Mid-Century Fetish: Ocean’s 11

Previously, we covered why Frank Sinatra is the Godfather of Mid-Century Modern, and now we check in on him in 1960 and see that he continued to personify the MCM lifestyle some 13 years after moving into Twin Palms.

Ocean’s 11 released in August 1960, but began 2 weeks of filming on January 11, 1960.  According to the exhaustively detailed commentary by Frank Sinatra, Jr. on the DVD re-issue, we learn that the vast majority of the movie was filmed on location in Vegas and inside the 5 casinos that were “being robbed.”   This makes Ocean’s 11 a valuable snapshot of what Las Vegas once looked like, a celluloid form of historical preservation for a town that has no use for such things.

Most of the movie’s action takes place in or around Las Vegas casinos, so there are only a small handful of Hollywood stage sets, like the one above.  For the sake of brevity, I left out screen grabs that were solely dedicated to the lighting that was chosen for residential sets.  Actually, for mid-century modern lighting and chair enthusiasts, this movie is highly recommended.

Coral orange and salmon pink are the popular accent color of the movie.  Another popular accessory in the movie is cigarettes; both the Rat Pack and Mad Men had a 3-pack a day habit, I swear!

Her Royal Highness, Miss Angie Dickinson (shown seated, above) also contributes to the DVD commentary, and when it comes to her first scene with Dean Martin, and they both get ready to light up, Angie says, “I can’t believe they’re going to pull out cigarettes!  To see myself smoking in movies is shocking.  It seems so wrong, but as everyone knows, in the 40s, 50s, 60, everybody smoked.  Back then, nobody hesitated - drinking and smoking and living it up.”

Sinatra’s character Danny Ocean masterminds a plot to rip off 5 casinos at one time on New Year’s Eve, and brings together his 10 best men to pull it off.  They gather at this stunning mid-century home.

Like most of the movie, it is an actual location rather than a set, in this case, it’s a home in Beverly Hills that was then owned by Hollywood theatrical agent Kurt Frings.  According to Sinatra, Jr., Frings’ was surprised they wanted to use it for the film, but was more than happy to let them do so.  This tidbit proves a conscious decision on someone’s part - maybe Sinatra? - as to what style of house these thoroughly modern rapscallions should gather in.

The downstairs rumpus room in the Frings’ house covers just about every decorating trend of the late 1950s, including Tiki, Asian and African.  There’s quite a bit of furniture (I lost track trying to count all the different types of chairs) and knick-knacks in this large room, yet it doesn’t look busy or fussy.  This is one of the hallmarks of mid-century modern residential design:  how to have a lot of stuff without looking like you do!

From the film we see the entrance to the original Flamingo Hotel, which was built in 1946 by gangster Bugsy Siegel.  By 1967, new owners began remodeling, renovating and removing, and by 1994 all pieces of the original hotel were demolished.  Only the name survives from the old days, but Ocean’s 11 preserves some important aspects of the place…

…like the multiple showrooms in each of the hotels. Sinatra, Jr. was most impassioned when discussing how the casinos used to operate, “when they were owned by individuals, not corporations.”  He explained that these intimate music lounges existed to “feed live music into the casino,” and give gamblers a place to eat and revive themselves for some more gambling.

Each music lounge (like the Flamingo Room, above) took great care to book quality music and comedy acts, regarding them as being as big a draw as the gambling.  Music or gambling, either way, they’d get your money.

The reason the production got the actual hotels as sets in the movie was because the Rat Pack was actually performing in the Copa Room at the Sands for the 1959-60 holiday season.  Once their shows were done for the night, filming began at 2:15 a.m. and they shot until it became too light.   The production made a deal with the participating 5 casinos to leave up their regular Christmas decorations for a couple of weeks longer so it could play into the New Year’s Eve plot line.

And here is the legendary Sands Hotel.  It opened in 1952, was the zenith of Vegas entertainment by the time of Ocean’s 11, and closed in 1996, followed by an infamous implosion a few months later.  Unlike some of the other lost hotels, the Sands named died with it.

Here’s a diner from the original Sands casino, and a distinction must be made about the building types.  As Sinatra, Jr. points out in the DVD commentary, the casino, showrooms and lounges were in a separate building from the hotel, and the hotels were no higher than 3-stories tall and situated behind the main building.

Right next door to the Sands was the Desert Inn (and both places would be owned by Howard Huges by the mid-60s), which operated from 1950 to 2000. And like the Sands, once it was demolished, the name went with it.

By the mid-1960s, the city of Las Vegas made a concerted effort to draw in more people by building a convention center, and more people required more rooms.  This is the time period when high-rise hotels were erected, and so required massive renovations to the existing casino hotels.

This is the gambling room of the Desert Inn as it was in January 1960. While not posh, it’s certainly more civilized than the lights-flashing-sirens-honking casinos we have now.

The Riviera (shown above), which opened in 1955, foreshadowed the super hotel concept by being the first high-rise hotel erected on The Strip, and it remains to this day in the same location with the same name.  But the building shown here is long gone.

The new corporate owners that took over in the late 1960s figured - according to Sinatra, Jr. - “that people should only have to walk as far as the elevator to spend their money,” which is when the concept of separate buildings was jettisoned in favor of a a gargantuan hotel that could allow you to never set foot outside of it.

The Sahara Hotel is the only other of the Ocean’s 11 5 that remain in the same place with the same name, but by 1963 they had begun serious renovations to the 1952 structure.  By the late 1970s, Vegas switched over to the “mega-resort” concept, which was a way to make Vegas family-friendly which meant more money from different types of people flowing in.  From the DVD commentary, both Sinatra, Jr. and Miss Dickinson are emphatic that luring kids to Vegas was the death knell for a once-great city, with Dickinson lamenting the disappearance of the last safe place for adults to be adults.

Here’s footage from the film of Dean Martin performing in the Congo Lounge of the Sahara.  Sinatra, Jr. was also very detailed about the death of quality entertainment in Vegas, explaining that the number of private lounges were reduced by new corporate owners who felt they were wasting their money with duplications of musicians throughout a casino.  The disappearance of the small music lounges that were free-of-charge to gamblers did not seem to affect the flow of people coming through the doors, so the rest of the lounges were torn out, replaced by grand concert halls with high-dollar tickets that could lure in even the non-gamblers.

After the robberies are completed, there are a few stage set scenes, with this office interior being one of them. I love the masculine drama of this room.

But for the most part, 1960 Las Vegas is the star of Ocean’s 11, with cameo appearances by the Rat Pack and friends.  And Vegas has always been about flash and money, so has constantly been changing to keep up with the cash, so any type of serious preservation of the Vega Strip was laughed off the street decades ago.  Though there is The Neon Museum, the graveyard for so many of the wonderful neon sings that are the landscape of Vegas.  They even turned the LaConcha Motel (which I covered in 2005) into their visitor’s center!

But for the most part, photographs and memories are the historical preservation of Las Vegas, and the Rat Pack era is the one that seems to ignite the romantic imagination the most.  Luckily, Frank Sinatra - the Godfather of Mid-Century Modern - left behind the most potent and complete snapshot of a time and a town.

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La Concha Motel, Las Vegas
Frank Sinatra: Mid-Century Modern Godfather

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Connecting the Mad Men Dots

In a previous post, I made a set design connection between the movie The Best of Everything and the TV series Mad Men.  I even wrote:“I’d make a bet that (Mad Men creator) Matthew Weiner has seen this movie even more times than I have, if only for set design research purposes.”

From the photo above, turns out he’d not only seen the movie, but he and his writing staff used the book as research, and then inserted into an episode in Season 2.

Betty Draper walks into the bedroom, where Don is reading a paperback copy of Rona Jaffee’s The Best of Everything.
DON This is fascinating.
BETTY It’s better than the Hollywood  version.
DON It’s certainly dirtier.
BETTY Joan Crawford is not what she was.  You know, honestly, I found her eyebrows completely unnerving. Like a couple of caterpillars pasted there.  Her standing next to Suzy Parker as if they were the same species.
DON Well, some men like eyebrows, and all men like Joan Crawford.  Salvatore couldn’t stop talking about her.

Trash talking Miss Crawford?  Another reason why I dislike Betty, and this moves to #1 on the list.  At least Don told her what for!

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Mid-Century Fetish: The Best Of Everything

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Frank Sinatra: Mid-Century Modern Godfather

One of the most iconic images of residential mid-century modernism was made possible by Frank Sinatra.  Though he only lived in it for 10 years, the home is forever associated with him, and still inspires retro fantasies.

As cover art for a CD EP we did earlier this year, I chose the shot above because it combined two things I love: Julius Shulman and Ole’ Blue Eyes.  Now, both of my 70-something parents didn’t care much for the music within, but when they saw the CD cover they both immediately identified it as Frank’s place.  How’s that for architectural staying power?

The place is known as Twin Palms, and is now for rent as a Palm Springs party palace or the ultimate background for a photo shoot.  The official website has all the details, plus a great history of the home, which hipped me to something I did not know: Sinatra’s place was used as a location for the Joan Crawford film The Damned Don’t Cry.

I’ll take every opportunity to wallow in Miss Crawford melodrama, but for those of you too busy or too butch to go there, the scenes featuring Sinatra’s pad are screen-capped here.

The story of how Frank Sinatra got this home is fairly well-known: upon deciding he wanted a permanent residence in the then-sleepy desert town of Palm Springs, Frank walked into the office of E. Stewart Williams and simply said, “I want a house.”  Sinatra was thinking traditional columns and bricks, but for his first residential commission, Williams went with modern design.

Shortly before he died, Williams talked about presenting the drawings of the home in the film about Julius Shulman, Visual Acoustics.  Williams remembered that Sinatra was surprisingly open to such a radical departure from what he’d asked for, and the meeting was very brief because Sinatra had only one criteria to make his decision: Can you have it done by Christmas?

Even though it was the Summer of 1947, Williams said “yes” to the seemingly impossible: design and build a house to completion in less than 5 months.  Incredibly, they missed the deadline by only a week; Sinatra didn’t do Christmas but was able to throw a New Year’s Eve Party.

According to the Twin Palms website, Sinatra repaid a favor he owed by letting the production of The Damned Don’t Cry film at his home in 1950.  But they were only allowed to film outside, so any scenes that take place within the interior of the home are Hollywood creations that have nothing to do with what the interior of the actual house looked like.

We tend to see still pictures of the home shot from the same angles, so it’s a real treat to see it in this movie from different angles and functioning as someone’s home, rather than the icon it was rapidly becoming.

In the film, Twin Palms portrays the home of gangster Nick Prenta, who is in trouble with the New York Mob Boss.  Miss Crawford is the mistress of said Boss, and is sent by him to spy on Nick.  But because Nick is such a virile Italian stud (who is so secure in his manhood that he rocks op-art swim trunks), Crawford naturally falls in love with him (and his house!) and can’t bring herself to rat him out because that equals death.   (Spoiler Alert) Of course, Nick gets whacked, but the violence happens in Crawford’s apartment, so Twin Palm’s had no blood on its hands, real or reel.

We’re not even going to comment on the irony of Sinatra’s house “belonging” to a gangster while he himself dodged Mob rumors for most of his career.  Instead, let’s marvel at these rare glimpses of the home in its infancy, and appreciate the people who have restored the place within the past 12 years.

And the place did need extensive restoration; Sinatra only lived in the house from 1947 - 1957, which left many new residents to muss its essence. By 1997, it was being sold as a tear down.  Scroll down 3/4 on this link to learn more.  Now it’s available to any of us with lots of disposable cash to live out Frank & Ava fantasies for a weekend, a wonderful gift suggestion to add to your Christmas wish list!

Mid-Century Fetish: The Best Of Everything

The Best of Everything is a rich chocolate sundae of Hollywood melodrama and mid-century modern design, with Miss Joan Crawford as the cherry on top.

Filmed and released in 1959, the movie is based on the 1958 novel of the same name by Rona Jaffe.  The book is a really great read because it’s far more than a soap tale of 3 girls coming to New York City to find love and good fortune; it is a realistic snapshot of how post-WW2 cultural and corporate standards demanded the creation of Women’s Liberation.

The dramatic and/or tragic stories of the girls’ journeys through sex and career were obvious bait for Hollywood, who added spoonfuls of glamor sugar to make the medicine go down, and this lesson was clearly understood and aped by both Cosmopolitan magazine and, later, Mad Men.   I’d make a bet that Matthew Weiner has seen this movie even more times than I have, if only for set design research purposes.

Along with Hope Lange, Barbara Lamont and Suzy Parker (above center), the Lever House should have been billed as a co-star, because it actually appears on screen as often as Joan Crawford.  It appears so much because it’s caddy corner on Park Avenue to the building where our heroines work…

… the Seagram Building.  So within the first 15 minutes of the film, you know you’re in for a rich and gooey mid-century modern treat.

The main character, Caroline Bender, comes to her first day of work as a typist and secretary at Fabian Publishing Company.   She arrives early to absorb the place, and the camera pans over this Mondrian-like office set.  The film’s art direction is primarily by Lyle R. Wheeler, who had already worked similar magic on films like The Long Hot Summer, Peyton Place, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Bus Stop.  For the Fabian Publishing set, he used door colors to signify which level each inhabitant occupied on the corporate totem pole and adhered to tight grids in the typing pool to symbolize the rigid class distinctions between executives and the female typing pool.  If - without seeing the move - this set looks familiar to you, it may indicate that you…

…watch Mad Men. During the first few episodes of the first season, I was vaguely disappoint in how refined the sets were, until I realized that I was instinctively comparing their sets to The Best of Everything.  The people responsible for the Mad Men sets have essentially created the accurate, real-world version of of Hollywood’s glossy interpretation of late 50s/early 60s corporate world.

Caroline Bender  (above) has ambitions to become an editor but first assigned secretary duties to editor Miss Amanda Farrow (Miss Crawford, below right).

The Mad Men character Peggy Olson is a perfect compilation of these two characters.  Peggy “before” is Caroline, all freshly scrubbed from a small town looking to make it in the Big City, and her quick learning curve and natural talent moves her quickly up the ladder.  If you’d like a sneak peak at Peggy “after,” see this movie and keep an eye on the Amanda character.  And look at those chairs!

This is the office of Fabian editor-in-chief Fred Shalimar, and dig the wall of built-in book shelves holding the paperbacks he’s overseen.  As in Mad Men, actual work takes a backseat to drinking, smoking and carousing, so the office needs to be comfy and stylish.

Hollywood depicted the bustling employee cafeteria inside the Seagram building as a mod fantasy of vivid aqua, yellow and purple, which stood in stark contrast to the marble and glass lobby that couldn’t be glossed into submission.

When the action leaves the office, we get a wide sample of the different aspects of mid-century modern residential design.  Above is the work-a-day kitchen in Amanda Farrow’s apartment, and below is the penthouse of rich playboy Dexter Key (played by Robert Evans) who will do terrible things to one of our heroines.

Eventually, Caroline becomes second-in-command at Fabian and gets this spacious new office.  It  does a better job of expressing the character’s reactions to her rapid rise than the actress does, which pretty much sums up the movie.  As often happens, Hollywood sucks the soul out of a book for the sake of selling tickets.  In the case of The Best of Everything, the sets and the costumes are the reason I watch this movie so often, and the reason I get an extra kick out of Mad Men.

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Mid-Century Fetish: Down With Love

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Mid-Century Fetish: Down With Love

Down With Love, released in 2003, is a homage to classic Doris Day & Rock Hudson films of the 1960s, starring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger. It works as both a tongue-in-cheek commentary and earnest love letter to that style of romantic comedy film.

Critics buried the film, and basically no one but me and my Mother saw it in the theaters. But two crew members did get nominated for a few independent film awards, and rightly so, because they were the meat and potatoes of this venture.

Costume designer Daniel Orlandi totally nailed the spirit of a typical Doris Day wardrobe, which was fabulous! Production designer Andrew Laws studied the sets of the original Day-Hudson films, then injected them with the revival of mid-century modern design that was foaming to a head, and thus created the ultimate fetishistic object for MCM design fans.

The lobby of Know magazine

Over the years, I have seen Pillow Talk - where Doris Day plays an interior decorator - easily 40 times. The sets are just as important as the actors and the plot and, for the last 10 years or so, I watch the backgrounds more than the foreground. So when Down With Love set decorator Don Diers said their sets were intended to be a “distinct character in the film,” my applause is deafening for a goal perfectly achieved. As with Pillow Talk, I can watch this film with the sound down and still be wildly entertained.

Catcher Block's office

The movie begins with this narration:
The place: New York City
The time: now - 1962. And there’s no time or place like it.

Diers confirmed this by saying, “Our New York exteriors existed in the back lot world of Universal. We made a concerted effort to recreate a 1963 Hollywood New York, as opposed to anything that might have been mistaken for reality. Through Fox Research, we searched a lot of old movie stills for just the right tone.”

Barbara Novak's Manhattan penthouse apartment

This level of fantasy detail is supremely delightful. Bringing to life idealized versions of what 1962 surely looked like is thoroughly satisfying and can be a time-consuming hobby.

Here’s a piece on how to re-create the Barbie doll feel of Barbara Novak’s penthouse apartment.

The bachelor pad of Catcher Block

And here’s a piece on how to get that “woman’s man, man’s man, man about town” look for your bachelor pad.

Another view of Catcher's apartment

Catcher's fireplace and vintage stewardess

As much as I genuinely love and strive to document real-world examples of mid-century modern architecture and design, I do get uneasy about the fetish aspect of it. The definitions of “fetish” succinctly explain my uneasy feelings:

1. an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency

2. Any object, idea, etc. eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect or devotion

3. Any object or nongenital part of the body that causes a habitual erotic response or fixation

Finding evidence of a design time period and collecting the items and/or trying to recreate that look is a time-honored tradition. Early American architecture was founded on the revival of most every European building style of most every century. So, reverential recreation of mid-20th century design is a natural progression, and may be the only thing that finally preserves the best examples of such for future generations.

Lobby of Novak's Now magazine

But there does exist unrealistic expectations among those cultivating a mid-century way of living. The most intriguing example comes from the stories of a realtor friend who specializes in finding St. Louis MCM homes for her clients.

Coming into Barbara Novak's office

In a nutshell, some folks want to live in subdivisions with homes like these, but they want it to look exactly as it did when first built. They look at what 40+ years of inhabitant’s remodeling did to the place and just don’t want to deal with the effort required to restore it to that original state.

Novak's office

Remodeling industry figures show that the average homeowner remodels at least the kitchen and bathroom every 10 years, and that when someone moves into a pre-existing home, some form of remodeling will take place. This is a psychological, aesthetic and functional desire to erase previous footprints and mold the home to your wants and needs.

Waiting area at Now magazine

If the house is over 25 years old, it’s going to automatically need upgrades to systems, roofs and exterior finishes. Maintenance is an on-going chore for a house of any age.

It is easily understood that the purchase of a period home is going to require a lot of work. Whether wanting to totally modernize it or restore it to its original state, it is the equivalent of a second full-time job until the job is done. Wait, the job is never truly done, so scratch that. It’s more like raising a child.

The Pan Am building is real, the rest is Hollywood

A house built in the 1950s or 60s is now, technically, a period home. Aside from the maintenance and repairs it will require, if you want to take it back to the original form, it requires remodeling. Many homeowners - especially first-time buyers - understandably don’t want to deal with this much work and expense. If that’s their mindset, then walking into a 1960s ranch that only looks like that from the outside is a major bubble pop, and disillusionment thwaps hard upside the head.

But what is it about mid-century architecture that makes it harder for us to accept the remodeling realities of a place that has been normally remuddled over the decades? Why do we expect these period homes to be like a perfectly preserved dollhouse?

Set for the closing credit musical number

Maybe it’s because it is the recent past. The second half of the 20th century went by at lightening speed; 25 years can feel like only 5 years gone, and how much can you mess up something in that short period of time? A home built in 1912 is an antiquated beast requiring massive work to bring it to current standards. But a 1950s ranch has central air conditioning and drywall, so we recognize it as “of our time.”

Then we see something like Down With Love, where they wave a magic Hollywood wand and create a mid-century Xanadu. Target lets us take home credible recreations of that era. Dwell shows regular people living in that world. It’s as easy as populating a dollhouse, right?

If only.