Looking for a good read? I hate to be anything but a total enthusiast about someone so fabulous, but I'm afraid that after ten days of slogging, I can recommend one book to avoid.
A Prima Donna's Progress, the autobiography of the redoubtable Dame Joan Sutherland, the Antipodean sensation known to opera lovers everywhere as La Stupenda, is less a memoir than a semi-guided tour of the world's most detailed datebook. It chronicles seemingly every event in the lady's long and varied career, one that should be - one might think - absolutely chockablock with incident, drama, and anecdote.
Instead, we get a relentless listing of every flight, every rehearsal, and Lord knows every performance that took place in a career that stretched from the end of the Second War almost to the end of the century. In fits of enthusiasm, people she encounters are described as "clever", "kind", or (in a rare spasm of enthusiasm) "talented"; otherwise, she remains singularly and obdurately silent on questions such as personality, aesthetics, or even the occasional on-the-fly observation of the goings-on about her.
Even so, it must be admitted, something of the magnificent absurdity of a diva's existence does float to the surface, apparently despite the authoress's best intentions. There is, for instance, the evocation of a vanished world conjured up by the juxtaposition of the lady's activities during a single week in the early '70s, in which she combined rehearsals at the Met with a quick stop at the book launch for Cole Lesley's tome on his life as Noël Coward's amanuensis and companion, with a (one presumes) lengthier appearance at a record signing in her honor - at Korvette's.
Still - it's a long haul, and the occasional gems are few and far between. It's frustrating to spend time with someone who's met everyone from Marjorie "
Interrupted Melody" Lawrence to the Queen Mother but who doesn't have an interesting thing to say about anyone, a certain sniffy dismissal of Pavarotti's starstruck ways possibly excepted.
Instead, why don't you read Cole Lesley's book, or the brief and touching memoir by Graham Payn, who was also Coward's intimate? The latter writes movingly on how much it meant that Sutherland - unlike many of the Master's other friends and toadies - kept up her relations with the eccentric band of companions Coward called "the family" even when the great man was no more (rarely has any widow been more thoroughly and completed dropped than Payn, and by people who really ought to have known better).
Reading Dame Joan, one senses that there is a fascinating, sympathetic soul in there somewhere lost in the rush to get from place to place; reading
about her, one learns with satisfaction that there truly is.
At a point one suspects fairly late in her relatively brief career as a Cheesecake Cutie, the first lady of the Broadway musical, Miss Mary Martin, adopts a festive seasonal pose.
Looking for a good read? I hate to be anything but a total enthusiast about someone so fabulous, but I'm afraid that after ten days of slogging, I can recommend one book to avoid.
You know, I think I shall have to complain to the municipality - the beach nearest to the Villa Muscato is really getting unconscionably crowded on the weekends now that the good weather is here.
In high school, Mary Margaret (second from left) always overidentified with Marilyn Munster, and never more so than during those awkward, embarrassing months when she was forced to join the family acapella group. Aunt Lavonne (second from right) sang bass.
Before you get too stuck in the holiday groove of bitching and moaning about having to find the perfect gift - hell, any gift - for everybody from your mother to the mailman, stop and count your blessings. 
I have all due respect for America's Widow™, really I do, but in this shot I can only believe that what's running through her mind is "You said he's worth how much?"
She's one of history's most famous spare tires, someone who leapt into a kind of substitute fame in 1967 when she joined the world's most famous musical group pretty much just after it had any real reason to exist. And today, Cindy Birdsong turns 70. Does that make you feel as old as it does me?
Sometimes people look so much like themselves that they look more like imitations of themselves. I like that. And clearly, a little something to take the edge off never hurts...
Little María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell had clearly had enough of being so relentlessly polysyllabic by the time she made the long trip from Mexico City to Hollywood, for she became known to film fans simply as Margo. Under that clipped moniker, she was a reliable supporting presence for more than three decades, mostly in roles that called for a little exotic mystery.
"Where," asked Gentle Reader CK rather peremptorily in reference to the last post, "is this?"
There is a great deal to be said for getting away from it all for a couple of days...
So, as mentioned a couple of days ago, I've planned a little treat to make up for the trials and tribulations of this particularly tiresome November. I'm flying off to meet Mr. Muscato in Egypt and spend a few days on the shores of the Red Sea; it's a tad counterintuitive to go from one idyllic seaside resort to another, I know, but the Egyptian version has any number of diversions one doesn't find hereabouts - being in Egypt, principally.
Oh, it's been a pattern since time immemorial; first the houseboys break into the liquor cupboard, then they get maudlin. Pliny the Lesser just hated it when it happened during his peroraration...
Miss Constance Bennett, superb, steely, languorous with self regard. She's the rare creature who can look both fluffily blonde and carnivorous... 
I ran across this image recently and was seized with nostalgia. When I moved to New York in the late '80s, this fine theatrical establishment was just 'round the corner from my tiny flat, part of the great, messy, tawdry, crime-and-drug-laced spectacle that stretched out from Times Square and 42nd Street.
Much as one adores the Queen, one must feel a tinge of sympathy for the journalists assigned to cover the Royal Beat, an assignment of ceaseless routine, implacable structure, and rigourous protocol, all centered around a woman who has not made a public misstep since the height of the Jazz Age.
Sometimes, if he would do their math homework, Dave and Chip would let Floyd watch them play "bunk bed gymnastics" - but only for the first ten minutes...