Town & Country February 2016

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…

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…

“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 One afternoon last year in Los Angeles, Victoria was proud to show me some unpublished images of her father’s that were stored in a black kid leather Hermès photo album her mother had made in the 1960s.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…

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…

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,…

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…