And utterly irrelevant

Tuesday lunchtime: post of no consequence

Some liked it

Last night Harry and I accepted a couple of complimentary tickets to hear Tony Curtis talk about his new autobiography with Joan Bakewell at the Criterion Theatre.

Curtis, who once looked like this

Now looks like this
(and is bald as a boiled egg under the hat.)

Still, what a moving an memorable evening! Joan Bakwell was continuously prompting the quite deaf Curtis to talk about Marilyn, and eventually he did recounting the brief affair they had when both had just arrived in Hollywood after the war. He was 20, she was 18; both were unknowns who had not yet made a movie.

But Harry and I agreed that of far greater resonance were his recollections of his childhood in the Bronx, of extreme poverty and anti-semitism, of speaking Hungarian at home until he learned English at the age of five, of the tragic death of his brother in a street accident when he was nine just after they were released from a month in an orphanage because their parents were too poor to buy food.

What Curtis really wanted to talk about was the Navy, the great institution which he described as his mother and his father, which gave him equality and an escape from poverty and racism. And under the GI Bill sent him to acting school. You felt that he loved the Nany more than all his years in Hollywood.

Though rather deaf and unable now to walk, his wit was as fast as ever. A male member of the audience asked him: 'What was it like to be as handsome as Elvis and as charismatic as Steve McQueen?' Quick as a flash he answered, 'You'd love it.'

Curtis is only really famous for one film, Some Like It Hot, his career had nothing like the highs of Jack Lemmon's - but what a film that was. Like having a starring role in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

I love Simon Doonan

I don't see how anybody could disagree with that statement. Here he is on his brilliant career:

But then Doonan, who is in his mid-50s, has long led a fabulous life. As a Reading boy turned window-dresser turned creative director of Barneys and celebrated newspaper columnist, he has documented many of his adventures in two memoirs, the second of which, Beautiful People, is the inspiration for a new television series. The book recounts Doonan's escape from Reading, accompanied by his best friend Biddie, in pursuit of the elusive beautiful people of London - and beyond. He says that the series has done "a magnificent job. They preserved a lot of essential elements, and the message of looking for the beautiful people, but here they are all along."

Doonan got his first sniff of the high life in John Lewis in Reading. This was a summer job taken after leaving the local cork factory, which, he says, "was hideous, because these insects used to crawl out of the cork, and I thought working in a shop would be better - you could get all dressed up and not get covered in insects". After university he returned to the store and contemplated his next move. "Biddie was in soft furnishings and I was in clocks and watches and we thought, we have to get the fuck out of Dodge."

Still, John Lewis had taught him a great deal and introduced him to the world of window-dressing. "I especially loved the dress fabric windows," he recalls with glee. "That's something you don't see much any more because people don't make their own clothes now, but back then they would have a birch log and a piece of fabric over it like that," he wafts his hands in the air, "and they would pull up each fabric like that, and nylon it so it was invisibly suspended. And then you'd throw a pair of pinking shears on the floor, and a little fan of patterns just to remind people what the hell it is they're supposed to be looking at. I wish we sold dress fabrics at Barneys so I could do that!"