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

Nina Van Pallandt: Detachment is Another Way of Belonging

 

The beauty of detachment

Born 1934. At first it she was Nina Magdelena Møller. From Denmark. Then, after marrying Frederik Jan Gustav Floris, Baron van Pallandt, she became Nina, Baroness van Pallandt… or just Nina Van Pallandt. They formed an unlikely singing duo, Nina & Frederik. Sang folk music, including calypso (!?). Had chart success. Divorced. Nina became a film star. Frederick was murdered in a drug deal.

The future is calling me...

With Nina van Pallandt, the ciphers don’t line up, but still the lock opens. A mystery. We have an attractive woman who is way too European for the 1960s—and the 1960s loved all things European—or thought it did. Somehow, with that elegant poise, Teutonic mannerisms, and a royal title, maybe we understand the cultural confusion. But her awkwardness bespeaks knowledge, not nativity. It’s odd, but there’s an American vibe coming from her attitude, from the way she half-regards a threat; a rebellious nature not found down the cold corridors of the Danish Queens. Her spirit was not indolent.

Nina, a free spirit on a windy beach, the Pacific Ocean frames her figure. And that’s why Robert Altman chose her for The Long Goodbye, for the character Eileen Wade, because of her organic, outsider status. That slight, indeterminate accent that lets you know she’s a survivor. 'Yes', we feel,' she belongs in Malibu much more than Barbie'. A 1960s beach bunny wouldn’t have worked. Beauty isn’t symmetrical; it’s the appearance of symmetry. Meet Nina.

Eileen Wade. It’s her greatest role unless you count the earlier one—as a Danish folk singer married to a royal soon-to-be drug smuggler. Nina Van Pallandt proves that detachment is just another way of belonging.

#ninavanpallandt #frederick #singer #actress #actor #thelonggoodbye #robertaltman #elliotgould #film #popular #pop #culture #ianmclarke #raymondchandler #cliffordirving #howardhughes #ibizia

Ian Fleming: Master of the Sex/Death Ratio

 

Author Ian Fleming (1908-64) lived with the insouciance and bad behaviour reserved for those who have resigned themselves to an early death. Menefreghismo is an Italian noun which connotes one’s approach to life; it translates– roughly – as ‘don’t give a shit’. It’s hard to discern what held Fleming’s interest, but he certainly lived with a free form, unbridled, if not erotic, passion that seems awkward to a modern sensibility.

And that’s where James Bond comes in. Menefreghismo.

Ursula Andress & the ratio

Although about one half of the Bond novels were published in the 1960s, their genealogical roots are embedded in 50’s, and even earlier. That’s why a female character can be named ‘Pussy Galore’. Not a big deal at the time.

And that’s why James Bond, in books and films, was successful. Fleming knew how to balance the critical sex/death ratio like few authors before—or since. He was so good at it—and it is the ratio that gives the early films their life. When, later, the ratio became unstable, so began the era of Bad Bonds.

The ratio is based on the notion that the proximity of death heightens sexual tension—and, importantly, vice-versa. That’s one reason why you will never see a child in a Bond film—for a child is the strongest representation of Life we have. It just messes with the balance.

The ratio is based on post-WW II notions of masculinity and femininity. Small wonder Fleming was among John F. Kennedy's favorite authors. Times change. JB (James Bond) got the JB (Jason Bourne) reboot in Casino Royale (2006). Now it was mostly about hand-to-hand fighting, lightning cuts, and constant close-ups. However, the ratio did appear, however warily, when needed.

Ian Fleming died as he lived, fully aware that the ratio was unlivable. But longevity was never the point for Fleming, or Bond. It was to greet Death at his own door, look in his eyes, and say, ‘Your move’.

 

#ianfleming #jamesbond #ursulaandress #drno #diamondsareforever #danielcraig #seanconnery #1960s #popculture #popularculture #film #casinoroyale

Jane Fonda: Redeemed by Resilience

 

“Well, there's this man... and I don't know exactly what he wants out of me, or anything like that. But he took care of me… When you're used to being lonely and somebody comes in...and moves that around, it's sort of scary I guess…I want to...manipulate him. In all the ways that I can manipulate people. I mean, it's easy to manipulate men. Right?”

-          Dialogue from ‘Klute’ (1971)

She was never robust, but had a hardness about her, as if Life, early on, had delivered low blows…. a mother’s suicide, an industry that celebrated beauty above brains… You could hear it in her sharp delivery, see it in her curt smiles. Perhaps Jane Fonda’s sublimated pain compelled her – professionally and personally – to haphazard choices.

We have a sex queen in Barbarella (1968) evolving into a political activist who poses in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun unit in Hanoi (1972). Just four years apart... Aside from an extremely private pursuit of integrity, she’s to be admired more for diligence than condemned for dreadful photo ops.

It comes as little surprise that her greatest role is of an emotionally damaged prostitute, striving to escape ‘the life’. The film Klute (1971) seems tailormade for someone detaching from the corporeal and sliding into a more cosmic vibe, the world of the mind where people can’t find you.  Jane Fonda always hummed with a West Coast 60s ethos…but never a hippy like brother Peter. There was a drive to escape herself, to transition the entertainer, the dancing bear, to Citizen Jane, to be taken seriously, damn it.

And she was. Jane Fonda was redeemed by her resilience. She never let up. Even her exercise videos attest to a discipline unknown by many. Relaxation is not in her lexicon.  She always had more angular lines than curves. And it was this emotional awkwardness that empowered her performances. Her difficulty in expressing compassion and understanding did indeed look real.

Again, from Klute.“You make a man think that he's accepted. It's all just a great big game to you. You're all obviously too lazy and too warped to do anything meaningful with your life, so you prey upon the sexual fantasies of others. I'm sure it comes as no great surprise to you when I say that...there are little corners in everyone which were better off left alone. Little sicknesses, weaknesses, which should never be exposed. That's your stock in trade, isn't it, a man's weakness? I was never really fully aware of mine...until you brought them out.”

In her best roles, perhaps in her life, Jane Fonda reveals the difficulty of emotional honesty. And the camera just loves emotional honesty. It’s so easy to fake.

#janefonda #klute #donaldsutherland #peterfonda #1960s #cult #film #rogervadim #barbarella #vietnam #film #review #pop #culture

Anna Karina: The Importance of the Moment

She didn’t belong with the hippies. She wasn’t rebelling. She wasn’t stoned. With Anna Karina, you could see the love of life was on her face, even when bathed in a vale of tears.

There seemed to be a Zen-like acceptance of the here-and-now, no yesterday and maybe no tomorrow.  Her pursuit of the present was irresistible.

She might dance now. She might cry or adjust her beret. It was the ‘moment’ and you couldn’t look away. There was no need for a narrative or three-act structure or character deficits. There was just Anna.

It was a charmed life (often the gods are kind to those with no agenda)...as if the French New Wave just happened to her. With her pale face and dark eyes, there’s a lightness to her that is ghostly. We see her forever in a school-girl outfit, pleated skirt and sweater: it wasn’t innocence; it was detachment.

In her face and body and attitude was an expression of the unshakable confidence that comes with the serenity of freedom:  she was what the 1960s always wanted to be.

 

Sophia Loren: Of Strangeness in the Proportion

 

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” - Edgar Allan Poe

We have millions of Monroe and Bardot lookalikes, but there are few, if any, women who remotely resemble Sophia Loren. What is it about her beauty that it should be restricted to one face only, ever?

The eyes, the nose and the lips – the proportions are odd, yet together proffer an allurement more supplication than seduction. If sound took form we would see harmony.

Her face remains more in memory than on a screen – for that’s where she belongs amid timeless shadows and sighs, the candle-lit embrace under a windswept moon with everything drifting out to dawn.

She could only come from an old land of sun and sea where the past is bemused by the present, knowing the love of life leaves you untouched by time. You can see it in her smile and the way she swirls her skirt. When she’s around, you don’t need a clock.

Laurence Harvey and the Art of Ennui

"Someone once asked me, 'Why is it so many people hate you?' and I said, 'Do they? How super! I'm really quite pleased about it."

-           Laurence Harvey

Laurence gives a neck rub

He was born in Lithuania but everybody thought him British. At birth his name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne. His Hebrew names were Zvi Mosheh. In South Africia, where he moved as a young boy, he was called Harry Skikne. ‘Laurence Harvey’ was just made up. He was married a few times but rumored to have other inclinations.

See the pattern? The swirling brocade he dutifully followed from cradle to grave? And so perfect with the 1960s demimonde passion for detachment and ennui.

Laurence Harvey was posh and pedestrian at exactly the same time. He was equally at home in Room at the Top as in Of Human Bondage. In fact, regardless of the part he played, his hair rarely changed. Always parted and combed, longish in a 60s mod way. And his face rarely changed too. Wooden, flat, ideal for the hypnotized zombie of The Manchurian Candidate, his most famous role.

And a lot of people did hate Harvey. Some actors and directors refused to work with him, even though he was popular and had box office appeal.

The Sound of Silencer

Laurence Harvey didn’t seem to like anyone or anything, even himself. His deep-rooted misanthropy empowered his performances with mystery and violence, an existential angst that was never supposed to be there but somehow worked. You got the feeling that Harvey couldn't be trusted by anyone, not even himself…and he was okay with that.

Playing the character Miles Brand in Darling (1965), Harvey has this exchange:

Diana Scott: I asked you to go. Why haven't you?

Miles Brand: Because I've stayed.

People don't like me?

More Beckett than Pinter? Few could speak a Waiting-for-Godot haiku with such conviction as Laurence Harvey.

He once said, “To bare your soul to the world, I find unutterably boring.”

So goodbye Zvi Mosheh and all others who know the fleeting power of not belonging.

Françoise Dorléac: A hollow man holds a flame

Considering the extent of Catherine Deneuve's fame, few people know that she had an older sister: her name was Françoise Dorléac - and she was just as beautiful as her famous soeur. Poor Françoise was to have a glamorous, brief life, making just a handful of films before her untimely death in 1967, gone at age 25 in a car crash.

Phillipe's flame from long ago

I didn't know any of this until I worked with a guy named Philippe Reux: we were partnered as 'on location' bodyguards for the film star Jean Claude Van Damme during the production of a movie called 'Maximum Risk', partly filmed in Toronto during a bitter winter.

Attempting to explain how I became Jean Claude Van Damme's lowly bodyguard occasions dark memories and general illegalities. Suffice it to say that for two weeks, it was my well-paid position to make sure that Mr. Van Damme was not harassed by his fans. I had a very quiet time.

Philippe was from Marseille, about sixty years old, white hair in a short pony tail, intensely skinny, once handsome with that peculiar Mediterranean tone of tan - light chocolate/more orange than gold. From certain angles he looked a lot like Keith Richards, especially in the early morning. Philippe chain-smoked, was excitable and chronically irritated. When we were introduced on the first day of our assignment, he just stared at me, wincing like he bit a lemon, as if he couldn't believe he was on a security detail with a man who had never killed anyone.

Sisters

He spoke English in short - often incomplete - sentences. His staccato delivery alternatively conveyed deep-seated anger, boredom or both.

Never once, in twelve days of work, did Philippe ask me about myself: in fact, part of his attraction was a self-engrossment so powerful that he barely needed to eat. I doubt if he ever knew my name.

By the second day, Philippe was more expansive, mainly because I gave him cigarettes and lobbed him banal questions. He told me that Canada was boring, and that he was "a party man. I can party. All the time. I never stop. There is no point." He really did speak like that.

Sisters in harmony

He had spent all of his life on movie sets in low-end jobs: filling a star's coffee cup, walking a producer's dog - it didn't matter to Philippe; he was there for the party. It was a haphazard career that began in 1960 on the set of Jean-Luc Godard's 'A bout de souffle' and had never really stopped. He went from film to film carrying nothing more than his toothbrush and wallet.

If you asked Philippe, 'what was Godard like?' or 'how was Brando on the set of Last Tango?' he would either just walk away or give you an elliptical answer like "A film. Just chemicals. Nothing is important."

"She had this little dog"

In fact, for a man who had spent his life on movie sets, Philippe had no interest in the medium whatsoever.

When I told him that François Truffaut was an important director and well-known in Canada, he reacted with shock, as if I had mentioned that his own brother was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Then he immediately lost interest in the whole thing. Truly, he seemed incapable of sustaining interest in anything that wasn't attached to his body. I had come to accept him as a condescending extraterrestrial: it didn't matter where he was on planet Earth because it needed him more than he needed it.

During our last day of work we were stationed at a side entrance of Toronto's Old City Hall, down at the bottom steps, right behind the Eaton Centre. Van Damme was inside the Hall, filming a 'prison scene'. We smoked, leaning against Van Damme's 'personal trailer' - that was never more than a few hundred meters from the great man himself.

Time crawled by. Just to raise Philippe's irritability level, I asked what in life was important to him. He squinted at me, suspicious, as if I was laying a trap. I wasn't. I just wanted to know what kept him going. He seemed so perfectly hollow.

But for the first time, Philippe looked pensive.

Beauty is an accident

It had been snowing and Philippe, who wasn't dressed for a Canadian winter, started to smack his hands together, scowling at the sky, taking it all personally.

He told me that he liked to travel and that he liked to look at beautiful women - and the best way to combine both pursuits was to work in the film business. I asked him if he pursued the starlets. He replied that it wasn't necessary; that actresses were insecure and vulnerable to flattery - and sexual conquest under such conditions is dull and void of challenge. (He really did say things like that). But beauty was another thing, he said - now that was worth pursuing.

"Okay," I said, "who is the most beautiful woman you've ever seen?"

"Do you know the name 'Françoise Dorléac'?'

"Vaguely. Wasn't she in that Polanski movie about some old guy who...."

Philippe cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand. Evidently, I had bored him with just over ten words.

Two Sisters

"She was talented," he said. "Very beautiful. Her sister was Catherine Deneuve. She died. 1967. Twenty-five years old. We worked on 'Cul-de-Sac'. We spoke. We were young. She had this little dog. I can remember her profile, her face, you know? You cannot be that close to beauty and be unchanged, undamaged. Died a few months later. Françoise. The most spectacular of them all." Philippe looked drained. "Beauty is a wonderful accident, you get it? Something in me arrived at the end."

Always another party

Philippe's eyes were frozen on an object moving farther away. I was dumbfounded that he had a capacity for sentimentality. For a moment he even looked different.

Some of the crew was beginning to exit the set, which meant that Jean Claude would soon require our tough-guy services to protect him against the surging, nonexistent mob of frenzied fans. Philippe emerged from his reverie. His face tightened and he slowly rubbed his hands together.

We began to walk up the courthouse steps to the movie set. Philippe suddenly turned to me and said, "Never stop. Always another party. You get it?" As we reached the landing, Van Damme himself rushed down, petit and feline, leapt up into his trailer and snapped shut the door.

#CatherineDeneuve #jeanclaudevandamme #lesdemoisellesderochefort #romanpolanski,#jeanlucgodard #maximumrisk,#FrançoiseDorléac #keithrichards #1960spop #film #1967 #toronto #ianmclarke #pop #culture #popular #dorleac #culdesac

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