 My Father's Fling With Zsa Zsa Gabor My father, Lou Junod, had Zsa Zsa Gabor. That is, he slept with her. That is, he had sex with her. I put it this way because that's how it was put to me. I was a salesman just out of college, traveling all over American roads in the cause of selling handbags to stores that would in turn sell them to American women, not unlike my father had done. I was in Houston, Texas, calling upon a buyer my father had called on for years. We went out for dinner, and she began telling me stories about the old man. She didn't tell me anything I didn't know until she broke the news with those exact words: "And of course everybody knows he had Zsa Zsa Gabor."
I had heard a lot of stories about my father and celebrities, most of them from his own mouth. In his stories, famous women flirted with him outrageously and helplessly, and famous men sought his company, paid him deference, or took umbrage after being upstaged by him. I neither believed nor disbelieved him, because although he was, by his own reckoning, "a very attractive man," and although I'd been with him several times when he was mistaken for a celebrity, he was still my father and still a salesman. All of his stories inherently doubled as myths, beyond the reach of fact checking. But the story the buyer in Houston told about Zsa Zsa Gabor was different. For one thing, he didn't tell it. For another, it lacked the splendor that transformed most stories about him into myths. See, my father was not just my father; he was married to my mother, and the Zsa Zsa story was my first inkling of what I was to find out—that he was the Don Draper of the handbag business. The buyer must've seen this thought play out on my face because she then tried to take it all back: "I shouldn't have told you. I just thought you knew. It might not even be true. It's just a story…"
But with those words, it registered in my mind as the truth.   All the Best Men's Fashion Sales to Shop for Presidents' Day 2022 Presidents' Day, over the past few years, has gone through a reckoning. It ain't cool to like it anymore. At its core, the holiday honors the commander in chiefs in our nation's history, an occasion to revere 46 men (and only men, regrettably) who made the United States what it is today. But hindsight is 20/20: the majority are problematic figures who don't live up to the heroic mythos that was once widely perpetuated at schools and libraries, and on televised programming. Many have done good over their tenure and accomplished great feats, sure, but it is also important to recognize their failings as much as their strengths—read: to be honest about the past—because it is only then that we can celebrate the idea of justice behind the red, white, and blue.
 2022 Is Finally The Year of the Fantasy Novel With new Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings series set to stream, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the fantasy novel. In other words: there's never been a better time to read one. But where to begin? We asked Marlon James, author of the epic Dark Star Trilogy, to recommend five standouts from the genre's exciting and inclusive new frontier.  The Joy of Kendrick Sampson It's an early winter evening in Manhattan, and Kendrick Sampson and I are settling into a quiet if antiseptic corner of the James hotel lobby. Despite working on a single hour of sleep, Sampson, thirty-three, manages to look warm and cheerful in a pair of black sweats and a gray mask. Then just as we've dispensed with the small talk and are on the verge of getting to the good stuff, a white woman in a silver dress begins setting up shop not twenty feet from us. A lounge singer! She turns the volume up to eleven and warbles that a scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me. Blessedly, when Sampson talks, it's impossible not to listen.
 Why Do The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Sequels All Suck? No horror movie is greater than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yet no classic has also spawned as many misguided sequels as Tobe Hooper's 1974 nightmare, whose grindhouse legacy is as unimpeachable and enduring as its progeny's reputations are–with one stark, glorious exception–deservedly awful. Netflix's new Texas Chainsaw Massacre (February 18), the franchise's ninth entry, doesn't change that trend; the tale of a group of millennials who fall prey to Leatherface in an abandoned town that they're trying to resurrect via cash infusions from party-busing entrepreneurs (!?!?), it does just about everything wrong in attempting to recapture its forefather's macabre magic. It's not the worst film to feature Leatherface and his enormous weapon of choice, but it reconfirms that, for nearly fifty years, no artist other than Hooper has ever truly understood the raw, terrifying power of the original and its chainsaw-wielding psychopath.  Kanye West Documentary, Jeen-Yuhs, Is A Remarkable Chronicle of The Making of a Major Artist If you're sick of the rapper, I can't blame you. But skipping the new three-part film means losing out on an unprecedented portrait of a towering, infuriating musical icon as a young man.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sunday, February 20, 2022
My Dad's Fling With Zsa Zsa Gabor
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment