Winking at the holiday - thirteen years of Christmas/New Year's cards

 

2020. Our current New Year's card... saying goodbye a year we would all like to forget.

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2019.

"Christmas-ed up" adaptation of the French-language poster for the 1946 film "The Killers."

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2018.

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2017. Obviously adapted from the famous "Arnolfini Portrait" by Jan van Eyck.

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2016. This was the year that G's incredibly successful anthology "City of Weird" came out. Entirely her project, she edited the book, did the cover and all the art...

 ... and our card that year shows she still had plenty of "weird" to spare.

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2015. Or 2016, as the case may have been; we missed the Christmas deadline and saluted the new year instead.

G looks absolutely terrifying. I look all too natural, like that could be my actual hair-do.

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2014.

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2013. Almost certainly my favorite. (I'm guessing no one will really find that at all surprising...?)

I took copies - the originals were destroyed in the burning of the Tuileries; but then I'm sure you knew that! - of the two separate state portraits by Winterhalter...

... of Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie and made one big one. Added a few faces and a dog and that did the trick.

G always does well with a moustache.

Honestly, this is rather how I imagine myself...!

Though more gussied up in the final image, I think Nicholas looked nicer in just this simple diamond and pearl collier.

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2012.

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2011.

Freaky....

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There was no card in 2010. Neither of us can remember why....

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2009. Kind of cheating; we just cannibalized my painting "Les Deux."

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2008. Another of my favorites. I so loved the Deco background G concocted, that I hated we had to cover up so much of it.

An alternate (unfinished) version. For the figures, I took two color images of us in character as Madeleine and Penny Prévert, changed them to black and white,
and then re-colored them. Then I stuck the heads on bodies that were - both - adapted from mid-Thirties publicity pictures of Miss Joan Crawford. As one does.

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2007.

This was our first Christmas/Holiday card. This was the year we were "supers" together for the first time with Portland Opera. G had been a priestess in a beautiful production of "Norma" at the beginning of the year, but this was my first go 'round. Our "Carmen" had been transplanted to Cuba, circa the 1940s. I was a soldier in three of the four acts, but G had three costume changes: a cigar factory worker in the first, a fruit seller in the last and, in the second act, she was done up as a... "brothel employee", shall we say? I was in that same scene, so I mentioned to the stage director that we were actually married so, if he wanted, we could act a bit more frisky than the other supers who were not so intimately - and legally - acquainted. We were decidedly frisky and the whole production was really fun. At some point, all the supers took pictures in character, upstairs in the dressing rooms of the theater. Those were the images I used a few months later; my Photoshop skills were pretty feeble at the time, but I took us out of the theater and put us into images from the real Havana.

The doorway to the gritty streets of Havana in these two pictures was in reality just another solid concrete block wall.

My dear, sweet wife was quite convincingly blonde and slutty in the second act, but her big moment actually came in the previous one. Carmen's knife attack on her co-worker, Manuelita - a character who doesn't usually even make it onto the stage - is what gets her arrested in the first place, the arrest is what hooks her up with Don José and starts the whole mess rolling. This production decided to show Carmen's handiwork, and G - an X carved into her cheek - was her far from docile victim. She roared on, kicking and snarling, and got to have a downstage center fistfight with the star of the show before - literally - being dragged from the stage; as they say, you go, girl! Her most excellent outraged and bloodied face was just so cool that we had to include this picture on the back of the card - hey, Merry Christmas!

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Edit: It's a Christmas miracle! G just found our card from 2010; we didn't skip a year after all. She created it in a Word file and it somehow got lost. Glad to have it back in the line up!

2010!

The story of a necklace - the "diamonds" of a queen... and other lesser mortals.

The necklace was not just a beautiful part of Norma Shearer's most glorious Adrian toilette from 1938's Marie Antoinette, it also constituted an important plot point. In the charming fiction of the scene at a gambling house, the young queen has lost the necklace in a bet with her brother-in-law, and employs the aid of a handsome stranger, Count Ferson - Tyrone Power - to try and win it back. The gambit ultimately fails, but the queen has found the great love of life in the Swedish count.

Incomplete and altered, and whether or not it was the necklace, this went to auction three years ago. Against an estimate of $6000-$8000, it sold for almost $9000.

The matching earrings were estimated at $800-$1200, but sold for almost $3000.

The necklace - and matching earrings - were the work of Joseff of Hollywood. The same necklace, or variations made from the same castings, can be seen in several other films. There were also copies made with colored stones, and differently arranged versions, using the same setting components. For decades, Joseff of Hollywood - the company is still in business - was the supplier of costume jewelry for the film industry - from Garbo's Camille to Scarlett O'Hara to Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra - and their early work is now highly sought after. 

With Tyrone Power.

Unlike the necklace as it was auctioned, as worn by Shearer, the pear-shaped pendants went all the way around, and there was a proper, matching clasp.

(A continuity issue I always make note of: when the moment comes for Shearer to take off the necklace and hand it over...

 ... to the comte de Provence, it has magically turned all the way around so that the clasp is conveniently in the front. Did they really think I wouldn't notice?!)

Here are a few other appearances of the necklace, or versions of it; I'm sure there are many more.

Jeanette MacDonald as Marianne de Beaumanoir in "New Moon", 1940.

With Nelson Eddy.

The necklace as worn by MacDonald is larger in circumference and composed of more elements.

Norma Drury as the Queen of Naples in "That Hamilton Woman", 1941. With Luis Alberni.

 (Ironically, the Queen of Naples - Maria Carolina of Austria - was actually Marie Antoinette's sister!)

Ruth Warrick as Countess Isabelle Gravini in "The Corsican Brothers", 1941. With Akim Tamiroff and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Betty Grable as Kate Farley in "Coney Island", 1943.

As worn by Grable, the necklace is much shorter.

With George Montgomery.

Heather Thatcher as Lady Mildred Dalroy in "Gaslight", 1944. With Joseph Cotton.

Tallulah Bankhead as Catherine the Great in "A Royal Scandal", 1945.

With Anne Baxter.

With Anne Baxter and Willian Eythe.

Anita Louise as Amélie de Montreval in "The Fighting Guardsman", 1946. With  Lloyd Corrigan, George Macready, and Janis Carter.

Anita Louise had played the princesse de Lamballe in "Marie Antoinette" eight years before. Here she wears the "Queen's necklace",
while Janis Carter wears a more elaborate rendition of the necklace and one of the actual gowns that Shearer wore in the latter film.

Barbara Britton as Angela Picard in "The Return of Monte Cristo", 1946. The necklace has been augmented with a rather unfortunate addition.

Angela Lansbury as Em in "The Harvey Girls", 1946.

Her "emerald" necklace and earrings (with a different post) are made from the same casts as the pieces worn by Shearer.

I'm not convinced this is the same necklace worn by Lansbury. If it is, it's been much altered and is also missing elements.

The necklace was also used for portrait sittings not necessarily related to a particular film. Lucille Ball, circa late 1940s.

The version worn by Ball is also larger in circumference; perhaps this is the same piece worn by MacDonald.

But there's then the question of who wore it best...? 

I'll always give my vote to Shearer.