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Monthly Archives: October 2013

Eloise

October 15, 2013

Eloise’s portrait at the Plaza Hotel

In 1955, my publisher Simon & Schuster published one of the greatest, most joyful, most subversive picture books of all time Eloise by Kay Thompson with illustrations by Hillary Knight. Eloise is a six year old girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel in New York City with her Nanny, her pug Weenie and her turtle Skipperdee and she is impossible and wonderful and for the most part on her own in a world made for grown-ups while her parents are always away. For me, it was almost like someone was telling my own story (the good parts at least) and Eloise became part sister, part role model, part best friend.

Kay Thompson (aka Katherine Louise Fink) was born in Missouri (just like me although in St. Louis not Kansas City) and became a singer, arranger, musician, songwriter, actor and, of course, author. She started in radio as a singer and choral arranger and worked with Bing Crosby and later headlined with the Williams Brothers (Andy’s first introduction to the world). She went to work for MGM as a vocal coach and choral director under the legendary musical producer Arthur Freed and worked with Judy Garland, Lena Horne and Frank Sinatra while there. Her only big starring film role was in the Stanley Donan musical Funny Face in which she played the imposing fashion editor, Maggie Prescott for whom Fred Astaire’s photographer and Audrey Hepburn’s model characters work. She was loud and brassy and wonderful — just like a grown up Eloise.

In fact, when asked if her goddaughter Liza Minelli was the model for Eloise, Thompson, the longtime Plaza Hotel resident, famously replied, “I am Eloise.”

While that may have been true, by the time I was introduced to the books while living in the Dakota and having tea at The Plaza and scrounging hors d’ouvres off the coffee table the mornings after Mother’s parties on Park Avenue in the late 60s, I was pretty sure that Eloise was me. And it was a great comfort.

Chanel Bonfire Paperback!

October 14, 2013

We interrupt your Columbus Day celebrations to inform you that the Chanel Bonfire paperback drops in one month on November 12, 2013 just in time for the holiday season. Put it on your list!

Maxwell’s Plum

October 11, 2013

Maxwell’s Plum, 64th and 1st Avenue

It was no wonder Mother had been miserable in the wild west of the Dakota when the Upper East Side was rocking with places like Maxwell’s Plum the original and quintessential singles bar of the late 60s and early 70s. While it may have been unusual for seven and eight year old girls to be seen at La Grenouille, it was probably a bit of a shock for some patrons to find Robbie and me at Maxwell’s.

Opened in 1966 by Warner LeRoy whose grandfather was Harry Warner (one of the Warner Brothers) and whose father Mervyn was one of the most successful directors in Hollywood, directing everything from The Wizard of Oz (uncredited) to Quo Vadis and Mr. Roberts to, more germane to my life, Gypsy. Like his father’s film choices, Warner’s menu was all over the place from chili and burgers to wild boar and caviar. And like both sides of his show business family, LeRoy was a showman first and foremost, later taking his larger than life sensibilities to Tavern on the Green and The Russian Tea Room.

While I’m sure mother was keenly aware of “the scene” at the bar where Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand and countless other hot, sexy young people were picking each other up, for Robbie and me, Maxwell’s Plum was a circus of stained glass, Tiffany lamps and large ceramic animals hanging from the ceiling that made it feel like a grown-ups restaurant for kids or a restaurant where grown-ups could act like kids.

Rumplemeyer’s and The Auto Pub

October 10, 2013

Hotel St. Moritz, 50 Central Park South

I can not for the life of me find a photo of Rumplemeyer’s Ice Cream Parlor which was housed at the St. Moritz on Central Park South but it was my first favorite place in New York. Begun as a restaurant originally called Rumplemayer’s and imported from Paris and run by the Viennese chef Rumplemayer, it was an original part of the hotel (built in 1930) in which the likes of Marlene Dietrich dined. By the late 60s when we moved to New York it was the most wonderful ice cream place filled with white painted iron, stuffed animals and leather booths. It was like Christmas. We’d go after skating lessons at Rockefeller Center or after a walk through the park from the Dakota or a trip to the slide at FAO Schwartz. Once we even went there for dessert after eating at the Auto Pub in the GM building…

The Auto Pub at the General Motors Building

…which was like having Christmas on top of Christmas. The Auto Pub was just a burger joint that had regular booth and table seating but also had seats inside sections of cars. In another room there was a kind of mini drive-in where you could eat and watch movies. Our mother’s second marriage may have been spirallying out of control but New York was not stingy with wonderful distractions for me and Robbie.

Schrafft’s and Serendipity

October 9, 2013

625 Madison Ave. (at 58th Street)

While our mother took us to the finer restaurants where she could see and be seen by fashionable New York dining on her alimony with her perfectly matched blonde daughters sometimes with an equally fashionable beau in tow, Robbie and I probably ate out more often at Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue (usually with a nanny). Part of a chain started by the Boston candy company, Shrafft’s was a piece of old New York. The first had been opened at the turn of the century (when Mother’s spot might have been Delmonico’s) and by World War One they were all over the city. Schrafft’s was a sort of upscale lunch counter or diner with wonderful cake and it’s own brand of ice cream. So important was Schrafft’s to the image of New York that it is hard to find a novelist, short story writer, poet or playwright who worked in the city and did not at least mention it or set a scene there. James Thurber’s meek clerk plots murder there in “The Cat Bird Seat”. Wallace Shawn mentions it in his elegiac taxi ride monologue in “My Dinner With Andre”. And of course there’s W.H. Auden’s lovely “In Schrafft’s” which you can see if you follow the link to my friend Tom Beller’s wonderful New York Literary site, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. http://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2004/01/in-schraffts

225 East 60th Street

Of course if Mother was with us, dessert or a treat after the park or ice skating would be more likely had at Serendipity. Opened in the mid-fifties by Stephen Bruce, it was famous and famously frequented by the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol from the very beginning. Our favorite thing was “Frrrozen Hot Chocolate” a drink so diabolically good that Jackie Kennedy tried to get the recipe so it could be served at the White House (she couldn’t). It’s somewhere between a milk shake and iced chocolate–a wonderful kind of chocolate frozen daquiri (without alcohol). They also served giant hot dogs and other fun things for kids that chic grown-ups like to have. And the inside was like a 19th century ice cream parlor in neon — what’s not to love?!

Isle of Capri

October 8, 2013

Isle of Capri, 3rd Ave. and 61st Street

In addition to the high style and classic French presentation of restaurants like La Grenouille, La Caravelle and Lutece, 1960s New York offered another kind of “fine” dining experience — the clubby neighborhood classic, often a bistro with sidewalk seating. After my mother divorced my step-father and sold the apartment in the Dakota we moved to Park Avenue on the Upper East Side which was home to many of this other type of restaurant, probably because there were fewer people who cooked in this more rarified neighborhood. One of our regular haunts was the Isle of Capri. It was a “fancy” restaurant but run by a family, the Lamanna’s, who made everyone feel as if they were eating at a rich Italian relative’s house. In 1967 Craig Claiborne validated the restaurant’s local reputation by naming it “the best small Italian restaurant in New York” and giving it three stars in the New York Times. It was the kind of place where everyone seemed like a regular and so, for a while, were we. My and Robbie’s La Grenouille training and matching Florence Eiseman dresses made us pretty additions to the crowd and the simple plates of pasta–fettuccine alfredo was our favorite–and veal piccata we were given made us feel happy and at home.

La Grenouille

October 7, 2013

La Grenouille 3 East 52nd Street

The number of things my mother Georgann Rea did right as a mother could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare (for cocktail rings probably) but one of them was taking Robbie and me, at seven, eight and nine years old, to restaurants — very very good restaurants.

Her role as a young, glamorous trophy wife to a wealthy older man (my stepfather Oliver Rea) demanded she be seen in all the best places and sometimes with children in tow to prove that she was not just some piece of white trash with great figure and a certain je ne sais quoi men found irresistible.

And while normally she was not above using threats of violence, destruction of prized possessions or limiting visits with our father to get us to do things she wanted and behave as she saw fit, none of these tactics was necessary at places like La Grenouille.

Despite its funny name–“Frog? Why would you name a restaurant frog!?” –the exquisite, jewel box of a restaurant with its elegant patrons and severe waiters demanded decorum even from little girls who may have spent the morning digging for worms in Central Park or running around the apartment screaming like wild animals (provided Mother was out which, of course, she almost always was).

Naturally, all of the hushed politeness and pretty table settings didn’t stop me from trying to order a hot dog. But it did make hearing that that would not be possible from the handsome waiter not so bad and trying Clams Corsini even better and realizing that a chocolate souffle makes even the most wonderful chocolate cake seem like a brownie the best of all.

La Grenouille was opened in 1962 by Charles Masson and is one of the few temples of classic French cuisine from its mid-50s to early-70s heyday left in New York City. Charles McGrath did a wonderful piece on it in the September 2008 issue of Vanity Fair and you may follow the link to read it.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/09/grenouille200809

Ending at Annabel’s

October 4, 2013

Annabel’s

44 Berkeley Square, London

Our tour of Mother’s ’70s London art/society/music life ends this week, fittingly, at Annabel’s the members only nightclub and disco in the basement of the Clermont Club (a casino) where many of Mother’s evenings with Marian and Silvio and members of her ex-pat moms crew ended. The club was founded in 1963 by Mark Birley and named after his then wife Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart. It is fifty years old this year and apparently still going strong–drawing the likes of Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise and Brian Ferry just as it once drew Princess Anne, Frank Sinatra, Aristotle Onasis, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Tina Turner. It was exactly the kind of place Mother loved and in London in the 70s being a beautiful young American divorcee with money and some talent was all it took to get her in. The expat community was open to Mother in a way society in New York wasn’t and she really flourished there.

Treasure of Las Flores del Vicio

October 3, 2013

Carrol Baker as Treasure in Las Flores del Vicio

After their success with “Summer House”, Mother and Marian Montgomery kept working together and wrote music and songs for Silvio Narizzano’s Las Flores del Vicio (released in the US as Bloodbath). It’s an insane phantasmagoria of sex and surreal indulgence set (and shot) in Spain that was locked up in a vault by the Spanish censors under General Franco. It’s kind of Bunuel meets Hammer Horror and stars Dennis Hopper at his craziest and most drugged out. Carrol Baker’s character, Treasure, sings Mother and Marian’s final song as she dies in a fountain at the end. It became a straight to drive-in and then video release in the US. in 1979 after the reels were finally freed. You can see a clip by clicking on the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHQN_X2y8Dc

Marion Montgomery & Mother

October 2, 2013

Mother’s friend, singer Marion Montgomery doing “Close Your Eyes” with Dudley Moore on piano.

In London Mother turned from writing poetry to writing songs with her new friend and fellow expat Marian (later changed to Marion) Montgomery. Marion knew where Mother was coming from. She’d been born Maud Runnells in Natchez, Mississippi, and got the hell out of there as soon as she could and started singing in clubs in Atlanta. Later, at a gig in Chicago, Peggy Lee saw her and convinced Capitol Records to sign her. In 1965 she went to London to sing with John Dankworth (later Cleo Laine’s husband) and fell in love with English pianist, musical director, (and arranger for Englebert Humperdink) Laurie Holloway. The two married and became well known in the British jazz and caberet scene. Mother met Marian at a party and the two began writing songs together. One, “The Summer House”, Marion sang live on the BBC. Another was used in Silvio Narizzano’s (Georgy Girl) film Bloodbath. More on that tomorrow!