Meanwhile, on Broadway

Miss Lansbury graciously gives us a useful lesson on the Art of the Entrance, seventies Big Lady style, encompassing the full range of staircase-descending, partner-acknowledging, dance-step-indicating, and adoration-reflecting.  She also manages to flash a surprising amount of gam in the process. Watch and learn; you never know when it might come in handy...

Kids in America

The past is another country:  one in which Bette Midler and David Bowie share a fondness for ruthlessly bleached poodle cuts; in which Michael Jackson's fashion choices almost make sense; in which Cher can be the least fussily turned out person in any group; and in which that other woman is international song sensation Kim Wilde.

Well, I suppose she still is, but honestly - did you recognize her?  Do you, as Miss Cara once implored, remember her name?

How do you suppose this distinctly eclectic evening turned out?  Based on Cher's expression, I'm not optimistic...

Beefcake Update #2

Peenee brought him up, but I've been thinking about poor dear Mr. Upen Patel in any case.  If our last blast from the past has forsaken the great wide world, going back to his roots in Cairo, Mr. Patel has headed out from the sphere in which first we met him, Bollywood, broadening his horizons.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, he has been studying in Europe, learning filmmaking and, however improbable it may seem, following in the footsteps of such illustrious forebears as Shelley Winters by taking up the Method at the Actors' Studio.

He's even on Twitter, giving us thrilling glimpses into his world - he is, it seems, fond of Playstation, put off by the cold, and dining with someone tantalizingly referred to as "Boy Asad."  Be still my heart.

In due course, one hopes he'll return to the Subcontinental Film Industry and triumph once again, although one hopes as well that he'll do it in somewhat less regrettable fashions than seen here...

Needless to Say...

Well, now I know what I want played at my wedding...

Our Mutual Friend

What a week it is for anniversaries! Can lifting, reigning, and, now the 200th observation of the birthday of one of the Café's favorite writers, the estimable Mr. Charles Dickens.

I was raised in a reading household. The Classics - defined as a radiating series of circles with the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dickens at the center, and Tennyson, Austen, Galsworthy, Hawthorne, and Alice Duer Miller not far off - were held in both reverence and familiarity. David Copperfield was one of the first Huge Long Books I ever read (and still, I think, my favorite Dickens), and A Christmas Carol, inevitably, featured heavily most Decembers.

Today, I got caught in traffic for a good long time, stuck in the heavy construction that is a more or less permanent feature of this city that is at once built on a rigid grid plan and, beyond that, as poorly planned as anywhere you can imagine. It was a less wearing go-slow than most, though, because the BBC World Service was playing a remarkably good program in honor of today's bicentennial: a look at how Dickens is perceived today in India, where his legacy looms large even in the post-colonial school curricula and where his brand of extravagant, sentimental, and episodic fiction strikes a chord with a public accustomed to Bollywood and enamored with its coventions (which are indeed as extravagant, sentimental, and episodic as the wildest Victorian three-volume novel).

Dickens and India - Mutual Friends is available here should you like to enjoy it yourself.

So anyway, there I am, idling away surrounded by construction barriers, ripped-up sidewalks, discommoded pedestrians, and the jumpsuited laborers who keep this whole place running (in this case undertaking with great pains the kind of large-scale grading that could be done in a morning with proper large machinery), listening to some very lovely people talk about how Dickens has shaped their educations, experiences, lives.

Interspersed here and there were readings from the Great Man's works, and that is how I found myself, on a fine Tuesday morning, bawling like a child at the death of Little Nell. Now, I know that dear Oscar has had written that one must have a heart of stone not to laugh at this particular passage, but in the right hands (or rather, voice), it's a killer:

She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death.

Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a spot she had been used to favour. 'When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always.' Those were her words.

She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird—a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed—was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child mistress was mute and motionless for ever.

Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues? All gone. Sorrow was dead indeed in her, but peace and perfect happiness were born; imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose.

And still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change. Yes. The old fireside had smiled upon that same sweet face; it had passed, like a dream, through haunts of misery and care; at the door of the poor schoolmaster on the summer evening, before the furnace fire upon the cold wet night, at the still bedside of the dying boy, there had been the same mild lovely look. So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death.

The old man held one languid arm in his, and had the small hand tight folded to his breast, for warmth. It was the hand she had stretched out to him with her last smile—the hand that had led him on, through all their wanderings. Ever and anon he pressed it to his lips; then hugged it to his breast again, murmuring that it was warmer now; and, as he said it, he looked, in agony, to those who stood around, as if imploring them to help her.

She was dead, and past all help, or need of it. The ancient rooms she had seemed to fill with life, even while her own was waning fast—the garden she had tended—the eyes she had gladdened—the noiseless haunts of many a thoughtful hour—the paths she had trodden as it were but yesterday—could know her never more.

Pardon me a moment; there's something in my eye.

Well, of course, I pulled it together Minnelli and headed back to the office. But this evening I think I need to go off and find a book - a good old-fashioned book, dusty and slightly musty and lovely - and see what's been going on at Miss Betsy Trotwood's since last I looked her up.

And what, you might ask, are those rather twee bibelots there up top? Well, one thing the Villa Muscato is replete with is Dickensiana, as Mother Muscato (of sainted memory) collected it. It's not the sort of thing to appeal to the Evil Stepmother, and so in due course a series of packing boxes showed up all the way across the seas where we were living at that point, full of things like yellowed editions of the Illustrated London News, plates with scenes from A Tale of Two Cities et al, an endearingly repulsive jug in the form of the great author himself (looking contemplative, for a jug), and a great many of these little figurines. That's Little Nell herself, third from left.

I suppose Dickens isn't terribly fashionable, or more properly dwells out somewhere beyond fashion. Still, I love him dearly, and as we head into his third century, I hope that somewhere there's a small boy sitting, perhaps, in his grandmother's living room, and opening, for the first time, one of those books, to read. "Chapter One: I am born..."

Venus in Furs (and Feathers and Diamonds)

Miss Crawford, just because. Utterly resplendent in her self regard. Not to mention her oddly endearing Mamie gloves, a surprising indication that, apparently, in Joan's world, this is daywear.

Gloriana 2.0

Sixty years today; hard to imagine it, doing that job, day in, day out for 60 years. Let alone doing it so very well. Say what you will, she has a marvelous smile.

Her mother, of course, was famous for hers. I've always found it a rather practiced smile, determined to charm, at its least successful verging on the fixed.

No, I think the Queen's is more like that of her grandmother, the redoubtable Queen Mary. It's altogether a less predictable phenomenon, but all the more endearing for it.

One can't, I suppose, wish her sixty more. You know what I do wish, though? That she's with us for a good long time, long enough to see her first-born's first-born have his first. And that that child is a girl, the first ever British heiress apparent. She'd have a thing or two to learn from her great granny...

Today in History: Nice Cans

Why, no, I don't actually know why dear Florence Henderson is hoisting those tins, or for that matter why she's looking so roguish about it. I'm guessing either Hi-C or tomato juice - neither of which exactly reek of Wessonality.

I do know, though, that this memorable vignette was snapped on February 5, 1998 - and Life was there.

A Note from the Infirmary

Well, it's been a rather quiet weekend hereabouts, mostly because poor dear Mr. Muscato finds himself rather in the position of the caped crusader above. Nothing broken, thank goodness, but an imposing splint/cast/bandage-y sort of thing, strict instructions to keep still, and an enticing array of painkillers.

(On a side note, it's not as easy as you might think to find a random image that combines a cast and a certain allure - and my goodness, do you have to wade through a ridiculous amount of eyebrow-raising ephemera to do so! The things that people get up to. All I know is that I don't recommend Googling "hot man leg in a cast" if you're not quite entirely alone. I'm still blushing...)

He'll be fine, of course, but it would not be wholly inaccurate to say that I think he may be working the situation a little more than is strictly necessary. I've firmly drawn the line, though, at the Robin costume.

Birthday Girl: Saint Gertrude

Seen here looking uncharacteristically girlish (not to mention be-foundationed), Miss Gertrude Stein. Not, it must be admitted, the most convincing of Gibson Girls, but she did grow into a trademark look that suited her far better.

138 today, and still going strong strong strong.

Too, Too Divine

The news from dear JoeMyGod that things have gotten even odder in the world of That Somewhat Different Bishop, Eddie "Muscles" Long, got me thinking. Why I love the Internet is that what I was thinking about was, more or less, this very wallpaper. And therein lies a tale.

The paper, you see, is from a longtime Philadelphia institution that I've only just discovered disappeared seven or eight years ago. It was a place called the Divine Tracy Hotel, a name that only hints at the bizarerie within. The DT, you see, was run by the International Peace Mission, better known locally as the Church of Father and Mother Divine. Theirs is a saga that reads like fiction (think Sinclair Lewis meets Nathanael West), but it was just part of the background weirdness of living in the City of Brotherly Love back then.

The Tracy was, even thirty years ago, more than a shade down at heel, but it had its standards. Actually, it was entirely a creature of its standards, which followed the particular diktats of Father and Mother and ranged from a vegetarian diet (served in the actually rather cosy Keyflower Restaurant) to a strict dress code (no shorts, please!) to a total segregation by sex (men on one floor, women on another, and no mixing allowed). It was way eccentric, but it was cheap and cheerful.

Why, then, the wallpaper revery? Well, you see, once upon a time one was a student 'round about those parts. From time to time it was extremely inconvenient not to have a quiet place uninterrupted by roommates, houseparents, or worse. Where better, then, for a young man of Artistic Tastes to repair with a friend for a quiet evening of, um, studying, than a quiet and almost laughably inexpensive hotel that ruthlessly enforced a single-sex setting? As long as you kept things quiet, the very patient (except with short sleeves and lamb chops) staff (who all had noms d'hôtel, or I suppose du Divine like Sweetness Peaceful and Cheery Faithfulness) were none the wiser. Actually, I have to admit that after the fourth or fifth consecutive weekend I took up residence in one of their $15 doubles (with, I also have to admit, varying study pals), I think Mr. Faithfulness might just have had a clue.

In any case, that's wallpaper I've seen from all sorts of angles, none of them strictly kosher, as it were, by Divine Tracy house rules.

Sadly, the glory days of the International Peace Mission have long ago come and gone. The Tracy is now student apartments, and its grander sister, the Divine Lorraine, lies derelict in North Philadelphia. Amazingly, though, Mother Divine lives on. Here she is, pictured in the Main Line mansion that is now the focus of the movement:

The snap's from a few years ago, but I picture her still there, just a shade more Miss Havishamy, waiting either for the return of Father Divine or for Mr. Faithfulness to bring in her doubtless meat-free dinner.

So in any case, Bishop Eddie may now claim to be a king, but he's still a piker by Father Divine standards - he after all, convinced not a small number of people that he was God incarnate, and got rather a fascinating life out of it. What Mr. Faithfulness and his fellow church members got out of it is less clear, but they all seemed serene enough. Maybe he tries on Mother's stoles when she's not looking...

The wallpaper comes courtesy of Katbert's very festive Flickr photostream.

Lady of the Lake

Or at least of her Brentwood swimming pool. Hope floats, they say, and so does the lovely and talented Miss Dolores Del Rio. Although she's about thisclose to a wardrobe malfunction in that daring bandeau top - which she has rather oddly paired with her girdle.

The mysteries of Hollywood never cease to fascinate...

Beefcake Update #1

Since yesterday may have been just a bit of a downer, I thought today we'd launch the first of a few Important Updates in the lives of some of our Café regulars.

Since last we met, of course, Egypt has had (as Eleanor of Acquitaine once observed of her own family, at least in The Lion in Winter) its little ups and downs, and at some point I suppose we will have to have a chat about all that.

In the meantime, though, there have been some triumphs and trials - and, it must be admitted, some setbacks - in the career of dear Mr. Tarek Naguib, last seen waxing Tribbianiesque (here, I'm happy to see that he has, by all appearances, cut down on the waxing, up to a point). In March 2010, he traveled halfway 'round the world to Incheon, South Korea, to vie for the coveted Mr. World title.

But alas, it was not to be. The dear boy only made the top 20, and has since retreated to a Nileside career in modeling and the occasional music video.

But all is not lost - if only because, while carrying out the necessary rigorous research that has gone into uncovering all this, I've just now encountered...someone new. Gentle readers, let me introduce you to one Mohammed Al Maiman, of whom more, I suspect, anon:

Back in 2010, he was Tarek's competition and vanquisher, as he went on to finish as 2nd runner up. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind running up against him any time. I suspect we'll be running into him again hereabouts, with any luck at all...

Not a Liberace Medley...

According to a new survey, a randomly queried set of Britons have identifed as the Saddest Song Ever REM's dirgelike "Everybody Hurts." I'm not convinced. The others named are really no better, taking in songs from the mawkish ("Candle in the Wind," for God's sake) to the bombastic ("My Way" - !) to the simply mystifying (are there really people who burst into tears when hearing "Seasons in the Sun"?). A few genuinely are misery-inducing ("Eleanor Rigby," for one, not to mention "Leavin' on a Jet Plane," which can still get me when the mood is just right), but on the whole, I think it's at best a highly incomplete sampling.

For example, not a single song by Janis Ian appears on the list, and that seems to me an egregious oversight. Making up for that, here we have a live rendition of her "Tea and Sympathy" (from an Israeli TV show a few decades ago, a number likely too lugubrious, I fear, for the definitely un-depressing Redundant Variety Hour...). Listening, keep in mind that this is probably not even one of Janis's top-ten tearfests - this is the woman, after all, who came up with "At Seventeen," "In the Winter," and "Breaking Silence," just to grab three titles from her woebegone catalogue.

Long ago and far away, I worked a Janis Ian show, and even then it was a surprise that she was actually a funny, feisty, and fairly completely non-lachrymose personage. More recent videos show that, even though she remains a master of sorrow (not to mention having become rather startlingly lesbo-matronly), this is still the case, which is somehow very nice to know - I would have to think that five decades of making people cry would get to you, somehow.

And to think we haven't even started on the hardcore stuff - "Strange Fruit," anybody? "Anyone who had a Heart"? And let's not even bring up "Puff the Magic Dragon"...

The Last Flapper

I just came across a remarkable obituary in that staple of the almost lost art of writing them, The Telegraph. Would you believe - and I very nearly don't - that the limpid-eyed young lady above has only just left us this month? She was the euphoniously named Frederica Sagor Maas, and at the time of her death she was, at 111, the third oldest person in California.

That alone is, to an extent, remarkable in itself. What has me gobsmacked, though, is that she was very likely among the very last links to the silent-film era at its most vibrant. A scriptwriter, she worked on films including the major Clara Bow vehicles The Plastic Age and It (generally identified, inaccurately, only with the hyperflorid writing of Elinor Glyn), as well as one of Louise Brooks's more notable Stateside efforts, Rolled Stockings (as evocative a Jazz Age title, in its way, as any, no?). She even had a hand in the great Garbo-Gilbert Flesh and the Devil.

She and her husband, Ernest, had a varied time of it, and while their work on Betty Grable's 1947 vehicle The Shocking Miss Pilgrim helped make that picture a hit, they left Hollywood, and Frederica spent the balance of her professional life in the somewhat less fraught field of insurance adjusting.

At 99, she published an autobiography that was, apparently, equal part bitterness and exposé, full of lurid tales of Paramount orgies and Metro misbehavior. She didn't think much, it seems, of most of the studio types she worked with, and she doesn't seem to have gone out of her way to have played the Hollywood game.

It's amazing to think that until just a couple of weeks ago there was someone among us who could have told us, first person, what it was like to watch Clara Bow at work and play, someone who was a peer and counterpart of Frances Marion, who was hard at work as a scriptwriter years before Dorothy Parker headed West. Not to mention someone who likely danced the Charleston and Black Bottom alongside Lucille LeSeuer in some LA nightclub and who was a friend of Norma Shearer's (before Mrs. Thalberg became the semi-petrified Boss's wife and no matter what she thought of the man she dismissed as a "mama's boy").

At 110, the Telegraph reports, she asked for "a large chocolate cake" on her birthday. She earned it.

Our Growing Family

I mentioned, I believe, that we've had an addition to our little family since last we met, didn't I? Well, here he is. He's a genuine pound puppy, left behind by a fleeing expatriate family (from what we've never learned, rather on purpose) and taken in following a distraught call from our vet's office - "but you boys are so good with little dogs!"

So here we are, (mostly) happy caretakers of a Yorkie whose only legacy from his fickle previous family, a tattered chenille blanket aside, is having been given an entirely inappropriate name: Baudouin. Ten points to anyone who guesses where they came from and, presumably, returned to...

Mr. Muscato, what with being Egyptian and all, is devoted to diminutives (only in Cairo can you attend a meeting in the most serious of corporate boardrooms surrounded by captains of industry named Gigi, Zizi, TouTou, and worse), so he promptly became Boudi. He's rather a handful, being of a rompful nature, but he and Koko get along brilliantly (which was distinctly a surprise), and while he has a regrettable tendency to eat socks (he's pulling one off my foot even as I type), he possesses a boundlessly optimistic nature that has been a great tonic in trying times.

Although I may have to start going to the office in that most 80s of looks, sockless loafers...

It's Alive!

Philips Family fun-fact: Minerva (left) makes all their underthings - including Vern's (center) chastity devices - out of that self-same brown dotted double-knit. In fact, he's wearing one of her more cunning designs; it's a one piece that includes the necktie. It takes Millie (right) more than thirty minutes to get him in and out of it.

Fame's Footnotes

Birthday thoughts, today, for two very different ladies, united only by the chance of their sharing the date - and the thoroughgoing way that, despite lashings of fame once upon a time, they have disappeared from the headlines and public consciousness alike. It's truly out of sight, out of mind for a lethal songbird and The Last of the Poor Little Rich Girls.

Murder first...

In 1976, Claudine Longet was just another middlingly successful, slightly faded pop star (had there been a Branson, she wouldn't merited her own theatre), recently divorced from her longtime, bigger-name husband Andy Williams. She had had a brief vogue in the mid-sixties for her wispy, charmingly accented renditions of middle-of-the-road pop favorites; you can, if care to, get a sense of her to my ears pallid oeuvre here. She returned to the front pages for all the wrong reasons when her boyfriend (and it was a scandal in itself, even in 1976, that a divorcée would have a boyfriend), a pro skier, wound up shot. She was convicted, if only of criminal negligence, and there was much agitation that her sentence was a mere 30 days.

That much I remembered. What I either never knew or had forgotten was that she ended up marrying her defense lawyer (after his own divorce), and as part of the settlement of a civil action that followed the first trial, agreed to stay mum for the rest of her life.

And so she's done. It's odd to think that she's still around, 70 today, apparently living quietly in Aspen, Colorado. You would have thought she'd had enough of skiing...

We see our second birthday girl, right, here in the first flush of her involuntary fame. Athina Onassis had the mixed luck to be born into almost inconceivable amounts of money, courtesy of an equally inconceivably dysfunctional family. Everything about her mother Christina's life made the papers, from her miserable love life to her miserable self-image to her miserable four divorces. The public seemed to take a kind of solace in knowing that all that cash couldn't make Christina happy, or pretty, or anything, apparently, but miserable. Athina was only three when the whole sorry spectacle came to an end, and her childhood was marked by a drumbeat of press looking to turn her into the living immolation her mother had become.

And here's the suprising thing: despite a spate of articles now and again when something caught an editor's eye (Athina taking her father's surname; various legal wranglings over her various inheritances; her supposedly mixed feelings about her Greek heritage), Athina seems to have let fame pass her by. Today she's 27, an equestrienne married to an equally horse-mad Brazilian, and seemingly living the life of a (comparatively) ordinary low-profile jet-setter.

One funny thing does unite these two: in true tabloid fashion, let's call it The Curse of the Kennedys.

Athina, of course, is Jackie O's step-granddaughter, and it was that connection that really fueled all the coverage of her mother's horrid life. Claudine, it seems, before she entered the limbo-land of the Hollywood ex-wife, had traveled in good circles: She and Andy were at the Ambassador Hotel, waiting to go out later, while their pal Bobby Kennedy gave the speech that was so decidedly interrupted by Mr. Sirhan Sirhan.

One wonders what each would make of the other, were they to meet blowing out their birthday candles...

So...

Geez. You go away for what, a year, year and and a half? Things really fall apart.

As did I, for a little while. I got sick, and then I got better, and through it all I stayed insanely busy trying to preserve the illusion that I'm fine, perfectly fine. Which I wasn't, of course, but what with having a new job in a new country, not to mention a heaping helping of debts and obligations, one tries to keep up. None of which is terribly amusing.

In any case, on the off chance that anyone's still paying attention, here we are. For the record: Mr. Muscato is still a saint, Koko is still a scamp, and we've even added a new terrier to all our lives, more of whom, perhaps, anon. We've learned to like, well enough, the life we're leading, and we're already planning Plan B.

And through it all, I've missed being here. All sorts of things good and bad have happened out in the Great Wide World, and I've missed dishing it all. Living, as I did for too long, in a kind of life-wide Writer's Block, I've missed out on so much. And now it's time to try and see if one can't, like Mrs. Levi, come out of one's personal haze - to the lights, if not of 14th Street, at least of this place I so enjoyed creating, once upon a time that feels longer ago than it really is.

In due time, I suppose, explanations and apologies as necessary. Today, I'm going to hit "publish" and see what happens. It's a little scary, truth to tell. But I'm learning, relearning really, as one must, that scary can be good. Here goes.

Birthday Girl: The Queen of Hollywood

105 years ago today, a few miles outside Helena, Montana, smack dead-center in the heart of Broadwater County, a rancher and his wife had a bouncing baby girl. Who could have predicted that that flower of the prairie would grow up to be the most supremely gracious, self-assured, and self-aware lady of the American cinema?

She was, of course, Myrna Loy, and while the crown bestowed on her by Hollywood was really just something of another studio publicity ploy (the King, of course, was Gable), it fit her.

She only hit her stride as a star after a decade spent in what must have seemed an endless string of stinkers and unlikely ethnic parts. After putting in her time as Vamp, Lady in Waiting, Fifi, Chorus Girl, Inez Quartz, Girl in China, Yasmani, Nubi, Slave Girl, Lola Bland (!) and, God help her, Fah Lo See, Myrna was at long last rescued. MGM, having taken its sweet time, figured out what to do with her, which was: treasure her, glorify her, and, most of all, Americanize her - as if that took much doing.

And so she became Nora Charles; the glamourous leading lady who warmed up William Powell in all those Thin Man movies (and many others) and who came to epitomize a kind of ideal American lady. In a town not known for the quality, Myrna was serene. By the time she moved on to television and the stage, as Hollywood's onetime studio goddess eventually did, simply casting her was a kind of shorthand, a mark of quality. Myrna Loy was, remained, and, I suspect, always will be a class act.

Would that one could say that for every luminary sharing this her natal day. In truth, they're a mixed bunch. Let's say Happy Birthday, even so, not just to Mrs. Charles, but also to epic bibulist Peter O'Toole and antic jurisprudentist Lance Ito; to real-life Mr. Bette Davis Gary Merrill and television's Mr. Edith Bunker Carroll O'Connor; to the barely Transylvanian eternal pre-teen werewolf Butch Patrick and hardly Olympian sometime Prince protégée Apollonia*; and to pulchritudinous Loy co-eval Ann Dvorak, piquant thesp Mary Louise Parker, and putrid would-be conservacomic Victoria Jackson.

We see Miss Loy here a few decades after the height of her reign, but in my opinion she still looked damn good. I love that fiesty Old Dame look, one too little seen anymore in this taut and frozen-visaged era...

*Apollonia fun-fact: it was in fact her eponymous sometime girl group Apollonia 6 that first sang, on their equally eponymous first album, "Manic Monday", ages, more or less, before the Bangles. Who knew?