Patti, Maxene, and LaVerne Meet the Age of Aquarius

...and love every minute of it.

Nothin' but three old broads having a ball a good twenty years after I, at least, thought they retired.

How much you want to bet those are gowns by Travilla? Either that or they mugged Judy Garland en route to the studio...

Portrait Gallery: the Unfortunate Archduchess

Today of course, is the legendary Quartorze de Juilliet. A big celebration in Paris and other centers of francophilia, but I tend to think of it as the beginning of the end for a woman who really deserved better. It was three more years before Marie Antoinette met her death before a jeering mob, but after July 14, it was only a matter of time.

Several of the most interesting portraits of the Queen were by artists who were themselves women of accomplishment, like Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, who helped create the Marie with whom we are most familiar, a confection of feathers, powdered hair, and impressive frontage.

She started out a very long way from her sordid end; she was born the Archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna of Austria, daughter of the formidable Empress Maria Theresa.

Her place in the pop-cultural firmament seems continuous and unshakable, the subject of portrayals ridiculous...

...and sublime.

In the end, though, I can't shake the memory of how very badly it all turned out.

This posthumous portrait was by an aristocratic admirer, the Marquise de Bréhan - not quite the painter Vigée-Le Brun was, but I'm sure her heart was in the right place.

Birthday Girl: Polly Bergen

Happy 78 to Miss Polly Bergen - a multi-talented lady who has been a show-biz stalwart since the late forties - actress, singer, writer, and business woman. My sainted late mother would always add, when her name was mentioned, "and such a lady."


We trust that today she is by no means All Alone, although one does hope that quantities of marabou are still involved.

The Lady in Question Says Goodnight...

We said goodbye this week to yet another ... well, perhaps not quite Hollywood legend, but certainly Hollywood staple: Miss Evelyn Keyes, best known as Scarlett's deeply trying sister Suellen (she who gets slapped and has her Mr. Kennedy stolen out from under her) in Gone with the Wind.

She was always on the second rung, somehow; on-screen, she was perfectly fine, but didn't offer anything uniquely distinctive. She too often gave the impression of being a blend of Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Claire Trevor, and any one of the Bennett sisters.

What she did have was a private life to give any of her modern sisters pause - affairs and marriages long and short with everyone from Mike Todd to John Huston to Anthony Quinn (oh, and, of course, Artie Shaw. In the words of my dear friend Miss Rheba, discussing Keyes's passing yesterday, "Shaw? Who didn't marry him? I think he was written into their contracts!") Perhaps she was too busy managing her datebook to properly manage her career.

She made a lot of pictures, albeit too many of them with utterly forgotten titles like Strange Affair, The Mating of Millie, and The Killer That Stalked New York. At her best, she offered a sly, noirish twist on the depths that might lurk behind the nice girl next door.

Like so many of her contemporaries, she ended up in the usual television slots, including what sounds like the dirtiest Love Boat ever made: its segments are titled "Bricker's Boy", "Lotions of Love", and "The Hustler". Goodness.

She leaves behind, according to her New York Times obit, at least one great quote: "I always took up with the man of the moment - and there were many such moments."

Picture This: René Gruau

Daily, for the moment, I walk a few blocks through a faceless commercial district just outside DC, subjecting myself to another day's indoctrination in things bureaucratic.

En route, I pass a sad little dress shop, the kind that's clearly just holding on until it, too, turns into a McCosiQuiznoChipotleBucks, of which there apparently can't be enough in any neighborhood through which pass commuters.

On the far wall, wrinkled, stained, and just off-center, is a fading framed poster, one that calls up a world infintely distant from the dowdy frocks on offer:


It is, of course, a work by the late, great René Gruau, an artist who is just a fashion illustrator only in the way that Ella Fitzgerald was just a girl singer.

That said, he was of course an extraordinary fashion illustrator, one whose bold, graphic style did much to cement in the popular imagination the High Fashion worlds of Dior, Balmain, and other mid-century greats:

Much of his work, though, balances delicately between illustration and abstraction, fueled by his tremendous gift for fast, swooping lines that evoke anything from an eyelash to a jetliner to, as here, a LoieFulleresque skirt:

His best works not only show a product - a line of Van Cleef & Arpel baubles, for example - but make it clear that owning it would transform the wearer:

His women are impossibly glamourous, elegant - languourous houris who combine a nineteenth century hauteur with a very modern élan.

When called on, however, he had a fetching way with The Opposite Sex as well...

He was that rare specimen, someone whose birthname was actually a great deal more interesting than his professional one: Count Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli delle Camminate.

Something in his exotic Franco-Italian heritage clearly rubbed on his sensibility.

He was for decades as much associated with American magazines like Flair and Harper's Bazaar as French couture, which perhaps accounts for something insouciant and approachable in even his most chic creations.

And the man himself? In the measured words of one obituary, in the veddy British Guardian, "His private life remained discreetly private."

Image du Jour: (Mrs.) Snowdon by Snowdon

The Princess Margaret Rose. Just because.

Homesickness...

...is, in this case, the result of the infinite ennui of putting up with bureaucracy, tremendously boring training, and the exquisite horror of a family-filled short-term residential hotel. Mr. Muscato and I are pining for home.

This was, by local standards, a very crowded day at the beach last winter...

Second-String Blondes: Cleo Moore

It's hard to believe, really, but Jayne Mansfield was the successful Marilyn Monroe clone, the Backup Bombshell who actually made a sort of career out of it. In her ample wake came dozens of stars and starlets, women who for better or worse never quite found a niche of their own.

Some shed the come-hither looks and became stars for other reasons (one thinks of Shelley Winters); some slid into second-leads and Bs before finding roles as character broads (Sheree North).

Some simply disappeared - like Cleo Moore:

Gown, furs, and cigarette: tools of the trade for the Femme Fatale

Vamping, bad-girling, and cleavage-wrangling kept her fairly busy for a decade or so, but when she left the screen in the late fifties, no one paid her much mind, and frankly, the films themselves don't make a strong case for her as an overlooked phenomenon.

She apparently had a quiet and happy enough private life between the end of her glamour days and her all-too-early death in the mid-70s.

I like to think she spent time like this, looking a little hard and weary but enjoying her garden, thinking of Hollywood, "I miss it; I miss it not; I miss it..."

As with what seems like virtually every performer who ever appeared in a film between 1910 and the late 70s, the Internet has done much to resurrect Moore's reputation, to the extent that her limited oeuvre makes possible.

I suspect that she would be perfectly pleased to be remembered, but not much more than that; behind that platinum hair and imposing frontage, it seems, beat a very sensible heart.

Cleo's portraits come from Brian's Drive in Theater - Thanks!

There's the Beef!

I think it's time for a little Tasteful Male Nudity, don't you?

And what could be more tasteful than the man who, some hundred-odd years ago, almost singlehandedly invented the idea of the kind of stardom later exploited by Steve Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, of course, Buck Winston: the art of male display.

His name was Eugen Sandow, also known as Sandow the Magnificent. He was, among many other things, the first and only Ziegfeld Man, a lone muscled presence among the feathers and sequins of the Follies Girls.

There's no question that he had what it takes:

And the occasional allusion to classical antiquity made it all seem so respectable:

He sure knew how to fill out a leopard-skin loincloth - an art lost to us today, I fear, except for the dimming memory of Mickey Hargitay:

He had a complicated private life, one that included both a Frau Sandow and a Great Friendship with the pianist who accompanied his vaudeville act.

And, it seems, he shopped at International Male!

Like so many great beauties, he didn't make old bones, dying at 58 of what seemed suspiciously like syphilis.

It was quite something while it lasted, though - and wouldn't you love to hear what the pianist had to say about it all?

Dosvidaniya, Star of the Volga

Now and again, the obituary column summons up, not just someone of whom one has not previously heard, but a whole vanished world: for example, yesterday's announcement of the death of Nonna Mordyukova, who was, we are told, one of the great stars of Russian cinema.

She made dozens of films between the late forties and the turn of the century, pictures with titles like The Young Guard, A Simple Story, and They Fought for Their Country.

She had a definite Eastern-bloc glamor, handling husbands, lapdogs, and paparazzi with much of the ease and flair of her Western counterparts.

Her trademark, if photos are to be trusted, was a coleendewhurstian sort of gravitas - large serious eyes, fine features and dramatic bone structure.

Mordyukova emerged, post-glasnost, as a utility character player, used to summon up the kind of mixed feelings about the past that, in the German context, is sometimes called ostalgie...

But one is glad to see that she also indulged in a certain amount of post-Soviet dressing up - a flattering auburn rinse and a makeover giving her something of a Lynn Redgrave air:

In any case, perhaps I'll have to dig up one of her pictures. The Commissar, made in the mid sixties, sat on a shelf for twenty years, its story of an unwed apparatchik and her friendship with a Jewish family too hot to handle in the days of Brezhnev. It got her a special prize when it finally emerged at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988.

Adieu!

Image du Jour: Flashback

It was a time when goddesses roamed the earth...

... clad in Halston, insulated from reality by pharmaceuticals, and staring at the off-camera shirtless cater-waiter and his tantalizing tray of cocktails...

Totie Fields, Selling Her Candy

Totie on Sullivan - file that under Gone Like the Dodo. And that's a shame.

I never realized how very much she looked - and sounded! - like Divine.

Image du Jour: Drag Beyond Drag

The Telegraph recently carried this photo of a reveller at San Francisco Pride.

Drag, I sometimes think, has moved beyond mere female impersonation to become something else entirely. This creation, for example, appears to be impersonating an entire ecosphere. I don't know, frankly, whether that's entirely a good thing (I'm a little scared), but it's certainly vivid.

Portrait Gallery: Paging Dr. Love

John Singer Sargent painted some of the most scandalous portraits of the nineteenth century. My favorite among them is that of Dr. Samuel-Jean de Pozzi, Paris's leading physician for women during the Belle Époque, roué, and possessor of two of the most sensual hands ever painted:

He was the only doctor Sarah Bernhardt allowed near her person (in one of several ways, apparently), and he doubtless looked fetching in his preferred working outfit of white overalls and black cap - although it's hard to imagine he looked any better than he did here, in red robe and enormous ... self-regard.

Image du Jour: Roz - is that you?

One day, if this picture is to be believed, Rosalind Russell - perhaps running late after a little too much fun the night before - raced into makeup and, paying no attention, sat one chair to the right of where she was supposed to be. Ninety minutes later, she arrived on set, much to everyone's confusion, done up as Ann Sheridan.

Well, that's as near as I can figure. What do you suppose happened? 'Cause that sure ain't the Roz I'm used to...

Travelogue

So, you ask - what have those two scamps, Muscato and Mr. Muscato, been up to? Still on the road. We've crossed the Atlantic - missing the old Normandie or Berengaria every inch of the way - and landed in Boston.

We admired tall buildings:

And the bronzes outside the Public Library. If I had an ounce of energy I'd look them up, but I think they're St. Gaudens.

We moved on to family in and about Manhattan, and celebrated the Fourth on the Circle Line, taking in the much-ballyhooed temporary installation, the Waterfalls. Rather dramatic:

And had a sober moment passing part of Lower Manhattan, where no matter what goes in and up, there will always be an aching void:

And ended up in my sister's rather Narniesque garden to think about it all:

A very dull couple of weeks coming up, learning the kinds of things that practical people think are important in perhaps the direst of all American cities: its capital. We will extract what joy we can, and pass it on.

Birthday Girl: Della Reese

Many happy returns to a Great Lady of Song, one whose career - and Essential Fabulousness - has in recent years been overshadowed by fairly boring mass-market TV stardom.

Perhaps when you're born Delloreese you just have this kind of flair as a birthright:

She hairhopped with the best of them:

I first remember Miss Della from her many appearances on Mike and Dinah, recounting her near-death experiences and repeated miraculous comebacks.

Today, she's survived being Touched by the Networks and even retained much of her pizzaz - more power to her!

Honey, if that's what 70-something looks like, I want me some!

Celebrate, Dalida-Style

Let's observe the day with the fabulous song-stylings of Dalida, at the height of her Disco Diva phase.

Americana, a bit of dreams and madness, indeed!

A Very Practical Lady

From London comes the news that over 700 items from the personal collection of the Queen Mother's longtime servant, "Backstairs" Billy Tallon, will be sold at auction this weekend - signed photos, gifts from the Royal Family, memorabilia...

Of them all, however, I can't imagine wanting anything more than this casual note; one that at a stroke summarizes all that was most adorable about that indomitable old lady, the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, last Empress of India, and vigourous centenarian:

I'm sure it was needed, and much enjoyed. She clearly took to heart the Scouting motto: be prepared.

Happy Fourth!

What with Mr. Muscato and I traveling in the States, it seems appropriate to mark the big day more than we normally would back home. Happy 232nd birthday, you dear, battered, ridiculous place! You don't look a day over 229.

A couple of special guests are dropping into the Café to help celebrate:

Is that fireworks? No, just the rat-a-tat of Annie's tireless tootsies...

God bless America - and Kate Smith!

Any country with fans like this has got to be okay with me. Now if we could just do something about the management...

November can't come soon enough.