She got the look

Possibly the most influential "look" in history.

Louise Brooks (born Mary Louise Brooks, 14th November 1906 – 8th August 1985)

Baddely or Goodeley

"I have spent most of my life working in the theatre - which is always my greatest love - but the films and television were the providers of the little luxuries of life."

The utterly marvellous Hermione Baddeley would have been 110 years old today...

Facts:

• She started her long acting career in the 1920s, but her big breakthrough was as 'Ida' in the classic film noir Brighton Rock in 1947.
• Her sister Angela was most famous for playing 'Mrs Bridges' in Upstairs Downstairs.
• Her first marriage was to the arch-decadent aesthete Stephen's brother The Hon. David Pax Tennant, socialite and BBC announcer; their first date was a double-date with none other than Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later HM The Queen Mother) and her escort.
• Miss Baddeley was teamed up with her inimitable namesake Hermione Gingold in Noël Coward's stage comedy Fallen Angels, though the two women were apparently "no longer on speaking terms" by the end of the run.
• Her 1961 LP A Taste Of Hermione Baddeley is notable for the presence of the rather brilliantly-titled track I Changed My Sex A Week Ago Today (a copy of which - inevitably! - we have in our collection here at Dolores Delargo Towers; it does not, however, appear to be anywhere on the interwebs now).
• After her success playing the maid in Mary Poppins, she had a lucrative career on US television, in such shows as Bewitched, Little House on the Prairie and Maude; she died at her home in Los Angeles.

Hermione "Totie" Baddeley (born Hermione Youlanda Ruby Clinton-Baddeley, 13th November 1906 – 19th August 1986)

Oh my Goth...

...Whitby Goth Weekend has descended again!

To have genius and be obscure

“Dandies... as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.”

“For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.”

“Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.”

“Ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men... men like you.”

"The most beautiful destiny: to have genius and be obscure."



As James J. Conway over at Strange Flowers says of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly:

[He was] the author of Du dandysme et de George Brummell, published in English as The Anatomy of Dandyism. Appearing in 1844, this slim volume was the first serious appraisal of the cult of the dandy which grew around George “Beau” Brummell in Regency England. Like jazz, like Samuel Beckett, like Tina Arena, dandyism had to go to France to be taken seriously.

For Brummell and his associates, dressing well required hours in front of the mirror to arrive at an ensemble of suiting and grooming so perfect that it eluded notice. But Barbey d’Aurevilly knew that dandyism wasn’t just “the art of deportment, costume, and fortunate and audacious dictatorship of the toilet and exterior elegance. It is certainly that, but it is much more.” And if it were possible to codify the dandies’ self-presentation as a “look” (and caricatures of the time prove that it was) then that “look” had been and gone.

In any case, for Barbey d’Aurevilly, “mimicry is not resemblance. One can catch an air or a pose, as one can steal the shape of a dress-coat; but the comedy is wearisome, the mask is painful…” The French dandy was, by all accounts, quite the head-turner, and the effort he went to in constructing his look was much in evidence. Tall for the era, he stepped out in rouge and lipstick, with rings on his fingers, dye in his hair and lace at his cuffs. The whole arrangement owed little to the cool reserve of les rosbifs; as Barbey d’Aurevilly noted, “I have been as dandy as one can be in France,” further commenting that “the country of Richelieu will never produce a Brummell”.

It may never have produced a Brummell, but d'Aurevilly's influence was far-reaching, paving the way as he did for such legends of Dandyism as Charles Pierre Baudelaire and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam - and of course the "decadents" of the Aesthetic movement, including Oscar Wilde.

Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (2nd November 1808 – 23rd April 1889)

The month of the long decline of roses

Hendecasyllabics
by Algernon Charles Swinburne

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”

Another British Summer Time is over...

On the Jukebox this Hallowe'en weekend at Dolores Delargo Towers

Scary...

Deliberate trash

"If you own a car, you change that every few years and that's just what I'm doing with my appearance."

"The only thing that separates us from animals, our ability to accessorise."

"You'd never catch me in a pair of fishnets! For one thing, they are not practical. And for another thing, it's just like a tacky drag queen."

"How trashy do I seem? I like deliberate Trash. I collect items like Elvis Presley clock radios and '50s memorabilia. It inspires a lot of my imagery. I like tasteful trash."

We're very sad here at Dolores Delargo Towers. Another great icon of the Eighties, Pete Burns is dead!

There will never be another...

RIP, Peter Jozzeppi "Pete" Burns (5th August 1959 – 23rd October 2016)

More Pete Burns and Dead or Alive here, here and here.