A thirteen year old’s reading list. At the time (the early 1970s) I didn’t see anything unusual in my choice of reading. With my mother out partying every night with a wild cast of American expats and European jetsetters, the insane drug addicted narcissists of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of Dolls, the rapacious unhappy housewife of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and the incestuous courtesans of Jean Plaidy’s Light on Lucrezia didn’t strike me as abnormal or different from the real world. In fact, they confirmed to me that life with my mother may not have been all that unusual in the great scheme of things.
It may be an odd worldview for a thirteen year old but it was all I had.
Fashion meant a lot to my mother. She saw it as a visa that enabled her to travel from provincial Kansas City and Minneapolis to glamourous New York, London and Paris. Couture and tailored clothes from designers and stores like Bergdorf Goodman became essential to the creation of her new selves: Mrs. Oliver Rea a chic trophy wife and then the ex-Mrs. Oliver Rea, swinging divorcee and jet setter. My stepfather facilitated this with open accounts anywhere she cared to dress. I still have a couple of the most beautiful black Italian silk cocktail dresses with lead weighted hems made for her at Bergdorf’s. Fashion week or as it used to be called Press Week became something she paid attention to and looked forward to like the changing of the leaves in Central Park outside her windows in the Dakota. Long after the apartment was gone however, the clothes still hung in her closets, reminders of Fall and Spring collections past.
“Mother leaned towards us, opened her arms, and drew us to her. She smelled like her new perfume, which was very sweet and expensive. It even had a name that went with her new life: Joy.” — Chanel Bonfire As much or more than clothes, jewelry, accessories, hair and make-up, perfume can announce, define and refine a person’s image. If “style” is the way in which a person wears a stock item, then perfume is the trickiest of things to “style” because the way in which a person wears it is determined by their own chemistry, their own essence. Just as my mother’s life could be measured by husbands and lovers, hair styles, or fashion designers, it could be marked by scent. Joy was the scent of the honeymoon period of her second marriage — the scent she wore at her wedding in the Dakota, a scent of promise and hope and happiness that she thought, at the time, was hers. Interestingly it had been created almost forty years earlier at another moment of promise and hope that was not to be, 1929, the year of the great stock market crash. Henri Almeras created it for Jean Patou by distilliing, among other things, 10,000 Jasmine flowers and 28 dozen roses for a mere 30 ml. Making perfume is a bit of a paradox — a guessing game that requires precise chemistry but also, ultimately, a kind of alchemy in which the common and rare essences of flowers and plants and animals can be brought to a point where, with the addition of skin and sweat of a thousand strangers, it is transformed into desire. The brutal extraction of purity becomes ethereal. (See Patrick Suskind’s wonderful novel Perfume for an entertaining primer.) As Mother’s joy in her second marriage faded, Joy was tossed aside and replace, appropriately enough by…
…Fracas. Created in 1948 by Germaine Cellier for Robert Piquet who was a designer for Paul Poiret.
Frank Sinatra headlines (bien sur) the Chanel Bonfire Spotify Playlist. He was a steady voice, a soundtrack to my mother, Georgann Rea’s life — from a girl in Kansas City dreaming off his songs of getting away to another world to a lonely soul living out some of his saddest sentiments. Fittingly, it was Sinatra and his daughter who optioned Mother’s unpublished autobiography “Someone Turn Off The Wind Machine”. It was indevelopment at Fox for much of the 1980s with Frank to play the role of my crusty grandfather. Alas, it never came to be. I listened to a lot of his music while working on sections of Chanel. The beginning of the playlist reflects the music of my mother which dominated the earliest years of our lives and then the list shifts to the music of my sister and me which then takes over the last part of the book. We all have playlists for our lives. What’s on yours?
It is hard for many in this post-PETA, animal rights oriented time to understand the meaning of fur, especially mink, to women of my mother’s generation. More than the couture clothes, fabulous jewelry and furnishings she was able to buy, the apartments in the Dakota, on Park Avenue, in South Kensington she was able to rent or own, a fur coat signaled her arrival to herself. And of her many fur coats, her mink was the most important–an incredibly warm, impossibly soft piece of fashion armor that was also as intimate as any item of lingerie. Her mink was for Mother a cocoon she could wear–it signalled her transformation from provincial Kansas City girl to jet-setting socialite even as it comforted her and protected her from doubters, snobs, and inconvenient questions. And as the money began to run out, the jewels and Mercedes sold, the coat could provide glamourous cover and a blanketing reminder of where she’d been and how far she’d gone.
Julie Harris, a great actress and one of my true idols, has died. She was an actor who seemed to have not so much skin as a scrim which barely contained her soul, so available were her emotions. She’s seen above with the author/playwright Carson McCullers and another great actress, Ethel Waters during the run of McCullers’ own adaptation of her novel “The Member of the Wedding”. My stepfather Oliver Rea produced the play, which, while not her first appearance on Broadway, was the first big landmark in Harris’ brilliant career. It was 1950, ten years before I was born, thirteen before the opening of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis which Oliver founded, and seventeen before he ran away with my mother Georgann and we moved to the Dakota. When I began acting in the early eighties I used one of Harris’ character Frankie’s speeches as an audition piece for way too long–I so loved it and her.
One of our last summers in Minneapolis with our father. A friend of the family took this amazing series of the three of us in the park. Thanks to the publication of Chanel, they resurfaced as if from a time capsule or the messages Robbie and I stuffed into coke bottles and dropped from the QE2 as our mother sailed us away.
For some time between Mother’s original, orphaned self, Loretta Gronau, and her ultimate self-made self, Georgann Rea, there was the girl above — Georgann Mary Margaret McAdams, St. Teresa’s Academy Class of 1956. She was a pretty, young, intelligent girl rescued from an orphanage and living the life of a princess in the wealthy Plaza section of Kansas City, Missouri. And her life was a fairy tale in the truest sense because her step-mother was evil and the abuse and beatings she suffered inside her very large house went unknown by the outside world. This Georgann was biding her time, dreaming of the next twist in her story, the arrival of the handsome prince and her rescue. And it happened when she met my father. And while she may have grabbed the keys to his white charger and jumped into the driver’s seat, the end result was the same–they went away to their fairy tale life. Only it wasn’t what the now Georgann Lawless had expected… I came across the Fallen Princess series of photographs by Dina Goldstein a photographer based in Vancouver, BC, on Facebook. They are being “shared” and “liked” all over the place. They are, like my mother’s story and my own and most other women in one way or another I suspect, a fascinating expression of the ideas of what it is to be a woman in the last fifty or so years — a sometimes twisted combination of expectation, reality and fantasy fueled by our culture and history. Here’s a link to Dina’s site if you’d like to see more: http://www.fallenprincesses.com/ I suspect as the photos spread even wider, that they will come up in my Book Group Skype sessions. Inevitably, during our discussions of Chanel, readers share some of their own stories or their mothers and their childhoods. And while exact details are always different, there are basic struggles and issues of identity and freedom and frustration that seem common to us all from Betty Friedan who so clearly expressed my own step-mother’s frustrations with marriage and the role of wife that she got a divorce upon finishing her book to now in the responses I hear to Chanel Bonfire. Andrea Dworkin’s book “Women Hating” from the 70s has a very interesting chapter on fairy tales and the lives of women in contemporary society. If your Book Group is reading Chanel, I’d be happy to set up a Skype or FaceTime Q & A with you. Just email me at chanelbonfire@gmail.com. I’m sure we all have lots to talk about!
“At graduation, after the diplomas were handed out, my class sang the Beatles song ‘In My Life.’ I’m sure that to the faculty or other students it seemed an appropriate choice of a song for a group of people whose lives were about to change forever, and who had happy times to look back on, but to me, it sounded like a dirge. Mother, decked out in one of her Chanel suits, took my picture in my white cap and gown beside Robbie in the pretty, tree-lined courtyard in front of the school, where the Beaver graduations always took place.”
For Mother, sadly, possessions were 9/10ths of life.
Meet Louis, Mother’s handbag, and an integral part of our childhood abroad. Purchased at Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Louis (named for, well, you know) traveled the world with us and contained important on-the-go items: Rince-doights, Kleenex, Band-aids, cigarettes, passports, maps, guidebooks, and Mother’s movie camera, which once filmed the inside of Louis while we were in Paris. Notre Dame has a cameo at the end when someone’s hand reaches in to fish something out, and the spires of the cathedral are revealed at an interesting angle.
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