We keep the faith

Very sad news today.

RIP, Paul O'Grady aka Lily Savage.

We're distraught.

The Boss

It's Miss Ross's birthday today.

All hail!

To tell the story of the moment you’re in is not always an easy thing

Josephine Baker (1927) by George Hoyningen-Huene for Vanity Fair

From the foreword by Dame Anna Wintour:

Brilliance and bravery. Those are my impressions from Chronorama: Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century that tells a story of the better part of a century through people, places, fashion, culture, and art. The word “brilliance” comes to mind because this is the work of the best photographers of our age. Steichen, Penn, Horst, Beaton, Newton, Elgort, Miller, and so many others – their names are as iconic as the cultural figures they captured.

Edward Steichen's Mary Heberden wearing a satin dress (1935) for Vogue

But I also think of bravery because these are magazine pictures. Photographs commissioned by editors to run in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden, GQ, Mademoiselle, and Glamour – Condé Nast magazines with a wide and varied readership. Each photograph is therefore an act of journalism: this person represents our moment, these clothes tell us about the time we’re in, this building or object explains our era.

Bert Stein's Twiggy (1967) for Vogue

Is journalism art? Of course, and every page of Chronorama puts that question to rest. But magazine pictures are also something slightly to the side of art, and that is why they seem so brave to me. To tell the story of the moment you’re in is not always an easy thing. Who is relevant? What matters now? What is happening? The answers can set off a storm of debate.

Suzy Parker's Snapshot of her famous sister Dorian Leigh (1954) for Vogue

Mick Jagger (1964) by David Bailey for Vogue

The editors behind these photographs, everyone from Edna Woolman Chase to Frank Crowninshield to Grace Mirabella to Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s legendary editorial director, made wonderful choices. The people here do define the century, from Charlie Chaplin to James Joyce to Henri Matisse to Ernest Hemingway, Mick Jagger, Catherine Deneuve, Karl Lagerfeld, Richard Avedon, Arthur Ashe, Twiggy, Veruschka, and so many others. The settings and fashion are profoundly chic.

Liza Minnelli (1967) by Alexis Waldeck for Vogue

It is impossible to pick favorites among the pages of Chronorama, but I will say this: the bravest pictures, the controversial ones, have uncommon power. Think of Helmut Newton’s “Story of Ohhh…” from 1975, a portfolio so sexually liberated that Vogue readers were aghast. Or the Deborah Turbeville bathhouse photographs from the same issue, as unsettling and allusive as they are glamorous. Or any one of Irving Penn’s unrelenting, uncompromising images with their classical, modernist style. In the 1950s, Vogue editors apparently fretted that his pictures were too much: “They burn the page,” they said. They certainly do.

Benedetta Barzini (1969) by Gian Paolo Barbieri for Vogue

I like to look forward, not back, but seeing these photographs, I find myself a little nostalgic for a different age, warmly recalling how, when I came to Vogue, Mr Penn would photograph models with barely anyone around him, only him, a Vogue editor, and the smallest of teams. I think of photographers disappearing for weeks and coming back with pictures that astonished me and frightened me too. Every editor knows the experience: the recognition of risk and the knowledge that no other choice will do.

Chronorama: Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century is published on 30th March 2023.

The year’s pleasant king

Spring, the sweet spring
By Thomas Nashe

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
      Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:
      Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
      Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!
            Spring, the sweet spring! 

It's the Vernal Equinox, dear reader, known in some quarters as "The first day of Spring".

From now on, the days get longer - Summer's just around the corner...

It's Mothers' Day! *

...let her have her fun!

[* in the UK; also (more properly) known as Mothering Sunday]

The higher the hair...

Be joyful!

...'Tis The Ides of March!

Don't hit the old man too hard with your sticks...

Weekend Reading

La Tigresa roars no more

More sad news - as I read that that one of my fave "diva discoveries", the terrifying "La Tigresa" has departed for Fabulon.

Who? I hear you ask...

Here's my tribute to the great lady from way back in 2012:

As regular readers will know, here at Dolores Delargo Towers, the discovery of a new exotic "diva" sends us into paroxysms of joy.

And so it came to pass when, after I featured her album among my "On the Jukebox" selection recently, the ever-diligent Madam Arcati was immediately on Google to find out more about the sultry sex kitten that is Irma Serrano. He found the music, and the fact she is [was] scarily still alive. I investigated the lady's outrageous life story...

Senorita Serrano - according to her own autobiography - was allegedly kidnapped at the age of 13 or 14 from her ranch home in rural Mexico, and ended up entering the burgeoning Mexican cinematic industry. In truth the teenage Irma Cielo Consuelo Serrano Castro Domínguez had run away with an older lover, and this early rebellious streak set the scene for a long and controversial life.

Her screen career actually began in 1962 in a trashy movie called Santo vs. the Zombies alongside several Mexican wrestling superstars. Presumably this was a precursor of how she would become regarded throughout her acting career, for it seems that in all her roles she played some kind of "man-eater". It was inevitable she would become known as "La Tigresa".

Allegedly blacklisted for her affair with Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Mexico’s president, she hit the headlines in the 1970s after she published several books about it. Her flamboyant appearance and tempestuous personality brought her renewed fame on stage and screen.

In the 1990s, she became a businesswoman and launched a political career, running successfully for Congress on the ticket of the leftist PRD, serving initially in the lower house and later in the Senate.

"La Tigresa" remained a popular television personality, too - most probably for her freaky appearance as much as anything - but just could not keep out of trouble. She scandalised the Mexican tabloids at the age of 71 by marrying a man of 29! She seems to specialise in telling tales about her many affairs with younger men (some were true, most were denied), and conducting public spats with a few of them. She has hit the headlines for claiming to be a witch, a Satanist, and being pregnant - in her seventies!

To top it all, in 2009 she was arrested immediately after a TV appearance and placed under house arrest, charged with forcibly evicting tenants (at gunpoint allegedly!) from a building she owned, despite their having a valid lease.

I wouldn't mess with her!

Irma Serrano "La Tigresa" - Tierra mala

Ay caramba!

RIP, Señorita Irma Consuelo Cielo Serrano Castro (9th December 1933 – 1st March 2023)