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Hollywood is no place for older women—or is it? In the cover profile of Vanity Fair’s upcoming January 2010 issue, Leslie Bennetts investigates the mystery of how, at age 60, Meryl Streep has become the industry’s “new box-office queen.”
The evidence is indisputable:
• Her 2008 screen musical Mamma Mia!, Bennetts writes,“has grossed $601 million worldwide, despite some cringe-worthy reviews (for the movie, not its much-lauded heroine).”
• The Devil Wears Prada, also from 2008, in which Streep played a demanding fashion-magazine editrix, has raked in $324 million around the world.
• And Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, released earlier this year, has earned $121 million and counting.
Producers hope for comparable results from It’s Complicated, a Christmas release featuring a love triangle between Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin. All this unexpected success has had the effect of exploding several long-standing myths:

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This post was written on November 26, 2009.

I am in New Delhi, India at the moment. As I am sure you are aware, 11-26-09 marks one year since the Mumbai Terror Attacks, a series of bombings and shootings that left well over 150 people dead and hundreds more wounded. The attacks have been linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan based extremist group. Of the ten men involved in the attacks, only one, Ajmal Qasab, survived. He is currently on trial.

For India, this is their “9-11,” as all you see on television here at the moment is “26-11.” News carriers are showing footage from the event, interviewing survivors and relatives of those who were not so lucky. It’s all very familiar.

Being an American, I remember 9-11-01, very well, where I was and the almost overwhelming feeling of emptiness, knowing that nothing in my country would ever be the same again. It’s not the kind of change you vote for, just the kind you somehow deal with. I also remember how 9-11-02 was almost as devastating, having had an entire year to dwell on the awfulness of it. And with all due respect hopefully paid, I would like to move on.

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Illustration by Ross MacDonald.

Reflecting on Norman Rockwell’s famous Thanksgiving painting, Freedom from Want, a thoughtful essayist recently wrote: “Freedom from Want… is especially telling, for the scene it depicts is joyous but defiantly unostentatious. There is a happily gathered family, there are plain white curtains, there is a large turkey, there are some celery stalks in a dish, and there is a bowl of fruit, but there is not a hint of overabundance, overindulgence, elaborate table settings, ambitious seasonal centerpieces, or any other conventions of modern-day shelter-mag porn. It was freedom from want, not freedom to want—a world away from the idea that the patriotic thing to do in tough times is go shopping.”

O.K., self-aggrandizement alert: that essayist was me, and the piece was “Rethinking the American Dream,” from the April 2009 issue of V.F. And that article paved the way for a sequel of sorts, “Norman Rockwell’s American Dream,” that ran in the November 2009 issue. In pondering Rockwell’s painting in the context of recent times, illustrator Ross MacDonald and I considered what an inversion of Freedom from Want would look like. We decided that its star would be inmate number 61727-054, Bernie Madoff, who would step into the Grandma role. And we thought that this new tableau, depicting the notoriously incarcerated and soon-to-be-incarcerated, should be called Wanting for Freedom.

After the jump, a guide to who’s who in MacDonald’s drawing.

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