HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LAUREN HUTTON

A PLAY AND A PLAYA.

(Above: Hutton - spring of 2022 - in the Cass Bird cover photo for the Harper Bazaar’s Beauty issue. Lauren once told The Telegraph here in London about 15 years ago now when she was only 65: “It's ridiculous what's happening. You can't tell a Kate Winslet from a Cate Blanchett. Every studio is stuffed with 24-year-old boys, all virgins, and all they know of females is from computer games and cartoons and PlayStations, where every girl looks about 16. So they've got to have girls who look like that. It's the same in fashion.” And only three years ago, she again was talking to The Telegraph: “It was thought we had one certain look which we were supposed to be. But the first thing you really see when you start traveling is that there are beautiful people of every size and shape and color and age everywhere – in the Far East, the Middle East, South America. There are so many ways of being beautiful. … They keep finding new things to do [here] like removing your fat or doing this or that, but I would rather have a face like an African elephant’s bottom anyway.”)

Today my Saturday rubrics over at Notes here on Substack - STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS, SOM JOY, and BEFORE GOOGLE - are all about Lauren Hutton who turned 80 yesterday when I posted the remembrance below about her, which got a lot of reaction on Facebook and Instagram so I am putting it up here for those of you who did not see it in those places. I know this is the second re-posting in a row I have done here from social media but don’t worry because next week I’m interviewing Billy Crudup by Zoom from Berkeley, California, where he is reviving his one-man multi-character play Harry Clarke by David Cale which was such a hit several years ago in New York. We’re going to talk a bit about Cory Ellison as well for us The Morning Show fans. Billy is one of our greatest actors and has grown into his older age from his years as the new young whippersnapper on the acting block with such deepening grace - just as Lauren has now that she has reached 80. So stay tuned for Billy next week. In the meantime, here is some Lauren to make your weekend just a bit lovelier and livelier because that is what Lauren’s role has always been in some way: to make the world lovelier and livelier because of her presence in it.

(Above: Lauren Hutton by Richard Avedon. On their famous shoot for Vogue during the October 1968 Great Exuma shoot in the Bahamas which resulted in the iconic one-breast one-nipple exposed shot with her head thrown back which became also an image about the almost latitudinal loveliness of her neck which elongated the lust below into longing. I debated whether to post that photo but I knew that some people in 2023 would politicize it into objectification and seek an elongation of offense which is what so much of the fencing off of desire has become within the confines of the 21st century at this juncture of it. But you can see the image here at Christie’s where it sold at auction for $85,640.00 five years ago.

Hutton said Avedon once told her, “‘Lauren, you have the life we’d all like to have.’ I got this chill when he said that. It took a long time to sink in but I never forgot it.”

In some way she’s the inspiration for me to set out on my pilgrim’s life because she’s always been one herself. I’ve never forgotten when our pilgrim paths crossed.)

THE REMEMBRANCE:

Lauren Hutton turns 80 today. I once hung with her a bit back in my younger days. Even sent her an early play of mine called Cadillacs in the Sky in case she might be interested in doing a reading of it. Dropped it off at her loft on the Bowery and wrote my number on it and she called me to talk about it. I wanted her to do the reading but she didn't think she was talented enough to pull off the character I had written for her in mind. This was before I was even at Andy Warhol's Interview as Executive Editor or at Vanity Fair where I framed the kind of fame she had but always found a way of handing back to us framers. We met and talked about the play some more. But she didn't quite think of herself as right for the role.

Back in the early 1980s I'd eat breakfast at a place called The Bagel on West Fourth and she'd come rolling in with her buddies after a night out wherever the cool coteries hung to feel less harried by those of us who were not so cool, those corners of New York that have always been a part of its lore where the cool go seeking their own lovely and unlovely kind. I'd eavesdrop and dribble a bit of honey on my toasted buttered bagel as I took mental notes about living one's narrative by not giving a shit and wondered if one could eavesdrop as well the effortlessness that Hutton seemed to have about it all. I was already exhausted by the effort it took to be who I wanted to be in such a place. As I look back, she taught me by her example to let go of the effort and turn instead to holding on to your truest self no matter what and trust that: your own damn truth.

When she had her awful motorcycle accident I found out which hospital she was in and sent her a note about some of this - what I thought of her, what she meant to me - not expecting to hear anything back. She had a lot of recovering to do. And I didn't hear back.

We lost touch.

(Above: Lauren Hutton photographed by Irving Penn. Vogue. 1971. )

But a few years later, I was down in Miami where I had a condo in South Beach for a time and one evening at dusk I was feeling that one-evening-at-dusk feeling I can still get - I am having it right now thinking about Lauren on this evening at dusk in London - and went down to the beach to contemplate my life and how sadness was - still is - the tide that comes and goes in the way that a tide does in being its own gravitational pull and how, high or low, it never ever leaves but dutifully lingers because it defines the shore, all that it's not because it is.

I was watching the tide's lingering that evening when, emerging from the ocean, a lone figure walked toward me after a solitary sunset swim. It was Lauren. She recognized me. . She sat in the sand beside me. I smelled the ocean on her, the dutiful tides that lingered now on her. She thanked me for my note in the hospital a couple of years before. We talked about sadness and surviving and writing and belief in one's self and what a crock of shit being cool is but how fame can help frame a life with the privilege of adventure but you have to be careful that the privilege itself is not the adventure you seek. We talked about that early play of mine. We talked about Mississippi. About how hard it was to recover from her accident, from being so broken. We didn't talk about healing really and all the weight that word can carry. We talked instead about growing older with some fucking dignity. We were so much younger that Miami dusk and not sure what dignity meant in our lives. But that is what I remember we longed for: a life lived with dignity but not with dullness. She also taught me not to confuse those two things, pointed out how different they were. Then she agreed to talk to me on the record for a story I was doing for Travel + Leisure about New Orleans where she went to school at Sophie Newcomb and worked for Al Hirt while doing her homework at his bar. She always knew what corners the cool folks found to be cool.*

Happy birthday, Hutton. Here's to honey dribbled on a bagel, recovering from brokenness, not giving a shit what others think, and not worrying about the frame or even what's in it. Walk past the tide from the ocean. Sit on the sand. Talk about sadness with someone who needs to talk about it. Dignity? Dullness? Fuck'em both finally. Being eighty, the dusk of life, is a privilege. That's your newest adventure, arriving yet again where you've never been and exploring it. May your eighties be just that: an exploration.

I'll be eavesdropping.

(Above: Mexico. 1968.)

(Above: Photo by Betthina Rheims)

(Above: Photograph by Alexandra Nataf. 2018.)

(Above: Photo by Michael Schwartz)

(Above: Another photo by Cass Bird.)

*The Travel+Leisure section:

“I got my education on Bourbon Street, not at Sophie Newcomb,” says model and adventuress Lauren Hutton recalling her first year at the two best-known New Orleans finishing schools. “I lived on Bourbon, baby, in a great apartment across from the Court of Two Sisters restaurant. Had a big brass bed that cost me twenty-five dollars. I was eighteen and waiting tables at Al Hirt’s place,” she says, invoking the name of one of the city’s most beloved jazz legends. “I’d work from seven p.m. till three-thirty a.m. I’d sleep four hours, hop on my Vespa, and head up to the Garden District for my classes at Newcomb. I loved working at Al’s. Dizzy Gillespie made a pass at me there. Believe me, that’s something a girl doesn’t forget. Al’s was the first to integrate Bourbon. I’d sit at the bar doing my homework. Field all the calls. And listen to the bomb threats we were getting.

“I went back recently for the first time in over twenty years and was appalled by what’s happened to Bourbon Street. It was always trashy, but wonderful trashy; now it’s devolved into the lowest of the low. The city government must be criminal to let that happen. All those damn T-shirt shops. It broke my heart. Don’t they know what they’ve got? New Orleans is a national treasure. No, it’s a world treasure. It’s America’s only European city. I know it must still have its charms, but I didn’t find any. So I’m heading back to do some more exploring. I’m going to bag me some of that city’s damn charm. I’m determined to. Determined.”

Calm down, Miss Hutton. Calm down. And listen to that sultriest of siren calls: New Orleans residents reeling off the reasons why “the weather don’t matter and the neighbors don’t mind.”

(Above: Hutton photographed for Town & Country)