Princess Tiger Eyes

The higher the hair, the closer to god...

From the Telegraph:

Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, who has died aged 83, was an Italian socialite, B-movie actress and fashion model, whose “profile of Renaissance beauty and fascination, like the portraits of young noblewomen in the Uffizi” was celebrated in 1960s Vogue.

A niece of Gianni Agnelli and the epitome of the jet set, Ira von Fürstenberg had, by the time she was 20, already been married to two of the 20th century’s most notorious playboys, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, the so-called “King of Clubs” who invented the resort of Marbella (and jealously refused Salvador Dalí’s request to paint Ira naked), and the Brazilian industrialist Francesco “Baby” Pignatari.

She was only 15 at the time of her first marriage, and needed special dispensation from the Pope to wed von Hohenlohe, 31, who had proposed to her by telegram after seeing her in a vision as he crawled clear of the wreckage of a plane crash. Ira the child-bride made the cover of Life magazine in 1955, leading a flotilla of 130 gondolas to the church in Venice. Her mother’s family company, Fiat, gave them a red Cinquecento, wrapped up and tied with a bow.

Five years later, by now neglected and disenchanted, she eloped with the 44-year-old Pignatari. Von Hohenlohe sent armed policemen to catch the couple in flagrante in a hotel in Mexico City, and there was a fight. Then von Hohenlohe kidnapped their two sons, and went on the run for two and a half years, occasionally dressing the boys in wigs and dirndls to pass them off as girls, to evade the princess’s million-dollar reward offered to anyone who could find them.

Her 1961 marriage to Pignatari in Reno ended in divorce in Las Vegas in 1964, after he sent a friend to tell her: “Baby wants to leave you.” As her son Hubertus later put it: “She had got caught up in a man’s world as half a child.” She steered clear of matrimony thereafter, although in the 1980s she seemed close to becoming the second wife of her cousin, Prince Rainier of Monaco, after the death of Grace Kelly.

The Agnelli money permitted her to lead a life of peripatetic glamour, with houses in Mayfair, Madrid, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on the Via Veneto in Rome, where she had avant-garde perspex furniture, and in the Place Vendôme in Paris, where she had solid gold bath taps. (“Everybody has to see something beautiful in the morning in order to have a good day,” she said.) She told her biographer, Nick Foulkes, however, that “my only real home is on aeroplanes. I spend so much time going from country to country that my children suspect that I’m really a flight attendant.”

It was on a plane in 1966 that she met the producer Dino De Laurentiis, who saw star potential in her famous tawny eyes (“princess tiger eyes”, her first husband called her). Her film debut was the James Bond spoof Matchless (1968), co-starring Patrick O’Neal and Donald Pleasence, and she went on to grace the screen in a string of “sex kitten” roles, playing opposite Anthony Quinn, Peter Lawford, Klaus Kinski and Walter Chiari; she was even screen-tested by Roger Vadim for the lead in Barbarella.

She declined to star in one of Tinto Brass’s erotic movies, but as a rule, over her 29 film and television roles, she was content to wear very little, reassuring her anxious father that “for the moment my acting does not have the same power to make people flock to the cinema as my body”...

When the parts dried up, Princess Ira merely moved on - running the fashion house Valentino’s perfume division, and using her influence in the world of haute couture to bolster the career of her protégé Karl Lagerfeld. In later life she became a renowned artist and sculptor, whose works sold for thousands to the latter-day "jet-set".

What a woman! What a life!

RIP, Princess Ira von Fürstenberg (17th April 1940 - 18th February 2024)

Everything's set out for the Dolores Delargo Towers New Year's Eve party...

...just waiting for our guests to arrive!

Happy New Year, dear reader!

A fabulous Dickie

From Vintage Everyday:

These photos belonged to an Englishman by the name of Richard Colley, known as 'Dick' or 'Dickie' to his many friends. Most of photos are dated from 1922 to 1925, some others are dated 1932 and 1933.

Richard Colley enjoyed a privileged lifestyle of holidays, afternoon parties, receptions and costumed balls, interspersed with trips to the races and to the theatre. Many of his friends in the album are unidentified, but it is clear that he knew Dorothy Gish, Gaby Deslys, Harry Pilcer, Beatrice de Bourbon, and the former Queen of Italy.

It is possible that he himself enjoyed a brief career as a dancer or in silent films.

He evidently loved dressing-up!

Fab-u-lous, indeed!

A perfect example of why LGBT History Month is so important.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” – Cicero

[click any photo to enlarge]

Balls - my favourite!

Seventy years ago today, Don Carlos de Beistegui y de Yturbe held a masked costume ball, which he called Le Bal oriental, at his Palazzo Labia in Venice.

From an article by Nick Foulkes in The Rake:

Don Carlos de Beistegui, or Charlie, as he was known to his circle of intimates (of whom there were few), was one of a small group of cosmopolitan plutocrats who dominated European high-life in the years between the Second World War and the beginning of the Jet Set era. They swept into mid 20th-century Europe on a tide of money. Their fortunes, built on the backs of labourers in Central and South America, may have come from unpleasant and malodorous beginnings in silver mines or the exploitation of centuries-old deposits of guano, but they dissipated them in Europe with style and liberality. In the first half of the 20th century the words ‘South American millionaire’ had much the same ring to them as ‘Russian oligarch’ or ‘Chinese billionaire’ have today...

...In 1948 he had happened across the crumbling Palazzo Labia, and, as he walked into the once-grand, dilapidated ballroom, with its flaking frescoes and peeling walls, he was able to see beyond the years of neglect. According to Life magazine, he bought the palace for a reported half a million dollars and spent another three-quarters of a million dollars doing it up.

Then, in the spring of 1951, cards inviting everyone from New World film stars to Old World nobility began to arrive, requesting the honour of their presence at half-past-ten on the evening of September 3 at the Palazzo Labia for an 18th-century costume ball at which masks would be worn. In all, 2,000 of what Life dubbed “the world’s most blueblooded and/or richest inhabitants” were invited.

However, it would have been a mistake for anyone to regard this as a jolly evening on the Grand Canal underwritten by an eccentric millionaire. “Ce n’était pas un bal pour s’amuser,” says Jacqueline de Ribes, who attended the ball as a young woman. “...It was a ball to be happy. But not for fun.”

For Beistegui, his guests were little more than living pieces of furniture with which to dress his Venice creation; as well as wearing costumes, they would also have to make an entrance... literally present a tableau vivant, which would require careful thought and could involve a dozen other, appropriately costumed, guests...

...Venice never had and never would again see anything like it. Over the coming days the city would witness the sort of grandiosity, imperious behaviour and outrageous displays of opulence not seen since the days of the doges. Only the doges did not have to contend with the world of colour magazines and gossip columnists, who were drawn to Venice like iron filings to a magnet...The Duchess of Devonshire wrote to her sister Diana: “I must say, it was fascinating in its way, and the ball itself a real amazer.” Even the private detective who screened each guest on arrival was in period clothes. Anyone who did not adhere to the dress code was quickly whisked out of sight, though most people had invested months and huge sums in their costumes - this was fancy dress as an Olympic sport, and just as competitive.

>

Arturo López Willshaw, the multi-millionaire scion of a Chilean guano dynasty who lived in an intriguing ménage with his wife, Patricia, and his wan young lover, Baron Alexis de Redé, was said to have spent $55,000 on a set of costumes that represented an 18th- century Chinese ambassador and his wife. Of course, his lover, de Redé, was a member of the party, clad in robes embroidered with real gold thread, along with a number of other friends and relatives as attendants ... all with masks and excessively long false fingernails, their entrées enhanced by accessories such as songbirds in gilded cages.

...“Daisy Fellowes, regularly voted the best-dressed woman in France and America, portrayed the Queen of Africa from the Tiepolo frescoes in Wurzburg,” recalled the Duchess of Devonshire in 2010. “She wore a dress trimmed with leopard print, the first time we had seen such a thing (still fashionable today, 60 years on).” She accessorised this memorable outfit with her famous ‘Hindu necklace’, a platinum-set suite of jewels by Cartier combining diamonds, emeralds and sapphires in the fashionable ‘tutti-frutti’ style. She completed her outfit with a phalanx of scantily clad male attendants.

And standing there, at the top of the stairs, was the host.

Beistegui was transformed from his normal 5’6” in height to nearly seven-feet tall in giant 16-inch platform shoes concealed by scarlet robes of a Procurator of the Venetian Republic, his disdainful features framed by the curls of a huge wig that cascaded over his shoulders and down his chest...



















Oh! How I wish I could have been there...

Conversation pieces

"I can wear a hat or take it off, but either way it's a conversation piece." Hedda Hopper











Royal Ascot Ladies' Day 2017 was a colourful affair, as ever.

With Chelsea Flower Show a distant memory, and Henley Regatta and Wimbledon just around the corner - the Season is halfway through already.

Must grab some more Bolly, sweetie!

Lucky for some

Each table seated 13. Upon each rested an open umbrella, a bottle of bourbon and 13 copies of a poem called The Harlot. The speaker’s table was strewn with horseshoes, old keys, old shoes, mirrors and cardboard black cats. Before it reposed an open coffin with 13 candles.

Nathaniel Leverone, originator of the Anti-Superstition Society celebrates Friday 13th with Judt Kurtz, Bernadine Stevens, Patty Allen, Tani Sawa and Connie Jean.

It's the weekend, and thoughts turn to balls...

Oh, those fabulous balls we used to hold!

Well, we can only dream of being invited to one of the notorious bals masqué held by one of the early 20th century's most extravagant society hosts Count Étienne de Beaumont.







His guest list alone was a glittering tableau of previous "exhibits" here at the Dolores Delargo Towers Museum of Camp - the Marchioness Casati, Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, The Comte's niece Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Serge Lifar, Christian Dior, Alexis von Rosenberg Baron de Redé, Nancy Cunard - as well as luminaries such as Romanov Princess Natalia Pavlovna (Natalie) Paley, the Viscount and Vicomtesse de Noailles, Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, Oliver Messel, Erik Satie, Duc Fulco di Verdura, Tristan Tzara, billionaire Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara and Leonide Massine. Man Ray was his "house photographer"...





The Comte was bitterly satirised in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, yet he was not merely a spoilt aristocratic party-giver. He was also one of Paris's foremost patrons of the arts - notably the more avant garde ones that were the penchant of some of his guests - and his money ensured that some of the 20th century's most influential works were brought to the public's attention.



Regardless of his influence, it's his balls we love!



Le Comte Étienne Bonnin de la Bonninière de Beaumont (9th March 1883 - 4th February 1956)

Pink pigeons, the Mad Boy and a horse at the tea table

Lord Berners by Bill Brandt


With Gertude Stein


Caricature by Max Beerbohm

"Here lies Lord Berners
One of the learners
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning
But praise to the lord
He seldom was bored."
[His self-penned epitaph.]

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners, also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, made Faringdon House (in the Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire) the centre of a glittering social circle, entertaining some of the most diverse, creative and influential people during the 1920s and 30s. His typical weekend guest list might have included: Aldous Huxley, HG Wells, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Edith and all the Sitwells, Nancy Mitford, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Siegfried Sassoon, Diana Mosley, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Frederick Ashton, Duff and Diana Cooper, Stephen Tennant, Chips Channon, Max Beerbohm, Lord Beaverbrook, John and Penelope Betjeman ["I don't mind Penelope as long as we don't have any of that God nonsense," he apparently told a friend], Tom Driberg, Beverley Nichols, Elsa Schiaparelli and many more of the great and the not-so-good.


Lord Berners and party guests including Sir Robert and Lady Diane Abdy, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Robert Heber-Percy is seated at the centre


With Elsa Schiaparelli

"I can always tell when Gerald's weekend guests arrive," said a friend, discussing his music. "There's a sudden clash of cymbals." [Read more about Lord Berners' musical legacy in an essay by composer Gavin Bryars.]



His themed parties were legendary, as was his avowed eccentricity. From an article by Joseph Epstein:

He dyed the pigeons around Faringdon bright colours (using a dye that did them no harm). He had an occasional penchant for monochromatic meals. Stravinsky recalled that "if Lord Berners's mood was pink, lunch might consist of beet soup, lobster, tomatoes, strawberries," with pink pigeons flying outside; Stravinsky's wife sent Berners a powder that allowed him to make blue mayonnaise. He built a so-called "folly," an isolated tower with no reason for being other than his desire to have it built, and to it he appended the notice: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk." He allowed Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti into his drawing-room for tea, [and] he installed a portable piano in the back of his Rolls-Royce.

Gerald was popular with this dilettante inter-war generation as much for his wit as his largesse. When an Australian newspaper claimed that it was sad to see the once noble city of Venice full of beggars, he suggested that it was a misprint and supposed to read "buggers." He referred to Vita Sackville-West as "Wry Vita", and described T E Lawrence as "always backing into the limelight". When the Marchesa Casati arrived at Faringdon in tight satin trousers with a live boa constrictor, Berners entertained her at dinner by wearing a false nose.

When he was nearly 50, he fell in love with Robert Heber-Percy. The young man of 20 was handsome and gentle-eyed, but he was also possessed, says Berners's biographer, Mark Amory, of "an electrifying wildness, the suggestion of danger, the dash that earned him the nickname of 'the Mad Boy'." In the days when homosexuality was illegal, the couple lived openly together in Faringdon, London and Rome, and delighted in defying conventions: the Mad Boy rode naked on his horse and Berners wore masks in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.


"The Horrid Mad Boy" by Cecil Beaton

The Mad Boy's granddaughter - product of Robert's brief, unexpected and passionless marriage (to Jennifer) during his residency with Lord Berners - Sofka Zinovieff, who inherited the Faringdon estate, has published a new book about the affair, titled The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me. From the review by Rachel Cooke in The Observer:

At its heart, though, is a riddle: what kind of man was Heber-Percy, and why did he act as he did? Zinovieff did not meet her grandfather until she was 17, by which time Gerald Berners had long since passed into legend (He died in 1950, and was widely memorialised, most notably by Nancy Mitford, who wrote him, in the form of Lord Merlin, into her novel The Pursuit of Love). Was their relationship a love affair? Zinovieff believes it was. But relationships, at least among the upper classes, were then more flexible than now, and theirs stretchier than most. If Gerald’s friends were astounded when he took up with Heber-Percy, who at 20 was almost three decades his junior, they were even more amazed when this handsome “ape” brought home a wife. What had happened? Had the couple taken too much champagne at the Gargoyle Club? Gerald, on the other hand, took in his stride both the marriage and the baby that arrived nine months later. If Penelope Betjeman could bring her horse to tea, why shouldn’t Robert install a child?

Miss Zinovieff describes how the Mad Boy, in the end, adopted almost as many of his lover Gerald's foibles as his marriage had appeared to be an effort to reject:

...determined to keep Faringdon’s spirit alive, the entertaining continue[d], and he install[ed] a preposterous pink bathroom, with tropical mural. Emerging from grief, his love life [was] as muddy as ever. There [were] two men, Hughie and Garth, and another baffling marriage, to the elderly Coote Lygon, who grew up at Madresfield, the house that inspired Brideshead Revisited. (“A Darby and Joan engagement just announced in the Times has led to much chuckling on the grouse moors this week,” said the Daily Express.) Coote was girlishly excited to be a bride - and crushed to be banished to a nearby bungalow soon afterwards.

Robert Heber Percy remained somewhat of a brute, it seems - he physically attacked Cecil Beaton (who always hated him, calling him "Horrid Madboy"), an act of revenge which some say prompted the Grand Old Man of Photography to finally go into retirement.

Inevitably, even in a biography of the lover, it is the legend of Lord Berners and those decadent days at Faringdon that, for me at least, cast the lasting spell...

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me by Sofka Zinovieff is available from Random House Publishing.

Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric by Mark Amory is available on Amazon.