Latest news with #Summertime
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Opera History Was Made in This House. Its Future Is Uncertain.
The scholars, preservationists and historians had been strategizing for about an hour inside the salon of the charming cypress cottage they were trying to save. They all agreed that magic had been conjured in this very spot nearly a century ago. That's when the writers DuBose and Dorothy Heyward invited the composer George Gershwin to visit their retreat, nicknamed Follywood, on the cozy barrier island of Folly Beach. Gershwin was writing an opera based on DuBose Heyward's novel 'Porgy,' which was adapted into a play co-written with his wife. The story depicted Black life in Charleston, S.C., and the Heywards thought Gershwin should see firsthand the place, people and culture he was writing about. Although Gershwin composed some of the music in New York, his South Carolina visit resulted in eternal anthems like 'Summertime.' 'That does bring up the elephant in the room,' said Harlan Greene, an author and historian who has done extensive research on the Heywards and the opera. He looked at those around him in mid-March, taking note that there were no Black people among the hopeful preservationists. 'Here we are, a bunch of white people in a very diverse economy and you know, cultural appropriation.' 'Porgy and Bess" is largely celebrated as the Great American Opera. It is also weighted by the country's historical baggage. The opera is an elevated piece of culture that explores the dynamics of segregated African Americans; in depicting Blacks as fully formed people nearly a century ago — and not as mammies or Mandingos by performers wearing blackface — it was an outlier. Yet it also faced significant criticism for reinforcing degrading stereotypes. The Heywards were American. DuBose Heyward's great-great-great grandfather, Thomas, signed the Declaration of Independence. They teamed with George and Ira Gershwin, whose parents had immigrated from Russia. The opera's brain trust featured no one who looked like the people depicted in it. The house has been on the market since last June with no serious buyers on the horizon. Folly Beach, just outside of Charleston, has no safeguards for historic homes, raising the question of what a city's responsibilities, if any, are in safeguarding its own history. The cottage, which stretches about 1,600 square feet across two stories, is surrounded by a tall wooden fence and is a portal to a bygone era. It stands out among the modern vacation homes that now line the area. 'It hearkens back to a history that is visibly being erased on Folly Beach itself,' Greene said. The home would likely be the spot of one of those nondescript homes if it wasn't for the current owner, Myles Glick. His motivation is less historical and more personal; the home was cherished by his late wife, Kathy. 'I'm trying to preserve it for one reason,' said Glick, a retired architect. 'I want the house to stay exactly the way she knew it, which is the way it is right now.' It was headline news when Gershwin arrived on the barrier island nearly a century ago. 'Gershwin, Gone Native,' read a 1934 article in The Post and Courier in Charleston: 'Sleek Composer, Burned by Sun, Lets Beard Grow, Wears Only Torn Pants While Writing the Opera 'Porgy.'' 'I have become acclimated,' Gershwin declared in the article. 'You know, it is so pleasant here that it's really a shame to work.' Kathy Glick also adored the region. And she was an enormous fan of the opera. Myles estimates that she saw 'Porgy and Bess' more than a dozen times. He knew better than to resist when the cottage was up for sale. 'It was just a matter of finding out how to pay for it,' he said. 'When she wanted something, she got it and that's the truth.' They bought it for $375,000 in 1998. The home features small rooms, built-in bookcases, a second-story sleeper's porch with a two-sided fireplace and an unattached writer's booth. 'When I walked in here, I could feel the genius,' Kathy told The Post and Courier in 1999. The Glicks held onto the Heywards furniture and memorabilia, restoring the house by placing fresh wood in the foundation and locating appliances that fit the era when replacing the kitchen and a bathroom. Kathy opened the house for tours about a decade after buying the property. She kept index cards that discussed the cottage, the Heywards and 'Porgy and Bess.' Inevitably, she'd break into songs with tourists. Kathy never let her husband in for a tour, though. She was worried that she couldn't keep a straight face with him as a spectator. The Glicks also purchased another home across the street from Follywood. They dreamed of living in that home to be close to the cottage. But Kathy became ill with Lewy body dementia about a decade ago. Instead, their son moved into the other home. In 2022, Kathy died at the age of 73. The Glicks were married for 48 years. 'I'm glad I married her,' Myles Glick said. 'Because I was very happy.' Glick had planned to work until he was 80. 'But Kathy getting sick and taking care of her, it took everything out of me,' he said. Now 75, Glick spoke a day after he visited the cottage to fix some siding and rails and one day before a scheduled surgery. He is tired, he said, of working on the house. 'It's a wood house,' Glick said. 'Is it going to deteriorate even further? One of the shutters is rotted. I've got to get that replaced. The sooner the better to put it into somebody's hands that will take care of it and maintain it.' 'Porgy and Bess' was one of the first representations of Black life in American popular culture. The opera was exported across the globe when the U.S. State Department selected it to represent the country on an international tour in the early 1950s just as the Civil Rights struggle was taking root domestically. The Gershwins mandated that only Black performers play roles in an effort to avoid blackface. 'Porgy' supercharged the singer Leontyne Price's career. A young Maya Angelou toured the world in the traveling production. The opera's music found voice in Black jazz innovators like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. But the praise was far from universal. James Baldwin characterized 'Porgy and Bess' as 'a white man's vision of Negro life.' And while Harry Belafonte released a 'Porgy and Bess' album with Lena Horne in 1959, he declined a role to star in the film version because he found it 'racially demeaning.' Those complicated dynamics endure and were on the mind of the historian, Greene, when he looked around at those attending the meeting to help save the house. He would have liked to have seen some Black people in attendance. He'd like to have seen some young people. But he was conversing with several well-meaning white adults. 'I do think that that's an important conversation for us to be really transparent about,' said Layle Chambers, a community organizer who brought the group together. 'We're going to have to reach out and really be diligent in our efforts to bring all people to the table, because I think we've got to have it as a cultural arts center.' Lauren Waring Douglas, a producer who was not at the meeting, said she supports the house being preserved. Waring Douglas, who is Black, is working on a documentary about the first performance of 'Porgy and Bess' in Charleston. That moment did not arrive until 1970 because of local segregation laws. 'Because Charleston could be such a limiting place to so many Black people, saving the Porgy house doesn't hold the same meaning that it does to white people,' she said. 'I say this with all due love and respect: The history is the history. The complicity is the complicity.' The meeting closed with the promise to convene again soon. One person who did not attend was Myles Glick. Vince Perna, Glick's real estate agent, labeled his absence a reflection of the potential for conflicts of interest. Glick wants to preserve the house. He also wants to sell it. Perna's job is to find him the best buyer. Perna listed the house in June, and later sliced nearly half a million from the original $3.4 million asking price. There have been offers, but nothing concrete that would preserve it. Tom Goodwin, Folly Beach's mayor, joked that he would love for the city to buy the cottage and relocate his office to Follywood. About a year ago, the city talked to Glick, he said, without hearing any numbers on what it would take to land the house. Glick said he departed the conversations with the belief that city did not have the budget to purchase the home. Now, Goodwin is interested to see what the preservationists will propose. 'As far as the city goes, we're really in the infant stages of talking about what we would do or not do or can do,' Goodwin said. 'That's all I know right now. ' As the group met, the irony was not lost that Folly Beach is a short 20-minute drive away from downtown Charleston, widely regarded as the birthplace of the country's preservation movement. The Preservation Society of Charleston, founded in 1920, is America's oldest community-based historic preservation organization and Charleston passed the first zoning ordinance enacted to protect historic resources in 1931. 'Unlike the city of Charleston, there's really no preservation protections,' said Brian Turner, the president and chief executive of the Preservation Society of Charleston. 'You can see the character of these beach towns changing very quickly up and down the coast.' Glick has made indications he wants the home to be preserved, but he has yet to take steps to make that happen, Turner said. 'The ball is in his court to an extent,' he said. The city could enact ordinances, but that could take time, Turner added. 'And I don't know if that would work on the owner's timeline.' For Glick, the sooner the home is off the market and Kathy's memory is honored with a preservation plan — the better. 'I'd like to have sold it,' he said. 'Last year.'
CNN
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Will Smith announces first full-length album release in 20 years
Will Smith is returning to his first love. The actor who rose to fame as a rapper announced he has a new album coming. 'It's OFFICIAL!! My new album Based On A True Story drops March 28,' Smith wrote in a post on social media. 'TWO WEEKS!! Hit that presave. Been working on this project for a minute and I'm itchin' to get it out to y'all.' His last album, 'Lost and Found,' was released in March 2005. Smith also shared a track list for his new project, which includes collaborations with Teyana Taylor, Jac Ross and Obanga. DJ Jazzy Jeff, Smith's longtime friend and collaborator with whom he had the 1991 hit 'Summertime,' is also listed on the opening track. Smith released the single 'Beautiful Scars' in January. Shortly after, he spoke about how the new music is a departure from some of his previous work in an interview with 'Big Boy's Neighborhood.' 'There's a thing, there's a brand that is Will Smith, you know, and the brand is slightly different from the man,' he said. 'The brand is just a really narrow slice of what the man is, and the man has expanded in a way that the brand can almost feel like a prison.' The album release date news came the same weekend he and his 'Fresh Prince of Bel Air' costar Tatyana Ali recreated an iconic scene from their series, accompanied with an assist from Grammy-winning female rapper, Doechii. Waited 35 years for this dance to trend. Ib: @Mimii Their TikTok performance was done to Doechii's viral hit 'Anxiety.' In April 2024, Smith made a surprise appearance during J. Balvin's Coachella set.
CNN
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Will Smith announces first full-length album release in 20 years
Will Smith is returning to his first love. The actor who rose to fame as a rapper announced he has a new album coming. 'It's OFFICIAL!! My new album Based On A True Story drops March 28,' Smith wrote in a post on social media. 'TWO WEEKS!! Hit that presave. Been working on this project for a minute and I'm itchin' to get it out to y'all.' His last album, 'Lost and Found,' was released in March 2005. Smith also shared a track list for his new project, which includes collaborations with Teyana Taylor, Jac Ross and Obanga. DJ Jazzy Jeff, Smith's longtime friend and collaborator with whom he had the 1991 hit 'Summertime,' is also listed on the opening track. Smith released the single 'Beautiful Scars' in January. Shortly after, he spoke about how the new music is a departure from some of his previous work in an interview with 'Big Boy's Neighborhood.' 'There's a thing, there's a brand that is Will Smith, you know, and the brand is slightly different from the man,' he said. 'The brand is just a really narrow slice of what the man is, and the man has expanded in a way that the brand can almost feel like a prison.' The album release date news came the same weekend he and his 'Fresh Prince of Bel Air' costar Tatyana Ali recreated an iconic scene from their series, accompanied with an assist from Grammy-winning female rapper, Doechii. Waited 35 years for this dance to trend. Ib: @Mimii Their TikTok performance was done to Doechii's viral hit 'Anxiety.' In April 2024, Smith made a surprise appearance during J. Balvin's Coachella set.
CNN
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Will Smith announces first full-length album release in 20 years
Will Smith is returning to his first love. The actor who rose to fame as a rapper announced he has a new album coming. 'It's OFFICIAL!! My new album Based On A True Story drops March 28,' Smith wrote in a post on social media. 'TWO WEEKS!! Hit that presave. Been working on this project for a minute and I'm itchin' to get it out to y'all.' His last album, 'Lost and Found,' was released in March 2005. Smith also shared a track list for his new project, which includes collaborations with Teyana Taylor, Jac Ross and Obanga. DJ Jazzy Jeff, Smith's longtime friend and collaborator with whom he had the 1991 hit 'Summertime,' is also listed on the opening track. Smith released the single 'Beautiful Scars' in January. Shortly after, he spoke about how the new music is a departure from some of his previous work in an interview with 'Big Boy's Neighborhood.' 'There's a thing, there's a brand that is Will Smith, you know, and the brand is slightly different from the man,' he said. 'The brand is just a really narrow slice of what the man is, and the man has expanded in a way that the brand can almost feel like a prison.' The album release date news came the same weekend he and his 'Fresh Prince of Bel Air' costar Tatyana Ali recreated an iconic scene from their series, accompanied with an assist from Grammy-winning female rapper, Doechii. Waited 35 years for this dance to trend. Ib: @Mimii Their TikTok performance was done to Doechii's viral hit 'Anxiety.' In April 2024, Smith made a surprise appearance during J. Balvin's Coachella set.
Telegraph
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Hotelier to the stars André Balazs: ‘If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont'
It is 10pm and André Balazs is sitting near the grand piano in the drawing room of the Chateau Marmont, sipping Campari and soda. At the keyboard the virtuoso house pianist Jason Pelsey is playing the 1934 George Gershwin classic, Summertime. Balazs's eyes are closed and he taps his hands on the lid in time to the music, completely absorbed in the moment. It may not be summertime but the livin' is certainly easy at Chateau Marmont, Hollywood's legendary castle, which Balazs bought 35 years ago. And you don't need to close your eyes to be transported back in time: it could still be the 1930s in this beautiful room where Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes once partied. The lighting is low. Guests on velvet sofas sip martinis. Arched windows, heavy curtains and exposed beams lend a Gothic glamour. Even the clientele seems to come from another age. A tall, bearded man in a full-length tapestry dress sashays around the room, gathering up his skirts to tackle the steps. On the other side of the piano is a man wearing a three-piece suit, paisley neckerchief and black trilby – it is he who requested Summertime. He carefully lays down a couple of $20 bills as a tip for Pelsey, who is also an award-winning film composer, drains his cocktail and disappears into the night. Balazs, who knows many of the guests, says he's never seen him before. A young-looking 68, Balazs is the man behind not only the Chateau (as it is known) but also two of the other coolest hotels in the world: The Mercer in New York, and Chiltern Firehouse in London, which was severely damaged by a fire last month. In a catch-up with The Telegraph after this interview to discuss the event, which began in the kitchen's pizza oven before raging to the top floors of the hotel, he says; 'we've been told it will most likely be a two-to-two-and-a-half year process. As I've often said in the context of what makes a great hotel, it's first and foremost about making sure that people feel safe. It's testament to the kindness of my colleagues in hospitality that we've been inundated with over 50 offers to employ our staff. We're grateful for their embrace.' Firehouse will rise again, undoubtedly, but it is his Los Angeles castle on the hill, which opened in 1929 and whose earthquake-proof walls harbour some of Hollywood's best-kept secrets, that is the jewel in his crown. Over the years, the hotel has hosted all sorts of shenanigans. 'If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont,' said Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures in 1939, installing best friends Glenn Ford and William Holden in a penthouse suite. Clark Gable had an affair with Jean Harlow here. The Rolling Stones created havoc when they stayed; Jim Morrison fell two storeys (and survived) while trying to swing from the roof or a balcony, no one can remember which. Bette Davis nearly burnt the place down when she fell asleep with a lit cigarette while watching one of her own films. In 1982 John Belushi died of a drug overdose in one of the bungalows. Johnny Depp claimed to have had sex with Kate Moss in every single one of the Chateau's 63 rooms. The quintessence of Old Hollywood, the hotel combines a heady mix of style and loucheness – as chronicled in the lavishly illustrated Hollywood Handbook, just republished and edited by Balazs. First published in 1996, it includes contributions from many writers who have stayed here. 'The Chateau has been a constant in my life, a kind of club for someone who has never been a joiner,' writes the novelist Jay McInerney. 'When people are looking very hard for me they eventually call the Chateau.' In 1926 Fred Horowitz, a lawyer, decided to build a version of the Loire Valley's medieval Château d'Amboise on a hillside above a scrubby, unpaved road called Sunset Boulevard, adjacent to Marmont Lane. Complete with turrets and a vaulted colonnade, it was conceived as an apartment block, and the first tenants moved in on 1 Feb 1929. But eight months later the stock market crashed and the apartments were let out to short-term lodgers. And so it morphed into a hotel. Over the decades, the Chateau went downhill. The ratty brown and orange shag carpets were a joke. The rooms, full of thrift-store furniture, were falling apart. Hell, it didn't even have a liquor licence. But somehow it retained its cachet. Visiting in 1990, Balazs bought the property: 'I learnt that the two partners weren't getting along and one of them wanted to sell.' The process of buying was swift. The desire to buy the hotel wasn't. He was looking for a sister property for The Mercer, and the Chateau fitted the bill. 'But what compelled me was I had stayed here five or six times, and I noticed how lonely LA was… I used to land late at night, and even just coming out of the airport, there's a sense of emptiness… The Chateau fought against that loneliness. It's an antidote to the loneliness of LA.' So he was buying somewhere to call home in Los Angeles? 'That would be a fair way to put it,' he agrees. It's a sentiment he shares with many of the guests. 'There are two people here now, a director and an actor, one who's lived here four years, the other a year and a half.' He introduces me to a director who stays here for three or four months each year. 'Once you're a part of this community, you tend to stick around,' says the director. 'It's a membership club with no application, no fees. You just subscribe to whatever magic André creates.' Balazs is far more than just the owner: he is sewn into the fabric of the Chateau, part of the scene, king of the castle if you will. 'I wouldn't go that far,' he says modestly. Yet, with his suave charisma and string of famous girlfriends (including Courtney Love, Kylie Minogue and Uma Thurman – twice), he is intrinsic to its glamour. When he bought the Chateau, he was married to Katie Ford, former CEO of the Ford Models agency, with whom he has two daughters, Alessandra and Isabel. He also has a son, Ivo, now aged seven, with Cosima Vesey, daughter of the 7th Viscount de Vesci. If there is one golden rule, it is discretion. If you see something, don't say something. 'You can feel safe being whoever you are, as quirky as you may be, it's not going to be exploited or revealed or shared.' His philosophy is that anything goes, as long as other guests don't mind: 'I don't think anyone's behaviour is objectionable, except if it disturbs other people. If someone wants to take their clothes off, it's not a problem for many people. That's very problematic for others.' Bookings are lightly filtered. They tend not to take groups or weddings, because they skew the make-up of a small, 63-room hotel. He rarely hears complaints from Chateau guests. 'I think they're too intimidated by the reputation that precedes it. It's either your cup of tea or it's not.' The idea of the Chateau as a safe haven dates from the early days, when it would provide rooms for anyone, regardless of sexual orientation or skin colour. During Covid, it offered free rooms for doctors, and now it is advertising free stays for the firefighters tackling some of the worst blazes in Los Angeles history. In fact, the hotel is abuzz with news of the very handsome firefighter staying in one of the bungalows. Of course he's handsome, it's the Chateau Marmont. Three nights before we meet, the Chateau had to be evacuated due to the wildfires, which were visible from the higher windows. Balazs was the last to leave. 'I would have stayed… but my two daughters and my ex-wife were imploring me to leave, they were so freaked out. To make them happy, I left.' Within an hour, he was back. I get the impression that, like the captain of the Titanic, he would have been happy to go down with his castle. In retrospect, it seems that the Chateau and André Balazs were always destined for each other. Born in 1957, Balazs is the son of Hungarian immigrants who fled to Sweden during the Second World War before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Balazs describes his father, a scientist, as 'amazingly creative', and his mother, a psychologist and musician, as 'fiercely rebellious'. A maverick as a child, Balazs broke the rules, with his mother's encouragement. 'I was very badly behaved,' he says when we meet the next day for lunch in the Chateau's sunny garden. 'Rules were just something I ignored… When I was 10 or 11, they were building a large highway near my home, and it involved filling in part of a lake that we lived on. My mother was incensed at this, and somehow she convinced me and my two buddies to go on these Caterpillar bulldozers that were parked at night and pour bags of sugar into the gas tanks, which would ruin the engines. I thought nothing of it, it was rather like a sport.' He went to Cornell University, then took a masters in business and journalism at Columbia University. After working briefly in political PR, he and his father formed a biotech company, which made their fortune. A friend invited him to become an investor in a Manhattan nightclub named MK. And from there it was a short leap into hotels – fuelled partly, he says, by a fascination with sculpture. 'I found it very frustrating that nobody understood the language of three-dimensional design… I liked the idea of making something out of nothing and have it express something.' Like many of the guests, Balazs views the Chateau as a character, a movie star in its own right. Sofia Coppola's 2010 Somewhere, filmed at the hotel, captures its dreamy, hypnotic nature. 'You could argue that a hotel is just a place to sleep,' says Balazs. 'And there are hotels like that. [But a good hotel] has a certain DNA, a soul, something that draws people.' A few weeks after buying it, he met the photographer Helmut Newton and his wife, June, in room 49, a suite in which the couple had been living every winter since 1957. 'Helmut started telling me that I shouldn't change anything: 'Don't f—k it up,' he told me. And as he was talking, I sat back and the seam of the sofa ripped and the spring literally popped out.' The hotel had to change, but Balazs made it his mission to make any changes imperceptible. 'The Japanese have a name for that: kaizen, perfecting things without people knowing what you're doing. It's a discreet fiddling, so things are better without losing its soul.' It worked. Newton continued to stay regularly. 'I'm so glad you didn't change anything,' he would say whenever he saw the hotelier. In the meantime Balazs was quietly changing everything. 'Not one surface is the same.' In 2004 Newton died after crashing his Cadillac while suffering a heart attack in the hotel drive. 'In fact,' Balazs tells me, 'you're staying in his room.' Is it haunted? 'Not that I've heard,' says Balazs – in a way that suggests it might be. Ghosts are part of the Chateau's mystique. Almost everyone has a ghost story, including Balazs himself: 'I was alone in one of the bungalows and I suddenly felt this weight in the room, like a physical weight, I could barely move, I slowly opened my eyes, and I saw a naked couple [standing] at the foot of the bed: I felt I was intruding on their space. They were holding each other in a very loving way and rocking back and forth… I clapped my hands to make a noise and they were still there. I said hello and they still wouldn't go. I turned the light on and I was looking at them and then slowly slowly they faded away… There was a sulphurous smell.' Perhaps more than ghosts, people talk about the creative energy of the Chateau. The filmmaker John Waters says the only time he didn't stay at the Chateau, he didn't get his movie deal. In the Hollywood Handbook, the late screenwriter Kit Carson describes how a ghost would come to him at 3.30 every morning in suite 23 and 'make me go to work… it was a rosy presence.' Balazs shows me Carson's old car, a 1967 red Morgan two-door convertible, which Carson abandoned at the hotel in the late 1970s. It is a classic Chateau story. 'For years I was calling everyone, I couldn't find him so I thought 'F—k it, I'll start charging him the same rate as everyone else.' [His bill went from] $120,000 to $200,000, I didn't know what to do. One day Griffin Dunne [the actor] calls me from Dallas and says, 'Why don't you pop down. I'm having dinner with Kit Carson tonight.' So I showed up [and said], 'I'm André, I have your car.' [And he said] 'Yeah, I know, why don't you just keep it.' So I said, 'OK, but any time you're in town you can drive it.'' Balazs's real home – when he is not staying at one of his hotels – is Locusts-on-Hudson, a neo-baroque country manor in New York, which he bought in 2004, also on a whim, while browsing an estate sale. '[Thurman's] mother loved to go to these sales, and I somehow finagled the address. We drove out and we were driving around the back of the house; the grass was so tall, taller than the car roof and I almost drove into an empty swimming pool. The real-estate broker had placed a sign next to the house so I pulled it out and put it in the trunk of the car. That was on a Saturday, I had bought it by Monday morning.' He says he views Chateau Marmont as 'the troubled child' in his brood: 'It's the one that refused to grow up.' And yet it is not hard to see that it is also his most adored child. 'It's been 35 years out of 97, it's a long time.' He is meant to be leaving tonight but finds that he cannot. 'I hate leaving places. I always come up with some excuse [to stay].' Two days later, he is still in residence. One night, I am working late in my room, which looks out over Hollywood, a massive billboard of Timothée Chalamet looming in the night sky, which is hazy red from the fires. I hear a crash in the living room. By now I have heard so many stories about ghosts that I almost jump out of my skin. I tiptoe through. All is still. And then I realise it must be the ice bucket. The ice has finally melted and the bottle that was nestled on top has dropped to the bottom. I have to admit that I am almost disappointed. Chateau Marmont: Hollywood Handbook, edited by André Balazs (Rizzoli, £29.95)
