Mansfield in her pool, surrounded by one of the odder experiments in early celebrity merchandising, hot water bottles made in her likeness
In addition to her rubber-necking beauty, Jayne Mansfield was known for a lot of things. There’s the famous side-eye from Sophia Loren, though that’s obviously nowhere near the most exposure her breasts received (Hugh Hefner was arrested for publishing her nudes). The gory details of her death are also the subject of much obsession—while she was not decapitated as is often rumored, the car wreck that took her life was horribly grisly. And she was romantically attached to a string of powerful and famous men, including Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Anton LaVey (which lead to wild stories about her death as the result of occult activities).
I prefer to think of Mansfield as a delightful eccentric, with a warmth and charisma that bubbled rather than smoldered—sort of a free-spirited bombshell with a girl-next-door sweetness. Nothing quite so beautifully encapsulates her explosive personality like these photos of her Los Angeles home, which she named, “The Pink Palace.” Mansfield purchased the 40-room Mediterranean-style mansion in 1957 and immediately began renovating. She didn’t stop at painting the exterior pink—think of an entire bathroom furnished in pink shag carpet, walls and all. As clever as she was lovely, she wrote to furniture and building suppliers requesting samples for her new home; those “samples” totaled over $150,000 ($1,246,742 in 2014 dollars). The house itself cost only $76,000 ($631,682 in 2014 dollars).
At the end, you can see video of Mansfield’s second husband, former Mr. Universe Miklós “Mickey” Hargitay, showing off his line of freeweights, poolside. Jayne also does a little demo of her own exercise routine, choosing not to remove her high heels—the camera quickly switches angles to shoot her from below in an obvious cinematic ogle.
Top art dealer David Zwirner looking to open gallery in Hong Kong
Zwirner, named third most influential in contemporary art world, with galleries in New York and London and representing artists such as Jeff Koons, sees city as ideal place for his first gallery in Asia
Installation view from the 2015 solo exhibition Michaël Borremans: Black Mould at David Zwirner, London. Photo: David Zwirner
David Zwirner, one of the most powerful art dealers in the world, is looking for a place in Hong Kong to open his first Asia gallery.
“A couple of years ago, we thought we would just come to the art fair. Now, I’m convinced we need a gallery here,” said the founder of the eponymous New York and London gallery during a whirlwind visit to meet local clients. David Zwirner. Photo: Dirk Eusterbrock Christopher D’Amelio, senior partner in the gallery, said it wanted to have a permanent presence in Hong Kong “as soon as possible” after witnessing a steady growth in its Asian business.
To cultivate awareness of the 51 artists it represents, and demand for their works, the David Zwirner Galllery wants to be able to put on exhibitions in Hong Kong and engage in dialogue with Asian clients outside of the art fairs. Massimo De Carlo, the Milan and London gallery, also announced recently that it will open a third branch in Pedder Building, Central, in a space previously occupied by Ben Brown Fine Art, which has decided to downsize. MDC will launch with a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Yan Pei-ming on March 21, during Art Basel week.
The arrival of Zwirner, named the third most influential person in the contemporary art world by ArtReview magazine, would be a big vote of confidence in the long-term prospects of the Hong Kong art market amid economic uncertainty and growing competition from other cities in the region. Among the artists he represents are Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Serra.
The years 2011 and 2012 saw a flurry of major international galleries, such as Gagosian Gallery and White Cube, open in Hong Kong after auction sales in the city doubled from 2009 to 2010. But there have been few additions since Pace Gallery opened in 2014.
One reason is the dearth of good gallery space, especially compared with what Zwirner is used to. In New York, for example, he had a new, five-storey building with 30,000 square feet of floor space put up in 20th Street three years ago so that he could put on museum-quality shows. Interior view of David Zwirner’s new building, at 537 West 20th Street, New York. Photo: Jason Schmidt/David Zwirner “We are spoilt. We have large galleries that in some instances we’ve built from the ground up. What I’d like to have is a space that inspires artists. But that is difficult in Hong Kong, so we might start with something modest,” Zwirner said.
He said he had yet to find a suitable space and was prepared to wait for Hong Kong’s retail rents to fall further.
It is only because Hong Kong is by far the easiest place to trade that he would put up with the high cost of opening a gallery in the city and the space restrictions. The gallery believes it can find much better properties in Beijing and Shanghai, with the latter becoming more attractive in recent years because of the proliferation of private museums and the establishment in 2013 of a tax-free zone. But opening a branch in China is less urgent than setting up shop in Hong Kong.
“For now, both us and our clients find it much easier to transact in Hong Kong than in mainland China. But for us, I know we’d like the sort of space that we can find in the mainland,” said Zwirner.
Singapore, another Asian city where there’s been a proliferation of art market activities, is not yet on Zwirner’s radar. “It’s a perfectly interesting market but to us, it’s a secondary market,” he said. Visitors walk around Colombian artist Oscar Murillo's 2014 exhibition A Mercantile Novel, in which the artist turned an art gallery into a fully operational candy-making factory line from Colombia's candy manufacturer Colombina, at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York. Photo: AFP The art market veteran predicts 2016 will be “complicated”.
“America has an election – that’s not good, there’s instability there. The auction houses are very weak right now. Chinese economy is decelerating. All kinds of external pointers suggest we will have a rougher year,” he said.
This was a good time for the art market to focus on quality again, he said. “One problem in the art market is too much art that maybe is not of the greatest quality, but fetches too high a price,” Zwirner said.
Artists who had relied on the support of auction results alone would see their works become less popular compared with those who had “real careers”, he said. “If you get a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Tate Gallery in London, and they acquire your work, then one can assume that your career is real. That’s an objective criteria,” he said. Another view of the interior of David Zwirner’s building in West 20th Street, New York. Photo: Jason Schmidt/David ZwirnerAs an example, he cited Ai Weiwei as an artist who has a “real” career. “He really hit international fame as a dissident. When he was put into prison he became a worldwide celebrity and then people discovered his art. Be that as it may. He is widely collected by major museums and he just had a major show at the Royal Academy. I think it’s a healthy career,” he said.
Zwirner will bring a wide selection of works by their artists to this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong. The gallery is presenting a group of artworks by Isa Genzken, a major name in Germany, in the “Encounter” section of the art fair. The works are free-standing sculptures she made in 2015 for her Schauspieler (Actors) series.
The gallery’s booth will feature, among others, new works by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, who will also visit Hong Kong during the fair.
Zwirner and MDC’s confidence in the Asian market is in contrast to Ben Brown’s decision to reduce its footprint in Pedder Building, the colonial landmark which only became a popular address for galleries after Brown’s arrival in 2007.
Amanda Hon, the gallery’s new managing director, said the decision to give up some of the space to MDC was made in the face of a slowdown in the Chinese economy, as well as the growing importance of art fairs. “We do eight fairs a year and the right audience tend to go to the fairs more than to galleries. We still have a major space in London and we thought we didn’t need such a big space here, which came with huge overheads,” she said. A New York native who speaks Cantonese, Hon was recruited by Brown to look after the Asian business as well as help the gallery expand in North America as the market turned more bearish in China and Europe, she added.
You know we’re in an art boom when the dealers start complaining that too much money is chasing bad art. That’s a phrase we heard a lot in 2007. The subtext was almost always Damien Hirst and his astonishing success. This, of course, was before Hirst’s incredibly popular 2012 retrospective at the Tate Modern, which curiously came after Hirst’s market was pummeled by the dual body blows of the massive Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale and the global credit crisis.
In the South China Morning Post, David Zwirner echoes the market from nearly a decade ago. This time, however, it is not immediately apparent which artist or artists he feels are drawing too much money:
The art market veteran predicts 2016 will be “complicated”.
“America has an election – that’s not good, there’s instability there. The auction houses are very weak right now. Chinese economy is decelerating. All kinds of external pointers suggest we will have a rougher year,” he said.
This was a good time for the art market to focus on quality again, he said. “One problem in the art market is too much art that maybe is not of the greatest quality, but fetches too high a price,” Zwirner said.
Artists who had relied on the support of auction results alone would see their works become less popular compared with those who had “real careers”, he said. “If you get a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Tate Gallery in London, and they acquire your work, then one can assume that your career is real. That’s an objective criteria,” he said.
When Ted Cruz Wanted to Be Part of the Establishment
He climbed over colleagues in search of W’s favor, only to be rejected—setting him on his outsider’s course.
Getty
Five years ago, as Ted Cruz plotted his path to the U.S. Senate, the anti-establishment crusader sought a private audience with and the backing of one of the faces of the modern GOP establishment: George W. Bush.
In a never-before-reported meeting in Bush’s Dallas office, Cruz began to outline his 2012 campaign playbook for the former president, according to people familiar with the conversation. Cruz explained how he would consolidate conservatives yearning for a political outsider, how he would outflank the front-runner on the right, how he would proudly carry the mantle of the ascendant tea party to victory over entrenched elites.
It was impressive foreshadowing. But Bush cut Cruz off before he could finish.
“I guess you don’t want my support,” Bush interrupted. “Ted, what the hell do you think I am?”
If the idea of a private meeting between Bush and Cruz seems strange now, it was not so odd at the time. While Cruz is running for president in 2016 as the consummate outsider, he launched his political career as a Bush administration insider, and his relationship with the GOP establishment is far deeper and more complex than he lets on.
On the trail today, Cruz bashes the “Washington cartel,” jokes of being so hated in the U.S. Capitol that he needs a “food-taster,” and says at nearly every stop, “If you see a candidate Washington embraces, run and hide.”
But 16 years ago, as a young domestic policy adviser for Bush’s 2000 campaign, Cruz himself had sought Washington’s embrace. He’d uprooted his life, taken an 80 percent pay cut and moved to Austin, Texas, with visions of a big, important White House job to follow.
Almost from his arrival at Bush’s headquarters, colleagues say Cruz flashed many of the same assets and liabilities still on his political balance sheet: acumen and ambition, combative and conservative instincts, elbows as sharp as his smarts, a knack for self-promotion and rubbing colleagues the wrong way.
When Bush won, however, Cruz would not get the White House post he had dreamed of; instead, he found himself in the bureaucratic backwater of the Federal Trade Commission. “Through mistakes of my own, I put the fault nowhere other than myself, I burned some bridges on that campaign,” Cruz told Politico in an interview. “I chalk it up to youth and immaturity.”
“It was a difficult chapter when you poured your heart into something for two years and the desires of your heart are denied. That’s hard. And particularly when you’re seeing so many of your friends rewarded.”
The snub marked a crucial inflection point in Cruz’s career, one that led the young lawyer to soon give up on Washington. In just over two years, he’d move back to Texas where he would reinvent himself as solicitor general and climb the political ladder anew, this time as a fire-breathing, tea-partying, anti-Washington insurgent.
“Not getting the job made him angry. But what it allowed, in a quirk of history, is it put him in the right place when the country got angry, also,” said a veteran of the Bush 2000 operation who, like most of the nearly two dozen people interviewed for this article about Cruz’s time in the Bush orbit, spoke on condition of anonymity. “He would not have had this moment if he began in the White House [then]. That ended up being a gift to him. He saw his moment when it came.”
That moment appears to be now. Powered by the Republican electorate’s disgust with the GOP elite that had rejected him 16 years ago as a junior staffer, Cruz is on an outsider’s course that has led him to enter next week’s Iowa caucuses in a virtual tie for the lead. But that is, he hopes, only the first stop. The final goal is the prize that eluded him as a young man: the White House.
Cruz had arrived in Austin with the sterling résumé of a Republican insider on the rise. He’d gone to Princeton, been a national debate champion and graduated from Harvard Law. He’d clerked for William Rehnquist, the first-ever Latino clerk for a chief justice of the Supreme Court. He’d taken a job in a connected boutique D.C. law firm, where one of his early clients was none other than future House Speaker John Boehner.
It was all part of Cruz’s master plan. He’d intended to be president since he was at least a teen. In high school, he wrote a frightfully prescient bio for himself that outlined his plans to go to Princeton (check), Harvard Law (check), have a “successful law practice” (check) and then “pursue his real goal—a career in politics.” The Bush campaign was the logical next step. "Ted would like to run for various political offices and eventually achieve a strong enough reputation and track record to run for—and win—President of the United States," Cruz wrote as a senior in high school.
By the summer of 1999, Cruz wasn’t yet 30 but his CV was already overflowing.
On the 2000 campaign, Cruz’s portfolio was domestic policy, everything from legal issues to immigration to campaign finance. Coworkers said Cruz was more conservative than most on the team, often agitating to take harder right positions. "He was the chief propeller head," said Mark McKinnon, who was Bush's chief strategist on the campaign. "He was the smartest guy in the room, who had a lot of confidence. But that was a good thing. You want that in your research team."
Added McKinnon, "He leaned in."
But Cruz, almost from the start, leaned in too far. Several 2000 colleagues recalled how Cruz would position himself prominently whenever a national news outlet came to town. When the Washington Post’s Style section wrote about why the campaign was based in the liberal enclave of Austin, it was Cruz who gave the Post reporter a tour of the headquarters.
When another Post reporter, now columnist Dana Milbank, came to profile the Bush campaign's young bucks, Cruz eagerly volunteered himself. "When I mentioned this self-promotional effort to a senior Bush adviser," Milbank recalled in a column more than a decade later. “I received a knowing eye-roll in response.” Milbank decided to profile someone else.
“It struck me that he was all pure unbridled ambition,” Milbank recalled in a recent interview. “I picked up a guy who would use whatever means necessary to get on top. He was like, ‘No, I’m the guy you should be writing about.’ I guess, in retrospect, he was right.”
Cruz kept in touch anyway. “He would send out, at fairly regular intervals, these email updates on his triumphs and conquests,” Milbank said.
Some 2000 colleagues questioned Cruz’s work ethic. “He acted like he was smarter than everybody and because he was that, he didn’t have to work as hard,” said one Bush 2000 veteran. Said another, “He didn’t make a lot of friends, but I found it mostly driven by the fact he didn’t carry his fair share of the work. In fact, he was downright lazy during the campaign.”
Ted saw the bright lights of the White House and wanted them to shine on him,” Fleischer said.
About a half dozen of Cruz’s campaign colleagues specifically recalled him leaving work around 5 p.m., only to return late at night to send off emails to senior campaign officials. In an era before everyone had smartphones, they said, the aim seemed clear to them—he was trying to make it look as if he’d been working continuously.
“Simply not true,” Cruz told Politico. “I was typically there very late at night, almost every day. I mean there were a lot of nights where I’d go home 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning.”
But Cruz acknowledges he made mistakes. “Listen, I am neither the first nor the last person to learn lessons when you’re young,” he said. “And maturity and humility are two of the most important lessons that most young people need to learn, and I certainly needed to learn.”
Ari Fleischer, who would go on to become White House press secretary, called himself “one of the few people in Bush world who likes” Cruz. “I always found Ted to be affable, self-deprecating, smart and enjoyable to be around,” Fleischer said. But he still said that Cruz had carved out a debilitating reputation for himself internally.
“Ted saw the bright lights of the White House and wanted them to shine on him,” Fleischer said. “He was young, extremely smart and ambitious, and he wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to misplay his cards and try to walk into that building. And in an environment where teamwork and modesty was prized, Ted didn’t fit that mold.”
Others said Cruz was known for trying to angle additional time with Bush, both on the trail and at the governor’s mansion, where the policy team would brief Bush in private sessions. “He was not a bad guy. It all just was someone looking for face-time with the then governor,” said a third 2000 campaign aide. “It just seemed so much more obvious when he does it. He lacks a subtlety that a lot of other people bring. He makes it feel like he wears his ambitions on his sleeve.”
Said a fourth Bush adviser: “Climbers like that really stood out and mostly got made fun of. They were people who were never really able to work their way into the inner circle.”
Rick Tyler, a Cruz spokesman on the 2016 campaign, dismissed all the complaints as unimportant. “That’s the trivial things petty people say when you’re trying to diminish someone,” Tyler said.
As for Bush himself, he took to calling Cruz, “Theodore.”
“Perhaps because I came off as super-serious,” Cruz wrote in his 2015 autobiography, A Time for Truth. “I don’t know if he assumed that was my full name, which it is not, but it didn’t really matter for his purposes.”
***
By the Thursday after the election, Cruz was on a plane to Florida to join Bush’s legal team. To hear Cruz tell it, he was indispensably in the middle of the historic recount. He slept only seven hours in the first six days in Florida. “It was one step shy of utter chaos,” he wrote in his book. “I should know, because I helped manage the process.”
That’s not how everyone remembered his role. While those involved say Cruz was a part of the legal team, he was not at its epicenter.
“I have no recollection of working with him or ever seeing him involved in the process,” said Barry Richard, who was the Bush campaign’s lead counsel in Florida. With Cruz now running for president, Richard has gone back to his files to search for Cruz’s name. “I finally found one book that noted that he had been working for Ted Olson and he had some work on some briefing or something,” he said. Richard is a Democrat, as he was in 2000, and he is married to the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, though not active in partisan politics himself.
Photos of the state a week out from the historically unpredictable way we start choosing a president.
As Iowa caucus day approaches, the campaigns are scrambling: Donald Trump darted from a college rally at Pella, Iowa to a high school rally and church visit in Muscatine over the weekend, while Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton sold their own messages on either side of the same town of Clinton. The urgency has only increased as healthy leads between the top two frontrunners in each party have been squeezed to just a few percentage points in the polls. Behind the strategies and the carefully scripted campaign stops, though, lurk all the human uncertainties of an event whose outcome won’t be known till tens of thousands of Iowans gather next Monday—and, given the complexity of counting, might not even be known then. (In 2012, a winner wasn't called for weeks—though this year it looks likely we'll know sometime around 10 or 11 p.m.) Politico photographer M. Scott Mahaskey has been following the Iowa campaigns to capture their less-controlled elements, the periphery of all that carefully arranged politicking—and finding in their details hints of the uncertainty that lurks just beyond January 31.
Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the only two Republican presidential candidates who have requested and received Secret Service protection (Hillary Clinton is automatically afforded it thanks to her status as former first lady). Above, Trump is escorted by Secret Services members as he departs the convention floor after an appearance at Iowa’s Annual Renewable Fuels Summit in Altoona. Seeking to bump Ted Cruz, who leads in corn-rich Iowa, Trump defended ethanol at the summit and, in particular, the Renewable Fuel Standard, a program that requires that fuel sold in the U.S. contain a minimum of renewable fuels like ethanol. Trump reportedly drew the largest crowd, but each of the four GOP candidates there struck the same tone on ethanol and renewable fuels to booming applause.
A man shows off his Rubio t-shirt ahead of a campaign stop in Decorah, Iowa. Most presidential candidates have created websites that offer everything from campaign fan apparel to plane ticket sponsorship, which gives the supporter Twitter verification, a signed postcard and a “personal update on the day from a team member.”
Governor Chris Christie leaves Perkins Restaurant and Bakery in Milford, Iowa, where he bounced from table to table taking pictures, signing autographs, and answering questions. Milford is known for its huge pockets of gravel, first mined for the Milwaukee Railroad in the early 1900s, and today, the town is is surrounded on several sides by used-up gravel pits, some of which have been repurposed into junkyards.
At the John Wayne Birthplace Museum in Winterset, a life-size figure of the star looms behind a lectern before Trump’s arrival. Wayne’s daughter told attendees that the Hollywood legend would be “standing right here” if he were alive. (Wayne’s son later disagreed, saying no one in the family could speak on the deceased film star’s behalf.) The museum celebrated its opening this past spring with a weekend of ribbon-cutting, free museum tours, a firemen’s pancake breakfast and a mounted shooters competition.
A vendor trailing campaigns tailors his products accordingly, touting Bernie Sanders buttons outside one rally last week, and Trump hats outside the John Wayne event.
Ben Carson filled the Waldorf College atrium in Forest City, Iowa, where he told the more than 200 attendees: “I am not a politician. I will never be a politician.” Carson appeared in Forest City at the urging of a Virginia-based volunteer who grew up there and whose parents still live in the town.
Snowmobiling is more than a hobby in Iowa, where drifting snow can temporarily block wind-exposed roads, making driving nearly impossible along the flat lands of the state’s northwest. It is estimated that there are 8,000 miles of snowmobile trails in Iowa, none of which, apparently, is safe from campaign appeals during election years.
A woman tries to stay awake at a Rubio campaign stop in Ottumwa. Temperatures dipped to negative 16 degrees when Marco Rubio began his day in Iowa, but the several hundred in attendance at the Bridge View Center in Ottumwa warmed up the room. Rubio joked that when his plane landed at 3:30 a.m. in Mason City, Iowa, for this trip, he asked his staffers whether the temperature was in Celsius.
A security officer awaits the arrival of Chris Christie at the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Parlor in Le Mars, Iowa, the self-proclaimed ice cream capital of the world. The New Jersey governor joked about his assaults on fitness and ordered a double scoop of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream, but left it untouched before getting back on the road.
An ad for Marco Rubio plays for an empty room in Le Mars as Chris Christie holds a town hall in a nearby conference room.
Campaigns exert a great deal of control over the optics of their events, but they can’t control everything: protesters and flamboyant supporters always present a potential wild card. Before Marco Rubio's campaign stop in Decorah, his staffers quietly discussed how to deal with an audience member wearing a potentially embarrassing T-shirt, and ultimately decided to let him be.
