brief leave of absence from Newsweek to be the assistant to director Lina Wertmuller, in Italy, during the filming of Seven Beauties. This film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. She later wrote about the experience in an article for the magazine. When news broke in August 1977 that Elvis Presley had died, Orth requested to be sent to Memphis, Tennessee to cover the story. She wrote the first news piece to suggest that Presley's official cause of death might not have been a heart attack. She was a contestant on The Gong Show and wrote about it for the magazine. Freelance work Between 1978 and 1980 Orth was a senior editor at New York, and New West Magazines. In 1981-1982 she was the principal correspondent of Newsweek Woman on Lifetime Television. From 1983 to 1984 she was a network correspondent for NBC News. Orth was a contributing editor at Vogue from 1984 to 1989, and a columnist for New York Woman from 1986 to 1990. She has also freelanced for the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Vanity Fair Orth has written for Vanity Fair since 1988 and has been a Special Correspondent for that magazine since 1993. Among the heads of state she has interviewed are Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Argentinian President Carlos Menem, and Irish President Mary Robinson. Orth secured the first interview with Thatcher just months after leaving office. Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Orth traveled to Central Asia to investigate the connection between drugs and terrorism for a piece titled "Afghanistan's Deadly Habit." Orth has investigated pedophile priest Paul Shanley and the Laci Peterson murder. Orth has also written articles on Tom Cruise and Scientology, Madonna, Tina Turner, Karl Lagerfeld and Conrad Black. She chronicled the Colombian hostage rescue of Ingrid Betancourt in a November 2008 piece titled "Inside Colombia's Hostage War" and wrote about Elda Neyis, aka Karina, Colombia's most notorious FARC female revolutionary. Orth was one of the first journalists to report on child molestation charges against celebrities Woody Allen and Michael Jackson. Reporting on Michael Jackson In January 1994 Vanity Fair published "Nightmare in Neverland," the first of five articles from 1994 through 2005 that investigated the charges stemming from Jackson's alleged behavior towards underage boys instigated by the 1993