What's Going On With This Insane Dr. Brandt Profile?
LatestVanity Fair readers have come to expect a certain bourgeois haughtiness in its prose, or at least a very proper, often snooty, and distant tone that capitalizes on the fantasies it sells its ideal well-heeled readership and the masses they intrigue. It wouldn’t really work to read about the lost diaries of Marilyn, or Jackie Onassis’s personal photographer, or gritty reportage of murderous Russian billionaires, or the mythical wasteland of Wall Street Tinder fuckers, in a conversational tone. As with Vanity Fair’s sister publication, Vogue, they are in the business of explicating the unattainable with the illusion of an insider’s perspective. Often, they report on tiers of society that many of us would not deign to be a part of even if we could, but relish reading about, as juicy as any gossip blog, but with a much heftier price tag.
There’s a confounding, off-putting quality, though, to their latest paean to Dr. Fredric Brandt, the infamous cosmetic dermatologist who, in April, committed suicide by hanging at home in Miami. Written by Lili Anolik, who most recently composed an equally off-putting profile of Sofia Vergara, we learn that Dr. Brandt was a personal friend of Anolik because, as she puts it, “I’m married to a doctor, Robert Anolik—Rob—and Fred was Rob’s boss.”
This is the kind of insight Vanity Fair offers at its best, its contributors often based on some unknowable formula of writerly merit and elbows rubbed—and quite often, the mix is intriguing and very rarely replicable. But again, even with insight, the author having been socially friendly with Dr. Brandt and possessing some insight into his otherworldly universe, there’s a strange flippancy to the piece that goes beyond provincial clichés like “Glitz galore,” and shit like “Formidable. The Real Deal.” It’s a gas!