Vladimir Kagan's Blog

My Palm Beach Week

My Road To Stardom

Copyright Vladimir Kagan, January 11, 2015

 

If the Chinese New Year is the Year of the Goat, mine will be the year of Stardom. NOT that I have been beckoned to appear in a film or design a Hollywood movie set - though this is only the beginning of the year! However, my brush with Hollywood and bathing in its reflected glory is well on its way. I spent Christmas Day having dinner with Woody and Sun-yi Allen, their family and my friend Melanie Courbet.

 

Dinner with Woody and family

 

Most of you know that I spent a good deal of my winter in Palm Beach:

 

Palm Beach is la-la land. You know you are heading to the sunshine state when the airline gate has a dozen or more wheel chairs lined up for boarding…. I am amongst those fortunate people because we board first – have preferred seating and whiz through security like a racehorse!

 

Palm Beach has gorgeous sunny weather, warm waters, beautiful blue skies and is just plain boring.

 
The glorious empty beaches in Palm Beach

The effortless flight of the pelicans

The Serene view from the terrance of my apartment

A glimpse into Edwina Sandys private sculpture garden

The latest attraction - The Palm Beach Outlet Mall

To its credit, Palm Beach has an extravagant new shopping Mall that keeps the ladies occupied. For the boys, the beach is lovely but the sand is granular, not like the white stuff of the Caribbean that sift so gently through your finger. Nor is the girl watching a match for the bottoms-only bikinis of St. Barths.

 

To continue on my road to stardom, I arrived in Palm Beach just in time to attend an intimate “Sixth Day of Christmas Dinner”. A party seated for fifty of the nearest and dearest friends of Michael Kovner and Jean DeMonyaillou, Palm Beach’s glamorous party givers.

 

The dining room of the Palm Beach Yacht Club

 

This was only the start on my road to stardom! This week, I was nominated, (for the fifth straight year), for the coveted Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 2015 National Design Awards, “Honoring excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement in American design. Your nomination is as an individual and pre-qualifies for excellence in the following category: Lifetime Achievement.” This is the Oscars of the design world!!!

 

 

The challenge in Palm Beach is how to overcome the doldrums? Simple: you import your own entertainment! Who better than an Oscar nominated movie Queen to liven up the party?  Our friend, Lilly Kilvert was nominated for creating the setting for the ‘Last Samurai”. Lilly has been a fixture in our Nantucket lives since she was a teenager. One of five children, Lilly went to Hollywood to follow her muse and became one of the most sought after Production Designers in the industry. (For other films that you might have seen, see list below.)

 

Lilly Kilvert on my terrace

Lilly is a great friend of my Daughter Jessica, (whom you have met in many previous Blogs). They thought three days in Palm Beach would be just the right tonic before Lilly returned to the wilds of Kazakhstan and to Budapest for staging the Vatican chambers and Streets of Rome, which Genghis Kahn was plotting to conquer.

For Jessica it was a respite from her blowtorches, gems, precious metals and designing her edgy jewelry. Needless to say, they needed a dinner party to help liven up their few days with me.

 

Lilly had just recently returned from Malaysia where she has spent the last ten months staging Netflix’s Marco Polo series. With the help of 400 staff artists, carvers, technicians and carpenters, she has recreated the Mongolian Desert in Kazakhstan, Mongol Palaces and Song dynasty on Pinewood stages in Southern Malaysia.  

 

Lilly Kilvert's set designs for Netflix's Marco Polo

Palm Beach is the playground for the rich and famous. Not to be outdone, I followed suite by hosting an intimate dinner party to introduce Lilly and Jessica to a dozen of my nearest and dearest. To accomplish the transformation of my apartment from bachelor digs into an elegant dining room, we needed new wine glasses, crescent-shaped salad dishes, extra-large soup bowls, a pair of Fu Dogs, dozens of roses, an electric mixer, a marble mortar and pestle, an extra-large new table cloth, napkins, dozens of candles, flowers, a new three piece pants suit for Jessica, a sweater for me and replenish the mostly empty liquor bottles in the bar…This essential shopping took most of the day. Finally home by four o’clock, Jessica started her magic cooking and was finished in plenty of time for our glamorous dinner.

Jessica not only acted as my hostess, but also cooked up the most divine dinner ever given in my apartment. My star-filled guest list included artist Edwina Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter; Nat and Lucy Day, the most entertaining hosts in Palm Beach; Michael and Jean, without whom, no party is complete; Dale Coudert, Palm Beach’s intellectual soul and “custodian” of one of the finest examples of a 1920’s Addison Mizner mansion complete with original furnishings… hers home qualifies as truly elegant shabby gentility – as opposed to my apartment, which is just shabby. For glamour, we had the lovely Sherril Goggin of Los Angeles, Nantucket and Pam Beach and Suzanne Klein the belle of Loveland Texas, Houston, Santa Barbara and Boca Raton. She has been my beloved client for many years and is truly a dynamo. Her business empire, Richland Corp of Houston owns commercial real estate all over the South West; her oil explorations discover oil where others have failed. I recently introduced her to my friend Zaha Hadid at which point she contracted Zaha to build Richland’s Headquarters in Houston Texas. Suzanne is particularly proud of the fact that her company is run by three women and together with Zaha, these four women will build the first Hadid monument to modern architecture in the West.

  

"The Dinner Party"

At my apartment in Palm Beach

Jessica’s innovative menu started with an hors d’oeuvre of goat cheese marinated in garlic and spices, followed by a subtle pasta topped with rare bottarga caviar. The main course was in celebration of the recent detent with Havana; a spectacular Cuban Fish soup, elegantly spiced and served with saffron rice, topped with a piquant rouille. For desert we burned through all the garlic and spice with a Colonel; Lemon sorbet laced with Russian Vodka.

 

 Back home - flying over Manhattan

 

By the time you read this epistle, I will have joined the millions of souls suffering through the coldest week in the North …. Hey, maybe Palm Beach doesn’t sound half so bad!

 

 

 

 

Links to films for which Lilly Kilvert was Production Designer:

 

The Outlaw 

 2008

Valkyrie 

 2006

The Pink Panther 

 2003

The Last Samurai 

 2002

Hart's War 

 2001

Heartbreakers 

 1999

The Story of Us 

 1998

The Siege 

 1998

City of Angels 

 1996

Ghosts of Mississippi 

 1996

The Crucible 

 1995

The American President 

 1995

Strange Days 

 1994

Legends of the Fall 

 1993

In the Line of Fire 

 1993

Jack the Bear 

 1991

Late for Dinner 

 1990

I Love You to Death 

 1989

Worth Winning 

 1987

Surrender 

 1985

To Live and Die in L.A. 

 1985

The Sure Thing 

 1984

Deep in the Heart 

 1981

The Loveless

 

 

 

Memories

 

 

Three Years Ago Today

Copyright Vladimir Kagan, December 13, 2014

 

Erica Wilson as we've all got to know her with her cowboy hat and feather! 

 

This is my daily reminder of  Erica. Her hat and the Erica Chaise in my bedroom

 

Three yeas is a lifetime – Three years is within living memory – Three years is a life changer –  It was three years ago that my darling wife Erica left me.

 

Life has its cruel ways: here today and gone tomorrow, not planned, just plucked out of my life. Even as I was holding her hand, still warm and blood coursing through her veins she was gone. I held on for twelve hours not believing the enormity – the life changing moment. Three years to this day, my life changed forever. I was cast adrift as her spirit soared into the heavens and I was left holding a cold hand. This was not the script I had written for myself. It is traditional that the wife outlives the husband.

It was not to be. Life is a gamble and God deals a wicked card. You are expected to accept and carry on. You are not alone – that is of little comfort.  But God also doles out an opiate that lets you survive. It is buried in memories, in flashbacks, good times dominate –others diminish. I was not perfect but she was. What lingers in the mind is the harmony we enjoyed for fifty-five years. Me, the scrooge who loved to kill Christmas and she, who lovingly bought presents for one and all, the more was better. Our bedroom became the warehouse for piles of accumulated gifts. Wrapping never happened until the night before Christmas. Scrooge was sucked-up into the process and like Ebenezer, his heart melted and willingly, happily joined into the festivities. This, of all times, is when she left me. The unwrapped presents accumulating in the room and dinner parties to accept and decline. Christmas cards to be written and addressed and now tell the world that I was now alone.

 

She is gone. She left the dining room table filled with ancient family photographs that we were meticulously pasting into photo-albums. Her father, Colonel Wilson in Mesopotamia, little Erica driving a goat car in Bermuda, Major Spragge her stepfather, looking dashing in his uniform as the A.D.C. to the governor of Bermuda – Mummy England, Erica’s elegant mother, looking smashing dressed for a queen’s tea party. And there were photos of little Vladi and his sister Tanya, looking shy and demure as tiny tots in traumatized Nazi Germany. There were photos of my family braving it out in very difficult times. Those albums remained on the table for weeks until we realized the task was more than we could face and so once again they were swept into storage boxes, awaiting a second spurt of nostalgic energy and there was more; two thousand pieces of Erica’s needlework to be sorted, cataloged, appraised and donated to select museums. This is still a work in progress, three years after her death. Erica was amazingly prolific. A quiet plodder who got things done. Sixteen hard cover books, thirty-six television shows shown over the entire English-speaking world by WGBH and the BBC. She wrote a newspaper column called: “Ask Erica” distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. She designed hundreds of custom needlework projects for her students and clients. She designed the kneelers and vestments for some of the most important churches in America. And she had time to cater to her very demanding husband, we both probably ignored our children, who had to fend for themselves a lot of the time, but at least no weekend went by without a family ski trip or sailing outing.

   

Colonel George Wilson in the first World War and Drorothy "Mummy England" to all

Erica's parents

  

 Erica with her Dad

 

The dashing Major Basel Spraqqe, ADC to the Govenor of Bermuda - Erica's Stepfather

 
And on the other side of the pond, my little sister Tanya and me being very pensive



Annecy and Ondine Kagan the two clones of Erica

Her’s were the days of writing letters in legible monastic handwriting. She never learned to type, the computer was complete anathema. We had stored all her family’s letters in ancient wooden boxes and on visiting storage bins in Europe, we found an equal number of Erica’s letters written to her mother. A perfect subject for the book “Conversations with Mummy”. Erica had always wanted to write a cookbook, of course, heavily laced with needlework illustrations, the title: “Really Dull English Cooking for When you are Pregnant or have the Flu”. These books still await a willing historian to take on the task.

 

Erica's long-hand notes in her inimitable handwriting

 

Drawings from Erica's hundreds of sketch books

It is difficult to carry on in her spirit. She wore big shoes; I’ve found no one to fill them. My children each carry a good slice her genes. Our son Illya inherited her amazing artistic strain. She painted beautifully, so does he. Erica would draw incessantly, as does Illya. They both have an overwhelming love of nature.  Of all of my progenies, Illya’s daughters, blond and slender, most resemble their grandmother. Jessica, the oldest of our children, has inherited Erica’s endless energy and in her career as a jewelry designer and maker, uses so many of the needle work skills that her Mother taught her. She is a devoted embroiderer and often lays aside her blowtorch to pick up a needle and thread. Vanessa worked closely with her mother in her shops and now lovingly runs Erica Wilson Nantucket, one of the Island’s most iconic retail locations. Vanessa carries on her mother’s tradition and teaches needlework classes to small children, guaranteeing a continuation of Erica’s legacy. Vanessa has been blessed with Erica’s caring and compassion. She is the mother hen of the family.

 

Erica, teaching little Jessica to do Crewel embroidery - a lesson that she has never forgotten

Erica teaching boys and girls on the beach in Nantucket
 
Vanessa, following in her Mother's foot steps, teaching a children's needlework class in Nantucket

Kids, horsing around in Vanessa's needlework class at the 1800 House in Nantucket

 

Erica was a marvel, she touches our lives daily. She had a saying for everything and she was stubborn: “You can agree with me or you can be wrong!” She strived to be tidy and admonished us all with ”A place for everything and everything in its place” – she inspired me daily with creative ideas “don’t sit on a table – its bad luck”, so I dutifully designed sofas with wide backs for sitting. She was a pesky; when a bug hit her there was no escape. She was a mosquito buzzing around my head relentlessly until I would finally acquiesce. My Fettuccini chair took ten years to put into production. It was only her persistence that made it happen. She was a frustrated furniture designer and sketched her ideas on paper table clothes, napkins or envelopes and then persisted until I adopted them into my designs. She was the inspiration for so much of what I did.

 

Erica may now be teaching needlework to the angels, but she has left her imprimatur here on Earth!

 

Yes, my darling Erica – I miss you – but you have never gone away.

 

 

Erica and I traveling the world in her ubiquitous straw hat

   

Our happiest moments were those spent together in the Swiss Alps. Why not Nantucket, you might ask... because Nantucket is where we worked while Switzerland is where we vacationed.

 

 

America’s Love affair with Violence

 

Copyright Vladimir Kagan January 20, 2011

 

What has happened in Tucson has been repeated many times before; I went on Wikepedia and counted 104 shootings in schools since the University of Texas massacre in 1966. Columbine High School 1999, Virginia Tech 2007, Northern Illinois University 2008, are just a few of the more gory ones.

 

This will not go away with wishful thinking. It is a malignancy less curable than cancer. The love of violence in our daily culture is deeply embedded. The press is finding scapegoats in political rhetoric: but they are not alone! I blame our entertainment industries, which revels in mayhem, blood and gore.

 

You cannot go to a movie (this week we went to see The King’s Speech…a benign deeply intellectual film but were first bombarded with trailers (Approved for all audiences!) one new violent film after the other: exploding cars, imploding buildings, pyromaniac-effects, blood, gore and guns, guns, guns. (Any wonder that a few deranged people in our society will follow suit?)

 

Visit Netflix and their inventory of violence is endless. Go to Prime Time TV and each network is vying for more violent entertainment than the other (ratings drop if they don’t.)… Scan the hundreds of Cable stations and select more mayhem. Kid's Video Games are awash in violence. Pick up your local newspaper and see the carnage reported as news…but it also sells papers. TV news broadcasts wallow in the stuff, books feed this craze for violence. Add explicit sex into this mix and you are seeing modern America.

 

…So I say, why blame political rhetoric? Sarah Palin is just doing what comes naturally in Moose country…. and so are all the other rabble-rousers who screech on both sides of the political spectrum.

 

We need to reverse this epidemic. It will be tougher than reducing the national debt. Congress has no appetite for attacking the core problem: The proliferation of guns. They hide behind the constitution: The Right To Bear Arms…. It is not a gospel, though Congress treats it as such.

 

The right to bear arms was fine in 18^th Century America as the fledgling country was fighting a revolution: all the citizenry possessed then were muskets and single-shot pistols. However, it is totally out of sync in today’s world of AK-47 attack rifles, semi-automatic pistols and high-speed bullet clips…. Parenthetically, It is more difficult to drive a car legally, (you first must pass a state driving test)… than to acquire guns and bullets. For that, all you need do is go to the nearest gun shop and load up.

 

 

Let me give you a few guns statistics I just read:

• There are about 85 guns per 100 people in the United States

The only country that is more armed than America is Yemen!

• About 80 people die from guns every day, and several times as many are injured.
• Handgun sales in Arizona soared by 60 percent the Monday, after the Tucson shooting spree.

An article in the forthcoming American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by Harvard professor, David Hemenway, quotes a book written a few years ago reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge. It makes clear that:

•  A gun in the home makes you more likely to be shot — by accident, by suicide or by homicide.
• The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are unbelievably remote. Dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury than brandishing a weapon.
• American children are 11 times more likely to die in a gun accident than in other developed countries, because of the prevalence of guns.
• Suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because there are more guns.
• Most homicides in the home are by family members or acquaintances — not by an intruder — the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun murder in that home.

Enough?... I think these are reasonable arguments for gun control legislation. But here is our Congressmen’s response to the issue:

 

• Gun rights advocates and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said Thursday that there was little chance the attack would produce significant new legislation or a change in a national culture that has long been accepting of guns. If anything, they said, lawmakers are less receptive than ever to new gun restrictions.
• As an institution, Congress seems to celebrate gun ownership as much as many communities in Arizona.
• Many members of Congress own firearms, which they carry while riding around in farm trucks in their district or concealed behind a jacket in the streets, among constituents. “I carry a gun because it is a personal preference and for my own personal safety,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, one of several lawmakers who carry a concealed weapon in their districts.
• Democrats who favor more restrictive gun laws say they do not expect new legislation to be passed, especially now that Republicans control of the House and Democrats have lost seats in the Senate. However, Democrats are hardly uniform in supporting tough gun laws as a matter of policy; as a matter of politics, Democrats in Congress have increasingly shied away from the issue.
• Asked about prospects for new gun restrictions, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, asserted, “I maintain that firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens makes communities safer, not less safe.”

 

• Erich Pratt, the director of communications for Gun Owners of America, says “These politicians need to remember that these rights aren’t given to us by them. They come from God. They are God-given rights.

 

 

• “The Pledge to America is our plan,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for the House speaker, John A. Boehner, “and our immediate focus is on addressing the top priorities of the American people, creating jobs, cutting spending and reforming the way Congress works.”…(A nice cop-out for responsible legislation!)

This week its business as usual in the gun industry: The Crossroads of the West gun show went on as planned at the Pima County Fairgrounds, 13 miles from the shooting site, another gun show is scheduled for the following weekend. “We had no hesitation about going ahead with the show so soon after the incident,” said Lois Chedsey, secretary to the Arizona Arms Association, a show sponsor. “Gun sales have been up since last Saturday”

An even bigger event in Las Vegas, the Shot Show — which bills itself as the country’s largest exhibition of guns and ammunition — is proceeding next week with a four-day run that fills two floors of convention space.

•••••

Here is my formula for a reasonable approach to the problem:

• Tone down the destructive rhetoric in our political discourse.
• Try a more constructive approach to Entertainment.
• Our military seeks intelligence about the enemies we are fighting to better protect the troops: Why can’t our civilian governments pool their knowledge of potential threats by deranged individuals wandering in our streets and schools and put them safely away before they do their damage? In the 60’s we closed thousands of our mental institutions and foisted the inmates into our streets…(they thought drug treatment would take the place of incarceration…it hasn’t). Preemptive action is cheaper than long-term prisons.
• Guns are too deeply entrenched in our social fiber…we can’t eliminate them, but it is our obligation to regulate who owns one. Educate and license an owner before they are qualified to own one: This can help ferret out the unstable.
• If the stated purpose of gun ownership is self-protection or hunting, there are many guns suitable for this purpose: Assault weapons are not the answer. (We have a dear friend, who is a gun advocate. She owns a hand-gun and a rifle. She has taken shooting lessons; she is licensed and she poses no menace to anyone…Neither she, nor Sarah Palin nor the thousands of other law abiding citizens have anything to worry about…. However, anyone possessing a gun should be licensed just like anyone driving a car…. SIMPLE!….(So why are they and the NRA so opposed?)

•••••

My friends, we are in for along siege…just duck, when you hear gunshots!