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 Rainy day, off-and-on
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Looking south from 18th Street along the Highline. 8:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
July 22, 2009. Rainy day, off-and-on, yesterday in New York. The weatherman had forecast tremendous humidity (not) and torrential rains (not). A lot of New Yorkers are sick of the rain although this New Yorker always welcomes it. It washes the streets, adds to the water supply and provides water for the plants and trees.
Around New York. Lunch at Michael’s with Nikki Haskell who is coming out with a new version of her Star-Caps in the autumn including a compound that can be dissolved in water, like Vitamin C.
Nikki, who divides her time between New York and Los Angeles, was telling me that Jackie Collins – the best-selling novelist sister of Joan – is addicted to Twitter and Twitters all day. I immediately took out my Blackberry and Twittered the info to the world out there. Other than that, I’m at loss to know what to Twitter.
I could have Twittered: Monday night I went to a buffet dinner given by Jesse Kornbluth and his beautiful wife Karen Collins, mother of his brilliant and beautiful little daughter Helen. Karen is an excellent cook. Karen is, I should add, a professional chef (by training/background). Set out before us during cocktails was a great mound of my favorite Guacamole and chips. A waiter passed plates and plates of deep-fried coconut shrimp, as well as mini-lobster rolls, all fresh from the kitchen.
After filling my face as if this were all I was going to get for the night, out came the buffet which included the chilled salmon, pasta primavera, plus salad and vegetables.
The evening was a celebration of Jesse having just completed his collaboration with Twyla Tharp on her new book/memoir/ autobiography. Something like that; I’m not sure. I don’t know Ms. Tharp although we have a mutual friend (not Jesse) and I know that she is a very intensely hard-working choreographer and probably with everything else. Jesse has finally reached that point that is always ant-climactic but nevertheless a relief for every writer: close to finishing.
The Collins-Kornbluth guest list is very gemutlich one, with a lot of writers, such as Geraldine Baum who is the LA Times correspondent in New York, Steve Aronson; Amanda Vaill, who wrote the biography of Jerome Robbins that was turned into a PBS American Master documentary; and before that “Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy – A Lost Generation Love Story.” So it was one of those parties where there was a lot of talk going on everywhere all the time. |
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Approaching the Guggenheim on 89th and Fifth. |
Leaving the Kornbluth-Collins, who live in the 90s off Fifth, it was such a beautiful night I decided to take a stroll down Fifth with another dinner guest (and a neighbor of mine) Charlie Scheips. The avenue was very quiet and almost void of traffic. At 90th I snapped this picture of the Guggenheim which has now been completely refurbished and looking as sensational as ever.
Last night in New York. I went to dinner with my friend Peter Rogers at Swifty’s. Which was jammed. Just inside the front door, public relations guru Jim Mitchell was dining with two lady friends. Across from him Liz and Jeff Peek (see Monday’s Diary) were dining with Bill and Candace Beinecke. Also: Todd Romano with b with a friend; CeCe Cord and friends; at another table: Stephanie Krieger, Brian Stewart, Hunt Slonem, Ann Rapp, Richard Heanu. The place was packed. Favorites on the summer menu: Cold Cauliflower soup; Beefsteak tomatoes with Buffalo Mozzarella and Basil, and Fresh Corn on the Cob. |
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Last night at Swifty's. |
From this morning’s Telegraph of London, a fascinating obituary of Jill Balcon Day-Lewis, widow of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and mother of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
On screen, she made an eye-catching film debut in 1947 as Madeleine Bray in her father's adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, alongside Sybil Thorndike and Stanley Holloway; she played Jessica in the television film of The Merchant of Venice the same year and enjoyed a dormitory scrap with Jean Kent in Good Time Girl (1949). On stage, she survived the experience of playing Zenocrate to Donald Wolfit's turbulent Tamburlaine in Tyrone Guthrie's Old Vic production. She continued to work into old age, becoming a sought-after reader of audio books and poetry. Dark, slender and famously sexy in her youth ("like the sort of woman you only see on a Greek vase" as one unnamed admirer described her), Jill Balcon was 25 and Cecil Day-Lewis 46 when they met in 1948 at a BBC radio poetry reading. They met again later the same year, at a poetry festival. He had been married to Mary King for the previous 20 years, during the last nine of which he had been conducting a turbulent affair with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann, with whom he set up a second home in London. Despite a long catalogue of tearful and stormy scenes with both women, he found himself unable to choose between them.
After he fell in love with the young actress, his wife recorded bleakly in her diary: "Jill Balcon comes into the picture. Everything has the feel of a nightmare." Later Sean Day-Lewis, Cecil's elder son by Mary, wrote of the "scorched earth he had left in his wake".
Rosamund Lehmann's reaction to what she regarded as an "infatuation" was uncontrolled fury. She slapped Day-Lewis in the face at a publisher's party and even enlisted Mary's help in her campaign to win him back. To the end of her life she remained vituperative about the usurper, this "fawning creature who unrolled herself like a spaniel at his feet". "Some of the things she said about me – I couldn't bring myself to read them," Jill Balcon admitted. Later, when Selina Hastings, Rosamond's biographer, visited Jill Balcon to interview her for her book, she said: "You're not at all the Witch of Endor I was expecting."
But Day-Lewis, emotionally exhausted by the years of shuttling between Mary and Rosamund, would not be moved. With Jill Balcon, he said, he had never known such peace. He moved into her flat in Pimlico. They married in 1951.
Day-Lewis's women were not the only obstacles to the match. Jill's father, Sir Michael Balcon, was outraged that she should be living in sin with a penniless poet and more horrified still when her name was splashed across the newspapers as co-respondent in Day-Lewis's divorce. He refused to attend the wedding ceremony or the reception. Her mother came, but afterwards could only see her daughter at clandestine meetings in Hyde Park. After their daughter Tamasin was born, neither of Jill's parents came to call, her father having taken it as a deliberate slight that, when Day-Lewis placed a birth announcement in the newspapers, he did not put the words "née Balcon" after Jill's name.
As her father had predicted, Day-Lewis was no more faithful to Jill Balcon than he had been to Mary, even having an affair with her great friend, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, godmother to Tamasin. In her memoirs, Elizabeth Jane Howard's account of it began: "Now I come to one of the worst things I have done in my life."
Somehow the two women managed to remain friends and, to keep her husband, Jill Balcon was careful never to make a scene. "Once, I behaved so well over an affair I discovered, he said, 'Why didn't you say something?', " she recalled.
Yet after his death she admitted to being deeply hurt by his infidelities, particularly the affair with Elizabeth Jane Howard. "It still haunts me," she told an interviewer in later life. "It comes back and hits me, often at night. I'm so appalled, even all these years on. I think: how could they?"
After marrying, Jill Balcon's own career took second place to her husband's and to her children. She carried on acting as they had little money, but mostly in radio and at poetry readings as it fitted in more easily with the school day. She and her husband had 21 years together before Day-Lewis, by then Poet Laureate, died of pancreatic cancer in 1972, leaving her a grief-stricken widow of 47.
Although she was proud of the achievements of her children, Daniel and his sister, the food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis, Jill Balcon expressed regrets that she herself had not achieved more. "It's very chastening," she observed, "to be a footnote in so many people's lives."
Jill Angela Henriette Balcon was born on January 3 1925 in London, the only daughter of Michael Balcon, the film director who would become head of Ealing Studios. She was educated at Roedean, where she developed a passion for poetry and, aged 12, saw Cecil Day-Lewis when he came to adjudicate a verse-speaking competition. "I was at the back of the school hall with the shrimps," she recalled, "and there he was, this very tall, very handsome, very talented creature."
In 1944, aged 19, she was taken on as a continuity announcer for the BBC and put to work in a studio in the bowels of 200 Oxford Street, the headquarters of the BBC's General Overseas and Forces programmes, from which she made occasional forays to introduce some of the big bands which came over with the American forces.
After her marriage to Day-Lewis, she made several more films in the late 1940s and 1950s before having her family. She continued to work mainly in radio, becoming, with her distinctive, honeyed voice, a supreme performer in plays and poetry readings. In 2003 the BBC commissioned Juliet Ace to write a play for her to mark her 60th anniversary on the airwaves, Deadheading the Roses, which featured her son Daniel Day-Lewis playing a friend of her character.
In later life she took cameo roles in two Derek Jarman films – Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993) – and was an imposing Lady Bracknell in Oliver Parker's 1999 adaptation of An Ideal Husband alongside Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver and Rupert Everett.
Cecil Day-Lewis wrote some of his most celebrated poetry during his marriage to Jill Balcon. Usually she was the first reader when he would emerge with a draft from his study. Later, she would share a recital platform with him as he read from his work. After his death, she took it upon herself to be the guardian of his flame, editing volumes of his poetry and, in 2004, touring the country with a one-woman show based on his work. She seldom spoke about their life together, not wanting to encourage the sort of prurient accounts which gave her such pain. But she was sparkling good company and usually won over biographers who came to ask her for her memories.
She is survived by her two children. |
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