Carly Simon Remembers Mom In Next Month’s Vanity Fair

Want a graphic snapshot of the music and movie businesses at mid-summer? Invest $3 in next month’s Vanity Fair, the one with Keanu Reeves on the cover.

Skip that and go directly to either of two pieces. One is Marie Brenner’s long, labyrinthine, but compelling and unsparing depiction of singer Carly Simon’s emotional payback to her late mother, Andrea. The other is Charles Fleming’s entertaining tsunami warning about “Waterworld,” at $200 million the most expensive movie ever made.

Brenner’s piece reads at times as what “Little Women” would look like if Tennessee Williams had written it. You wade through what at times resembles the transcript of a deep therapy session. A key line is “My mother, my mother, alas, I haven’t another,” attributed to poet Sylvia Plath by Simon’s older sister Joanna, an opera singer with whom Carly argued three days after their mother’s death. The argument was about who would get Andrea’s double strand of Tiffany pearls.

“Hollywood people live large,”

notes Charles Fleming in his “Waterworld” expose in the same issue. “By normal human standards, they live huge.”

The rest of the piece illustrates his thesis. An enduring image here is the tsunami warnings dotting the landscape on the big island of Hawaii where the movie’s being shot.

Tsunami warnings are everywhere but you look through them, sort of the way “Waterworld’s” executives look through the warning signs as the movie’s budget soars into the stratosphere. It’s as the late U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen said of government budgets, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

The news here is “Waterworld’s” origins. The $200 million Kevin Costner vehicle, now derided in Hollywood as “Kevin’s Gate,” “Fishtar,” and, since Seagram took over the studio, “On the Rocks,” began as the script of a low-budget rip-off of “Mad Max” that was rejected by cheap B-movie king Roger Corman because it would cost too much - $5 million.

To the average couch potato, the periodical Running Times may sound about as appetizing as Kielbasa Quarterly to a vegetarian. But it holds surprising pleasures for non-targeted readers.

In the July/August issue, the magazine examines the issue of encouraging children and teenagers to run.

The cover story on 16-year-old Julia Stamps, the winner of last year’s Foot Locker High School Cross Country Championships, goes beyond mere boostering of the speedy Santa Rosa, Calif., girl to examining the unusually sensitive support of her parents, Dan and Valerie. They’re glad she has friends from other school activities: “She has enough people talking to her about running,” says her mom.

Editor Scott Douglas continues, “Too many of these talkers, Dan and Valerie agree, speak in the thinner-is-better voice that propels so many female runners into endlessly obsessing about their body images - usually with devastating results.”

He then relates an incident at the ‘93 world cross-country meet, where someone removed a pancake from Julia’s plate because he thought she shouldn’t eat so much.