Like an American heiress in a tale by Henry James, Iris Origo was born into a world of unfair advantages of education, money, environment, and opportunity. She used her birthright wisely, traveling the world, studying art with Berenson, and, with her Italian husband, improving the land and the lot of the peasants in the Val d'Orcia of Tuscany. She tells her life story in the book Images & Shadows.
The editors at Spy understood celebrity culture, which is why they became arguably the most influential magazine of the late 20th century, or, in Dave Eggers' words "cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all." Combining an elegant house style, barbed satire, and a healthy dose of class-rage, Spy inspired a radical tonal shift in American journalism just in time for the arrival of a perfectly suited new platform: The Internet.
Harry's Bar is a legendary bar in Venice, Italy.
Joan Burstein has owned and run London’s most influential boutique Browns since she founded it in 1970.
Tatiana Cotliar is an Argentine model.
Mariage Frères is one of the finest well- known French tea companies, based in Paris. It was officially founded on June 1, 1854.
Legendary Parties is a book by Jean-Louis De Faucigny-Lucinge. The author, who traces his family to the 11th century when they ruled the Barony of Faucigny in Savoie, and who was active in French political and banking circles, records details of certain rarefied fetes held in France between 1922 and 1972, which he hosted or attended as a guest. He recalls the lavish costume balls presided over by such glitterati as the Count Etienne de Beaumonts, the Viscount de Noailleses and the Baron Guy de Rothschilds. In 1928, the author and his first wife "Baba," now deceased (he describes her as "exotically beautiful" and "one of the most elegant women in Paris"), gave a soiree, based on the theme of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which ended at six in the morning under the Eiffel Tower. There are handsome photographs by Cecil Beaton and reproductions of drawings by Pablo Picasso and Yves Saint Laurent, and of Christian Berard's hand-painted screens.
Slim Keith invented her persona as a teenager, growing into a chic woman who became known among the socially elite as Slim. Film director Howard Hawks and Broadway entrepreneur Leland Hayward divorced their wives to marry her; and although she was pursued by the likes of Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway, the one love of her life, she writes, remained Hayward, who in turn left her for another woman. Her next and last husband was British banker Kenneth Keith, who provided her with a title and whom she left in 1972 after a 10-year marriage. Her "memoirs of a rich and imperfect life," written with freelancer Tapert, is compulsively readable, an account of a determined striving up from the middle class to join the Beautiful People. Keith, a woman of style, is revealed also as boastful and betraying, as a gossiper who spared few friends - the real-life Lady Coolbirth of Truman Capote's infamous Answered Prayers.
The Happy Valley set was a group of privileged British colonials living in Kenya and Uganda during the 1920s - 1940s. The elite social group became notorious for stories of drug use and promiscuous sexual encounters.
Manhattan's Stork Club, one of the most famous watering holes in the long history of American nightclubbing, was - from its opening in 1929 to its demise in 1965 - the place to see and be seen in the Big Apple. The slick, sexy, smoky creation of a native Oklahoman and ex-bootlegger named Sherman Billingsley, the Stork was, in the words of legendary gossip columnist and radio loudmouth Walter Winchell, "New York's New Yorkiest" joint. Sherman Billingsley, Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley Billingsley was, it would seem, born for the role of nightclub big shot; rarely a night went by when he wasn't on the floor, shaking hands, slapping backs, greeting movie stars, musicians, powerful pols and famous athletes, keeping the booze flowing, playing cards with the clientele - in short, running an upscale saloon like a well-oiled (and highly profitable) machine.