BEYOND THE BLUE DRESS

The power of Monica's pen; flying with J.F.K. Jr.; reviewing The Goldfinch; a grandson has doubts; and more

I applaud Monica Lewinsky's candor, intelligence, and chutzpah ["Shame and Survival," June], As a fellow victim of public humiliation—I became a lawyer after many years in the justice system as an offender; the press decided that the front-page story about me that was most relevant was my stint as a call girl, something I did to support my child and myself—I, too, am concerned with the skewed priorities of the press and society and the liberties they in general take with subjects' privacy

The fact that women appear to be the most critical of one another is the ultimate humiliation and degradation. We need to spend more time standing up for one another and less time judging.

KATHRYN L. SMITHENToronto, Ontario

I read with compassion Monica Lewinsky's article about the humiliation she has suffered. What doesn't make sense to me is how she characterizes her relationship with President Clinton as simply one of mutual consent, unrelated to power. She was a 22-year-old; Clinton was twice her age and the most powerful man in the world. He may not have physically forced her to have sex, but I cannot believe that his position did not influence the nature of the relationship. No matter what Lewinsky did to encourage the relationship, Clinton took advantage of his powerful position. The victim should not be blamed. The impeachment proceedings were ridiculous, but Clinton demeaned our country with his wordsmithing and lying. And as for Hillary, it's completely irrelevant to her candidacy. We should all move on.

JOAN TEMKO AN YONSan Francisco, California

THE PILOT PRINCE

Matt Berman's story ["The Prince and I," June] on J.F.K. Jr. and life at George magazine correctly portrayed the key role Hachette editorial director Jean-Louis Ginibre played. I was editor in chief of Flying magazine at the time, another Hachette title and the largest-circulation aviation magazine aimed at pilots who flew their own airplanes.

One day Jean-Louis called me to his office to meet someone "who is very important." It turned out to be John Kennedy Jr. The negotiations to create what would become George magazine were just beginning. John told me of his lifelong interest in flying, of his early flying lessons, and said that the only two magazines he read regularly were Flying and Aviation Week.

Needless to say, we hit it off immediately.

Jean-Louis organized many lunches for Hachette editors, including John. He and I flew together several times, and always the talk was of airplanes and flying. John had taken a few flying lessons years before, but he resumed the lessons while editing George and earned his pilot's license.

Contrary to what was implied in the media coverage following John's tragic airplane crash, he was not a daredevil, was conscientious in his aviation studies, attended one of the leading aviation academies in the country, and was fully qualified to make the flight that ended his life. We can never know for sure exactly why he lost control of his Piper, but similar accidents happen many times each year in light airplanes.

My favorite John-junior story happened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. John had joined me there for the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual fly-in, which attracts more than 500,000 people and an astonishing 10,000 airplanes for the week. John and I were checking out of the hotel when a young woman on the housekeeping staff rushed up holding a watch and asked John if he had left it in his room. It was a watch that his dad, the original J.F.K., had bequeathed to him. Would that watch have been returned in many cities other than Oshkosh? I don't think so.

J. MAC MCCLELLANGrand Haven, Michigan

CONFLICTING MEMORIES

Despite having been prompted by my essay in The Spectator (September 29, 2012) and interviewing me at some length, Paul Elie ["A Fundamental Fight," May] was apparently unable to absorb my description of how the protest reading of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses at the Columns in New York on February 22, 1989—came about. As I explained in the essay and on the phone, the staff at Harper's magazine felt a special responsibility toward Rushdie, since Harper's had published the only excerpt of the novel in English (ironically, in the same issue as we published a banned-in-the-U.K. memoir by former M.I.6 agent Anthony Cavendish). When Gerry Marzorati, who bought the excerpt, suggested to me that we hold some kind of public event in defense of Rushdie, I jumped on the idea, called the staff at PEN to enlist their support, and started recruiting writers to read from the work, beginning with Norman Mailer, who was initially reluctant, and Robert Stone, who never wavered.

For his Vanity Fair piece, Elie depends almost entirely on Rushdie's account, taken from his memoir, Joseph Anton. According to Elie's reading of Rushdie, "the [Columns] reading came about after Susan Sontag [the president of PEN] 'whipped' her fellow writers into line," thus stemming the panic in Manhattan that had led to bookstore chains' pulling the novel from their shelves. This is fanciful, not to mention dubious journalism, since Rushdie was in hiding in England when all of this transpired. In fact, Harper's initiated the reading with no encouragement from Viking Penguin, Rushdie's publisher. In fact, Karen Kennerly and Gara LaMarche, of PEN, along with Helen Stephenson, of the Authors Guild, did most of the work, not Susan Sontag, who certainly helped coordinate. However, on the day of the event, with protesters chanting anti-Rushdie slogans on Broadway, Sontag seemed to lose her nerve. She approached me with the strange and foolish proposal that the authors just make statements, or perhaps read from Rushdie's other books, so as not to inflame the passions of the mullahs in Iran and their supporters. I said that would defeat the whole purpose of the reading and urged Stone to ignore Sontag's last-minute attempt at appeasement. Fortunately, Stone agreed with me, and the reading went forward as planned.

In real life, under pressure, not everybody behaves the way novelists might like to imagine. Sontag came through in the end, as did a lot of other writers.

JOHN R. MACARTHURPresident and publisher Harper 's magazine

V.F. Creative-Development Editor DAVID FRIEND RESPONDS: Writer Paul Elie's account of the gathering was based on interviews with numerous participants, including John MacArthur, several members of PEN, and Gerald Marzorati, then of Harper's magazine, who is quoted at length. The article m en tions the roles of MacArth ur, Marzorati, and Harper's: "The idea for the gathering came from Gerald Marzorati, who had carved out an excerpt of the book that ran in the December Harper's Why not a public reading of Rushdie's novel, to be coordinated by PEN and Harper's publisher John Rick' MacArthur?" Susan Sontag, whose role in the gathering is also discussed in the article, died in 2004.

UNFORGETTABLE MRS. LUCE

I enjoyed your article about Clare Boothe Luce ["Clare, in Love and War," by Sylvia Jukes Morris, July], and I'd love to pass on a little reminiscence of my own.

Thirty veal's ago, near midnight, I found myself in front of the ladies'-room mirror at the Engineers Club, in Baltimore, home to a few of the Luce grandchildren. In walked Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, looking svelte and sharp despite the hour and her age. Two middle-aged women stood in the corner, chatting away. At the time, short skirts were just making a comeback, and one of the ladies was sporting a particularly daring hem. I heard the sound of Mrs. Luce's heels click up beside me. Then she pulled out her lipstick, dabbed on a swift coat, and with her eyes fixed straight ahead quietly muttered, "Well, she obviously borrowed her daughter's dress," and briskly waited out.

That acid tongue never lost its bite.

GAIL GARRUBBONorth Caldwell, New Jersey

I am the youngest nephew of Henry R. Luce. Because I grew up on a ranch in the Sacramento Valley, far from New York City, and because I was young, I was unaware of the details concerning the matrimonial discord between Uncle Harry and Clare as chronicled in Sylvia Jukes Morris's article. One wonders what the sources were of her quotations of such intimate, private conversations between these two giants of American history, none of which were likely witnessed by third persons or recorded by the protagonists. The authenticity of these alleged conversations is brought further into doubt by her description of Clare's meetings with J.F.K. and L.B.J.

Assuming Clare really did discuss the Cuban missile crisis with Kennedy, it is extremely unlikely that J.F.K. would have failed to mention to Clare that Khrushchev planted ICBMs in Cuba that threatened the U.S.A. in retaliation for Kennedy's planting ICBMs in Turkey aimed at Russia. Indeed, part of the then secret deal that ended the crisis was that Kennedy would remove the missiles in Turkey if Khrushchev removed those in Cuba.

The alleged conversation between Clare and L.B.J. is even less credible. It is unlikely that a political genius such as Johnson would have confided to someone like Clare his desire that Kennedy die in office. One wonders why, had he done so, Clare did not come forward and testify before the Warren Commission that Johnson had admitted that he had high hopes, perhaps even expectations, that Kennedy would die in office. On a minor note, it is also unlikely that Clare would ever have used the phrase "Come clean, Lyndon." This was not her style of repartee.

JAMES LUCEPeralada, Spain

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS REPLIES: If Mr. Luce consults the text of my book Price of Fame, from which the article in Vanity Fair was adapted, he will find that all the points he queries are fully documented in the endnotes. Acutely aware of her place in history, Clare Boothe Luce took pains to mite up encounters with important people, including her husband. She preserved copious, detailed accounts of her marital disputes, all of which I cite, and which can be read in the Clare Boothe Luce papers in the Library of Congress. She even asked Henry Luce to keep some of their more intimate letters in his vault, saying, "It is important that your biographers get an accurate picture of what your women think of you and themselves. Ell take my chances if you'll take yours. "

My quotations from the meeting with President Kennedy derive from C.B.L. 's own typed transcript, "Memorandum of Conversation, Sept. 26, 1962. " She quoted Lyndon Johnson's half-joking words to her about the number of presidents who had died in office in a tape-recorded interview with me on January 6, 1982. Mr. Luce may doubt that L.B.J. would have confided such a thing to her, but they were old friends from the early 1940s, as my book makes clear. As for the phrase "Come clean, Lyndon " not being her style of repartee, it certainly was. Elsewhere in Price of Fame I quote her response to Motley Safer's suggestion in a 60 Minutes interview that professional women were bitchier about one another than men. "Oh, come off it!" she said.

I might add that copies of all the documents substantiating the excerpted material were seen by Vanity Fair's meticulous fact checkers.

GONE WITH THE GOLDFINCH

In "It's Tartt—but Is It Art?" [July], Evgenia Peretz stated, "Margaret Mitchell's Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind, won the Pulitzer and inspired comparisons to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Now it's considered a schmaltzy relic read by teenage girls, if anyone."

I don't advocate any particular position on Gone with the Wind's literary greatness. That is a matter of personal taste. However, I have to disagree with Peretz's statement that the book is a relic. I wonder if she is aware of a recent Harris poll that listed Gone with the Wind as the second-favorite book in America this year. Also noteworthy, a quick glance at today's Amazon statistics indicates that the hardcover edition is ranked at 21,997, the trade paperback at 4,615, and the Kindle e-book at 3,687. Not bad for a book published more than 75 years ago.

ELLEN F. BROWNCo-author of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood Richmond, Virginia

This is utter nonsense. I couldn't put down The Goldfinch, I enjoyed every page, even though it got a little indulgent and cluttered at the end. I couldn't stop thinking about it, or the characters. Doesn't that count for anything? I read a recent story collection by an acclaimed writer and kept imagining different ways I could commit suicide while lying in bed, I was so bored. Why is a distinction between "literature" and "genre fiction" necessary? Is Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl not literature? It was brilliantly written and vastly entertaining. Life is short, and so much of it is wasted by false pretensions to art, where people are afraid to admit they're actually just bored, and their connection to a work of art thin, misguided, and meaningless.

DEREK MIT MANNew York, New York

Lorin Stein writes: "What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren't children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise ..."

This is a ridiculous comment when most people in this country are reading James Patterson and books such as Gone Girl. These critics are very out of touch with what people in this country are reading if they think Tartt's book is a step down.

COLLEEN CONOVERNew York, New York

THE SIMPSON SOAP OPERA

'It All Began with O.J.," by Lili Anolik [June], was a clever, insightful, and thought-provoking piece of journalism. Who could argue with its central thesis, that the spectacle of the O. J. Simpson trial set off the dismal and dreary succession of "reality"-TV damp squibs which have followed down the years?

The same article also revealed another equally sad but definitely indisputable reality, however.

For those of us who were lucky enough to have not only read but also met and spent time with the late, great Dominick Dunne, the absence of his mix of investigative work, gossip, and magic-dust-coated yarn spinning leaves a terrible hole in journalism.

I'll never forget his welcoming my wife and myself into his Hadlyme home. As we left he beckoned me to his workplace in a nearby converted barn, where I spotted those awful photos of the almost decapitated Nicole Simpson and her slain companion, Ron Goldman. They almost made me sick to my stomach, but I tried not to show it, because I was sure he'd steeled himself when viewing them throughout the case. I was expecting some comment from him, but instead there was total silence.

He will always be to me, and many others I am sure, a man who knew that losing someone beloved through an act of murderous violence scarred the soul forever and caused one to either stay down or rise larger in life to reclaim the inherent dignity others had dared to strip bare.

DR. EAMONN O'NEILLGlasgow, Scotland

My uncle was the executive producer of Days of Our Lives, and I remember that after the car chase he said, "This kind of spectacle will kill soap operas." And... scene.

KATIE ROSMANNew York, New York

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More from THE V.F. MAILBAG

From Toronto, a note from Kim Lockhart regarding "Her House of Cards," by Molly Bloom: "I too have my memories. It was shortly before noon when the door opened that day and the famous actor Barry walked into the washroom. He went straight to the middle urinal, took his stance for as long as he needed, and zipped up, then washed his hands briskly. Turning, he sent a brief nod my way as he stepped out of the room." Whereupon an intensely curious Mailbag did what any self-respecting Mailbag would do and went back to read the article. No Barry.

Several readers—O.K., several eastern-Wisconsin readers-were unhappy to see Willem Dafoe's comments about his hometown in the Proust Questionnaire. "It is truly unfortunate," writes Rob Maertz, from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, "that Mr. Dafoe decided to portray his life as escaping the 'favelas' of Appleton, Wisconsin. Appleton is a beautiful, low-crime, progressive Wisconsin city that is residence to many who are happy to call it home."

Does New York City's Pat Lipsky speak for many when she wonders, "Did we (your readers) really have to see Jeff Koons's behind inV.F.?" Since hers was the only letter on the subject, it's safe to say that for now, Lipsky only speaks for one.