James Spada's Blog, page 4

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRACE!

Grace Kelly was born on this day in Philadelphia in 1929. She would have been 84!

SHE'LL BE DOING BAR MITZVAHS NEXT!

Barbra Streisand plays Lincoln Center one night only for a $2.3M private concertBY MARIANNE GARVEY, BRIAN NIEMIETZ AND LACHLAN CARTWRIGHT    Tuesday, November 12, 2013, 2:00 AM
#static{height:38px;} #static td{vertical-align:top !important;} #static td td{vertical-align:middle !important;} #static .fb-like iframe{width:450px !important;} #static:after{content:".";display:block;height:0;clear:both;visibility:hidden;}     21191Print AMIR COHEN/REUTERSBarbra Streisand performed 10 songs at a pricey private Lincoln Center show. Above, Streisand during her summer concert in Tel Aviv. Barbra Streisand proved she means business by collecting a check for a cool $2.3 million for singing at a banking conference at Lincoln Center on Friday, Confidenti@l has learned. The “Memory” singer was listed as the “surprise entertainment” at 2:45 p.m. on the schedule of investment firm Baron Funds’ 22nd Annual Baron Investment Conference at the Metropolitan Opera House.
She arrived under a cloak of secrecy in a black SUV with tinted windows that parked at the loading dock. And Babs got paid the whopping figure for what amounted to a miniconcert, one attendee says. She belted out 10 tunes, including “Memory,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and “People,” in just under an hour for the buttoned-up crowd. After her performance, she left just as stealthily as she arrived.
The audience was packed with more than 4,000 Baron shareholders, who arrived early in the morning for the all-day affair. Babs was the highlight of the event, which included presentations from business leaders and speeches by Baron Capital Group president Linda Martinson and CEO Ron Baron.
We hope none of them filmed Babs doing what she does best — she once threatened to sue former “Real Housewife of New York” Jill Zarin for taping her at a Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces fund-raising gala and posting the 30-second clip on YouTube.
Zarin was happy to take it down, tweeting, “Someone from Barbra Streisand’s company just called my store to tell me to take down my YouTube video or they will sue me. Is that nuts? Sorry guys. I took it down!”
Although Barbra was the queen bee at the conference, guests also heard numbers by the Counting Crows, Melissa Etheridge and Katharine McPhee.
While in New York, Barbra saw “Pippin” on Broadway and posed with Tovah Feldshuh and the rest of the cast after the show. Last night she picked up the 2013 Woman of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award from Glamour Magazine at Carnegie Hall.
Babs’ rep wouldn’t talk about the hefty paycheck.
“I have no idea, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you,” he said.
Baron Funds declined to comment.

PRINCESS GRACE BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Grace Kelly Covers Tatler In Iconic 1955 Edith Head Dress (PHOTO)       #news_entries #ad_sharebox_260x60 img {padding:0px;margin:0px} She may have passed away in 1982, but Princess Grace is having a moment. The princess of Monaco is the latest cover star of Tatler, with one of her most iconic photos peering back at readers of the December 2013 issue.
The icy green dress on the cover is by Edith Head, the most influential costume designer who outfitted Kelly in movies like "To Catch A Thief." Grace Kelly wore the green frock to the 1955 Oscars and was later photographed in it by Life magazine.
Now it's landing on newsstands once again, as Princess Grace enjoys an uptick of popularity. The Philadelphia-born noble and actress is the subject of a new exhibit, "From Philadelphia to Monaco: Grace Kelly Beyond The Icon," at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pa. And just this week, Princess Charlene of Monaco, who's married to Princess Grace's son Albert, honored her mother-in-law's memory at the Princess Grace Awards Gala in New York City.
Charlene even wore green. Check out Princess Grace on the gorgeous, nostalgia-inducing Tatler cover below and see more at tatler.co.uk.

A timeless beauty:

ANOTHER HONOR FOR BARBRA!

Barbra is Glamour Lifetime Achievement Winner
(from www.barbra-archives.com) With a new (gorgeous!) photo by Russell James, Barbra Streisand appears in the December 2013 edition of Glamour magazine (out Nov. 5—or download the issue now in the Glamour iPad app here). Barbra wears Donna Karan in the photo; boots by Chanel.
In the article, Barbra offers five tips for young women: “One, find your passion. Find what you love to do. Two, trust your instincts. Three, stay true to yourself—people respond to authenticity, and they can smell a phony. Four, don't fear your self-doubt. Doubt can motivate you, so don't be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out.”
And five? “Take risks. Don't stand on the sidelines. Get involved. It's your life. It's your country. It's your world.”
Fellow 2013 Woman of the Year, Lady Gaga, said this about Streisand: “She's such a pivotal figure in music. As a performer, she's always been so different from everybody else around.”
Gaga was also asked about Barbra in her December Glamour interview: “Yes, I've always admired her, and I always found her to be extremely confident in herself. I think it's the thing that I found the most amazing about her—her confidence.”
The 23rd annual Women of the Year Awards will be held at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Nov. 11.
You can read Barbra's Glamour interview online here.

HEAR MARY J. BLIGE-BARBRA STREISAND DUET!

http://www.broadwayworld.com/videoplay.php?colid=598398

"THE WAY WE WERE" BLU-RAY EDITION ON SALE NOW EXCLUSIVELY

I love "The Way We Were." I love the period ambience, the way Barbra looks in the hairdos and outfits of the forties, the wonderful love story, and the great acting of Streisand ands Redford. A Blu- Ray edition of the film is available now, but only at one web site:

http://www1.screenarchives.com/display_results.cfm

If you're interested, I'd act quickly, because it's a limited edition!

MARILYN STAYS HOT, HOT, HOT!

Marilyn Monroe is the new face of Chanel No. 5Six decades after the late actress claimed she wore nothing to bed but Chanel No. 5, Monroe will become the face of the brand. Her photos will appear in upcoming TV and print ad campaigns for the iconic fragrance.                                                                                     69112Print Getty Marilyn Monroe dabs Chanel perfume on before the premiere of Tennessee Williams' 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' in 1955. Chanel has announced that images of the iconic American actress will be used in TV and print campaigns for its legendary fragrance starting November 17.
Although she did not appear in ads for Chanel No. 5 during her lifetime, Marilyn Monroe may have been the perfume's best ambassador. In 1952, when asked by Life magazine what she usually wore to bed, she famously responded that she wore nothing but the fragrance. The declaration went down in Hollywood history as an example of the famous sex symbol's witty charm, contributing in the process to the mystique surrounding Chanel No. 5.
Six decades later, Chanel plans to place the late actress in the spotlight in No. 5 campaigns.
At the end of 2012, just after bringing on Brad Pitt as an ambassador for No. 5, Chanel released "Marilyn and No. 5," a web video in its "Inside CHANEL" series. The clip expresses Monroe's affinity for the fragrance through archival images and a previously unreleased audio recording of Monroe discussing her famous quote.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/fashion/marilyn-monroe-new-face-chanel-5-article-1.1488509#ixzz2iBqiwYJI

PETER LAWFORD MARATHON ON TCM!

Well, they didn't do it for his birthday last month, but TCM is running a Peter Lawford mini-marathon today. They're showing It Happened in Brooklyn, with Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante, Just This Once with Janet Leigh, Dead Ringer with Bette Davis, and It Should Happen to You with Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon. Check them out if you can!

Barbra Streisand on Mary J. Blige Holiday CD

Barbra has recorded a duet of the Disney classic “When You Wish Upon A Star” with Mary J. Blige for Blige's holiday CD, A Mary Christmas. Trumpeter Chris Botti is featured on the song, too. The track was produced by David Foster.
The CD will be released October 15th.
You can pre-order the CD from Amazon here.

TODAY IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF PRINCESS GRACE'S DEATH

On September 14, 1982, a mysterious automobile accident took the life of beloved movie star and princess of Monaco Grace Kelly. Here is the chapter from my book Grace Kelly: The Secret Lives of a Princess, which is available in eBook format at Amazon, B&N, Kobo and Authoropolis.


CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE  On the brilliantly sunny Monday morning of September 13, 1982, Grace prepared to leave Roc Agel, where she, Albert, Rainier, and Stephanie had been staying, for an appointment with her couturier in Monaco. She needed to have several dresses altered before leaving that evening for Paris with Stephanie. She loaded her brown Rover 3500 with luggage and laid out the dresses needing alteration along the back seat to prevent them from wrinkling. Grace, who did not enjoy driving, usually was driven by her chauffeur, Christian Silvestri. But when he started to enter the car, Grace—aware that there wasn’t room for three people in the Rover—told him, "That won’t be necessary." When Silvestri reminded Grace of her fear of the tortuously winding road between Roc Agel and Monaco, she told him jokingly, "You can run behind us."
At around nine-thirty, the Rover, with Grace at the wheel and Stephanie beside her in the passenger seat, left the Grimaldi property and ventured out onto County Highway 53. The twisting road has over fifty sharp turns, many of them hairpin, and Grace negotiated them at a snail’s pace. During the last five miles, truck driver Yves Raimondo was directly behind the Rover. He watched it make one turn, then another, without incident. But, about two hundred yards before the final and sharpest curve, Raimondo saw the car in front of him zigzag so badly that it almost sideswiped the mountain rocks on the opposite side of the road. Assuming "a lack of attention," Raimondo sounded his horn and, as he expected, the Rover righted itself as it continued down the roadway. Then, to his growing horror, he realized that the car was not slowing down in anticipation of the dangerous turn ahead. "The corner came up," he later said. "I did not see it slow down . . . the brake lights didn’t come on . . . she did not even try to turn and I had the impression that she was going faster and faster . . . [the car] disappeared over the edge."
      All of the curves on the Moyenne Corniche have crash barriers, but this one, unlike the others, extends only halfway, because at that point a narrow dirt road runs off the main roadway at right angles. Grace’s car barreled straight ahead, brushed against the edge of the barrier, passed over the entrance to the roadway, and careened off the hillside. It flew a few feet in the air, then crashed through thick underbrush and somersaulted several times before landing on its roof at the edge of a vegetable garden. The police photographs taken immediately after the accident reveal that the car’s right side had been crushed flat in the fall down the hillside; the left-hand, driver’s side of the car wasn’t as badly damaged, and the door had popped open. Steam poured out of the car’s radiator. It was 10:05 A.M.
Stephanie, injured but conscious and able to move, crawled out of the left-hand side of the car just as several residents of the area arrived. Her first words were, "Help my mother . . . My mother is in there—get her out!" Grace was lying on her back amid the car’s jumbled seats, her feet toward the front windshield and her head resting against the back window. There was little blood, but she was only half-conscious and did not respond to shouts.
       Stephanie wandered to the steps of the nearby farmhouse, sobbing to the occupants that they must call her father. They didn’t recognize her and asked who her father was. "He’s the Prince. I’m his daughter, Stephanie, and maman is in the car." Calls were made to the gendarmerie and to the palace, and within five minutes two ambulances arrived. The attendants saw that there was no way to extract Grace from the car except to smash the rear window and pull her out through it; they did so. She was obviously very badly injured. Her open eyes were glazed over, a gash ran across her forehead and her right leg lay at an odd angle. She did not respond when spoken to.
      Grace and Stephanie, each in a separate ambulance, were rushed to Princess Grace Hospital. Rainier and Albert arrived shortly afterward but were not allowed to see them. Stephanie, the doctors discovered, was suffering from shock, a concussion, and a vertebra fracture that had come perilously close to paralyzing her. Grace’s reactions to light and other stimuli were tested and were negligible, indicating severe brain damage. She was placed on a life-support system, and Dr. Charles Chatelin, head of surgery at the hospital, began four hours of surgery to treat her external wounds—a broken collarbone, broken femur, fractured ribs, severe gash in the forehead, and numerous cuts and bruises. Internally, Grace had sustained damage to her thorax and had a collapsed lung. Chatelin opened both her thorax (to remove blood and to bring air to her lung) and her stomach (to treat internal bleeding).
       Her condition continued to deteriorate, however, and her electroencephalogram indicated she was falling into a coma. Dr. Chatelin and Dr. Duplay, head of neurosurgery at Nice Hospital, who had joined his colleague at Grace’s side, realized that a CAT scan of her brain would be necessary. Princess Grace Hospital did not have the machine to do this; the only one in the area was owned by Dr. Michel Mourou in Monaco. Nearly thirteen hours after the accident, Grace was taken to Dr. Mourou’s office on a stretcher. The elevator to his suite wasn’t big enough to accommodate the stretcher, so Grace had to be carried up two flights of stairs. The scan was administered and revealed an area of massive bleeding deep in her brain that had caused extensive damage, and a smaller area of bleeding in the temporal lobe that, the doctors hypothesized, had occurred just before the accident. Grace, they concluded, had suffered a stroke, which may have precipitated the accident, and had sustained such severe brain damage that she was unlikely to live. If she did, she would never again have use of her faculties. Grace was returned to the hospital named for her and was put back on life-support systems as her husband and children stood vigil and prayed for a miracle.
       No one but those closest to the family knew the seriousness of the situation. Within hours of the accident, members of the world media descended on Monaco, eager for any detail. Nadia LaCoste, whose seasoned handling of the press had kept many another situation under control, was on vacation, and in her absence the job fell to an inexperienced member of the Grimaldi household. This, it turned out, made a bad situation worse. Pressed for some official word on Grace’s and Stephanie’s conditions and the reason for this seemingly unfathomable accident, the palace aide was unable to get the information he needed, either from Grace’s doctors or from Prince Rainier. Wanting to protect his Prince, and his own job, the aide recalled Rainier’s complaint about press sensationalism: "You have a bump with your car. Five minutes later it has become a bad accident. Next it is really dramatic: the car is wrecked and you are injured. It ends with you being thrown out into the road and killed."
       Unwilling to give the press anything "really dramatic," the aide released an unofficial "official statement" that was inaccurate and misleading. Grace, it said, had suffered only some broken bones but "strict observation is necessary to diagnose any secondary complications," and Stephanie had suffered just some bruising. As to the matter of what caused the accident, the Monaco communique was a total fabrication. Perhaps assuming the only logical reason for such an accident must be mechanical failure, Rainier’s aide wrote in his release that Princess Grace had "ascertained a brake failure."
       The communique, in the light of subsequent events, gave rise to suspicions among newspeople that there had been a cover-up of the real facts surrounding the accident. Within the next few days, rumors became rampant: Stephanie, under the legal driving age, had actually been driving the car (this rumor was given credence by reports from the first people who arrived at the crash site that Stephanie had crawled out of the driver’s side of the car); Grace had been driving but she and Stephanie had had a violent argument that led her to lose control; Grace had left the palace in a rage after a fight with Prince Rainier and was in no condition to drive; the Rover had been tampered with by the Nice Mafia because Grace had fought to keep them out of Monte Carlo; the car had been whisked away by the palace before the authorities could examine it in order to conceal evidence; Prince Rainier had refused to allow the police to inspect the vehicle.
       There is no way—short of a full explanation from Stephanie, which has not been forthcoming—to know what actually took place within the Rover on that tragic Monday. The official version is that Grace suffered a stroke and lost control of the car. What Prince Rainier has said Stephanie told him, however—"Mommy panicked. She didn’t know what to do. She lost control"—would seem to work against such an explanation. Had Grace suffered a stroke, she would likely have blacked out and been unable, as Raimondo testified, to right the car after hearing a horn blast. Stephanie could have done so, but if she had, why didn’t she also either press down on the brakes or attempt to maneuver the curve ahead?
       There is so little plausible explanation for the fact that the Rover’s brakes were never used and the car’s trajectory was straight off the cliff that even the argument scenario doesn’t convince; no matter how violently she and Stephanie may have been fighting, Grace surely would have realized that the curve was ahead and been cautious, especially after the near-miss of the zigzagging. The mystery, which may never be solved, is so compelling that more and more fantastic explanations keep popping up. In fact, a Paris stringer for one of the American tabloids, Patrick Wilkins, says, "The consensus among everyone I’ve talked to here in Paris is that Grace was so beside herself with all her problems, and so furious with Stephanie, that she just didn’t care what happened to them anymore. A lot of people are convinced that Grace’s death was a suicide."
       That is the one theory that can never be proven, and we may never know the truth of any of them. But other rumors can be laid to rest. Capt. Roger Bencze, who conducted the official investigation into Grace’s accident as a member of the Mentone police force (the town in which the accident occurred) and is now a member of France’s national gendarmerie, has spoken out for the first time for this book. With the confidential investigation file’s depositions and photographs in front of him, Captain Bencze stated firmly that he believes the official version of the accident to be essentially correct, although he adds that "it was wrong for the palace to downplay the injuries."
       Bencze stressed that "there was never any attempt to interfere with my investigation. I examined the car at four-thirty on September 13, in the company of the district attorney of Nice and the chief of police of Monaco. My inspection had been approved by the palace and no one tried to influence it. I found that the car had absolutely no mechanical problems. There was no evidence that there had been a fire, as was later suggested, and it was clear that the only possible way for Stephanie to exit was through the driver’s side of the car. The fact that she crawled out of that side would in no way indicate that she was driving—it was the only way she could have gotten out." Examination of the photographs confirmed Bencze’s statements.
Bencze believes that the evidence available could support the explanation that Grace suffered a stroke. "She might have lost awareness momentarily, as if she was falling asleep, and the sound of Raimondo’s horn could have roused her. Then, as the effects of the stroke grew worse, she could have blacked out just before going over the cliff.
       "There is no way of knowing for sure, of course, but in my official capacity—and just as a human being—I’m satisfied that there isn’t all that much mystery involved in Princess Grace’s death."
       The original communique from Monaco—that Grace had been injured but was doing well—appears to have been not so much subterfuge as uninformed wishful thinking, because it wasn’t only the press who were given this optimistic news, but Grace’s intimates as well, including Nadia LaCoste—who was told that the situation wasn’t bad enough to warrant her immediate return—and the Kellys. Later, reports appeared that Grace’s family in Philadelphia was "furious" with Prince Rainier for "keeping from us" the extent of Grace’s injuries. Lizanne denies this. "When the palace called me right after the accident," she says, "they didn’t know how serious it was. They thought she just had a broken leg, that it was very superficial. They didn’t know how serious the head injury was. When I spoke to Rainier the day she died, he told me it was very serious. But I don’t think even then that he knew just how serious it was. He never kept anything from us."


Grace lingered, falling slowly into an ever deeper coma, throughout the night and morning of September 13-14. Her family —including Caroline, who returned from a trip to England at noon on Tuesday—kept a vigil at her bedside, anxiously conferring with the doctors, embracing one another, trying to hold on to a vestige of hope. At 6 A.M. the oscilloscope monitoring Grace’s brain activity indicated that she was, in all but the most technical sense, dead. Her children kissed her, then left their father to be alone with his wife. At noon Prince Rainier gave the doctors permission to cease artificial life support. At 10:35 that evening, Grace died.