Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald by Harrison Fisher, 1927; Conté crayon on paperboard; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Fitzgerald’s daughter, Mrs. Scottie Smith

Amy Henderson, curator at the National Portrait Gallery, writes about all things pop culture. Her last post was on technological revolutions.

As someone who adores sequins and feathers, I am buzzing with anticipation over what the New York Times has dubbed “an eminently enjoyable movie,” Baz Lurhmann’s new film version of The Great Gatsby.  Will I like Leo DiCaprio  as Gatsby? Will Jay-Z’s music convey the fancy-free spirit of High Flapperdom?

F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited with coining the phrase “The Jazz Age” in the title of his 1922 collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. He also became its effervescent chronicler in his early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), along with another short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920).  Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby was the quintessence of this period of his work, and evoked the romanticism and surface allure of his “Jazz Age”—years that began with the end of World War I, the advent of woman’s suffrage, and Prohibition, and collapsed with the Great Crash of 1929—years awash in bathtub gin and roars of generational rebellion. As Cole Porter wrote, “In olden days a glimpse of stocking/Was looked on as something shocking,/But now God knows,/Anything Goes.”  The Twenties’ beat was urban and staccato: out went genteel social dancing; in came the Charleston. Everything moved: cars, planes, even moving pictures. Hair was bobbed, and cigarettes were the new diet fad.

Gloria Swanson by Nickolas Muray, c. 1920 (printed 1978) (c)Courtesy
Nickolas Muray Photo Archives; gelatin silver print; National Portrait
Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

According to his biographer Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald wrote his agent Maxwell Perkins in 1922: “I want to write something new. . .something extraordinary and beautiful and simple.” Like today, newness was fueled by innovation, and technology was transforming everyday life. Similar to the way social media and the iPhone shape our culture now, the Twenties burst with the revolutionary impact of silent movies, radio and recordings. New stars filled the mediascape, from Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, to Paul Whiteman and the Gershwins. Celebrity culture was flourishing, and glamour was in.

Paul Whiteman in “King of Jazz” by Joseph Grant, 1930; India ink and
pencil on paper; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift
of Carol Grubb and Jennifer Grant Castrup

Accompanied in a champagne-life style by his wife Zelda, the embodiment of his ideal flapper, Fitzgerald was entranced by the era’s glitz and glamour. His story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” he admitted, was designed “in the familiar mood characterized by a perfect craving for luxury.” By the time he wrote Gatsby, his money revels were positively lyrical:  when he describes Daisy’s charm, Gatsby says: “Her voice is full of money,” and the narrator Nick explains, “That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jungle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.”

Fitzgerald acknowledges the presence of money’s dark side when Nick describes Tom and Daisy: “They were careless people—they smashed things up. . .and then retreated back into their money. . .and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”  But his hero Gatsby is a romantic. He was a self-made man (his money came from bootlegging), and illusions were vital to his world view. Fitzgerald once described Gatsby’s ability to dream as “the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

Rudolph Valentino by Johan Hagemeyer, c. 1921; gelatin silver print;
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Alan and Lois Fern
Acquisition Fund

Gatsby sees money as the means to fulfilling his “incorruptible dream.” When Nick tells him, “You can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby is incredulous:  “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can.”   (Cue green light at the end of the dock: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into time.”) As critic David Denby recently wrote in his New Yorker review of the Luhrmann film: “Jay Gatsby ‘sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,’ and his exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failures.”

It was the American Dream on a spree. Fitzgerald ends Gatsby intoning his dreamlike vision of the Jazz Age: “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .And one fine morning—”

Surveillance is a way of life. Photo by Quevaal, courtesy of Wikimedia

Amy Henderson, curator at the National Portrait Gallery, writes about all things pop culture. Her last post was on makeup’s greasy past.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 7, 2007, he said, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that…changes everything….Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”

The iPhone has proved even more revolutionary than Jobs understood, as its role in the remarkable capture of the Boston Marathon bombers illustrated. In the wake of the bombing, the FBI asked for crowdsourcing assistance to identify suspects. The digital sites Reddit and 4chan were instantly swamped by a “general cybervibe” of shared digital information sent from iPhones and video surveillance cameras. It was a stunning interaction between citizens and law enforcement.

This interaction is currently very high on the media radar screen. In the Washington Post, Craig Timberg recently wrote about the technologies that can produce “access to unprecedented troves of video imagery” and information about location data emitted by cellphones. In their recent book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Google executive chairman Jared Cohen and Google director of ideas Eric Schmidt describe how a camera will “zoom in on an individual’s eye, mouth and nose, and extract a ‘feature vector’” that creates a biometric signature. This signature is what law enforcement focused on following the Boston bombing, according to Schmidt and Cohen, in an excerpt from their book, published last week in the Wall Street Journal.

Steve Jobs ushered in his own technological era. Photograph by Diana Walker, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

A media appeal from law enforcement is not new. John Walsh’s television program, “America’s Most Wanted,” is credited with capturing 1,149 fugitives between 1988 and 2011. But the stakes have sky-rocketed in the digital age, and the issue of unfiltered social media information has proved problematic. In the midst of the Boston manhunt, Alexis Madigal wrote for the Atlantic that the crowdsourcing flood revealed “well-meaning people who have not considered the moral weight” of their rush to judgment: “This is vigilantism, and it’s only the illusion that what we do online is not as significant as what we do offline. . .”

In a story on April 20th, the Associated Press reported that “Fueled by Twitter, online forums like Reddit and 4chan, smartphones, and relays of police scanners, thousands of people played armchair detectives. . . . .” The problem of inevitable mistakes, the AP noted, illustrated the unintended consequences of law enforcement “deputizing the public for help.” Reddit is a giant message board divided into subsections similar to local newspapers, except that users are the content providers. In the Boston case, users viewed their assistance as “a citizen responsibility” and engulfed the digital sites with every possible piece of “evidence.”

On the PBS News Hour April 19th, Will Oremus of Slate said that Reddit is unmediated democracy in action—a site where everyone gets to vote on what rises to the top of the page as the headlined feature. The lack of a filter means mistakes will be made, but Oremus argued that the potential for good superseded the bad. He also suggested that the Boston experience, where innocent people were momentarily tagged as suspects, illustrated how complex the learning curve is going to be.

Thomas Edison launched his own technological revolution. Thomas Alva Edison by Pach Bros. Studios, Gelatin silver print; 1907, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

It has certainly been a learning curve for me. I was intending to write here about a fascinating new book, Ernest Freeberg’s The Age of Edison, when I found myself scurrying around exploring “Reddit” and “4chan.” But as it happens, there are intriguing parallels between the advent of revolutionary technology a century ago and today’s media metamorphosis.

In the Gilded Age, Freeberg writes, society “witnessed mind-bending changes in communication. . .hardly imagined beforehand.” Their generation was the first “to live in a world shaped by perpetual invention,” and Edison personified the age with his contributions to the light bulb, the phonograph, and moving pictures.

Thomas Edison’s lightbulb. Courtesy of the American History Museum

As in the digital age today, the greatest impact then was not simply the invention itself but the invention’s consequences. There were no rules: For example, how should street lighting be constructed–should there be one giant arc light, or a series of lights lining the streets? Freeberg also explains how standards were developed for the use of electricity, and how professions evolved to implement those standards.
One of my favorite stories in The Age of Edison describes how electricity affected public behavior: people accustomed to lurching home from saloons in gaslight’s forgiving darkness were now exposed to public opprobrium by electricity’s illumination. Electricity, Freeberg suggests, was “a subtle form of social control.” Neighbors peering from behind curtains were the cultural antecedents of today’s surveillance cameras.

Like Steve Jobs did in the 21st century, Freeburg writes that “Edison invented a new style of invention.” But in both cases, what became important were the ramifications—the unintended consequences.

Cosmetics have a long history. Courtesy of Wikimedia user KaurJmeb

The boa-adorned Amy Henderson is a cultural historian at the National Portrait Gallery

How better to celebrate April Fool’s Day among scholars than to parse, deconstruct, reconsider and otherwise dismantle a subject rarely considered. This year Smithsonian curators, historians and researchers assembled at the National Museum of American History to take part in the annual (well, sometimes) “Conference on Stuff.” In the past, we’ve considered the marshmallow, Jell-O, corn, crackers, peanut butter and pie. This year, our subject was grease.

I was drawn instantly by the spirit of “dedicated hilarity” and volunteered to make a presentation on “greasepaint”—a pig fat concoction originally invented as a makeup base for actors, but one that has since morphed into a cosmetic industry that grosses an estimated $170 billion dollars annually.

For those of you who missed my talk “Greasepaint Glamour,” providing both intellectual gravitas and an excuse to fluff up and wear my boa, I  will share now with my adoring online fans.

The tradition of face-painting extends as far back as the advent of image creation. Ancient Egyptians rimmed their eyes with kohl—a mixture of lead, copper, burned almonds, and soot—to ward off evil spirits; they also used a type of rouge to stain their lips and cheeks—a stain made from a deadly combination of iodine and bromine that gave us the phrase, “kiss of death.”

Russell wore a makeup that included a mixture of mercury and nitrate of silver. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Historically, pale skin was a status symbol of upper class fashion, meant to distinguish women who spent their lives indoors rather than out in the fields. Elizabeth I coated her face with white lead and vinegar, optimistically intending to evoke a “Mask of Youth.” In the 19th century, Queen Victoria went bare-faced and declared makeup was something only worn by loose women or actors, neither of which category included Her Royal Highness. Leading actors of the American stage such as Joseph Jefferson—known for his role as Rip Van Winkle—and singer Lillian Russell wore makeup composed of an unappetizing mixture of zinc oxide, lead, mercury, and nitrate of silver.

At the turn of the 20th Century, a theatrical cosmetic based on pig fat (lard) was invented in Germany: known as “grease paint,” it was a flesh-colored paste that combined lard with zinc and ochre and gave actors a less garish, more natural appearance onstage.

With the advent of moving pictures, the demand for makeup burgeoned with the rise of the “close-up” as actors scrambled to cover flaws and enhance their most attractive facial features. Makeup also had to stand up to the powerful new lighting technology invented for filmmaking, and because black and white film stock didn’t register all colors accurately (red looked black on screen, for example), actors had to wear a green-tinged arsenic makeup that looked “natural” once projected onscreen.

Max Factor cosmetics, Her Majesty’s Arcade, Sydney (taken for M.G.M.), c. 1941, by Sam Hood. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Arsenic makeup’s side-effects were dangerous, but Polish immigrant Max Factor soon came to the rescue. Factor arrived in Los Angeles with his family in 1904, and by the time the movie industry began its migration from New York to “Hollywood” in the early teens, he had set up shop as a wig-maker and a makeup artist. In 1914, Factor invented “flexible greasepaint”—a makeup in a tube that revolutionized movie cosmetics because it reflected well under movie lighting. Happily, it also didn’t contain anything that could poison actors.

Flexible greasepaint was applied with a wet sponge and then “set” with powder; Factor went on to devise a “color harmony” palette that individualized makeup for such stars as Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford. He also coined the noun “makeup” from the verb phrase “to makeup one’s face.”

As Hollywood moved into its glamorous heyday in the 1930s, movie makeup had an enormous impact on everyday life. Women followed such fads as bleaching their hair to imitate Jean Harlow’s platinum locks, or painting their nails “Jungle Red” as Joan Crawford did in the 1939 film The Women. In 1937, Max Factor patented his “pancake makeup,” and it became so wildly successful that one-third of all American women wore it by 1940.

Cosmetics had become big business, and Factor was joined in this increasingly competitive trade by Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden. Like Factor, Rubenstein was born in Poland: she first immigrated to Australia and set up beauty salons marketing pots of her special “Krakow face cream.” Enormously successful, she soon opened salons in London, Paris, and in 1914, New York City.

Rubenstein’s Fifth Avenue salon was mere blocks from Elizabeth Arden’s, another pioneering figure in cosmetics who came to New York from rural Canada in 1907. Arden worked at a beauty salon at Fifth Avenue before opening her own salon on Fifth Avenue and 42d Street. Fiercely competitive, the two would battle royally over what a PBS documentary termed “The Powder & The Glory” for the next half century.

As I wrapped up my contribution to the Stuff Conference, I gave the final words on makeup to one of my oracles—Miss Piggy.  Curator of entertainment Dwight Blocker Bowers, himself, is a fan of the grand dame of pork and before the conference we had mused together on what Miss Piggy might offer on the subject of pig-fat makeup. No fool is that pig. “If you’re going to slap lipstick on a pig,” she would likely intone, “make very sure it’s not a relative.”

The new series “Mr. Selfridge” begins airing March 31 on PBS.

Historian Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery covers the best of pop culture and recently wrote about the film Cabaret.

For Downton Abbey fans wondering how to spend their time until season four begins next year, PBS is offering a little something to dull the pain. Starting March 31st, we’ll be able to indulge our frothy fantasies with “Mr. Selfridge,” a new series replete with Edwardian finery, intricate plots and engaging actors.

Inspired by Lindy Woodhead’s 2007 biography, Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge, about department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, the new Masterpiece Theater series starring Jeremy Piven in the title role, makes an important connection: “If you lived at Downton Abbey, you shopped at Selfridge’s.”

The American-born Selfridge (1856-1947)  learned the retail trade in the years when dry goods outlets were being replaced by dazzling urban department stores. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Gimbels in New York were vast “palaces of abundance” that treated shoppers like pampered pets. These stores made shopping entertaining, competing for attention with tea rooms, barber shops, fashion shows and theatrical presentations.

John Wanamaker helped pioneer the concept of the department store in Philadelphia. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

In a twist of irony, shopping also provided a platform for women’s empowerment and for the rising emancipation movement. The modern “new woman” rode bicycles and worked in cities and appeared in public alone without fear of scandal. To women who embraced a modern public identity, department stores became a safe haven where they could convene without guardians or escorts. Shopping was a declaration of independence. And the fun was in the details. Fashion was always changing so there was plenty of reason to load up shopping bags and come back for more.

Setting the stage with as much hoopla as possible, the art of selling had became as much a “show” as any theatrical venture. Beautifully appointed, Field’s, Gimbels and Wanamker’s were glittering showplaces, bathed in the glow of newly invented high-wattage electric lighting. And shopper’s found paradise enjoying the displays of exciting new goods in the large plate glass windows. John Wanamaker, whose Philadelphia department store reflected the newest techniques in salesmanship—smart advertising and beautifully displayed merchandise—even exhibited Titians and Manets from his personal art collection.

The first Selfridges on Oxford Street. Photo by Russ London, courtesy of Wikimedia

Harry Selfridge got his start as a stock boy at Marshall Field’s landmark Chicago store. For 25 years, he climbed rung-by-rung the proverbial corporate ladder until he became Field’s partner, amassing a considerable personal fortune along the way. But it wasn’t enough to quench an insatiable ambition and on a trip to London in 1906, he had a “Eureka” moment. Noting that London stores lacked the latest selling techniques popular in America, Selfridge took his leave from Field’s, and opened a London emporium.  Always a dreamer, but quite practical as well, he chose a site ideally situated to attract thousands of people, traveling the Central Line—the London Underground that had opened just six years earlier and would become a boon to West End retailers.

Opening for business on March 15, 1909, the store became a commercial phenomenon, attracting a million people during its first week. A London columnist reported that it was second only to Big Ben as a tourist favorite. The store was a marvel of its day—five stories high with three basement levels, a roof-top terrace and more than 100 departments and visitor services, including a tea room, a barber shop, a hair salon, a library, a post office, sumptuous ladies’ and gentlemen’s cloakrooms, a rifle range, a nursing station and a concierge who could book West End show tickets or a passage to New York. The store’s massive six acres of floor space was gorgeously designed with wide open-plan vistas; brilliant lighting and trademark green carpeting throughout. Modern Otis “lifts” whisked customers quickly from floor-to-floor. “A store, which is used every day,” Selfridge said, “should be as fine a thing and, in its own way, as ennobling a thing as a church or a museum.”

Alice Paul of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Sending a clear message at the 1913 march in Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the American History Museum

The opening coincided with the burgeoning suffrage movement. The same year,  Alice Paul—a young American Quaker who moved to London to work on the British suffrage movement—made headlines when she disrupted the Prime Minister’s speech by throwing her shoes and yelling, “Votes for women!” Politically awakened, women felt newly empowered in the marketplace and at the department store in particular where they could shop independently, without a chaperone and without fear of causing scandal for doing so. Selfridge himself understood this, once explaining “I came along just at the time when women wanted to step out on their own. They came to the store and realized some of their dreams.”

The act of shopping may have opened doors for turn-of-the-century women, but the dream of suffrage would require organized political engagement for ensuing generations. On her return to the United States, Paul became a leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In March 1913, she organized a massive parade in Washington to demand a Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. The 19th Amendment was ratified seven years later on August 18, 1920; in 1923 Alice Paul drafted an Equal Rights Amendment that would guarantee women’s equality. Congress passed the ERA half a century later in 1972, but of course not enough states have yet voted for its ratification.

Meanwhile, the enticing real-life story of Mr. Selfridge and his department store will take us back to a time when women wore corsets and ankle-length dresses, and couldn’t vote. But they could shop. And perhaps unwittingly, Harry Selfridge furthered their ambitions when he said: “the customer is always right.”

Liza Minnelli took home Best Actress for her role as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Image courtesy of Fanpop

Sometimes, the road to the Red Carpet is as fascinating as the journey to Oz—and with a more glittering prize behind the curtain. That’s certainly true of the 1972 film Cabaret, which won a colossal eight Oscars, including Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey). The only big award it missed was Best Picture, which went to The Godfather. 

Cabaret began its life as a Broadway show produced and directed by Hal Prince in 1966, but that stage musical was itself based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel, Goodbye to Berlin; a 1951 play, I Am a Camera, was also taken from this short novel. In part a fictionalized memoir, Goodbye to Berlin chronicled Isherwood’s bohemian experiences in 1930s Berlin as Weimar fell to the rise of Fascism; the “divinely decadent” Sally Bowles debuts here as a young Englishwoman (Jill Haworth), who sings in a local cabaret.

Film poster, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

The play I Am a Camera fizzled, although it remains chiseled in Broadway history for New York critic Walter Kerr’s infamous review:  “Me no Leica.”  The key stage production came about in 1966 when Hal Prince collaborated with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb on the landmark Broadway musical, Cabaret.

Prince wanted to develop his idea of the “concept musical” with this show—he told his cast at the first rehearsal, a show was not only a spectacle that “promotes entertainment,” but should have a theme that “makes an important statement.” The devastating rise of Fascism would be an inescapable dramatic presence: designer Boris Aronson created a huge mirror that faced the audience and, in its reflection, incorporated these passive spectators into the horrific events unfolding onstage.

One key character introduced by Prince was the Master of Ceremonies. In the mid-1990s, curator Dwight Blocker Bowers of the American History Museum and I interviewed Hal Prince for an exhibition that we were working on, “Red, Hot, & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical.” Prince told us that this role was based on a dwarf emcee he had seen at a club in West Germany when he served in the U.S. Army after World War II. In Cabaret, the Emcee—portrayed with charming decadence by Joel Grey—symbolizes the precarious lives of people caught in the web of Nazism’s rise to power. The Emcee rules over a cast of characters at a dicey cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub, and his behavior becomes the crux of the show: uncontrolled and without any moral restraint, he represents the flip side of “freedom.”

Hal Prince’s desire to produce a break-through musical reflected his commitment to devising a socially responsible musical theater. Just as his stage production grew out of the social and political upheavals of the Sixties, the show’s identity as a postwar cautionary tale continued when the film Cabaret premiered in 1972, as reports of a Watergate burglary began appearing in the Washington Post.

Today, the film version of Cabaret is celebrating its 40^th anniversary with the release of a fully-restored DVD. In the movie, Joel Grey reprized his Emcee role, and the film begins with him drawing you leeringly into his kaleidoscopic refuge at the Kit Kat Club–a subterranean haven where demi-monde figures cast shadows of in consequence while Nazi boots stomp nearby. (Later in the film, it’s clear that the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” doesn’t refer to them.)

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles. Courtesy of Wikimedia

Minnelli stole the show. Liza May Minnelli; 1972 by Alan Pappe. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery; gift of Time magazine

In the film version, the role of Sally Bowles is played by Liza Minnelli, whose strengths as a singer and dancer are reflected in her Oscar-winning portrayal; in the film, Sally Bowles has become an American and is a good deal more talented than any actual Kit Kat Klub entertainer would ever have been. In addition to her show-stopping performance of the title song, Minnelli-Bowles sings such evocative Kander and Ebb works as “Maybe This Time” and, in a duet with Joel Grey, “The Money Song.” She also dazzles in the churning choreography Bob Fosse devised for her.

The Library of Congress selected Cabaret for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1995, deeming it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The newly-restored DVD was made possible after 1,000 feet of damaged film was repaired through the process of hand-painting with a computer stylus.

This restoration is being spotlighted at the National Museum of American History’s Warner Theatre over the Oscar weekend. With his donated Emcee costume displayed onstage, Joel Grey will be interviewed by entertainment curator Dwight Bowers on February 22.  As the lights go down and the film begins, the theater will be filled with Grey’s legendary Emcee bidding everyone, “Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!/ Im Cabaret, Au Cabaret, To Cabaret!”

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery.

A regular contributor to Around the Mall, Amy Henderson covers the best of pop culture from her view at the National Portrait Gallery. She recently wrote about Bangs and other bouffant hairstyles and Downton Abbey.

Barack and Michelle Obama walk down Pennsylvania Avenue together on Inauguration day, 2013. Photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House

When Michelle Obama debuted her new hairstyle for the inauguration, her “bangs” stole the show. Even seasoned broadcasters spent a surprising amount of time chattering about the First Lady’s new look. In all fairness, there was also much speculation about the president’s graying hair—but that was chalked up to the rigors of office rather than a deliberate decision about style.

“Bangs” first made headlines nearly a century ago when the wildly popular ballroom dancer Irene Castle bobbed her hair. Castle and her husband Vernon were the Fred-and-Ginger of the 1910s and became famous for making “social dancing” a respectable pursuit for genteel audiences. They were embraced as society’s darlings and opened a dance school near the Ritz Hotel, teaching the upper crust how to waltz, foxtrot, and dance a one-step called “the Castle Walk.”

Irene Foote Castle by Bardon Adolph de Meyer. Photogravure, 1919. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Irene Castle became a vibrant symbol of the “New Woman”—youthful, energetic, and unfettered. She was a fashion trendsetter, and when she cut off her hair in 1915, her “bob” created a fad soon mimicked by millions. Magazines ran articles asking, “To Bob or Not to Bob,” and Irene Castle herself contributed essays about the “wonderful advantages in short hair.” (Although in the Ladies Home Journal in 1921 she wondered if it would work well with gray hair, asking “will it not seem a bit kittenish and not quite dignified?”)

The “bob” suited free-spirited flappers of the 1920s: it reflected women’s changing and uncorseted role in the decade following the passage of woman’s suffrage. In 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” evoked this transformation by describing how a quiet young girl suddenly morphed into a vamp after her hair was bobbed.  In years before women had their own hair salons, they flocked to barber shops to be shorn: in New York, barbers reported lines snaking far outside their doors as 2,000 women a day clamored to be fashionable.

Silent film stars, America’s new cultural icons of the 1920s, helped feed the rage for chopped hair.  Three stars became particular icons of the flapper look:  Colleen Moore is credited with helping to define the look in her 1923 film Flaming Youth; by 1927 she was said to be America’s top box office attraction, making $12,500 a week. Clara Bow was another bobbed-hair screen star said to personify the Roaring Twenties: in 1927, she starred as the prototypic, uninhibited flapper in It. Louise Brooks was also credited with embodying the flapper: Her trademarks in such films as Pandora’s Box were her bobbed hair and a rebellious attitude about women’s traditional roles.

Colleen Moore by Batiste Madalena. Gouache over graphite poster, 1928. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Clara Gordon Bow by Alfred Cheney Johnston. Gelatin silver print, 1927. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

First Ladies Lou Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, and Mamie Eisenhower made few headlines with their hairstyles—although it is true that Mrs. Eisenhower sported bangs. But when Jacqueline Kennedy became First Lady in 1961, the media went mad over her bouffant hairstyle.

When the Kennedys attended the Washington premiere of Irving Berlin’s new musical Mr. President in September 1962 at the National Theatre, journalist Helen Thomas wrote how “First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy—a devotee of the Parisian ‘pastiche’ hair-piece—is going to see a lot of other women wearing the glamorous superstructured evening coiffures at the premiere.”  Mrs. Kennedy had adopted the bouffant look in the 1950s under the tutelage of master stylist Michel Kazan, who had an A-List salon on East 55^th Street in New York. In 1960 Kazan sent three photographs of Mrs. Kennedy en bouffant  to Vogue magazine, and the rage began. His protégé, Kenneth Battelle, was Mrs. Kennedy’s personal hair stylist during her years in the White House, and helped maintain “the Jackie look” of casual elegance.

Jacqueline Kennedy, 1961. Photo by Mark Shaw, courtesy of Wikimedia

In the 50 years since Mrs. Kennedy left the White House, First Lady coifs have rarely been subjected to much hoopla, so the advent of Michelle Obama’s bangs unleashed decades of pent-up excitement.  In a January 17th New York Times article on “Memorable Clips,” Marisa Meltzer wrote that “Sometimes the right haircut at the right moment has the power to change lives and careers.” The Daily Herald reported that obsessive media attention was sparked only after the president himself called his wife’s bangs “the most significant event of this weekend.”  One celebrity hairstylist was quoted as saying, “Bangs have always been there, but they are clearly having a moment right now,” adding that “Mrs. Obama is really being modern and fashion-forward. We haven’t had a fashion-forward first lady like this since Jackie Kennedy.”

Fashion-forward is a concept I find fascinating, both because “fashion and identity” is a topic that intrigues me as a cultural historian, and also because it entails one of my favorite sports—shopping.  And when it comes to the corollary topic “bobbed hair and bangs,” I feel totally in-the-moment:  last summer, I asked my hairstylist to give me a “duck-tail bob.”  He is Turkish, and I had a difficult time translating that for him until his partner explained that the word in Turkish that came closest was “chicken-butt.” His face lighted up, and he gave me a wonderful haircut.  I told him I would make a great sign for his window –“Home of the World Famous Chicken-Butt Haircut.”

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery

A regular contributor to Around the Mall, Amy Henderson covers the best of pop culture from her view at the National Portrait Gallery. She recently wrote about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ball and Downton Abbey.

Scene from the 2012 film Anna Karenina.

Inaugural fever is sweeping Washington, D.C. The “Official Inauguration Store” is now open down the block from the National Portrait Gallery, parade viewing stands have been constructed along Pennsylvania Avenue, and street vendors are hawking T-shirts and buttons that bark out the coming spectacle. The Inauguration Committee expects 40,000 people at the two official inaugural balls that will be held in city’s cavernous Convention Center.

At the Portrait Gallery, I decided to soak up some of this festive spirit by imagining the inaugural ball held for Abraham Lincoln on the building’s top floor in 1865. The museum was originally built as the U.S. Patent Office, and its north wing was a vast space deemed perfect to house the grand celebration for Lincoln’s second inauguration.

Earlier, the space had served a very different purpose as a hospital for Civil War soldiers wounded at Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Poet Walt Whitman, who worked as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Patent Office Building, had been an orderly who treated these soldiers. The night of the inaugural ball, he wrote in his diary, “I have been up to look at the dance and supper rooms. . . and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view since fill’d with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war. . .” Now, for the ball, he recorded that the building was filling up with “beautiful women, perfumes, the violins’ sweetness, the polka and the waltz.”

J Goldsborough Bruff created this invitation for Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. Courtesy of the American Art Museum

Engraved invitations were given to dignitaries while public tickets, admitting a gentleman and two ladies, were sold for $10. The day of the ball, according to Margaret Leech’s evocative Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865, the building bustled with preparations for the big event: a ticket office was set up in the rotunda, and the ballroom band rehearsed while gas jets were strung from the ceiling in the north wing to provide lighting. Workers were draping the walls with American flags and a raised dais was built for the presidential party and furnished with blue and gold sofas.

As I walked the path inaugural guests took to the ballroom, I appreciated the special challenge facing women in hoop-skirted gowns as they negotiated the grand staircase. At the top, people would have entered the ornate Model Hall, with its stained glass dome and gilded friezes, and then promenaded down the south hall past cabinets filled with patent models. Early in the evening, guests were serenaded by military music from Lillie’s Finley Hospital Band; after ten, the ballroom band signaled the official beginning of the festivities by playing a quadrille.

Just before 11 p.m., the military band struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the President and Mrs. Lincoln entered the hall and took their seats on the dais. Lincoln was dressed in a plain black suit and white kid gloves, but Mrs. Lincoln sparkled in a dress of rich white silk with a lace shawl, a headdress of white Jessamine and purple violets, and a fan trimmed in ermine and silver spangles.

Standing in what is today called the “Lincoln Gallery,” I found the vision of the 1865 spectacle elusive and hazy. Victorian culture had strict rules for everything, and the etiquette governing waltzes, schottisches, reels, and polkas was as carefully codified as knowing the proper fork to use at a formal dinner. It seemed a tough way to have a good time.

An 1865 engraving of Lincoln’s second inaugural ball held at the Patent Office. Courtesy of the American Art Museum

And what did the ball actually look like? Engravings of the event exist, but there are no photographs–and how could static images convey this spectacle’s electric sense of excitement? Moving images weren’t invented by the 1860s, but even later, movie re-creations of Civil War-era balls fared little better. Both Jezebel (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939) use ball scenes to capture the idea of fundamental codes being flaunted: in Jezebel, Bette Davis’s character stuns the ballroom by appearing in a brazen red dress rather than the white expected of someone of her unmarried status; in GWTW, Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett—a recent war widow—shocks the guests by dancing a Virginian Reel with Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler. In each case, a highly-synchronized choreography shows people dancing beautifully across the ballroom floor. But the Hollywood vision is about as emotionally charged as porcelain figures gliding around the surface of a music box.

It wasn’t until I saw the new film Anna Karenina that I felt the dynamism that must have fueled a Victorian ball. Tolstoy published the novel in serial form between 1873 and 1877, setting it in the aristocratic world of Imperial Russia. The 2012 film directed by Joe Wright is a richly stylized, highly theatrical version envisioned as “a ballet with words.” Washington Post dance critic Sarah Kaufman has evocatively described the ball scene where Anna and Vronsky first dance, noting how their “elbows and forearms dip and entwine like the necks of courting swans.” For Kaufman, the movie’s choreography created a world “of piercing, intensified feeling.”

The Lincoln inaugural ball may have lacked a dramatic personal encounter such as Anna and Vronsky’s, but the occasion was used by Lincoln to express the idea of reconciliation. While he walked to the dais with House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, Mrs. Lincoln was escorted by Senator Charles Sumner, who had fought the president’s reconstruction plan and was considered persona non grata at the White House. In a clear display of what is today called “optics,” Lincoln wanted to show publicly that there was no breach between the two of them, and had sent Sumner a personal note of invitation to the ball.

The 4,000 ball-goers then settled in for a long and happy evening of merry-making. As Charles Robertson describes in Temple of Invention, the Lincolns greeted friends and supporters until midnight, when they went to the supper room and headed a large banquet table filled with oyster and terrapin stews, beef a l’anglais, veal Malakoff, turkeys, pheasants, quail, venison, ducks, ham, and lobsters, and ornamental pyramids of desserts, cakes, and ice cream. Although the president and his wife left about 1:30 a.m., other revelers stayed on and danced until dawn.

After nearly five years of a terrible war, Lincoln hoped that his inaugural ball would mark a new beginning. He also understood that for nations as well as for individuals, there were times to pause and celebrate the moment.

As I wrapped up my recreated vision of the ball and left the Lincoln Gallery, I smiled and whispered, “Cheers!”

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery

A regular contributor to Around the Mall, Amy Henderson covers the best of pop culture from her view at the National Portrait Gallery. She recently wrote about Downton Abbey and dreams of a White Christmas, as well as Kathleen Turner and the Diana Vreeland.

Shirley MacLaine makes her debut as Martha Levinson this Sunday in “Downton Abbey.” Photo courtesy of NBCUniversal/Carnival Films

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery is a regular contributor to Around the Mall

Silver polished? Feathers fluffed? Good—then like me,  you are properly primed to receive the opening salvos of “Downton Abbey“’s third season, which begins airing on PBS this Sunday, January 6.

The hugely popular soap opera froths over this year when Shirley MacLaine arrives with the subtlety of a blunderbuss. MacLaine portrays Martha Levinson, the social climbing New York mother of Lady Cora who, as one of the American “Dollar Princesses,” had injected her substantial money into marriage with the Earl of Grantham at the turn of the 20th-century. Alas, by season three, time has passed and that fortune has dwindled to the point where the privileged life of Downton Abbey is threatened.

Enter Shirley MacLaine’s Martha Levinson, a character variously described as “rich,” “crass” and “brassy.” Most delicious of all is that she is a worthy sparring partner to Dame Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess, Violet Grantham.

The stage is set even before the American mother arrives, when the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) says to Lady Cora at dinner, “I’m so looking forward to seeing your mother again. When I’m with her, I’m reminded of the virtues of the English.” Handsome young Matthew innocently asks, “But isn’t she American?” To which the Countess says, “Exactly.”  (Bada-bing!)

Of her role, MacLaine says: “The gunfight at the OK Corral does not happen between Maggie and me. We do a little sparring, we have our moments but it’s more sophisticated than that. Martha is not just a crass, cranky American coming in there to call a spade a spade. She’s very smart and to a large extent sensitive as to what’s going on with all her daughter’s children. And Maggie’s character is so well established but you have to look beyond what is her expected reaction to Martha. The Dowager Countess is a human being who has complications and a past of some pain that Martha understands – and to some extent addresses herself to.”

The pairing of these two legendary Oscar-winning actresses allows series writer Julian Fellowes to depict the enormous social change wrenching the class structure of 1920s British life: for Fellowes, Dame Maggie’s Countess represents the entrenchment of “class,” while MacLaine’s Levinson heralds the democracy of “crass.”

Shirley MacLaine by Gordon Munro, 1984. Photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Poster America

As it happens, Shirley MacLaine and Maggie Smith have known one another for more than 40 years, although they had never before worked together. Both were born in 1934, and both had extensive careers on stage and screen. Maggie Smith made her stage debut in 1952, and early in her career appeared in both musical comedies and drama. Her best known stage roles include her Tony-winning performance in Lettice and Lovage, as well as notable Shakespearean performances as Queen Elizabeth, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and a revival of Noel Coward’s  Private Lives.  Her classic screen performances have included The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Room with a View, Gosford Park, all of the Harry Potter films, and 2012’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet.  Queen Elizabeth II appointed her a Dame Commander in the 1990 New Year Honours.

Like Smith, MacLaine has had a diverse and colorful career. She grew up in Arlington, Virginia, with her younger brother Warren Beatty, and studied dance at the Washington School of Ballet.  During the golden age of 1950s stage musicals, she symbolized the prototypical Broadway baby who vaulted to fame while waiting in the wings. She was the understudy for dancing great Carol Haney, the star of the 1954 smash hit The Pajama Game. When Haney was injured, Shirley went on in her place, performed brilliantly, and—just like in every chorus girl’s dreams—“came back a star.”

Shirley MacLaine by Bob Willoughby, 1959. Photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bob Willoughby

Her winning gamine personality put her in high demand in Hollywood as well, and she starred in two of Billy Wilder’s classic 1950s movies, The Apartment and Irma la Douce, earning Best Actress Golden Globes for each. At the same time, she headlined a Las Vegas cabaret act and for a while ran with Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. Renowned as a dancer, she continued to kick up her heels in such films as Can Can and Sweet Charity. Among the Portrait Gallery’s images of MacLaine  is a thoughtful 1959 Bob Willoughby photograph of her resting backstage while filming Can Can. The museum also has an exuberant Gordon Munro photograph that captures the high-stepping dancer in her 1984 show, Shirley MacLaine on Broadway. But she turned increasingly to drama, and in 1983 received the Best Actress Oscar for her stirring performance in Terms of Endearment. For her remarkably varied work on screen, the American Film Institute awarded her its Life Achievement Award in 2012.

Along the way, MacLaine has been known for her outspoken views. When she won her Oscar, she exclaimed, “I deserve this!” She has also written several memoirs outlining her beliefs in spiritualism and UFO encounters, and readily admits, “People think I’m nuts.”

She had never paid attention to “Downton Abbey” until she was approached to join the cast, and she may seem an eccentric choice. But after all, it is an eccentric role, and MacLaine’s energized personality helped bring the brassy Martha Levinson character to life. In an interview with The Daily Beast, MacLaine said that what she admired most about the series was that “It was extraordinarily artful and I thought, ‘Whoa, we’re making a painting!’”

MacLaine’s movie career has been rejuvenated as she approaches her 80th birthday. Currently, she is filming the love story Elsa and Fred with Christopher Plummer, and there are four more potential films on tap. She is suitably grateful to “Downton Abbey“, and has said that her favorite scene was one she herself suggested to writer Julian Fellowes—an improbable scene in which she serenades the Dowager Countess by singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” When this scene was explained to Dame Maggie, that world-class scene stealer raised her eyebrows and said, “You know what I’m going to do, dear.  I’m going to fall off the chair when you start singing.”

Fasten your seatbelts!

The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson recently dreamed about a White Christmas and has written about Kathleen Turner and the Diana Vreeland.

Actor Bing Crosby, Actresses Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, and Actor Danny Kaye, during the 1954 Paramount production of “White Christmas.” Underwood & Underwood/Corbis

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery is a regular contributor to Around the Mall

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,

Just like the ones I used to know.

Where the treetops glisten and children listen

To hear sleigh bells in the snow

“White Christmas” launched a revolution. Before this Irving Berlin song topped the charts in October 1942, the airwaves between Halloween and December 25 did not blare relentlessly with Christmas carols. Thanksgiving served as a quiet bystander rather than as the clamorous launch for THE HOLIDAYS!  It was a more innocent time.

Nor was songwriter Berlin the obvious composer for this Christmas classic.  His boyhood had been less than idyllic: in 1893, five-year-old Israel Baline immigrated with his Russian Jewish family and settled on the Lower East Side. As a youngster, he was sent out to earn money for the family. He hawked newspapers on the street and worked as a singing waiter—there was no time to deck the halls with boughs of holly.

But decades later, while sitting beside a pool in sunny California and writing songs for his upcoming 1942 movie Holiday Inn, Irving Berlin conjured up the classic Christmas atmosphere of his dreams. The song’s original opening bars set the scene:

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The orange and palm trees sway.

There’s never been such a day

In Beverly Hills, L.A.

But it’s December the twenty-fourth,—

And I am longing to be up North….

From top to bottom: a portrait of Berlin by Samuel Johnson Woolf 1944, a drawing of Bing Crosby by Henry Major, c. 1930s, and a 1925 caricature of Berlin by Miguel Covarrubias. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

He had already composed “Easter Parade” and other “holiday” songs for the film, and was looking for a boffo finale that would serve as the movie’s high point. According to Berlin biographer Laurence Bergreen, the song had to have the same kind of impact that his iconic hit “God Bless America” had earned: it had to be great.

Nostalgic for the imagined Christmas of his youth, Berlin created lyrics describing the perfect holiday that everyone yearned for—a white Christmas that was merry and bright. Dwight Blocker Bowers, the Smithsonian’s curator of entertainment at the National Museum of American History and a Berlin expert, told me that the songwriter—who couldn’t read music and played piano mostly on the black keys—had his secretary write down the lyrics as he sang them.

According to Bowers, Berlin wrote about his own longing for a mythic past that was certainly never a part of his tenement upbringing. The song, released in the early days of wartime America, also fed into strong nationalistic sentiments about ideals of “home and hearth.”

Berlin knew as soon as he wrote it that he had created something special, something that was possibly “the best popular song ever.”

He was right. Before “White Christmas,” Bowers explained, most Christmas songs were liturgical; with this song, Berlin created a popular idiom—and industry!— for secular holiday hymns. Bolstered by wartime sentimentality, “White Christmas” found a mass market that brought the idea of holiday entertainment into the mainstream.

Bing Crosby gave the song its first public performance December 25, 1941, on his highly-rated NBC radio show. The movie Holiday Inn, which starred Crosby and Fred Astaire, was released in 1942, and from October through the New Year, “White Christmas” headed the Hit Parade and Billboard charts. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and, with 50 million copies sold worldwide, is credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the most popular single recording of all time.

For Bowers, the song’s success resulted from its ability to be both timely and timeless. Berlin had a wonderful feel for the popular pulse, and he knew that wartime America longed for links that would connect people as a community. The beauty of “White Christmas” was that it made an ideal shared past (however mythic) accessible to all.

In 2012, our disparate cultural community bares little resemblance to the shared mainstream idealized 70 years ago. Life today is so highly-individualized that few markets focus on group sentiments, whether in movies, art, sports, or perhaps especially in music.

But we all still sing along to “White Christmas.”

The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson recently wrote about Kathleen Turner and the Diana Vreeland.

Read more articles about the holidays in our Smithsonian Holiday Guide here

Academy Award and Tony Award nominee Kathleen Turner will be speaking Monday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. at the American Indian Museum’s Rasmuson Theater. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Associates

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery is a regular contributor to Around the Mall

The liveliest 80 minutes of theater in Washington this fall belongs to Kathleen Turner’s one-woman show at Arena Stage, “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.” It’s a rollicking, loving, and feisty celebration of the wit and witticism of political journalist and commentator Molly Ivins.

As you might guess from the title, this show contrasts vividly with such earlier one-person shows as Julie Harris’s genteel “Belle of Amherst” (Emily Dickinson), or Hal Holbrook’s story-telling performance as Mark Twain.  Here, the star does not wear a shawl or a white linen suit, but struts onstage in denim and red cowboy boots. She does not narrate from a rocking chair like Dickinson, nor address the audience center stage as Twain did. Rather, she pronounces with feet propped up on her desk or sitting cross-legged on the floor.  She only speaks softly when purring rapier witticisms, and often roars with laughter.

Born into an oil-rich Texas family and educated at Smith, Molly Ivins launched her career as a political journalist with The Texas Observer in the 1970s. She called Texas “reporter heaven” and particularly enjoyed piercing the pomposity of the state legislators who roosted in the Austin capital: “Can you believe,” she once asked, “that God gave me all this material for free?”  She gained a national reputation writing op-ed pieces and features for The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as speaking on the lecture circuit; her column was syndicated in more than 400 newspapers. She worked for the New York Times from 1976-1982 (she considered her obituary of Elvis Presley her highpoint there), and then for the Dallas Times Herald, where she once happily outraged readers by saying of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”

In an interview conducted this week at Arena Stage, Ms. Turner told me that she explicitly wanted to do this show in the nation’s capital during the fall campaign to beat the drums for Molly Ivins’s essential message: “Get involved, citizens!  Beloveds, do not sit back!”

Her performance takes unabashed aim at rallying the troops. An activist and advocate for women’s issues herself, Turner has been delighted by the enthusiastic audience response she has received for the play’s populist pronouncements. She clearly relishes unleashing rolling cascades of Ivins’ irreverence, whether capturing a Texas pol in the cross-hairs or verbally smacking the president that Ivins nicknamed “Dubya” and “Shrub.”

A standout within the pantheon of American wit, Mark Twain once wrote, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Samuel Clemens / Edwin Larson / Oil on canvas, 1935. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

I began our interview by explaining that, like her living portrait of Ivins, the Portrait Gallery focuses on works of art that narrate “visual biography.”  I wondered how creating a living portrait differed from shaping a fictional role on stage, and she said it really didn’t—the acting preparation is similar.  In the Spencer Tracy tradition (“know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture”), she also emphasized, “No ad libbing!!”

During her stay in Washington, Ms. Turner has visited the Portrait Gallery, so I linked the museum to my next question. The Gallery originally had a policy to collect portraits of the seminal figures of the American story, only after they had been dead for ten years. Now, the Gallery includes contemporary figures; and I wondered how portraying a contemporary figure like Molly Ivins on the stage compared with creating historic personalities like Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain. Turner acknowledged that there was a difference, but that it mainly involved distinguishing a character made familiar by the immediacy of today’s media, rather than one known only from secondary accounts.

In creating the show, Ms. Turner worked closely with the playwrights, twin sisters Margaret Engle and Allison Engel. Their research involved sifting through hundreds of Molly Ivins’s columns, several of her books, and studying her regular appearances as a commentator on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Turner also was fortunate enough to meet Ivins herself, once in the company of Ivins’s great friend Anne Richards.

Ivins died at 62 of breast cancer, but her final column was a recognizable rouser: “We are the people who run this country,” she reminded her readers. “We are the deciders.” At the end of our interview, I asked Ms. Turner what she thought was most significant about Molly Ivins. Her response was lightning fast:  “Her belief in the CITIZEN!”

Amy Henderson interviews Kathleen Turner 10/10/12 at Arena Stage.

Tickets are sold out to the Smithsonian Associates  “A Red-Hot Evening with Kathleen Turner” on Monday, October, 15 at 7 p.m., but a wait list for tickets is available. The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson recently wrote about Diana Vreeland and Walter Cronkite. 

Diana Vreeland brought a unique perspective to the fashion world. Courtesy DianaVreeland.com

Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery is a regular contributor to Around the Mall

Forget spectacular leaf colors and cooler temperatures:  it’s the onset of “Fashion Week” in September that announces the Fall Season.  Like new seasons in music, theater, dance, and art, Fashion Week signals a fresh start. What is new and wonderful? How shall we invent ourselves this time?  Demure and understated? Flashy but chic? Undecided?

In addition to being a favorite sport for clothes hounds, fashion is a hot topic in the culture world these days. Project Runway has legions of fans. Yet, fashion is also emerging as a resonant topic in the museum world. Such high-visibility exhibitions as “Aware: Art Fashion Identity” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2010, and the Costume Institute’s 2010 show, “American Women: Fashioning a National Identity,” as well as its 2011, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” have placed fashion center-stage in contemporary explorations of identity.

Fashion Week first premiered in 1943, the brainchild of advertising maven Eleanor Lambert. The media-savvy Lambert, whose clients included Jackson Pollock and Isamu Noguchi, had helped found the Museum of Modern Art. But her greatest passion was fashion. In 1940 she created the “International Best Dressed List” (which she would curate for decades), and in the midst of World War II, she decided it was time to de-throne Paris and declare America’s fashion pre-eminence by launching Fashion Week in New York.

Diana Vreeland by Richard Ely Crayon, ink and gouache on paper 1989 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © Richard Ely

At the same time, Diana Vreeland was emerging as a force of nature at Harper’s Bazaar. Editor Carmel Snow hired her in 1936, and she quickly made a name for herself with her column “Why Don’t You?”  These outings were wildly eccentric, with Vreeland cheerfully asking such questions as, “Why don’t you…rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne, as they do in France?. . .(and) twist her pigtails around her ears like macaroons?”

During the war, Vreeland became a great promoter of American designers. Writing about the launch of Fashion Week in 1943, she extolled the “integrity and talent of American designers.”  Rather than Parisian couture, she argued that the dominant style had become American, with exciting new designers standing for “American style, and the American way of life.”

Vreeland’s unblinking eye paid attention to everything that surrounded her—sartorial, literary, artistic. For her, attitude and gesture were key:  “You gotta have style. . . .It’s a way of life. Without it, you’re nobody.”  She put her stamp on every part of the magazine, choosing the clothes, overseeing the photography and working with the models. “I know what they’re going to wear before they wear it, what they’re going to eat before they eat it, (and) I know where they’re going before it’s even there!”

Photographer Richard Avedon, who collaborated with her for nearly 40 years, said “Diana lived for imagination ruled by discipline and created a totally new profession. She invented the fashion editor. Before her, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies.” With Vreeland, the focus shifted from social class to personality: “ravishing personalities,” she enthused, “are the most riveting things in the world—conversation, people’s interests, the atmosphere that they create round them.”

In her 26 years at Harper’s Bazaar (1936-62) and her near-decade at Vogue (1962-71), Vreeland conveyed her visionary sense of style through remarkable photographs.  At Bazaar, she collaborated notably with Louise Dahl-Wolfe on such historic shoots as the January 1942 resort fashion story shot at architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arizona house “Ship Rock”—in which Vreeland herself appeared as a model—and the March 1943 cover that introduced a then-unknown Lauren Bacall, who was consequently whisked away to Hollywood to co-star with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not.

Vreeland—who always spoke in superlatives—established a distinctive look that exhorted her readers to be bold, brave and imaginative: “fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world,” she once declared.  “If it’s not there in fashion, fantasize it!”

When she left Vogue in 1971, she mused, “I was only 70. What was I supposed to do, retire?” Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Hoving invited her to become Special Consultant to the Met’s Costume Institute, and she quickly embarked on creating a 3-D fantasy world that wasn’t confined by a magazine spread. Lights, props, music and stage sets were all rolled out to create exhibitions that celebrated subjects ranging from the Ballets Russes to Balenciaga.  Her shows were enormously popular sources of inspiration for contemporary audiences, and revitalized the Costume Institute. Before her death in 1989, Vreeland curated 14 exhibitions and successfully campaigned for the acceptance of “fashion as high art”—the idea that garments were as masterful as such traditional artworks as painting and sculpture.

In her 1980 book Allure, Vreeland dared people to live with passion and imagination.  One’s creativity had to be in constant motion, she argued, because “The eye has to travel.”  I asked Ricki Peltzman, owner of Washington’s  Upstairs on 7^th boutique and a recognized fashion curator, to assess Vreeland’s lasting impact on fashion. “Fashion is about style. It’s personal. Every day we show the world how we feel without having to say a word. And no one said it better than Diana Vreeland.”

The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson recently wrote about Walter Cronkite and the Olympic athletes.

National Portrait Gallery curator Amy Henderson is a regular guest contributor to Around the Mall.

Who do you trust?

In 1972, an Oliver Quayle Research survey reported that CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite was the “most trusted man in America”—more trusted than anyone else in public life, although, that’s not including such 1970s pop stars as Cher or Paul Newman.

Trust. Today, it is an eye-popping notion that a network newsperson would have that kind of status. How many of us even watch nightly network news? The Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism reports that between 1980 and 2011, the three commercial networks lost 28.4 million nightly news viewers, or 54.5 percent of their audience. Does Swanson still make TV dinners? Do people even know what a Swanson TV dinner is?

The man embraced by postwar audiences as “Uncle Walter” is the subject of historian Douglas Brinkley’s new biography, Cronkite. It is a richly detailed chronicle of a media figure who both personified his era and who radiated an unblinking authenticity in years before “trust-but-verify” became the nation’s cultural watchword.

During World War II, Cronkite was a war correspondent for United Press International. He was not one of the “boys” Edward R. Murrow nurtured to prominence during the war, but instead he joined CBS in 1950 and distinguished himself by covering the first televised political conventions in 1952. Brinkley writes that Cronkite was tagged the first national “anchor” when the CBS press office needed a word to describe what he would be doing at the conventions. They decided to say “he is going to anchor for us,” and from then on he was routinely referred to as their “anchorman.”

The museum’s portrait of Walter Leland Cronkite by Robert Vickrey, 1966. courtesy of NPG/SI; gift of Time magazine, © Robert Vickrey

The “cool medium” proved a highly-receptive stage for Cronkite’s calm and reassuring personality, and his on-air convention coverage helped make television a major influence in American politics. Cronkite was also a riveting storyteller. He could hold his audiences’ attention for sometimes as long as seven hours at a stretch. Brinkley enthuses, “Cronkite blazed like a meteor,” and just as Murrow “had linked Great Britain to America with his voice during the Second World War, Cronkite brought the Chicago conventions into the living rooms of America.” Few Americans had ever been to a political convention, and now watched enthralled as the avuncular Cronkite demystified the machinations of convention politics.

For the next 30 years, Walter Cronkite reigned as an iconic broadcast news personality. Compared to today’s media mash-up of raucous 24/7 competition. Cronkite was a pioneer in a time when “the broadcast media” consisted of just the three commercial television networks—NBC, CBS and ABC and television was just finding its way into American households—in 1950 only 11 percent of American families had one, but by 1960, 88 percent did. Cronkite was there as the medium recast the American political landscape to fit its visual demands: how did a candidate “look” on TV? What “image” did the small screen transmit into people’s living rooms?

Looking back, it is amazing how networks were once pinioned for “monopolizing” news reporting: unlike today, the issue 50 years ago wasn’t about network political affiliation or persuasion, but about the exclusive power held by the three major networks. In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White quoted journalist Walter Lippmann warning how the Big Three endangered freedom of the press by monopolizing the dissemination of broadcast news—a mind-boggling concept in 2012.

Of course, we all know how the story goes. Fissures in the broadcast news monopoly began appearing in 1980 with the formation of CNN as the first 24-hour news network. Over the next few decades, the exponential growth of cable and Internet outlets transformed news delivery from a system that “broadcast” to a large, mainstream audience, into a vast web of “narrowcast” channels focused on audiences with niche interests.

Television news today is a world that lacks, and perhaps, doesn’t need a “Walter Cronkite.” The nation experienced vast political and social changes under his 30-year watch, from landing a man on the moon, to the assassination of a sitting president, to the war in Vietnam. His clout was such that when he reported from Vietnam in 1968 that the war was “a stalemate,” President Lyndon Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

The year Cronkite was chosen “most trusted” was the year a bungled burglary at the Watergate changed the trust landscape forever. At the same time, technologies were expanding audience access to an exploding multiplicity of channels. New access meant new rituals: there is little demand today for the TV dinners of the 1950s and Cronkite’s signature signoff—“and that’s the way it is.” But in all fairness, there was little demand back then for baby arugula or Greek yogurt.

The loss of the evening news ritual is partly the result of a democratic hunger for information. Unfiltered and 24/7, media is an unmediated cosmos.

Today, who do we trust? We trust the person holding the smart phone, the iPad, the remote—the person facing the screen, not the one beaming back at us.  And that’s the way it is.

View several portraits of the famous newscaster at the National Portrait Gallery, including one with astronaut John Glenn and journalist Daniel Ellsberg.

Guest blogger and Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson

This post is part of our ongoing series in which ATM invites guest bloggers from among the Smithsonian Institution’s scientists, curators, researchers and historians to write for us. The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson recently wrote about new technologies and the 1940 Census.

With the 2012 Summer Olympics opening in London on July 27^th, I decided to explore the Portrait Gallery’s images to see what historic or current Olympians we have in our collections. What I discovered was a fascinating group of very different characters connected only by their supreme athletic excellence.

First, some Olympics background: the modern Olympics were reconstituted in Athens in 1896, with fourteen nations and 241 athletes competing in forty-three events. After being occasionally interrupted in the 20^th century by disorganization and war, the Summer Olympics today are held every four years. For the XXX Olympiad in London this summer, an estimated 204 countries and 10,500 athletes will compete in 26 sports.

Duke Kahanamoku, pictured here circa 1915, helped popularize surfing on the mainland and won several Olympic medals for swimming. Photo courtesy the National Portrait Gallery.

The Portrait Gallery’s earliest Olympian is Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968, right), a Hawaiian swimmer who helped popularize the sport of surfing, both in Hawaii and on the mainland. From 1912 to 1924, he won three gold and two silver Olympic medals in swimming. He lived in Southern California in these years, working as a character actor in Hollywood movie studios and surfing on his long, pine surfboard.

Sports in 1920s America flourished in a “golden age,” notably in swimming, tennis, golf, baseball, and boxing. One of the most famous American swimmers was Gertrude Ederle (1905-2003), who competed in the 1924 Summer Olympics and won a gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle relay team and bronze for the 100-meter and 400-meter freestyle races. Ederle would win lasting fame two years later as the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Two works in the collection commemorate this athlete: a 1925 photograph of her with her swim gear and a 1963 oil painting.

One of the key figures in women’s tennis was Helen Wills Moody (1905-1998), who dominated U.S. courts between the wars. Numerous photographs in the gallery capture her on the court and a 1936 terra cotta bust of Moody demonstrates why she was nicknamed “Little Miss Poker Face.” She won 31 Grand Slam titles, including seven singles titles at the U.S. Championships, eight at Wimbledon, and four at the French Championships. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, she captured gold medals in women’s singles and doubles. These Olympics marked the last time tennis was an Olympic sport until 1988.

Legendary sprinter Jesse Owens not only competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics despite Hitler’s wish to use the games as Aryan propaganda, but he also won four gold medals and broke several world records. Photo by Leni Riefenstahl, National Portrait Gallery.

An extraordinary image in our Olympian collection is Leni Riefenstahl’s photograph of American track and field star Jesse Owens (1913-1980) at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Riefenstahl was commissioned by Hitler to film the Olympics to promote “Aryan racial superiority.” But when Owens became the most successful athlete of the Olympics, he couldn’t be ignored. He had been a star of college competitions, and in Berlin generated international headlines by winning four gold Olympic medals—one each in the 100-meters, 200-meters, the long jump, and as part of the relay team. Riefenstahl’s still photograph of the African-American champion is a remarkable document of his personal “triumph of the will.”

In more modern decades, the Gallery’s Summer Olympics collection continues to represent track and field champions. Carl Lewis (b. 1961) was a pre-eminent American sprinter and long jumper from 1981 through the mid-1990s, winning ten Olympic medals, including nine gold, in the 100-meter, 200-meter, and long jump events. Two 1984 photographs by Neil Leifer show Lewis celebrating his success, including one picturing the athlete leaping into the air with the Statue of Liberty behind him. He won his last Olympic event in 1996, and in 1999 was voted “Sportsman of the Century” by the International Olympic Committee.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee (b. 1962) was also one of America’s greatest athletes. At the 1984 Olympics, she won a silver medal in the women’s heptathlon; two golds in the heptathlon and women’s long jump in 1988; a gold and a bronze at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992; and a bronze at the 1996 games, which were her final Olympics. A black and white photograph in the collection from that year shows Joyner-Kersee facing away from the camera in contemplation. Sports Illustrated voted her the greatest female athlete of the 20^th century.

Record-breaking Olympian Michael Phelps said, “I’d like to break a record every single time I go out in the water.” Photo by Ryan McGinley, National Portrait Gallery.

The Gallery’s most contemporary Olympic champion is swimmer Michael Phelps, who is competing this summer in London. At the 2004 Olympics in Athens and the 2008 games in Beijing, Phelps won sixteen medals: six gold and two bronze in Athens, and eight gold in Beijing. He was the most successful athlete at both events, and his eight gold medals in 2008 broke U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven-gold record set in 1972.

Like the Olympic athletes competing this summer, the Gallery’s sports figures inspire us with their remarkable stories. For about two weeks in the July and August heat, we’ll happily watch and cheer and be thrilled. Get the popcorn ready!

Guest blogger and Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson

This post is part of our ongoing series in which ATM invites guest bloggers from among the Smithsonian Institution’s scientists, curators, researchers and historians to write for us. The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson last wrote about the real-life stories of American socialites who married into British nobility.

Recently, I gave a talk called “Going Gaga: Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture,” in which I began with George Washington and ended with Lady Gaga. Outrageous? Yes, but early American culture embraced role models who evoked “character,” while later the emergence of a mass media culture shifted our focus to “personality.”

When I give talks like this, people often ask me what characterizes a role model in today’s celebrity culture? Not the notorious figures of tabloid headlines, but iconic figures people want to emulate and who somehow encapsulate “stardom”—movie stars like Gable or Hepburn, dancers like Baryshnikov, rockers like Springsteen. It is a difficult thing to explain, except that we know it when we see it. Last week, for example, I saw the New York City Ballet dance a Gershwin medley with choreography by George Balanchine, and I was transported. Gershwin’s wonderful music and Balanchine’s magical movements transmitted sheer, heart-thumping genius. No other music, nor any other choreography, could have combined to create this unique sense of something extraordinary.

Similarly, when I was growing up my parents played a lot of Louis Armstrong LPs, and even as a child, I understood that Armstrong was “special.” I certainly didn’t know about his role as a pioneering jazz figure then, but I knew I liked the sound of the ebullient personality that came through in his gravelly voice and, of course, in his astonishing trumpet-playing. They would have been overjoyed at the news of a fresh Armstrong recording being discovered and released this spring!

On January 29, 1971, Louis Armstrong played his trumpet in public for what is believed to be his last recorded performance. The occasion was the inauguration of a fellow-Louisianan, Vernon Louviere, as president of the National Press Club. Keeping with a Louisiana theme, Louviere was sworn in holding a bottle of Tabasco sauce instead of a Bible, and the dinner in the Ballroom featured such New Orleans specialties (and Armstrong favorites) as red beans and rice, and seafood gumbo. The evening’s emcee was the witty British television journalist David Frost, newly-knighted by the Queen and popular on both sides of the Atlantic for his high-on-the-radar interview programs.

Louis Armstrong embodied stardom in jazz. Photo courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bob Willoughby © Bob Willoughby

Armstrong’s performance at the black-tie gala was recorded on a limited edition LP of 300 copies. The original liner notes by Ralph de Toledano explained that the 69-year-old jazz legend had been in such poor health that his doctors warned him not to play for more than ten minutes, but the crowd’s warmth and cheers stretched his performance to half an hour. De Toledano reported, “He played, he sang, he scatted.” Joined by longtime band-mates Tyree Glenn and Tommy Gwaltney, he showed no frailty as he rollicked through such favorites as “Rockin’ Chair,” “Hello, Dolly,” “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Mack the Knife,” and a never before recorded “Boy from New Orleans,” a musical autobiography that he sang to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Today, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings made this historic performance widely available. Listen to his rendition of “Hello Dolly” here.

Released as part of the Smithsonian’s 11th annual celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month, “Satchmo at the National Press Club: Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours” is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration involving the Press Club, Folkways, and the Louis Armstrong Foundation. Press Club executive director William McCarren explained that although his organization is known worldwide for news and history, it is also “a venue for music and the arts and a forum for entertainers of all kinds.”  That “one of the world’s great entertainers found his way to our stage. . . is a pleasure to tell,” and the Club was happy to help make this “great gift to the world” available to all.

The album’s subtitle refers to how Armstrong often signed his letters—“Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours.” Nearly three dozen of his favorite Louisiana recipes are included in the recording’s liner notes, as they were in the original pressing. Now, you too can feast on such Armstrong favorites as shrimp mousse, Louisiana caviar, or Walter McIlhenny’s “Frogs a la Creole.”  Where else will you find Armstrong’s version of “Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane Punch” or his real-deal “Sazerac Cocktail”?

Armstrong died five months after his Press Club appearance. This newly-released 58-minute recording includes not only his historic performance, but tracks from a tribute concert that Tyree Glenn and his band performed at the Press Club shortly after Armstrong’s death, featuring such classics as “Mood Indigo” and “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”

The recording will be released on CD and digital download via Folkways as well as through such retailers as iTunes and Amazon.  According to D.A. Sonneborn Armstrong, the associate director of Folkways, the recording has “a wonderful live quality. Armstrong was in fine form that evening. We all wish we could’ve been there, and now we can!”

Guest blogger and Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson

This post is part of our ongoing series in which ATM invites guest bloggers from among the Smithsonian Institution’s scientists, curators, researchers and historians to write for us. Today, the National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson, inspired by the Cora Crawley character on PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” traces the real-life stories of few American socialites who married into British nobility. She last wrote for us about Clint Eastwood’s visit to the National Museum of American History.

In a recent New York Times interview, marking the end of “Downton Abbey’s” second season, series creator Julian Fellowes discusses the Gilded Age “dollar princesses” who were the models for the character of Cora Crawley, the rich American who marries the Earl of Grantham.

“I’ve read all these things,” Fellowes told the Times, “like Cora is supposed to be Mary Leiter. She isn’t really – she’s one of that genus, of which Mary Leiter is a famous example.”

I broke into a wide smile as I realized that Fellowes had given me a slim, but very real academic connection to this wonderfully addictive sudsfest. Just before joining the staff at the Portrait Gallery in 1975, I was hired by Nigel Nicolson to research a biography he was writing of a young Chicago woman who became Vicereine of India at the turn of the 20th century—Mary Leiter Curzon.

Heir to the Marshall Field retail business her father co-founded, Mary Leiter moved with her family to Washington, D.C. in the 1880s. She was an immediate social sensation, a beautiful “swanlike” figure who quickly became close friends with the young first lady Frances Cleveland, wife of Grover Cleveland. Leiter’s social success followed her to London, where she met Lord George Curzon. Married in 1895, she and Curzon moved to Bombay three years later when he was appointed Viceroy of India. Mary’s elevation to Vicereine remains the highest position an American woman has ever held in the British Empire.

Lady Mary Leiter Curzon by Franz Von Lenbach, 1901. Photo courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), bequest of Lady Alexandra Metcalfe

The centerpiece event of the Curzons’ tenure was the 1902 Delhi Durbar, organized to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII. Mary wore an astonishing dress designed by the House of Worth known as “the peacock dress.” The gown was an extravagance of gold cloth embroidered with peacock feathers, and Mary wore it with a huge diamond necklace and a pearl-tipped tiara. One could only imagine the eye-popping reaction of Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (played by Dame Maggie Smith), to such an over-the-top confection floating down Downton’s halls.

Mary Leiter Curzon was one of perhaps 350 wealthy young American women, Fellowes estimates, who married into the cash-poor British aristocracy between 1880 and 1920. Winston Churchill’s mother was an early example. The daughter of a New York financier, Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill in 1874. She has been called the forerunner of the wealthy American women who came to England in the late 19th century to marry titles—a species novelist Edith Wharton immortalized in The Buccaneers. Jennie was remarkably lovely, and her portrait was in high demand because of her status as one of the era’s leading “PB’s,” or “professional beauties.” According to Consuelo Vanderbilt, “Her grey eyes sparkled with the joy of living and when, as was often the case, her anecdotes were risqué it was with her eyes as well as her words that one could read the implications.”

Jennie Jerome Churchill by Herbert Barraud, c. 1895, courtesy of NPG

The vivacious Jennie had numerous affairs that included even the Prince of Wales, and embraced the idea that living well was the best revenge: “We owe something to extravagance,” she pronounced, “for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.”

Another of the famous “dollar princesses” was Nancy Langhorne, a renowned Virginia-born beauty. While her sister Irene married Charles Dana Gibson and became a prototype for the Gibson Girl, Nancy moved to England, where she was sought after socially for her wit as well as her money. In 1879, she married William Waldorf Astor, who had also been born in the United States, but had moved to London as a child and been brought up in the manner (and manor) of the English aristocracy. After their marriage, the Astors moved into Cliveden, a country house much like Downton Abbey, and which, during the Great War, served like Downton as a hospital for convalescing soldiers.

Viscountess Nancy Langhorne Astor by Walter Tittle, 1922, courtesy of NPG

Lady Astor’s real distinction was to be elected to Parliament in 1919. Her husband served in the House of Commons, but became a member of the House of Lords when he succeeded to his father’s peerage as Viscount Astor. Nancy Astor then ran and won his former seat in the Commons, becoming the second woman to be elected to Parliament but the first to actually take her seat.

These American-British marriages were all the rage at the turn of the 20th century, and an entire industry emerged to help facilitate matchmaking.  A quarterly publication called The Titled American listed the successfully anointed ladies, as well as the names of eligible titled bachelors:  “The Marquess of Winchester,” one citation read, “is 32 years of age, and a captain of the Coldstream Guards.” It was a resource much like Washington’s social register, The Green Book, or contemporary online resources like Match.com.

Novelist Wharton, a member of New York’s Old Guard, relished writing about the nouveau riche as a “group of bourgeois colonials” who had made a great deal of money very quickly in industry. Denied access to social position by the established upper crust, they crossed the Atlantic and acquired titles that transformed them, she wrote, into “a sort of social aristocracy.”

In acquiring prestige by title, the “dollar princesses” are estimated to have contributed perhaps $25 billion to the British economy in today’s currency. These wealthy American women are also credited with helping to preserve such stately English homes as Highclere, the actual country house featured in “Downton Abbey.”

The accommodation between old status and new money is well-reflected in this exchange between Cora (played by Elizabeth McGovern), the Earl of Grantham’s American wife, and Violet, the Dowager Countess:

Cora: “Are we to be friends then?”

Violet: “We are allies, my dear, which can be a good deal more effective.”

Ok, for fun—two other favorite Dowager Countess quotes:

—“I couldn’t have electricity in the house, I wouldn’t sleep a wink. All those vapors floating about.”

—“What is a weekend?”