American Originals

This time:  Some fashion history.  Eventually.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Taking up in the middle of the page. . . People Have Been Talking About Claude Chabrol and Peter Gunn.  The conversations turns - improbably, I say - to Robert Frost.  "The new book for children, You Come Too, a collection of familiar poems by Robert Frost, whose poetry abounds not only in strong read-along rhythms, but also in those foreboding shadows that properly shiver the minds of youngsters. . . . "  I got this from LinkPlus, photographed a particularly apt poem, but can't get at it until after a trip to the Genius Bar.  Now, if I had copied it out, we could get somewhere.  You were a child with a very solid upbringing if you found this book under the tree.  But hard to imagine any child actively delighted by it.   And I doubt that whoever bought it thought, "Just the thing to unsettle Junior's peace of mind!  Could you gift wrap?  Perhaps that Gorey paper?"

In a livelier corner, People Are Talking About . . . The Third Avenue bar, Allen's where the food is pretty good, the walls covered with non-sequitur group photographs, and the juke box plays new records, often too loud."  Oh, go home and have some Ovaltine.

I don't know if this was a forerunner of Joe Allen, which I think used to have a branch in L.A., which I think I went to once; it was that time a very short, intense disco-type guy tried to pick up my friend Betty by inviting her to a weekend meditating somewhere - very vague descriptions, possibly UFO involved - and I finally asked, "Well, do you have breakfast, or what?" and he requested that I go outside because I was ruining the vibrations.   Tenuous, tenuous.

Somebody is holding forth on William Faulkner. ". . . The cloudy power, like a thunderhead building up, of The Mansion, the last volume of William Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family whose only morality is survival: every Snopes meanly sinful, and each ugly, despicable Snopes surviving, prevailing, and by virtue of this 'equal to any, good as any, brave as any, being inextricable from, anonymous with all of them: the beautiful, the splendid, the proud and the brave, right on up to the very top itself among the shining phantoms and dreams which are the milestones of the long human recording."   Played too loud.  Vogue and Faulkner inextricably entwined.

Always avoided Faulkner, so this was a good opportunity to give him a go.  First, the preface in which he says he's been writing about these people for so long that he's got them kind of mixed up, but he's sure not going to go back and fix things at this late date.  Second, the name really is Snopes.  I can't read about people named Snopes.

In dinner culottes: Sandra Church

"Dinner culottes worn by Gypsy's Sandra Church, in an everything's-coming-up-roses pink silk.  The neckline is halter, and the back bare -- a fashion concession to the fact that in America at home clothes should be compatible with central heating.  By Townley.  About $120.  At Henri Bendel; Neiman-Marcus; I. Magnin."  First - it would be about $958 today.  But more important, if this isn't exactly by Claire McCardell, who had died in 1958, it was certainly more than inspired by one of her designs.

A few years ago I tracked down her 1956 book,  What Shall I Wear?  I longed to have the ability to reissue it; someone else had the same idea.

Claire McCardell was kind of the American Chanel and also the anti-Chanel.  That's her red dress at the top of the post; go to the Met for 150 or so of her designs, including many versions of the puzzling diaper bathing suit.  Don't get that one.

Third, Gypsy? Both Sound of Music and Gypsy in 1959.   Not much Sandra Church on YouTube; best we can do:

We may or may not meet the 1962 movie - will any of us live that long, the way this is going?  It was one of those movies I watched every time it was on television.   I was fascinated by the tenement poverty, the hard luck, the Chinese restaurant, the teenage marriage and utterly mystified at Natalie Wood's transformation.  Funny - we started this spread with the utterly repellent Sound of Music and wandered into Gypsy, which I thought was sad in many ways, but rather more moral than Sound of Music.

Next time:  the end in sight of PATA.