Gossip Central

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.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer on Author’s Night: Sex Talk in Brief

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, now 92, gets hot and heavy talking about sex. This year’s Author’s Night being different from all others, her talk was on Zoom, no touching allowed. Which does not mean it was phone sex, or phoned in. One of the joys of listening to the pint-sized therapist who loves to boast that her grandkids are taller than she is, is hearing her say the words vagina and penis with aplomb, whether or not the discussion calls for it. That’s part of her schtick, getting people used to the vocabulary, and the action. This year she is celebrating a reissue of her Heavenly Sex, dispensing the wisdom of the sages on her subject. “In the Jewish tradition,” she says, “sex is an obligation between husband and wife,” especially on Friday night, the beginning of the Sabbath. The sages were the best at sex therapy, she opines, because they suggested the man say to his wife, you are the best, an effective aphrodisiac. A husband can enter the vagina from behind, leaving the clitoris for stimulation. Good to know.

Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso: When in Rome . . .

Abel Ferrara makes movies the way Jack Kerouac writes fiction, in controlled spontaneity. The idea for Tommaso, about a filmmaker living in Rome, came to Ferrara as he was making another film, Siberia, a more challenging work demanding a greater budget for mountaintop scenes in five feet of snow, and forest exteriors. Tommaso is shot in Rome, where both he and his star Willem Dafoe reside in the same neighborhood; with interiors in Ferrara’s home, Tommaso is a take on his own domestic scene. His wife Cristina Chiriac stars as Tommaso’s wife, their daughter Anna Ferrara stars as their daughter. What a daring set up! Your friend playing an aspect of you making love to your wife!

As Dafoe explained the process in an interview on this past week, the actors know the start point of a given scene, but don’t know where they will end up. Dafoe, a great theater actor, handles the improvisation, especially well, partnering with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, but, he says, he finds more freedom in more structured filmmaking. Still, their close relationship helps with an improvisational strategy: Ferrara could tell Dafoe a story, and he, says Dafoe, “tries to inhabit what he’s talking about.”

Remembering Photographer Elsa Dorfman

A longtime collaborator with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and other literary figures, photographer Elsa Dorfman was a true American original. A portrait artist often associated with her main instrument, the large format 20" x 24" inch Polaroid camera, Dorfman, an influence to poets, and, from all reports, a great friend, died this week at 83.

In 2017, I met her when her pal Errol Morris made a film about her, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, his most intimate documentary. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to name a few, documentarian Errol Morris has the further distinction with his 1985 The Thin Blue Line, of having changed the course of one man’s destiny with his investigative work, unearthing evidence that showed he was innocent of murder.

Elsa Dorfman, a neighborhood friend seems a smaller portrait indeed, but the filmmaker caught up with this mild-mannered photographer just as the Gentle Giant movers were removing some large-scale Polaroids for storage, so his picture of her surprises as it covers the technical aspect of Polaroid photography, and perhaps, the end of an era. This conversation from that time, as the film was about to open after a distinguished festival run including the New York Film Festival, reveals something of Dorfman’s charm. Errol and Elsa complete one another’s sentences.

John Waters Cajoles Graduates at SVA Commencement: Become Covid-19 Commandoes!

Superstars Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey may be grabbing headlines offering online encouragement to college graduates this season, but John Waters did the job this week, dispensing discordant wisdom to designers and other artists graduating from The School of Visual Arts. The ceremony, usually held at Radio City Music Hall, featured far flung speakers, Waters himself at a podium with curtain backdrop from his home in Baltimore, setting of his most famous satiric films including his underground homage to filth, Pink Flamingos, and his breakout commercial hit, Hairspray. A dapper dresser in brocade jackets, Waters wore a traditional gown, cap, and latex gloves, all in black, his signature pencil thin ‘stache under an artsy mask. Pulling it off, he consoled the graduates who’d been robbed of a “normal” graduation: “If you do die tomorrow, at least you’ll have a college degree.”