Something Tells Me

The inimitable Miss Lene Lovich presents the very moment that New Wave died.  And went to lip-synch hell. 

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East is East

Today's birthday gal took my febrile brain in the direction of all things vampy, while earlier this week, dear Bill revealed that he, like me, has spent some time in the Land of the Rising Sun.  Well, to me, shady ladies and Japan add up to only one thing:  1968's Black Lizard, one of the greatest psychedelic transvestitite musical thrillers starring Yukio Mishima ever made.

Here we see the leading lady, as it were, of Black Lizard, Mr. Akihiro Maruyama, albeit in a different kind of drag.  Dating to 1962, this clip clearly captures a very specific - and deeply unsettling - moment in Japanese culture, one in which Beatnikiana meets The Mikado in a dark alley on the way to a Robert Wilson opera.  While I first traveled there 25 or more years later, it's pretty much exactly how I felt the entre time I was in Japan - certainly a much more accurate depiction, at least to me, of that particular form of anomie than that snoozefest Lost in Translation.

I really find this number very odd.  How would you describe it?

Dark Lady Laughs...

...and lights her candles one by one - 123 of them, actually, for today is the birthday of French cinema's seminal femme fatale, the enchantingly mononymous Musidora. 

The original Irma Vep gave Theda Bara (and how often do you get two anagrammatical names in one sentence?  This kind of prose don't come cheap, kids) more than a run for her money in the vamp department, leavening her lethal allure with both stunts and humor, two things that weren't poor Theodosia's long suit, as it were.  She even outlived her American coeval by two years.  If so inclined, you can catch a brief but startlingly effective glimpse of her here.

File Under "Feelings, Unlikely"

Well, that's as maybe, Mrs. Steve Lawrence, but it's going to take more than a little Max Factor Light Egyptian to turn you into the Rose of Spanish Harlem.

She may be feeling Spanish, but the overall effect is less Sexy Señorita than a vague attempt at a Princess Margaret impression, don't you think?  I suppose in 1961, though, an album called "I Feel So Snowdon" wasn't likely to be much of a chart-topper...

Not that the onetime Edith Garmezano doesn't offer the occasional surprise, mind you - did you know that she's half Turkish?

Practice, Practice, Practice

Fifty-two years ago tonight, dear Mr. Eisenstadt snapped this perfectly charming shot of what Life described as "Mrs. Gustav Mahler, widow of composer, raptly listening to his 'Resurrection Symphony,' conducted by Leonard Bernstein, at Carnegie Hall."

Well, possibly, but I think we might be justified in thinking that the lady known to her friends and not inconsiderable number of enemies as Alma Maria Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (yes, she got around) finds the Maestro's obsession with her late (first) husband just about as tiresome as she found the composer himself by the time he conveniently shuffled off this mortal coil back in '11.

Yes, I do believe we're safe in saying that this is a picture of a widow (twice over, actually; Gropius she divorced) napping, possibly even snoring lightly, happy in the knowledge that not a soul will dare to say a word about it (not to mention perfectly content in her sables, false fringe, and continuing notoriety-by-association). She's probably dreaming of what Bernstein's excellent cook will whip up for the after-party; she looks like someone who enjoyed a toast point and a glass or two, no?

White House Woman

On this Presidents' Day, let's spend a moment considering the remarkable lady we find here looking quite uncharacteristically benign.  She is, you see, someone rather special in the annals of the American presidency, having been the goad and gadfly of our fearless leaders for the better part of the twentieth Century:  Alice Roosevelt Longworth. 

She started with McKinley (she regarded "the President and poor frail little Mrs. McKinley as if they were two usurping cuckoos" at the inauguration that saw her own father seated as vice president, and she admitted, after his assassination, to the slightest twinge of guilt at having hoped so ardently for his death) and ran straight on through Roosevelts Teddy, her father ("I can be President of the United States or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both," quoth he), and Franklin, her cousin ("nine parts mush and one part Eleanor," quoth she), and ending up with Carter, whom she considered an over-earnest bore and refused to meet. 

She wowed the Dowager Empress of China in 1905 (and therein lies a tale or ten, not to mention gifts of enough fine brocade to keep her in evening gowns for the better part of fifty years), and she was still wowing them 70 years later - her last public appearance was at the official celebration of the Bicentennial.  She played at politics, voting more by instinct than party, and she had, it seems, from start to finish and despite some of the inevitable setbacks and missteps, a fairly marvelous time of it all.  I hope that the current White House daughters give her a thought or two as they head into what we must hope will be their second term - she's a far better role model, heaven knows, than those dreary Bush twins or the dreaded Nixon sisters.  Maybe we'll find them, come 2015 or so, raising a little discreet hell in her memory...

A Girl Like That

Although life has turned into a whirlwind of travel and unexpected dentistry, I don't want to lose sight of our little contest.  I'm happy to note that after a couple of false starts, you Gentle Readers came through and discovered the secret identity of our chipper pigtailed waif.

She is indeed the child born Rosa Dolores Alverío, but known to the world (after her own false start as Rosita) as Rita Moreno.  She's seen here, on this the nearer end of her long career, working a pair of lounging pajamas as only a veteran of MGM could do.  Hers is a varied career, taking in everything from a supporting part in an Esther Williams epic (Pagan Love Song) to a stint as my second-favorite Rockford Files Expendable Girlfriend (first place being reserved, as it so often is around here, for the divine Sheree North).*  She's played Thai in The King and I and (rather more authentically) Puerto Rican in West Side Story, but that only hints at the ethnic diversity that Hollywood threw at her, from (India) Indian in Father Knows Best to generically ethnic in any number of now-forgotten film and TV moments (let titles like The Fabulous Señorita and Garden of Evil tell the tale - not to mention Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation, in which she's apparently the mysterious - and uncredited - Soubrette).  And she did Singin' in the Rain (which came out sixty years ago, in case you're not feeling old enough today), which has to count for something.

In any case, all congratulations to the lucky winner, the mysterious Snappychuck, who beat out suggestions sensible (dear MJ's Lena Horne, who I thought might come up in this conversation) and less so (whatever madness the ineffable Thombeau was going on about).  I wish I could say there were fabulous prizes, but I can offer nothing more satisfying than the opportunity to appreciate the dressing-room poise of La Moreno - from roses to bracelets (and everything in between) - she is superb.  You don't get to be an EGOT without knowing a thing or two about The Pose, after all, do you?

* Hmmm and Oh, dear.  I just went and checked, and Sheree North doesn't seem to have done The Rockford Files.  Why then do I have a distinct memory of her playing, recurrently, one of his Hooker-with-a-Heart-of-Gold girlfriends?  It seems like every other actress of a suitable age in the mid-to-late-70s did an ep or two (we're talking everyone from Mrs. Bogart to Linda Dano, after all) - how did they miss Sheree?  I don't care; in my mind she did, and she was damn good. Rita was a Rockford doxy, too, and nabbed an Emmy (one of two) for it.

He Told Me to Open Wide...

Just so you know that I do intend to entertain as well as whine, herewith the young Miss M. at her bawdiest (well, close), to introduce a tale of woe.

The minibreak was a great success, but darlings, the hours preceding it were fraught.  Our saga starts one night late last week, when I was swanning about feeling terribly posh at a very glam local soirée, the kind of gala party at which these parts excel.  A band was playing, the canapés were being handed about, and, on behalf of Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International (before whose mast, as it were, I labor), I was all set to give a gracious little speech.

Alas, it was not to be.  While moving around, greeting friend and foe alike (have you mastered the art of the forced smile? I have, and deploy it at will), I had the uneasy feeling that all was not right.  I bit with gay abandon into a shrimp puff, and knew for a fact that it was so:  a decade of dental neglect had come home to roost, and how.  Gathering up the remnants of my suddenly vanished elegance (and not a few fragments of tooth), I skedaddled, leaving my clever little remarks to a colleague and racing home to commiserate with poor Mr. Muscato.

Now, I do confess it isn't wise to leave these things undone, but you have to realize I have what amounts to a genuine phobia about dentists, the legacy of my late mother's unquestioning devotion to her childhood practitioner, who by the time I came around was best described as Dr. Shakes McParkinsons.  Between the ages of one-and-a-half and six, I was forced to spend ample time in his terrifyingly primitive offices (all of his equipment was black enamel, the kind more usually seen on vintage typewriters or the switchboards answered by extras in films of the '30s.  Much of it was pedal-operated.  Get the picture?) as the result of an early childhood accident.  Never the most coordinated of tots, I fell off a bed.  Into a wastebasket.  About three weeks later, my elder brother looked up at breakfast one morning and asked, "Did the baby's nose always look like that?"  It hadn't, and neither had most of what turned out to be a thoroughly rearranged jaw.  It's amazing, really, that I have teeth at all.  My early childhood was a festival of bizarre full-cranial apparatuses to be worn at night, as well as the complete lack of any photos of me smiling, what with not having any front baby teeth.  I'm still probably the only person you know who can eat corn on the cob without using any canine teeth.  Molaring away isn't efficient, but until I was about eleven, I had no choice.

In any case, the tender ministrations of Doctor Shakes left their mark.  For a number of years, I was terrified not merely of dentists, but of anyone in white.  Weddings were a fiasco of helpless wailing, and poor Grandmother Muscato used to ring ahead to the local department store to have the ladies in Cosmetics near the door stow their labcoats in order to avoid my having a meltdown on the way to her favorite destination, Modern Matrons, the most elegant corner of Better Dresses.  The combination of crippling fear and some of the places we've lived (the average dental facility in West Africa making Doctor Shakes's SweeneyToddian premises look like the Mayo Clinic) have meant putting off the day of reckoning until, as this past Thursday, I had no choice.

So off we went, me in no fit shape to be seen in public, to a dentist highly recommended by one of Mr. Muscato's friends.  One of his more sadistic friends, it turns out, for the dentist - let's call him Dr. Ahmed - was nothing if not direct.  "Your mouth," he informed me in no uncertain terms and a nearly unintelligible Syrian accent, "ees a dizeszter."  And then, ignoring all attempts to make him pity me my crippling fears, and abetted by two equally obdurate Philippina assistants, he set to to work, pausing only long enough for me to contemplate what seemed to be my clearly imminent mortality, but not long enough for me to demand novocaine (novocaine?  I wanted morphine).  He drilled, he filled, he used some sort of miniaturized jackhammer on places that haven't seen the light of day in ages, and, while he may not the kind of dentist immortalized in the classic number above (although he is, I have to admit, comely enough for a middle-aged Syrian dentist), he certainly was thorough.

I think his take-no-prisoners approach may have done what years of Specialists in the Sensitive Patient back in Manhattan were never able to achieve.  I have to go back for a second appointment next week, and while I'm hardly looking forward to it, I'll probably go.  And I must say things are feeling better.

The only real effect of all this on our lovely weekend was a certain tenderness, leading to a great deal of soup and the less chewy cuts of meat.  Now we're home safely, the dogs are over the moon - and I have to take Mr. Muscato to the dentist.  He's not quite the dizeszter I was, but it looks like we'll be seeing more and more of Dr. Ahmed...

All I Ever Wanted

Mr. Muscato and I have heeded the good advice of Misses Caffey, Carlisle, Schock, Valentine, and Weidlin and are making the most of this President's Day weekend.  We've hied off to Dubai (just up the road, don't you know) to our favorite Big Silly Resort Hotel.

Fortunately, it's a place that is pretty much what Biosphere could have been had it been decorated by Messrs. Waldorf and Astoria (and, yes, I know there are no such people.  On the other hand, I firmly believe that had they existed, they wouldn't have sired anything as trashy as Paris Hilton, but we're heading very far off topic here).  It's lavishly over-the-top and entirely self-contained, from the dozen or so restaurants to the vast and highly environmentally suspect mini-rainforest that graces the multi-acre lobby.  It's a great place to be this weekend, as Dubai has been hit by what today seemed just about the worst sandstorm we've seen in our six-plus years out in these parts.

So here in our own little world (as the sand howls by outside and the view is reduced to what looks vaguely like a scene from Miss Gish's great epic The Wind), we've done what we like doing best on minibreaks:  nothing at all.  Breakfast, spa, lunch, spa, cocktails, dinner, collapse in room.  If we're terribly ambitious tomorrow, we'll mix it up a little bit and maybe throw in a massage or sit in the rainforest for an hour or two.  And you know what?  We've earned it, we need it, and on Sunday we'll drive back home (presuming it's possible to see more than a car-length by then) all the better for it.  God knows what mischief those damn dogs will have been up to, though...

Yip!

 

Let's spend a few minutes, shall we, with Mr. John Daly and the panel on that most civilized of television Game Shows, What's My Line?  Tonight's mystery guests are the lovely and talented Andrews Sisters, and it's some measure of their fame even in 1959 that all it takes is one syllable by the trio for the panel, led as usual by Miss Dorothy Kilgallen, to break into one of their hits.  I love that one of the most common reasons mystery guests get found out is because they're appearing this week at the Latin Quarter, and the Andrewses are no exception.

Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne look to have been good eggs.  Patty's on the right, and today is her 94th birthday.  I hope somebody sings her a chorus of "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön," don't you?

Continental Tittle-Tattle

News traveled fast.  On their first morning in Paris, Irene stopped in mid-matchstrike and Harriet looked on in horror as Yvette laid out the truth to Alice: as incredible is it seemed, Stephen Haines was stepping out on Mary.

Lady of the House Speaking

Fifty years ago today, this lovely lady - then most commonly referred to as Mrs. John F. Kennedy (and which makes you feel older, that form of address or the phrase "fifty years ago"?) became a TV star.  She led Charles Collingwood of CBS News on a tour of the White House that was one of the most widely watched programs to date.  She even won an Emmy (well, an honorary one, but still).

Millions of viewers got a heaping helping of vintage Jackie, in a film that, seen today, seems almost as primitive as a Biograph two-reeler.  It's hard to imagine the country now glued to something as stately, sedate, and reverent as the factually titled A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, and in 2012 it makes for curious viewing (you can see it,whole, here, although alas without contemporary commercials).

Mrs. K. won plaudits for banishing from the president's residence what were then seen as decades of bad taste - to paraphase that Ultimate Arbiter of Good Taste, June Bride, she gussied up the McKinley Stinker she moved into, making it into, if not a Kennedy Modern, then at least a paragon of American Elegance.  To today's eye, though, she replaced Teddy Roosevelt's moose heads and Taft's potted palms with something that looks very much like every middle-brow resort hotel lobby of the next decade (until mod swept away the last vestiges of Mid-Century Federal, sending smoked-glass mirror tiles and mud-colored shag carpet cascading up walls at Hyatts and worse across America). 

It's odd, too, to see so much of the future Jackie O; once her image was frozen forever a year and half after the broadcast, she was never again so present, in such abundance.  Watching her drift from room to room, her vaguely anaesthetized voice murmuring rapturously about "masses and masses of gold and glass..." or the night Pablo Casalas played the East Room, she is at once charming and disconcerting.  Her artless delivery recalls nothing so much as that of a supporting player in a John Waters movie, and the whole thing moves at an underwater pace. 

Her often parodied accent (the still-unfinished Treaty Room is "a chambah of HAAARahs...") is even more distinctive than one expects, an at times beguiling, at times giggle-inducing fugue of Boston (did she pick it up from the in-laws?), lockjaw, and the breathiness more associated with her famous blonde rival.  She smiles on cue, she nods her vast coiffure (Mr. Kenneth at his most cotton-candied), and says things like "It really is terribly good," (of a Van Buren-era portrait) in a way that calls forth the spectre of Gloria Upson.  When her husband joins in for the last few minutes, he seems by contrast to be speaking perfect Broadcast MidAtlantic.

We leave them there, that handsome couple, serene in the cluttered, half-decorated Treaty Room.  All these years later, we know more about them then they ever could have dreamed, a depressing amount of it not even slightly flattering.  The White House still looks much the same, even though it's survived being Ultrachintzed by Nancy Reagan and Little Rock Contempo'ed by the Clintons.  Bits of the Obama updates look even more Conference Center Classic than Mrs. Kennedy's Diplomatic Reception Room (there's a good article on presidential decorating, by the bye, here).

And yes, I am home sick from work today, with too much time on my hands.  Why do you ask?

On this Holiday...

Let me be the first to wish you, as is traditional in these parts, the happiest of Karen Valentine's Days.  May your residuals be plenty, and may you never be bumped for another damn season of Alf.

B is for...

Bourgeois (this interior), Bess (Truman, the lady deep in her magazine, left), and Birthdays.  Today is hers; she would be, in a better world, 127 today.

Few would argue that she was the most exciting of first ladies, but she had her own kind of homey charm, and she simultaneously managed to keep Harry happy and put up with Margaret (who would sing), which is no mean feat.  If nothing else, she set the stage for Mamie, who seemed by contrast both stylish and vigorous.

I don't know about you, but I'm just mad for that davenport, and I have to admit with a certain pride that somewhere in the depth of a storage unit back home, I have a chair just exactly like Harry's.

Funny Thing, a Woman's Career...

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1983, I bought this record. It's really a kind of longish EP, seven songs total; I bought it entirely because I wanted "It's Raining Men," which I promptly taped and then put the album aside.  I maybe listened to it, beyond the featured single, half-a-dozen times, at least a couple of which probably took place after that last-billed singer, to put it mildly, hit it big.  Her song is called "Eternal Love."  It's not her greatest work, but the voice is already there and in all fairness she's not yet even 20 (you can, if you like, hear it here).

Then a few years after that, there was a fire, and the album disappeared from my life (along with a couple hundred others, not to mention a great deal of other lost ephemera, ranging from every piece of paper I owned until that time to a portrait of Queen Marie Louise of Prussia that could probably be of assistance in forwarding my retirement had it survived).  I don't think I thought at all about the album until last year, when disco star Loleatta Holloway died.  "Ah," I thought, "she was that singer who was also on that bizarre Whitney Houston album I used to have."  It never occurred to me to check if I were right.

And of course I wasn't.  That other singer, tucked in between the fabulous Weather Girls and the soon-to-be superstar, is the nearly homonymous Leata Galloway.  It turns out she's very much alive.  She was older than Whitney, already in 1983 established on Broadway (the original cast of Hair, a few other things) and in the business in general.  She put out a couple of albums, featured here and there in some films.  She even sang backup on a track on one of my favorite albums, the Divine Miss M's Songs for the New Depression.  She did a run as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill (is that something in which every black singer d'un certain âge is required to have a stint?); she's been available for corporate events.  It seems, from a quick Google survey, like a respectable career, rather in the way an old pro once described hers to me as having made her "famous, at least on a couple of blocks in about 20 cities."  She hasn't yet rated Wikipedia, though, and she's not exactly a household name.
 
I'm thinking of Leata Galloway today, and wondering what she thought, over the years, working away in clubs and on German TV, about the girl she once was billed above.  Did she envy her, seeing her on some vast stage in one of those beaded white columns that made her into the goddess her voice made her seem?  Did she wonder why it wasn't she herself vaulting up the charts, into the movies, up, up, up?  And when, do you suppose, that envy stared to fade, to turn, perhaps, to something like relief?  I suspect it was long before yesterday, and now, I hope, she knows how much better off she is, selling her reissued records on Facebook and turning up here and there (at a memorial, for example, for songwriter Linda Laurie - herself a fairly fascinating person - singing "The Very Thought of You" in what seems on shaky homemade video pretty good voice).

Fame is a funny thing, and rarely entirely good for the people it blesses.  Sometimes it seems as if only the least prepared are chosen, and that for the most gifted is reserved the most special kind of hell.  All too often, it boils down in the end to a hotel room, at last a few too many too wrong choices, and ... scene.  Having played Billie, I suppose Leata could tell us a thing or two about all that, even if offstage she herself escaped.  It's easy to romanticize the pain of stardom, to let the sentimental tears fall, for Whitney now as before for Judy, Dalida, Amy, La Môme, too many.  Let's a spare a thought, a grateful feeling, for the working artists who soldier on.  To paraphrase the Master: God knows at least they were there - and they're here.  Look who's here.  Still here.

Racing with Destiny

 

And now she's free...

Vivre

 

Last year, on his birthday, Mr. Muscato got a wonderful present.  We were at our favorite hotel in that den of semi-iniquity, Dubai, having a cocktail, as one does, in the concierge lounge.  As everyone in these parts did, we had spent much of the day watching television, either sitting directly in front of it or keeping it in mind out of the corners of our eyes while we were doing something else, amazed and confused and apprehensive about what suddenly seemed like revolutions, revolts, uprisings springing up all around us.

We weren't surprised then, when the regularly scheduled mayhem was interrupted by a Special Announcement on Al Jazeera.  And two minutes later, we were surrounded, even in that sedate setting, by laughing, crying, and wonderfully surprised people.  Some were Egyptian; some had been there; some hoped for the same thing in their own countries; and some just saw the expressions on our faces and, half understanding, joined in to congratulate us.

After thirty years of stolid, brooding, infinitely depressing presence everywhere, it seemed, the man I've always thought of, derisively, as Uncle Hosni was checking out.  Even then we knew that it was just the end of the beginning, but it my God it was a start.

Moments like that stick in one's mind, of course, and they can be depressing in retrospect.  Now, one year later, again it's Mr. Muscato's birthday, but nothing seems any clearer - and much seems distinctly less hopeful - than it did that lovely long evening last February.

Still, I am not, to the limited extent of my political abilities, without hope.  Egypt is stronger than anyone can know, and while there are still obstacles, hurdles, setbacks, and annoyances without number ahead of us, I still believe it can, even if only in part, meet the expectations set during the unforgettable spring of 2011.

So today, we're off to celebrate again, have a nice lunch with friends (a little closer to home this time than Dubai - our own Fair City is suddenly chockablock with silly new ultra-deluxe hotels - I'll let you know how it goes).

My present to you is the video above.  I really do encourage you to watch it.  It's a song called "Sout el Horeya" (The Voice of Freedom), by Hany Adel, Amir Eid Hawary, and Sherif Mostafa, and last spring suddenly it was everywhere.  Now it's on the short list, with "Bread and Roses" and a few others, of Political Songs That Always Make Me Weepy.

It was made right in the middle of the uprising that was and is, reductively, referred to as Tahrir Square.  Watch those people.  They don't know how things are going to turn out; they know they might be attacked, assaulted, shot at, killed.  Still, they've come out to say, as Egyptians do, kifaya.  Enough.  There is only so long people can go without dignity, without pride, without hope; and the moment when they do something about it can be an astonishing thing to see.  They're not done yet.  Stay tuned.

Junior Miss-tery

Well, here's a familiar face, albeit at an unfamiliar time in her life.  Don't let those bobbysocks fool you, though - this pretty teen is already well on the way to the career that's kept her going ever since. I think she's cute as a bug in her two braids and pennyloafers.

The question is: who's that girl?  

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...