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31st
Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. 2:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
They
celebrated the Chinese New Year, the year of the Monkey
last Thursday with a red and black launch party for Saks Fifth Avenue’s
new exclusive women’s fragrance Shanghai, which was created
by Marc Rosen and Gerald Tsai. The
evening was hosted by Saks’ new President and CEO Fred
Wilson and, the new President and CEO of Saks Fifth Avenue
and Quest magazine’s publisher Chris Meigher.
The red on red dining room was festooning with Oriental decorations
– Chinese lanterns, branches of quince blossoms and liter-sized
bottles of Shanghai which are spherical, the bottom half of solid
glass, the top half contained the exotic, spicy, floral, perfume with
a lucite and gold Chinoiserie closure.
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Chinese
New Year fortunes |
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A big crowd of
social and industry people turned out in the “red and black”
theme including Lauren Bush in an 18th-century embroidered
Mandarin jacket; her mother Sharon Bush; Amanda Hearst; Annie
Churchill; Serena Boardman; Cindy Adams; designers Nicole
Miller, Cynthia Rowley and Jill Stewart; Gigi and
Averill Mortimer; Kaufmann de Suisse’s Charles
and Georgia Kaufmann; Wendy Carduner; Muffie Potter Aston; Baron Thierry
van Zuylen and Carole Holmes McCarthy; Richard and Marcia Mishaan;
Marife Hernandez and Joel Bell; CeCe Cord; Rena Sindi; Somers and
Jonathan Farkas; Marjorie and Ellery Gordon; Allison and Leonard Stern;
Christine Schott; Bartle Bull; Tim and Helen Schifter; Tiffany Dubin,
Jane Powell and Dick Moore, and Arlene Dahl (Mrs.
Marc Rosen).
I was seated next to Allison Stern who is one of New York’s
most active fund-raising philanthropists, especially for animals and
wildlife conservation. She told me that she and her husband would
only be “honorary chairs” of this year’s upcoming
Wildlife Conservation gala because she and Muffie Potter Aston,
another fund-raising dynamo are going into business together producing
films. |
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Annette
Tapert |
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Barbara
Liberman |
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Emilia
Fanjul |
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Aston
and Stern are not the only society girls in town who have caught the
producing bug. Annette Tapert, Barbara Liberman
and Emilia Fanjul have all joined forces
with veteran producers Daryl Roth, Roger Berlind and
Ray Larsen (in association with Robert G.
Bartner) to back the Pulitzer Prize winning Anna and
the Tropics, the new Jimmy Smits show at the
Royale. Ben Brantley of the New York Times
said that Smits and Daphne Rubin-Vega deliver something
“elusive on Broadway these days: the glow of sexual chemistry.”
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Daphne
Rubin-Vega and Jimmy Smits in Anna and the Tropics.
Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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Playwright Nilo
Cruz sets his story in 1929 in a Cuban-American cigar factory
where cigars are still rolled by hand and where “lectors”
are employed to educate and entertain the workers. A novel idea in
this day and age. Smits’ character, a handsome and virile “lector,”
reads them Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and
unwitting becomes a catalyst for the fire and passion in his listeners
that fills the theatre with, in Brantley’s words “the
glow of sexual chemistry.”
Amazing, compelling performances. At the Royale Theatre (between Broadway
and 8th) – Tuesdays, 7 PM, Wednesday through Saturday at 8;
matinees Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 and Sunday at 3. Tickets can
be purchased through Tele-charge.com, at (212) 239-6200, or at the
Royale box office. |
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L.
to r.: Allison Stern and Diahn McGrath; Elizabeth Loomis,
Muffie Potter Aston, Gary Goldstein, and Jill Brooke |
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Julian
Farrell and friend |
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Nicole
Miller and Tim Schifter |
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Marc
Rosen and Fred Wilson |
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L.
to r.: Gerald Tsai, Arlene Dahl, and Marc Rosen; Chris
Meigher and Fred Wilson; Tiffany Dubin. |
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Charles
and Georgia Kaufmann |
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Marjorie
Reed Gordon and Ellery Gordon |
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Bartle Bull and Carol McCarthy |
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L.
to r.: Cindy Adams; Feng Shui fashion; Somers Farkas. |
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Annie
Churchill with her husband |
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Christine
Schott, Amanda Hearst, and Elizabeth Loomis |
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Sharon
Bush and Gerald Tsai |
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DPC
with Carol McCarthy and Tiffany Dubin |
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Lauren
Bush with the hostesses |
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Ann
Miller, the dancing star of Hollywood musicals
from the 1930s through the 1960s died in Los Angeles last week.
I knew her in the 1980s through our mutual friend Hermes
Pan who was the first man to give her a job in pictures
– at RKO in 1936. They were lifelong friends after that.
He called her Annie Crow because she claimed to be part Cherokee,
and she in turn called him “Bear.”
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Ann
Miller |
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Pan’s
voice often rumbled with laughter when he talked about “Ann
Miller” as he’d refer to her. She told him when
he hired her that she was only fourteen. He didn’t really
(ever) believe her. But he laughed and accepted it. He admired
her drive and indefatigability.
She was a naturally funny lady on stage and off. The dumb blonde
syndrome (although she was always raven haired); dumb like a
fox, a mixture of show-biz smarts, (street smarts really), over-the-rainbow
naiveté and an intense commitment to her job.
It was Pan who first suggested she rip off her skirt as she
went into her dance – a move she repeated many times on
screen. She became famous to her audience for her tap-tap whirling-dervish
twirls. These often produced amusement for her choreographer
as well as thrills for her audience.
When she was at MGM, she had had plastic surgery to change the
shape of her nose. The result was less than flattering and reduced
the size too much, so that when she was filming, the make-up
artist had to apply a temporary piece to make the nose more
photogenic. During the shooting of a dance sequence for Cole
Porter’s “Kiss Me Kate,” (which was
filmed in 3-D), Miller went into one of her twirls and the nosepiece
went flying off right into the camera. |
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Ann
Miller in Kiss Me Kate |
She
went to work at a very young age to support herself and
her mother to whom she was devoted all her life. A number of
girls of Miller’s generation who became film stars were
very close to their mothers who often ruled with an iron hand
– which is where those girls got a lot of the discipline
it took to maintain a career. (There were enough of these “mothers”
to have formed a “club” during the 1940s and 50s
when the mothers would meet a couple of times a month.)
Ann Miller was married three times, all never for more than
a year or two. The husbands were all wealthy but somehow they
all cost her. She got pregnant by the first, Reese Milner,
a wealthy Los Angeles oilman. Milner had a legendary temper,
so vile that he eventually ended up behind bars. He was also
an alcoholic.
One night in the bedroom of their Holmby Hills mansion, when
Miller’s pregnancy was close to term, the couple got into
a quarrel (although it’s impossible to imagine Ann Miller
ever having a fight with anybody). Milner picked up a gun and
threatened to shoot his wife. She ran and he shot. Bang-bang.
She was able to dodge the bullets by making a fast exit down
the grand staircase. He missed (the bullets ended up lodged
in the wall next to the staircase).* Miller gave birth shortly
thereafter and her only child died three hours later.
After the marriage to Milner, Louis B. Mayer,
the head of MGM and King of Hollywood, who dated Miller briefly,
lent her money to buy a house on Arden Drive in Beverly Hills.
Spacious, although not large, it had the Hollywood faux
grandness that lent itself to the illusion of stardom, complete
with a faux grand staircase for entrances (and exits).
Although she built a house in Sedona, Arizona in the 1980s,
the house on Arden remained her base for the rest of her life.
Away from the camera and her work, she was friendly with other
dancers from the chorus boys and girls to the stars like Rita
Hayworth. In the Hollywood community in those days,
as it still is on Broadway and the ballet, most of the dancers
loved being with other dancers. “All dancers are children,”
Pan used to explain. “They have to be in order to move
around like that without feeling self-conscious.” Miller
was, first and last, a dancer. A consummate pro her life revolved
around the “job.” There was glamour in their lifestyle
but a lot of that was with an eye on publicity.
Late in her career, she became to her own thinking, a star,
on the stage in “Sugar Babies” which she co-starred
on Broadway and then all over the United States, with Mickey
Rooney. She was well into her fifties and out there
rap-tap-tapping on wood eight times a week. It was tough work
but she loved it. She always loved it; and we loved her.
* The house was later occupied by Louis B. Mayer’s
daughter Edie and her husband, producer William Goetz for the
next forty years. Today it is the home of Northwest Airlines
executive Gary Thornhill-Wilson and his wife, Barbera. |
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