RIP, VIP

Shout out to Kevin on the astral plane - which in his case I'm sure is shimmering, glowing, and fantastically lit.

One of the great ones. So sorry to hear.

Andy Warhol TV director and longtime cultural archivist Don Monroe (see the Don-A-Thon Topic here) died last night of cancer. I will post details of his wake here which will be on Bleecker Street Wednesday night. We join with New York's other great factory in mourning his loss.

Here are the details for Don's wake and funeral.
Please please pass them on to anyone whom you feel
would like to celebrate Don's life.

The Wake:
Wednesday 5th June
Perrazza Funeral Home
199 Bleeker Street
(between Macdougal + 6th Ave)
2-5pm Open Casket for family
7-9 Closed Casket

The Funeral Service
Thursday 6th June
St. Francis Xavier Church
16th Street (between 5th + 6th)
10:30 AM

There will be an informal lunch at Bowery Bar after
the Funeral Service.

Thanks for all your love and support during this time.
Jill x

Widely publicized and with a NYMag article to come out Holly died last week. She had been my art dealer from 1974-1980. Everything the many NYTimes obits said about her and Grace Gluck's full biography is true. She treated artists like friends, supported many many talents, and went with her gut feelings no matter what the odds.

My personal memory which I'll never forget was the crazy summer we drove up to Lake Placid with a stationwagon trunk full of white wine and returned with a statonwagon trunk full of depression glass. We had gone for a mad thrift shop depression glass binge, had housefulls of guests for drunken dinners everynight and rooted her son John on in his skating. William Wegman told me later that we scared him! It was the best time!!

I spoke with her son Tom with whom I shared some memories.

Although she never attended Mother, Chi Chi told me they played scrabble at a friend's on St. Bart's (or was it hearts at a rehab?) No matter two great muses who have influenced me and been an important part of my life.

There will be a Memorial Service for Holly in the fall.

--------------------------------------------------

SOLOMON-Holly. We will miss this grandest lady of the art world, who surrounded herself at her gallery and at home with the creations of the artists she loved, supported and represented. Thank you for all you did to make the art world so lively. Agnes Gund, Daniel Shapiro

THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK | June 10, 2002, Monday
Holly Solomon, Adventurous Art Dealer, Is Dead at 68

By GRACE GLUECK (NYT)

- Holly Solomon, an art dealer known for her championship of the new and untried, for her spirited, high-stepping lifestyle and for being the subject of a glamorous portrait by Andy Warhol that made her a Pop icon like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, died on Thursday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She was 68 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications from pneumonia, her son Thomas said.

[This message was edited by daddy on 06-21-02 at 03:14 PM.]

Holly was a steam roller. She paved the way. She had one of the first galleries in SOHO. When SHE moved downtown EVERYONE moved downtown.

Holly started so many people's careers. Too many to mention. She was often the first person to give an artist a break. Most of the household name artists of the 70's, 80's, 90's and beyond got their start somehow with Holly.

Holly, subsequently, had one the best art collections in the world. Going to her apt. (57th Street) was like going to the Museum of Modern Art. This building, which she and then husband Horace owned, was Marilyn Monroe's Building. (Holly had amazing Marilyn Monroe momentos)

Horace was the inventor of the bobby pin.
(Not true but he told everybody that. I guess I was the only one that actually believed it)

Holly was absolutely GORGEOUS when she was young. If you ever saw pictures you would gag. The Andy Warhol Portrait of Holly is definately one of his best.

Holly was generous. She helped with my rent on a couple of occasions when I was in art school. I showed her my (awful) art and she wanted to help. She saw something I guess. (It wasn't my drawings)

She always supported and often came to Jackie 60. She loved it. I think that was the art that she was waiting for. She was supposed to be interviewed for the Jackie 60 Movie but got sick. Always the trouper, she wanted to do the interview at her house right after her chemotheropy but I said let's wait. We never did it.

Holly was fierce.

[This message was edited by daddy on 06-21-02 at 03:15 PM.]

(not natural born blondes)



Chi Chi & Holly on St. Bart's, late 20th century.
(I'm not too good with dates as most of you know)



Holly

[This message was edited by daddy on 06-21-02 at 03:38 PM.]

Thank you, Daddy for these priceless images. I'm kvelling!

Michael's lover Gareth sent me a note that Michael died last night between 8-9PM, at Saint Vincent's of complications due to HIV/AIDS which he had been fighting bravely for years. Gareth shut off his med tubes at 8PM because Michael loved curtain time.

I'm sure many of you remember the pierced and tattooed very handsome couple, Michael and Gareth who frequented Jackie 60, Click & Drag and recently Cheez Whiz.

Michael was an actor/songwriter. He was one of the girls in "Cage" on Broadway and recently performed his songs at small gatherings.

Michael was a fun loving rebel, a fierce and loyal friend and over the past couple of years threw many parties for which he hired Hattie Hathaway, Robert Flowrider and myself to entertain. He also befriended Sabrina who was to write a piece for an anthology Michael was planning. Ginger recently photographed Michael at the Betty Page party. If Ginger could post that picture I know Garreth would love it.

Anyone wishing to write Gareth a note:

GHendee@aol.com

[This message was edited by Rose Royalle on 06-21-02 at 05:00 AM.]

Michaelian (L) and Gareth (R) at Betty Page 12 by Jamie Casertano.

Hi, everyone,

I have at last found a place suitable for a party for us all to get together and honor Michaelian. Here are the details:

Monday, August 19 - that's a week from today
The Slipper Room
167 Stanton Street at Orchard
(lower east side - 1 block south and east of 1st Ave. and Houston)
7:30 til whenever
Cash bar

We'll start with about an hour of sharing memories, stories - anyone who wants to contribute is welcome to do so. Then we'll turn up the music and just mingle.
Please let me know if you are coming. And spread the word to others who I might not reach. Would like to have a big turn out.

Can't wait to see you all.

Gareth

Pioneer artist, actor and jazz musician Larry Rivers died at his home Wednesday, in Southhampton, NY, at age 78. Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx, he played saxophone as a preteen in the Borscht Belt and changed his name after the War. The cause of death was unknown.

AP Obituary

Tara died suddenly last Monday from complications
brought on by an untreated chronic bronchial condition.

Versaille Room vets may remember Tara, one of a group of very pretty, quite passable Pan Asian/ Philipine young ladies who were regular customers @Mother. The girls were always followed by droves of chasers who would compete for the privilege of buying their drinks. They remained loyal to "Jackie 60" and even followed the legendary party downtown to Don Hill's. Among her coterie of friends--Ana, Meghan, Gretchen (of Lucky Chengs) and Kim to name a few.

Tara worked selling cosmetics @Bergdoff's and later bartended @Eidleweiss off and on for many years. I will always remember her good humor and generosity to me.

Services will be held today, Sunday October 6 from 2-9PM at a Memorial Home (wasn't told name) on "12th St. and Avenue A". All are welcome to attend.

Was this the same Tara that was pretty big and would wear black rubber dresses? Often she wore a black Betty Page wig and I used to tell her she could totally win in a plus-size Betty competition. I used to see her at Mother and also Kitsch-Inn and I even have a picture of her somewhere. (without her wigs she had a shaved head)

If it's the one I'm thinking of I had no idea she was even a tranny! I thought she was genetic girl all this time! Just goes to show you never know.

Very, very sad. So young and so full of spirit. Rest in peace.

hattie,
did you know larry rivers?
he lived around the corner from us in southampton.

he has great art in his garden, i hope someone will light the huge legs this christmas. just legs and crotch!

Lexx, I don't think it is the same Tara. Tara, the rubberkitty one with shaved head, was a genetic female, and the Tara that ChiChi mentioned was a tranny.

At least I think so...

Was a very special person. Always helping out young artists. Very nice.

Next to Quentin Crisp, one of my favorite New Yorkers was an uptown girl whom I belatedly learned passed on. I was visitng the NYTimes obit section for the first time in many months and discovered Daphne Helman, had passed away this summer very close to if not on Warhol's birthday.) She was listed as a name on the bottom of the page but the link wasn't working. Later that day I was on the Motherboards in the Versailles section and was reminded of the RIP VIP which I've also avoided far too long so I finally visited and learned of Holly Solomon's death. Another great loss. I was curious if a mention of Ms. Daphne appeared here and since it had not I'd like to contribute the Times synopsis with the small footnote that they failed to account for the fact that age 80 she took up Rollerblading in Central Park which is where we happened upon each other, her in lots of colorful protective gear and me in one of my April Fool's numbers.

Daphne Hellman, Harpist With Eclectic Taste, Dies at 86
By RANDY KENNEDY

Daphne Bayne Hellman, the jazz harpist who performed around the world and for three decades at the Village Gate but who had a special affection for playing on subway platforms, died on Sunday at a nursing home in Manhattan. She was 86.

Ms. Hellman, who had played on the streets of Paris at a music fair as recently as June, was recuperating from injuries suffered in a fall last month near her town house on East 61st Street, her family said.


In a wildly peripatetic musical career that began in the 1940's at Town Hall -- where Time magazine called her ''as curvesome as a treble clef'' -- her professional choices were generally as eccentric as those she made in the rest of her life.

She saw nothing particularly unusual, she said, about plucking her harp on the street in front of the Hotel Pierre, where she came out to society in 1933, at a supper dance in the roof garden.

She did not seem to care what people thought when, after years of playing well-to-do places for well-to-do crowds, she also took the stage at clubs like CBGB, on the Bowery, accompanied by the kitchen-drawer percussion of a man called Mr. Spoons, otherwise known as Joseph Jones Jr., whom Ms. Hellman put up in her town house after his third wife left him.

She played the Beatles or Roger Miller or bluegrass warhorses like ''Foggy Mountain Breakdown'' with as much appreciation as she played Bach and Debussy, Gershwin and Kern.

Although she was an heiress with substantial means -- ''My mother had mucho money,'' she said in one interview -- she liked to count the money she earned when she began playing in the subway in the 1980's, sometimes carrying coins to a delicatessen near her house to trade them for bills.

''She was just the antisnob, that's what she was,'' said Art D'Lugoff, who owned the Village Gate, where Ms. Hellman and her trio, Hellman's Angels, played every Tuesday for 30 years when she was in town. It was one of the longest nightclub runs in the city's history.

''She had money and she knew a lot of people and she got along with everybody,'' said Mr. D'Lugoff, whose club closed in 1994. ''She opened up a new world for me, and I opened up a world for her.''

Ms. Hellman was sometimes compared to Katharine Hepburn, not only because of her high cheekbones and patrician good looks, but also because she lived a life of elegant rebellion, even before she first touched a harp at the age of 12.

Born Daphne Van Beuren Bayne, the granddaughter of the founder of the Seaboard National Bank, she recalled in a 1990 profile in The New Yorker that as a child she liked to keep bats and armadillos as pets. ''They are much maligned and misunderstood,'' she said of bats.

As a young woman, she first tried acting, training in New York and London and landing a walk-on part in a Broadway production of ''Hamlet.'' She also modeled for Man Ray and Harper's Bazaar. But after her marriage to her first husband, Harry Bull, the editor of Town & Country magazine, and the birth of their son, Sandy, she began to take the harp more seriously.

Over the strong objections of her father, she had her jazz debut at a cabaret called Le Ruban Bleu, at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue. Over the next few years, she played at a string of clubs that sound like a roll call from another musical era: the Hotel New Yorker, with Ving Merlin and his All-Girl Band; Upstairs at the Downstairs, with Blossom Dearie and Imogene Coca; Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe; the Versailles; Le Perroquet.

Once, at Le Ruban Bleu, according to the New Yorker profile, a young Billie Holiday, quite drunk, angrily refused to share the club's only dressing room with Ms. Hellman, who played there twice a year.

But most of Ms. Hellman's relationships with famous people were much more congenial and enduring. Her cluttered East Side town house, usually full of boarders, birds, dogs and litters of gerbils, served as the base for a kind of floating salon. And she was its musical Zelig, whose close friends included, besides Mr. Spoons, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the artist Saul Steinberg and the writer Norman Mailer.

In the 1940's, she had briefly supplied a beautiful face and high-society name to gossip columns when her marriage to Mr. Bull fell apart and she had an affair with Geoffrey T. Hellman, a writer for The New Yorker. She married him in Reno in 1941, hours after her divorce from Mr. Bull. (Her son, Sandy Bull, a noted guitarist, died last year; she is survived by a daughter, Daisy Paradis, and a son, Digger St. John.)

Mr. Hellman left her for another woman, and in 1961, she married Hsio-Wen Shih, a Chinese-American architect and writer, who left their home one day in 1965 and disappeared, breaking her heart, friends said.

''It was like he went out for a pack of cigarettes and just didn't come back,'' said Lyn Christie, the bassist in Ms. Hellman's trio, who played with her for decades, everywhere from the subway to Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Bombay and Hong Kong.

''It felt sort of like the trips we made to China were an attempt to try to find out about him,'' Mr. Christie said. ''But we never did come across him.''

Ms. Hellman's daughter, Daisy Paradis, said that her mother, who sometimes smoked a pack of Salems a day, had slowed down only slightly over the last few years. She had not played the subway for quite a while, mostly because it had become harder to find someone to help her lug her 85-pound harp down to the platform. But she played in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka this year and was appearing at the Firebird Cafe in Midtown at the time of her fall.

''She was an incredibly intrepid woman,'' said Mr. Christie, who recalled that in Hong Kong she tried to ride on horseback into Communist China. ''She loved to do whatever she knew you weren't supposed to do.''

rb//nyc//bronx//bohemia

[This message was edited by dreambot on 10-19-02 at 11:46 AM.]

Daphne was a NY class act. Sorry to hear the news.

Sory to report I heard of Richard Bernstien's death yesterday--I remember him as such a nice man as well as the author of all the "Interview" covers.

I'm sure there is and will be reams public information.

Randella is correct - Tara was beautiful-but for her transgendered state of being, she was otherwise conventional and quite tasteful I might add in appearance.