Perfect of a New Year's Eve outing (or hostess gift, darling!), from the good people at Veuve Cliquot (my favorite widow, actually) comes this rather awesome picnic accessory. Designed by the divine Karim Rashid, it's a handy carrier for a single bottle of Champagne that is a combination cooler/atmospheric lamp.
Here at the Café, we are of course having a few friends in this evening.For those planning a festive night out, remember:
Beware the Truth Seekers. And the Givers.
Are you ready for the new year? Debbie Reynolds certainly seems to be. Although apparently she has been for 56 years, based on the tiara...
I have to admit: when I first moved to New York, I considered How to Marry a Millionaire something of a user's guide to the city. It's so practical!
287 years ago today, in a modest quartier of Paris, was born a baby whom her parents, M. and Mme. Poisson, decided to call Jeanne-Antoinette. Her brilliant career belies the general gloom of babies born today, although even her glamorous legacy has, of late, become tainted.
I thought you might enjoy a glimpse of our Christmas, darlings, which really was lovely. Here's the view from our friends' roof, taken during the intense but all-too-brief twilight we get down here. As predicted, the Italians cooked, the Champagne flowed, and it's just as well that the three of us spent the night.
Her earliest incarnation was also, to me, her least convincing. She just wasn't ingenue material, her breathy "As Tears Go By" too unsettling to stand aside the work of putative Swinging London contemporaries like Petula Clark. 
She even managed, somehow, to make knee socks and maryjanes seem more depraved than fishnets and stilettos. There is a timeless quality to her decadence, one that links her to Weimar and the opium dens of the late nineteenth century, even as she rode the waves of punk in the 70s and performance art in recent years.
She is a magnificent wreck, a valid interpreter of Weill and Brecht, an unapologetic hedonist, an occasional and occasionally quite effective actress, and if nothing else, these days she's certainly looking better than her erstwhile colleagues the Rolling Stones.
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, who, even if he wasn't (pace Boney M) "lover of the Russian Queen," certainly caused more than his fair share of mischief. Who else has ever so enthusiastically looked the part of villainous religous maniac? These days they tend to the smarmy and suntanned, which to my way of thinking isn't nearly as effective.
She was a semi-impoverished White Russian who found herself stuck in Germany when the start of the Second War cut her off from her family and forced her to find work in the Nazi capital. The book starts just as things are getting under way, with a glimpse into the increasingly surreal life of a circle of friends trying to preserve some shreds of normality.
You hope and pray it will turn out like this: revelry, glamour, and good times for all...
All too often, though, you end up with the nagging feeling that something not-so-great is about to happen. Or that Red Buttons will show up. Or both.
...Exactly whom, do you suppose, at the studio (and it looks like her Warner's days) did Miss Eve Arden piss off so royally (you should pardon the expression) that she had to spend a morning at the portrait gallery in that getup?
How characteristic of her, too, to slip away on Christmas day, guaranteeing that we would as much celebrate as mourn her. Certainly, it's just as she would have had it, for few entertainers were such thorough celebrators as Miss Kitt: of sex, of life, of love, of all the pleasures of the flesh and spirit.
She had, onstage, the kind of matchless self-confidence that comes with being known as "the most exciting woman in the world." She could, with a glance, a gesture, a shrug, be the most bewitching creature you ever beheld, whether in sequins and feathers or reclining in a hotel armchair.
But she could also kick it up with the best of them, high-spirited and feisty and probably, at the occasional moment now and then, a little tempestuous. Poor Lady Bird Johnson found her so, but Jo Ann Worley would seem to have been a kindred spirit.
And through it all, from little clubs to New Faces of 1952 to Hollywood to television to exile to Broadway to discos to cabaret and even, however unlikely, to a new incarnation as a Disney villainess, she worked. I feel so lucky to have seen her in several of these guises, most often at the wonderful Café Carlyle.
She ruled that place, flirting and purring and whispering and shouting, singing songs old and new, seemingly as the mood struck but clearly with an enormous amount of dedication and preparation. ... I don't think there has been, a few of the canonical carols aside, a more beautiful Christmas song, or any that captures so perfectly what the holiday becomes as we grow up, grow away from our childhoods and their certainties, and even (so sadly, unlike its greatest singer) grow old.
We will have a merry day, the three of us; Mr. Muscato, Koko, and I are driving down the spectacular coast of this lovely country, to have a bang-up lunch with a big group of friends on the roof of a rambling villa by the sea. We will have Champagne and turkey and (some of these friends being Brits) very likely crackers and paper crowns. Later, as the day fades, we will have (some of these friends being Italian) incredible desserts and strong tiny glasses of grappa.
There will be a child or two, to make the day more Christmassy, and people's parents and, I believe, a grandmother who's daringly made the flight down. It will be lovely.
But even so, as happens, there will be other, parallel days in at least some of our heads; Christmas mornings past, with sharp sudden memories of those long gone; Christmas mornings that never were, possibilities that didn't happen; and even Christmas mornings yet to come, that perhaps won't be so bright.
And through it all, we'll have to muddle through somehow. Today, we all will be together, and for a little while, leave all the rest to those Fates. As for you, well; have yourselves a merry little Christmas, darlings, and let your hearts be light.
If perchance you haven't yet gotten my gift, I have to say I'm kind of jonesing for Evil Nurse Barbie here. I can think of all kinds of mean fun one could have with her, especially in combination with Dr. Kildare and Tallulah...
On Christmas Eve 1922, Ava Gardner joined this low world and made it, somehow, for 67 years more radiant, more extraordinary. She was the unlikely product of a poor Southern family, so extravagantly beautiful that really she had no choice but to become an international film star.
She was not, perhaps, tremendously sensible - no one could marry Frank Sinatra and be considered that - and in fact her whole life could just about be summed in her plangent comment about her wild affair with a Spanish bullfighter, an escapade that tried the patience of even her dearest friends (who do seem to have been awfully longsuffering):
It's almost a shame that she was so heart-stoppingly lovely, for she was also a smart, proud, wordly woman and, when she cared to be, a fine actress. She Lived, in a kind of Auntie-Mame capital-L kind of way, and while she might have lasted longer with a little more care, I'm not sure that she would have traded quantity for quality.
Not to stereotype the pretty, vapid, and stupidly tattooed (I just keep thinking of ranks and ranks of 70 year-olds with drooping barbed-wire garlands around their withered biceps) but:
Well, somebody's just full of the milk of human kindness at Christmas!Or is it?
This is an old favorite, I know, but somehow I never feel like it's Christmas until I've seen it. Really the spirit of the season, if you ask me. Being the long version, with the credits, only makes me realize how very, very fabulous that little moment in time actually was.
The Library's annual Christmas fête took a turn for the bizarre just moments after Santa's conga line led the reference staff into the locked Curiosa section. Looking back, with a mixture of shame and ecstasy, Myrtle realized she never did find her hat - and that no one had in fact hired a Santa.
The horror, the horror...Mr. Peenee, in his infinite evil, has passed to me that modern equivalent of sour dough starter kits (remember that craze? It was, for a while, right up there with macramé and chia pets), a blog tag.
The requirements: 1. Link to the person who tagged you; 2. Post the rules on your blog; 3. Write six random things about yourself; 4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them; 5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog; and 6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
So here we go:
1. I've mentioned this in passing before, but here's the real deal: as a child I was – okay, right up 'til today I remain – terrified of only one film I've ever seen: Lili, starring Leslie Caron. Something about the same characters being played by puppets and by real people (and one of them a Gabor!), something about the creepy not-quite-real/not-quite-fantasy setting, something about the smarmimess of leading man Mel Ferrer, something about the implied near-idiocy of the Caron character – and most of all, everything about that madness-inducing theme tune ("Love Makes the World Go 'Round…Hi-Lili, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo…" – just typing it makes my flesh crawl). My poor patient parents let me stay up one night to watch it on television, thinking I would be enchanted; I rewarded them with banshee screams and about three months of sleepless nights. I still have bad dreams about those damn puppets.
The movie, treacly in its family-friendliness, created in me a horror that even a first viewing of Night of the Living Dead in the middle of the night in an isolated house in the country, while stoned, barely approached.
2. I am bone lazy. I was raised by terrifyingly energetic old ladies who ran charities, bullied church committees, kept spotless houses, made their own jam (hell, made their own clothes), and had plenty of time left over for hobbies like tatting, genealogy, and gossip. One grandmother was the county tax collector and the other the doyenne of the local social scene, a veritable Miss Mapp in our little community. Me? I count a day well spent if I get dressed.
3. I was once a performer, albeit one whose career, such as it was, was marked far more by variety than quality, by ambition than by talent. Over half-a-dozen years I appeared in at least one each of: drama, comedy, musical comedy, opera, operetta, ballet, nightclub act, and independent film, as well as working as a stage manager, house manager, assistant director, and costume designer. In all of the above, except maybe house manager (for which I had an odd flair), I was thoroughly, if enthusiastically, mediocre.
4. I am torn between self-satisfaction at still having a full head of hair and fury that so much of it is turning gray.
5. Otherwise, in terms of looks, the biggest surprise of the last few years is that I don't really mind having irretrievably lost my waist. I'm out, I'm stout, get used to it!
6. I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks! But not much else.
So there you have it. Everything you ever wanted to know, but were far too polite to ask. And really, that's enough about me - what do you think of me?
We're still suffering from a nasty case of Slow Internet syndrome here, so right now I'm going to ignore the last bits of the rules, although no one should rest easy, because I will likely pounce once we're restored to the usual local sluggish-but-usable speed...
File this away for next July: when dressing for warm weather, whether East or West, sari or sheath: it's all about the pearls.
Rule Number One of Faux-Dating: the Beard should never be butcher than the Boy.
Today marks the birth of one of Hollywood's Great Ladies, the versatile Miss Irene Dunne. She's seen above, for some reason, apparently doing an Olivia de Havilland impression in an outfit that's so '40s that it looks like a parody.
Dunne shone, almost equally, in weepie soapers like Back Street and the first Love Affair, in glam musicals like Roberta, and in heartwarmers like I Remember Mama. She brought a slightly off-kilter dignity to screwball in The Awful Truth and Theodora Goes Wild, and she did her share of Great Actress roles, even unto one of the better onscreen pre-Dench Queen Victorias in The Mudlark.
Lead Vocals, Blue Angel, 1981
Backup Dancer, 1979
Frontwoman, The Tourists, 1978
Composer/Keyboards, 94 East, 1977
December 1976: Aunt Marge has her best Christmas EVAR!
Sometimes it catches me up short, how much I miss some people; people like Kitty Carlisle Hart.
She was the mistress (and muse) of poet and generally amusing troublemaker Guillaume Apollinaire; she painted this group portrait (which also includes Picasso, bottom left) with him at the center (and herself the smiling odalisque bottom right).
After Apollinaire, she married a German (not a brilliant idea early in World War I, if you were a French woman), but she soon saw reason and returned to Paris.
This portrait by Rousseau (from her Apollinaire period) sees her a little less faun-like than the photo would indicate.
She is considered the main female painter of the Cubist circle, as is clear from the self-portrait above.
As time passed, though, their influence seems to have diminished considerably; she came to specialize in willowy, languishing pictures of women in various stages of deshabille.
Still, at its best, her work is, I think, quite beguiling. Gertrude Stein claimed that in fact she was just painting what she saw - because her eyesight was so bad, the whole world actually was vague and pastel-colored.
Whatever the case, she was, as far as I can see, one of the very last painters who could convincingly paint a classical nude, and that has to be worth something...
