Ageless Audrey

Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina (Paramount, 1954)

Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn in Love In The Afternoon (Allied Artists, 1957)

Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Funny Face (Paramount, 1957)

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (Universal, 1963)

Audrey Hepburn and William Holden in Paris When It Sizzles (Paramount, 1964)

Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (Warner Bros., 1964)

Among her many talents: teaching old dogs new tricks.

Sing A Song

Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear.

The Casting Couch...

...is currently being occupied, but we shall re-commence with our "role play" casting series very shortly. Our professional life just became unexpectedly busy, but fear not, we have more behind-the-scenes gossip and trivia to share, culminating in a marvelous "What might have been...?" scenario thoughtfully submitted by one of our readers. There will actually be several more posts based on suggestions from you wonderful people out there in the dark, so keep the ideas coming! And thank you to all who have participated in the comments; the greatest fun of this series has been hearing everyone's thoughts and opinions on the subject. We love you, darlings!

Another Life From Now...

 

 

 

SHIRLEY MACLAINE

April 24, 1934

  

 

 

BARBRA STREISAND

April 24, 1942

Cosmic fabulosity.

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

 

But. if you're thinkin' 'bout being my baby, it don't matter if you're black or white.

Thanks for the Memory

Was New York in the 1950's really as glamorous as we here at SSUWAT like to think it was? Listening to the fabulous anecdotes of our beloved friend Merle Bassett, the answer seems to be a resounding "Yes!" Over the next few months, we'll be sharing some of Merle's memories of a bygone Manhattan with you. We'd like to thank him for his time and graciousness in this endeavor, which we admittedly begged him to participate in! We inaugurate this series with what may not be the dishiest or raciest of his tales (keep watching this space!), but one which describes his (near) encounter with the most elusive superstar of them all.

Greta Garbo by Cecil Beaton, 1946

"I often dreamed of meeting the great Greta Garbo and in 1959, almost did! She lived on 52nd Street and the East River; I lived on 51st Street and 3rd Avenue. There was a Swedish delicatessen near my studio and I often went there to get sandwiches for me and my model. One cold winter afternoon I went to this delicatessen for sandwiches. When I got there I saw Garbo smiling and chatting (yes, chatting!) with the counterman! I froze in my tracks as I was about 15 feet away from this film icon, trying desperately not to stare. I stood there, watching the lady out of the corner of my eye. I was unsuccessful in hearing what she was saying and decided to leave before I made a complete fool of myself. When I returned to the studio, my model asked 'Where's our lunch?' I had forgotten all about our sandwiches." - Merle Bassett

Merle Bassett, 1950's

Bless the Beasts and the Children

"I've always admired Miss Crawford for being such a wonderful mother -- for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I knows what that means to homeless little ones?" - Marilyn Monroe

Two on a Couch

Monroe on Crawford: "I've always admired Miss Crawford for being such a wonderful mother -- for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I knows what that means to homeless little ones?"

Crawford on Monroe: "She was cheap, an exhibitionist. She was never a professional, and that irritated the hell out of people. But, for God's sake, she needed help. She had all these people on her payroll. Where the hell were they when she needed them? Why in hell did she have to die alone?"

Connie-Connie-Connie-Chameleon

In the 1930's, Constance Bennett was renowned as a fashion plate even more than she was as a movie star ("I'm a lot more sartorial than thespian," she acknowledged. "They come to see me and go out humming the costumes."). Interestingly, for all her East Coast pedigree, the New York-born and bred Bennett seemed to look southward for her fashion inspiration. To wit: her sleek, polished look of the 1930's was a Hollywoodized magnification of the ultra-chic style of such socialites as the Kentucky-born Mrs. Harrison Williams, later Mona, Countess of Bismarck.


By the 1950's, Connie's screen career had declined, but she found great success in the touring company of Auntie Mame, the fabulous stage play based on Patrick Dennis' novel, and a precursor to the musical. She was the perfect embodiment of brittle, theatrical glamour, and her look seemed to mirror that of Alabama's infamous daughter, Tallulah Bankhead.



As related by our dear friend Poseidon3 over at his utterly fascinating, fabulous blog, Poseidon's Underworld, Bennett made her simultaneous big screen comeback and swan song in Ross Hunter's plush remake of Madame X (1966). In preparation for her return before the cameras, Bennett once again completely transformed herself - this time, apparently taking a page from the Texas handbook of Miss Ann Miller.

And if you're gonna go, you may as well go like Annie!

Cecil, Fair Ladies Who Need Cecil

Barbra Streisand by Cecil Beaton for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1969)

Audrey Hepburn by Cecil Beaton for My Fair Lady (1964)

There is Nothing Like a Dame

Dame Edith Sitwell by Cecil Beaton
Courtesy of the ever-elegant TOBY WORTHINGTON

Like another stylish eccentric, Diana Vreeland, poet Dame Edith Sitwell was well aware of her less-than-conventional features, yet adored to pose and was a favorite of Cecil Beaton's. Her distinctive (to put it mildly) profile and imposing height (6 ft.) certainly made her a striking subject. Both her appearance and her poetry, which also went against the grain of traditional British prose, inspired strong opinions among her critics; we really would expect nothing less from a woman who favored gold brocade turbans and "cocktail" rings the size of small planets.

Rustic Elegies, 1927; the cover illustration is based on a Cecil Beaton portrait of Sitwell

Since we have only a superficial reverence for actual history, and prefer to gleefully glom onto the glamorous and salacious, we can tell you that Dame Edith's renowned passion for jewelry, rings in particular (evidenced in the portrait above), is documented in the jewelry collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her lookalike brother, Osbert, was homosexual; and so was her alleged lover, Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew.

Edith and her brothers, Sacheverell (top) and Osbert (bottom), photographed by Beaton for Vanity Fair, 1929

Pavel Tchelitchew, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934

Named a Dame Commander in 1954, Dame Edith Sitwell was confined by illness to a wheelchair after 1957. She passed away in 1964, at the age of 77.

HEART AND MIND by Edith Sitwell

Said the Lion to the Lioness-'When you are amber dust,-
No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun
(No liking but all lust)-
Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,
The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,
Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws
Though the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.'

Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time-
'The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps...so is the heart

More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules
Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:
But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind.'

Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,
And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,
Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.'

Out of Fashion

The Model as Muse exhibit at the Met.

A dud.

For one thing, the concept was perplexing (models influencing fashion? the cart before the horse?); and the execution did nothing to convince one of its validity.


It started off promisingly enough, with a mannequin wearing the black-and-white Dior gown worn by Dovima in Avedon's famous "elephants" shot; the spectacular draped Mme. Gres gown worn by Sunny Hartnett in another iconic Avedon portrait; and some really beautiful Balenciaga creations. But, aside from the famous Dovima and Hartnett poses, there was no clear correlation between the clothing and the supposed muses, aside from a few vintage Vogue and Bazaar magazines behind glass (which, bafflingly, usually had nothing to do with the clothing on display alongside it... DV, no stickler for authenticity she, would have done wonders with this concept!).


However, the couture garments from the 1940's and 1950's are so stunningly constructed, they were worth looking at, no matter the context. Unfortunately, they comprised the smallest part of the exhibition, the larger part of which was made up of 1960's-2000's fashions, which simply failed to register the same impact. The Generation Gap: a wall of "supermodel" covers from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, versus the images of Dovima, Jean Patchett, Dorian Leigh, Lisa Fonssagrives, et al., on the covers of Vogue and Bazaar.

There was also a "supermodel" portrait of Patrick Demarchelier which clearly was an "homage" to the classic Cecil Beaton shot of the House of Dior's models posed in the atelier, 1957. And that's one of the problems with this show -- everything past the 1960's (or even the 1970's, if you want to be generous) references the past, or has a post-modern irony, or is in "tribute" to something else. No originality. The fact that these more recent decades make up the bulk of the exhibit left us wanting to hop a plane to London, for the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition honoring the true masters of couture. 

And there was certainly no originality or style emanating from the crowd of poorly-dressed onlookers posing alongside Dovima's Dior gown and cut-out elephants, chewing gum and fanny packs firmly in place as they took their MySpace and Facebook cel phone photos. For them, this was surely the height of fashion. As for us -- well, we were un-a-muse-d.

THANKS

Is it True What They Say...

...about the size of a man's hands?

Dancer Boris Kochno by dear old Cecil Beaton; we'll have to ask Sergei Diaghilev and Cole Porter for confirmation about the hands business.

A Study in Contrasts

Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford, photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1956