We’ve had a bit of a crisis,” Hughes de Courson told me on a raw Parisian morning last February. I’d found him slumped at a table overlooking the cobblestones of the Place Émile-Goudeau, trying to mollify his much younger girlfriend, Naomie Assana. Courson explained that they had spent the previous night drinking a fair amount of wine in Versailles, and this morning their hostess had asked them to leave, claiming they’d kept her up all night. Exhausted, they had returned to the city and checked into this modest hotel in Montmartre.
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One rich, one not — and among the sport’s most promising American prospects. The making of talent, in two different laboratories.
Read MoreOn a Monday in mid-August, 47-year-old Boris Becker is hobbling across the lobby of the Marriott in Mason, Ohio, where the pro-tennis caravan has pitched its tent for the last hard-court tune-up before the U.S. Open. If his shockingly reduced gait (owing to two hip replacements and a steel plate in his right ankle) is the cost of hurling his 215 pounds at passing shots like a goaltender, then it seems too high. But how do you set a fair price on seizing tennis immortality by winning Wimbledon at 17?
Read MoreThe Maidstone Club in East Hampton may be snooty, but it also has quite a lovely golf course. Which one nonmember decided he just had to play.
Read MoreMidway through the second quarter of an early-season game against the Memphis Grizzlies, the rookie power forward for the Phoenix Suns, Amare Stoudemire, flying diagonally across the paint, made an unlikely but life-affirming attempt to convert a low-altitude rebound into a reverse put-back dunk. Only that he's 20 and what the N.B.A. auditors of flesh and bone call ''a freak'' enabled him to even imagine that he could make this play.
Read MoreOn a perfect Sunday afternoon in Steelville, Missouri, a hundred of its more prominent residents are holed up in the long corrugated metal warehouse of the private country club on Highway 8. A couple are at the bar. The rest crowd tables in the dim cavernous room beyond it, their cans of Stag within easy reach.
Read MoreExactly two weeks after terrorists ambushed New York and Washington, killed more than 5,000 of us and changed everything, and nothing, Aaron Sorkin, creator of ''The West Wing,'' leans anxiously against a long table filled with actors and production assistants. This is the high-tech briefing area where the show's main character, President Josiah Bartlet, huddles with the military brass when make-believe blips on the radar grow alarming.
Read MoreOverlooking Thimphu, Bhutan's capital and the closest thing it has to a city, is a 9,000-foot hill called Sangyegang. At the top of it, where the long, thin, spear-tipped prayer flags never stop rippling -- and you can serenely take in the full valley, if not the whole epic impermanent cosmicness of it all -- a red carpet adorned with loose elaborate patterns of dyed rice has been rolled to the door of a modest one-story structure.
Read MoreYou think it's easy navigating a $20 billion company that has never made a dime?
Read MoreWhen New York scenemaker and hotelier Steve Rubell left his fortune to his brotherʼs family, what did they do with it? They steeped up their art collection and developed some hotels of their own.
Read MoreHal Hartley’s films, miniature landscapes of tainted love, revel in their depression. Just like their creator.
Read MoreAlthough the women on these pages are undeniably beautiful, they have never asked the world to think of them that way. Standing in front of a sweeping gray canvas, they occupy their bodies with an ease and intimacy seen only in people who spend a great deal of their time going flat-out.
Read MoreThey are the beauty world’s hired guns, the genetic-Lotto winners who stare at us with such vacant intensity every time we turn a corner or flip a page. For exclusive access to their lips and cheeks and eyes and hair, a make of lipstick, mascara, and haircolor will gratefully pay more than a million dollars a year.
Read MoreEarly on the morning of March 27, Pete Sampras, then the no. 1 ranked tennis player in the world, and Andre Agassi, No. 2 with a bullet, boarded a Concorde jet in New York City to fly to London and then on to Sicily to represent the United States in a Davis Cup match against Italy.
Read MoreOn a mild morning in late fall, Tiger Woods, a tall, thin, impossibly elegant Stanford freshman, is standing at the edge of the seventeenth green of the notorious Shoal Creek golf club near Birmingham, Alabama, awaiting his turn to putt. For Woods, who is almost invariably the longest off the tee, and very often the closest to the flag
Read MoreA woman I’d never spoken to before invited me to smell the Champagne on her slip. Another offered the Cristalle on her neck, while confiding that she’s also been known to anoint the back of her knees.
Read MoreLike Iman in Somalia and Bianca in Bosnia, Cher has just touched down for a whirlwind misery tour in one of the more hard-pressed pockets of the world, believing that the six pages in People and the 11 minutes on 20/20 it will yield somehow represent a significant contribution toward revealing the hardship.
Read MoreAs the third game in the first round of the Eastern Division playoffs wore on, Starks's teammate on the New York Knicks, Charles Oakley, began referring to Miller as "Cheryl," the name of his older and, until recently, more celebrated Olympic-basketball-playing sister. For his part, Miller, a guard with the Indiana Pacers, was punctuating his long-range jumpers with obscene references to a report that the Knicks, confident of ending the series that night, had checked out of their hotel before the game.
Read MoreCecil Fielder leans over his kitchen sink and squirts out a light brown sluice of saliva and tobacco juice, then washes it down the drain with a pull on a thin white tap. It's about 8 in the evening, but the darkness inside his huge new home, in an enclave of huge new homes just outside Dallas, feels more like 3 in the morning.
Read MoreThe characters Nick Nolte plays are bewilderingly screwed up. Where do you think it comes from?
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