Out with the old...

...with Mae West!

...Anita Ekberg!

...Betty Grable!

...Ms Scarlet Clara Bow!

...and Ann Miller!

Happier New Year, dear reader!

Aventurier et iconoclaste

And so, farewell to the last of the truly great fashion designers of the post-War era, M Pierre Cardin - departed for Fabulon, where he will no doubt improve the decor and attire.

Always ahead of his time, his creations were futuristic, daring and, ultimately, wildly popular - it was his collarless jackets that made the Beatles' image so instantly recognisable, and all the premier fashionistas of the day flocked to wear his clothes. He premiered couture for men, as well as off-the-peg fashion lines, and was the first of his ilk to use his name as a brand for non-fashion ranges such as sunglasses, watches and perfume.

• Read my previous tribute to the great man

Repose en Paix, Pierre Cardin (born Pietro Costante Cardin, 2nd July 1922 – 29th December 2020)

Do I hear a Waltz?

Scandalous goings-on in the film Wonder Bar (1934).

Boys will be boys, indeed...

The woman who invented beauty

"I fell in love with beauty a long, long time ago, but what I wanted was to create beauty - not to be blinded by it."

"I've always thought that a woman owes it to herself to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity."

"American women had purple noses and grey lips and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder. I recognized that the United States could be my life's work."

"Work has been indeed my best beauty treatment. I believe in hard work. It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young."

"I have never had my face lifted. I prefer to have my spirits lifted. In my opinion, the effect is very nearly the same."

"Beauty is power. The greatest power of them all."

Facts:

• Born into a poor Jewish family in Krakow, Poland, she fled the arranged marriage her family had planned for her by emigrating - changing her name to Helena Rubinstein on her identification papers and wiping 10 years off her age in the process - and began her cosmetics empire in rural Australia.
• She expanded her horizons when she opened beauty salons in Mayfair, London (in 1908), Paris (in 1909) and eventually, in New York.
• In 1928, she sold her business to Lehman brothers for $7.3m - but when the stock market crashed a year later she bought it back for $1.5m, a business move that helped her become one of the richest and most famous women in the world.
• In 1941, when she was told she couldn’t buy an apartment in her New York block because of her Jewish heritage, she thwarted the anti-Semitic residents by buying the entire building.
• When she died aged 93, her fortune was estimated at more than $100m.

Helena Rubinstein (born Chaja Rubinstein, 25th December 1872 – 1st April 1965)

Look at winter with winter eyes

Winter Eyes
by Douglas Florian

Look at winter
With winter eyes
As smoke curls from rooftops
To clear cobalt skies.

Breathe in winter
Past winter nose:
The sweet scent of black birch
Where velvet moss grows.
Walk through winter
With winter feet
On crackling ice
Or sloshy wet sleet.

Look at winter
With winter eyes:
The rustling of oak leaves
As spring slowly nears.

Oh, how I love that last thought - for today is indeed the nadir of the year; the longest night - and everything from here on in will be getting lighter again...

Midwinter's Day aka the Winter Solstice.

On the Festering Season Jukebox at Dolores Delargo Towers

This weekend, I am mostly dressing casual...

...like today's birthday girl, the remarkable Dame Gladys Cooper!

[...who shares her day with a bizarre range of mis-matched "names" including Betty Grable, sex god Brad Pitt, Dame Celia Johnson, Christina Aguilera, Fletcher Henderson, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Michael Moorcock, Rosemary Leach, Keith Richards, HH Munro aka Saki, Steven Spielberg, Paul Klee, Willy Brandt, Billie Eilish, Queen Christina of Sweden, Joseph Stalin, Charles Wesley, Ray Liotta and Sia...]

Private Lives

Noël Coward (right) in the Bahamas with Alan Webb

[click to enlarge]

From an article by Noël Coward's biographer Philip Hoare in The Guardian:

In 1931, Noël Coward was the highest-earning author in the western world, celebrated for his scintillating comedies and sensational dramas of hidden love such as The Vortex, Private Lives and Easy Virtue. As well as writing hit songs, musicals, novels and short stories, he painted and, not least, performed. But perhaps the most astounding thing of all is the fact that – at a time when homosexuality was illegal and would remain so for some time – he lived an openly gay life.

It is this that makes a newly discovered photograph album so extraordinary. It shows intimate glimpses from the private life of this towering cultural figure. Apparently compiled in the 1930s by Coward’s closest female friend, Joyce Carey, the album is a remarkable insight into gay lives of the interwar years, lived in plain sight...

...Many of Coward’s guests are highly glamorous theatre women: Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead, Gladys Calthrop. But Coward’s allure extended far beyond the stage: the writers Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf were also his good friends. And then there are all those handsome young men, sporting droopy woollen swimsuits that leave nothing to the imagination.

The mere existence of such images could have brought the punitive weight of the law – and public prejudice – down on Coward’s head. Yet these men were his lovers and he made no secret of it. His relationship with Alan Webb, then starring in Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, was tempestuous, and ended in tears. We see the two men posing on the beach at Nassau in the Bahamas, holidaying there together in 1937...[and] Graham Payn, an altogether less troubling young man, [who] was to become Coward’s longest and most constant companion, and became the executor of his estate when the dramatist died in Jamaica in 1973.

I do love - even more than those glamorous posed publicity photographs taken by flatterers like Cecil Beaton or Angus McBean - having a good old nose at such rare insights into the ordinary lives of our idols.

The whole album went up for auction in London just yesterday - with an estimated sale price of just £500-£800. If I had that kind of money going spare, I might have bid! It sold for £1600 in the end, such is the interest in the great man even after all these years.

And no wonder, when (also quoted by the aforementioned Mr Hoare) we have witticisms such as this to remember him by:

[Nothing stopped] the Master from making a joke of it all. Wit was the great man’s defence. Once, crossing Leicester Square with a friend, he looked up and saw a cinema marquee advertising a new film: Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them.

Coward turned to his friend and said: “I don’t see why not. Everyone else has.”

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16th December 1899 – 26th March 1973)

Weekend Reading

Carry On, carried off

RIP, Dame Barbara Windsor. An icon, an inspiration, a national treasure.

We will miss you.

Dame Barbara Windsor, (Babs) DBE (born Barbara Ann Deeks, 6th August 1937 - 10th December 2020)

Fan Club

Mary Martin (1st December 1913 – 3rd November 1990)

Maria Callas (2nd December 1923 – 16th September 1977)

Agnes Moorehead (6th December 1900 – 30th April 1974)

Zeki Müren (6th December 1931 – 24th September 1996)

Concha Piquer (8th December 1908 – 12th December 1990)

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (9th December 1915 – 3rd August 2006)

"Fan for me fan for me, fan!"