Donyale Luna: Behind Every Great Face is a Greater Spirit

 

Born Peggy Ann Freeman (1945-79), in Detroit. Later, by her own hand, she becomes Donyale George Tyger Luna. 6’2”. Slim. Her parents married and divorced on four separate occasions. In January 1965, her mother fatally shot her father in self-defense. Luna stayed away.

First Black model to appear on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar—although Harper’s likened her to a Masai warrior. A supermodel before the term was born.

She said: “I wasn’t accepted because I talked funny, I looked funny, and I was a weirdo to everyone. I grew up realizing I was strange.”

Sometimes, she told people she was Polynesian or Mexican. Some thought she was Indian. Whatever they wanted her to be… She could wear colored contacts and once expressed a desire to be white, blonde, and blue-eyed. Did it really matter? Never a shapeshifter because she always controlled the light.

She palled around with Andy Warhol, Otto Preminger, Salvador Dali and Federico Fellini. Restless, pursued by demons from long ago and far away.

She joked that her home was in the cosmos, hence ‘Luna’. Possible, for her beauty was untethered and somehow intellectually seductive. Very rare. Great photographers know that beauty itself is banal and strictly limited—just a matter of proportions: behind every great face there must be a greater spirit.

Marriage failed, a nervous breakdown, so off to swinging London as 1966 got underway. Then her most famous photo, a cover for British Vogue. Her pose was a riff on Picasso’s ocular-centric portraiture. One of Luna’s eyes playfully peers from between her fingers.

Eccentric, even for a model, she spoke of her love for LSD and had a habit of not wearing shoes while walking on city streets.

The end came from drugs. Too many, too soon. Luna is gone.

When asked in 1966 about what her success might mean for other people of color, she said, “If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Negroes, groovy. It could be good, it could be bad.” She thought for a moment. “I couldn't care less.”  Cosmic for sure—because the farther up you go in the sky, all of the Earth looks blue.

 

#donyaleluna #model #vogue  #harpers #beatles #rollingstones #1960s #fashion #andywarhol #film

Dennis Hopper: An Artist Knows Who to Trust

 

"The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider, it was everywhere". – Dennis Hopper

“No other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper". - Matthew Hays. film critic

 

Dennis Hopper was such a good actor that you always assumed he wasn’t acting. That’s an extremely rare accomplishment.

In his greatest role, Frank, in Blue Velvet, he presents mental illness as empowering components of his personality, traits that render him forceful and attractive and violent. It’s a seamless performance. Sure, we say, that’s Hopper. But it’s not. He became a go-to-actor for offbeat roles which, to work, can only be played by so-called ordinary people. Yes, the best comedians are sad and serious. Life works in opposites. It always has.

In his most famous role, Billy, in Easy Rider, he detaches himself from Earth, Camus’ stranger on a motorcycle, tripping the light fantastic, burdened with worry but unencumbered by fear. With hair blowin’ in the wind, we motor with Hopper down dark halls of hippie existentialism. No flowers. No peace. No music. Fade to black.

He long mourned his buddy James Dean. He got sick on drugs and booze. He had five wives—with one marriage lasting eight days. Unemployable. Erratic. Dennis the Menace. Somehow his anger was transmuted to art—without artifice. He stumbled from the fifth dimension, torn and frayed but unbowed. He was what he was. 

He held a tremulous flame. Dennis Hopper enslaved his demons, kept them in chains, to be visited now and then, as they hunkered in their dungeons, waiting for a reprieve that never came. Because artists always know who to trust.

#dennishopper #easyrider #peterfonda #jacknicholson #michellephillips #motorcycle #1960s #james dean #rebelwithoutacause #bluevelvet #davidlynch