“The Passionate Spectator” columnist Robert Sacheli previously delivered a lengthy appreciation on Fred Astaire. Here, inspired by a new biography on the style icon, he takes a curtain call.

Despite the best intentions of our Founding Fathers, Americans have long been crazy for aristocrats — particularly when it comes to emulating their style. In the 1930s, fashionable men looked to a pair of princes for their cues. One, the Prince of Wales, aka the Duke of Windsor, was a bona fide blueblood, and the influence of his Fair Isle sweaters, midnight-blue dinner jackets, and country-house suits was reflected in the gentlemanly swank of Esquire’s fashion illustrations and in the haberdasheries that catered to the well heeled.

When he foxtrotted off with that divorcée from Baltimore, the dapper Prince abdicated more than an imperial throne. He passed the title of ranking monarch of male fashion to a royal from another powerful, if slightly more mythical, land: Hollywood. Fred Astaire’s reign would prove to be a long one, and his enduring imprint on American style is a legacy as remarkable as his films.

While most of us have happily been content to sit back and watch the man dance, Astaire has long been a magnet for cultural historians, and Joseph Epstein, former editor of The American Scholar, stepped up for his turn on the floor last year with his brief biography, “Fred Astaire” (Yale University Press). The book wasn’t exactly rapturously received (the New York Observer pronounced it “intellectual slumming” and “priggish”), and an extended excerpt in the Hudson Review shows that the carping is justified.

In it, Epstein comes off as alternately snarky, sour, and worst, clueless about musicals — as expected for a highbrow whose works include a volume called “Snobbery.” He’s also not been done any favors by his copy editor. Among other gaffes, he manages to misspell the name of one of Fred’s frequent co-stars, Helen Broderick, and refer to Van Nest Polglase, RKO’s master of the 1930s Big White Set, as an exemplar of Art Nouveau and mangle his name as well. Epstein’s biggest head-scratcher, though, is his assertion that for all the pure joy that Astaire radiated to generations of audiences, he falls short of being a genius. Instead he’s an undeniably talented, perfection-obsessed, but basically dull fellow who can somehow dance up a storm. As Miss Broderick might dryly retort with an appropriate eye roll, “Oh, yeah?” (more…)

After a long interruption, Dandyism.net presents the final installment of Robert Sacheli’s article on Gerald Murphy. For convenience’s sake (and to refresh your memory), we have combined all three parts into this one post. 

Fresh from his assiduous assessment of Lucius Beebe, Sacheli seeks to rescue the reputation of another forgotten 20th-century American dandy for whom life itself was the greatest work of art.

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Murphy’s Law
By Robert Sacheli

“The true dandy was not the most foppishly dressed, the most stylish, the most flash-mannered; he was primarily an artist of talent.” — From a biography of Count D’Orsay, part of Gerald Murphy’s collection of quotes.

If any American dandy in Jazz-Age Paris could look at an automobile part and think “I could wear that,” it was Gerald Murphy.

Photographer Man Ray captured Murphy and his wife, Sara, arrayed for the Comte Étienne de Beaumont’s 1924 Automotive Ball, one of string of fetes that made the nobleman’s name synonymous with up-to-the minute, headline-grabbing party giving.

Here is Sara, bizarre but chic in what looks like a foil dress and oversized driving goggles, accented by the strings of pearls that were her trademark. Gerald, also in goggles, wears tights, gauntlets, and a breastplate into which he has been welded. A fanciful, ziggurat-shaped helmet towers on his head, half metallic wedding cake and half Constructivist chimney.

One element lifts the ensemble from witty party get-up to something approaching art: the side-view mirror attached to his left shoulder. With it, Murphy simultaneously embodies the glamour and power of both master and machine, linking a chivalric nobility to speeding promise of modern life.

That mirror also reflects what made Murphy’s dandyism so potent: his life-long ability to transform the everyday into the extraordinary though an alchemy of imagination, energy, and an innate sense of style. But unlike other dandies over whom history exerted its nostalgic sway, Gerald Murphy’s personal and aesthetic visions were always firmly fixed on the future.

For Gerald and Sara, that future first unfolded in a procession of charmed years whose keynote was a unique kind of grace. Rooted in their love and manifested in their gifts for friendship and for living, it was a grace that nourished some of the most innovative talents of the early 20th century. In the years when their own future darkened, it was a grace that sustained them through the cruelest of losses. (more…)

On September 17 I had the pleasure of speaking on Lucius Beebe at the Coffee House, one of Beebe’s own clubs. It’s a bastion of a vanished Manhattan, an outpost of the bohemian artists-and-writers world of the 1920s and ’30s. It’s still governed by its founding credo from 1915: “No brokers or bankers and perhaps no drama critics. No card playing. The club to be for sculptors, artists, foreigners, illustrators, authors, editors, professors, sportsmen, lawyers, actors, singers, playwrights, musicians, inventors, composers, statesmen, judges, etc.”

Revered above all is the organization’s Rule Six: “No Rules.”

I’d visited the club on several occasions and found its members welcoming and quirky, and easily fell into the pleasant time-warp of its atmosphere. So when my biographical series on Beebe appeared on D.net this spring, I tapped the self-promoting spirit of the Junta and proposed that I return to the Coffee House, this time as a dinner speaker. My offer was accepted.

The 30-odd attendees were seated at a single, long table. Ringed with the Windsor chairs that date to the club’s early years and anchored by towering chandeliers at both ends, the table was a convivial raft fueled by food and drink and lively conversation, one that for a couple of hours floated serenely free from the New York that clamored a few floors below.

Folks were eager to talk about Lucius, and one of the members, who worked at the Herald Tribune during Beebe’s glory days as a columnist, remembered being intimidated by his “fancy Dan” presence. Dandyism, too, proved to be of fascination, and I was pressed to offer contemporary exemplars. I abetted myself well in explaining the nuances of the Gay Talese vs. Tom Wolfe match-up. (more…)

The big-screen adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” opens July 25 in the US. “The Passionate Spectator” columnist Robert Sacheli recently attended a press screening. The following are his thoughts on the film, as well as the charges of sacrilege leveled by fans of the 1981 Granada Television version.

Outrage against cultural debasement becomes a dandy as much as a good pair of white summer flannels, but the new film adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” has stirred up a level of feverish emotion ill suiting the man of bemused detachment.

Why has the film hit so many exquisitely sensitive nerves? Perhaps because revisiting “Brideshead” in 2008 is less a threat to the cultural legacies of Evelyn Waugh or Granada Television than it is to our own memories of the 1981 series and the role it holds in our lives.

My own sacred and sometimes profanely silly “Brideshead” connections reach back to high school. Despite the questionable erotic themes — and possibly more problematic, the Jesuit bias — the Brothers of Holy Cross judged “Brideshead Revisited” to merit a place on our summer reading list as we headed into junior year. I’m now deeply ashamed that a hasty late-August skim through the novel left no lasting impression except for its cover illustration, a floridly rendered version of the Brideshead fountain with a pair of male and female figures ominously dwarfed by its sculptural glories.

The now-legendary television series, though, was quite another story. I was as guilty of being a “Brideshead”-head as the next impressionable fellow in the early ’80s. I had an English friend record my answering machine greeting with the series theme swelling in the background. Spellings such as “emphasised” spilled from my fountain pen. I admit to have spoken the phrases “unused to wine” and “would your friend care to rumba?” in actual conversations.

In short, I joined a brotherhood of millions who happily fell for a seductive vision of inter-war England as filtered through the lens of Thatcherism. With that memorable baroque trumpet theme echoing in our imaginations, we daydreamed about cricket sweaters, plover’s eggs, and perpetually indulgent nannies.

Yes, we thought, this is when and how we deserved to have lived.

Burnished in our affection by repeated DVD marathons, “Brideshead” was a comforting return to our youth — or at least the imaginary version we’d assembled from Waugh’s seductive characters and the glow of high-level art direction.

So it’s understandable that there might be reluctance towards Brideshead II. Better to boycott the local cineplex with a wearily dismissive attitude.

Sorry to spoil your fun, but this version of “Brideshead” is neither a desecration nor a disaster. Rather it’s a refocused approach to the novel’s story and characters — a necessary step when adapting any work of literature for the screen.

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Herein follows the final chapter of Robert Sacheli’s biography of Lucius Beebe, which depicts the subject in his final years haunting the modern world like an elegant phantasm.

Sunset in San Francisco

The television show “Bonanza,” set in Virginia City, was a gold mine for the town, but this fictional version of old Nevada was at odds with Beebe’s more rarified vision, and in 1960 he and Charles Clegg decamped for San Francisco. The column “This Wild West” became his bully pulpit at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he continued to write for the glossy magazines that guided aspirants in the art of finer living, such as Gourmet, Holiday, and Town & Country.

Beebe’s work of this period still reflects his wit, enthusiasms and indulgences, but the charm could now sometimes curdle and the nostalgia grow overbearing. Still renowned as the nation’s foremost “eatall and tosspot,” Beebe roamed the globe and reported on fabled restaurants, but his articles blur into an over-rich banquet of le hommard Deauvillaise, poularde sautee au Champagne, croustarde de langouste, and soufflé Grand Marnier, washed down with Chateau Margaux ‘34 and topped off with snifters of Hine cognac and a Cuban belicoso fino. Who, in the early 1960s, was dining like this?

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Here follows part two of Robert Sacheli’s resuscitation of the forgotten American dandy Lucius Beebe, in which the author pays particular attention to Beebe’s sartorial splendor and his place as the first retro-eccentric of modern dandyism.

Dressing for the role of official czar of Nightclubland came naturally to Lucius Beebe, as he’d been rehearsing for it all his life.

Beebe was reportedly the first man to introduce white linen plus-fours to Yale (Gibbs reported that “Professor Chauncey P. Tinker, seeing them at a distance, complained irritably that the place was getting overrun with women. ‘Don’t look now,’ he said, ‘but here come two of them now.’”) He got better reviews from his fellow students. The campus paper enthused over his “orchidaceous grey trousers” and “vine-covered top-hat.”

In London, Beebe ordered his suits from Savile Row’s Henry Poole & Company, and he looked on being measured for a bespoke suit as something akin to taking the sacrament. The venerable gentleman’s tailor was “not only a cathedral of waistcoats and hunting pinks, [but] a repository of Victorian grandeurs establishing continuity with the past and the great names of English legend.” Throughout his life, his business suits from Poole duplicated the lines of one made for him in New York in the early ’20s, which were, he says, “cut from doomsday fabrics, with notched lapels and four buttons.” The suits were only one component of the grand effect. The New Yorker helpfully provided its readers with a partial inventory of Beebe’s dressing room:

He has a good evening dress coat lined with mink and collared in astrakhan, which he has insured for $3,000, and an old rag also lined in mink, but with a sable collar, which didn’t seem worth the bother. The jewels necessary to set off this splendor, or else hold it together, include three gold cigarette cases (although he rarely smokes anything but cigars), valued at $700 each [in 1937 dollars], a cashmere sapphire cabochon ring worth $1,200, a single emerald stud at $500, and a platinum evening watch which cost $10,000.

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When Dandyism.net launched four years ago, we stated as our mission the desire to rescue the dandy from the slag heap of history through rigorous scholarship and unflinching self-righteousness.

Now it is time to rescue one particular dandy: Lucius Beebe, an all-but-forgotten American original who barely warrants a mention by the academics of dandyism, who are more concerned with muddled abstractions like “performance” and “self-invention” than the tangible plumage of top hat and tails.

To Beebe, this plumage was essential as it was to Fred Astaire. In donning it, Beebe simultaneously defined himself, an era, and the new genre of celebrity journalism. His gold-headed cane cut a wide swath through stuffiness, social conventions, and hoi polloi (he was called a notorious “peasant baiter”). Beebe’s patrician style was unmatched, as was the notoriety his wardrobe brought him.

During his lifetime he was equally as famous as the stars and socialites who populated the small and swank universe he called “crazy luxe,” but within a few years of his death in 1966 he all but disappeared from public memory.

“The Passionate Spectator” columnist and burgeoning staff biographer Robert Sacheli, whose appreciations of Noel Coward and Fred Astaire have brought D.net acclaim on the Web and in print from as far away as New Zealand, ransacked a bevy of buried texts on Lucius Beebe in preparation for what is certainly the freshest and most thorough account of the man written in many decades, which will be presented in three parts.

The Junta encourages its faithful myrmidons to join us in a toast to Sacheli for his assiduous research, and to a long-lost member of our fraternity.

Welcome back, Lucius. (more…)

Fred Astaire lounges in a swank London flat, attired in a speckled dressing gown and cravat, musically daydreaming about the girl he’s just met. He’s smitten, but true to the plots of his films with Ginger Rogers, he doesn’t know the girl’s name.

So begins the “Needle in a Haystack” number from “The Gay Divorcée,” in which dressing becomes dancing and Fred Astaire becomes the superlative dandy in motion.

Drawn to the terrace doors by the line “I’ve got to find you,” Astaire’s reverie is interrupted by his valet, who presents a selection of ties and a mirror. Off comes the cravat and dressing gown. Astaire momentarily considers a tie, then selects another. After knotting it and fixing it in place with a tie bar, he absentmindedly begins to tap his suede shoes, still wondering where his anonymous crush might be.

Gradually the desultory taps expand into a dance that grows in scale and energy as Astaire dons each new item of clothing. On goes the suit jacket, the boutonniere is put in place, and suddenly he’s leaping over the sofa, bursting with optimism. The taps, increasing in intensity and rhythmic complexity along with Astaire’s resolve, propel him farther and farther, punctuated by a series of balletic beats.

The music and the movement reach their crescendo and Astaire is aloft again, gently landing atop the seat of zebra-striped chair, where he deftly catches a bowler and a furled umbrella from his man. Back on the floor, he bids goodbye to his valet with a gentle tip of his hat, then glides out the door to meet his destiny. He is a modern knight dressed for a quest, a man transformed by ardor, dance and fine tailoring into a new kind of romantic hero.

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Hugh Grant, that blend of Christopher Robin and cuddly roué, is the ideal cinematic Englishman. Take the hesitant stutter and the shyness of his “I can’t quite look at you” glances when romantic ardor sets him a-flutter. Once the self-deprecating head bobble reaches full throttle and that adorably thatchy forelock gets loosened, he becomes the actor’s equivalent of a Pimm’s Cup: jaunty, pedigreed and oh-so-English.

But Hugh Grant is no Rupert Everett.

Even the most indulgent of British nannies would never describe Everett as a cuddly performer. With his craggy aristocratic grandeur, coolly direct gaze, and a self-assured sensuality that combines ’30s matinée-idol aloofness with modern intensity, Everett radiates a more adult and complex presence than Grant’s twinkly boarding-school heartthrob. Everett may be too British — or at least the wrong kind of British — for filmmakers who want to rope in the megaplex masses, and his brand of posh throwback glamor has surely kept him from the top ranks of bankable leading men.

In two Wilde film adaptations, though, these rare and magical qualities are the paramount reason why Everett is the ideal cinematic dandy of his generation. (more…)

Sunday’s indolent pre-noon hours usually find me with energies sufficient for only the least demanding of a gentleman’s morning-after rituals. These include things like burrowing over the Berber in search of an errant cuff link, squinting to determine if my favorite piqué-front shirt will bear permanent reminders of last night’s claret, or straining to remember to whom I now owe lunches, apologies or foolishly large sums of money.

So imagine my jolt when, idly leafing through the March 11 Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, I saw the ensembles of the male attendees at the recent Fashion Week shows in Bryant Park. These included eye-popping Op-Art suits; a mid-calf kilt, cutaway, and boater; full-length ladies-who-lunch furs and matching hats; and a vested, side-vented suit topped by a trapper hat.

But what really caused me to spill my lapsang souchong? These “men dressed to their own beat” were anointed as “21st-century Beau Brummells.”

Not bloody likely. Call them poseurs, provocateurs, canny conceptualists, or simply insane, but dandies they’re not.

(more…)