Word: redness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...think of myself as a black male Lucille Ball," he says. "I like making people laugh." Indeed, can one imagine the reclusive Yves Saint Laurent skateboarding a la Kelly through Paris' seedier neighborhoods? Picture crusty Karl Lagerfeld nude from the waist up, posing for Vanity Fair, with red buttons over his nipples and 16 satin bows on his pigtails? Such antics have charmed the powerful French fashion press. "Le mignon petit noir Americain," enthused one Paris newspaper -- although in America being called a cute little black would seem more like an insult...
Months before a show, Kelly is in high gear. Red sweat pants peeping from under the overalls, he sits high at his drafting table, drawing in deft strokes, crumpling up sketches one after another and sipping hot tea from a tall glass. Interruptions are constant. "No!" he barks, surveying a list of proposed models. "We need someone with de vraies fesses -- a real fanny." The sultry beauties who glower through most French fashion shows must learn to prance, dance, skip and even smile for Kelly's semiannual follies. He dismisses another candidate offhandedly: "Tell her she can do my show...
From the first sketch to the moment he spray-paints his red heart on the runway, Kelly wrestles with the tiniest details. Two hours before the last show, he was backstage in the Louvre tent amid models, dressers, seamstresses, hairdressers, makeup artists, lighting technicians and stagehands. "Paint those red lips!" he ordered. "I want you to look like you just got rid of your third husband!" Dashing through mounds of hats decorated with rhinestone Eiffel Towers, past racks of pink minks, turquoise ostrich feathers, Mexican blankets and red sequined gowns, he fusses with a model's hair. He directs...
...putting Owen Meany's dialogues in upper case? Irving got the idea from editions of the New Testament in which Jesus' utterances appear in red letters. And John Wheelwright's inability to forget the country of his birth? "Even if you try hard to look away from the U.S., it is there in your face like a flag...
...Stuart M. Kaminsky's sleuth Toby Peters is hired by General Douglas MacArthur on a matter of national security and gets a helping hand from Dashiell Hammett on a spree. The volume is one of the sprightliest in the series built around Peters but is overshadowed by A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's; 210 pages; $15.95), which features Kaminsky's other recurring detective, Soviet policeman Porfiry Rostnikov. That sly and assiduous investigator is dispatched to Siberia to look into the killing of another officer, who in turn was probing the killing of the daughter of a prominent dissident. Despite...