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 Hot as hell
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Summer sky. 7:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
| August 19, 2009. Hot as hell, yesterday in New York. Traffic going up Madison Avenue mid-afternoon was nil. My cabbie said he thought everyone was on vacation. I thought it was that everyone was inside. The thick heat stayed like that until 10 pm when the dark clouds rolled in (in a dark sky), the thunder roared, the lightning clapped and the rains came in a deluge. It cooled things off some. Not entirely, but better ... |
| Looking south on Amsterdam and 79th street. 9:45 PM. |
| Outside the Paris Theater on 58th and Fifth, across from the Plaza, 10:10 PM. |
Last night I went down to the Paris Theater where Rouge Tomate and Skyy Vodka played host to the New York premiere of “My One and Only” starring Renee Zellweger. I had not seen the piece in the New Yorker about the film and so I did not know that it was actually based on the life of actor George Hamilton and his mother Anne and his brother Bill.
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| George Hamilton explaining at last night's premiere of "My One and Only" how the film came about. |
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Before the screening, Hamilton took the mike and told the audience the genesis of the film. It was first suggested to him by the late Merv Griffin after he’d heard George talk about how he got started in the movies, and his mother’s influence on his career.
Merv, who also knew George’s mother, who was a very popular figure on the Hollywood and Palm Beach social scene for many years (she died at 93), made arrangements to have a screenplay written, and after a film production company picked it up, the company went out of business. The script was picked up more than once again after that although it never made it beyond discussion stages until one day Renee Zellweger read the script and decided she wanted to play the mother.
Those of us who’ve known or known about George Hamilton’s (now long) career were surprised to learn of the ups and downs (and even hardscrabble moments) of his early life with his mother and brother.
The film opens with the mother and the two sons packing up and leaving New York after the mother comes home and finds her husband in bed with another woman. From there, life is an odyssey initially seeking a new husband to take away their troubles, and ends up (without the new husband) in Hollywood where George’s serendipitous stardom restores the family.
It’s a very sweet story, and a surprising one about a family that stays together because of one woman’s resolve. I’m sure if I hadn’t known it was based on George Hamilton’s life, it wouldn’t have mattered because it is a touching tale of “an adventure,” but really a story about a willful but charming woman used to taking enormous risks to realize a dream (keeping the family together). She was a Southern belle of the first order, monumentally naïve in some ways but driven to find happiness for herself and her sons.
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| Norton Herrick, the film's angel producer. |
Felicia Taylor. |
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The audience was mesmerized. I got to the theater just before George Hamilton spoke and found one of the few remaining seats next to artists Leroy Neiman and his longtime assistant Lynn Quale. They were there because of the producer Norton Herrick, who is also a big collector of Neiman (he bought the Playboy/Hefner collection). Neiman, who is now 88, lives here in New York. Lynn told me he never takes a vacation but works everyday. Yesterday, he made preliminary sketches for five new paintings. (Hammer Galleries is his gallery).
Afterwards there was a big buffet dinner at Rouge Tomate on 10 East 60s, located in the old Nicole Farhi boutique and restaurant (and years before that, the Copacabana night club). The films’ stars were there as well as producer Herrick and his family. Among the guests were Mark Badgley and James Mishka, Andre Balazs, Tovah Feldshuh, Erin Fetherston, Donna Karan, Sandy Gallin, Bonnie Pfeiffer Evans, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Felicia Taylor, Bob Simon, Rachel Roy, Al Roker and Deborah Roberts, Commissioner Ray Kelly and Veronica Kelly, Terry Allen Kramer and Nick Simunek, Andrew Rosen, Nanette Lepore. |
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| Logan Lerman who plays "George" in the film and the original George. |
The new issue of Vanity Fair (with its alternating Farrah and Michael Jackson covers) also features this year’s International Best- Dressed List. The “List” was begun 69 years ago, at the outbreak of the war that became World War II in Europe ago by the late Eleanor Lambert, the public relations doyenne of the American garment industry. Eleanor, who lived to her centenary (and worked until about two months before she died), initiated the poll/list to promote American garment manufacturers while Paris was occupied by the Nazis.
The List was a great success, and in its day was a familiar household phrase across America. In the beginning it was a list of the 10 Best Dressed Women in the world, most of whom were Americans (and New Yorkers). Among its members was Janet (Mrs. William Rhinelander) Stewart who was known as “the most beautiful woman in New York” and famously uninterested in fashion to the point where she’d wear something she’d bought for $5.98 at Macy’s (really), and Mrs. Harold Carter who bought only one dress a season from Paris couture (when it was available) which she wore to her weekly lunches at the Colony restaurant with different accessories.
Fashion changed dramatically at the end of the 1960s during the time of the War in Viet Nam and the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Liberation movements. By the 1990s when I was asked by Eleanor to join the committee, fashion as it was known during the four decades before had changed along with the mores and the folkways of the century. When you think of centuries and fashion, it is easy to see that there were major differences between the 18th, the 19th and the 20th. Although the 20th century traditions are now gone, and anything goes, we have yet to see what the 21st century’s fashion will be.
After Eleanor Lambert’s death, at her request Vanity Fair took over the List. I dropped off the committee (benign negligence) because it seemed to me that my contribution was more than negligible. In my experience, the List is a matter of personal tastes and likes and dislikes of its committee members.
I remember a meeting (during the Lambert days) when one of the town’s most fashionable women was suggested and one of the committee members very loudly said “NO NO NO!” Another member – the late John Galliher – remarked in defense to the naysayer that this particular woman not only spent a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars annually) on clothes but also wore them beautifully but, as John put it, “you just don’t like her.”
Everyone knew what John was saying was so. The woman did not make the List. There are several examples of non-Listers like that from those days when I was present. How the decisions are made these days is unknown to me since I do not participate. Perhaps it has changed although I do know it remains a kind of popularity contest with certain individuals deciding, according to their tastes and/or their social politics, just Who Is and Who Isn’t. Another version of the I Am and You’re Not which socially ambitious people have a penchant for.
Considering myself an inadequate judge of couture and the sartorial, I asked a friend who for a long time made it her business to assess and write about fashion, Blair Sabol, if she’d give me her take on this year’s List in a Guest Diary (on today’s Guest Diary).
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Blair, she came on the scene in the late 1960s writing for the Village Voice, and she was always a must-read for this non-fashion maven because of her very intelligent irreverence. The name of her column (which she wrote for 16 years) was “Outside Fashion” (as opposed to the then current establishment column in the New York Herald Tribune and later the New York Times called “Inside Fashion” by Eugenia Sheppard).
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| Jackie Onassis, circa 1970. |
Babe and William Paley, circa 1968. |
I asked Blair, who now resides mostly in Scottsdale, Arizona about her career as a fashion reporter:
“I was the Abbie Hoffman of fashion during the 70s then ... Vogue for 6 years and Mademoisellle for five. All columns. And then The New York Times freelance. I stopped writing 20 years ago because I had nothing left to rant about, the scene changed and whenever I did write I was constantly threatened by litigation ... so much for right of speech. Now, living in Arizona, I can scream at the desert and no one hears or cares. All my writing nowadays has to do with checks.”
I also asked her to comment on the two most famous fashion icons of those years, Jackie Onassis and Babe Paley, and what set them apart from today:
“As for Jackie and Babe ... I saw them both (separately) on Madison Avenue. With perfect (Mr.) Kenneth hair helmets, (no longer seen) extraordinary "boat" low heeled pumps (no longer made) and a bamboo-handled Gucci bag I have never seen replayed. They were always "perfection" ... as well YOU know. They also wore fabrics I don’t see anymore, such as real silks and gabardines, and not the parachute and wrinkled polyester we see now. Ah China ... |
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