Category Archives: Fashion

December 4, 2013 · 7:05 pm

The Spirit of Electricity

I finally saw “The Spirit of Electricity,” the costume worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II at an outrageous fancy dress party she gave with her railroad tycoon husband that was one of the highlights of the Gilded Age in New York City. Textiles perish, and you don’t often get to see the famous gowns of the past. Mrs. Vanderbilt was always going to be a static image on a photo card, fetching but more than a little cracked.

Born Alva Erskine Smith, Mrs. Vanderbilt orchestrated the ball in 1883 to christen the new lodgings erected for the couple at 1 West 57^th Street. Theirs was the largest house ever built in Manhattan. In staging one of the most elaborate balls of the time, Alva assured the Vanderbilt family a perpetual place on Mrs. Astor’s 400, the list of New York’s social elite.

The New York Times covered the party perhaps less objectively than it would today. “The Vanderbilt ball has agitated New-York society more than any social event that has occurred here in many years,” read the article that ran the day after, on March 27th. “Since the announcement that it would take place…scarcely anything else has been talked about. It has been on every tongue and a fixed idea in every head. It has disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks, and has even, perhaps, interfered to some extent with that rigid observance of Lenten devotions which the Church exacts.”

In advance of the evening, quadrilles were relentlessly practiced, costumes were tailored, quantities of hair powder were laid in. The party was a showstopper. The Times reporter exclaimed about the “garden in the forest” where guests took their supper, and the phalanx of cops that kept gawkers at bay outside the mansion as carriages began to arrive after 10:30 or so. We have no pictures of the hordes with their noses pressed up against the windows, but the fashionables inside had their images captured for posterity by society photographers.

Each guest’s getup was wilder than the next.

Jesters, Romams, Mary Antoinette, the Four Seasons – it was a motley group.

I thought that the souvenir photos were all that remained of the event.

Then I visited Gilded New York, an exhibit that is currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York. The show includes the decorative arts, some paintings and some fashion. Yes, the end of the nineteenth century is big in Manhattan at the moment, with this enterprise and Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America at the New-York Historical Society. If you are a fan of ostentation, now is the time to put aside workaday worries and immerse yourself in a level of excess that is hard to fathom today.

The items on display were those that would have figured big in ball culture. Images of the grand Fifth Avenue houses set the stage, most long torn down, commissioned for the new industrial elites. By 1892, 27% of the nation’s millionaires lived in New York City, more than 1,100 of them.

Many of their mansions, like the Vanderbilt house, had a castle-like, European flavor. The structure where the 1883 ball took place was a model for the immense confection inhabited by the Delegate family in Savage Girl.

With their newfound wealth, the millionaires bought jewelry at Tiffany, gold, enamel, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. But they also went to Tiffany for other accessories, like this card case made of frog leather in 1900.

They had a taste for the over the top, like a decanter and cup fabricated of Murano Glass.

Long kid gloves were a necessity for a ball-going lady.

When they were feeling rustic they might show off a different style of ware, say the one decorated with an alligator, snake and lizard – this one belonged to Montana copper baron William Clark, one of the Fifth Avenue denizens.

All, it seemed, was glossy, elegant, costly. You can read the plush lifestyle in the portraiture, like the depiction of Helen Virginia Sands at age 19, shortly before her marriage to a successful Wall Street trader.

What I found most affecting, though, was the golden silk gown, “The Spirit of Electricity,” here in front of me, for real. It had emerged from the black-and-white photo card. Heavily embroidered in beaten gilt, it had silver tinsel filaments that lifted like small wings above the shoulders. Imported, of course, from Worth in Paris.

That’s a Herter Company jewelry cabinet in the background, for you Herter furniture fans. The dress survived because it was gifted to the Metropolitan Museum by Mrs. Vanderbilt’s daughter Countess Laszlo Szechenyi (neé Gladys Vanderbilt).

More affecting, even, the yellow silk stockings and pumps that Alva wore with the fancy gown.

This opulence of the distant past was real, something I could almost touch.

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December 3, 2013 · 8:23 pm

Making Book

Frank Stella’s splashy, enormous constructions line the walls of the lobby where my book publisher has its offices. Three collages, to be precise, of mixed media on a base of etched magnesium. Standing in front of one, you have to crane your neck to see the top of the piece. Standing there, I try to imagine creating something so large as the exploding Stella’s, so imposing. My mind wanders – outside is a dumpling truck with the snazzy legend: “Who’s Your Edamame?” It’s a New York morning, and art and food and commerce jostle for attention.

Books, books, time to think about books. Or one book: my book. Stella’s work depicts the inside of my head as I take the elevator to the fourth floor. We’re going to talk about how to introduce Savage Girl to the world. How can I describe the feeling? Heart-pounding excitement. Trepidation. All shades in between.

Savage Girl comes out March 6^th. And all the people at our meeting, editor, publicist, social media pro, literary agent – all of them are invested in making sure that my novel reaches a wide reading public.

So we talk about strategies. Bound gallleys, called ARCs in the business (for Advance Reading Copies) – who has received them so far, who gets them next? Print is no long king when it comes to reviewers – we want people to blab online about the book, on Goodreads, “where bookworms congregate,” as someone at the meeting says, on blogs, everywhere. We want the twitter-sphere to sing its praises. We want the people who read this blog – yes, you! – to get ahold of a copy and make their friend read it too. We want it to be consumed and consumed some more. Come up for air! Someone will say. It’s time to do the dishes. To go to the dentist! But I can’t possibly, you say, I am too immersed in the adventures of Hugo and Bronwyn.

Booksellers who received their early copy are liking Savage Girl, it seems. (Some Hollywood producers are too – shush, don’t jinx it by talking about it.) Authors have weighed in with comments that will appear on the back of the dust jacket. I like this one from Da Chen, the lyrical novelist:

The best historical fiction brings the reader back to a bygone era and the depth of humanity then. Jean Zimmerman does all that and more in her elegantly written new novel. I simply could not put down this this tale of sweet and painful love, of a savage girl and her encounter with modernity.

All I have to do between now and March is a hundred things. Suffice it to say I’ll be writing more here and elsewhere about the Gilded Age, sharing what I learned in the process of researching Savage Girl. Debutante rituals, fashion, feasting, feral children, nineteenth century medical practices, mansions that are architectural marvels… I hope that people who don’t know much about the period will find out something new, and that I’ll satisfy Gilded Age aficionados’ yearning for more on the subject.

Say you enter your favorite independent bookstore, where the management has carefully curated its collection. You inspect the table when you come in the door and find scads of titles that tantalize you, that beg to be picked up and perused. It may seem that they found their way there by some kind of magic. Not so. Behind every glossy jacket is a team of geniuses who have pondered and sleuthed and brainstormed a way to bring that wonderful volume to you. Like an explosion, like the mixed-media Stella on the wall, the planning all comes together to unveil a bound book.

Riding the subway uptown, I notice a man standing next to me with headphones. Dancing, and not so demurely, either. He is rocking and rolling. He is happy. So am I. I remember a couplet by one of my favorite poets, another Frank, Frank O’Hara, who made New York City the star of many of his poems in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

How funny you are today New York

like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime

Sometimes, when you’re in Manhattan, everything can seem so right. I get off the train at my stop and look from one side to the other, not sure which direction to head on the platform. A woman in black-framed glasses and long black hair touches me on the arm. I don’t even have to ask. She points with her finger and softly, kindly says, This way. This way.

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November 26, 2013 · 8:01 pm

Thank You for Reading

I am thankful.

This is a post about this blog.

At Thanksgiving, in a lot of families, a blessing is performed before the turkey comes on in its golden, crispy glory. The blessing consists of going around the table with every guest sharing some thing they are especially grateful for. On the occasions I’ve taken part in this ritual, I’ve sometimes had to squelch the urge to say something slightly comical or snarky. I don’t know why, perhaps because the whole thing seemed so self serious. Real thanks seem quieter, more internal, perhaps.

Now, with a few days before us until we’ll be stuffed with stuffing, with a clear head, I want to be serious.

I am grateful, deeply grateful, to those of you who read this blog.

When people ask what my site is all about, I say different things. It’s called Blog Cabin, and it’s about living in a circa 1800 home in a thoroughly modern world, and the time travel that allows for. Sometimes I call it a personal magazine. A diary. A cultural commentary. It’s about the past as a living, breathing entity. All about history and art and nature and literature… An author blog, as I have one novel about to come out and one just in the rearview.

What it really is, is playtime. Writing books, of course, is hard work. (If you’re doing it right.) Writing this blog has given me a chance to dabble in the things that absorb me in my book writing life, but on a more finite scale, with pleasure at the foremost – yes, history and art and nature and literature and… a pogo stick championship?

It was hot July and the contestants soared. You could taste the adrenaline.

Writing for you has given me a reason to go on adventures that you might not take, even if you had the chance. Or perhaps you would, like my search for an infant saguaro cactus at a botanical garden in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a beaming guide, but you couldn’t get there that day.

I’ve taken myself to a Victorian waltz class and tea.

To a Broadway disco-play, and to a euphoria-inducing Brahms recital. And to a dramatic dance performance en plein air, at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

I’ve plumbed the depths of the 20-something psyche, because I have a young adult close to my heart. Instagramming is their life.

They’re fascinating animals, as are husbands, and mine hitchhikes along with me from time to time.

As are dogs. Mine is inscrutable, but adds flavor to the mix.

And writers. I’ve loved writing about Gertrude Stein.

I’ve shared many favorite recipes, like the one for Marcella Hazan’s braised pork in milk.

Observed motorcycle pirates on the loose in NYC. With some history about pirates intertwined, of course.

A rowdy pig festival in upstate New York.

Explored a local farm on an enchanted evening, just as dusk fell.

Learned about the power of graffiti at the late, great 5Pointz. Got my leg cast tagged there, too.

And witnessed the unlikely beauties of slime mold in a pristine nature preserve.

It’s been my pleasure to gather these treasures and offer them to you, and your great generosity has been receiving them from me. So thank you. I’m looking forward to many more adventures.

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November 23, 2013 · 4:19 pm

Portrait of a Lady Descending a Staircase

Visiting the exhibit of Gilded Age Portraits at the New-York Historical Society, I simply had to let myself go into a cloud of chiffon, of gleaming satins, of deep-pile velvet. And, on the masculine side, really good wool. I fortified myself beforehand, consuming a dish of pappardelle with duck ragu and chocolate shavings, the kind of meal they serve in museum restaurants in New York City. I felt that eating something rich and rare would prepare me for a glimpse into the lives of people whose dinners were usually revealed by servants lifting silver tops off of Sevres dinnerware.

At the entrance, outside the gallery itself, there happened to hang a portrait from quite a different time — a star of the Society’s collection, depicting Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, appointed governor of the province of New York and New Jersey by Queen Anne in 1702. In some ways this painting was a perfect New York introduction, as so many of these Gilded Age models were New Yorkers. Though in this case there is definitely a hint of the weird, since Lord Cornbury was known for strolling up Broadway wearing women’s clothes.

No, the people portrayed in the exhibit, people who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were aristocrats whose likenesses were proper, proud and a little mysterious. The little boy with the big name, Cortlandt Field Bishop, was painted by Bouguereau in 1873. A sky blue sash and a trumpet – did he choose the trumpet prop, I wonder – and his baby-fine hair make him seem the perfect lace-swaddled little lord fauntleroy. But he was descended from mighty Van Cortlandts and DePeysters.

The exhibit is based on portrait shows sponsored by the elites of that era, and so we find Martha Washington on the wall, although she seems almost out of place here as Lord Cornbury, with her country mouse, Revolutionary-era bonnet.

But Rembrandt Peale’s 1853 portrait was displayed at a famous 1895 portrait exhibition, presumably because “Lady Washington” had by then earned the status of domestic goddess.

When elite families wanted their Portrait of a Lady (the novel published first by James in 1880, and then extensively revised for a 1908 reprint) they demanded the tried and true. They wanted a painter to reliably render the jewels and flounces and creamed skin of a well-to-do woman.

The woman shown here in 1906 is Saint Louis socialite Nellie McCormick Flagg, painted by her husband James Montgomery Flagg. He described his conception of female beauty.

She should be tall, with wide shoulders; a face as symmetrical as a Greek vase; thick, wavy hair… long lashes; straight nose tipped up a bit at the end; her eyes so full of feminine allure that your heart skips a beat when you gaze into them.

Looks like he got her.

On display was an image of the infamous Ward McAllister. I’d always wondered what he looked like. He played God when he deemed himself the arbiter of social acceptability in Gilded Age Manhattan, creating the concept of the Four Hundred – the number of fashionables who could fit in Mrs. Caroline Astor’s ballroom. He was the master of exclusivity.

But despite his power, he was only a man with a drooping mustache who depended on his wife’s wealth for his social standing.

I think my favorite piece in the show was the picture of James Hazen Hyde, rendered in 1901 by Frenchman Theobald Chartran.

Soon after Hyde’s likeness was painted he removed himself from New York to Paris. Why? He was accused of mismanagement of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, a company his papa left to him. He looks like a guy who’s getting ready to drink your milkshake (as turn-of-the-century oil tycoon Daniel Plainview puts it in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood).

And meanwhile… not decades away, the traditional art of beautifully modelled heirs and heiresses was about to explode. I walked up a flight from the portraiture show at the Historical Society to an exhibit of works from the 1913 Armory show, which scandalized New Yorkers.

There were chunky Matisse nudes, symbolic Redons, shockingly sauvage Gauguins – on another planet from the Gilded Age canvases. The world was changing. Thomas Edison was shooting movies of men building Manhattan skyscrapers. The lobby for “woman suffrage” had racheted up and would soon make a revolution. There was no rigid dividing line between the Gilded Age sensibility and the modern; a collector might hang examples of both in his drawing room. John Singer Sargent, the sultan of sumptuousness, had caught Edith Minturn and I.N. Phelps Stokes in a thoroughly modern moment in 1893.

Still, it’s no wonder that the people who loved statuesque Nellie McCormick Flagg flung insults at Duchamp’s brazen Nude Descending a Staircase.

It was painted in 1912, a thousand years after Nellie’s 1906 portrait.

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November 19, 2013 · 8:24 pm

Another Fine Dress You’ve Got Me Into

I always wondered by what means people got up their getups for fancy dress balls during the Gilded Age. A fancy dress ball didn’t mean, as it sounds, elegant gowns for the ladies and stiff black tails for the gents. They were actually masquerades, opportunities for the well-heeled to escape their own trials and tribulations – there were, in fact, economic downturns and “reversals” throughout the last decades of the 1800s – with a lot of very pricey role-playing. And to prove just how boss they were.

Balls were splendid on their own. Edith Wharton described a typical scene.

Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women’s coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves.

For Savage Girl I looked into debutante balls, when 18-year-olds got their first taste of all the splendour that money could buy.

I first got interested in fancy-dress shenanigans, though, when I wrote about I.N. Phelps Stokes as a young man studying architecture in Paris in 1894.

Most of the people he knew attended the spectacular Bal des Quat’z’Arts, where artists and architects partied hearty in the name of everything aesthetic and bohemian. Revelers could expect gold and silver paint slapped on bare flesh along with displays like the last days of Babylon, complete with “blackamoors,” camels and nearly naked women. Excess reigned every year.

Stokes, I learned from his generally no-nonsense memoir, wrote home to his mother demanding she ship over the black velvet dress he’d worn for a costume ball at his home the previous winter.

What, I wondered, trying to imagine Stokes be-gowned in velvet, was this slightly stiff, shy young gentleman doing cross-dressing at a balls-out ball?

It was the thing to do, though. Fancy dress celebrations were prevalent in Victorian England and Canada as welll as Paris and New York. One Canadian scholar who has studied archival material puts it this way:

The sheer number of archival photographs of people in fancy dress, as it was known, attests to the popularity of this phenomenon, as well as its importance to those who took part. These portraits reveal a great deal about Victorian morals, values, taboos and tastes regarding clothing, bodies and social behaviour. While the basic appeal of fancy dress lay in its semblance of permissiveness and escapism, this sort of amusement was controlled by a complex set of moral restrictions.

Few costumes survive, but these people were photo-obsessed and made sure to document the fancy ball madness.

On the website of Montreal’s McCord Museum you can find startling images of partygoers dressed to the nines, such as Herbert Molson and his sister Naomi as “Vikings,” costumed in 1898 for the Chateau de Ramezay Ball in Montreal.

And Miss Bethune as “An Incroyable,” in Montreal, in 1881.

There was also the “Girl of the Period,” shot in 1870. The Victorians could really break loose on ice skates with a swinging braid and a cigarillo.

The image was spookily familiar, and I realized it was the embodiment of a Currier and Ives print I have hanging on my wall.

You can see some of these photos as a video.

At the end of the century,New York City could always put on the biggest fancy show. One of the most famous costume extravaganzas was the Bradley-Martin Ball, which took place at the Waldorf in February 1897. Cornelia Bradley-Martin vowed that it would be “the greatest party in the history of the city”.

She and her husband spent nearly nine-million dollars in current money hosting eight hundred of the city’s leading lights, Astors, Schermerhorns, Morgans and Posts included. Cornelia doesn’t look like a party animal, but the fact that she is smiling slightly suggests something to me. Most people still did not smile when posing for a portrait.

The ballroom was a replica of Versailles, wigmakers stood at the ready, and guests arrived as Mary, Queen of Scots, a Spanish toreador, Henry the IV. The hostess appeared with a gold, pearl and precious stone embroidered gown.

She might have managed to best the Vanderbilts’ legendary ball of 1883, thrown by Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alva to christen their new Fifth Avenue chateau. Alva sure looked good in doves.

The Museum of the City of New York has a extensive collection of photos of people posed with all seriousness at the ball. Including Mrs. Henry T. Sloane as, I think, a witch. Probably a good witch.

If you’d like to get up a Gilded Age costume there are resources at your disposal.

But, what are we to wear? asks a manual from 1896, accessible on line in its entirety. This is the first exclamation on receipt of an invitation to a Fancy Ball, and it is to assist in answering such questions that this volume has been compiled.

Several hundred costumes are described with every incidental novelty introduced of late, including Autumn, Bee, Gipsies, Carmen, Dominos, Esmerelda, Fire, etc.

Henry James wrote:

The rooms were filling up and the spectacle had become brilliant. The ball borrowed its splendor chiefly from the shining shoulders and profuse jewels of the women, and from the voluminous elegance of their dresses.

You’ll have to invite 1,000 or so people to really get the fancy ball experience. And make sure to call your wigmaker. Everything will be rosy.

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November 17, 2013 · 7:31 pm

The Things We Carry

What heirloom would you bring?

I’m reading about refugees and the things that they carry (remembering the Tim O’Brien tale The Things They Carried, about the impedimenta Vietnam soldiers take with them into battle.) BBC News Magazine profiles refugees during the Nazi menace of the 1940s, asking that question.

Isabelle Rozenbaumas’s mother escaped Nazi-overrun Lithuania, barely, with her carriage-driver father, and snuck out three class photographs from that time.

Julian Glowinski’s grandmother was deported from Poland to Siberia in 1940. Amazingly, she packed a sewing machine onto a cattle truck, and converted gowns into wedding dresses in her concentration camp in exchange for food.

Elke Duffy and her family fled East Prussia in January 1945. With her she took an amber necklace her mother had strung from amber she and her sister found on a Baltic beach.

Ian Carr-de Avelon’s wife’s grandfather was forced onto a train in Lwow (then Poland, now Ukraine) with his wife. Rather than cherished photos he took a camp stove. A camp stove? But of course ultimately it made perfect sense.

So what to take in a hurry, with the monsters breathing down your throat?

Photos. But today they mostly stay trapped in the computer. You can’t just lift them out of an album, with yellowed tape stains on their backs. So print some, fast.

Maybe I’d take this one, if I had to take one.

I’d have to take another. Mark it on the back with a Sharpie, April 1987. The engagement party.

If I could, I’d grab more. My parents. My extended family. Gil would take this burst of joy.

Or, he says, an oilcloth Santa he remembers making when he was six.

What object would I choose? Not a sewing machine. Not an iPhone. I looked around my house, and I thought about storage. At least three dusty cardboard boxes are marked Heirlooms, mostly from a family bow-windowed breakfront now residing in a home with more space. How do you choose among the loved objects of the past?

I might take my paternal grandmother’s copy of Ulysses, by James Joyce, its cover broken off, which she bravely purchased at a time when the novel was still censored in the U.S.

Or a scrap tatted by my ancestors, embroidered with carnations, the cloth handled by their fingers.

I could tuck that into my sock.

But if I was going to bring some bigger object – what?

How about a china plate. A cake plate, a foot across, strewn with pink roses and lilies of the family. Utilitarian as well as cherished.

Just a plate. But a plate belonging to my great-great-grandmother, a woman with the interesting name of Brown Coats. A deep souvenir of family, embodying the optimistic conviction that sometime in the future, there will be cake.

Will the plate make it through the mud, the rutted roads, the mountain passes? Despite its apparent fragility, I am certain it is strong.

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November 16, 2013 · 10:09 pm

The Myths of Time

I love that building, said my friend John, a publisher with a reliably elegant sense of taste. It was designed by Louis Kahn. The Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, is housed in a sleek shell of matte steel on Chapel Street, the bustling main drag of the town. It was the architect’s last major commission, completed after his death in 1974. It’s an interestingly modern container for the almost exclusively older works of art within, lovely canvases of fetching ladies, bewigged lords, and big-eyed colonial children with their colonial pets. Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love, completed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1771, is a good example.

You’ll also find lots of animals, horses and dogs mainly. My old friend Betsy, who lives nearby, told me she has spent serious time sunk in an overstuffed leather chair in the high-ceilinged gallery admiring the zebra painting. A rather famous zebra painting, made by George Stubbs in 1763, when a zebra would have seemed about as exotic to Europeans as a unicorn.

We couldn’t help but be stopped just inside the glass doors as we were coming in by a much more modern work. What is that? I said to Wendy, puzzling it out. A minotaur? A centaur?

No, she corrected me, a centaur is a man on top, horse on the bottom. This was a horse on top. I liked it a lot, it was so rough and raw, like something you’d see in a dream.

Turned out that Foal, sculpted of painted bronze, was one of seven works by the British artist Nicola Hicks which had been installed as a special exhibit in the Yale Center. The mythic is central to her work. As part of the show Hicks selected pieces from the museum’s collection to serve as counterpoints to her own. The British tradition of animal imagery intertwined with the contemporary creatures in a dynamic, charged way.

The painting chosen for the display that I found most affecting was William Barraud’s A Couple of Foxhounds with a Terrier, the Property of Lord Henry Bentinck. Hicks has said she recognizes Baraud’s profound understanding of how the “social structure” unites the animals depicted. It’s about the independent dogness of dogs, despite the humans that may believe they own them lock stock and kibble.

One sculpture reflected on Aesop’s fable about a donkey found in the forest wearing a lion’s skin, which ultimately results in the donkey being exposed as a fool.

Nicks’ Who was I Kidding, created of plaster and straw, shows the poor donkey with the skin thrown across its back. It bears some resemblance to another Stubbs canvas in the museum, A Lion Attacking a Horse. The horse in that conception feels not shame but blind fury.

Later, over tea, I noticed that Wendy had bought a postcard at the gift shop. She had out her small, purse-size sketchbook and a pencil.

Wendy’s a musician, an actress, an astute psychotherapist. She was drawing the donkey, tracing the gentle lines of its hanging, shamed head. She had taken the experience with her, as we do all myths that have power.

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November 13, 2013 · 9:04 pm

Forever Twenty-One

Icy New York City, hot colors, textures, tastes – drinking it all in with a 21-year-old, on break from scholarly endeavors, who needs a pair of boots.

Not those boots.

Who needs a cookie.

The crumbliest, crunchiest, richest cookie in Manhattan, from Levain bakery on West 74^th Street. Chocolate, a zillion calories. Would make a good lunch. Highly photogenic, too.

What she doesn’t need: forced bulbs from a fancy shop.

She creates blossoms of her own in her mind.

Needs no silly store slogans.

A suit of clothes suitable for a different girl.

And no other body than her own, please.

No plastic toys, either, no matter how quirky. These flap!

Life itself is a sweet, quirky game.

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November 7, 2013 · 4:32 pm

Natasha and Pierre on Broadway

Well, yes, only in New York, sure. An electro-pop opera in a night club. In a tent. On a parking lot. In Times Square.

On line outside Kazino supper club, on a Wednesday night, we wait in the cold.

There are many sweet and stylish young couples.

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 takes place two centuries before us. A young theatrical wizard named Dave Malloy concocted the musical production. Will there be relevance in the enterprise?

A handsome man in a Tolstoy tee shirt waits for admission.

The company’s names appear on sheet metal inside the entryway. You know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Inside, cocktail tables. Grey Goose available at $240 the bottle. Hot pierogies materialize, and short glasses of pink borscht that look like votive candles.

A big babe of a man called Royce strides around acting the hostess. Cossack hat, fur slouched over the shoulders, in a leopard skirt. Welcoming everyone.

There are voluptuous wine-colored curtains all around, hung with “vintage” paintings, including one of Napolean.

The actors prance onto the floor, belting it out. Suddenly, the show has begun.

There’s a leading lady straight out of Julliard, who really knows how to warble.

Tolstoy would say the actresses are “nude” because they have bare shoulders. They range the room along with the dashing young actors; the scene changes from the opera to a drawing room to a gypsy lair. Lovers Natasha and Andre are parted when he goes off to war, Natasha is seduced by Anatole, then finally forgiven by Pierre. A simple plot delivered with much gnashing of teeth, tears and sexy dancing. The audience is given egg-shaped shakers to accompany the musicians.

The finale has Pierre singing a haunting tune to the Great Comet of 1812, represented by one of the night club’s old-fashioned chandeliers. It’s goose-bump-making, breathtaking.

Did I mention the play’s based on War and Peace?

Only in New York. And Moscow.

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November 2, 2013 · 10:01 pm

Victorian Waltz and Tea

Writing a novel in which Gilded Age debutantes dance with their swains in the gaslit ballrooms of fashionable New York made me want to get some nineteenth century dance moves under my belt. Or, rather, under my crinolines. So I brought my best Tigger kicks in to Manhattan for an afternoon of 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

Susan de Guardiola, our elegant yet earthy instructor, came down from Connecticut. She generally teaches what she calls Jane Austen classes – picture Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, sashaying down the line, all aglow.

I always preferred Matthew Macfadyen in that movie. Does he show up at any of Susan’s classes? She teaches not only English country dancing but about 12 other kinds and is a true authority in her field, with a website called Capering& Kickery that gives all kinds of background on Victorian and Regency-era dance.

“If everyone’s good enough,” she told us at the start, “we’ll progress to jumping.” Such, I will tell you now, was not to be. It was baby steps for many of us, even as we behaved very well and tried very hard.

The last time I waltzed was in seventh grade cotillion, wearing a micro-mini dress and short white gloves. I loved it. But that was a long time ago. And a far cry from a tiny dance floor in the back room of a tile shop, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Today, some women wore black dance shoes and a man came in wearing a steampunk-style leather top hat. You don’t see that every day on the streets of New York. “Shall I put my hair up because I’ll get all hot and sweaty?” asked a curly-haired woman. “I usually do,” said Susan.

This class was offered under the auspices of the New York Nineteenth Century Society, an outfit that takes seriously its mission: it “unites historians, scholars, artists, philosophers, dreamers, and impresarios inspired by the 19th century.” Recently they had a Nineteenth Century Extravaganza, for which everyone put on their full Victorian regalia. Next up is an archery event. Yes! Perhaps I’ll attend. Savage Girl is an expert archer, as were many young ladies of the late 1800s.

“The 1880s, 1890s were the root of modern ballroom dance,” said Susan. It turns out that the waltz changed seven or eight times in the course of its development, becoming faster, closer, more stylized. The dip back we expect from the female partner now didn’t used to exist.

“I’ll tell you the secret of this kind of dancing,” said Susan. “It works if you do it on the balls of your feet.”

“When this waltz gets going,” she said, “it flies around the room.” She might have been a tad optimistic.

This was a lesson in shoulder blades. The man should place his hand on the woman’s left shoulder blade (“that’s the sharp thing sticking out of her back,” said Susan) though in Victorian times when everyone wore corsets and your posture was therefore better, your partner could put his hand farther down your back. The woman holds her left hand against the man’s right shoulder, above his chest, to help push him around during the turns.

We learned the gavotte glide, a slide to the right followed by a turn, and we learned the importance of leading with your toe, Victorian style. Susan suggested we lean in and not worry about the various “bits” of us that might touch. We passed partners around the circle, dancing with utter and complete strangers, experiencing waves of cologne, perspiration, different kinds of breath, good and not-so-good manners. Everyone tried hard. I got one partner, Jake, a couple of times, and we shared laughs over each other’s clumsiness. He suggested we hold a hand behind us, as I might do holding a bunch of petticoats.

Jake high fived me when we came to a halt semi-successfully. Very Victorian.

Lesson over, Gil and I proceeded outside, where a young dancer waiting for a tango class advised me that rubber soles such as the ones I had on might cost me an ankle. “I hope you keep it up,” she told me and Gil kindly. “Maybe I’ll see you on Dancing with the Stars.”

On the street, I asked Susan how to improve. “Practice five minutes every day,” she said. “Go to a supermarket and practice down all those wide aisles.” You don’t need to do it all at once. “Sleep on your lesson,” she said, “and you will do better the next day.”

We hadn’t had enough Victorian flavor so we went afterward for high tea at a place called Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon. It was on the first floor of a Gramercy Park hotel, The Inn at Irving Place, carved out of two adjoining brownstones that date back to 1834. Washington Irving was said to have spent some time in a house down the street, enhancing the old-fashioned aura of the neighborhood. The online reviews I read said a man would not be welcome at the establishment, so of course Gil wanted to go.

Lights were turned down low and the whole effect was gracious and mellow and ladylike, even if there were a few male interlopers.

We chose our freshly steeped tea from a menu of 27 varieties. The “Lady Mendl,” which I selected, was hot and heavenly, especially after waltzing for two hours.

Darjeeling scented with bergamot, it was named after Lady Mendl herself – none other than the society woman Elsie de Wolfe, one of the first people to make her fame as an interior decorator. It’s said she had the expression “never complain, never explain” stitched on her throw pillows.

There was an amuse bouche consisting of a butternut squash tart with crème fraiche. Tea sandwiches. We were rolling. Everyone in the room appeared happy, or rather, high. High on hot, fragrant tea.

We reminisced about the banyan I made Gil one Christmas. Banyans are the “exotic” silk robes colonial men wore when they were at home at leisure, with their temporarily unperiwigged pates covered in caps.

There were, of course, scones and clotted cream. I ate some of the cream on a spoon to make sure it was property clotted.

As if that wasn’t sweet enough we had millefeuille cake with more cream, and chocolate-covered strawberries. In my opinion the strawberries are a specious addition, since a century ago you couldn’t get the kind of giant fruit they dip now. Not that I’m complaining.

“It’s good to do something you don’t ordinarily do,” I opined with Victorian superciliousness. “It makes you grow.”

“It makes you groan,” said Gil, ready to go back to the Cabin, put his feet up and his banyan on.

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October 16, 2013 · 8:18 pm

What a Wonderful House

The walls can talk in Satchmo’s house. Literally. Standing in Louis Armstrong’s den in his longtime residence in Corona, New York, we heard his perfect rumbling tones describing his inspiration for What a Wonderful World – the children of his neighborhood in Queens. The docent had pressed a button. The effect was magic.

We were visiting the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where the atmosphere created by Pops and his wife Lucille has been impeccably preserved. It was the house’s tenth anniversary as a public destination. A celebration was underway. A group called The Hot Sardines had a throwback style and even a peppy tap dancer, dressed in the current men’s fashion of skinny, tight suits.

There was a powerful trumpet player who might have felt a bit under Armstrong’s shadow.

The singer called herself Miz Elizabeth and the dancer was Fast Eddy. Basin Street Blues and Ain’t Nobody’s Business mingled nicely with the jingle of the Mister Softee truck making its way through the neighborhood.

Waiters came around bearing paper bowls of gumbo — “based on Louis’s own recipe” according to the museum — prepared by The Cooking Channel’s Tamara Reynolds and her company, Van Alst Kitchen.

The cornbread squares were properly crumbly-chewy. We went back for thirds on the gumbo.

“There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them,” Armstrong said. Anyone that couldn’t feel the swing in the air of this little Japanese-inflected garden in Queens would have to be unconscious.

After Miz Elizabeth delivered a soulful rendition of Sophie Tucker’s great signature tune, One of These Days, we ventured inside.

A time capsule. Everything was exactly as it had always been, down to the knick knacks and the vacuum cleaner.

Lucille, a Cotton Club dancer, made this a showplace, a glitzy but cozy habitat. She had found the house while Armstrong was out touring, she bought it, fixed it up, and gave him the address, so when he came back from the airport in a taxi he drove up and didn’t believe it – That’s not my house! he said. Or so a docent told us.

Everything is from another age. The kitchen has glossy turquoise cabinets.

And a stove to which a personalized nameplate was affixed.

You could see the Armstrongs’ recipe box.

Duke Ellington called Armstrong “an American original.” Pops liked all types of music, not just jazz, and kept a well-used reel-to-reel tape deck with a collection of 750 tapes. He once made a country album and among his first recordings was a duet with Jimmie Rodgers.

His den was his sanctuary, the only place in the house he could smoke weed. Pot, he said, insulated him from racism.

What about that 14-carat-gold-plated bathroom? High style for Corona, Queens.

A young woman with cat eye glasses was giving a guided tour to her boyfriend as we passed through the upstairs rooms. She had been there many times before. Look at the wallpaper, she said. I just love the decor, she told me, it has so much of them.

So many things change. This hasn’t. The telephone number for the museum is the original for the Armstrongs’ house.

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October 11, 2013 · 10:30 pm

The Golden Notebook in Golden Fall

Tomorrow will be a perfect day to take in the leaves upstate as they color up. If so much natural beauty wears thin and if you happen to be near Woodstock, New York, consider coming to The Golden Notebook for my 2:00 talk on The Orphanmaster. Signing copies, too. I know there are excellent lattes down the street and I’m pretty sure the nice people in the store will allow you to nurse one in in a paper cup while you sit back and enjoy my slide show — lots of nuggets about the way people, places and things looked in 1660s Manhattan. The raging beaver trade. The fashion of men in red-heeled pumps. What was it actually like, anyway? New York before it became New York. Imagine.

Please do come. I’ll be up on the second floor.

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October 9, 2013 · 3:00 pm

A Victorian Evening

There were not enough chairs. Victorian Society guests who came in late had to huddle by the door rather than join the hundred or so in the room. I was only a little distracted by all those wide eyes in the audience, drinking in the images on the screen behind me, so entranced were they by the Gilded Age. It was a marvelous evening.

The Victorian Society New York members are a lovely bunch, very serious about their history and dedicated to preserving the built past of the nineteenth century. Talking about I.N. Phelps Stokes and his passion for Old New York, I could see that that strong interest of his resonated personally with so many of this group. That Edith “Fiercely” Minturn’s old-fashioned beauty touched them.

There were some great minds and delicate sensibilities in the crowd. The master horologist John Metcalfe – clock expert, to you — with public school English diction and an L.L. Bean bag, informed me that when Newton and Edith Stokes packed up a sixteenth-century British house in 688 boxes to export and reassemble on the coast of Connecticut, they were not the only ones.

It was, apparently, a vogue at the time for those who could afford it. I knew that those of tremendous wealth paid people like Stanford White to cull the monasteries of Europe for great rooms that would be installed intact in their country houses. But I didn’t realize the wholesale shipping over of houses was a fashion for the fashionables until Mr. Metcalfe told me so.

There was the great preservationaist and historian Joyce Mendelsohn, who introduced me with the gracious admonition that listeners buy “two or three books “ and to give the extras to friends. Music to a writer’s ears.

An author herself, most recently of The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited: A History and Guide to a Legendary New York Neighborhood, Joyce has been a pivotal presence in Victorian Society New York.

Then there was the architect-scholar David Parker, who first introduced me to the dripping-with-history Loeb house at 41 East 72 Street. David knows pretty much everything about buildings and interiors of the late nineteenth century, all of which he applied to the renovation of that brownstone, with its Herter furniture, Tiffany glass, Minton ceramics, swags of velvet and fantastically patterned wallpapers.

There was a woman from Fraunces Tavern that had me sign copies of all my books at the request of her boss there. Fraunces Tavern is one of the oldest structures in Manhattan – it was first opened by Samuel Fraunces in 1767 — and I was proud to give a talk there once before.

I hope I do so again soon.

One scholar present had completed a doctoral thesis called “Psychosexual Dynamics in the Ghost Stories of Henry James.”

If she had had a copy with her I would have bought it and asked her to sign it.

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October 8, 2013 · 12:14 pm

Sargent and the Newlywed Stokeses

John Singer Sargent painted Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes in 1897, during the couple’s honeymoon – a classic portrait and an icon of the time. The three of them spent weeks in his studio, with Sargent occasionally taking breaks to pound out tunes on his grand piano. The great painter was at the height of his career and almost too busy to make time for them, but an influential family friend had commissioned the work as a wedding gift.

Not everyone liked it. One critic called the painting “too clever for its own good.”

Bringing the portrait into existence had been a challenge for Sargent. According to I.N. Phelps Stokes, newlywed Edith “sat to” Sargent 25 times, posing over and over agin in a blue silk gown. Sargent finally got fed up with the formality and said “I want to paint you as you are.” Edith had come in from the hot London streets that day wearing informal attire, clothes drastically different than the diaphanous gowns the painter’s models typically posed in, and she had a fresh, dewy look about her cheeks.

In other words, she was sweating.

Come tonight to see more pictures and hear more nuggets about the Newton and Edith Stokes, their portrait, and their remarkable lives – Dominican Academy, 44 East 68^th Street, bet. Park and Madison, at 6pm, sponsored by the Victorian Society of New York. Free.

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October 5, 2013 · 3:48 pm

Crystal Palace Visions

One thing on the island of Manhattan that I’ve always wished I could have seen is the Crystal Palace, built to house the World’s Fair of 1853, “The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations.” Walt Whitman called the glass and iron complex “Earth’s modern wonder.”

On 42^nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where Bryant Park now stands, the Crystal Palace welcomed its thousands of awe-struck visitors. Believed impervious to fire, it burned to the ground 155 years ago, on Oct. 5 1858. The conflagration started in a lumber room and within 15 minutes the huge dome had collapsed. I wonder whether any of the exhibitors were able to salvage their goods in time – Samuel Morse had his telegraph there on view, and Isaac Singer was showing his new invention, the sewing machine, which would transform our world in ways that couldn’t have been imagined.

Across the street stood the tallest structure in New York, the Latting Observatory, 315 feet high. Warren Latting erected a wooden tower resembling a scaled-down oil derrick as a tourist attraction in conjunction with the fair. Sightseers could take a steam-powered “safety hoister” elevator up 315 feet in a tiny, ornately decorated cab to the pinnacle of the tower. There they would admire the marvels of Manhattan through a battery of telescopes.

A meticulously detailed engraving, drawn in 1855 by B.F. Smith and engraved by William Wellstood, documented the bird’s eye view of the city south of 42^nd Street. It revealed the sheen of the Crystal Palace and the bulk of its neighbor, the brick-walled Croton Distributing Reservoir, which had supplied the city with pure drinking water from upstate since its completion in 1842, when the neighborhood was largely fields and cows. To the south you could just see the neo-Gothic spire of Trinity Church, a geographic talisman of New York the way first the Woolworth building and then the Empire State Building would be for future generations. People would go courting up in the steeple.

The Reservoir had 50-foot-high Egyptian-style parapets, 25 feet wide, upon which the fashionables of the day had grown to favor promenading.

Later, the 42^nd Street Public Library would come, with its 20,000 blocks of marble, its Beaux-Arts edifice, its lions cleverly named (in the 1930s by, of all people, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia) Patience and Fortitude, the two traits absolutely required of any writer. The site would be excavated by 500 workers over the course of two years before construction could begin in 1902, and the library wouldn’t open for business until 1911.

You can still see a chunk of the old reservoir if you know where to look inside the library.

Carrere and Hastings delivered a grand design. The grandest structure in the city to this day, I think, with its sweeps of stone, its vaulted arches, its treasure trove of seven floors of books.

Still, it’s no Crystal Palace. Imagine the wonders you would have seen strolling through those light-flooded rooms?

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