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Fall
abounds.
4:00 PM. Photo: JH.
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The art, the
astonishing. Another amazing night in New York (a beautiful
night in New York also).
At the Pierre: the second annual One
World One Child Benefit presented by the Arts for Healing and the
Children’s
Health Environmental Coalition (Honorary Chair: Meryl Streep).
Honorees: John Adams, Ray
Anderson, Maria Rodale.
At the New-York Historical Society History Makers Gala honoring Chelsea
Piers Sports and Entertainment founders Tom A. Bernstein and Roland
Betts. First Lady Laura Bush was honorary Chair. Mr. Betts was a
Yale classmate of the President and a lifelong friend ever since.
When you hear about the honoree from other friends and classmates
of Mr. Betts, you hear a story about an amazing individual who always
marched to his own drummer.
Over at the Waldorf, the annual Animal Medical Center gala – Top
Dog dinner. This year honoring Ellen and Jim Marcus, a remarkable
New York couple who have their hand in lots of philanthropies and
good works and always extend a warm greeting to whomever they meet.
Another two for the “amazing individuals” category.
And down at the Chelsea Piers, Senators Hillary
Clinton and Charles
Schumer, who were honorary chairs for the Museum of Arts
and Design’s
Visionaries 2005, honored four more “amazing individuals” for
their outstanding contributions in their respective fields.
At Cipriani 42nd Street, the 2005 ACE Awards, Deborah
Norville emceeing
the evening: more “amazings”: Kenneth Cole Productions,
Betsey Johnson, Teri Agins, IN STYLE magazine, Juicy Couture, Neiman
Marcus Online, Oscar de la Renta, Diddy, Jessica Simpson,
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Whew!
Over at the Century Assocation on West 43rd, The
Mercantile Library Center for Fiction’s Fall Benefit Awards
Dinner honored author
James Purdy and editor Nan Talese. The
Library’s Center for
Fiction provides work space and living quarters for fiction writers,
mentoring programs in fictions and programs that bring writers
and writers of fiction together for discussion and support.
Down at the Jack H. Skirball Center for
Performing Arts on Washington Square South, the Lar Lubovitch Dance
Company returned to the Village
with the acclaimed “Men’s Stories” and the US premiere
of “Elemental Brubeck" (through November 12).
Over at Lincoln Center, Alice Tully Hall, there was
a crowd for their “Great
Performers, Art of the Song” series with baritone Matthias
Goeme performing a program of Mahler, Berg, and Wagner.
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Evelyn
Lauder with Umbrella Girl I (without Umbrella), 2005.
$1,250.
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First stop for us was at the Pace/MacGill Gallery where
they were holding a reception for Evelyn Lauder and
her exhibition of photographs: “Beauties
and other New Work" (on view through November 12th).
Mrs. Lauder, as you may have gathered by now is one of the “amazing
individuals,” one of the New York Indefatigables who never
seems to stop and always seems to look like she just came back from
a week’s rest. Her Breast Cancer Research Foundation is one
of the extraordinary philanthropic achievements in New York in the
past decade. For years, besides raising a family and looking after
her husband, the cosmetics executive and art collector Leonard
Lauder, she worked for the family company, tended to her
and her family's many charitable and cultural interests, travels;
she entertains, lunches
and ... in her “spare time,” takes photographs. |
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Eyeshadow
Please, 2005. $850.
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Pretty
Baby with Roses, 2005. $1,250.
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This
collection of photographs was inspired by her collection of antique
lady head vases which now number about seventy. The first one
she bought was for the powder room of her then new house in Palm
Beach. And then she acquired another, and another, and like everything
else she puts her mind to, it just “growed.”
The photographs which she refers to as “the Beauties” were done so
that the light and shadows heighten the drama of their expressions – coy,
forlorn (or frightening). The blossoms (completely sunlit, all natural light)
add to the eccentric charm of the “ladies.” Mrs. Lauder’s take
and objective: they are “at once elegant and playful ... (and) join two
of my loves, the beauty found in nature (as seen in the flowers) and the beauty
that we create through style, attitude and – of course – makeup.”
The exhibition is going to tour, underwritten by the Phoenix Companies, Inc.
(for information about the tour, go to: www.evelynlauder.com or
call 646-497-2611. All proceeds from the sale of the Ten Beauties portfolio and
limited edition photographs go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (for
more about that visit www.bcrfcure.org.) |
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The
scene at the Pace/MacGill Gallery
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Leonard
Lauder
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From
the Pace/MacGill (which is on 32 East 57th between Park and Madison)
JH and I made a quick hike up to the Ingrao Gallery
at 17 East 64th Street where interior designers Tony
Ingrao and Randy
Kemper were celebrating the third anniversary of their
gallery by hosting a 40-year retrospective of the Sculpture and
Avant Garde
Design
of multi-media artist Nicola L.
The show which was curated by the gallery’s director Jennifer Olshin, introduced
Nicola L’s iconic and symbolic sculptures and functional art into a space
that creates a new dialogue between her art and the important antique furniture
and decorative art of the gallery. Among her pieces were some designs on paper
accompanied by words or rhymes by Dorothy Parker – always intriguing.
The place was mobbed, as the Ingrao’s receptions always are. It’s
a big party with the cocktails and the champagne flowing. Word goes out and it’s
happening. There’s even an overflow on the sidewalk outside the gallery
especially on a beautiful night. |
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Tony
Ingrao, Nicola L., and Jennifer
Olshin
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Tony
Ingrao, Nicola L., and Randy
Kemper
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Lucia
Hwong Gordon
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Heather
Clawson
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Marcia
Schaeffer
and Bernard Combemarle
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Len
Morgan and James Reginato
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The
Ingrao Gallery from the sidewalk
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After
a look-see and JH’s digital perusing, we moved
on up the avenue to the penthouse apartment of Terry Allen
Kramer and Nick Simunek who
were hosting a booksigning for architect and designer Jeff
Smith. The beautiful coffee table
book is called Palm Beach Splendor; The Architecture of Jeffrey W. Smith.
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Palm
Beach Splendor by Jeffery Smith. Click image
to order.
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And
splendor it is. Mr. Smith was the designer of the very space where the party
was being held, as well as the Kramer beach house in Southampton (which is now
on the market) and La Follia, the enormous and fabulous oceanside villa in Palm
Beach.
We arrived toward
the end of the (two-hour) cocktail reception although there must
have been forty or fifty still enjoying the terrace looking out
at the New
York skyline to the south and the actively abuilding sushi bar and the
drinks bar and the trays and trays of hors d’oeuvres.
Mrs. Kramer (who is also said to be Mrs. Simunek in real life) is one of those
generous and glamorous hostesses who makes you feel you could stay all night
and the staff will just keep the party rolling, the music playing, the drinks
pouring and the buffet buffet-ing. Welcoming is the operative word. |
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Nick
Simunek, Terry Allen Kramer, and Mario Nievera
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Nick
Simunek
and Arianna Boardman
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The
man of the hour, Jeffery Smith
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The
sitting room
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Bongo
Kramer, sleeping through the party
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The
staircase
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Guests
on
the terrace
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Bill
Strawbridge,
Carole Ruhlman, and DPC
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During
the past few weeks we’ve been deluged with
beautiful books, coffee-table size, having to do with decorating
and design. The market is gearing up for the holiday season
and these are wonderful gifts, with something for (almost)
everyone. Some of these books have already been feted at
booksignings that we’ve covered on the NYSD.
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On
the desk ...
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Such
as the Jed Johnson Opulent Restraint published
by Rizzoli. And the Bunny Williams An
Affair With a House, which, if you’re like me
and can’t afford the house (or even the trip out of
town to see it), is worth the price of the book. Then there’s Mr.
Jeffery Smith’s which the author was signing
copies for on the Kramer-Simunek terrace
last night.
Palm
Beach is a popular site for these books. John Loring has
just published Tiffany’s Palm Beach (his 23rd book) for Abrams
and it’s full of extraordinary houses and poolsides and well-groomed
and casually glamorous denizens and hosts and hostesses and table settings
and of course the diamonds that remain best friends to so many of those girls
down there and everywhere else.
Then there’s another Smith in the mix: Michael Smith, the
interior designer who operates bi-coastally who’s just published Michael
S. Smith: Elements of Style (Rizzoli) with Diane Dorrans Sacks. Mr.
Smith’s “look” departs somewhat from the other Mr. Smith’s
Palm Beach palaces although the thread of sumptuousness continues. |
| Above,
left: One of Michael Smith’s commissions is
the Beverly Hills Spanish style stucco mansion of Wendi
and Rupert Murdoch. The Wallace Neff designed
house is a famous L.A. landmark and has been seen and written
about a number of times over the years. It was built for
silent film director Fred Niblo on a hilltop
overlooking what was at the time almost entirely barren
hills and canyons right out to the Pacific and Catalina
Island. Mr. Niblo’s only prominent neighbors at the
time were Rudolph Valentino “Falcon’s
Lair,” further down the canyon and Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s “Pickfair.” The
house was acquired in the 1940s by Jules and Doris
Stein. Mr. Stein was the founder of MCA which
later became MCA-Universal. He and his wife were both connoisseurs
of mainly 18th-century English antiques. The giltframed
mirror in this picture is Chippendale, one of a pair, hung
on either side of an opening to another sitting room. They
are priceless. Doris Stein once told me
that during the famous Bel Air fire of 1961, in an effort
to remove the most valuable pieces in the house, they discovered
that the Chippendale mirrors were so delicate they could
not be moved without their being destroyed. So they waited
out the firestorm, luckily went unscathed and found new
owners (and a designer) more than willing to adopt. |
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| Above,
right: This is the sitting room of Lord and
Lady Evelyn de Rothschild for their New York apartment.
Lady Rothschild, a longtime New Yorker and businesswoman
wanted the apartment to be comfortable for both entertaining
and family life. The soft tones were selected to “serve
as an understated canvas for a burgeoning collection of
museum-quality furniture by Jacques Emile Ruhlmann and Diego
Giacometti as well as works by artists including Agnes
Martin, Giorgio Moreandi, Luc Tuymans, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth
Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson
Pollock. |
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Cindy
Crawford and Michael Smith
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Nora
Ephron and Nick Pileggi
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Casey
Ribicoff and Ralph Rucci
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Chris
Albrecht and Mellody Hobson
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Dominick
Dunne and Nancy Novogrod
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Wendi
Murdoch, Cindy Crawford, and Lynn de Rothschild
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Paige
Rense and Ralph Lauren at her book party. Click
image to order book.
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“Hollywood, Hollywood, fabulous Follywood
Celluloid Babylon, Glorious, Glamorous …”
Went the lines of poet Don Blanding from his 1928
book Vagabond’s
House, and the poem Hollywood. Paige Rense, the
now legendary editor of Architectural
Digest has turned out another
boffo volume on the wonders of that glittering town with Hollywood
At Home (with introduction by Gerald Clarke).
This
is the kind of stuff I grew up on, filling my head with design fantasies
that had to do with movie stars and shiny cars and cocktail bars.
It is a concept that still delivers, bound to evoke the starstruck
in anyone looking to have a good time looking. |
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Where
else in the world would you find citizenry who builds a
house to accommodate two planes; jets, as a matter of fact?
This
is the home of John Travolta
and Kelly Preston. Mr. Travolta, as the world
knows, is an actor who loves to fly. The first thing
he did way
back when he first hit the big time was to take some
money and buy a DC 3 (or was it 4?).
Now, many moons
and many millions of box office dollars later, he’s
got a Gulfstream and a Boeing 707 parked literally
just outside his front door. How he gets them onto
the runway (assuming he does), I don’t know.
But in this book you can see that he’s carried
his love of airplanes and airline terminals right into
his dining room with its walls covered with murals
reminiscent of the old airline terminal restaurants.
Fabulous follywood
and then some! |
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first real home Judy Garland ever had after
her parents went on the road with a vaudeville act (The
Gumm Sisters) was a house built for her in Bel Air in
1939, the same year she made “The Wizard of Oz,” when
she was 15. It was a New England style house with a
brick exterior, a front porch, rustic shingles and looked
as if it had been transported from Connecticut. Although,
in those days, such Connecticut houses rarely had a glamorous
mirrored dressing room. This was a concoction straight
out of Hollywood, created by the studio’s brilliant
art directors with the intention of glamorizing the image
of their star. These photographs were not taken for interior
designers but for the millions of fans who drooled over
the interior designs made for the inhabitants of the
world of make-believe. |
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| “Here
we are, living as we want to as bachelors with
a nice home at a comparatively small cost,” Cary
Grant explained to a fan magazine that featured
a layout of the house he and western star Randolph
Scott shared on the beach in Santa Monica
(Grant also lived there briefly during his marriage
to dime store heiress Barbara Hutton).
The beachhouse was one of several that the two men
shared between 1932 and 1942, in between and after
marriages. It was an arrangement that gave first fire
to the rumors that the men shared a domestic relationship
that was romantic as well. Nevertheless, in those innocent
days (innocent to the moviegoers although not to the
ladies and gentlemen — so to speak — of
the community), the boys were rising stars as well
as handsome charmers who entertained their friends
on weekends at the beach. In those early days, the
studios were going six days a week. Only Saturday nights
and Sunday afternoons were available for good times.
This house, according to Mr. Clarke’s reportage,
was also a party house which knew “only amusing
stories: of Ping Pong games by the pool, of backgammon
in the game room, of Grant sitting at the piano struggling” to
learn to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody
in Blue. |
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Jayne
Mansfield created an interior decorating sensation with
the pink palace she shared with her husband Mickey
Hargitay just off Sunset
Boulevard in Beverly Hills.
The house featured a heart-shaped
swimming pool – the ultimate
fantasy luxury in 1950s America (where almost all
the swimming pools were found in and around Hollywood).
Mansfield’s
house was like everything else in her life at the
time, designed to garner publicity.
The house was later
acquired
by Englebert Humperdink who lived there for more
than a couple of decades before selling it to a tycoon
who
bought several houses in the area, tore them all
down and put up a house bigger than all of them combined. |
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| Above,
left: John Wayne’s Newport Beach waterside house
came as a surprise to a lot of his fans who worshipped
his macho, big-guy, man-o-few-words screen personality.
Off-screen he had a charming, sophisticated personality
who liked luxurious but comfortable surroundings and
the company of worldly and cosmopolitan people. He
felt quite at home dining at a highly polished table
under a crystal chandelier, and so did his guests. |
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| Above,
right: Jimmy
Stewart lived with his wife Gloria and
his children, in the same house for several decades – on
North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, across the road
from Lucille
Ball and down the street from Jack Benny,
Ira Gershwin, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Cantor, and Agnes
Moorhead. The house was on two lots, one of
which was walled-in and used for Stewart’s flower
and (mainly) vegetable garden which he tilled and cultivated
himself. The library is, as you can see, used for books
for the taciturn man was inclined to cultivate his mind
as well. The only other library that I ever saw (I’m
sure there were many I didn’t see) that was as
well-stocked in Hollywood, was that of Sammy
Davis Jr. Shelves and shelves of well-read volumes
covering all kinds of subjects of fiction and non-fiction. |
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| Jack
Warner’s house, a 13,000 square foot Georgian
mansion started out in its original conception as a
Spanish colonial-style
mansion (not unlike Fred Niblo’s farther up the
road) in 1926. As the Warner Brothers prospered (with
the introduction of sound film), the man who was famous
for his bad jokes, got grander. He bought three surrounding
lots, tore down their houses and enlisted the prominent
Los Angeles Roland Coate to rebuild his mansion with
the impressive Greek Revival portico. |
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| William
Haines, the former silent star-turned interior decorator
did the interiors, adding the antique English paneling and
furniture as well as pieces of his own design. Included in
all this grandeur was the requisite screening room where a
dinner party moved to after the meal, and the barroom, a staple
in every sophisticated (and not so) house in movieland. All
of this was enhanced by Warner’s beautiful second wife
Ann whose presence gave him the kind of sophistication that
Hollywood cultivated in its drawing room comedies. Mrs. Warner
was an independent, spirited woman who marched to her own drummer.
At one point in her marriage her husband suspected her of having
an affair, and he concluded that he was being cuckolded by
one of his contract players, actor Eddie Albert. The mogul’s
conclusion blacklisted Albert in Hollywood and he had to come
to Broadway (where he successfully found work until the cloud
passed). The inside knew, of course, that Albert was falsely
accused. The object of Mrs. Warner’s affection was Jean
Howard, the beautiful wife of agent Charlie
Feldman. Theirs
was a friendship that lasted (in the latter years entirely
by phone, for Mrs. Warner became an overweight recluse) until
her death in the 1980s. The house, with much of its precious
contents was sold to a modern entertainment mogul out of the
same fold as Jack Warner: David Geffen. |
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these books are the stuff of dreams for the likes of us who are not interior decorators or designers
or millionaire/billionaire
tycoons and heiresses, then I’d have to say the one that
intrigues me most is Jean-Bernard Naudin and Christiane
de Nicolay-Mazhry’s The
Finest Houses of Paris (Vendome Press). Still extant in
the 21st century, they evoke the themes and histories I continue
to find compelling, of other centuries, other orders, and other
aesthetics. This book contains fourteen houses that are astonishing
in their composition and textures. Only one example is the Paris
residence of Comte and Comtesse Hubert d’Ornano, an apartment
in a 1920s building overlooking the Seine. With the assistance
of the late Henri Samuel (who did the Wrightsman rooms in the
Metropolitan Museum as well as some other commissions here in
New York such as John and Susan Gutfreund’s Fifth Avenue
apartment), the d’Ornanos who are descended from French
nobility and Polish kings, mixed the antique with the modern,
the past with the present, the opulence of Louis XV and the Second
Empire to create the marriage of luxury with comfort that makes
one (me, anyway) think: I could live here. In my dreams, that
is. |
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The
Paris residence of Comte and Comtesse Hubert
d’Ornano.
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Then,
for those of us who are eternally enhanted by history and
its romance as well as its turbulence, and who as children dreamed
of
living in palaces surrounded by royalty, Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill’s Blenheim
and the Churchill Family (Rizzoli) is the best, the most brilliant,
the dishiest, the most informative, and let’s face it – to
paraphrase old King George III when he first visited
the palace at Woodstock: “We don’t have anything like
this!!!”
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Blenheim
and the Churchill Family. Click image to
order.
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Lady
Henrietta, who is the daughter of the 11th duke of Marlborough and
a very successful international interior designer herself, has produced
a fascinating account of the building and the subsequent history
of this great monument and house that was begun in the first decade
of the 18th century as a gift “from a grateful nation” to
the general who militarily defeated the armies of Louis XIV and
changed the balance of power in Europe for the next two centuries.
Readers
of NYSD will recall our visit to Blenheim last June (some
of JH’s
photographs of our tour are included here). Having thus seen the
place first hand, and having had a personal tour by Lady Henrietta,
and having read much of Churchill history in the past, I wouldn’t
have thought there would be anything new or anything more to engage
my curiosity about the world’s largest private palace. But
there is, for the secrets of its archives and the ways of this most
famous family (whose financial fortunes were rescued in the late
19th century by marriages to American heiresses, especially Consuelo
Vanderbilt) are articulately and captivating told and displayed by
Lady Henrietta in this wonderful book. |
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Left: The
Grand Saloon at Blenheim. |
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Right: Lady
Henrietta Spencer-Churchill sitting in the smoking room at
Blenheim in her late grandfather's favorite well-worn leather
chair. She
writes,
"Its shabby
chic is an essential element of the country house look. I
am seated with Bounty, my Border terrier/Jack Russell cross." |
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DPC
looking west on the lawn of Blenheim
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L.
to r.: The
entry hallway to the private apartments; a sitting room
in the private residence.
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