Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2016 i Town & Country

Last fall, in anticipation of this magazine’s upcoming 170th anniversary, we decided to make a short movie in our offices about our big celebratory plans. It was a hastily conceived production. Inspired by mysterious sources, a script entitled Breakfast at T&C was written on a Tuesday, calling for a number of the staff to essentially play themselves—except, that is, arts editor Kevin Conley, who stepped into the role of the butler. Props and costumes were called in: five cigarettes, two four-minute eggs with buttered toast, a miniature Texas flag, four white lab coats, a smoking jacket, a rack of jewel-colored dresses by Zac Posen, a few funereal numbers by Thom Browne, and a skateboard—the kind of stuff we tend to keep around in the T&C pantry. By Thursday we had…

The day before Sarah Sallee was to marry David Rosengarten, in an outdoor ceremony at Kucuksu Palace in Istanbul last August, the wedding planners informed her that the chance of rain was 100 percent. But Sarah’s initial panic was soon replaced by cool indifference. “I just wanted to have fun,” she says. “I was marrying my favorite person on the entire planet, the love of my life.” Plus, Plan B turned out to be much better anyway. The skies were clear when 350 guests arrived by boat at Ciragan Palace, where they were greeted by a line of waiters in military jackets serving champagne. After Sarah and David exchanged vows by the Bosphorus, enjoyed an alfresco dinner, and watched a fireworks show, the rain arrived, as if on cue. A…

“Men tend to be freakier,” the jeweler Nicholas Varney told me. He was referring specifically to a longtime male client who collected only precious stone tigers, an auspicious symbol in Asia. Talismans aside, men who collect jewelry tend to fall into two groups, according to Frank Everett, vice president and sales director of Sotheby’s Jewelry. The first and most common category is men who buy for their significant others but who are themselves connoisseurs of stones and craftsmanship. The Duke of Windsor is a good example of this subset, as is, based on the jewels in his wife Bunny’s sale at Sotheby’s last year, Paul Mellon. Often, Everett points out, the lucky recipients are far less interested in the jewels than the buyers are. It is unclear exactly who benefited…

Do you ever get a feeling of quiet desperation in the middle of a dinner party, as the conversation wafts from school admissions to real estate to the vacation plans someone is making to the new deck someone is building? Everyone around you seems to be throwing themselves into these safe domestic topics with zeal, banal subjects that won’t threaten or surprise or inflame or challenge or, let’s be honest, interest anyone, while you reach for your fourth glass of rosé. The kind of night, in other words, that you find yourself sitting over grilled swordfish and asparagus, in an extension of the conversation you were having at breakfast with your spouse. Why, you wonder miserably, did you hire a babysitter for this? The problem here is simple: If you…

We live in the age of Ashley Madison and Tinder. When wooing is simply a matter of swiping right, is there anyplace for that suspect and seductive species known as the bachelor to blossom? There are places, like wildlife reserves, where the breed is protected. In the safe havens of St. Bart’s and St.-Tropez, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio maintains standards set by the likes of Warren Beatty and Robert Evans. Elsewhere, however, the bachelor as we once knew him seems under threat. There was a time when seduction was an art, and its finest practitioners were celebrated the world over—a time when the ideal bachelor was not Jack Dorsey but James Bond, the suave man of action, man of the world, man about town. In those days being a good…

CHARLIE ROSEN The Bard College student is the son of real estate lord and contemporary art patron Aby Rosen. NATURAL HABITAT Behind the bar at his father’s Gramercy Park Hotel; global art fairs; the estate in Old Westbury. CAVEAT Picasso tapestries not welcome here. ALEXANDRE ARNAULT The 23-year-old former DJ is one of LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault’s five kids. Alexandre helped mastermind a fournight Kanye West concert at the Fondation Louis Vuitton during Paris Fashion Week. NATURAL HABITAT On Twitter, welcoming new acquisitions into the LVMH fold. CAVEAT No Gucci bags for you. SEBASTIAN THEROUX A picture was published of Sebastian walking with older brother Justin (a.k.a. Mr. Jennifer Aniston) in coordinating ensembles, and a star was born. NATURAL HABITAT At home reading Nabokov or Uncle Paul. CAVEAT Leather jacket…

JORDAN SPIETH Another ginger who looks great in green. Last year the 21-yearold became the youngest guy to win the Masters since Tiger Woods. NATURAL HABITAT Brook Hollow Country Club in Dallas, minutes from his Preston Hollow mansion. CAVEAT Wholesome enough he may just marry high school sweetheart Annie Verret. JACK SOCK Last year the 23-yearold tennis player made the top 25. NATURAL HABITAT Kansas City, where he trains with his brother and recently bought a house. CAVEAT Could be the sensitive type, if fainting at the U.S. Open is any indication. And he may still be dating fellow pro Sloane Stephens, who can be fierce both on the court and off. ON THE CUSP We’re guessing it won’t be long until these three teens are making headlines. BROOKLYN BECKHAM…

LAURA LOVE “My mom has all of my old pointe shoes displayed on a wall in my bedroom,” says LAURA LOVE, laughing with embarrassment. Her mother, former model Lisa Love, seems like an unlikely childhood shrine maker. The longtime West Coast editor for Vogue and Teen Vogue, Lisa is often spotted at celebrity-packed parties, nonchalantly wearing sunglasses indoors. But mementos are important when your child moves across the country at age 13, as Laura did 10 years ago, to devote herself to ballet at Walnut Hill School for the Arts, a boarding school for the performing arts outside Boston. “I would do my homework in the splits,” Love says. Dance consumed her time until a couple of years ago, when she decided to shift her focus from ballet practices and…

When people wax poetic about their dogs, be they spaniels or corgis or mutts of indeterminate origin, there is one phrase that arises again and again: unconditional love. That sentiment can justify some of the grander comforts lavished on our pets throughout their lives, and beyond. It’s hardly a new phenomenon— Marie-Antoinette famously doted on her dogs; one of their gilded kennels now resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The William Secord Gallery in New York City deals exclusively in 19th- and 20th-century dog paintings, including the portraits shown here. The collectible Staffordshire porcelain dogs above present pairs of pups in austere poses. All are worthy homages, but there’s nothing like coming home to the real thing.…

ALEX HITZ The self-described chronicler of lives well lived writes about two such lives this month, in “LOST WEEKEND” (page 37) and “VICTORY SIGN” (page 64). The former concerns a trove of never-before-seen photos of Frank Sinatra on holiday in Palm Springs. In the latter, T&C’s new watch column, Hitz remembers his stepfather Robert Shaw and a particularly unforgettable Audemars Piguet. “It’s incredibly satisfying for me to have an outlet for these special stories of extraordinary people, so they won’t be forgotten,” he says. MARIA ZIEGELBOCK “It was great to get an insight into the mythic, macho universe of Ernest Hemingway through a strong female perspective,” Ziegelböck says of shooting Valerie Hemingway in Paris for “PAPA’S PROTEGEE” (page 138). The photographer was especially pleased with how quickly she bonded with…

Somewhere along the path that led David Miliband to become head of policy under U.K. prime minister Tony Blair at the age of 29 and foreign secretary under Gordon Brown at 41, Miliband acquired the nickname the Brain. And, sure enough, seconds after we’re introduced, the slim 50-year-old asks with Cumberbatchian rapidity whether I’m “Ernest in town and Jack in the country.” I’m lucky to catch the reference: I’d chanced on the Colin Firth–Rupert Everett movie version of The Importance of Being Earnest on cable just days before. But the tone has been set: We will be moving quickly. Miliband needs that speed and acuity in his new job, as the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. The NGO, founded in 1933 with the help of Albert Einstein,…

Before pleats became synonymous with schoolgirl uniforms, they were associated with money and power. Only expensively trained hands could fold fabric back on itself impeccably. The technique has evolved and multiplied; here, Gucci uses a box pleat. But though the nomenclature can get clunky, the look should not be.…

There’s the global approach to health: eat right most of the time, exercise consistently, don’t smoke, reduce stress. And then there’s the hyperspecialized one, which focuses on vitamins, workouts for particular body parts, and all manner of supplements. Surely you need to employ both, though how much of each depends on your particular needs. The same could be said for skincare. There are the daily musts—antioxidants, sunscreen, moisturizer—and then there are things you pull out when your skin is dry, dull, or simply won’t cooperate. Enter the face mask. The beauty staple that inspires nostalgia for girlhood sleepovers is now one of the hottest things in skincare. GlamGlow is launching a peel-off mask that looks like aluminum when it dries but tightens skin with algae and polymers. Kiehl’s aims to…

.COM FOR ADDITIONAL READINGS BY KATHARINE MERLIN, GO TO TOWNANDCOUNTRYMAG.COM AQUARIUS JANUARY 21–FEBRUARY 19 Amal Clooney With aggressive Mars out of harmony with your sign this month, you’re bound to resist others’ attempts to coerce or control you. But this is nothing new, because individuality is Aquarius’s hallmark, and February is the time to take a stand about what you want and go for it. The new Moon of the 8th is all about sowing new seeds, and once Venus enters Aquarius on the 17th, not only will you be garnering accolades and admirers, you’ll have a chance to truly shine. PISCES FEBRUARY 20–MARCH 20 Gloria Vanderbilt With several brilliant aspects in Capricorn, you can forge new alliances this month that will open up fresh vistas. Pay close attention to…

*B SERGEY BRIN Last year the Google co-founder got both a divorce and a promotion (from head of Google X—where he oversaw projects like developing self-driving cars—to president of Google’s new parent company, Alphabet). NATURAL HABITAT Burning Man. CAVEAT Wears his Google Glass a lot. *B ALEX KARP Peter Thiel’s Stanford Law roommate runs Palantir, a company that helps the CIA mine data—and allegedly helped locate Osama bin Laden. NATURAL HABITAT His Palo Alto offices, named the Shire after the Hobbit homeland. CAVEAT Death threats force him to have a bodyguard. *B BOBBY MURPHY The quiet(er) brains behind Evan Spiegel was raised in Berkeley and went to Stanford before co-founding Snapchat. His even temper reminds some of a monk. (Hopefully, the similarity ends there.) NATURAL HABITAT Venice Beach, where Snapchat…

GABRIEL-KANE DAY-LEWIS In April, Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis’s beautiful midriff-bearing daughter Lily-Rose, 16, emerged from obscurity in the front row at Chanel’s NYC reshowing of its Métiers d’Art Collection, much to the internet’s delight. Three months later, at the house’s Couture Fashion Week show in Paris, Daniel Day-Lewis and French actress Isabelle Adjani’s son GABRIEL-KANEDAY-LEWIS debuted, to equal media fanfare. And guess what? The 20-year-old musicianmodel’s cameo in the notoriously elaborate production wasn’t a favor called in by Mom or Dad—at least, not exactly. “I stopped to get coffee across from the Chanel studio, and I saw Karl Lagerfeld,” Gabriel-Kane says. He halts to warn me: “It gets crazier.” Feeling emboldened because his parents are friendly with the designer and he “spent some time at Karl’s house in the…

“We were there constantly— always!” explains Doris Brynner when I call her about these never-before-seen photos of a weekend trip to Palm Springs with Frank Sinatra in October 1964. Yul Brynner, who was married to Doris at the time and who became an icon as the king of Siam, was also the world class photographer who took these pictures. In 1996 his and Doris’s daughter, my friend Victoria Brynner, collected his work in a book, Yul Brynner: Photographer. But these shots were not included. One afternoon last year in Los Angeles, Victoria was proud to show me some unpublished images of her father’s that were stored in a black kid leather Hermès photo album her mother had made in the 1960s. The Brynners’ milieu then, as shown in image after…

If there is anyone still laboring under the delusion that great wealth and a couple of palm trees bring happiness, Jean Stein’s long-awaited oral history of Los Angeles, West of Eden (RANDOM HOUSE, $30), should put that notion to rest. As in the darkly glamorous 1982 cult classic she wrote with George Plimpton, Edie: American Girl, about Warhol star Edie Sedgwick, Stein, who is from a storied Beverly Hills family herself, is fascinated by madness, self-destruction, and fragile or lost children. She lingers lovingly on all the varieties of unhappiness visited upon the rich and powerful. And there are many: murder, suicide, cruelty, betrayal at the McCarthy hearings, breathtaking narcissism. There are fading beauties who won’t even sleep without makeup, aging patriarchs who are losing their memories, brothers who stab…

Alexander Calder mobiles sold for three times their estimate at Christie’s in November. One, from 1948, fetched $9.5 million. And as some of the artist’s works go off the market, others come back on: Calder’s one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces. Hand-crafted by Calder and never licensed for reproduction, they’re wearable equivalents of a Modigliani nude, originally made for the sculptor’s friends and family from bronze, silver, and steel wire. The most soughtafter pieces are those that are formally registered with the Calder Foundation and have the provenance of the singular women who wore them— Peggy Guggenheim, Jeanne Moreau, and art dealer Marian Willard Johnson, to name a few. The collection shown here, for sale at Christie’s not too long ago and recently acquired by estate jeweler Lee Siegelson, comes from the stash…

In 1992, when Sheikh Majed al-Sabah opened Villa Moda, a 100,000-squarefoot luxury retail space outside Kuwait City, he was the first to bring Western designers like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren to the region. This month al-Sabah, the grandson of the 10th emir of Kuwait, will reverse that strategy by introducing his Middle Eastern perfume house, the Fragrance Kitchen (TFK), to the United States, at Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. Scent is part of daily life in the Middle East, where it is used for both religious and secular purposes, and al-Sabah speculates that his average customer goes through 60 to 80 bottles a year. TFK’s blends capture scent memories and his grandmother’s recipes, as well as impressions from his travels and how he imagines the places he’d…

DOUGLAS BOOTH The stage helped him overcome dyslexia. Now he gives thanks by volunteering for the UN’s HeForShe and refugee organizations. NATURAL HABITAT Protests for Syrian refugee rights. CAVEAT He’s played Boy George and Romeo. What’s life like with a star-crossed chameleon? NICHOLAS HOULT If he can handle the vivacious whirlwind that is Jennifer Lawrence, you’ll seem tame. NATURAL HABITAT In hiding, à la J.D. Salinger, whom he plays in the upcoming biopic about the Catcher in the Rye author. CAVEAT His J-Law rebound is rumored to be Kristen Stewart. NAT WOLFF He’s a child prodigy: At four he could play piano, at seven his street performances raised $50,000 for 9/11 families, and by nine he was on the silver screen. NATURAL HABITAT Washington Square, reading indie film scripts. CAVEAT…

Even in his natural habitat—Twin Quarries, his arcadian estate in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where hummingbirds gather nectar beside a tranquil lake—Horace “Woody” Brock is an exceedingly rare bird. He is a political economist with five degrees from Harvard and Princeton whose passions encompass the philosophy of science, game theory, aesthetic theory, and moral philosophy. Brock, 69, is also a prolific collector of Regency and Rococo furniture and decorative objects of museum quality, and a generous benefactor and lender to world renowned institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick in New York, the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the Getty in Los Angeles, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. If this high-octane combo of intellectual firepower and aesthetic worship sounds daunting, fear not. Despite a fiery temper that…

After spending the 1980s in Manhattan, and barely surviving the experience, in 1992 I married a Nashville native and bought a house in that city. I found much to capture my interest there in the coming years; what I didn’t find was a thriving dining scene. Although I was impressed on my first visit by a lively New American bistro called the Sunset Grill, where Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle were twirling pasta, Nashville’s restaurants seemed stuck in the ’50s. Even after Birmingham and, later, Charleston had become centers of a Southern culinary renaissance, I used to fly to New Orleans to get a decent meal. Now people are flying to Nashville just to eat. The city the New York Times called the “it” city of 2013 is being transformed…