Gossip Central

Celebrating Guild Hall at Cipriani 42 Street

Many revelers at this week’s Guild Hall winter gala remembered that before Covid locked everyone down, they were celebrating the premiere East Hampton cultural institution at its 2020 annual gala. And while much has changed in these two years—the venue was now the cavernous Cipriani 42^nd Street—and, the 2022 honorees were Board Chair Marty Cohen and Michele Cohen without the customary Academy of the Arts recipients—the mood was exuberant, as this huge, yet intimate event of East End neighbors chatting, catching up has not lost any of its warmth. Academy president Eric Fishl recalled that in that pre-pandemic limbo, no one knew whether to fist or elbow bump but preferred to kick one another in the ankles. All these dressed up people kicking the s__t out of each other, he laughed.

Renee Zellweger in The Thing About Pam at the Whitby Hotel

Her spindly legs over sky high heels, Renee Zellweger, both star and a producer on NBC’s series The Thing About Pam, commanded the stage at the Whitby Hotel this week after a screening of the first two episodes of the 6-part series. Based on a true-life crime podcast, already well known, about a 2011 murder in small-town Troy, Missouri, The Thing About Pam is so tongue-in-cheek, you have to laugh at the shenanigans of bungling law enforcement and grieving citizens, as a beloved wife and mom—and daughter—is found dead of multiple knife wounds in her living room. The two-time Academy Award winning actress plays Pam, hardly recognizable with her pudgy face and physique, her legs like elephant trunks, who slurps endlessly on a giant sugary beverage further sweetened with cherry syrup. The camera can’t get enough of her fat face and squinty eyes as she figures out her next shady moves.

Freda Payne at The Cutting Room: What Love Could Be –And Is

An apt locale for a book party for a famed pop singer, the Cutting Room filled with well - wishers for Freda Payne’s memoir, Band of Gold, last week. Co-writer Mark Bego flew in from Tucson, wearing the most outstanding jacket, a print of black & white with sparks of bold color. Yes, it was rock n’roll --without the music. And Payne, resplendent in red, greeted everyone with a kiss and hug. Of course, I knew Freda Payne’s most famous pop tune, “Band of Gold,” grew up with its sound in my ears, her great voice on the proto-feminist lyrics: Left on her wedding night, she laments, all that’s left is a band of gold—and memories of what “love could be.” It did seem like a turning point in 1970. For Freda Payne, a jazz vocalist of note, this was a breakout, flying high on the pop charts.

Up next for her is a new release, “Freda Payne: Let There Be Love,” featuring duets with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kenny Lattimore, Kurt Elling. With Johnny Mathis, her rendition of the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Way From Me” is an inspiration. She is set to perform at Birdland on November 22.

Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth Opens the NYFF: Let It Come Down

As a tragic hero, a deeply flawed man, Denzel Washington was perfect for the role of Macbeth. He’d done downcast/larger-than-life before, say, in August Wilson’s Fences, and now in Joel Coen’s new film that opened the new season’s New York Film Festival, his Macbeth oozes Shakespeare’s eternal wisdom: It’s not that good to be king.

When Coen was asked whether Washington was his first choice for the role, his producer, Lady Macbeth herself, Frances McDormand said, “There’s no list for Macbeth. You must be born to it.” Seated between Coen and Washington, her two husbands so to speak, in life and in tragedy, on the Walter Reade Theater stage for a post-screening press conference, she professed to have instigated the project, having slept walked in Lady Macbeth’s shoes since she was 14. While there have been many Macbeths through the centuries, this one, in sumptuous and austere black & white most closely follows Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, and yet Roman Polanski’s was referenced as well. Discussing the age of this murderous couple, the usual idea is to make them young and ambitious. McDormand and Washington make them older, passed over by the king, and wanting to get their due. We can attest to that feeling, Frances and Denzel, revel in a private joke.

Hamptons Journal: Authors Night: One Cocktail Party Plus a Four Day Festival of Books

Weary of pandemic year lockdown, I was pleased to attend Authors Night 2021 in person under a tent on the East Hampton Library grounds, a scaled back celebration of books and the people who write them. Gone (temporarily) is the voluminous tent in a large field that could hold150 authors. Twenty sat at a long table behind their books in piles: Robert Caro with Working, film critic Jeffrey Lyons’ Hemingway and Me, a memoir of his bonding with the legendary author over bullfights, the latest cookbook from Florence Fabricant (The Ladies’ Village Society Cookbook) seated near the team Hillary Davis and Stacy Dermont, writers of The Hamptons Kitchen. What could be more geared for the pairing of land and sea?

Night life and the social scene! Noel Hankin with his wife Gwen sat behind piles of After Dark:Birth of the Disco Dance Party, about the clubs in midtown that inaugurated the era of Studio 54and celebrity culture. An homage to one person who never missed the party scene, Gwenn & Steven Stolman’s Bill Cunningham was There: Spring Flings and Summer Soirees, sold out almost immediately. Stolman explained how he helped Kurdewan, Bill Cunningham’s editor at The New York Times, assemble this collection of the photographer’s work after they toured the photographs cross country. As  Anna Wintour so aptly put it, “Everyone dressed forBill.” The Vogue icon is a star of Thomas Maier’s All that Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown,and the rivalry inside America’s Richest Media Empire.

Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation: Genius Never Gets Old

T Literary titans Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, both Southerners and gay, travelled in the same artistic circles. Friends with Paul and Jane Bowles, Donald Windham, and Gore Vidal, they were also friends/rivals; each called the other “genius.” The documentary Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation puts them in dialogue using evocative archival footage. The strategy works well for filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s examination their lives and art, using the voices of the actors Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto as needed for readings from letters, journals, and key texts. They make talk show appearances, on Dick Cavett and David Frost. Tennessee reveals that in Streetcar Named Desire, both frail Blanche and brute Stanley are parts of him. Truman says writing In Cold Blood nearly killed him. Clips from the movie versions entertain, yes, and show how vital these figures are to American culture.

Having already documented Diana Vreeland, Peggy Guggenheim, and Cecil Beaton in feature length films, the filmmaker may have been most challenged by moving Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation through the film festival circuit during this pandemic year. At long last, it opens in theaters this week. As the film screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival, I spoke to Lisa Immordano Vreeland about this film about both writers rather than making a biopic about each one.

Martha Stewart Brings Her Flair for Perfection to Southampton

Patrick McMullan

Without even saying “It’s a good thing,” Martha Stewart’s reassuring presence sanctions any project. This past weekend, the occasion was a swank party in Southampton attended by a who’s who of who’s out east: from Brooke Shields to Chuck Scarborough to Alina Cho. The event was designed by Bronson Van Wyck and photographed by Patrick McMullan. And, because the party was organized by Peggy Siegal, the concept was high-minded, bringing cultural awareness to a great literary cause: The House of Speakeasy Bookmobile delivering books to children in underserved neighborhoods. The founder and author Amanda Foreman introduced a panel of writers on architecture, Peter Pennoyer and Paul Goldberger, joining Martha Stewart (that makes it Peter, Paul and Martha, someone quipped) to discuss the Coopers Neck Lane site, owned by David Walentas and now on the market. So yes, that’s culture/ cause/ commerce.

Christmas at Moran Studio: Peaceful Holiday Cheer

When he wasn’t in a brownstone in Chelsea, the painter Thomas Moran occupied a studio on Main Street in East Hampton. “A shingled two-story boardinghouse with a smoking chimney” facing the pond, described the late Robert Long in his 2005 book, De Kooning’s Bicycle. In the late 1870’s, “Moran thought that this could be his Fountainebleau.” Visible from Montauk Highway, the stately “cottage” was in disrepair for years, and has been restored as an exhibition space for Moran’s etchings, and this year, for a Victorian Christmas.

DOC NYC 2020: In THE MEANING OF HITLER, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker Explore the Cult of Personality

Of the extraordinarily fine offerings at this year’s DOCNYC 2020, The Meaning of Hitler, from directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker stands out in illuminating the continued fascination with dictatorial psychopaths epitomized by Adolf Hitler and extending to the Nazis of World War II. Leading off on the topic, novelist Martin Amis,who has grappled with the Holocaust era in several books, wastes no time comparing Donald Trump to Hitler: noting, neither had problems with lying.

Taking off from Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 German bestseller of the same title, the film features interviews with many experts and provocateurs including Deborah Lipstadt, Yehuda Bauer, Saul Friedlander, Sir Richard Evans, Francine Prose, and Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Nazi hunters who famously brought Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” to justice. Exploring Hitler’s meaning takes the filmmakers to Hitler’s bunker in Berchtesgaden, to the memorial site that once was the death camp Treblinka, and to the forest at Sobibor where 250,000 were murdered without a trace.

Poetry in a Pandemic: Bukowski, Towle, Giorno, La Prade

For Charles Bukowski’s 100^th birthday, coronavirus or not, attention must be paid. Famous in movies portrayed by Mickey Rourke (Barfly) and Matt Dillon (Factotum), the subject of a 1973 documentary by Taylor Hackford, Bukowski was a one-of-a-kind, sexy despite huge facial crevices left by acne, crude: he once described writing a poem was like taking a big bear shit. Now there’s a new documentary assembled from a rare, rediscovered 1981 interview by Silvia Bizio, an Italian journalist, You Never Had It-An Evening with Bukowski, directed by Matteo Borgardt, and whether or not you agree with Bukowski’s view of poetry composition, it is a must-see for a glimpse of this boozing, chain-smoker who fascinates with every word.