Given that it hasn’t yet got properly cold here, it feels like a very strange hallucination. In a naked effort to make us forget that we are living in an economic meltdown, the stores are full of Christmas trees and fairy lights. Their illusion makes you feel you are in some sort of dream world […]

I n January 1995, Veronica DeGruyter Beracasa de Uribe Hearst gave an intimate lunch for Diana, Princess of Wales, in her opulent apartment on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 66th Street. The Princess was in New York to give an award to the then editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine and fellow Englishwoman, Liz Tilberis. […]

F or a moment last week, around midnight on Tuesday, we all went mad with joy. Mad in a way I’ve never seen or heard. As I went to bed around 4am I could still hear the screams from people in the street: “We did it.” Emails came in from friends the next day “I’m […]

F or a moment last week, around midnight on Tuesday, we all went mad with joy. Mad in a way I’ve never seen or heard. As I went to bed around 4am I could still hear the screams from people in the street: “We did it!” Emails came in from friends the next day: “I’m […]

If you weren’t in Times Square tonight, the only place to be was downtown in the West Village at Gavin Brown’s gallery for an installation by Jonathon Horowitz called Obama ‘08.
Hundreds of artists, including Piotr Uklanski and Elizabeth Peyton along with collector Peter Brant, model Jessica Joffe and one of the Olsen twins crammed into […]

When I first heard of of the passing of Madelyn Dunham, 86, grandmother of Barack Obama, my reaction was like that of my friends: “Oh no. How tragic she missed this by just a few hours: the likely culmination of an historic journey to the Presidential nomination by her own flesh and blood.”
This morning’s press […]

We’re finally here: tomorrow is Election Day. You could cut the tension with a knife. Many of my friends have been stumping in swing states for Obama over the weekend, terrified that at the last moment a “Bradley effect” could rob him of the victory the polls predict. I don’t think this will happen. H […]

I love the concept of the “Smash Shack” the store opened in San Diego, where according to CBS News, victims of the credit crisis are taking out their frustrations by buying fragile objects and hurling them against the wall.
I haven’t got to that place mentally myself. But nonetheless I think the “Smash Shack’s” basic […]

The other evening I went as a guest of friends to a dinner to raise money for a hospital in New York. This was the same hospital where my twins were prematurely born. On entering this world they weighed only 2lb and 3lb respectively, but went on to thrive. So I was glad to be […]

Recently, CNBC interviewed me for an hour-long special documentary on high-class prostitution, due to air on November 11 at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. ET—a date when hopefully we will no longer be worried about politics and our minds will be back on the important stuff: illegal sex.CNBC just posted a promotional clip for the […]

B ack before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the global economic collapse, I had a dirty little secret: my weekly addiction to the TV series Gossip Girl, about the absurdly rarefied lives of a fictional group of wealthy New York teenagers. Now ratings for the show are soaring: more than ever, people want cheap […]

Back before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the global economic collapse, I had a dirty little secret: my weekly addiction to the TV series Gossip Girl, about the absurdly rarefied lives of a fictional group of wealthy New York teenagers. Now ratings for the show are soaring: more than ever, people want cheap escapism.
I […]

“How poor are you?” That’s what formerly rich guys ranging from hedge-fund kings and tech pioneers to bankers and trust-fund heirs are now asking each other at dinners around town.
This group doesn’t care who ends up buying Wachovia. That’s all background news; just one more sorry piece of detail in the carnage of a lost […]

“How poor are you?” That’s what formerly rich guys ranging from hedge-fund kings and tech pioneers to bankers and trust-fund heirs are now asking each other at dinners around town.
This group doesn’t care who ends up buying Wachovia. That’s all background news; just one more sorry piece of detail in the carnage of a lost […]

L ast week saw not just the initial failure of Hank Paulson’s bail-out bill but also the death of the $800 bottle of wine.
“It’s just not OK to have that on your expenses at a time like this,” one restaurateur says he has been told by banker clients. In this cut-throat world of mergers and […]

On June 16 royal photographers waiting to capture Britain’s Prince William, 26, in flowing velvet robes outside St. George’s Chapel, in Windsor, were caught by surprise. Just before the start of the 660-year-old ceremony, in which the Prince was to be made a Royal Knight of the Garter, a car containing his younger brother, […]

Alberto Vilar once promised so many millions to both New York’s Metropolitan Opera and London’s Royal Opera House that his name was engraved in both places — only to be removed in 2005, when prosecutors charged him with stealing most of his fortune.
But the former financier said that what has hurt him most in the […]

“I understand why the British are livid,” said a friend (American) who is high up at Lehman. My friend was talking about the Sunday front page headlines – screaming that a $2.5 billion bonus pot was being retained – from the English bankruptcy court - by Barclays to pay eight US senior executives who […]

F or some reason, in the last week or so I’ve had a series of lunches and dinners with friends who are male, single, over 35 and never-married. Men like this were traditionally labelled playboys, a term implying they possessed a rakish charm and a wariness of settling.
New York is full of them, since this […]

The story I’d been hearing for some time has finally emerged in the mainstream media: namely that Hillary Clinton, her husband, Bill, and many of her major financial supporters, known as “bundlers” are so livid at what they see as underhanded — I’ve even heard it called “vindictive” — play by the Obama team, that […]

F riday saw a brilliant move by John McCain in choosing Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, to be his running-mate. Theoretically, if you look at the polls which had McCain close to the Obama-Biden ticket before this announcement, his appointment of Palin ought to make up for all his deficiencies. Palin is young. […]

Like 37 million American viewers last Wednesday night, I sat transfixed as I watched the previously unknown figure of Sarah Palin turn herself into the angel of the Republican party. But the burning issue in my mind was: what is a hockey mom? OK: I am British, and I’ve never touched an ice hockey stick. […]

T he phone has rung off the hook all weekend. “Are you OK?” I’ve asked friends whose husbands have been at Lehman Brothers. No, of course they are not. They just saw everything they’ve worked for go down the drain. A lunch barbecue with a Lehman executive who has been there 16 years was cancelled. […]

Like 37 million Americans last Wednesday night, I sat transfixed as I watched the previously unknown figure of Sarah Palin turn herself into the angel of the Republican party. But the burning issue in my mind was: what is a hockey mom?
As a New York mother, I don’t believe the subject has ever come up […]

J ohn McCain made a brilliant move in choosing Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, to be his running-mate. This appointment ought to make up for all his own deficiencies. Palin is young. She’s female. She’s attractive; she’s got some celebrity, having been the runner-up in a Miss Alaska beauty pageant.
She also wins our […]

T he story I’d been hearing for some time has finally come out in the open: Hillary Clinton, Bill, and many of her major financial supporters, known as “bundlers”, are so livid at what they see as underhanded play by the Obama team that they intend to eviscerate what ought to be Obama’s coronation at […]

In New York, the pre-movie hype about Woody Allen’s latest movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, had all been about the kiss between Penélope Cruz, onscreen and real-life girlfriend of male lead Javier Bardem, and America’s modern version of Marilyn Monroe, Scarlett Johansson.
So as I shovelled down popcorn at the New York premiere last week I was […]

F or women, dressing for summer here is a whole lot easier (and cheaper) than in London. You know that stepping outside will feel like walking into a blast furnace, so you choose pretty light sundresses and then you buy a cardigan to battle the freezing air-conditioning inside.
But for the men? I have long pitied […]

T he light-bulb went off while I was driving home last weekend. From the back seat of the car, my twin five-year-olds burst into song: “I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker …”
I have no idea where they heard such unsuitable lyrics (well, actually I do - their father will be spoken […]

L ast week, in the wake of the near-implosion of mortgage insurer Fannie Mae, and with rumors swirling about the fate of Lehman Brothers, where the stock has plummeted 70 percent, I got an email from a friend. Instead of his usual pithy jokes — he sent me his investment fund’s second quarter report.
He wrote:
“Even […]

Last week, in the wake of the near-implosion of mortgage insurer Fannie Mae, and with rumours swirling about the fate of Lehman Brothers, where the stock has plummeted 70 per cent, I got an email from a friend. Instead of his usual pithy jokes, he sent me his investment fund’s second-quarter report. It read: “Even […]

New York’s billionaires, it seems, have not really noticed the downturn. They still spend their summers on lavish yachts in Europe, and are still flying in their own planes. Hearteningly, they also continue to give philanthropically on a vast scale.
Earlier this year, Blackstone Group chairman Stephen A Schwarzman gave $100 million to the New York […]

The headlines here recently seem to have all been about sex - and costly, illicit sex at that.
First there are the lurid details exposed in the divorce trial between model Christie Brinkley, 54, and her fourth husband Peter Cook, 46, who allegedly cheated on her with an 18-year-old and had a penchant for looking at […]

A few months ago I went to a luncheon on New York’s Upper East Side and saw Michelle Obama speak, without notes, without hesitation.
Her husband was at that point still the underdog in the Democratic primary race, but the excitement in that room was palpable–and his wife lifted it further. She talked for almost an […]

As Angelina Jolie bravely brings twins into this world, she has my good wishes—and encouragement, since raising twins, as any parent of multiples knows, is something completely different from raising siblings one at a time.
Before I gave birth—somewhat dramatically and very prematurely—to my twin sons, one cold February morning five years ago, I thought I […]

I know what it’s like to face a birthday and ponder the meaning of life. This Thursday is my birthday, and thinking about turning a year older has been keeping me up at night.
Someone once said to me, “You’d better know where you are going when you reach your mid- to late-30s—otherwise it’s a catastrophe.”
If […]

It’s muggy here - a point emphasised by the increasing number of sweating brows I’ve watched on TV the past week. These brows mainly belong to men in suits who are on their way in and out of courthouses on charges of white-collar crime.
One theory, according to prosecutors and TV pundits, is that desperate economic […]

A friend saw Laura Bush recently and told me how “poised” our First Lady was: “petite” and “gracious”, a “listener”, not a talker. These are the traditional qualities we are supposed to admire in a First Lady. Feisty Democratic women have had a harder time fitting the mould than their Republican counterparts, except for Jackie […]

I returned from London last week after a whirlwind trip of reporting for Vanity Fair and seeing old friends. It’s funny how the very second you get off the plane at Heathrow, life seems to slow down compared to Manhattan’s frenetic pace. (Unless, of course, you are Naomi Campbell and Heathrow baggage-handlers have lost your […]

For the first time in a year I have spent the week in London, working and seeing friends. It has been an eye-opening experience; after all, it has been 11 years since I lived here.
I was expecting to complain about the weather. When I left New York the temperature was in the high nineties. But […]

It was the one item in the diary marked “DO NOT MISS”, scheduled for 10.30am on Thursday. What occasion merited such urgency? My children’s graduation ceremony … from nursery school.
Given that my parents did not make it to my university graduation, I was amazed to receive emails from other (more involved) parents advising me that […]

I will readily confess to being a New York gym rat: I like to go for a run or workout on the elliptical machines. The only times it isn’t relaxing is if I happen to enter the gym at the same time as the “spinning” class is taking place; then, you can literally smell the […]

Critics in the mainstream media scoffed, for the most part, at John Cusack’s low-budget didactic satire, War Inc., calling it heavy-handed and five years too late. The film struggled to get into festivals, finally making it into Tribeca this year. But on the Web, voices sang a different tune, calling War Inc. “prescient” and groundbreaking […]

It was an intensely political evening. First, the premiere of the amazing new film Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary, turned the dry legal arguments about “hanging chads” in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election into fascinating drama. Then screens hung down at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant so we could watch the […]

Guest commentators on the financial cable shows tend to be shouty men in striped shirts. But a rather different face has been showing up on CNBC lately, one that’s familiar to New York’s social and media types: Vicky Ward, Talk magazine survivor and current Vanity Fair contributing editor. Ward credits her new gig as a […]

Last week, in a dash to get to a television studio, I lost a valuable ring. Devastated, I later narrated the story to a friend who works in finance. “The ring was worth X. How much was TV paying you? You clearly didn’t rationalise the situation,” he said. I was speechless at his words, but […]

Jeffrey Epstein, the mysterious financier, absconded to Israel to escape charges of soliciting prostitutes? That was the rumor circulating at the Plaza last night, during the dinner that followed HBO’s premiere of its fabulous documentary about Roman Polanski. The whispers went that Epstein had followed in the footsteps of Polanski, who decamped to France in […]

“D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey played a risky game in catering to Washington’s power brokers with her upscale escort service. Her suicide, this month, marked a tragic—and not unexpected—end for a complicated woman who believed she was unfairly victimized. Having talked to Palfrey for months and spoken with her mother after her death, Vicky Ward […]

Those of us firmly in the anti-Hillary, pro-Obama camp are fed up with it. “I can’t read about it any more,” one Obama backer wrote to me over the weekend.
But the endless press surrounding the inflammatory remarks pronounced by the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor of 20 years at Trinity Church in Chicago, just […]

Just a few hours ago, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the former owner of the Pamela Martin escort agency, was found dead in a shed near her mother’s house in Tampa, Florida.
The authorities said she had hanged herself. And while the news was shocking, I cannot say I was surprised. The 52-year-old, known in the press as […]

I hate to rub it in, but in New York we are on the cusp of summer. The temperature has been in the high seventies; all around me I see girls in summer dresses. The season-change generally coincides with the Tribeca Film Festival, now a staple of the social season, and, for me, the first […]

For me, no matter what happens in Pennsylvania, I’m done with Hillary Clinton. I have long felt that either Democratic candidate would suffice as President. Most New Yorkers (remember, this is a liberal town) have become so tired and cynical about the current administration’s screw-ups I think a frog might be welcomed as the next […]

Fortune magazine is out with its annual ranking of America’s 500 biggest corporations, and only a dozen of the 500 have women at the helm. Watch the discussion here.

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I recently interviewed actor, writer and director of War, Inc., John Cusack for CNBC. Watch my exclusive, one-on-one interview here.
Watch the trailer for the movie here.
You can also watch this on the Huffington Post here.

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I had the pleasure of talking with Jared Kushner, owner of the NY Observer, about his possible purchase of NY Newsday and his battle over it with Rupert Murdoch. Watch my one-on-one interview here.

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It is every celeb’s nightmare: Rob Lowe has hit the headlines with his $3 million lawsuits against a “blackmail” plot by two nannies and a former chef, allegedly seeking to extort $1.5 million from him. In response, Lowe has also accused them of wild behaviour, namely sex and drugs, in his California and London houses.
All […]

This last week has seen a sorry-looking bunch of people in bars around our block. Many are Bear Stearns employees, whose life-savings just tanked. These (mostly) men are livid - mainly at 74-year-old chairman Jimmy Cayne, who could have sold the business a year ago at $200 a share instead of the measly $10 they […]

I do not believe in Facebook. I know this sounds heretical, especially since I am a journalist and I live in America, pioneer of gizmos and wireless communications, but I can’t stand the thing.
My husband, who is a tech-fiend, put me on it - and so, to all those people who have emailed me wanting […]

This year we ended up cancelling our Easter vacation, because I’d been away, filming in Los Angeles, and the husband had been to Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, Munich and London in the space of 14 days. He felt like he’d travelled enough. And anyway, he told me, he doesn’t have time for vacations in these […]

Settling down didn’t come naturally to Simon Sebag Montefiore, the English banking scion with a playboy reputation who gave up finance for war reporting. Then he met the woman he knew he couldn’t let slip away, and started producing a series of acclaimed histories. Our correspondent drops in on the toast of London as he […]

This month’s American Vogue begins with a letter by the editor, Anna Wintour, about Hillary Clinton dropping out of a cover photoshoot.
Wintour writes that she found it “amazing” that “our only female presidential hopeful had decided to steer clear of our pages - for fear of looking too feminine. The notion that a contemporary woman […]

With a triumphant second exhibition at his Venice Museum, Francois Pinault, the self-made french tycoon whose holdings include Gucci, Christie’s, and the Chateau Latour Vineyard, has found a new role: Champion of Contemporary Art.
On Friday, June 8, 2007, the thousands of art aficionados who had made the pilgrimage to the 52nd Venice Biennale experienced […]

This year marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Frances Elizabeth Kent, more widely known as Sister Corita, the Andy Warhol of Hollywood. Sister Corita was a nun, a member of the West Coast’s Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, under whose progressive roof Corita developed and taught her art, a cutting-edge populist […]

Since Brooke Astor’s grandson, her powerful friends, and her longtime staff alleged that the 104-year-old philanthropist’s son, Anthony Marshall, and his wife, Charlene, were taking advantage of her failing health, a New York court has removed her from the Marshalls’ care. The Embattled couple tell their side of the scandal.
On Friday, September 29, early on […]

It was a blisteringly hot afternoon in September. A friend in her 30s had hauled herself out of bed after suffering from a painful inner-ear problem to go to her husband’s annual office barbecue.
This takes place at his chief executive’s stunning house on the beach in the Hamptons, America’s summer playground for the wealthy on […]

At 81, Leila Hadley Luce, widow of TIME Inc. heir Henry Luce III, is being sued for sexual abuse. In exclusive interviews, Luce, her daughters, and her granddaughter chart the disintergration of a family, in which money, madness, and drugs led to charges of attempted rape, incest, and betrayal.
Leila Hadley Luce enters, leaning on a […]

The president of the world’s richest art institution, the $9 billion J. Paul Getty Trust, Barry Munitz is on the ropes, with the press lambasting his tenure, California’s attorney general investigating, and former Getty antiquities curator Marion True on trial. In a tearful interview, Munitz tries to set the record straight
On an unusually hot day […]

To some very wealthy architecture-lovers, including Calvin Klein, Nicole Kidman, and Martha Stewart, the idea was a dream come true-a customized apartment in one of two glass towers designed by the renowned Richard Meier. Four years later, the buildings have generated more nightmares than far less glamorous New York addresses: leaks, heating problems, security lapses, […]

Richard Clarke’s apology to America for 9/11, and his best-selling book, Against All Enemies, which criticizes the White House’s obsession with invading Iraq, have made him famous, wealthy, and a hero to many. But the former “counterterrorism czar,” who went into government three decades ago to help prevent another Vietnam, is still grappling with a […]

When Sita White, 43-year-old daughter of the late British industrialist Lord Gordon White, dropped dead in her Santa Monica yoga class last May, her life was in complete disarray. There were the drugs she used and her questionable “nancial advisers.” There was her child with Pakistani politician Imran Khan (now divorced from heiress Jemima Goldsmith). […]

After London’s Daily Mirror ran front-page photos of Uber-model Kate Moss doing cocaine, the 31-year-old style icon lost contracts with Burberry, Chanel, and H&M reportedly totaling close to $4 million. But while the tabloids screeched about her decadent image and damaged career, the fashion elite rallied to her defense. Was she the victim of overzealous […]

London society is up in arms over a threat to civilization as they know it: the civilization embodied in Mark Birley’s exclusive clubs-Annabel’s, Harry’s Bar, Mark’s Club, George, and the Bath & Racquets-which the ailing 75-year-old perfectionist wants to hand over to his son Robin and daughter, India Jane. The menace: American shipping-and-luxury-hotel tycoon James […]

No one denies that Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim’s controversial director, has put the museum on the map-literally, guratively, and, some say, dangerously. His global expansion began in Bilbao, included branches in Berlin, Lower Manhattan, and Las Vegas, and continues with talk of a mammoth building in Singapore. But he’s clashed with two powerful donors, Ronald […]

Eager to seal their $10 billion merger, Morgan Stanley C.E.O. John Mack handed Dean Witter’s Philip Purcell the reins of the combined nancial behemoth in 1997. A few years later, or so the plan went, Purcell would hand them back. Instead, he tightened his grip, while the company hemorrhaged top talent, saw its stock plummet, […]

One of the world’s oldest and most prestigious private investment banks, Lazard Freres has been gripped by a clash of civilizations. In one corner is the aristocratic chairman, Michel David-Weill, who regards Lazard as his patrimony; in the other is the brashly brilliant American C.E.O., Bruce Wasserstein, who wants to take the bank public. Probing […]

Lately, Jeffrey Epstein’s high-flying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor financier lives in New York’s largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and flies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. VICKY WARD explores Epstein’s […]

A botched coup by mercenaries last year against the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea ensnared Sir Mark Thatcher, son of Britain’s former prime minister, whose business dealings have made him controversial before. Though he denies involvement, he was arrested by the South African government, and faces charges of having helped finance the plot. Reporting from […]

As Neil Bush went from one venture to another, tarnished by his role in the 1990 Silverado S&L scandal, his wife, Sharon, couldn’t understand why she had to worry about the grocery bills. Wasn’t he the son of America’s 41st president and brother of two governors? Then Neil divorced her last April to marry Maria […]

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, are at the center of controversy over President Bush’s bogus claim, in last year’s State of the Union address, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. The Justice Department is investigating who leaked Plame’s covert status—a federal crime—to columnist Robert Novak, […]

When Simon de Pury needed a C.E.O. for his struggling Phillips auction house, he hired his millionaire girlfriend, Louise MacBain. Ten months later, after she warred with his partner, she had to leave. But MacBain, now owner of Art & Auction magazine, hasn’t gone quietly.
There were those who pronounced the first weekend of August 2003 […]