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No. And yes. It depends on how you do it. Some people do it horrendously wrong. Let’s take a look. Curiosity-Click Traffic is Crap If one of your primary traffic strategies is to leave fast comments on the posts of larger blogs in your niche just to get a few clicks from the passing traffic, stop. You could get more traffic [...]

The Paper Chase

Over the years, Hollywood shape-shifter Johnny Depp has excelled in “difficult” films (Edward Scissorhands, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), romances (Chocolat, Finding Neverland), and blockbuster comedies (the Pirates of the Caribbean films). Vanity Fair’s pages chart the journey, from unknown actor to private-island king.

From the “social strategy” by which Nancy Reagan conquered the Georgetown elite to her role in Ronald Reagan’s daring “fireside chat” with Mikhail Gorbachev, part two of this intimate chronicle of the Reagans reveals her as perhaps the most influential First Lady in recent history. Margaret Thatcher, Michael Deaver, Richard Helms, and Nancy herself, among others, share memories of the secret lunches with Katharine Graham, the power struggle between Reagan’s California “Kitchen Cabinet” and the Washington establishment, and the trauma of the assassination attempt, for a portrait of the marriage that shaped a presidency—and an era.

The famous love story had a rocky start. Ronald Reagan was still pining for his ex-wife, Jane Wyman, in 1949, running up $750-a-month nightclub bills and throwing himself into his job as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Nancy Davis, proper Chicago debutante, was struggling to launch her own movie career while tongues wagged about her friendship with an MGM executive. In an excerpt from his new book, Bob Colacello lifts the veil on a courtship that was sparked by Hollywood’s anti-Communist frenzy and would change the political map forever.

Photographer Howard Schatz had an idea: place actors in a series of roles and dramatic situations to reveal the essence of their characters. Such was the premise behind his book, In Character: Actors Acting, which captures some of Hollywood’s most emotive stars in the act of, well, making faces. Luckily for us, he continued the tradition for the pages of Vanity Fair. Here are some of the best.

As Ronald and Nancy Reagan struggle with his Alzheimer’s disease, surviving members of the powerful, wealthy inner circle that propelled them to the White House—which included Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, Earle and Marion Jorgensen, William and Betty Wilson, Walter and Lee Annenberg, Holmes Tuttle, and Justin Dart—open diaries and memories for the author. Part one of this two-part intimate history takes the Reagans from a 50s world of ranch outings and potluck picnics to the triumphal $16 million inauguration of 1981.

A Hollywood golden boy after his Oscar nomination for Pirates of the Caribbean, Johnny Depp is still keeping critics and fans guessing. Coming up: two kid-magnet movies (Tim Burton’s new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a planned Pirates sequel), a Victorian drama (Finding Neverland, about the writer of Peter Pan), and the very adult The Libertine. In London, Depp talks about falling for French pop star Vanessa Paradis (mother of their two children), being attacked by Fox News, and the philosophy behind his unconventional career.

Renowned restaurateur Elaine Kaufman holds court at Le Cirque and explains why she hasn’t slugged any of her patrons lately.

For more than two decades, Bernard Madoff’s secretary sat just outside his office. She knew his clients and his feeders, his moods, habits, and indiscretions. She saw both sides of his wife, Ruth. Until December 11, 2008, she trusted him as a generous, caring boss. Now, in an exclusive collaboration with Mark Seal, Eleanor Squillari describes the madness surrounding Madoff’s arrest—meticulously planned, she believes, by him—her role in helping the feds, and the mysteries of the 17th floor, two levels down, where his massive Ponzi scheme was perpetrated.

dek no codeIf former studio chief Jon Peters’s book proposal were a movie, it would get an “R” rating for graphic depictions of sex, violence, and brute narcissism. No wonder Hollywood’s elite is obsessed with it. But are these outlandish, self-serving anecdotes about Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Sumner Redstone, and other aging A-listers true? Our correspondent tests the most outrageous claims.

The former Studio 54 waiter and leading light of the Baldwin clan has transformed himself into one of the finest character actors of his generation. The star of 30 Rock and this month’s My Sister’s Keeper muses on his hometown, his daughter, and a particular leaked audiotape.

Comparisons are inevitable: two elegant women, catapulted into the national spotlight by their charismatic, ambitious husbands. The upbringings of Jacqueline Kennedy and Michelle Obama hold no resemblance, but their roles as standard-bearers for a renewed American hope certainly do. A pictorial of fashion’s favorite First Ladies, then and now.

Mark Seliger spotlights the young cast of Fame, who will be telling the world to “remember my name” in the upcoming remake of the hit 1980 movie.

As the Metropolitan Museum of Art puts on a Francis Bacon retrospective, John Richardson spotlights the cruel genius of the late British artist’s work, recalling the dark comedy of Bacon’s 1968 trip to New York.

Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were already at loggerheads when Gertrude Stein introduced them in 1906, and their challenge of opposites—played out at Stein’s combustible soirées, in studio visits, and through an intriguing exchange of paintings—would continue even beyond Matisse’s death. With a blockbuster show about the Matisse-Picasso relationship opening at New York’s MOMA, the author explores how each man’s genius lit the other’s work, in a rivalry that was also a secret partnership.

Obsessed by the ballet, Edgar Degas created hundreds of paintings and sculptures which captured the harsh realities of 19th-century dancers’ lives and hinged on his voyeuristic fascination with the pain ballet inflicted on female bodies. The author explores the sexual undercurrents that drew this conservative, lifelong bachelor to his greatest subject, the creeping blindness that led to his famous wax model of 14-year-old Marie van Goethem, and the revolutionary mix of beauty and brutality that gave such power to his vision.

The Aussie soap star heads for the big screen.

The author analyzes Paul Gauguin’s breakthrough masterpiece, the heart of a “Gauguin Tahiti” show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Think things are grim for Wall Streeters in the here and now? Envision the scene in hell, where the Devil is talking bonus cuts, the Pit of Remorse is packed with frustrated financiers, and trophy wives are weeping over the eternal torment of their broke husbands’ company.

No one is safe under the brush of Vanity Fair contributing artist Edward Sorel, whose watercolors expose the pathology of power and the fatuousness of fame. VF.com presents a gallery of Sorel’s rogues.

What’s it like being young and beautiful, with a 24-karat pedigree and inherited wealth, in populist, economically perilous 2009? The 38 heirs and heiresses who posed for Bruce Weber are making privilege count—many, like Ivanka Trump and Antoine Arnault, in the family business; some, like Mercedes-Benz scion Alex Flick, in areas of their own choosing.

Having served as a platoon leader in the Afghanistan war, Craig M. Mullaney—an Obama-administration adviser and author of the new best-seller The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education—understood full well the dangers that his younger brother, Gary, would face when he deployed to Baghdad. Watching from the audience at Gary’s Ranger School graduation, Mullaney reflected on his own experiences, and lessons learned, during three rigorous months of training.

In his new memoir, My Remarkable Journey, the talk legend recalls how a favor from Jackie Gleason led to an unforgettable pair of nights with Frank Sinatra.

The so-called Sunni Awakening, in which American forces formed tactical alliances with local sheikhs, has been credited with dampening the insurgency in much of Iraq. But new evidence suggests that the Sunnis were offering the same deal as early as 2004—one that was eagerly embraced by commanders on the ground, but rejected out of hand at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

If New York City were to slide back into the crumbling anarchy of the 1970s, as some fear, would that be so bad? The author recalls a time when artists’ lofts were inhabited by actual artists, every subway car held potential drama, and legends–Lennon, Warhol, Garbo–walked the streets.

Washington has dismissed the Iraqi resistance as extremists, Saddam loyalists, foreigners, and criminals. But Baghdad is full of ordinary men and women—teachers, shopkeepers, mothers—who are learning a clandestine new trade: armed insurgency. Getting to know a number of fighters, and discovering how organized they have become, the author finds this disparate army shares one belief: that expelling the U.S. is a battle they cannot refuse, or lose.