man Ray and Cecil Beaton brought celebrity portraiture to new heights. In 1936, though, the magazine could not escape the cultural catastrophe of the Depression and suspended publication for almost half a century.
Reincarnated in 1983, the magazine toyed with cover styles, experimenting with illustrations and black-and-white headshots. Then, in 1984, with Tina Brown in the editor's office, Vanity Fair returned to the celebrity emphasis, enlisting the help of photography greats Annie Leibovitz and Harry Benson for striking covers. Under Brown, the magazine was a thriving cocktail of wealth, scandal and celebrity, and famously featured a heavily pregnant, nude Demi Moore on its cover in 1991.
Editor-in-chief since 1992 has been Graydon Carter, who has expanded Vanity Fair's coverage to include news and world affairs. Carter has also introduced cornerstone editorial features, including the International Best Dressed List and the Hollywood Issue. On 31 May 2005, his success as editor reached new heights, when an article revealing the identity of Watergate's "Deep Throat" appeared on the Vanity Fair website.
Notable covers of the Carter reign include the March 2006 issue, featuring Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley, both nude, beside a fully-dressed Tom Ford. December's issue also provoked comment when a shot of Brad Pitt, wearing boxer shorts, made the cover. Pitt later said he was not aware the picture was for use on the cover.
Abigail Outhwaite