Gossip Central

On the Road with Jeremy Thomas

The glorious conceit of Mark Cousins’ documentary about British producer Jeremy Thomas is filming him from the passenger seat of a posh car on the way from London to Cannes, for the yearly film festival of festivals. A man of routines, Thomas followed the family business of filmmaking, always having a film to promote, but more, to schmooze with directors and distributors from a balcony overlooking the sea. The festival is after all, a work place. This is his 45^th year, seeing beautiful countryside as it whizzes by on the highway, and discussing life and filmmaker along the route. Some of his films, The Last Emperor, Only Lover Left Alive, Sexy Beast among them, are screening at the Quad Cinema for a retrospective, as is Cousins’ documentary, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, a glimpse of the man behind the wheel.

This week, a special viewing of Cousins’ documentary drew many guests from his distinctive career including Debra Winger, who starred as Kit in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. Interviewed in the documentary, she speaks about Thomas’ humor and taste. A clip from the film shows her emerging in North Africa with John Malkovich and dozens of suitcases as they are travelers, not tourists, taking everything with them as if they will never return, in author Paul Bowles’ defining distinction. Interviewed in person by Sony Picture Classics’ Michael Barker, Thomas spoke about filming in the desert, taking liberties in the vast expanse of sand that makes this film so unique. Another clip shows Winger as Kit returning to a crowded café, just short of the author’s cameo, as he asks, how many times do we return to the same place in one’s life. It’s a question that works well pondering Thomas’ career as production auteur.

Hamptons Journal: Bob Colacello at The Peter Marino Foundation/ Hanzhi Wang at LongHouse

Writer Bob Colacello is the best kind of gossip; he observes people with a big heart and humor. In his latest book, an art volume of vintage New York photos by David Jimenez, accompanied by his text—a forgetting, as Colacello told a packed house at the Peter Marino Foundation in a conversation with Ivorypress publisher Elena Ochoa Foster, who flew in from Madrid for this occasion. He was inspired by the poet Joe Brainard who wrote a memoir listing his remembrances. For his own take, titled New York Memories, Colacello lists all that he had forgotten about New York in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when, as he was “forgetting,” downtown and uptown arts met at happy studios, galleries, discotheques, especially Studio 54, Steve Rubell’s place in midtown, and Eric Goode’s more artsy Area in Tribeca.

The conceit works well to dispel the impulse toward nostalgia, as Elena Ochoa Foster noted, even as Colacello records a bygone world. Going back to his childhood, he told the crowd that included Francesco Clemente, Vito Schnabel, his mother Jacqueline, Zac Posen, Vincent Fremont, and an artworld elite, in the upstairs space where the Israeli artist Michal Rovner’s brush strokes migrated against austere backdrops, it all started out when he came into “the city” as a boy:

“I forgot the awe and wonder I felt as a child arriving at the old Penn Station, which had been designed by McKim, Mead, and White in 1910, and was torn down to make way for the new Madison Square Garden in 1963.

“I forgot Woody Allen always sat at the most visible table at Elaine’s, pretending to be invisible.

“I forgot Malcom Forbes told me his old money friends like Doris Duke and the Mellons asked to be taken off the [Forbes 400] list, claiming they were worth much less than Forbes thought, and the only friend who insisted he was worth a lot more was Donald Trump.

“I forgot going to Andy Warhol’s Memorial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April Fool’s Day, 1987 with Sao Schlumberger, and thinking the huge crowd was testament to his greatness.

“I forgot that no matter what happens New York goes on, feet on the ground, head held high, heart and mind open.

Remembering Brice Marden in Tangier

You know the old adage: I would have paid more attention had I realized how important it was. In 1983 when I taught a summer writing workshop in Tangier with Paul Bowles at the American School of Tangier, the School of Visual Arts, under the leadership of founder Silas Rhodes invited a distinguished faculty that included Brice Marden. With reverence for the history of Tangier as an artists’ mecca, Marden and his family, his wife Helen Marden, their two girls, Mirabelle  and Melia (5 and 3), and an au pair, were given the room Henri Matisse occupied when he resided at the Villa de France Hotel. I lived in the room next door. The view was over the sumptuous gardens which Matisse painted in his modernist style. Marden’s abstract style, lyrical blocks of color and sinewy lines did not seem suited to palm foliage and flora, nor to the colors but he surely absorbed the vibe. At breakfast on the terrace, the girls seemed extraordinarily well behaved. Having already met the man I would marry, my fears about life as a wife and mother were allayed by seeing this family living free to travel and explore. Helen, an artist who had waitressed at Max’s Kansas City, would say, to acclimate to a culture, eat their yogurt and onions, and drink their wine.

At times, Brice and Helen, and whoever was teaching—that could be photographer Mary Ellen Mark, or graphic designer Milton Glaser, or type designer Ed Benguiat, or journalist Pete Hamill, would meet at the hotel bar. Because Brice was a fan of the beat writers, we had a connection through the poetry—I had written on Jack Kerouac and knew William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom spent time in Tangier. And, we smoked kif together. Later, after our time in Tangier, he did a series (1989-91), an homage to the Chinese poet Han Shan named for his “Cold Mountain” poems. Han Shan, famously a reclusive drunk, was the inspiration for Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and poems by Gary Snyder. On a random evening Brice and I had dinner at the Claridge, a classy joint on the main boulevard, Louis Pasteur. Visiting Tangier in July, I had Brice on my mind as I passed the former restaurant now a bar and a bit run down. Sadly, Brice Marden died on August 9.

Candace Bushnell’s Lesson #6: Be Specific About What You Want

HBO’s And Just Like That, now nearing its final episode in series 2 features happy endings for Charlotte, Miranda, and we presume Samantha, and several additional characters. Carrie Bradshaw has moved on from the loss of Mr. Big, happily, and her creator, Candace Bushnell, has moved on too. An author—though not yet a Pulitzer Prize winner—and performer, Bushnell wowed the crowd at Canoe Place Inn in Hampton Bays this week in her one-woman show. Strutting across a stage in baby blue satin with feather trim, she recounts her stellar career as Observer columnist, coming to the big city, modest suitcase in hand, landing on Beekman Place with photographer Gordon Parks, sleeping around. Sex, or rather, “having sex like a man” becomes her material, and like her characters, she is quite explicit. If you are a fan of Sex & the City, you know what I mean.

Miraculously, in her tour de force hour and a half one-woman show—with the exception of a cameo by two dogs, the words “penis” and “vagina” are uttered once each, as Bushnell poses the question, Is There Still Sex in the City? Phone in hand, answering, “Good news only,” she converses with her Samantha, her Miranda, and her Charlotte, composites of her real-life friends and paragons of wisdom, as she navigates her rise as writer, all the while dumped by lovers including her ballet dancer husband. Through all of these experiences, she has learned many lessons, each numbered and epiphany-like. These she shares with her audience. The men she mentions do not fare well—even her supportive father somehow lets her know her flat chest will get her nowhere in love.

Authors Night/ Paula Abdul at SHE Summer Hamptons Evening

Famously, you cannot get near the famous authors at the yearly event of the season, Authors Night to benefit the East Hampton library. For books by Misty Copeland, Robert Caro, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paulina Porizkova, the lines are long. No matter, writers in abundance are just happy to schmooze with one another. Susan Isaacs sat beside A. M. Homes, favorites conferring behind stacks of their most recent books. Similarly, Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner could not say enough about Alice Carriere, seated beside her with a memoir about growing up the daughter of artist Jennifer Bartlett and French actor Mathieu Carriere, even when Katie Couric stopped by to say hello. Alafair Burke, daughter of novelist James Lee Burke, does her famous father proud. Another father, Geraldo Rivera was on hand to support his daughter Sol Rivera who has written a book of poetry. Page-turning author  Jean Hanff Korelitz spoke about book clubs she organizes in private Park Avenue homes. Allison Yarrow, passionate about women’s reproductive rights, held forth beside Amy Zerner and Monte Farber, regulars at this mega-gathering with a new book registering astrological verites for each birthday. Crazy as it may sound to some, they always get it right. Looking up mine, I did learn a “karmic lesson:” “the life and fun of a party,” I should, at overwhelming times, “change activities and cultivate more determination.” Good to know!

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.

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered at Birdland

The iconic American satirist Kurt Vonnegut might seem an unusual inspiration for a jazz suite but composer/ pianist Jason Yeager brought the Slaughterhouse Five author live in a musical homage at Birdland this week. Originally performed in tandem with Vonnegut’s centennial year at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis in November, the show featured Yeager’s quintet—multi-reedist Patrick Laslie, trumpeter Alphonso Horne, trombonist Mike Fahie, vibraphonist Yuhan Su, bassist Danny Weller, drummer Jay Sawyer, and two guests, Miguel Zenon on alto sax and Yeager’s partner, singer Julie Benko, currently wowing audiences as Fanny Brice on Broadway in Funny Girl.

Entitled “Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite,” Yeager’s playlist followed his new CD by the same title, the “unstuck in time” metaphor working well to describe the medium of jazz. As Yeager aptly put it, Vonnegut loved jazz, and the American songbook in particular. Punctuating Yeager’s improvisations on his work, Benko sang the standards “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” A charming presence, she helped her flustered spouse light a Kurt Vonnegut candle, with a prayer from their rabbi who was seated nearby.

It was that kind of a night, intimate with great music. “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” an homage to Bluebeard, “Unk’s Fate,” referencing a character in Sirens of Titan, “Kilgore’s Creed,” for the protagonist of Timequake, and “Blues for Billy Pilgrim” honoring Slaughterhouse Five. Fans will immediately see the connections to their Vonnegut favorites.

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.