The Duchess of Alba has returned to Spain from her belated honeymoon in Paris! All is right with the world!
Here she is wearing what she thinks is a clip-on flower in her hair, but she’s accidentally picked up one of the cleaning cloths for the Duke’s eyeglasses. Ah well, it works. The makeup is sheer and has that slight glow of formaldehyde, and perhaps the smell.
The red rosary necklace gives her that bit of Christmas warmth, like Mrs. Claus on vacation in the islands.
The dress is purely hideous. It puts me in the mind of an unfortunately decorated tissue box, uncorrected by an aggressively imposing scarf which appears to represent a slide of a rapidly multiplying amoeba.
Overall effect: stunning, nonchalant elegance punctuated by mild visual trauma.
The magnificent, towering, mostly despised Marilyn sculpture that has been waving its dress in the air over Pioneer Court in Chicago is being dismantled for a trip to California. Most people wait until they get here to get ripped apart.
The 26-ft. work, titled “Forever Marilyn,” was created by Seward Johnson, is now bound for Palm Springs.
The dress Marilyn wore in “The Seven Year Itch,” on which the sculpture is based, sold last June for $4.6 million to an unknown buyer.
It had been in the collection of Debbie Reynolds, who bought it when 20th Century Fox unloaded all of Marilyn’s wardrobe in 1971.
Camilla, Duchess of Rothesay (as she’s known in Scotland), visited the Rosslyn Chapel on Tuesday, where she praised the restoration work.
Her Exquisiteness is holding a stonemason’s hammer, which had just been used to touch up her hair.
Cam chose one of her new outfits for the Scotland visit, showing a bit of plaid on a large collar that frames her face beautifully… like a painting you’d find at the Salvation Army.
That’s our Betty, topped with the Imperial State Crown, as though she’d just eaten margarine (some of you may remember that), and wearing the expression of a woman who needs two Tylenol, stat.
Her Majesty attended the State Opening of Parliament today, where she paraded through the Royal Gallery in the Palace of Westminster.
This year’s session is expected to introduce banking reform, House of Lords reform, and plans for increased internet monitoring. If I should disappear in the next few weeks after posting about Camilla, you’ll know who to blame.
I don’t often write about personal things, but today it seems appropriate.
I worked for Maurice Sendak from 1995 until 1998, out of an office in his darkly magical home in Connecticut, filled with Mickey Mouse memorabilia, Blake originals, frayed carpets and such obscure ephemera as the walking stick of Beatrix Potter. I lived in the nearby town of West Redding, where he visited me once to see my checkerboard collection.
I am not going to write a paean simply because he has died. Dying does not make you great. He was, by his own admission, not a great man, but he was the most extraordinarily talented and disciplined man I have ever met.
As his assistant, speech editor, occasional chef and babysitter, I got to know him very well. One thing he taught me, indirectly, was discipline about work. He worked every day, and pretty much did the same thing every day of his life. He had a wicked wit and a way of assessing people as objects, saying things like, “That woman reminds me of a great potato.”
At the time I began working for him, the film “Wild Things” was just getting off the ground. It would take another dozen years to bring it to the screen. Among many other projects, we were working on the merchandising of the Wild Things characters, for which he had approval of all things. “The hair is too orange, the whiskers too long.” Everything took forever. He was also working with Tony Kushner on a project about the holocaust, on the sets for the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” illustrating the complete works of Shakespeare, designing a play area and restaurant for the Yerba Buena “Metreon” Center in San Francisco, and the cartoon series, “Little Bear.” President Clinton gave him the Medal of Arts in the snowy winter of 1996, for which I made all arrangements, not including an inadvertent trip to Newark when, while trying to get him settled, the train left with me still on it, my first and only experience as a stowaway.
He was a curmudgeonly figure, cranky and curious, and lived rather unhappily with a terribly unpleasant maid and her grungy husband (who lived on his property). His partner of 40 years, Dr. Eugene Glynn, would visit on weekends. I could never tell if this pleased or annoyed Maurice.
During the Japanese recession of ’97, the entire Sony Retail Entertainment Division (my employers who assigned me to him) would be axed. Even the chairman was canned. I returned to California.
Maurice had the extraordinary ability to recall everything about his childhood in vivid detail. He kept a small box on his dresser that contained the wedding rings of his late parents. On top of the box was a blue and white ceramic dog. I asked him about it on my first tour of his home. “There were about five of those dogs when I was little, that’s the only one left. He guards the rings.” About a year into my job, I was shopping at an antiques store in Greenwich, and found a similar dog from the set. I gave it to him for his birthday.
The “Postman” costume was designed by Irene, who in 1962 slit her wrists (although that’s disputed) and jumped from the 14th floor of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood (not disputed). She was reportedly distraught over the death of her true love, Gary Cooper, in 1961.
In 1948, legendary film director D.W. Griffith dropped dead in the hotel lobby of a cerebral hemorrhage at 73.
On March 3, 1966, William Frawley (best known as Fred Mertz) collapsed a half block away and was carried to the Knickerbocker lobby where they were unable to revive him.
He was 79.
Gay American poet Frank O’Hara wrote this lovely poem about Lana Turner.
O’Hara, 40, was killed when a dune buggy ran over him on Fire Island, July 24, 1966.
