Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Jennifer Jones with her third husband, Norton Simon
“I met Jennifer Jones when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven I traveled everywhere with her. I spent more time with her than anyone, even Norton … It would take four hours to do her hair and makeup. And it was all for Norton: hair, makeup, beautiful dresses. The point was not to go out and show other people. Everything was for Norton.  ‘Norton deserves for me to be beautiful.’ And he was paying. I did her hair and makeup every day, an incredible cost. For the cost of a whole year, you could buy a house in the Valley.
And I did it for more than thirty years, every day, sometimes morning and night. And she didn’t take off her makeup at night. She’d leave it on until I arrived. When she went to bed, she was all made up. Do you know why? This was not for Norton, this was for herself. She said it was ‘in case I get sick at night and have to go to the hospital. Somebody’s going to take a picture of me, and I don’t want to be without makeup.’ She did this every night.”
—Tomoyuki “Yuki” Takei, West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

Edgar Degas, The Violist, 1880

 

George Krause, Hand of Fatima, Spain, 1964

 

Marcel Breuer (b. Hungary, 1902-1981)
Isokon Dining Chair, 1936

 

Fei Fei Sun and Xiao Wen Ju photographed by Tim Walker for Vogue China, December 2014

 

Samuel Rothbort (1882-1971)
Coming from the Cemetery
oil on canvas, hand carved frame, 11″ x 14″
Courtesy Chassidic Art Institute

 

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve (1941, written and directed by Preston Sturges)
“You don’t know very much about girls. The best ones aren’t as good as you think they are and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not nearly as bad.”

 

Rick McGinnis
Hollywood Hills, Topanga Canyon, Riviera and Malibu, Los Angeles, Nov.-Dec. 2016

 

Erwin Blumenfeld, Powder box, study for an advertisement, circa 1944 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld

 

John McLaughlin (1898 – 1976) ~ “Untitled”, 1955. Oil on canvas (122.2 x 81.3 cm).

 

“I’ll tell you one of the reasons I’m ready to leave [the movie business]. When I first came to Hollywood five years ago, my makeup call was at eight in the morning. On this movie it has been put back to seven-thirty. Every day I see Joan Crawford, who’s been in makeup since five, and Loretta Young, who’s been there since four in the morning. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to stay in a business where I have to get up earlier and earlier and it takes longer and longer for me to get in front of a camera.”
—Grace Kelly
Simeon Solomon
Judith and her Attendant Going to the Assyrian Camp, 1863

 

Douleur, 1895 by Antoon Van Welie (Dutch painter 1866-1956)

 

Sir Winston Churchill, The Library of Sir Philip Sassoon’s House, 1928
oil on canvas

 

A rare, black-dialed Omega Constellation Calendar produced around 1960, once belonging to Elvis Presley, was auctioned by Antiquorum in New York on June 12, 2012. The watch has an automatic chronometer movement with center seconds and date and a steel case with rose-gold plating. Antiquorum put the pre-sale estimate at $10,000 to $20,000, but bids for the coveted piece of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia quickly escalated to a final hammer price of $52,500. The winning bidder received, in addition to the watch, a letter of attestation from Charlie Hodge, the watch’s onetime owner, a longtime friend and confidant of Presley and a member of the so-called “Memphis Mafia.”
—Watchtime

 

“Now the questions that come to mind. Where is this place and when is it? What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm? You want an answer? The answer is, it doesn’t make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence, on this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A lesson to be learned— in The Twilight Zone.”
—Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, “Eye of the Beholder” (1960)

 

Erwin Blumenfeld
Dovima in a suit by Pacific, hat by Lily Dache, Vogue, 1950

 

Rick McGinnis
Hollywood Hills, Topanga Canyon, Riviera and Malibu, Los Angeles, Nov.-Dec. 2016

 

“First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.” —Marilyn Monroe

 

David Gelernter
Ha’azinu, (Hebrew: Listen) Blue and Gold. Acrylic, gold leaf and shell gold on panel, 16×20.

 

Erwin Blumenfeld, Hat and Jewelry (Probably by Schiaparelli), Paris, 1938

 

John McLaughlin
“#2” Oil on canvas, 1975, 60 x 48 inches

 

Robert J. Avrech
Portrait of The Bostoner Rebbe, Levi Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz, 1921 – 2009. A few months before Karen and I were married, we visited friends in Boston. They introduced us to the Rebbe who was kind enough to grant us a private audience. At the end of our meeting the Rebbe gave us a b’racha, a blessing.

 

A Female Lockheed Employee In Burbank, California, 1944

 

Rick McGinnis
Bugatti, Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

 

Antoin Sevruguin, Kurdish Jewish Girls, Persia (Iran) c.1880

 

God bless President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania. Our long national nightmare is over.

 

Pinchas Tzvi wishes all our friends and relatives a lovely and meaningful Shabbat.

 

 

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Comments

  1. Pinchas Tzvi looks full of “personality”. May G-d bless him, indeed. My great-great Grandfather was Pinchas. My great-grandfather’s marker notes that he, Aphriam Pokrass, is the son of Reb Pinchas, HalLevy.

    Sadly, though we know where great-grandfather is (a cemetery in Towanda, PA), no idea on hid father. As far as we know, he lived and died in Zlatopol, Ukraine, and the Jewish cemetery there was pretty effectively desecrated by the Nazis, and probably Ukrainian “neighbors”.

  2. She said it was ‘in case I get sick at night and have to go to the hospital. Somebody’s going to take a picture of me, and I don’t want to be without makeup.’ She did this every night.”
    —Tomoyuki “Yuki” Takei, West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

    Jennifer Jones didn’t realize that, when you’re lying in a hospital emergency room, seriously ill or injured, you look like death warmed over, no matter how muchmakeup you’re wearing?

  6. The Post’s attack on Gerlernter is interesting. Apparently only the left is allowed to be “Intellectual.” The slur was noted by Steve Hayward at Powerline.

    A Facebook friend points me to a Time magazine profile of Gelernter:

    “Inside the house, evidence of the mind of Gelernter is everywhere. The towering walls of books–including his own works on computer science, religion, popular culture, history and psychology. His works of art–some abstract, some powerfully figurative, like the life-size evocations of the great kings of Israel inspired by Christian tomb art at the Basilica of St. Denis outside Paris. Musical instruments fill the floor space. Flamboyantly colored birds survey the scene–a purple parrot in a cage near the kitchen and a multihued macaw named Ike that presides over the family room. Gelernter’s conversation runs in torrents from the prophesies of Isaiah to the subtleties of Gothic engineering to the proper design of graphical user interfaces.

    The anti-Intellectual.

  8. Robert,
    The nightmare is not over. To these people (who’s very existence is power based on politics) Trump does represent an existential threat. Not that they’ll go to camps, but with Obama they threw the dice for it all and it looks like they’ve lost. They will fight tooth and nail now (recently not very smartly), but their strength (the press, the message) was a brittle veneer and it no longer shields them. If Trump presses on and keeps the support he has among the people then they can’t stop him. They will not disappear, but they may become irrelevant for the next 30yrs.

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