Word: elesina
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This view may be dating rapidly, yet it serves to underpin Auchincloss's latest novel. The Dark Lady. It is a Social Register version of A Star Is Born-a tale of two women allied in a successful assault on wealth, fame and political power. The star is Elesina Dart, a beauty of good background who has gone through two marriages and flubbed one promising theatrical career. The impresario is Ivy Trask, a cynical, shrewd middle-aged fashion editor and social arbiter at Broadlawns, the Westchester estate of Judge Irving Stein, banker and art collector...
...schemes would scorch the ears Truman Capote. In the three decades spanned by the novel- from the late Depression to the mid-'50s- she salvages Elesina from failure and alcohol, marries her to Irving and the Stein fortune, and finally launches her toward a seat in the House of Representatives...
Born Actress. But Ivy should have read Auchincloss on the natural superiority of women over 40. Elesina grows into the job as mistress of Broadlawns and proves more formidable than her Svengali. As a born actress, she instinctively understands that the world is more than a stage- it is an audience. Her repertoire enlarges. She tutors herself in art history and is both dutiful wife to the aging, impotent Irving and ardent lover of his son David. Elesina knows how to balance passion and Pragmatism: What was all of Broadlawns and its treasure compared to a lover like that...
...quality of closet theater that makes his work consistently entertaining-even when his sphere of wealth and privilege may seem hopelessly remote to most readers. Irving Stein provides the best example of this in the current novel. Urged to remember his sons when bequeathing his entire art collection to Elesina, he relents with a few to kens: "Well, suppose I leave them each a painting?...To Lionel the Holbein of Mary Tudor. To Peter the Botticelli To David the big Tiepolo...
Auchincloss may strut a bit but he does not moralize. He delivers no indictments against aging millionaries who swap loyalty for beauty, and neither lauds nor ridicules youths who seek truth in the trenches of a war. And Elesina, the dark lady with the soaring ambition who taints all those who come close to her, does not pay for her sins, at least not as dearly as her friends, family and lovers pay for her. At the end of the book Elesina is still stunning, still wealthy, still powerful, and still adored. Even the palm fronds would tremble...