Pink Navy Girl in Every Port: Dita Von Teese (No Explanation Needed)

Keira Knightley to Fart-Face Her Way Through Yet Another Costume Drama

On the plus side, Charlotte Rampling is around to shred the taffeta with her customary hauteur, and the wigs do look fab.

And now, Mrs. Vreeland shows you how it's done.

A Packet of “Crisps”: Marlene Dietrich

Possums, while going through our library recently, we re-read with great pleasure a collection of essays by Quentin Crisp, gnashing our teeth all the while over how neglected he has become of late.

In an effort to remind ourselves of just how perceptive a writer he could be (in addition to being endlessly entertaining and peerlessly bitchy), we will bring you a few of his best tidbits about the subject he knew best: as Countess DeLave might have put it in The Women, "Oh glamour, glamour."

To start, let Mr. Crisp tell you, possums, about Miss Dietrich:

“Miss Dietrich’s early Hollywood movies were the most immoral ever generally released. She did not reveal any more of her body than other screen sirens of her day, nor was she seen behaving in an any more explicitly sexual way, but the plots of nearly all these pictures showed her living a life of total degradation. In Shanghai Express, for instance, she forever plied her trade back and forth from Shanghai to Peking until, after a great deal of mileage, to say nothing of footage, she re-met her former fiancé quite by chance but without, one must add, the slightest sign of embarrassment. Here as elsewhere, her costar was chosen from among the most boring actors that the casting office could supply. This was done to make it clear that matrimony was inevitable.

Though on one occasion she sank so low as to wear a hat—the brim of which was weighed down with artificial cherries—Miss Dietrich never seemed to pay the smallest price for her sins, but perhaps I have read the message wrongly. It may be that the ultimate punishment for a lifetime of unremitting fornication is that you become too weak to defend yourself from marriage.”

Pink Navy Girl in Every Port: Kay Kendall

As far as we know, possums, this week's Pink Navy Girl in Every Port was not a bitch, and didn't have a drug habit, but by God, she was fabulous. And funny. And tall.

As David Thomson puts it, "Kay Kendall grew up tall. Indifferent to the unhelpful state of being an outcast, not just a great beauty, but one of the most sophisticated looking women you had ever seen. She seemed made in Belgravia."

She came from a theatrical family, and by the age of 13, she was tall enough to appear in the chorus line at the Palladium in London. Unfortunately, her stage and film career didn't go anywhere until, in 1953, she landed a role in the British comedy Genevieve, a film about two classic-car enthusiasts in the annual London-Brighton race.

As Thomson points out, one of the two competing drivers "was Kenneth More, who turned up with this tall, languid and gloriously daffy girlfriend, as if he had found her in screwball comedy. Kay Kendall was the joker in the film, not least in the dance-hall scene where she joins the band and plays a very hot trumpet...." Pauline Kael agrees: "Kay Kendall had perhaps her happiest (and most irresistible) role as the trumpet-playing model....Everything about this movie seems to go right, and it looks relaxed and effortless." And Kay Kendall was quite something, as you can see for yourselves, possums.



Genevieve made her a star at the age of 27, and after appearing with Rex Harrison (yes, as in My Fair Lady) in the ironically titled The Constant Husband, she began an affair with Harrison, who was inconstantly married to the fabulous-in-her-own-right Lilli Palmer.

According to Wikipedia, "when Rex Harrison learned from Kendall's doctor that she had been diagnosed with myeloid leukemia, he and Lilli Palmer agreed to divorce so he could marry Kendall and provide for her care. Kendall was never told of her illness and ended up believing she merely had an iron deficiency. As for the divorce, Palmer said she was not upset because she had a lover, too. She and Harrison planned to remarry after Kendall's death, but Palmer ended up falling in love with her companion, Carlos Thompson, and married him instead."

Before her death at the age of 32, Kay Kendall was also the best thing about Les Girls, a George Cukor-directed version of a Cole Porter musical designed by George Hoyningen-Huené, and if your fingertips went all tingly from reading that, you're definitely gay. As Pauline Kael put it, "the tall, blithe, and beautiful comedienne Kay Kendall...does a funny, drunk 'La Habanera' and has a number with [Gene] Kelly in which she seems to be outdancing him and having an easy, amused time of it." In the trailer below, she's the tall, funny, fabulous knockout.



David Thomson offers the best tribute of all: "Her last film was Once More With Feeling, where she steals the picture from Yul Brynner, who plays her conductor husband. That was the saddest thing about Kay Kendall - she was left to steal pictures in a world where talented and fond men might have made entire movies for her and her comic timing. She was very sexy but she made fun of sex. She was upper-class, yet itching to be a tramp. If only she had known Preston Sturges - they might have saved each other and kept the flame of screwball burning for another 10 years." Amen to that possums.

How You Like Them Apples (and Bananas and Grapes)?

Just in time for the weekend, possums, we bring you the original lady in the tutti-frutti hat, Carmen Miranda herself. This clip from The Gang's All Here ought to give you an idea of what our dreams are like. Be sure to watch for the giant, phallic bananas at about 3:45 in.

Pink Navy Girl in Every Port: Miss Tallulah Bankhead

Possums, we have a recollection of an episode of Absolutely Fabulous in which Edina dismisses the way her gay ex-husband has been smitten by Patsy’s fabulous sister thus: “Typical! A bitch with a drug habit, and you’re anybody’s, aren’t you?”

We’ll cop to that, but, as it turns out, this week’s bitch with a drug habit, er, Pink Navy Girl in Every Port, happens to be Miss XaXa’s selection, and our first American (so you don’t think we wander only in foreign ports)—the one, the only, the fiercest bitch the State of Alabama ever produced, Miss Tallulah Bankhead.

Endowed with a voice that one writer described as “steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning,” Miss Tallulah came from Alabama aristocracy. Her uncle and her grandfather were U.S. Senators, and her father was the Speaker of the House of Representatives under Roosevelt.

Like every Southern belle, Miss Tallulah tried at every turn to get her own way, with some occasions more successful than others, and stated, “To deny me anything only inflames my desires.” Her tantrums were treated with a bucket of water by her no-nonsense grandmother.

At fifteen she moved to New York to be an actress, and checked into the Algonquin Hotel. Yes, the one with the round table. John Barrymore (Drew’s grandfather) put the moves on Miss Tallulah, exposing himself to her in his dressing room, after which she swore publicly that she would never bed a man who wasn’t “hung like Barrymore.” She later claimed to have kept her word.

Like many another ingénue, she tried lesbianism and cocaine. Her first experiment was with the great lady of the theater, Eva Le Gallienne; she took to introducing herself to strangers at parties with, “I’m a lesbian. What do you do?” She may also have had an affair with Billie Holiday. Not that she could exactly make up her mind, as she also declared, “I could never become a lesbian because they have no sense of humor.”

She eventually ended up in London, where she had a great success, until she was rejected by Somerset Maugham (the gay novelist married to famous decorator Sirie Maugham) to play Sadie Thompson, the floozy who tempts a minister in the tropics in his play, Rain. As a result, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing 20 aspirins and writing a suicide note that read, “It ain’t goin’ to rain no moh.” She awoke the next day in fine fettle to the news that she would star in a Noël Coward play.

She then made her way to Hollywood and a well-paid career in undistinguished movies. She had loads of fun, though, including a tryst with Tarzan himself, Olympic swimming medalist Johnny Weissmuller, in the swimming pool of the Garden of Allah, after which she declared herself “a very satisfied Jane.”

She eventually married John Emery, a good-looking man who was a second-rate actor, but whose charms were undeniable. According to a piece in The New Yorker:

One of Tallulah’s party tricks was to escort guests to the master bedroom, fling back the covers from the bed in which Emery was sleeping, and crow, “Did you ever see a prick as big as that before?”….Soon she was telling people, “Well, darling, the weapon may be of admirable proportions, but the shot is indescribably weak.” Within a few years, the marriage, such as it was, was over.

She contracted a severe case of gonorrhea from actor George Raft, which led to hospitalization, a hysterectomy and severe weight loss. She left the hospital weighing 70 pounds, but proclaimed to the doctor, “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!”

Like some of today’s celebrities, she was given to flashing audiences. Because so many people in the audience complained during the run of a Thornton Wilder play, Actors’ Equity had to order her to wear knickers while onstage. The same problem came up, as it were, while she was filming Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which, according to a biographer, led Hitchcock to respond “with his much-quoted deliberation about whether the matter needed to be referred to the makeup or the hairdressing department.” Sounds like Kelly Wearstler.

Unfortunately, her film career didn’t add up to much, and the stage work dried up as well. By the 1950s, she had a radio show, a rather saucy memoir on the bestseller list, and made appearances on I Love Lucy as herself. In 1968, she died from double pneumonia. A giver of great quote to the end, her final words were, “codeine—bourbon.”

Miss Tallulah, referred to as “Humphrey Bogart in silk panties” and as the “most thoroughgoing libertine and free-swinging flapper of the age,” left a trail of anecdotes and quips. Apparently, she was given to swimming in nothing but a string of pearls. Her reasoning? “I just wanted to prove I was a natural ash blonde.”

And Miss XaXa’s favorite quotes:

- I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late, start without me.

- It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.

- My father warned me about men and booze... but he never said anything about women and cocaine.

Pink Navy Girl in Every Port: Dalida

If Judy Garland had had a disco period, access to peroxide, a beauty-queen past and a string of men who killed themselves, she might have been this week’s Girl in Every Port, Dalida.

Our girl was born Yolanda Gigliotti in Cairo, Egypt, to a family of Italian immigrants who expected her to go to secretarial school. As usual in these circumstances, however, she had other ideas. In 1954, she entered and won the Miss Egypt contest. She changed her name to Dalida, played a bit part in an Omar Sharif movie and then promptly left for Paris to make a name for herself.

After the usual struggles, she was taken up by, and took up with, Lucien Morisse, the married artistic director of the Europe 1 radio station, and recorded her first single, entitled, wouldn’t you know, “Madonna.” But it was her second single, “Bambino,” that turned into her first number-one hit, and she eventually became the opening act for Charles Aznavour.

After the usual montage of hit singles and concert tours, she returned a star to her native Egypt. Then it was back to Paris, more hit singles, and an ultimatum to Lucien Morisse—divorce your wife, or else. She and Morisse married in 1961, but a few weeks after the wedding (which had involved the expense of flying her entire family from Egypt), she traveled to Cannes for a concert and there fell in love with a man named Jean Sobieski (who later went on to father Leelee Sobieski), and left her husband for him.

She bought herself a chateau in Paris, on top of Montmartre, behind the Sacré-Coeur. Then she divorced Morisse, broke up with Leelee Sobieski’s future father, and became a blonde.

More hits and world concert tours, and lonely years in the chateau. In 1966, the RCA record label introduced her to a young Italian songwriter, Luigi Tenco. Naturally, they fell in love while working on a song for her for the San Remo music festival in Italy. Indeed, they decided they would both perform at the festival, each with their own version of the same song, “Ciao Amore.” In January of 1967, they arrived in San Remo, and announced that they would be getting married in April, a marriage that, alas, was never to take place. Neither Tenco nor Dalida won the song festival, and Tenco got smashed on tranquilizers and alcohol, and accused the festival’s jury members of being corrupt. He then went back to their hotel room and killed himself. A few months later, Dalida tried to do the same by taking a full bottle of barbiturates.

She reinvented her look again, started wearing a long white robe, and was dubbed “Saint Dalida” by the French press. More hits and world concert tours. And in 1970, her ex-husband and Svengali, Lucien Morisse, committed suicide. (For those of you keeping score, that’s two.)

In 1973, her duet with Alain Delon (yes, that Alain Delon) was a huge hit, and she met a new love, Richard Chanfray, who claimed to be the Comte de Paris, but was most likely an impostor (shades of Zsa Zsa Gabor and her prince). More phenomenal hits and world concert tours.

Then she went back to her roots (recording in Arabic) and had her disco period. In 1978, she had a smash show at Carnegie Hall, which (in the symmetry of these music-star narratives) made up for an unsuccessful American tour in the 1950s.

In 1979, she had her biggest disco hit with “Monday, Tuesday (Laissez-moi danser),” which we have included below in two versions for your delectation. The first version, from one of the numerous variety shows on French television, is not to believed—hydraulic lift, white fur stole, clones in leather pants. And the best part occurs about a minute into the clip when, having thrown her white fur stole to the floor in a grand and fabulous gesture, a fan or flunky sneaks in on his knees to save the white fur from the trodding feet of her back-up dancers. The other version is a remix by Cerrone, and, oh boy. Once again, you are advised to pull the shades down, and hide anyone you want to protect from the huge, gay-making ray that will erupt from your computer and lay gayste to everything within a two-mile radius.





Returning to Egypt in 1979, she was met by President Sadat. More hits and world concert tours. Then she broke up with Richard Fresnay, got in trouble for supporting President Mitterrand, and left on a year-long world tour to get out of the spotlight in France. She returned to France in 1983, and later that year found out that Fresnay, erstwhile Comte de Paris, had committed suicide in St. Tropez, albeit not in a cabana. (That’s three.)

More concert tours, more failed affairs, and on May 3, 1987, the woman who sold something like 80 million records (back when there still were records) and became the foremost European gay icon, killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. She has, indeed, practically been elevated to sainthood. The French government released a Dalida postage stamp, and one of the main squares in Montmartre has been renamed in her honor. Her gravesite is a place of pilgrimage. Oh, and did we mention that during her last-ever photo shoot, with Mario Testino for Vanity Fair, Princess Diana was listening to Dalida’s hits? (Oh, and Di's boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed, was also Egyptian.) Hmmmmm. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

St. Tropez, Serge, and Sun

Well, it is Friday, and what with shirtless carpenters, topless designers, and Raggaydy Andy Cohen in the Virgin Islands for the weekend, we do seem to have a theme going, so here's another taste of St. Tropez. It's "Sea, sex, and sun," as performed by the dirtiest Frenchman ever, Serge Gainsbourg. Serge can currently be heard on television in his duet with Brigitte Bardot, "Bonnie and Clyde," which is the theme of a commercial for some massive SUV--the Escalade, we believe.

Serge is the father of Charlotte Gainsbourg (whose mother is Jane Birkin, as in the Birkin bag). In 1969, Serge and Jane scandalized an entire continent with their own duet, "Je t'aime, moi non plus," which was banned on the radio and condemned by the Vatican (we also include it below; as with "Sea, sex, and sun," it's better you don't know what the lyrics say.) Enjoy, possums, and imagine yourselves on Nikki Beach in St. Tropez.



And just for the hell of it, here's Charlotte Gainsbourg continuing the family tradition by doing a duet, in this case with Etienne Daho on a very witty song called, "If."

Brigitte Bardot Goes to St. Tropez

Pink Navy Girl in Every Port: María Félix

This is one of those instances, possums, when we are grateful for the “other matters of taste” rubric in our blog description.

As we’ve mentioned, we’re more than a little bored by Top Design, but let us introduce you to something that has us very excited indeed. We present our first-ever Girl in Every Port, none other than Mexican actress María Félix, diva extraordinaire and one of the most fabulous women who ever lived.

She was the original barefoot contessa, an admixture of Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford. She had four husbands, and numerous lovers. Her second husband, Agustín Lara, was the Irving Berlin of Latin America. Her third husband, Jorge Negrete, was a Mexican amalgam of John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Her fourth husband, Alex Berger, a millionaire French financier, financed the construction of the Mexico City subway, modeled after the Paris métro, in order to please her, or at least that was her version.

Her lovers included Diego Rivera, who painted her twice, once in the nude. (She was also painted by Jean Cocteau, though, of course, they didn’t become lovers). King Farouk of Egypt reportedly offered her Nefertiti’s crown in exchange for one night of love.


Her most passionate and longest-lasting relationship may well have been with Cartier, whom she famously commissioned to make necklaces based on her pet snake and pet crocodile. She reportedly walked into the Paris branch with her pet baby crocodile and asked the Cartier jewelers to make her a scale replica in gold. She was dressed by Dior and outfitted by Hermès, which also provided all the gear for her stable of race horses in Paris.

In addition to her beauty and her reputation as a femme fatale, she was also famous for her quick wit. Of jewels, she said, “Some friends have told me that pearls make people cry. The only pearls that have made me cry were the fake ones.” When an audience in Colombia protested after she cut short a musical performance, she retorted, “Others have seen less, and paid more.” To a lady reporter who dared to ask her age, she witheringly replied, “Look, young lady, I’ve been very busy living my life and haven’t had time to count.”

Other examples of her bons mots:

* “I don't count the years, I only limit myself to living them.”

* “A man has never made my life difficult, because I have never bet all my chips on only one man.”

* “Women will never be like men, although sometimes there are men with the heart of a woman. From the beginning of time, men have taken the largest piece of the pie. I have the heart of a man and that's why things have been good for me.”

* “I cannot complain about men. I have had tons of them and they have treated me fabulously well. But sometimes I had to hurt them to keep them from subjugating me.”

* “‘Diva’ is something made up, but I was not fabricated, life made me and it possibly made me very well.”

She made films for Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Emilio Fernández. She was celebrated by writers Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Kiss of the Spider Woman author Manuel Puig, and it is said that she is the “spider woman” of the title. She titled her delicious memoirs, All My Wars. She was the first Latin American woman to be made Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

But her greatest achievement may well be this: she might just be the one who made us gay.

So we advise you NOT to watch the video below unless you are prepared for the consequences of so much fabulousness unleashed.