Pilates, painting and bike rides: Gene Hackman's life in Santa Fe
'You didn't realize that you were talking to a celebrity'
Hackman was a lover of the arts and a painter himself, so he fit in well: Santa Fe is known for its iconic adobe architecture and is home to more than 250 galleries.Everything in Santa Fe is colourful, from the woven tapestry hanging on shop walls to the clothes people wear and even their personalities.There are murals in almost every alley and metal street art lining the roads. Hackman immediately got involved with local art museums, most notably sitting on the board of directors at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum, while Arakawa had a luxury home-goods store, and collaborated with artists on various projects.Hackman's paintings are displayed prominently at local restaurants, and there are a few lucky residents who have them hanging in their home.One of those people is Stuart Ashman, the executive director of the Artes de Cuba gallery.
Mr Ashman first met Hackman at a community arts meeting. He was running late and there was one seat left when he arrived: next to the Hollywood star.They shook hands and that started two decades of friendship."He was so down to earth that you didn't realize that you were talking to a celebrity. He was more interested in you than in telling you about himself," Mr Ashman said.While both men supported the arts community, their real bond came through Pilates workouts when they took back-to-back private lessons.When asked who was better, Mr Ashman laughed. "I think we're both pretty bad," he said. "Our teacher said I was lazy and he was older and stiffer."
Mr Ashman said Hackman often got in trouble for being too much of a chatterbox."Gene, are you going to workout or do you just want to talk to Stuart today?" Mr Ashman recalls their Pilates teacher asking.Every week, Mr Ashman, who raised chickens, would bring a dozen eggs to Hackman. Then one day, he showed up with a huge landscape painting as repayment to Mr Ashman, who didn't want to accept it. But Hackman insisted and said a painting for eggs is "a very fair deal". When Hackman wasn't at Pilates or riding his bike through the beautiful landscape, he loved to spend time at his home in the hills above the city, his friends said.
Perched on a 12-acre plot, the property has panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, with vistas stretching as far as Colorado.Hackman purchased the home in the 1980s before starting expansive renovations. He wanted this home to have meaning, so he worked with an architect to blend Pueblo, Colonial, and Spanish Baroque architectural styles to pay homage to Santa Fe's rich cultural history.Arakawa also enjoyed her secluded life in Santa Fe. People I spoke to said she was a talented pianist and smart business woman. The only person who liked working out more than Hackman was Betsy. They said she was in incredible shape, always attending exercise classes.
Though Hackman was an active member of the community for most of his post-Hollywood years, he became much more isolated after Covid-19 lockdowns, locals said.Those who knew him speculate his health and age made mobility too difficult to wander down the hill into town.But everyone still had a story about Hackman.James Roybal, a native of Santa Fe, once signed up for a pastel painting class in the 1980s and when he arrived Hackman was also there.They painted next to each other for a bit, making small talk.Mr Roybal couldn't believe the celebrity would want to be there. He took a picture from a ways back because he didn't think anyone would believe him. He still boasts about the image.
Victoria Murphy, a real estate agent and actress, saw him around town on several occasions."I was in the middle of the street as I was crossing in the crosswalk, and he started to go through the stop sign at that time, and then suddenly saw me stopped, waved, smiled, held up both hands, you know, like in a surrender," she recalled. "And I just smiled and kept going."At a local restaurant in town, customers told me they'd see him at the grocery store, or shopping on the high street. David, the general manager of a shop in downtown Santa Fe where Hackman was a long-time patron, was holding back tears, remembering his friend and client."Since he lived here, he wanted to use his money towards the local people. He always bought Seiko watches from my store for his friends and family. "He invested in local restaurants and grocery stores, and showed up to openings for art museums. It obviously wasn't because he needed the money, but because he loved the local flare," he said."We lost a great Santa Fein."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
The raucous, uncensored 1990s was an extraordinary era for fashion. No wonder Hollywood is all in
What is it about the 1990s that's so much more interesting than the decades just before and after it – and still relevant? Oasis has dominated the summer. CDs are on the cusp of a vinyl-style revival and a clutch of films about Kate Moss, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Isabella Blow are heading to our screens. Meanwhile, Gen Z has been raiding the era for so long, they risk squandering any chance to leave a sartorial and cultural mark on their own decade. But maybe the lure is so powerful, they don't care. Can you be nostalgic for something you never had? CS Lewis argued powerfully that you could in a 1941 essay, The Weight of Glory. It's a sense that something's missing from your life; a yearning for what you intuitively feel was a simpler time. You could go to a rock concert or the Royal Opera without being hectored by protestors. You didn't necessarily know, nor care, how your friends voted. Cancellation happened to trains (some things never change), not people. In a rare departure from its post-war status quo, Britain seemed bathed in optimism. After Black Wednesday the country's finances defied the economists' predictions and boomed. Films, YBAs, music and fashion were the super novas of the UK's soft power. How were we to know that famous Vanity Fair cover with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit was only on the British version of the magazine? A young couple (ie, my husband and I) working in the burgeoning 'creative industries' could live in London on their combined non-banker salaries, buy an airy Victorian house overlooking a park in an up-and-coming, relatively central area – and pay for a nanny. We even had a classical Pilates studio close by. When I think how rare that was and how ubiquitous Pilates is now, I realise there have been some gains. But back to the rose-tinted specs. The creative industry I worked in was magazines. Unlike Isabella Blow (Izzie), the aristocratic eccentric famous for nurturing a sizeable chunk of the British fashion industry – most notably Lee McQueen (or Alexander as she decided he should be called) – who sat across the Vogue corridor from me for around five years, I wasn't a stylist, but a writer. Less glam, but frequently in the same room as the supermodels and photographers who were shaping the decade's aesthetic. I interviewed them all. Christy was the most spiritual; Cindy the most laser-focused; Helena the most down to earth (she happily jumped into the Vogue mini bus between shows in Paris); Linda the one who took it all the most seriously; Naomi initially cute, adorable and adoring; and Kate, the one about to embark on the biggest journey. In 1993, when I first interviewed her, she was unaffected and delightfully giggly. Most people had no idea she'd become a cultural flashpoint, encapsulating all that was light and dark about the period or that she and Lucian Freud, who became as fascinated by her as everyone else, would be the subjects of one of those forthcoming biopics. (She's played by Ellie Bamber, while Derek Jacobi is Freud.) They were stupendous to look at and Botox- and filler-free. They also set punishingly high beauty standards. There were no agents, managers or publicists at these interviews. I'm not sure when they became a fixture. The contrast between then and now is best summed up by the two I did, 25 years apart, with Miuccia Prada. The first was 1993; she had two little boys whose presence was very much evident in the stylish apartment she and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, inhabited in Milan. She whizzed us around her neighbourhood in her teeny Fiat, showing me her favourite hangouts. Two decades later, shortly before she was due to collect an award in London, I flew to Milan to interview her again. This time it took place in her austere office in the Prada complex and was closely monitored by one of her team, who then emailed me afterwards with a plea to expunge anything remotely controversial. Mrs Prada, like everyone else in fashion, film and music, was terrified of getting cancelled. God knows how Izzie would have coped with cancel culture. She was eyebrow-raisingly uncensored; her conversation a raucous, unfiltered account of disastrous sexcapades, her precarious finances and infectious enthusiasm for the seemingly never-ending stream of talent she kept finding in British fashion colleges. She was a collision of so many worlds: landed gentry and high fashion, what she called penury and jet set; screwball comedy and ultimately, tragedy. Acutely fascinated by and partially resistant to class distinctions, she wanted everyone to rise to her social level, which even in the 1990s seemed to belong to another century. I can't wait to see what actress Andrea Riseborough makes of her in the Queen of Fashion, the film of her life. Alexandra Shulman, one of Izzie's editors, is played by Michelle Dockery. Coincidentally, Izzie and I both moved from Vogue to a certain newspaper company then based in Wapping. I would sometimes see her stumbling along the highway in her rackety heels – her shoes always wobbled, her hats were always skew-whiff . This was before the epicentre of London shifted several miles to the east. Wapping might as well have been Perth. Her mad millinery and the signature red lipstick that was invariably splattered in the vague vicinity of her mouth meant flagging down a black taxi (no Uber back then) was a hit and miss undertaking. I'd grind to a halt alongside her in my Mini (it was strictly no stopping on the highway) and she'd clamber in, an assistant – who'd been dispatched to the other side of the highway to double their chances of nabbing a cab – scrambling in with several sack loads of clothes, behind her. One story we worked on together about Bella Freud culminated in Izzie literally flinging herself at the feet of the art director begging for his forgiveness. She was in charge of styling the models (including Yasmin le Bon) and her brief was to make them look natural and spontaneous. By the time I arrived to do the interviews, the models were coated head to toe in white clay to make them look like statues. Brief not fulfilled. Pictures killed. She might have seemed a vortex of chaos but she trained her assistants brilliantly. I was always happy to take them on after an Izzie induction. One of them, in particular, was a paragon of efficiency – although she did plaster the pinboard behind her with pictures of herself which had largely been shot by Steven Meisel, Conde Nast's star photographer. That was Plum Sykes, who would later pen best-selling comedies of manners that read like a high-end travel agent's road map of the past 30 years. Having begun with Bergdorf Blondes in 1990s New York, her most recent is a chronicle of the heli-pad set in the Cotswolds. Fashion hadn't yet become an industrial complex dominated by three main groups, LVMH, Kering and Inditex. Designers were exploring some concepts such as minimalism, for what felt like the first time. I recently caught myself trying to manifest a dark navy Jil Sander cocoon coat I had from the period. Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto and Helmut Lang, from whom I bought one trouser suit, were the architects of that pared-back rigour that would be recycled and reduced 30 years later on Instagram and TikTok , somewhat tediously, as 'quiet luxury'. We had far fewer clothes then, even at Vogue. Fast fashion didn't really get going until the Noughties. That was good. So was not being run over by twerps on e-scooters. On the other hand, e-bikes have made getting around our cities fun again. We didn't, for better or worse, have Spotify, streamers, sourdough, social media, hand-held clothes steamers, sexy looking flat screens – and that's just the S category. I wore that Lang trouser suit well into the new millennium, until the seat of the trousers wore out. Form followed function – a refreshing switch from the gaudy 1980s. Those bias-cut slip dresses skirts and dresses, ribbed skinny T-shirts, Prada camel coats, sinuous, any-colour-so-long-as-it's-black cocktail dresses and the 'natural make-up pioneered by Bobbi Brown in 1991 still seem current. Three enduring shots sum up the decade's louche but elegant glamour: Kate Moss in a Narciso Rodriguez sheath dress on the arm of Johnny Depp (before we knew about his feet of clay); Brad and Gwyneth, in a red Tom Ford for Gucci velvet suit (before we knew he was, as Gwyneth later allegedly said, 'dumber than a sack of s--t'); Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, a one-time VIP dresser at Calvin Klein, pacing through Manhattan or Martha's Vineyard, like a hunted doe, with John F Kennedy Junior. But other images tell a different story: shell suits, whale tails, lads, ladettes and bad fake tans. 'The late 90s was pretty naff and ugly,' creative director of Joseph (another beloved 1990s label still going), Mario Areno, reminded me recently. The clothes aren't the only aspect of the 1990s that have been run through a nostalgic filter. There was plenty that was dark about the decade. A pre-digital era sounds relaxing but it fostered an environment where outrageous behaviour happened out of sight. When I was commissioned to write a feature about the cult of so-called 'heroin chic' (which saw models being propped up on pillows for shoots because they were so out of it they couldn't sit up) the industry closed ranks. No one would talk about it on or off the record. Size zero was as prevalent as racial and body diversity were rare. It was, like any time, complicated, contradictory, bookended by Margaret Thatcher and the poll tax riots and The Spice Girls and Cool Britannia. The Priory – a rehab clinic in west London – did huge business, but a nascent wellness industry was also germinating. It was party, party, party and you came home reeking of fags because, apart from the Tube, you could smoke everywhere. The comedown, as Izzie, who took her own life in 2007 discovered, could be brutal.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Daily Mail
Kmart shoppers go wild over $2.70 'perfect dupe' of popular $18 item: 'OMG I need it'
A bargain buy that's just landed in Kmart Australia has been hailed as a 'must-have' for Pilates and yoga classes. Fitness lovers were quick to spot the Pilates-perfect Frill Quarter Crew Non-Slip Socks in the Love Cherry Multi design newly available at the budget mass retailer. The best part? The price tag is only $8 for a pack of three pairs of socks - making them just $2.66 per pair. Shoppers were also quick to note that the budget-friendly socks were a 'perfect dupe' of other pricier Pilates sock brands, with similar looking buys found costing between $18 and $25 for a single pair. Kmart Australia recently showcased the footwear find in a short six-second video shared to both their TikTok and Instagram accounts. '$8 for a three-set of the cutest Pilates socks we ever did see,' Kmart said in its post. The video quickly attracted hundreds of likes on social media, with impressed shoppers excitedly taking to the comments. 'OMG,' simply stated one response. 'Super cute,' declared another. 'Not a want. A NEED,' chimed in a third. One happy shopper was already planning to take the socks out for a test run at Pilates. 'I bought these the other day. They're so cute!! Can't wait to wear them to class,' the Aussie woman wrote. The quarter crew shape and the underfoot non-slip grip make these socks ideal for fitness classes like Pilates, where students wear no shoes and only socks. (Or are barefoot). The cotton rich socks are made from a blend of cotton, polyester, elastodiene and elastane materials and come in a pack of three different coloured designs. The main pair from the three-pack that are featured in the video are a cute red-trimmed sock with red bow-shaped grips underfoot and a cherry with bow logo around the ankle. The second pair in the same pack is a pale pink trimmed sock with matching coloured heart-shaped grips, accompanied at the ankle by a cute heart logo. The final, simpler pair in the pack features no logo on the white sock, but has a lavender frill and snowflake-shaped grips underfoot. As Kmart shoppers noted online, the added aesthetic details of the sweet coloured trim, matching logos and patterned grips make these socks look extra 'cute'. The Kmart Pilates socks also feature a ribbed elastic welt to help stop the sock from slouching as you move through your workout. They have also been designed with a Rosso machine toe closure, which should help prevent any sneaky toes from poking a hole out the top of the sock as you lunge and squat in class. The care instructions confirm these socks can be warm machine washed, but should not be tumble dried or dry cleaned, in order to best maintain their stretch and shape. Pilates socks are somewhat of a recent phenomenon, combining function with fashion. The footwear is often worn to fitness classes like Pilates, barre and yoga, with wearers convinced the socks' non-slip grippy bottom helps prevent them from sliding on the mat or machine. Sam Mostardo, owner of Club Pilates North Lakes, told Daily Mail that Pilates socks were essential during classes in their studio. 'Club Pilates requires grip socks for safety and sanitary purposes, we do not allow normal socks or bare feet,' Sam said.
Times
3 days ago
- Times
The 8 hottest gym co-ords to workout in now
T here was a time, before paparazzi shots of Kendall Jenner striding out of her favourite Pilates studio (Forma Pilates in Beverly Hills, for those who care) and Instagram snaps of green-juice-wielding influencers were ten a penny, when the matter of what to wear to work out felt like a moot point. Certainly in fashion terms we spent little — if any — time thinking about it. If our leggings were comfortable, we were happy, if our sports bra held us gently but firmly, we were delighted. These days we are harder to please. With Pilates reformers and weights areas now serving as a catwalk of sorts, the matter of what to wear to do a single-leg hip bridge or power through a renegade row or ten is of paramount importance. The answer, this summer, is a matchy-matchy co-ord. Certainly, gym-ready twin sets à la Jenner, Hailey Bieber et al have become as essential as the emotional support water bottle.
