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 Lightning crashes
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Looking north towards the Empire State Building from 15th and 6th Avenue. 8:00 AM. Photo: JH. |
June 10, 2009. There was a tremendous thunderstorm on Monday night, starting about 2 AM. The lightning crashes were unusually frequent, abundant and crackling. And scary.
The dogs were on the bed with me, quivering. The lightnight flashes seemed brighter and longer. Some of it sounded like cannons or bombs exploding. Or were these memories left over from my impressions visiting Churchill’s War Room bunker this past Saturday in London.
Then about eight o’clock yesterday morning, the skies turned black, and it was almost like night again when the skies opened up with a torrent. The threat of it returning stayed with us through the day and into evening.
I went down to Michael’s for lunch with Judith Agisim, a public relations woman I’ve known since I came back here from California in the early 90s. Judy is one of those women who is eternally fascinated by the city and its characters. And Michael’s is a perfect place for the fascinated.
Yesterday’s crowd was entertainment heavy. Entertainment and the money, of course. Ron Perelman was lunching with Ron Meyer. Next to them Stan Shuman was entertaining Marshall Rose; and next to them Barbara Walters was lunching with Wendy Goldberg who is in town for five minutes while her husband Leonard attends the CBS board meeting. Next to them were the two impresarios of NewLine Cinema Bob Shays and Michael Lynne. Next to them Randy Jones (“The Richest Man in Town”) was entertaining a woman who looked a little like Catherine Zeta Jones (turned out not to be), and across the way was Pedro Almodovar. Next to (Mr. an Mrs.) Weinstein. Also Chuck Pfeiffer, Mickey Ateyeh with Joel Isaacs and John Sykes, Fredi Friedman, Sarah Silverman, Linda Janklow. You get the picture. The likely suspects, Michael’s-wise. |
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| Stephen Attoe and Robert Caravaggi of Swifty's. |
Last night it was down to Swifty’s to dine with Brooke Hayward, Bruce Addison and Michael Foster. The place was full front and back. The Swifty’s likely suspects. In front, former sisters-in-law, Anne Ford and Barbara Uzielli. Around the place: Dick Ney and Francesca Stanfill, Sassy Johnson and friends, Armine Milliken, Pat Patterson et al; Donald and Cynthia Frank, daughter Amanda, et al.
Swifty’s, by the way, is going literary. Its owners Robert Caravaggi and chef Stephen Attoe are doing a book on the Upper East Side hub of social life. Descended from the legendary Mortimer’s which was just up the avenue at 75th Street, Robert and Stephen have moved the tradition into the next generation.
For what could be a neighborhood restaurant, the clientele is both local (around the corner) and international. They come from all over -- next door neighbors to French counts, English earls and all their girls. They come for the Stephen’s “haute comfort food” and the just basics clubby atmosphere. And to see who else.
To this writer, who’s been dining there since Day One, it’s storage vault of lives and stories, tragedies, scandals, laughs, occasionally loves, and endless curiosity. Marianne (Mimi) Strong, the literary agent is the director of this endeavor. Stay tuned.
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| Fleur in her suite at the Lowell, 2001. |
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Fleur Cowles died this week in England, where she’s lived for years, at age 101. I met Fleur only once – about ten years ago. It was when JH and I were first doing NYSD. Fleur was in town from London to publicize the new edition of the Flair retrospective and we went to interview her. Thinking back on it, it is hard to believe the lady I met was 93 at the time. She was definitely a lot older than I but she had the (mental) energy of a young woman. Or two or three young women.
We went up to see her at suite in the Lowell. She sat on one end of a small sofa while we talked and JH photographed. She was a very friendly woman -- not effusive but she had a way of extending herself as if to say: I’d like to know you. She and her husband Tom Meyer lived in what were said to be fabulous “sets at Albany,” the Edwardian former bachelor quarters on Piccadilly.
I knew very little about the woman before we met. I knew superficially about her career in the magazine business. She was one of those glamorous magazine women of another era – Clare Boothe Luce, Edna Woolman Chase, Diana Vreeland and the last of them who is still with us, Helen Gurley Brown. They were a different breed of cat living in a very different great big town. They had influence and wielded it to their liking. Fleur wrote a memoir “She Had Friends and She Kept Them.” And my dear she did. The friends were world-famous. A magazine story; early reality tv, all.
She told me she was born Fleur Fenton of Kenmore Square, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts in a big house that still stands today. With a straight face, as I later learned she was born quite ungrand circumstances right here in Manhattan and named Florence Freidman on January 26, 1908.
From Flo to Fleur. As a young woman, she came to New York to study at Parsons. She never finished. Instead she persuaded the editor of the World Telegram to hire her as a columnist to write about anything she liked. To her amazement, he did. She never went into the office, but worked at home, because she was afraid that if the editor saw too much of her, he might realize she was just a baby.
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| Fleur at a party at Doubles in her honor. |
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She didn't say this about herself, but she obviously was one of those girls you sometimes meet in New York (and almost nowhere else) who possess a brilliant ability to network their talent. Starting out in the 1940s as an associate editor, she went to work, having a hand in transforming a "barber shop"-sort-of-magazine called LOOK, into a family readership magazine with a circulation of more than six million weekly. She later took full credit for what was undoubtedly decided by someone other than she. However, that was when America read magazines, all kinds of magazines, and there was room for more than one genius.
Fleur also married the magazine's publisher Mike Cowles. Remember him? It was Cowles who published possibly the most artful startup magazine America has ever known, before or since -- Flair. The hubby.
In 1950, Flair made its debut on the newstands with 265,000 copies in circulation. The magazine's hallmark was its innovative graphic design. Famous for the hole in its double-image die-cut front cover, its small booklets by Cocteau, Gypsy Rose Lee, Steinberg, accordion foldouts (including advice on entertaining by the Duchess of Windsor), Fleur provided readers with a mix of articles by Tennessee Williams, Colette, James Michenor, John O'Hara, Tallulah Bankhead, and Mary Hemingway; with paintings by Winston Churchill, Rufino Tamayo, and the then almost completely unrecognized (except by his famous last name) Lucien Freud. Flair was not (and is not) like any other magazine: you have to see it to believe it.
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It captured the country's imagination, as well as the cartoonists who had a field day poking fun at the highly unusual graphic design. It did not, however, capture the advertisers; imagination enough to keep publishing.
And so, almost a year after its debut, Flair went out of business. Its production qualities, however, have made it a highly regarded collectible that a half century after ceasing publication, is remains sought after worldwide.
After the closing, Fleur divorced Cowles and moved to England where she married Tom Montague Meyer whom she told me she met in Persia (now Iran) in 1953. Elsewhere she had also said she met Mr. Meyer in other places and situations. Wherever it was, the meeting took. The couple remained together and shared homes in London, Sussex, and Spain. Fleur wrote or co-authored eighteen books and paints. She has had more than 58 one-man shows around the world. She told me all this in our meeting at the Lowell where her door bore a brass plaque: The Fleur Cowles Suite.
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It was difficult to know where to start in an interview with a woman like Fleur Cowles. She was a vision in reds, as you can see from the photos, from her tinted glasses down to her self-designed slippers that were made for her in Venice. Her curiosity was vast and thus is her social experience. She'd known a lot of the players, the geniuses, the dictators, the movie stars, the scoundrels, the artists, and the billionaires who populated the 20th century.
She liked to talk about how she put together Flair. This was why we were meeting. This was her job and she handled it brilliantly. She told me she'd meet someone and decide to do something on them in the magazine. Cocteau, for example, after meeting her in New York, wrote her a letter on his trip back to France. She published it as his "letter to America." She published Tennessee Williams first print assignment. She gave Steinberg a sheaf of photographs had asked him to illustrate over them. She had the rare editorial talent to amaze. Her fashion layouts are without peer and have never been duplicated, continuing to fascinate long after the clothes themselves have gone out of style.
She told me she saw a lot of the Windsors. She recounted her details like an aunt who’d just come back from an interesting trip and wanted to share it all.
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The duchess, she said, treated the duke very badly. It was Fleur’s opinion that the duchess was furious that he'd abdicated and never really forgave him for it. Once she was present when the duchess' controversial boyfriend Jimmy Donohue (the Woolworth heir/cousin of Barbara Hutton) gave her a birthday present from Faberge. When the duke gave her his gift, she pointed to the Faberge: "now there's a real birthday gift." The duke was compliant (or eternally passive) and overlooked the insult, weakly defending his intentions.
On the other hand, Fleur admitted the duke was a bore, recounting the time she was sitting next to him at dinner and his entire conversation was about why she chose to wear her eyeglasses tinted. Of course she knew whom she was talking to and he did not know whom he was talking to. Not a clue.
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She was a woman who did what she liked, and you couldn't help noticing. The short life of Flair, ironically, provided Fleur Cowles with a solid and everlasting place in the largely fleeting memory of 20th century magazine publishing. Probably because it is the closest anyone ever got to making a memoir out of a magazine. And a made-up memoir at that.
The book, meanwhile, THE BEST OF FLAIR ($168.75 from Amazon. Rizzoli International Publications) is still ten years later the perfect gift for the connoisseurs of taste and style you know, featuring art, fashion, décor, travel, literature, and comment from some of the 20th Century's most prolific individuals. All designed to amaze. The 340 page volume, with Foreword by Dominick Dunne, comes appropriately encased in a stunning Valentino red cloth-covered folding case with the magazine's logo (Fleur's handwriting) streaked across the front in white.
The Telegraph of London ran another of their excellent obituaries, this time about Fleur, last week. I learned more about the woman from this. I’ve known a few of her contemporaries in my life, including my mother. All strong women, they came from a world where women were trained and used to a secondary role. Yet the toughest of them knew that wasn’t necessary if you knew how to work it. They were often smart and sharp, curious and energetic. Mountain moving was nothing if it meant something they wanted. Difficult was also a good word for them if you got in the way of their mountain moving.
Florence Freidman had been evacuated early on in Fleur’s life. It was a banquet for the lady, no doubt about it. And interesting; she was interesting. And amazing.
The link to the Telegraph obituary. |
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