CELEBRITY WATCH

Green Hotels & Broadway Gold

By George Christy

       “Eco-friendly innovators have always found a home in San Francisco, and now everyone’s energy is focused on sustainability. Residents enjoy high-tech architecture, and the freshest food. The best life imaginable, in my opinion, while still maintaining their green credentials.” So claims Karrie Jacobs in an issue of Travel and Leisure, for which she wrote the recent cover story, Designed for Living, photographed by the East Bay’s Amanda Marsalis, who adds, “San Franciscans respect their environment and its beauty. They want to leave it cleaner than they found it.”

   Karrie met with Mayor Gavin Newsom, who favors the word exponentially — “as in exponentially more trees” and “exponentially more solar.” He assesses, “Not only is it the right thing to do, we also think it creates an environment, literally and figuratively. You better believe it — we’re among the top travel destinations in the world. Why? People are attracted to the values of our city.”

   But what about riding in the cable cars or touring Alcatraz, muses former resident Karrie, who was seeking places “where everything is not bigger and shinier…looking for a city that might correct the excesses of the previous century and come up with new formulas — architectural and otherwise — for the future.” She deduces it’s San Francisco.

   Driving her rented Honda Civic Hybrid and noting that San Francisco rates second to Los Angeles in Hybrids purchased, she added, “Practically every other car here is a Prius.” She checked into the Orchard Garden Hotel, two years young and anointed “America’s first LEED-certified property, LEED standing for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design… the au courant version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”

   According to the article, she loved her hotel’s location at Bush and Grant — “where Chinatown hits Union Square,” checks out the Ferry Building, finds herself “eating organic, drinking organic, looking out at the Bay, listening to Al Green sing Love and Happiness, and thinking how supremely intertwined virtue and pleasure are in this town.”

   Exploring the new architecture and health-conscious eateries serving antibiotic-free meals that even snooty foodies embrace, she discovered more environmentally worthy facets of the area. She was impressed with the ban on plastic bags and bottles and foam containers, and decided, “People don’t come to San Francisco just for its values, people come because those values are always presented as part of an enviable lifestyle.”

   Anticipating the city’s century with its “plethora of green landmarks,” Karrie quotes Mayor Newsom that the citizenry can count on having “the most sustainable, greenest development of its kind in the United States.”

SYDNEY’S SUCCESS
   In addition to the Bay Area’s enhancing and enduring green scene, among its cultural pleasures are discussions and lectures programmed by Sydney Goldstein, who founded her City Arts & Lectures in 1980, and which is going strong. Literati, politicos and bigwig critics come to San Francisco for their sold-out interviews at Herbst Auditorium.

   CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, authors Steve Martin, John Updike, Khalid Hosseini, Garrison Keillor, Picasso biographer John Richardson, Stephen Sondheim (interviewed by former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich, no less) are among the notables, in conversation with Steve Winn, Roy Eisenhardt, Dave Eggers.

Barbara Walters

   On May 15th, Barbara Walters, arguably the most important woman journalist in the history of television, will “talk” with Marcia Brandywine at the Masonic Auditorium, more likely to accommodate the expected crowd than the Herbst. Barbara will discuss her Audition, A Memoir, published by Knopf, with a $5 million advance, and embargoed until May 6th, but we’ve managed to glean some insights from Walters’ book.

   The first woman to co-host a network news program, her story, offers her publisher, is “heartbreaking and inspiring, surprising, riveting and sometimes startling.” She delves into growing up with her mentally retarded sister, Jackie, and her brilliant, risk-taking father Lou, an atheist who owned nightclubs, made and lost fortunes and suffered a breakdown, her loving but fearful mother about whom Barbara’s already noted that she “should have married a doctor or someone in the dress business.”

   Yes, there’s the struggle to make it in a man’s world, her relationships with men and her three marriages, and that extraordinary range of interviews over 40 years. Every president and first lady, Margaret Thatcher, Saudi kings, Russian and Chinese leaders, Monica Lewinsky, Harrison Ford, Katharine Hepburn, Angelina Jolie. Columnists often talk of the interview “get,” which Barbara miraculously “gets” at that ideal moment, and that are tantamount to scoops. Truth to tell, whom has she not interviewed?
  
COOKING FOR 100

Alex Hitz

   “Cooking it all took me three days, but I have a housekeeper who helped with the marketing,” says Los Angeles’ smart new host, Alex Hitz, who’s inherited major Coca-Cola stock from his grandfather, and is used to building houses that suit his pleasure. To celebrate his 39th birthday in the three-story aerie north of Sunset Boulevard, which he’s now putting on the market and will build a new home in Beverly Hills, Alex, who was “born to cook,” prepared the buffet that folks couldn’t get enough of.

    Inspired by his Southern roots, he whipped up fried chicken, pulled pork, shrimp with rice, stewed tomatoes, corn pudding, coleslaw, cheese biscuits, and two birthday cakes that were red velvet and coconut. Served with family porcelain and heirloom silver for the 100 guests that included Betsy Bloomingdale, Barbara Davis, Joan Collins & Percy Gibson (Joan’s filming a comedy, Cowboys for Christ), Ronnie & Vidal Sassoon, Jolene & George Schlatter, Alex von Furstenberg, Peter Bacanovic, Texas lioness Lynn Wyatt, and plenty of Pretty Young Things.

   New to California, and alternating between residences in Manhattan and the West Coast, Alex revealed that he and Victoria Brynner (daughter of the late Yul Brynner) own the film rights to Empress Bianca, the controversial novel by Lady Colin Campbell. Copies were pulled in England, after libel litigation threats from philanthropist Lily Safra, widow of the late banking billionaire Edmund Safra, who burned to death in an arson attack in Monaco.

   Mme. Safra, named by Forbes as the 746th richest person in the world and with homes in Monaco, London, New York and Geneva, claims the novel’s thinly veiled characterization of her is defamatory. Since libel laws in the United States are not as strict, Empress Bianca is scheduled for publication this year by Dynasty Press. Books bought before the British boycott are selling on amazon.com for thousands of dollars. Facts and bizarre implications about Edmund Safra’s death have been reviewed ad infinitum by Dominick Dunne in Vanity Fair and by 60 Minutes.

   Lady Campbell’s is a story unto itself. Born in 1949 with a fused labia, she was raised as a boy, and after corrective reassignment surgery during the teen years, she became a model, wed Lord Colin Ivar Campbell, and among her admirers have been the late Alexander Onassis and Ted Kennedy. Her previous endeavor was The Real Diana, about the Princess of Wales.

BROADWAY’S GOLDIES
   At 90 years of age, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for the 1959 Gypsy, has directed this hit Broadway revival at the St. James Theatre, and it’s among the three revivals that have sold-out audiences cheering with standing ovations. Two are musicals. Gypsy is based on stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s biography, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The other musical is South Pacific, adapted from James Michener’s tales of two Pacific islands during World War II, and the 1949 production starred Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza and ran for eternity.

Laura Benanti in Gypsy

    In Gypsy, Patti LuPone stars as Momma Rose in a powerhouse performance as the suffocating, stagestruck vaudevillian hustler of all time, a role created by Ethel Merman, once described by George Gershwin or Cole Porter as “that kid from Astoria with a trumpet in her throat.” Critics concur that Patti lives up to Merman’s fabulous legend. Momma Rose’s daughter Gypsy is the ravishing Laura Benanti, who emerges from her little brown sparrow nest into the world’s most famous and glamorous burlesque queen. If directing Gypsy wasn’t enough for the nonagenarian Arthur Laurents, he’s reining in to stage a Broadway revival of Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 West Side Story.

   Helmed by Barlett Sher, the superb production of South Pacific at the Lincoln Center Theatre co-stars the enchanting soprano Kelli O’Hara as Ensign Nurse Nellie Forbush, and hunky Brazilian opera baritone Paulo Szot, who’s sung Figaro and Don Giovanni. Paulo is of Polish ancestry, and has vocal power to spare as South Pacific’s French plantation owner Emile de Becque, who retreated to Polynesia after a murder.
   Broadway buffs can’t believe they waited nearly six decades before hearing such classics as Some Enchanted Evening, I’m In Love with a Wonderful Guy, Bali Ha’i, There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame, and Younger Than Springtime.

Anika Noni Rose and Terrance Howard in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

   While Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Debbie Allen, has been critiqued for some shortcomings, audiences are pooh-poohing the comments and filling the Broadhurst Theater. The all-black cast stars Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow) as the alcoholic Brick, with sultry Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls) as his wife Maggie the Cat, aching with desire that’s unfulfilled by the is-he-or-isn’t-he gay Brick, who’s haunted by the death of his football star friend Skipper. Maggie cries that Brick’s fixation on his Scotch bottle is “the charm of the defeated.”

   Phylicia Rashad appears as Big Mama, and James Earl Jones delivers a towering performance as the cancer-wracked Big Daddy of this filthy rich, Southern Gothic plantation family. He’s destined for a Tony Award. While the production’s not perfect, the New York Post’s Clive Barnes finds it “well worth seeing…it has satisfying power.”
  
PHALLIC PHOBIA
   Actresses often wonder why they, and not the men, are asked to strip in bare-thee-well in movies and in the theater. All the same, the actresses don’t appear shy about being nude. Witness Diane Keaton showing off her trim, full frontal physique in Something’s Gotta Give, and Nicole Kidman and Kathleen Turner unabashedly baring all on stage in Manhattan and London.

Jason Segel

   In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the wacky comedy Jason Segel wrote and stars in, Jason goes full frontal several times. He explains that first scene when he drops his bathrobe to Kristen Bell: “This actually happened with my girlfriend…I was ready for some action, let the robe fall, but she stopped by to tell me our love affair was off, that she was seeing someone else…all true!” Was it dicey filming those scenes? Not at all, he shrugs. “I was born without shame.”

   Viggo Mortensen delivers the Full Monty during his bathhouse fight scene in Eastern Promises, and others letting it hang out on film include Bruce Willis, Ewan McGregor (four times), Kevin Bacon, and Harvey Keitel, who holds the record of going full frontal on camera seven times! Forgetting Sarah Marshall producer Judd Apatow, who’s also given us Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, says it’s time for uptight Americans to join the Europeans and get over their phallic phobia.” He’s aiming for “a penis in every picture.”

THOSE EYES & THAT STRUT
   This year being the 100th anniversary of Bette Davis’ birth, screenings of her movies at museums and art houses prove that, as Ed Limato, William Morris Agency’s man about Hollywood, claims, “One of Bette’s movies is better than the entire oeuvre of many of today’s actresses.” Ed represents Denzel Washington, Steve Martin, Richard Gere and Mel Gibson, among other major talents, and hosts the best party for 400 insiders during the Oscarcast weekend. Long ago, we christened Ed as “the barefoot host in the Versace shirt,” which is his indelible signature during that Friday night of Oscar partying at his Beverly Hills mansionette.

Bette Davis

   Those Bette Davis eyes still light up the screen, her slinky strut is alluring, as is her clipped manner of speaking, and those stylish and timeless Orry-Kelly dresses are elegant feminine classics. Granted, Bette’s films are soap operatic, but the character-driven narratives are suspenseful, unlike today’s self-justifying, sordid tales. Rent the DVDs of The Letter, based on a Somerset Maugham short story. Or Joseph Mankiewicz’s brilliant All About Eve, and nor should we forget Dark Victory, Jezebel, Now Voyager with Bette’s breathless sigh at the end, “Why ask for the moon, when we have the stars?”

   Charlotte Chandler’s The Girl Who Walked Home Alone is the best biography about Bette, who was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis. As a child, she was known as Betty, but after reading Honoré de Balzac’s My Cousin Bette, she changed the spelling. She takes credit for naming the gold statuette Oscar — “looks like my Uncle Oscar.” When her two Oscars (for Dangerous and Jezebel) were auctioned, Steven Spielberg bought both and returned them to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

   She was talked about as “the fourth Warner Brother,” when she became the Warner Bros. studio’s most profitable star, appearing in more than 100 films and television shows. Besides her four marriages, Bette was known for her liaisons with director William Wyler, co-star George Brent, Howard Hughes and others. The American Film Institute ranks her second to Katharine Hepburn on its list of all-time great stars. Who today has that charismatic magic with a face that lights up the screen? Let’s consider Faye Dunaway and her haunting roles in Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, The Thomas Crown Affair.

   In the midst of our meeting toward Bette’s last years, she lamented about “too much sci-fi in the movies,” that stars are overly protected, and that actors of her era worked six days a week, without the pitiful pampering from today’s entourages. “Unless you’re known in my profession as a monster, you are not a star,” she reflected. “But I’ve never fought for anything, never fought but for the good of the film.”
  
COCA-COLA & CHOCOLATES
      They could have sung all night, with the audience cheering long and hard, not wanting it to end. Our gala evening at the Los Angeles Music Center honoring Placido Domingo’s 40th year with the Los Angeles Opera was a night of nights, planned to perfection and raising $1.5 million. Glamorous to the max  —  tenor Placido and soprano Patricia Racette were singing solo and duets from favorite operas during a two-and-a-half hour concert with the esteemed James Conlon conducting, before the open-air dinner in the Music Center Plaza. BBC Music Magazine hails Placido as “the king of the singers, our Number One Choice, who combines an astonishing versatility with an instinctive musicality and worldwide popularity.” Enrico Caruso is Tenor Number Two, followed by Luciano Pavarotti, Lauritz Melchior, Jussi Bjorling.

   “The voice is a mystery, it puzzles me,” Placido told the black-tie crowd. “After all these years, I feel the strength and the passion are still there.” Placido was born in Spain, and is 67 years old. At the dinner, he greeted his Spanish compatriot Antonio Banderas, who arrived with wife Melanie Griffith, all offering congratulations to the gala’s chairs, Eva & Marc Stern, Carol & Warner Henry. Wine importer and distributor Warner contributed the wines from Spain to complement the Spanish-themed dinner of tapas, rack of lamb with saffron risotto, dulce de leche mousse with honey-macerated blackberries.

  Opera-philes included civic and social leaders, along with cardiologist Harold Karpman, a major benefactor, as are Lennie & Bernie Greenberg, Gena Rowlands, Jane Seymour, Betty Endo & Fred Hayman, Ginny Mancini, Pat & Michael York, Malgosia & Stacey Keach with teenage daughter Karolina. Later this year, Stacey will star as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.

   During the boogie-down dancing, we visited with Placido’s wife, Marta, who’s directed numerous operas in Los Angeles. With a twinkle in her eyes, she laughed that a friend mentioned he napped during the performance. “Next time, don’t eat, I warned him…, only drink Coca-Cola, eat chocolates, and you’ll stay awake.”

    The author of All I Could See From Where I Stood, a novel written in college, and The Los Angeles Underground Gourmet, George Christy traveled as a roving editor for Town & Country magazine (when he fell in love with San Francisco), before joining the Hollywood Reporter, where his column, The Great Life, appeared for 26 years. He appears in films and on television.

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