Life, Infinitely Rich and Beautiful

I think that these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

- Karen Blixen, letter to her brother, April 1931

Pretty Pierrot

Yesterday, she would have been 110.

Friends and Acquaintances

“I looked in on Chips in London and found the Duchess of Kent, her sister Countess Toren, the reigning Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein, the Ranee of Kapurthala and the King of Egypt’s sister. It was like a stamp album."

The Mrses. Grant

Poor dear Cary; such a complicated private life. He started with a luminous star, made immortal by Chaplin but essentially the celluloid version of a One Hit Wonder...

He continued as one of the two non-titled husbands of the World's Richest Girl, Princess Countess Mrs. Princess Sra. Baroness Princess Barbara Woolworth Hutton Mdivani von Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Trubetskoy Rubirosa von Cramm Doan, seen here by Beaton...

...before moving on to a refreshingly simply named actress.

Who was followed, after a while, by a far less restful successor...

...before rounding things out with a granddaughter substitute.

But through it all, he never looked happier than when he bunked with the cowboy star who also shone in FredandGingerland. There's a lesson for us all there, but I'm too distracted at the thought of Randolph Scott in Barbara Hutton's tiara to think it through...

Swans

A Belle Époque fantasy, courtesy of Mr. Beaton and the ravishing creations of Mr. Charles James; London, 1948.

How extraordinary these dresses must have seemed at the time, coming in the midst of lingering post-war rationing and all that had happened in the past ten years or so....

Why Don't You...

...reconsider solids? Cecil Beaton did, for the charming drawing room of his Manhattan pied-à-terre, to considerable effect.

I, of all people, hate to admit it, but it appears to be so: it doesn't have to be all about flowered chintz and Toile de Jouy. Dammit.

Portrait Gallery: The Dirty Duchess

Today's object lesson in the dangers of misdirected fabulousness is Margaret, sometime Duchess of Argyll: a beautiful, brilliant, crazed woman who is one of the few historical figures I can think of still regularly referred to as a hopeless nymphomaniac.

In her early days, she was a fairly standard - if especially stunning - Bright Young Thing, as evinced by this extremely fetching portrait by Cecil Beaton.

She married serially and well, spending a brief period in Ducal splendour as something of a pillar of the establishment, leading to eighteenth-century-style portraits and regrettable (almost Windsorian) taste in ballgowns.

And then it all went rather wrong. Something - a naturally voracious nature; a bad fall that shook loose some shard of crazy that set her off, who knows - made Margaret the talk of London for her wild promiscuity, culminating in one of the nastiest divorces in British history, with a scandal that included a Polaroid camera, her trademark three strands of pearls, at least one gentlemen but probably more, still anonymous, but likely well-known, and some extremely Compromising Circumstances.

She ended her days in reduced circumstances and her final decades in clinging to whatever shards of the high life she could. As seen here, she spent time in some fairly dubious company, and looks rather bemused by it.

She is remembered, beyond the scandals, for her style: the pearls, the poodle, the black-red bouffant; the brittle remarks; the extraordinary contrast between her High Lady facade and whatever it was that roiled within. Composer Thomas Ades wrote an opera, Powder Her Face, on her life, and it was as entrancing and befuddling as the lady herself would seem to have been.

But I keep going back to the Beaton: those eyes, that face.

Ladies on Stage

Once upon a time, you went to a Broadway play to see Broadway stars: not to see scenery, a Disney story, or a Name vaguely associated with a half-forgotten TV series or last year's "reality" show.

More than that, being a Broadway star was, in some existential way, being a Real Star (the last gasp of this fleeting situation is seen, of course, in All About Eve), one that could land you, say, on the cover of Time.

And in such good company.

The first of these three formidable profiles was at the time the greatest star and is today perhaps the least remembered. In her devotion to the stage, Katharine Cornell made only one film, as Herself, as if being Katharine Cornell were in itself such an all-consuming experience that it could be subsumed into character only on stage.

She was the quintessential Great Lady of the Boards, the ultimate expert at Entrances, Exits, Gracious Acknowledgement of the Audience, the Doubting Pause, and other necessities of her trade.

The lady in the middle is Dame Judith Anderson, so indelible as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca that her decades of triumph on stage are rather overshadowed. A little girl from Adelaide who made her way halfway 'round the world to New York and stardom in classical and modern drama, Anderson dabbled with more variety in films serious (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and less so (Lady Scarface).

As this superb portrait demonstrates, she had full command of all the trappings of Great Lady status, from beauty-marking to fur-wrangling. Where has such deft handling of Glamour gone?

Last but hardly least, and looking uncharacteristically swank in this portrait by Beaton, we have Miss Ruth Gordon, avocationally Mrs. Garson Kanin, who parlayed her years on stage into a late in life run as Beloved Oldster in films like Harold and Maude. Many of her coevals felt she rather overdid her Gleeful Granny shtick, but she clearly had a marvelous time, so what's the harm? She'd worked hard for it.

Oh, and why are these three amazons gracing the cover of Mr. Luce's little magazine? They were not only on Broadway - the were on Broadway together, in Chekhov.

Which makes the latest Mamet revivals seem a little bland, no?

Goodnight, Mr. Blackwell

Lily Pons, by Beaton

What better way to remember the late Mr. Blackwell, the original fashion policeman, than with one of his signature warm-hearted insights into the Great and the Good? Speaking of a certain French diva, he once said, "maybe Lily Pons was the toughest I ever worked with. That was five feet of pure hell."

Looking at the smile, I'd believe it.

I've always had a soft spot for Pons, if only because her name seems so close to being a drag name, just one step away from something like Anita Mann.

Nursery Rhyme

There was a little girl
who had a little curl;

And when she was good,
She was very, very good -

But when she was bad -

She was better!

Although I'm not sure the somewhat skeptical-looking Simon Callow, seen here about to have his cocktail ashed, would necessarily agree.

Some days, all it takes is thinking about Princess Margaret to help me out of a funk. Is that so wrong?