This weekend, I am mostly dressing casual...

...like the silent movie star the papers named “The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful”, Miss Barbara La Marr!


[click to enlarge]




Read more about the tragically short yet fascinating life of the alluring Miss La Marr.

The Dame is a Vamp

Gosh. Dame Helen Mirren is 75 years old today!



My thoughts exactly.

[See my tribute to the great lady on her 70th...]

How can you tell I'm under a spell?

Gosh. Miss Truly Scrumptious is 90 years old today! Any excuse to play this wonderful number...

Doll On A Music Box (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 1968)

What do you see
You people gazing at me
You see a doll on a music box
That's wound by a key
How can you tell
I'm under a spell?
I'm waiting for love's first kiss
You cannot see
How much I long to be free
Turning around on this music box
That's wound by a key
Yearning
Yearning
While
I'm turning around and around

Love it.

Happy birthday, Miss Sally Ann Howes (born 20th July 1930).

Weekend reading

Tout en finesse

"You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there's diamonds and pearls in your hair"

And so, farewell to another legend - the magnificent Zizi Jeanmaire.

The darling of Paris cabaret, she trained at Paris Opera Ballet, danced with Nureyev, and starred in films such as Hans Christian Andersen (opposite Danny Kaye) and Anything Goes with Bing Crosby. Her costumes were designed by Yves Saint Laurent, her trademark "gamine" hairstyle went on to influence the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and the 1960s "waifs" in Swinging London, and with her choreographer Roland Petit she became a leading player in the "jet-set" art-house scene, collaborating with such luminaries as Andy Warhol...

...and, as the song translates, she adored her "feathery things"!

Zizi Jeanmaire - Mon Truc en Plumes

RIP, Renée Marcelle "Zizi" Jeanmaire (29th April 1924 – 17th July 2020)

Le tricolore étincelant

Joyeux Quatorze Juillet!

Joyeux Dalida!!

[Much more Dalida over at my other blog Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle]

This weekend, I am mostly dressing casual...

...just like the legendary Puerto Rican television astrologer and cult icon [who bore a striking resemblance to my Nan towards the end] Walter Mercado, subject of a recent (Netflix-only at the moment, more's the pity) documentary about his life, named after his catchphrase: Mucho Mucho Amor.

From the New York Post:

Mercado’s career began in 1969 when he began reading horoscopes on television in his native Puerto Rico. He eventually became an international phenomenon, known as much for his astrology shows as he was for his coiffed look and Liberace-like wardrobe of colourful suits and jewellery and signature crystal-bedecked capes.

While one might assume he was gay, it wasn’t something Mercado ever discussed. He was an open book with the film-makers, except with it came to his romantic life. “He didn’t like the labels and he didn’t kind of embrace them in any particular way,” co-director Kareem Tabsch said. “But, he was a queer icon. If you were a Latino, Latin American, like myself as a young queer kid watching for the first time, I recognized that sense of otherness in him that I saw in me. I was a much less fabulous version, but I could tell he was different in a way that I was different. And if there was that possibility that he was so loved in the Latino community being so different, that as a young queer person, maybe I too could be loved.”

Mercado was in his 80s when [they] approached him about making the documentary. He agreed after they told him their astrological signs.

By then, Mercado’s life in the spotlight was long gone. His career stumbled during a seven-year legal battle that began in 2006 over the rights to his name and likeness with his former manager Bill Bakula.

Mercado was 87 when he died in November 2019, not long after the doc had wrapped. “He’s our Mr. Rogers and our Oprah and our Liberace all combined into one,” co-director Cristina Costantini said. “I think on a certain level we were shocked that he agreed to do the film. But he so badly wanted to be a public guy, so badly wanted attention and wanted to make this his comeback. We thought it was going to be a comeback but it ended up being a swan song, of course. He really loved the lights and the camera. They gave him energy. They gave him life.”

Here's a trailer for what promises to be an extraordinary programme [and should it ever be shown on "proper telly", I might watch it]:

Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado

Extraordinary!

The swan nonpareil

From The Robb Report:

Every artist must settle on a medium; and although Truman Capote, as a boy, imagined a career in films, by the time he turned 20 he had tied his hopes to a literary career. Style - in language and in life - was a preoccupation for the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, whose aesthetic ideal was the fusion of ambition and taste in what he described as a living work of art. “There are certain women,” he said, “who...are born to be rich. By and large, these persons are artists of an odd variety; money, in astronomical amounts, is their instrument.”

Capote became an eminent connoisseur of such venal virtuosos, whom he playfully called his “swans.” These ladies shared more than friendship with the writer: each possessed striking looks, a flawless fashion sense, and a determination to secure the means to bend the world to her whims. “He...got the sense of what a person wanted to be,” recalled one acquaintance, “and then he helped her to achieve it. It was his way of getting close to her.”

...The swan nonpareil, however, was Barbara “Babe” Paley. “Mrs. P. had only one fault: she was perfect,” Capote noted. The youngest of the three celebrated Cushing sisters of Boston, Paley abandoned her post as an editor at Vogue for the more remunerative position of Mrs. Stanley Mortimer. She filed for divorce when the Standard Oil heir returned from service in World War II a broken man, and thanks to the ministrations of her well-connected sister Betsey Whitney, she displaced the first Mrs. William S. Paley to become the second wife of the broadcasting pioneer.

Capote met Paley in 1955, when one of her guests asked if “Truman” could join them for a weekend on her estate in Jamaica. Expecting the former president of the United States, she agreed. From the moment the impish author boarded the private plane, he and Paley were inseparable.

Barbara "Babe" Cushing Mortimer Paley (5th July 1915 – 6th July 1978)

An inspiration to us all

Olivia de Havilland...



...still going strong at 104!

Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland DBE (born 1st July 1916)