Joan Juliet Buck

Joan Juliet Buck
Study for a portrait of Buck by Reginald Gray, Paris 1980s (graphite on canvas)
Born	Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Writer, editor, actor

Joan Juliet Buck is an American writer and actress. She was the editor-in-chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001, the only American ever to have edited a French magazine.^[1] Buck was contributing editor to Vogue and Vanity Fair for many years and currently writes for T, New York Times's fashion magazine, W magazine, Newsweek/Daily Beast, among others. She is known for her controversial article in Vogue on Asma al-Assad

Early life and family

She is the only child of Jules Buck (1917–2001), an American film producer, who moved his family to Europe in 1952 in reaction to the political repression in the United States at the time.^[2][3] Her mother was Joyce Ruth Getz (aka Joyce Gates, died 1996), a model, actress, and interior designer.^[2][4] John Huston, for whom her father worked as a cameraman,^[3] was the best man at her parents' 1945 wedding. Her first language is French.^[5]

Career

Journalism

Dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College to work at Glamour magazine^[6] as a book reviewer in 1968, Buck became the features editor of British Vogue at the age of 23, then a correspondent for Women's Wear Daily in London and Rome.^[7][8] Buck was an associate editor of the London Observer. A contributing editor to American Vogue from 1980 and also Vanity Fair,^[6] her profiles and essays appeared in The New Yorker,^[9] Condé Nast Traveler,^[10] Travel + Leisure,^[11] and The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

As movie critic for American Vogue from 1990 to 1994, she served on the New York Film Festival selection committee the year its program included Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine, Jane Campion's The Piano, and Robert Altman's Short Cuts.^[12] From 1994 to 2001 she was editor-in-chief of French Vogue,^[6] where she doubled the magazine's circulation and produced thematic year-end issues on cinema, art, music, sex, theater, and quantum physics.^[13]

For US Vogue, she profiled such cover subjects as Marion Cotillard,^[14] Gisele Bündchen,^[15] Carey Mulligan,^[16] and Natalie Portman, writing also about the playwright Tom Stoppard^[17][18] and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy for the magazine.^[19] For Vanity Fair, she profiled people like Bernard-Henri Lévy^[20] and Mike Nichols.^[21] For the New Yorker her subjects included the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, chronicler of Russian émigrés in Paris Nina Berberova, ans Princess Diana's relics post-death.^[22][23][24]

She has appeared in numerous documentaries, among them James Kent's Fashion Victim, the Killing of Gianni Versace, Mark Kidel's Paris Whorehouse and Architecture of the Imagination. Buck narrated James Crump's 2007 documentary Black, White, and Gray, about art collector Sam Wagstaff and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

She currently writes for T magazine, New York Times's fashion magazine and W,^[6][25][26] among others.^[27][28][29] Her humorous cultural pieces for T have included such subjects as Willem Dafoe, the evolving culture of high-end bedding, and the cross-country tour of The Moth storytelling series (in which she participated in 2009 and 2011).^[30][31][32] Since 2011, Buck has also been the consulting editor to Dasha Zhukova on her Garage magazine which the New York Times called "one of the most intriguing magazines to come along in years."^[30][33][34]

Performance

She began studying acting in 2002, and appears in a supporting role in Nora Ephron's 2009 movie Julie and Julia as Madame Elisabeth Brassart, head of the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.^{[13][35][36][37]} She wrote about the experience of auditioning for Ephron after she passed away in June 2012.^[5]

In November 2009, she appeared in an action theater piece with other actors for Performa09 at the White Slab Palace in New York City.^[38] Curated by Michael Portnoy and Sarina Basta, it was part of a week of Weimar cabaret,^[39] and in it, Buck and another actor held a conversation guided by the third actor's random flashing of prompt cards.

In 2010, Buck played Mrs. Prest in an adaptation of The Aspern Papers, a Henry James novella, directed by first-time filmmaker Mariana Hellmund.^[40][41] She played Marguerite Duras in Irina Brook's La Vie Materielle that spring and again in 2013 at La MaMa E.T.C. theater in New York City alongside Nicole Ansari from Deadwood.^[42][43]

In May 2012, she appeared with comedian Eugene Mirman, performers Ira Glass, Lucy Wainwright Roche, and Amber Tamblyn in a night of interpretations of the Joan of Arc narrative at the Littlefield, a Brooklyn performance space.^[44]

As a child, Buck was cast as a Scots waif in the Walt Disney film Greyfriars Bobby.^[45]

Novels and adaptations

Buck's novels about multicultural expatriates are The Only Place To Be published by Random House in 1982 and Daughter Of The Swan published by Weidenfeld in 1987.^[46][47] She was one of a long line of writers commissioned to adapt D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel. Her version was singled out by Thomas as "faithful and intelligent" among versions that included ones by the writer himself and Dennis Potter but the film has never been made.^[48]

In 2009, the story "the Ghost Of The Rue Jacob"^[49] was a big hit at The Moth. In February 2012, Buck went on "The Unchained Tour" through Georgia with George Green, founder of The Moth.^[50][51]

Asma al-Assad article

In March 2011 Vogue published a profile that Buck wrote about Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, describing her as "glamorous, young and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies."^[52] The piece caused a furor within foreign policy circles^[52] and media websites, including The Atlantic, which attacked it as an ill-timed "puff piece" that ignored human rights abuses under Syria's Ba'athist regime.^[53] Because the appearance of the profile coincided with the Arab Spring uprising, The Washington Post wrote, "It may have been the worst-timed, and most tin-eared, magazine article in decades."^[54] In May 2011 the article was removed from Vogue's website,^[52] even though the magazine had previously said it had taken "more than a year" to cultivate.^[53] It was also satirized in The Philadelphia Inquirer.^[55] Buck's contract was not renewed.^[1]

Buck subsequently wrote an article about the assignment in Newsweek in which she described the encounter with the Assads in fuller scope, claiming that she had not wanted to write the story.^[56] Like the original piece, Buck's follow-up generated controversy and was derided on blogs and social media;^[57] in Maclean's, Barbara Amiel pointed out that at the time Buck wrote her original article, Syria was already on the U.S. State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism.^[58] Gawker.com restored Buck's article to the web in early September 2013.^[59]

Personal life

In 1977 Buck married John Heilpern, a journalist and writer; they divorced in the 1980s.^[13][60]

References

External links

• The Media Business; French Vogue names editor. The New York Times. April 11, 1994
• Fashion Week - Joan Juliet Buck
• Joan Juliet Buck at wowOwow
• Joan Juliet Buck's Twitter account
• Quoted in Syrian activist web-movie, by Syrian March
• Joan Juliet Buck's essay about being in Venice with her family in 1970 for T. November 30, 2011
• The Only Place To Be, Buck's 1982 novel
• Buck's humorous piece on the latest in bedding, T. October 10, 2012
• Richard Cohen, "Bloom is finally off the Rose in the Desert", Washington Post. June 11, 2012