From left to right – Model, Orry Kelly, Bernard Newman, Travis Banton, Edith Head, Adrian, and Irene.
With model showing evening gown, 1955:
Edith at bat 1957:
A fashion show from the “Think Pink” sequence at the premiere of “Funny Face” – model Ginni Adams with Edith Head:
Dressing Debbie Reynolds for a benefit, 1960:
Hosting a charity event at her home, Casa Ladera, 1967:
With Tony Curtis, Anne Baxter and Omar Shariff, 1967:
At the Costume Designers Ball with Greer Garson, 1969:
Even Google got into the act today with Miss Edith’s birthday:
They lived in a wonderful house called, Casa Ladera…
Here’s the deal, I only saw Mr. Newman on film sets and in elevators. He was about the same age as my dad, quite a bit younger than my uncle – so, as a kid I just categorized him as “old”. My dad, well, I don’t suppose there was a time he could be considered hip, my uncle… maybe a long time ago. However, Paul Newman, even to a child was the epitome of cool. And, beyond cool, he was NICE.
Obviously I never saw him in this incarnation, but I present Paul Newman, and the roots of hip:
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Kitchens – this one is from a Pasadena estate and was designed by Wallace Neff:
A cheerful California kitchen from 1938:
And here’s one you might recognize from “My Man Godfrey”:
… But during the last few years this has become increasingly difficult owing to the misguided encouragement of a new form of social parasite, the gossip columnist. This curious phenomenon has insinuated itself itself into the lifestream not only of Hollywood but the whole of America, and what began as a minor form of local, social and professional scandalmongering has now developed into a major espionage system the power of which, aided and abetted by radio, has reached fabulous proportions… This is not done, except on rare occasions, with any particularly malicious intent, but merely to gratify one of the least admirable qualities of human nature: vulgar curiosity. The accuracy of what is written, stated, listened to and believed is immaterial. The monster must be fed, and the professionally employed feeder of it is highly paid and acquires a position of power in the land which would be ridiculous were it not so ominous. In Hollywood, where this epidemic first began to sap the nations mental vitality, no large and few small small social gatherings can take place without one or several potential spies being present… Excerpt from “A Richer Dust” by Noel Coward
Imagine what he would have thought of social networking?
1949 – Van de Kamps Bakery and Drive-In:
1939 – Simon’s:
As the millennium was about to turn a high rolling actor, after two chaste dates with someone very near and dear to my heart, invited her back East to meet his parents. You know, a girl takes an invitation like that quite seriously. (Although, she might not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer regarding his very gentlemanly demeanor.)
The pair checked into a lovely hotel suite, not far from the actor’s childhood home. It was graced with a living room and a single king sized bed. My friend had visions of the weekend turning into something like that pictured above. Yet, as their last night unfolded and she snuggled up against him – oh so much more than suggestively – he gave her a peck on the forehead and said, “Don’t be silly, dear”
After their return home to Hollywood, and two weeks of radio silence, the actor called and inquired if my friend would accompany him to a premiere. To which she replied… “Don’t be silly, dear”.
Why people do people still engage in this backward rigamarole? Box office. Name me one openly gay American movie star and I’ll show you an actor who isn’t working. Sad… and completely ridiculous… but true.
Ext. Romanoff’s:
Int. Romanoff’s:
The Zanuck’s celebrate Susan”s graduation from the Marlborough School with a dance at Romanoff’s. From left to right, Darryl, Susan, and Virginia Zanuck:
1960, when everybody read the paper, but none so suave as Cary Grant:
The Beatles landing at LAX – they played the Hollywood Bowl in August of 1964 and 1965:
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August 24, 1964 — the day after the Hollywood Bowl — at a Bel-Air rental:
April 18th, 1961 Elizabeth Taylor arrives at the Academy Awards in a gown designed by Dior with her husband Eddie Fisher:
Best Actor to Burt Lancaster for “Elmer Gantry, and Best Actress to Elizabeth Taylor for “Butterfield 8”:
Filming at the track in 1935:
The building was designed by Architect Gordon B. Kaufmann (who also designed the Los Angeles Times building) in a fluid Art Deco style – 1936:
The entrance and the paddock – 1936:
A view of the stands the year it was completed – 1934:
In the early years stockholders included Cary Grant, Edgar Bergen, Bing Crosby, Lana Turner, Harry Warner, etc., remember, Hal Roach was a major booster, and the track opened Christmas Day, 1934.
From the tips of your toes to the top of your head – elements of style from hats to escalators:
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Even the grocery stores were glamorous – designed by Morgan, Walls & Clements (also designed the Chapman Market) – this firm designed some of the most iconic buildings of early Hollywood (and I promise we’ll get to these landmarks) but for now we’ll roll with my fascination with the mundane market made marvelous:
Wilshire Blvd.
Hollywood Blvd.
And, where Mildred Pierce’s boyfriend made his home in high tone Pasadena.
How does a young lady who hops aboard a train in New York City without her luggage and ticket end up serenaded by “The Ale and Quail” club?
And, breakfast with a stranger dressed in a pajama top and blanket skirt?
You’ll have to watch “The Palm Beach Story” to find out, but if you’d like to see a delicious scene where she scores a ruby bracelet check in at noon.
Here’s the historical context. That’s David Bowie, during a decade he reports to have forgotten, nabbed in Upstate New York on a coke charge. Talk about aplomb. He looks impossibly elegant under obviously trying circumstances. Contrast that with any mug shot you’ve seen recently of errant celebrities and then just shut your mouths!
But, I digress. Recently, a music industry great of similar vintage, and possibly more lifetime habits, has returned from Switzerland with a sparkle in his eye and new spring in his step. Rumor has it he has taken the cure with a complete blood transfusion. Who can say? My sources inform me he has reconciled with his first wife, a legendary folk singer, at least as far as having her most recent restraining order against him revoked.
Seen strolling Wilshire Dr. at 7 a.m. in his tennis whites accompanied by a silver haired friend the impresario was queried by a curious onlooker as to his sportive attire. His answer, “I do not own sweats. They are an abomination against man and God.”
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Icon, practically asleep on set…
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A romantic rendezvous on Sunset Blvd.
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Profiterolles glacees au chocolat aka cream puffs with chocolate sauce are actually pretty easy to make. If anyone wants the recipe let me know and I’ll post it – it would be a “wow” to feed your sweetheart on Valentine’s.
I was running around town with my sweetheart and I snapped these photos with my ancient, but mighty, iPhone. This is a neighborhood at the southern edge of Korea Town, south of Wilshire Blvd. When I was a little girl I used to have dreams about Los Angeles. It was city crossed by rushing canals and there were a million cities hidden within the city, and I was always trying to find my way from one to another. Turns out those early dreams were slightly prophetic. Here we have a pocket of Old Hollywood glamour in an area now pocked by bad signage, vinyl windows, and uncontrolled development…
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Hermes Pan choreographed everything from “Swing Time” in 1936 to Elizabeth Taylor’s “Cleopatra” (including the spectacle – dancers, warriors, witch doctor’s, elephants, and zebras – that was Cleopatra’s procession into Rome).
Pictured above with Ginger Rogers, he was a soft-spoken gregarious man who was loved by his dancers. Recently a biography was completed by John Franceschina, titled: Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire: John Franceschina: 9780199754298: Amazon.com: Books. A fascinating look at a rare talent.
February 23rd, 1952. Nancy Davis, and her soon to be husband, Ronald Reagan, at Ciro’s celebrating with Jeanne and Dean Martin.
The menu:
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George Kaplan, a friend writes from somewhere in the British Isles:
I was looking for somewhere to put this and well this piece seems not totally inappropriate because the extract at least begins with a quotation about L.A.’s winter light –
“Robert Towne, who wrote the L.A. classics Chinatown and Shampoo, once said the city’s winter light was as if “someone put the sun in the freezer overnight.”
There is an essay on L.A. light by Lawrence Wechsler that begins with him and his daughter watching the O. J. Simpson Bronco chase of 1994. The kid sees that Dad is moved. “Did you know that guy?” she asks, and Dad says, no, it’s the light that’s getting to him: “the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles – golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds.” Wechsler goes on to collect all kinds of light from different witnesses. David Hockney recalls the crisp shadows in Laurel and Hardy films that dad took him to see in overcast Yorkshire. Others say it’s the weather effect of the desert abutting the ocean. Astronomers find it’s perfect for their work. And the cinematographer John Bailey (he shot American Gigolo, a fine slice of L.A. light) testifies that a sophisticated light meter gives you readings you wouldn’t expect. Strangers to the city sometimes feel that everyone there looks beautiful.
Is the light in Los Angeles really unique and lovely, or uniquely lovely?…”
The Big Screen, David Thomson
The photographs of California that you’ve been sharing (and those you shot yourself) came to mind when I read this, I thought it might interest you. Also parts of it are lovely. Light in the movies is fascinating and so too sometimes in “real” life. I find myself wondering what the light looks like in your garden! Is it unique and lovely?
The twilight pink and the palm fronds are above, the garden below:
As you might have gleaned by now, when there’s a story to tell about Hollywood, I’m inclined to change the names and mix it up a bit to protect the innocent. What follows is mostly true, except what’s not.
At the end of summer, after several restorative sessions, Ms. Todd made Mr. Bloomfield a proposition. She offered an entrée position in the film industry in exchange for a suitable period of physical, if not matrimonial devotion. When Kier replied earnestly that he usually preferred the company of men Toni countered, “One must always cultivate friendship, I’m talking about marriage, when you get older you’ll come to appreciate what I mean”.
At twenty-one, after a love affair with a dominating, tan, Lacrosse player went sour, Kier graduated from Dartmouth despondent and took a job Toni arranged assisting a British director. The opus was a comic book turned major motion picture. The director complained of being “malignantly nobbled by the studio” and sent his young assistant to fetch his laundry, market for delicacies at Irvine Ranch Market and Chalet Gourmet, tend his brick sized Motorola cell phone, drive him from club to club on his evenings off, and on one notable morning appear at his Santa Monica rental at 3:00 a.m. to catch a blue jay that was systematically flying into every window in the house in an attempt to escape. Why, the director wasn’t able to throw a towel over the bird and toss it outside himself could only be explained by the white powder clinging to his nostrils and the frenzied kibitzing he offered as Kier chased the unfortunate animal down.
After the bird incident the director found Kier indispensable. He relied on him for practically everything. He kept him by his side always. On one such occasion, with Kier in an indelicate position in the director’s trailer reading the day’s new script pages while Ian (the director) bemoaned his 100 million dollar “film fiasco” and let his sweaty forehead rest against the young man’s bare pelvis, Kier piped up with some surprisingly good script notes. Thus, his screenwriting career was born.
Delighted, Toni bought him a Lexus, then, a few years later on his 25th birthday a condo on Wilshire in Westwood.
When he was twenty-seven Kier nursed Toni through her second face lift, a primitive affair involving an early version laser that turned her skin to strawberry jelly, and incisions under the chin, behind the ears, and in the eye orbit just below her brows. He served chilled pineapple juice with a straw and a Vicodan chaser, plumped pillows, applied antibiotic salve, and on the hour placed ice packs around her swollen face. All the while Toni’s white Persian cat, Renee, sat on Toni’s chest and stared up at her adoringly. The cat creeped Kier out, and besides, all that fur couldn’t be sanitary. But, every time he shooed Renee away Toni patted the bed and the cat flounced back into place. A week later, after he’d driven her to the surgeon to have her sutures examined the doctor puzzled over why the stitches above Toni’s eyes had disappeared. Kier had no doubt the cat had licked them out, but thought it better not to mention it to Toni who was delighted at her rejuvenation. For his devotion during her transformation back to forty Toni secured Kier representation at CAA, and finally, when he turned twenty-nine she called in his debt and they were wed.
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© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material (text) without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
As you might have gleaned by now, when there’s a story to tell about Hollywood, I’m inclined to change the names and mix it up a bit to protect the innocent. What follows is mostly true, except what’s not.
Carrot topped Kier Bloomfield smeared zinc oxide over the bridge of his freckled nose and jammed a self-described “dorky” golf cap over the crown of his head. He was a sophomore in college (Dartmouth, in nowhere, New Hampshire) and he was home in the intense heat and sun of Southern California for the summer. He longed for gray skies and the stolid disposition of New Englanders. Instead he was accompanying his landscape architect mom on a round through Beverly Hills. She had him scampering over flawless lawns, hauling and placing, and then replacing, botanical specimens. Kier didn’t like to sweat. As a matter of fact he didn’t really like being outdoors at all. He knew better than to complain. He knew single Zoe Bloomfield’s stock answer to dissent, “I’m putting you through college all by myself, and you don’t want to help me out?” Then he got the incredulous look and the martyr’s dismissive twist of the head. He had four more weeks before he could return to school. Kier drove to their last stop. Zoe reached to turn off the car radio, he swatted her hand away, “What is that noise?” she demanded.
“It’s the Thompson Twins, and I’m driving.”
“And that gives you license to make me insane?”
“Ma, we’re almost there.”
They arrived at a strange hybrid of Art Deco and Castilian Castle on Coldwater Canyon. The garden was English and high maintenance and the owner was Toni Todd; legendary beauty, husband collector, and currently Hollywood’s come-back queen, as she had just recently maneuvered her way, at nearly sixty, into a starring role in a night time soap. In July her show was on hiatus so Toni was at home, wandering the estate, making “improvements”. Ms. Bloomfield cautioned Kier to stay out of Toni’s way, to no avail. While Kier was hiding under a shade tree Toni spotted his pallid white skin practically shining out against a dense background of blossoms and greens.
“Funny dumpling, come here!” she commanded. Kier obeyed. “You can help me hang some pictures. Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kier replied.
“And, then afterwards if you’re overheated you can take a dip in the pool.”
“But my Mom…”
Toni interrupted, “That’s right, your Amanda’s boy. Kier made a funny little popping sound like a guppy. “Amanda!” She called out.
Ms. Bloomfield looked up from her sketchpad. She squinted in Toni’s direction.
“Amanda! It’s late. You go on home. I’m going to take your boy inside for a little manpower. I promise I won’t keep him more than an hour then I’ll drop him off at your place.”
“Mrs. Todd, ma’am, Mom’s name is Zoe.”
She turned to Kier. “Of course it is. Don’t worry. I’ll take you home, or you can take one of the cars… Unless, you don’t want to…” she said pausing by a massively carved double front door. To Kier, who lived with his mother in a depressingly sunny window-box of a house in Burbank, it looked like the entry to something promising, a rich, dark, cool place, reminiscent, in his mind, to what he’d left behind at Dartmouth. To Toni, who had interesting ideas about male vitality, and the regenerative powers of sex, a nineteen year old suited her perfectly.
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To be continued…
© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material (text) without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Really? Just reading through this makes me a bit queasy – and doesn’t Mary look stealthy, like she’s plotting our culinary doom?
At least they had the sense not to claim Clara cooked…
I’ve had this, it’s kind of bland and a little sweet.
Not bad, Bessie Love – and what a cute picture 
Read about two of the greats at one of my favorite blogs:
Restored by: Marmol Radziner | Restoration.
And, there’s this beautiful book that’s like a vacation in itself… Palm Springs Living: Diane Dorrans Saeks, David Glomb: Amazon.com: Books.
From the marvelous short story, “A Toast to Ava Gardner”, by a friend of Miss Gardner’s, and author of, “I, Claudius”, Robert Graves:
“Questioned about the monstrous legendary self which towers above her, Ava told us that she does everything possible to get out from under, though the publicity-boys and the Press are always trying to clamp it even more tightly on her shoulders. Also, that she has never outgrown her early Hard-Shell Baptist conditioning on that North Carolina tobacco farm, with the eye of a wonderful father always on her; and still feels uncomfortably moral in most film-studios; it isn’t what she does that has created her sultry reputation, but what she says. Sometimes she just can’t control her tongue.”
At work:
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Doing good work, on their way to London to perform at a benefit in December of 1951:
Recognized for her work:
“Our phone bills were astronomical, and when I found the letters Frank wrote me the other day, the total could fill a suitcase. Every single day during our relationship, no matter where in the world I was, I’d get a telegram from Frank saying he loved me and missed me. He was a man who was desperate for companionship and love. Can you wonder that he always had mine!” Ava Gardner
The Seven Wonders of Preston Sturges
In just four years, 1940–44, Preston Sturges wrote and directed seven classics reflecting the America he loved and laughed at–a fast-talking, unpredictable melting pot that seems more real than the visions of Frank Capra or John Ford. Then his luck ran out.
By Douglas McGrath
Of all the stupid vanities in a business that specializes in stupid vanities, the possessory credit takes the cake. That credit is the one that appears at the top of a film saying, “A film by _______,” the blank then implausibly being filled by the name of a single person, the director.
Let’s not get into how many other people—starting with the writer and continuing in essential ways through the cast, cinematographer, editor, and composer—influence the quality of a film. (Try to imagine the original choice of Shirley Temple instead of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz or Mae West rather than Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to understand how dependent a film’s tone is on the contributions of all its elements.)
The possessory credit is silly for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s redundant: we’ll see whom the film is by when we get to the other credits. But if anyone deserves this credit, it would have to be someone who has created a world in which the speech and actions and people, in which the tone and tenor of events, are as obviously the creation of one artist as a passage of Twain’s is obviously a passage of Twain’s and not of Charlotte Brontë’s, as a Renoir is never confused with a Picasso.
It is safe to say that no one ever mistook a film by Preston Sturges for a film by anyone else. This is not something you can say of most directors, including many fine ones: George Cukor, William Wyler, John Huston. While one might expect that it was George Cukor who directed Roman Holiday instead of William Wyler, one could never imagine anyone but Sturges behind any of the manic yet buttery pictures that bear his name.
Though the events in his films often border on the unreal, ironically his world resembles ours more than most movies do, because the Sturges universe is so ungentrified. The characters in a Sturges film are slickers and hicks, frantic, contemplative, melancholy, literate, sub-intelligent, vain, self-doubting, sentimental, cynical, hushed, and shouting. A hallmark of most artists is the consistency of their world—one thinks of the delicacy in René Clair’s work, the droll, intoxicating understatement of Lubitsch, the painful clamor of Jerry Lewis. But the Sturges world seems the product of a multiple-personality disorder. (Sturges used to dictate his scripts aloud to a secretary as he wrote them, and when he did, he convincingly played all the parts.) I can think of no other artist who keeps the delicate and the explosive so close together.
This collision of tones perhaps took its cue from his life. He was born in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. His mother, Mary, divorced Preston’s father when Preston was not quite three and moved with her son to Paris. On her first day there she met the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan. Though Sturges would at times resent his mother’s fast friendship with Duncan, he owed the Duncan family an enormous debt. Almost as soon as they arrived in Paris, Sturges, always susceptible to respiratory trouble, came down with a pneumonia that no doctor could tame. Isadora Duncan’s mother arrived with a bottle of champagne, from which she fed him lifesaving spoonfuls until he was restored. “Champagne and Pneumonia”—it could be the title of a Sturges movie. It also aptly calls up the conflicting elements at work in his films: the effervescent and the feverish.
via The Seven Wonders of Preston Sturges | Vanity Fair.
Preston Sturges, center, flanked left to right by Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, Claudette Colbert, and Rudy Vallée on the set of “The Palm Beach Story”.
My darlings, I first posted this the day after the Academy Awards in February, and I’m trotting it out again because; a) it’s possibly my favorite movie of all time, and b) I’m still working with my editor on the manuscript… and I feel certain he would have something to say about that semi-colon I just typed in 
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It’s the day after… And, if you’re reading this any time before noon Pacific Standard Time I’m probably burrowed under my blankets and flat out sound asleep. About a month ago I finally figured out how to put film clips up on the blog (look, I’m middle-aged so cut me some slack, and yes I know the kid could do it in about 15 seconds, but he’s busy at school), the point is this is sooooo much more entertaining than anything I could come up with – so have some fun and watch.
I’m not a shopper, and considering who raised me that must have come as quite a shock. My mother, the erstwhile retail ninja, also was responsible for sitting me down when I was young and screening “The Palm Beach Story” – still one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. If only shopping was like this… effortless, indulgent, adventurous, and full of surprises.
About a block west from Gelson’s market on Franklin, across from the Bourgeois Pig cafe the Villa Carlotta is now painted… an interesting array of hues and surrounded by foliage. The apartment building was designed by Arthur E. Harvey and built in 1926 by Eleanor Ince (Thomas Ince’s widow) for an upscale Hollywood clientele. Former residents include famed director George Cukor and mogul/producer David O’Selznick.
Famous for launching the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and the production of the Astaire-Rogers musicals… Oh, and a bunch of “B” movies…
Located at the corner of Gower and Melrose…
Or, the ladies who lunch at Perino’s:
The Beverly Hills Hotel:
And, the Ambassador Hotel:
1920 – out in the fresh air:
1934 – at The Talk of the Town:
A carhop on roller skates, reminiscent of Vickie Lester, hat tip to SCENTS MEMORY | There is nothing like the smell of a man..
