Seraphic Secret

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

Jan Steen

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I really don’t remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on.”
—Elizabeth Taylor

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Letter from Jennifer Jones to husband David Selznick, March 1959
Dearest:
Hope you are well and the deal goes but most of all that you miss me a little. Betty Bogart [Lauren Bacall] came through from Klosters on her way to London with her two children in hand and she told me I was pushing my luck. That you are a very attractive guy and in her words there are plenty of dames in wait for an attractive guy. I said I was less concerned since she had left California but I realized the danger, only I had to continue this work [psychoanalysis] with Dr. Meier. Her reply was, if you can take it, exactly as follows. “F— the Doctor, go home and get yourself l— and you won’t need doctors or diets. Greatest thing in the world for the complexion.”
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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“We had been asked to stay in Los Angeles by Mr. and Mrs. Jack Warner… the Warners threw us a star-scattered party. It was a bit of an orgy, none the worse for that and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. I started in a fine pink brocade Molyneux dress, but Mr. David Selznick told me that my breasts were too flattened and that people were complaining about them, and could I change? So I went back to the old Central European’s peasant dress and took a new lease of deep-bosomed life.”
—From Lady Diana Cooper’s Autobiography
Photo by Emil Otto (‘E.O.’) Hoppe, 1916

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete, but so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man - that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under “M” for mankind—in the Twilight Zone.” —Rod Serling, “The Obsolete Man”, The Twilight Zone
“The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete, but so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under “M” for mankind—in the Twilight Zone.”
—Rod Serling, “The Obsolete Man”, The Twilight Zone

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Hollywood Hair: Leda Styled By Leonardo da Vinci

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Four studies of Leda by Leonardo Da Vinci. In Greek mythology, the God Zeus transforms himself into a swan and travels to Earth to seduce a lady called Leda. She gives birth to two eggs that hatch to be Polydeuces and Helen.
Four studies of Leda by Leonardo da Vinci. In Greek mythology, the God Zeus transforms himself into a swan and travels to Earth to seduce a a beautiful lady named Leda. She gives birth to Polydeuces and Helen, AKA Helen of Troy. The date of this chalk and ink work is 1506, and executed while Da Vinci lived in Milan. The dimensions are 17.7 x 14.7 cm.  The completed “Leda and the Swan”painting is lost.

Years ago, on Shabbos evenings, when our children were little, I would frequently grab an art book, sit in my chair, and one of the kids would climb into my lap. We’d turn the pages, look at the pictures, and make up stories about the figures in the paintings.

Ariel, Z’TL, was intrigued by the Dutch painters of the Seventeenth Century: Jan Steen, Peter de Hooch, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. Offspring #2 and #3, girls, inclined to the High Italian Renaissance: Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo.

One memorable night, I opened a book devoted to the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci.

Offspring #2 was about 5 years old at the time, and after leafing through a few pages, she grew bored. She wanted lush colors, luminous light, and dramatic figures in mysterious landscapes. Leonardo’s drawings were too stark, too black and white. And Leonardo’s anatomy drawings… totally gross.

Then I turned to Leonardo’s four sketches for the head of Leda.

Offspring #2 nearly fell off my lap.

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