Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 - Issue 48 i The Rake

“I’m not a Charles Bronson fan,” confided Charles Bronson to a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 1975. “I don’t think I turned out the way I thought I would turn out when I was a kid. I’m a disappointment to me. My image, my sound, everything else.” This is an uncommon admission for an actor to make, particularly when he is the world’s most popular and highestpaid movie star, as Bronson was in the mid seventies, and even more so when that popularity hinges on a leathery, gruff, pitiless persona, honed to archetypal American tough-guy inexorability in films such as 1974’s Death Wish, in which he played an architectturned-vigilante in New York, hunting down his wife’s killers and daughter’s rapists with Terminator-like, take-no-prisoners tenacity. Such roles earned him the nicknames…

Craig Roberts represents a collective of actors that are the descendants of beta-male heroes such as Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It proves that the wider cinema-going audience isn’t always after someone with the muscle mass of a Men’s Health cover model, or who spends most of the day killing bad guys. We were first introduced to Craig through the highly regarded indie movie Submarine. His angsty adolescent mannerisms in the film earned him universal acclaim, and since then we have seen the Welsh actor feature in Bad Neighbours, 22 Jump Street, Kill Your Friends, and Amazon’s hit series Red Oaks. He is currently in preparation for a film he is to direct. The Rake believes that independent and arthouse movies have…

In the all-time list of signs you are no longer a sex symbol, being cast as Miley Cyrus’s mum in a Disney sitcom has gotta be way, way, way up there. One gets the feeling that Brooke Shields couldn’t give a continental. Yet those who may have dismissed her in the Hannah Montana series as yet another MILFish American drawing minimal interest in the spank-bank don’t know the half of it. Shields’s mother, Teri, was herself a model, and genetic coding did its paso doble to produce a stunningly beautiful child, Brooke, in 1965. Teri, divorced a year later, looked at what was in front of her and immediately thought ‘casting’ — with Brooke getting her first modelling campaign, in an Ivory Snow campaign, before her first birthday. A decade…

Where do you begin when talking about the prodigious Jean-Michel Basquiat? His enigmatic mind — a mystery that should never be solved — and the nature of his work are topics of discussion that have remained newsworthy since his untimely death, aged 27, in 1988. He has been viewed as the greatest black artist ever, though such classification is crude and unhelpful. As he once made clear, “I am not a black artist, I am an artist”. I, for one, believe he supersedes that statement. His precipitous rise to stardom inevitably prefaced his sharp downfall. Basquiat’s story is not so much about the life of the world’s first commercially successful black artist, but of the struggles and tribulations that went hand-in-hand with fame in the 1980s New York art world.…

It was, as Josh Feldman puts it, “one of those father-son fights that was fraught with anger and resentment”. And it involved sailboats — or what passed for them. Actually, they were garish triangles forming a print on a shirt. Feldman Sr thought it was attractive. Feldman Jr thought it was “a design celebrated for its ugliness”. The problem was that the minimum order with their textiles printer was 2,300 metres, or enough for around 1,200 shirts. The order was placed. “And I’m not exaggerating,” says Feldman, “but we sold five of them. I felt vindicated by that in some way — my dad had been wrong and I was right. But at what cost? We still had all that fabric… ” Such are the trials and tribulations of the…

The old saw is that generals always prepare to fight the last war, but that was not the case with the U.S. at the end of the second world war, when it found itself the world’s sole nuclear power. Rather than developing new tanks, ships and planes using the lessons learned during the recent conflict, all the effort went into methods of delivering nuclear munitions: the army developed new howitzers capable of firing nuclear shells and even a nuclear backpack for commandos to smuggle behind enemy lines, and the air force brought forth bombers designed to carry the bombs and equipped its defensive fighters with a nuclear-tipped air-to-air missile. The navy, desperate to find a role, equipped some of its submarines with an updated version of the German V1 ‘Buzz…

In another era, Mark Franklin would have been considered a pariah, a man emerging from the fog into a world where outsiders are treated with suspicion and new money is derided and given the cold shoulder. As it happens, Franklin, the protagonist of George MacDonald Fraser’s novel Mr American, arrived on a ship from the U.S. and into imperial Edwardian Britain. Never was there a better time to be rich and unknown if you wanted to be welcomed into the highest echelons of society — even to the point where you get to play bridge with the King. Yet Franklin is also a tragic character. To put it in context, the U.K. establishment and landowning families were starting to lose their grip on the rather feudal way in which British…

From the way we’re discussed on abhorrent dog-breed websites — you know, those poorly designed affairs whose homepages feature quirky pictures of Mexican Xoloitzcuintles and Dandie Dinmont Terriers with faces like they’ve been slapped round the chops with a vegan cutlet — you’d think our ‘obedience issues’ matched those of some spittlehurling Premier League sociopath. “They’re not from the same lineage as a Labrador or Goldens,” these websites scoff, “so don’t expect them to have the same bovine-on-ketamine temperament as dogs you like.” I paraphrased that last bit, obviously. Fallacies are replicated around the web-o-sphere like micro-organisms in a farm pond, so let me redress the ones that defame us Chesapeake Bay Retrievers here and now: begin training us in our formative years and we’re as smart, obliging, calm-natured and…

The study of those who have achieved greatness, rather than had it thrust upon them, points to one common factor: ambition. That quality takes many forms, however, and can be fired by a variety of motivations, as the case of Robert Miller, the billionaire duty-free magnate, shows. From ordinary beginnings he has risen to become a regular feature in lists of the richest in the world, spending his free time on the traditional pursuits of the old-world aristocrat, and seeing his daughters marry into the grand families of the world as if by morganatic contract. In many ways it is a traditional American story, one of ascension via great wealth to grand social status. The Millers’ tale, however, is so traditional as to be emblematic of an entire stratum of…

The German-born Levi Strauss received many letters from clients over the years attesting to the quality and durability of his most famous creation. In a note dated 1942, Mrs. M.H. English of Wyoming describes one of her afternoons: “Going between here and Basin, we found a man who had run his car off the highway and was stuck. We hoped to get him back onto the road but had no chains or rope to pull him with. Finally we found a pair of old Levi’s in the back of our car. We tied one leg to our car and one to the front of his. We really had to pull, but the pants held and out he came.” Levi’s weren’t just for wearing, it seems. Many of the most iconic…

Mood building is something that Antoine Fuqua takes very seriously. His most famous movie to date — 2001’s Training Day, with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke — has a tightrope-taut, gritty aura throughout, thanks to the 50-year-old’s weapons-grade filmic text. In conspiracy action thriller Shooter, Fuqua proved yet again that eyebrow-hiking, nerve-shredding atmospheres are his stockin-trade; and Southpaw, his pugilistic tale of redemption, is as intense as the eyes of its leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal. So when The Rake met Fuqua in the penthouse suite of Hotel Arts in Barcelona, he knew exactly what to do when we couldn’t get the unfathomably high-tech stereo to create a soundtrack for the photoshoot. He produced his iPhone, stepped out onto the sun-blasted terrace, surveyed the panoramic view of the city and its…

ANDERS OVERGAARD Danish-born photographer Anders Overgaard comes from Helsingør, the home of Hamlet. Anders’s interest in photography was piqued at the age of 10, when he began taking pictures of subjects he knew well — his skateboarder and windsurfer friends. His love of the outdoors and the water continues to fuel the energetic quality of his work. In 1990 he moved to New York to work with the world-renowned photographer Bruce Weber, and then spent the next five years travelling with him. Ultimately, Anders put down roots in New York, where he has worked as a photographer for the past 15 years. He divides his time between New York, London and Copenhagen, with his wife and two sons. In this issue, Anders photographed Pedro Pascal for our cover story (page…

When Grace Kelly, legendary beauty, classic Hollywood star and Princess of Monaco, was asked if she would write an autobiography, her reply was telling. “No,” she said, “but I would like to write one about my father, in which I am only a postscript.” For most of the world, this must have been baffling: how could her father possibly be more significant than one of the most famous women in the world? For Americans of a previous generation, particularly those from Philadelphia, it would have been wholly understandable, however. John B. ‘Jack’ Kelly was a legend in his own right. A self-made multi-millionaire, influential politician and classic American patriarch, Kelly was also the greatest rower of his time, winner of three Olympic gold medals. Until his retirement in 1924 he…

On March 26, 1957, James Symington, an attaché at the American embassy in London, held a dinner party for three urbane couples: the publishing scion and ambassadorial assistant Michael Temple Canfield and his wife, Caroline Lee Bouvier, the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy; Prince Stanislas ‘Stas’ Radziwill, an émigré Polish aristocrat displaced by the second world war, and his wife, Grace Kolin, a Swiss shipping heiress; and Lord and Lady Dudley, a Conservative politician and a Viscountess. “I remember the date because it was a birthday party for my son,” Symington said later. “After their divorces, Lee married Radziwill, Grace married Lord Dudley, and Michael married Lady Dudley. It was quite a trio!” This relationship roundelay may be indicative of postwar social ferment, or of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remark to…

Today it would be the length of one’s yacht. Turn back a millennium and the number of rooms in one’s castle would be the arbiter of wealth. But a century ago, moguls and magnates, plutocrats, robber barons and captains of industry competed with each other through watch complications. And the biggest rivalry of them all, the one that led to the creation of a handful of the most incredible timepieces ever made, was that between James Ward Packard (1863-1928) and Henry Graves (1868-1953). It was certainly indicative of the era, especially as the two were part of America’s drive to global prominence. In becoming the first superpower of the 20th century, the United States had usurped Europe’s importance, but both Packard and Graves knew of one area where the U.S.…