Gossip Central

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Final Season: Tits Up!

In fact, two tits up! The stunning final season makes for a picture of life as a stand-up comic for Mrs. Maisel and her agent Susie, or Susan, depending on your history with her. Our heroine is now gainfully employed: she’s a writer on the evening’s popular celebrity television talk program, The Gordon Ford Show. The season flips through time periods, juxtaposing Midge’s rise to comedy superstardom with her rookie warm-up to fame. Both Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) and Susie (Alex Borstein) learn on the job, the hard way. Mutually dependent, they have each other’s backs—except when the mob’s involved—becoming an object lesson in female friendship. Working on television, on a popular evening talk show, Midge writes for Ford, and though there’s a taboo on actually getting on the show if you are a writer, well, you can guess that Midge gets there. And, having delivered a great speech to her boss about how if she slept with him, she would never know if she got the job by her talents or some casting couch. It’s a proto-feminist monologue that would work in our day.

Susie becomes a famous agent, roasted at the legendary Friars’ Club. Danny Strong gives an outstanding performance as a rival agent, and fills everyone in on her backstory. Susie’s sister gushes and soaks up the air in the room, refusing to leave the podium. [An aside: Show biz being what it is, she played by Emily Bergl, the very actress who is currently on Broadway playing Sean Hayes’ Oscar Levant’s wife in Good Night, Oscar, a drama that similarly offers a glimpse of television’s salad years.] As to the Friars, the whole set up is a piece of New York history, playing out in real time; faced with financial ruin, the Friars’ Club is about to end if someone doesn’t come up with a way to save it—soon.

Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen in Book Club: The Next Chapter

A four female post-pandemic road trip, Book Club: The Next Chapter, defies the current trends toward diversity and inclusion and yet manages to be silly enough to be just what we need: a big laugh against the backdrop of scenic Italy. One can argue that rich older white women are in a class that needs to be seen and heard.

When first seen, in Zoom squares, wine glasses in hand, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, Candice Bergen ponder the finer points in books and quickly move on to escape (high end) lockdown as Covid restrictions allow. Jane Fonda as Vivian, recently engaged with a giant rock on her finger, will have a bachelorette bash in Italy with her besties. Candice Bergen’s Sharon, a retired judge is a pill, doing what older women do: find excuses for not embracing new adventure. Needless to say, she becomes the most outrageous of the lot in some clever plotting by writer/director Bill Holderman featuring travel mishaps: loss of luggage (we’re talking Louis Vuitton), misplaced ashes, a flat tire, and a night in jail. On the plus side: a steamy night on a boat in a Venice canal, kneading of dough, and yes, a wedding in Tuscany.

This week’s premiere and afterparty at Tavern on the Green echoed the movie’s joyful release from the pandemic. Diane Keaton wore stripes and a signature hat. In the film, kooky as Annie Hall was, her character, Diane, favors dots and a flared silhouette. Partiers included Tovah Feldshuh, Candace Bushnell, Clive Davis, Carol Kane and Judd Hirsch (stars of iMordecai, the most adorable rom-com of the year), David Rasche (mum on Succession’s surprising series’ end), Ted Danson, Diane Sawyer, and many others toasting to all four stars!

Viola Davis Honored at Film at Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Awards

The newly minted EGOT, Viola Davis, is having a moment. More than one speaker at this week’s Film at Lincoln Center’s gala noted what distinguishes Davis in the awards world. Now she can add the Chaplin Award, presented to a film artist for film career achievement. By all measure, Viola Davis has had an astonishing career. Clip after clip, in big and small movies, she melts into character, never looking the same, whether she’s the mother Mrs. Miller looking respectable in hat and gloves in Doubt, the housewife Rose giving Denzel Washington the what for, or festooned in war gear as in The Woman King, in housemaid apron as in The Help, or the grieving wife in Widows, or gaudily made-up and hefty as Ma Rainey. When words come, she delivers every speech as if it were Shakespearean, with Oscar worthy gravitas.

I said as much, reviewing her most recent movie, AIR. Playing Michael Jordan’s mother, a woman so fierce in her demands for her son, she elevates a business negotiation with Nike, making it a speech about knowing one’s worth. Scripted or not in Ben Affleck’s movie, this recognition of self-worth was precisely how the Chaplin Award tributes—from Jayme Lawson, Meryl Streep, Gina Prince-Bythewood, George C. Wolfe, and Jessica Chastain—might be summed up.

My favorite speech of the night came from Meryl Streep, not only because she’s naturally funny, but because she actually went through a scene from Doubt telling precisely how Davis works—not told in Davis’ memoir, Finding Me. Playwright/ director John Patrick Shanley was putting them through their paces on the scene when Streep as a nun confronts Davis as Mrs. Miller about the priest who is taking liberties with her son. As scenes go, this one is through the roof emotional as Davis tries to explain how her abused son needs male guidance, no matter what. Take after take, Davis was giving her all and Shanley wanted to keep going. Seeing Davis go to a heart wrenching place each time, Streep asked Shanley, what are you doing? He did not like the way a leaf in the background was blowing. Davis nailed it every time she was asked.

Guild Hall Celebrates Peter Marino: Renaissance Man

“I hate it,” architect Peter Marino exclaimed surprising even himself, as he noted Gotham Hall, a cavernous former bank on Broadway, decorated for the 350 guests arriving for a tribute to him, and to art collectors Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. This was Guild Hall’s winter gala, celebrating too the venerated East Hampton art institution’s emergence from a long renovation. Can it be that Peter Marino, clad in his hard-to-miss signature head-to-toe leathers and silver rings, all his own designs, is oddly demure? A video featured his many achievements and talents: architect, painter, sculptor, potter, gardener, collector with an impeccable eye. It finally took the Israeli artist Michal Rovner, a longtime friend, to underscore his bold innovations with a telling anecdote: In Tokyo, at the opening of a Chanel store he designed, he found the perfect use for the building’s façade, projecting her art on it.

This was not a boast. An internationally renowned multimedia artist, Rovner will be featured at Peter Marino’s art foundation housed in Southampton, as part of a series, “Brunches with Bob,” the Bob being writer Bob Colacello who was part of Marino’s entourage, with his daughter Isabelle Trapnell Marino, who, despite her valuable input quips, she’s the “Vanna White” of the conversation series. The culture-packed room also included Michael Halsband, just back from his opening of his iconic sparring Basquiat/ Warhol photos at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, April Gornik, Blythe Danner, Lisa Perry, Iris Smyles, Alice Aycock, and many more to honor their East End neighbors, Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. A retired doctor, he used to treat many artists when they occupied lofts in Soho, before they became big names.

Andre Royo in Drinking in America: Heads of a Bygone Era

A glass of wine with dinner, or a joint if you are so inclined, might be a good idea before meeting the array of characters who so imbibe in Eric Bogosian’s award-winning one-man tour-de-force, Drinking in America, a production of Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Performed to wiry perfection by Andre Royo, the assorted men he plays hale from the 1980’s. You might want to consider this background, drinking in American culture, to understanding the male toxicity—and fragility-- of our moment, decades later. And let’s face it, the drugs are different now.

Which may explain why the jokes landed askew at the performance we attended, even though Royo could not have been more appealing—as a talent agent, for example, doing lines of coke to wake up, trying to book Lee Marvin, but Richard Chamberlain would do. Or vice versa. It would be good to know the young folk in the audience could get these references.

Or the traveling salesman, on the road hawking industrial ceramic tile, wasted in a hotel room with an unseen “Cheryl.” The vignette starts with his paternal, fatigued request: “Cheryl, keep your rubbing to yourself,” as he passes out in an easy chair. The ending is less than happy; getting his money’s worth, he advises her, “There’s no future in the escort business.”

Jessica Chastain in A Doll’s House: Ibsen for our Time

Revolving on the barren Hudson Theater stage in an expansive orbit for 20 minutes before the first words of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House are spoken, Jessica Chastain as Nora Helmer sits stationary as she in her chair marks the periphery. The edgy blacks and whites are not the way you imagine this classic Ibsen drama from 1879 would be set—more likely in the well-appointed, tastefully muted parlor of a proper home. In Jamie Lloyd’s revival, you have to see the living space in your mind’s eye, and ask yourself, why are the virtues of women in marriage so compelling a subject for men? Think Honore Balzac, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy—and Ibsen: why do him now?

Amy Herzog’s fine adaptation distills Ibsen’s play to its essence: ditsy and chirpy, --a “femme enfante,” as the French would say--Nora keeps up her marital façade. Wife to Torvald Helmer (Arian Moayed), she’s his precious bird. But she’s more complicated than she looks; she’s mired in deception, and a naïve trust that her marriage is solid enough, that Torvald loves her enough, that he, though perhaps tarred, under the generous blanket that love weaves could bear any fault that she might present. Well, you know there’s trouble when only he has the key to the mailbox. Especially this mailbox!

Among a pared down roster of minor characters, a nanny for the children (Tasha Lawrence), a schoolmate (Jesmille Darbouze), a wealthy, devoted best friend who might be called upon (a wonderful Michael Patrick Thornton), Nora seems well-situated in her world. And then there’s Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan) with whom she’s bonded by a loan. Visually, when he comes to her, they are seated back-to-back, as though, pale as Nora is, and shadowy as Krogstad is lit, they form a single unit.

Charlie Mackesy’s Journey: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

Jet-lagged as you might expect for a British writer/illustrator just arriving from L.A., having promoted his film, and looking as you might imagine a mad scientist crossed with Gene Wilder, Charlie Mackesy held forth at a luncheon at the Whitby Hotel, signing cupcake boxes, posters, copies of his book, and telling a story about how his teaching drawing to a Holocaust survivor helped the man, now 100, unleash painful memories. His energy seemed remarkable, but the occasion, a celebration of the film adapted from his beloved book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, was nominated for a Best Animated Short Film Oscar. Then you realize he’s fueled by the film, a fable with a fresh message. Starting with an encounter between a boy and a mole who is looking for cake in a snowy landscape—(well, isn’t everyone?)—the film addresses a fundamental question: the mole asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The boy answers: “Kind.”

Okay. Simple enough. The mole voiced by Tom Hollander thinks he sees a cake, and even when he discovers it is a tree, there’s no disappointment, well, not really, because the tree is the most perfect tree, just as the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse they encounter on their journey are drawn with a romantic perfection, becoming kind together, and yes, a family. The fox—gently voiced by Idris Elba—bares his teeth. He could just as easily have eaten the mole who saved him from a trap—but he doesn’t and saves him right back from drowning in fast-moving icy waters.

Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz --hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News-- Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.

Salman Rushdie in Public

In one of the great Curb Your Enthusiasm vignettes, Larry David wanted to make a musical called “Fatwa,” the word itself giggle-worthy. But the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was no joke. Last week a lone, determined man got past light security at Chautauqua, a famous writers conference and knifed the author of Midnight’s Children and an Islam-offending novel called The Satanic Verses. As the story goes, without having ever read the book, the Ayatollah declared a bounty on Rushdie who had imagined mortal qualities in the prophet Mohammed. A translator was murdered in the ensuing outrage. 

Meanwhile, Rushdie had been in hiding in safe houses in England and the States for decades. In the 1980’s, someone sent the book to the American writer Paul Bowles who resided in Tangier, and worried about his expatriate status there if the authorities found out he possessed such a book. One year a hushed event brought the writer to the New York Public Library’s main branch for a PEN forum, an affirmation of freedom of expression; many celebrated Rushdie and the daring it took to pull this off. Needless to say, security was tight. And over time, Salman Rushdie let his guard down.

Hamptons Journal: Longhouse’s Artistic Legacy as the East End Expands as a Destination for Fine Art

Wood stitched with wire does not sound like an ideal way to structure an outdoor shed, but that’s what Steven Ladd and his brother William Ladd used to create one of the masterful works showcased at this year’s Longhouse Benefit. As Steven guided visitors through this piece, open on both ends, he explained how he learned to sew using his grandmother’s sewing machine, and in fact, the upstate New York resident wore slacks and a shirt that he had made himself. It defied the imagination to think how that textile practice might be translated to their sculpture titled “Right Here, Right Now.” Similarly, Taiwanese artist Cheng Tsung Feng invited celebrants into an airy bamboo pavilion, “Fish Trap VI.” The spirit of Longhouse founder Jack Lenor Larsen could be felt in these works on this annual occasion with Robert Wilson, Nathan Lane, Alice Aycock, and many others celebrating his legacy at the best art party of the summer.

Newer art venues in Montauk flourish: The Ranch, the site of the famed Deep Hollow Ranch, where for years a summer concert would bring hoards to the East End, to be seated on haystacks and hear, for example, Paul Simon one year, The Eagles the next, and James Brown. Repurposed barns featured Frank Stella’s sculpture at the early part of summer. His larger pieces were spread out on the immense, now grassy field. Currently, in The West Barn, hangs, Jo Messer’s “Whale Tail,” a presentation of nine new paintings of women emphasizing limbs and gesture in incongruous position saturated in monochromatic palettes. The exhibition title comes from “a resurgent trend of hiking a g-string thong above the waistline as overt provocation.” Yes, provoke it does.