Garbo, at 45, ready to go back to work. After turning down what became over 300 film proposals, she agreed to do La Duchess de Langelais, co-starring with James Mason, to be directed by Max Ophuls. She wanted this badly enough that she agreed to go in front of the camera again and test for it. She appears sullen at first. But when her smile and playfulness break through it's a revelation that perhaps this is the only record of what she was really like. That she didn't vant to be alone.
June 6, 1950. "Vis-O-Matic department store." A Vis-O-Matic spokesmodel, or perhaps even the queen of Vis-O-Matic, the Canadian catalog store whose slide-projection system of displaying merchandise was like a Buck Rogers premonition of online shopping. The Vis-O-Matic phenomenon seems to have been short-lived, with hardly any documentation online aside from these photos in the Life archive, and no word of its fate. Photo by Bernard Hoffman.
IDon't speak! We live in modern times that demand everything be unadorned and comfortable. But women don't look as good as they used to. And a hat before you step out of the house would go a LONG way to correct the forgettable impression most women make when they enter a room. Let alone their postures. Or is the idea of making an impression when you enter a room as dated as these pictures? I think this may be true. Truer still is the idea that in these modern times you want to avoid being noticed when you enter a room. And maybe that's why places that boasted stairs that announced your entrance, like the old Brasserie in NYC, have gone the way of the hat too.
Is there another song that rhymes "cha-cha" with "cucaracha"? It's inspired, yet so obvious. We remember this growing up in Cuba, when it was known as "Me Lo DIJo Adela" or "Adela Told Me."
The suis generis Kay Thompson (nee Kitty Fink) was the sensation of the night-club circuit in the mid 50s. Surrounded by the Williams Brothers (you can easily spot Andy here,) she had a strong connection with the Plaza Hotel beyond her invented alter ego, Eloise. She played its ultra chic boite, the Persian Room, and here she gives it a kind of desultory tribute. We are posting this because the early TV technology gives the performance a charming, ragged quality.
in BUTTERFIELD8 Eddie Fisher lives on Horatio St in what was still thought of as the bohemian part of NY, Greenwich Village. It's a very small studio. But he's a composer so he's managed an upright piano in somehow. He's also Elizabeth Taylor's best friend. She plays a call girl who just got up that morning to find Laurence Harvey left her money in an envelope with a note "Gloria - $250. Enough?" She's so pissed she grabs a lush mink coat out of his wife's closet and throws it over her silk slip. She comes out the 5th Ave building facing Central Park, hails a cab, and makes for Horatio St. All the exteriors are real location shots.
It's 1959 and Eddie Fisher pays less than $100 for that studio. I know because in 1965 I checked out a much nicer 1 brm apt on Christopher and Sheridan Square for $150. I spent a couple of days debating wether to take it or take a small studio with a large deck overlooking the Manhattan skyline in Brooklyn Heights for $100. I took the latter, finally, because that's the view everybody seemed to have in the American movies I grew up watching in Cuba. And now it would be mine.
Decadence and all, watching BUTTERFIELD 8 made me miss those innocent days when New York was affordable, even if you just got out of school and were only making $75 a week. It also made miss the days when, like Gloria, I would often wake up in strange men's apartments to find they had already left for work and I would have a cigarette and walk around naked, exploring The Other's foreign turf. Sigh. I don't think I'll have that experience again. And I know New York will never be affordable again. Nobody ever left any money behind, let alone $250. But I get a sweet pang when I think of that time and how easy everything seemed.
