Reflections on ... Cindy Sherman Exhibit at Sprüth Magers

“In the large-scale colour portraits, the artist imagines herself as a cast of 'grandes dames' from the Golden Age of 1920s Hollywood cinema. Differing from Sherman’s earlier series, these actresses are presented outside of the filmic narrative, posing instead for what seem to be formal publicity shots. Despite their elaborate garb, coiffed hairdos and painted faces, the leading ladies are clearly in their twilight years, and the grave stoicism of their expressions gives way to instances of poignant vulnerability: fine lines emerge through caked-on make-up, and sinewy, aged hands seem at odds with the smooth polish of their owners’ faces. The actresses pose against digitally manipulated backgrounds that are suggestive of the film sets and backdrops of yesteryear. Skyscrapers, a busy café scene, manicured gardens and a classical landscape all feature within the series. One photograph created earlier this year, displays four actresses in different coloured tulle costumes. Seated together, they reference the historic popularity of sister acts in the entertainment industry.” 

From Sprüth Magers’ catalogue

“Some play with scarves to hide their wrinkles, others rely on a brave, haughty or mysterious expression. All could quite clearly carry off once more whatever roles they played on the silver screen until age edged them out of the system. But in each case there are a hundred more nuances, of doubt, pride, suffering, foolishness, survival, courage, learned from the life and irrepressible even in these supposed publicity shots for films that will never be made.” 

From The Guardian’s review

I visited the new Cindy Sherman exhibit at Sprüth Magers’ gallery in Mayfair on Saturday 7 July. In it, the masterful American artist and photographer completely transforms herself into a series of powdered and bewigged veteran show biz divas of a certain age in eerie, powerful and riveting self-portraits. The focus is on liver-spotted hands clutching chiffon and the whole arsenal of artifice: plucked-out eyebrows, scarlet lips painted into a cupid’s bow. The vibe is very ruined glamour, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, decaying Hollywood Mansions, Sunset Boulevard / Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 

Looking at them, you can’t help but associate the photos with the doomed flapper Clara Bow, Mary Pickford’s reclusive alcoholic later years, or the botched face lift of Hedy Lamar. The show is about aging, but also about haughty defiance (or denial) towards aging, and a commitment to glamour at all costs despite aging. (And the show is inevitably about the aging of Sherman herself, who is now 64. Those unretouched liver-spotted hands belong to her!). The exhibit is free and runs until 1 September 2018.

Further reading:read my scene report from John Water's 2015 exhibit Beverley Hills John at Sprüth Magers here.

Holy Religious Artefacts from Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace

/ Jayne Mansfield luxuriating in the boudoir of her Pink Palace /

The Pink Palace – the legendarily kitsch, lurid and nouveau riche Mediterranean-style mansion on 10100 Sunset Boulevard belonging to Hollywood’s platinum blonde sex-kitten-gone-berserk par excellence Jayne Mansfield (1933 – 1967) from 1957 until her death – was razed in November 2002. In my dreams, the Pink Palace would have been preserved exactly as Jayne left it and open to the public as a museum, like Elvis’ Graceland. (I’m sorry, but in low-brow trash culture terms Mansfield is every bit Presley’s equal!). Incredibly, though – five decades after Mansfield’s tragic premature death in a car crash en route to New Orleans – treasures from her long-demolished Pink Palace occasionally re-surface in the present day! For me, these are sacred holy relics!

Now this is what I call “art”! When I saw this listed online as part of Engelbert Humperdinck’s auction in autumn 2017, I felt like setting up an urgent crowdfunding page just so I could bid on this spectacular genuine vintage bust as seen in The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968)! (The online auction happened in April 2017, but I didn’t find out about it until later). The bust used to be prominently displayed in the Pink Palace.  Humperdinck (who, of course, bought the Pink Palace following Jayne’s death) must have kept it in storage for decades before auctioning it off. Weird: why wouldn’t one of Jayne’s five children have this gorgeous object? Imagine how great this would look on my mantelpiece (if I had a mantelpiece). Read the full details here – and note the status “Lot closed – unsold”. Where is it now? Some hip entrepreneur should make a mould of this bust and sell replicas commercially, like those plaster-of-Paris Elvis Presley busts that were ubiquitous in the seventies and eighties. (I had one when I was a university student! Eventually it got smashed – I don’t like to talk about it!).

/ Glimpses of the bust in situ at the Pink Palace. Mansfield seems to have kept it the bedroom / 

Then came this announcement from the Burlesque Hall of Fame's Facebook page on Valentine’s Day 2018: 

“A special Valentine’s Day reveal: Jayne Mansfield’s heart-shaped settee, refurbished for our upcoming Exotic World exhibit! 

We acquired this piece in the 1990s, shortly before Mansfield’s iconic mansion, the Pink Palace, was razed. The heart shape and colour was a theme of the mansion, which also featured a heart-shaped pool and bathtub.” 

The historical significance of this cannot be overstated! Seeing this put me in a state of religious awe - a genuine artifact from Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace! Jayne, Mickey and her Chihuahuas once frolicked and cavorted on this pink settee! (When I visited the Burlesque Hall of Fame last April when I was in town for Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender 2017,  this was most definitely not on display then! Now I have to return to pay homage!).

Let’s hope further riches are exhumed!  Maybe we could re-assemble the Pink Palace piece-by-piece!

/ Bath time at the Pink Palace /

At Home with Zsa Zsa Gabor

At home with Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1967 in her palatial Bel Air mansion! For aficionados of kitsch, this represents a goldmine and a fascinating oddity - 28 minutes and 20 seconds of pure bliss!

The TV show Good Company was apparently some kind of atomic-era variation of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs with celebrities inviting you behind the security gates into their private inner sanctums. It begins with the Hungarian glamourpuss, famous-for-being famous movie diva, glorified courtesan and camp icon addressing the viewer directly (“Hello, darlings!”) from her bubble bath with soap suds up to her décolletage. Her décor is spectacular: check out the golden cherubs festooning the bathtub – a testament to her baroque / rococo taste. While waiting for Zsa Zsa to dress, host F. Lee Baily interrogates her queen-y gay male private secretary Karl. Is it a difficult job? Karl breaks into a sweat, attempting tactful diplomacy. “I can’t say it’s not difficult,” he stammers. “I guess it is. She’s very complex.” Read between the lines: she’s a temperamental nightmare! Karl backpedals, adding, “She really is this beautiful, this chic, this exciting, this witty, this unpredictable!” Phew!

/ Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ultra-glamorous passport, issued in 1966: I love that her passport photo is a beautifully lit and re-touched soft-focus Hollywood portrait and that she’s clearly doctored her birth date with a pen (which in theory should make the document invalid!). For the record, Gabor was apparently born in 1917! /

/ If this blue gown isn't the actual ensemble Zsa Zsa wears in this episode of Good Company, it's an awfully good facsimile! /

Post-bubble bath, fragrant chatelaine Zsa Zsa sweeps down the staircase and joins them. She’s donned a powder-blue, fur-trimmed floor-length muumuu and bouffant ringleted wiglet for the interview that Lady Bunny herself might covet. Zsa Zsa graciously takes Baily for a tour of her ostentatious nouveau riche home. Her closest neighbor, we learn, is Nancy Sinatra! We see the swimming pool, the Steinway gold grand piano (the one borrowed later for the 2013 Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra) covered with family photos, Zsa Zsa’s ultra-flattering idealized portrait above the fireplace, her collection of original Renoirs and various objets d’art and antiques.

/ This is the portrait of Zsa Zsa with her young daughter Francesca above the mantelpiece she contemplates with Baily /

Things turn seriously interesting and awkward when Zsa Zsa’s 18-year old aspiring actress daughter Francesca joins them. Dressed like a matronly socialite and looking like an escapee from Valley of the Dolls, the ultra-poised Francesca is one world-weary teenager.  Baily asks Francesca some outrageously intrusive, lecherous and tactless questions like if she’s “going steady” and what age of men she’s attracted to. “Between 25 and infinity,” she snarls. Zsa Zsa think Francesca says, “Between 25 and 70” and admits she doesn’t understand what “infinity” means. When Francesca leaves the room, Baily complements Zsa Zsa on how well-bred she is. “It’s not “groovy” to be polite nowadays,” Zsa Zsa laments. Postcript: the troubled Francesca’s acting career never took off and she never managed to carve a satisfying niche for herself. Later Francesca would repeatedly clash with Zsa Zsa’s ninth and final husband (the parasitic gold-digging ersatz “Prince” Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt) and she pre-deceased her mother, dying in 2015. (Wracked with ill health and dementia by then, Zsa Zsa herself died in 2016 without ever having been informed of her daughter’s death).

/ Zsa Zsa's bed - an exact replica of  Empress Joséphine’s. apparently /

/ Zsa Zsa and Francesca lounging on mama's bed. This is very how much how they both appear in this episode /

Zsa Zsa coquette-ishly invites Baily to see her boudoir, guiding him by the hand upstairs. “If I don’t come back after this next commercial, you know where I am,” Baily leers to the camera. Her bed, draped and canopied in lurid green, is an exact replica of Empress Joséphine’s, Zsa Zsa claims. Baily asks if the bed expresses her personality and Zsa Zsa nonsensically responds, “Well of course it does! It’s blue and green. Sometimes I’m blue and most of the time I’m green!” Huh? Lounging in bed, Zsa Zsa then lists the men she thinks are sexy: Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra. Turning to Baily she flutters her false eyelashes: “I’m sure you are a very sexy and glamorous man!” Watch and squirm!

/ Little sister Eva Gabor (1919 - 1995) and Zsa Zsa (1917 - 2016) sharing a laugh - and a wig /

/ Now that's what I call art: trompe l'oeil portrait of Zsa Zsa by Margaret Keane / 

Pretty much all of the photos illustrating this post are swiped from the Heritage Auctions' website for The Estate of Zsa Zsa Gabor Signature Auction later this month. The video below is a handy guide to the deluxe glitzy trash on offer / 

Tallulah and Billie

/ Tallulah Bankhead in the 1930s /

/ Billie Holiday photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1949 /

The intimate friendship between dissolute husky-voiced first lady of the American stage Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) and the great doomed jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday (1915-1959) spanned at least two decades – from the golden age of 1930s Harlem cafe society until the mid-1950s. “Tally and Lady were like sisters,” as one observer put it. Fierce, stylish sisters with a tinge of incest, apparently.

From Joel Lobenthal’s 2005 biography Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady:

Tallulah’s relationships, of course, seldom observed clear-cut boundaries, and it appears that during the late 1940s she and Holiday were also lovers. Perhaps they had been all along.  Holiday later told William Dufty, who ghostwrote her autobiography, that when Tallulah visited backstage at the Strand Theatre, the thrill she took in exhibitionistic sex made her insist on keeping Holiday’s dressing room door open. Holiday later claimed that Tallulah’s brazen show of affection almost cost her her job at the Strand.

John Levy was also Holiday’s lover as well as her manager at the time, and although he was one of the abusive strong men to whom Holiday gravitated, Levy was intimidated by Tallulah and her connections. When Tallulah came around, all he could do was get out of the way. Once at a nightclub he sat at a nearby table watching Tallulah express her affection to Holiday. “Look at that bitch, Carl, look at that!” he exclaimed to musician Carl Drinkard. “That bitch is going out of her fucking mind, she’s all over her.”

A daughter of the patrician Old South who knew a thing or two about breaking taboos, the gloriously hedonistic Tallulah was a bold pioneer when it came to interracial sex – another of her conquests was Hattie McDaniel (yes, Mammy from Gone with the Wind). Sadly, Bankhead and Holiday’s friendship ended acrimoniously around the time of the publication of Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday’s 1956 memoirs. (Bankhead was bedeviled by tabloid scandals at the time and, fearing what dirt Holiday might rake up in her autobiography, abruptly distanced herself from her – probably on the advice of her lawyer). What a shame. Read Holiday’s lacerating and embittered kiss-off letter to Bankhead here. 

/ Bankhead was primarily a stage actress and only made a handful of films. In the early 1930s she was dispatched to Hollywood in the hopes she would become a screen rival to Garbo and Dietrich (in truth, she was the rare American actress who did convincingly exude their kind of heavy-lidded Continental decadence). Unfortunately all her films belly flopped and her Hollywood stint was brief. Here she is in The Cheat (1931), which certainly looks intriguing. I've never seen it, but apparently it’s available to watch in ten-minute segments on Youtube /

/ Sultry Bankhead with delectable leading man Gary Cooper in The Devil and The Deep (1932) – which I have seen and is great, campy fun. Bankhead famously confessed, “The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”/ 

/ I think my favourite photos of Billie Holiday ever taken were from this weirdly modern 1949 series by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) – which include these sensational nude portraits. Young Holiday looks a bit tough and hard-edged but not yet ravaged. I love how they're clearly un-retouched: you can see the little scar on her face. Her golden skin makes her look like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian beauties. See more here /

/ Towards the end: Holiday in 1958 /

/ Rare shot of Billie and Tallulah in happier times, apparently taken at The Strand Theatre circa 1948 /