Book Review

by Kitty Kelley

“As New York goes, so goes the nation” is more than a Big Apple brag. It’s the bellwether of the country, highlighted by the city that takes bold initiatives and establishes the national pulse. Some might dispute that point today, but Russell Shorto makes a persuasive argument for it in his eighth book, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

The author comes to this historical exploration via his previous work, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, written in 2004, and documenting the initial influence of New Amsterdam. Shorto is a senior scholar at the New Netherland Research Center of the New York State Library, which is in the process of translating 12,000 Dutch records into English.

In the new book, Shorto presents the story of 17th-century America and the three wars waged between the Dutch and the British for dominance of Manhattan Island — “a world-changing event,” he writes, that rocketed the British to victory over the Dutch, and the reason why most residents of the New World now speak English. (When Donald J. Trump became president in 2025, he stipulated that English was to be recognized as the country’s official language.)

At certain points, Taking Manhattan reads like a psychohistory of man’s inclination to plunder and pillage for power and illustrates the rancor of religion and the wars waged over whose deity should reign supreme. The entire era was awash in religious hatreds among knee-bending Catholics, anti-pope Protestants, and bloodletting Puritans, plus Presbyterians and various other religions, all hell-bent on killing each other in the name of God.

In recounting the 17th-century restoration of the Stuart monarchy in Great Britain, Shorto writes that it’s easy to dismiss London as Gomorrah, full of primal urges and indulgences. “There is surely something to that but my inclination is to turn the matter on its head.” With perspective, he does exactly that, pointing out that the previous era of Puritan rule had been pernicious: no drinking, no dancing. People were imprisoned for holding religious services and punished if their children played on the Sabbath. The Stuarts simply restored enjoyment. They rediscovered Shakespeare and no longer demanded chastity be the hallmark of civilization.

Being steeped in the history of the era, and with access to newly translated documents, the author celebrates the Dutch influence on Manhattan but takes issue with previous historians. He questions one declaration that the “sale” of Manhattan in 1626 involved only a verbal agreement. “I find that unlikely,” he writes, “because if they had initially settled for a verbal agreement, the Dutch, being highly conscious of such administrative matters, would have gone back to the Lenape [Native Americans] later to put it in writing.”

Within his text, Shorto also instructs readers “to cast a cold eye on the mindset of our ancestors,” particularly on the subject of religious tolerance, which was sorely lacking in the 1600s. He champions Dutch tolerance but chides Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general who barred Lutherans, Quakers, and Jews from settling in New Netherland, adding that “the attitude toward Native Americans and Africans argues pretty decisively against any broad underlying ethos of tolerance.” Shorto further cautions against applying 21st-century acumen to 17th-century actions. “We don’t need to judge people of the past according to our standards so much as we need to recognize patterns and milestones in history.”

Such compassion is not characteristic of all historians, and Shorto seems to have come by his while growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which he recalled in his 2021 memoir, Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Writing with certain pain, he told the story of his namesake grandfather, a small-town mob boss in the 1950s who, Shorto estimated, made about $2 million a year over a 20-year period. “The pain he inflicted on [my grandmother], the pain he inflicted on my father…that then colored my father’s whole life, which in turn colored my life,” Shorto wrote. The New York Times summoned a mafia association to praise his book, predicting readers would be with him “All the way, as Sinatra would say.”

Mentioning the memoir in connection with the publication of Taking Manhattan may be instructive to underscore Shorto’s understanding of history’s human dimension and the historian’s moral responsibility to penetrate facts and figures, dates and details to present the ugly underbelly of our nation’s growth.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Most biographers can only fantasize about unfettered access to their subjects — to know their thoughts and dreams and aspirations, to understand their dilemmas, to explain their demons. Consequently, they invest years researching old records, hunting sources, and plumbing archives to construct a life story. In this respect, David Sheff is a unicorn. As a personal friend of Yoko Ono, who is now 92 years old, he had full access to her files, friends, records, and children, to whom he dedicates this book, which he describes a bit exuberantly as “one of the greatest stories of our time, a harrowing, exhilarating, and inspiring journey.”

Sheff met his subject in 1980 for a Playboy interview published in January 1981. At the end of that year, John Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan, and Sheff flew to New York to be with Ono, Lennon’s wife. He then wrote a book, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He also contributed to the January 1981 People cover story, “Yoko Ono: How she is holding up,” and later sold the film rights. In 1984, he wrote more Lennon profiles (“The Betrayal of John Lennon” and “The Night Steve Jobs Met Andy Warhol”). His Playboy interview was reissued in 2021 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Lennon’s death, underscoring the wisdom of “waste not, want not.” Now comes Yoko: A Biography, which the author presents as the capstone to Ono’s career as a conceptual artist.

When Sheff first proposed interviewing the couple, he had to submit his date of birth, plus its time and place, to Ono beforehand. “The interview apparently depended on Yoko’s interpretation of my horoscope,” he writes, “just as many of Lennon’s business decisions are reportedly guided by the stars. I could imagine explaining to my Playboy editor, ‘Sorry, but my moon is in Scorpio — the interview’s off.’ It was clearly out of my hands.”

Ono’s obsession with astrologists, seers, and fortune tellers, much like Nancy Reagan’s mania for consulting the stars to plan presidential trips, bordered on pathology. In one year, Ono spent over $1 million on readings from psychics, mediums, and clairvoyants. When she agreed to meet Sheff, she summoned him to the Dakota in Manhattan, and he arrived with copies of previous Playboy interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Bob Dylan, and Jimmy Carter. Ono leafed through them and then responded:

“People like Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the world.”

Apparently, Ono’s seers didn’t “see” Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize in the future. When the former president died at the age of 100, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang “Imagine” at his state funeral, the song that Ono and Lennon wrote in 1971. She co-wrote the lyrics with Lennon, who deprived her of credit at the time. He later told Sheff, “I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it. I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without acknowledging it.” In an interview with the BBC, he added, “I just put ‘Lennon’ because, you know, she’s just the wife and you don’t put her name on, right?” “Imagine” became the most acclaimed song of Lennon’s solo career. Years later, Ono said, “I feel in the big picture the fact that John and I met was to do this song.”

Sheff’s biography of Ono is buttressed by her marriage to Lennon, particularly their years opposing the Vietnam War. In fact, they celebrated their 1969 wedding with a seven-day, public “bed-in” for peace, filmed and distributed around the world. “Lil’ Abner” cartoonist Al Capp accused them of staging the event for money. “Do you think I could earn money by some other way, sitting in bed for seven days, taking shit from people like you?” Lennon snapped. “I could write a song in an hour.”

Weeks later, Lennon wrote to Queen Elizabeth and returned the 1965 MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) medal she’d presented to each of the Beatles. His accompanying note:

“Your Majesty: I am returning this MBE in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts. With love. John Lennon of Bag.”

(“Cold Turkey” is the song he wrote about the couple’s withdrawal from heroin; “Bag” refers to their “bagism” campaign, which they introduced by covering themselves in white bags as an example not to judge people by their race or physical appearance.)

The last part of this biography, entitled “Yoko Only,” illustrates her career as an artist best defined as avant-garde — radical, experimental, even revolutionary. In “Cut Piece,” possibly her most famous performance art, Ono knelt on stage with scissors on the floor in front of her. Fully clothed, she invited audience members to come to the stage, one by one, to cut a piece of her clothing, and take the cut piece with them until she was completely naked. Described as “reception theory,” the audience becomes as involved in the art as the performer.

More recently, Ono unveiled her “Wish Tree” in several cities around the world. Each tree carries instructions: Make a wish, write it on a piece of white paper, and tie the paper to a branch. She does not read the wishes but collects them every year to be buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland.

The “Wish Tree” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, welcomed spring last year abloom with thousands of white paper blossoms tied by wishful visitors, a testament to participatory art and to the avant-garde artist who continues to imagine and intrigue.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) found fame in France in the 1920s as the American expat who danced in “a mere belt of bananas.” Ernest Hemingway described her as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Now, 50 years after her death, the dancer, singer, ingénue, scandal-maker, activist, and spy is being celebrated in a memoir pieced together from various interviews she gave in French over more than 20 years. While there have been a few biographies and one film about the “Bronze Venus” — also known as the “Black Pearl” and the “Creole Goddess” — this potpourri, translated into English after a half-century, purports to present “a collection of defining moments, impressions and images” of her life.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri (pop. 800,000 at the time), as Freda Josephine McDonald, she took her second husband’s name and kept it through two more marriages. She recalls her hometown as “the city of 100,000 Negroes,” where she grew up “cold and hungry…No father…I left school when I was eight years old to go and work.” Scavenging food from garbage cans, she spent many nights on the street. At 15, she was recruited for a vaudeville show, moved to Harlem, and then to France for a role in La Folie du Jour at the Folies Bergère theater.

In Paris, Le Josephine’s landmark cabaret show, “Le Revue Nègre,” became a sensation as the flamboyant dancer played to the disturbing stereotype of Blacks as inherently primitive. Crossing her eyes, waving her arms, swaying her hips, and swinging a G-string made of bananas, she clowned, rolled her eyes, and made faces. Exuding sexuality and wearing only feathers (or fruit), “the American Negress” became an instant sensation with her tribal-inspired dances and her comic commentary. “One day, all the papers, the dailies and the weeklies, were talking about me,” she recalled, citing the “presents, pretty presents, a mountain of them” bestowed upon her “dance sauvage”:

“I’ve been given rings with fire opals as big as eggs; I’ve been given a pair of very old earrings that belonged to a duchess one hundred and fifty years ago; I’ve been given pearls like teeth; flowers that came from Italy on the same day…a pair of golden shoes…”

Seizing her instant fame, Baker posed nude for fashion photographers, sold Bakerskin — a skin-darkening lotion — and promoted Bakerfix, a hair pomade. Yet she paid a price for her celebrity:

“[B]eing a curiosity was a very tough job for me…It was written in the contracts: ‘Entertain people’…tweaking the beards of good old gentlemen, flattering the fat ladies, making them dance in their fancy coats and stiff outfits, you know the sort of thing.”

On her European tour, the “Onyx Queen” recalled “the old Catholic groups hounding me with their Christian hate, from station to station, from town to town…in Vienna they rang all the city’s bells at full peal to warn the church-goers that Josephine Baker, the demon of immorality, the devil herself arrived…I came to represent the ‘moral decadence threatening the great country of Austria.’” In Hungary, her visit was debated in Parliament three times, and her performance was greeted by an ammonia bomb. “For one endless second,” she writes, “I had goosebumps under my ostrich feathers.”

By 1936, Le Josephine was the toast of Paris, but when she returned to the U.S. to star in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, Time magazine denigrated her as “a St. Louis wash woman’s daughter” and “a Negro wench,” who stirred jaded Europeans of the jazz-loving type. “But to Manhattan theatre-goers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed young Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any night club show, whose dancing & singing could be topped anywhere outside France.”

Devastated, Baker returned to France, renounced her U.S. citizenship, and became a French citizen the following year. During World War II, she aided the French Resistance, performing for troops throughout the country, for which she received the Croix de Guerre, the Légion d’honneur, and the Rosette of the Resistance. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to enter France’s Panthéon.

Baker punctuates many anecdotes in this book with “oh, la la!” and presents her philosophy of life as “a matter of affection that one has or doesn’t have,” which may or may not explain why she adopted 12 children, “one of every race,” and kept a menagerie of pets, including six dogs, three cats, a monkey, a parrot, two budgies, three white mice, a goldfish, a snake, and a cheetah — the latter, adorned with a diamond collar, was part of her stage act. The children, plus menagerie and maids, lived on her estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, outside of Paris, until 1968, when Baker went bankrupt and had to sell the property to satisfy her debts.

While Le Josephine acknowledges four husbands, she does not mention her reputed relationships with women, such as the French writer Colette or the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In another publication, one of her sons described her as bisexual.

Sadly, the chanteuse ends her mishmash of a memoir on a dark note. “No Jews, no dogs, no [n—–s],” she writes in a diatribe against the U.S. “That’s what they boil down to, Americans, in their country, along with the atomic bomb, the portable refrigerator, and chewing gum.” Baker repeats her racist rant several more times and then asks:

“Can you blame me for being obsessed with this phrase, these ferocious words that I heard people say even in New York itself and by good people?”

In her introduction to Fearless and Free, the writer Ijeoma Oluo promises readers “a collection of defining moments, impressions and images.” On that weak point, there’s no debate.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Dorothy Parker is probably best known for her bon mots: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” During a party game called Give Me a Sentence, she drew the word “horticulture” and seconds later quipped, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

Such sparkling wit from the only woman to sit at the Algonquin Round Table suggests a gleeful romp through Gail Crowther’s new book, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. But buyer beware. Before the first chapter, the author issues a stark warning about her subject: “irreverent, witty, mocking, uncontrollable, derisive, drunk, world-weary, deadpan, and wry.” Parker attempted suicide four times and wrote wistfully about ending her life in a book of poems she entitled Enough Rope. After one overdose, she wrote the poem “Résumé”:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood is not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. In fact, one wonders why a British writer like Crowther with limited familiarity with Hollywood decided to tackle a subject so previously well documented by Marion Meade (1934-2022), who wrote Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988), followed, in 2004, by Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. Two years later, Meade edited Parker’s collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker, still in print after 60 years. (“Even Marilyn Monroe had a copy on her shelves,” Crowther reports.) And, in 2014, Meade published her final book, The Last Days of Dorothy Parker: The Extraordinary Lives of Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman and How Death Can Be Hell on Friendship.

Crowther’s earlier book Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton suggests she knows the territory of self-destructive female poets, so perhaps she felt equipped to address the sad screenwriting years of Parker, who claimed to “hate Hollywood like holy water.” Parker died in 1967 in a Manhattan hotel with only her brown poodle, Troy, at her side. Crowther seems to identify somewhat, as she dedicates this book to her own dog, which died in 2022: “In memory of my best boy, my life and writing companion. My George.”

Curiously, Crowther begins Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by citing “the unpleasant side of Parker, her meanness…cruelty…malice…brutality.” Yes, she celebrates her subject for being clever, but add an “a” to clever, and you get cleaver, which illustrates the effect of Parker’s humor. She once critiqued an actress as someone “who looked like a two-dollar whore who once commanded five.” When told that Clare Booth Luce made a habit of being kind to her inferiors, Parker asked, “Where does she find them?” And in her “Constant Reader” column for the New Yorker, she said of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

Understandably, most of Parker’s contemporaries wanted to be the last to leave the room. Meeting her sounds like encountering a boa constrictor: You can freeze in place or you can bolt. Either way, you’re still a goner. She seemed to fit Murray Kempton’s definition of a critic as “someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.”

With “a string of spectacularly unsuitable younger lovers,” writes Crowther, Parker’s private life was a bit of a mess. Her first husband, who divorced her, was an alcoholic, and her second husband, whom she married, divorced, and years later remarried, was bisexual, although she dismissed him in public as “queer as a billy goat.”

Hollywood was extraordinarily lucrative for Parker, but she claimed her screenwriting years were not happy, despite her 1934 salary of $1,000 a week (the equivalent of $20,000 a week in 2024). “It took over half the screenwriters in Hollywood one year to earn what Dorothy Parker was being paid for one week,” writes Crowther.

Parker loved the money but hated the place, which she described as “dull a domain as dots the globe.” Yet she cherished her left-wing political circle of friends, including Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart, Orson Welles, and Fredric March. She was arrested and fined for picketing the death sentences of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and was put on the FBI watchlist during the McCarthy era, when she was blacklisted as a communist in 1950. She never worked on another film but lived comfortably on royalties from four volumes of short stories, eight poetry collections, and three theatrical plays.

Still, Crowther is stymied by a lack of information. “Between 1951 and 1961 it is hard to imagine what life was like for Dorothy Parker,” she writes, forced to acknowledge that “little is known about these years.” This is a biographer thrashing in the deep end without a life preserver, swept into waters over her head:

“Sadly, we do not have Parker’s response to this unfortunate accident…”

“It is difficult to know what Parker was up to…”

“With no surviving screenplay that specifically shows Parker’s contributions it is impossible to know for certain…”

“The lack of surviving Parker material is lamentable…”

Parker’s alcoholism soaks every chapter of this book, along with the trauma of her abortions, depression, and suicide attempts. Yet by fictionalizing herself in the 1929 short story “Big Blonde” as a drunken divorcée who survives suicide, she earned the O. Henry Award that catapulted her to fame. But there was no happily-ever-after to her life.

Leaving Hollywood in 1964, Parker, widowed at 70, lived her last three years at the Volney, a dignified residence in Manhattan for little old ladies and their dogs. “Still drinking, still hopeless with money and still unable to write,” according to Crowther, “she spent her days smoking, reading gossip magazines and watching soap operas.”

The New York Times, which once dismissed her poetry as “flapper verse,” ran Parker’s obituary on the front page, followed, days later, by coverage of her star-studded memorial service, which attracted 150 friends and admirers. Eulogized by Hellman, she was buried in the gold and pearl-encrusted caftan she’d received from Gloria Vanderbilt, which recalled Parker’s poem “The Satin Dress,” which celebrated just such an event:

Satin glows in candle-light —
Satin’s for the proud!
They will say who watch at night,
“What a fine shroud!”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Curling up with a hefty book of almost 1,000 pages dense with footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, an index, and a bibliography is like cuddling a St. Bernard: It’s a challenging prospect. Yet Mary Gabriel’s behemoth Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art rewards in almost every chapter.

Gabriel has written a massive homage to the women who barged through “men only” barriers to help establish Abstract Expressionism in America, a movement (1937-1957) once defined solely by male artists like Jackson (“Jack the Dripper”) Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Discrimination against women artists was so pervasive at the time that art historians claim Grace Hartigan exhibited her work under the name George Hartigan until 1953, when she was finally given her first show. A raging feminist and the first female artist to make money, Hartigan denied the charge. “It never entered my head,” she said. Elaine de Kooning also rebuked being characterized as a woman artist:

“To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”

Readers will be grateful that the author defines Abstract Expressionism through the women painters who resisted being characterized as such but represented with their husbands and lovers, “too often fueled by alcohol and dizzying infidelities,” the miraculous movement of 20th-century art in America.

Lee Krasner, who married Pollock, signed her paintings with initials only so no one would identify her work as having been done by a

Seated from left: Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1950

woman. Early in Krasner’s career, she took lessons from the esteemed painter Hans Hofmann, who stood before her easel one day in wonder. “This is so good you would never know it was done by a woman,” he said. Krasner later focused on helping her husband gain recognition because she believed that he had “much more to give with his art than I do with mine.”

Elaine de Kooning, a painter in her own right, frequently slept with renowned art critics and gallery owners in order to promote her husband’s work. One male artist of the era is quoted as saying, “The fifties was a boys club, but some of the women painted almost as well as the boys so we patted them on the ass twice and said keep going.” Elaine de Kooning collected lots of pats.

The book, a bohemian saga, divides between the first wave of female artists — Krasner and de Kooning, scramblers who lived in the shadow of their famous spouses and only came into their own as painters later on — and the second wave of more successful figures like Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Joan Mitchell Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan in 1957.
Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan in 1957.Photograph by Burt Glinn / Magnum

All of these women, with the exception of Frankenthaler, gravitated to the grittiest parts of Greenwich Village around Ninth Street, where they toiled in cold-water flats with no heating or plumbing but surrounded by great wall space where they could spread their canvases. Gabriel describes Frankenthaler as the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and a graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, then the most progressive and expensive women’s school in the U.S.:

“She was a woman of enormous self-confidence who never wasted her time with anything but the best.”

The most tempestuous was Mitchell, raised by prosperous parents in Chicago who arranged for her to go to Paris to meet Alice B. Toklas, the life partner of Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, who owned Shakespeare and Company, the French bookstore that published James Joyce and sold copies of Ernest Hemingway’s first book. When Mitchell married Barney Rosset, the union made history: Rosset owned Grove Press, which published Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Tom Stoppard, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence. Mitchell, the author maintains, “was one of the greatest artists the U.S. has ever produced.”

The book sweeps from erudite scholarship to gritty gossip as it presents the panorama of American art history from the Depression and World War II through McCarthyism and the Red Scare, all of which affected the majestic talents of the “Ninth Street Women.” Like a St. Bernard, that majestic alpine dog, it will save you from avalanches of boredom and ennui and provide a vicarious plunge into the messy lives and mesmerizing genius of American Abstract Expressionism. You’ll emerge gobsmacked and gratified.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Given that women are the biggest buyers of books in America, and that the country also boasts the largest apparel market in the world ($312.4 billion from 1992 to 2022), the combination of a book about women in fashion is bound to be a bestseller for Julie Satow, who ingeniously spotlights the three female moguls who ruled Fifth Avenue fashion in the 20th century.

With style and sass, Satow tells the story of the trio who revolutionized retail at Bonwit Teller, Lord &Taylor, and Henri Bendel. Each of those plate-glass palaces, late and lamented, reigned as cathedrals to the carriage trade. While all three were purchased by men, each blossomed into profit and prestige under women, and Satow unspools their stories of success with polish and panache, writing of an era in which department stores were consumer wonderlands and rich emporiums of luxurious goods.

Satow begins When Women Ran Fifth Avenue at the height of the Depression, with Hortense Odlum arriving at Bonwit Teller wrapped in fur as she steps from her chauffeured limousine to enter the Art Deco skyscraper her husband, Floyd, now owned as part of Atlas Corporation. Unbeknownst to Hortense, 41, her husband had fallen in love with the young woman behind the perfume counter, but he decided his wife, who’d never worked but always shopped, could transform Bonwit’s, then bordering on bankruptcy. Said Floyd:

“Just take a look and tell me what you think…Figure out why women don’t shop there anymore.”

Hortense Odlum

Hortense accepted the challenge. She took a look, made a few suggestions, and, thinking the corner office and title of president would only be temporary, began rearranging the boutiques and salons, painting and redecorating every department and, most importantly, relating to customers as “high class, but not high hat.” The 26-year-old behind the perfume counter ended up marrying Floyd, who financed her career as a pilot; Hortense, meanwhile, became the first female titan on Fifth Avenue, a position she held for six years before she abruptly retired, embittered by the price she’d paid for her professional success. “I worked like a Trojan. But I never intended to stay,” she remarked. “I’m out now and the whole thing leaves me cold.”

Dorothy Shaver

The real Trojan, who thrived on the 24/7 work and the pressure of retail business, was Dorothy Shaver of Mena,

Arkansas, who devoted her life to the job from 1921 until the day she died in 1959. Shaver became president of Lord & Taylor and, writes Satow, “Fifth Avenue’s First Lady.” By the time she died, Shaver, who never married and lived with her sister, had rocketed store sales to $100 million a year and was revered throughout society. Her death at the age of 66 made the front page of the New York Times, which hailed the “First woman ever elected to head a large retail corporation when she became president of Lord & Taylor.” Such was her standing that the paper’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, wrote to Dorothy’s sister: “Terribly distressed to hear of your loss.” Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, and Vice President Richard Nixon also sent their condolences.

By this time, Geraldine Stutz was reigning over the exclusive boutique of Henri Bendel and dispatching buyers

to the side streets of Paris to purchase garments only from small-scale designers and only in small sizes. Given her phobia about weight, Stutz stocked sizes two, four, and six, figuring that anyone larger should shop at Macy’s. Stutz decreed Henri Bendel would be all about style. “I want our own stuff, the way that we want it.” Her mantra:

“Fashion says, ‘Me, too,’ while style says ‘Only me.’”

Geraldine Stutz

As a connoisseur of style, Stutz hired a uniformed butler to greet Bendel’s clientele, opening doors, supplying umbrellas, and hailing cabs for the privileged likes of Gloria Vanderbilt, Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Lee Radziwill. In addition to providing European fashion for elite shoppers, Stutz converted Bendel’s sixth level into “the beauty floor,” with a hair salon, cosmetic counter, and Pilates studio for her slim clientele. In addition, she opened a sportswear department, most appropriately called Cachet. It was not to last long.

The demise of these luxury stores started at the end of the 20th century, when Bonwit Teller closed and the building at 56th and Fifth Avenue was bulldozed by Donald J. Trump, who erected Trump Tower, 58 stories of shining brass and, according to the BBC, “enough pink marble to make Liberace blush.” Trump draped his doormen in gold braid and dangling epaulets like “The Pirates of Penzance” and ushered in the Gordon Gekko era of “greed is good.”

Fifth Avenue elegance made its last gasp in 2019, when Henri Bendel folded just weeks before Lord & Taylor, America’s oldest department store, collapsed and emerged from bankruptcy as a website. By then, the sun had set on Satow’s “Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion,” but her recollections of Hortense’s heyday, Dorothy’s legendary run, and Geraldine’s Street of Shops make for a wistful look at retail’s most romantic era.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Jonathan Turley road-tested an idea last year with a 45-page article entitled “The Right to Rage: Free Speech and Rage Rhetoric in American Political Discourse” for the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy. Now, Turley, the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School, has expanded his “rage” thesis into The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.

He garnered blurbs for his new book from friends like former attorney general William P. Barr (“a robust reexamination and defense of free speech as a right”), conservative columnist George F. Will (“This efficient volume is packed with indispensable information”), and CNN host Michael Smerconish (“a master class on the unvarnished history of free speech in America”).

The professor posits that we’re living in one of the most anti-free-speech periods in history; as examples, he cites the divisiveness of racial discrimination, police abuse, climate change, and gender equality. “Any and all of these issues can provoke public anger and mob rage,” he writes.

Turley’s book promises “a timely, revelatory look at freedom of speech.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t deliver on that promise and breaks no new ground in exploring the most basic right of all Americans. He concedes as much in his acknowledgements. “This is not the first book on free speech. It is not even the hundredth…[T]here are masterful prior works.” Here, he cites the books of three professors like himself but omits the gold standards of the genre: The Soul of the First Amendment and Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment by Floyd Abrams and Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis, who also wrote Gideon’s Trumpet and Make No Law: the Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.

There’s always room on the shelf for a riveting new tome on the First Amendment, for it is the fundamental right that protects all others. Yet, while Turley climbs the tower, he doesn’t ring the bell. Rather, the professor seems to have summoned “the many law students…who have assisted me in decades of research and writing on the theories and cases discussed in this book” and then cedes control to the inmates. In other words, the orchestra conductor drops his baton and lets the timbales and tom-toms take over. The concert makes noise but hardly inspires.

Turley credits Justice Louis Brandeis for “the indispensable right” of his title but claims subtitle credit for himself and his students, who march readers through all the ages of fury in sections that include, among many others: “The Boston Tea Party and America’s Birth in Rage”; “The Whiskey Rebellion and ‘Hamilton’s Insurrection’”; “Adams and the Return of ‘The Monster’”; “Jefferson and The Wasp”; “Jackson and the ‘Lurking Traitors’ Among Us”; Lincoln and the Copperheads; Comstock and the Obscenity of Dissent; “The Bund and the Biddle: Sedition in World War II”; “Days of Rage: Race, Rhetoric, and Rebellion in the 1960s”; “Antifa, MAGA, and the Age of Rage”; and “January 6th and the Revival of American Sedition.”

Turley has evolved from a liberal Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, Ralph Nader in 1996, and Barack Obama in 2008 to an unbending critic of Obama and his “sin eater,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Turley went on to support Neil Gorsuch for confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court and publicly promote his friend Bill Barr as Donald Trump’s attorney general, while bashing the Bidens for alleged influence-peddling. In 2022, Slate took notice of this political evolution and asked, “What Happened to Jonathan Turley, Really?”

The online magazine concluded that the man who “was once a serious and respected legal scholar” has devolved into a paid contributor for Fox News who presents “himself as a kind of Alan Dershowitz with table manners.”

Turley is not immune to such slights. At the end of The Indispensable Right, he writes, “I hope that this book will explain my own long and at times unpopular fight for free speech rights.” That plaintive wish calls to mind the Oval Office address Aaron Sorkin penned for Michael Douglas in “The American President”:

“We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people…If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up.”

One hopes that Jonathan Turley would show up, too, if only to defend his treatise on free speech.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books