Gish on Ice

                                       Lillian Gish

In my experience, Monday night parties are a rare occurrence, but when they do happen, you just think, “Wow, what a way to start the week! There should be more Monday night parties! Why didn’t we think of it first?!” But we didn’t. Stella and Ambrose did, for his birthday, and for this reason, we thank them.

Stella and Ambrose have the most grown-up parties of anyone we know in London. Going to a party at their house is like stepping into the past, into a swanky, New York apartment circa 1932. Finding a young Hedy Lamarr at the grand piano would be no surprise. Their combined hospitality, gracious and easy, seems old-world as well, and one can’t help but feel both special, and spoiled in their company.

It’s not an English thing either- well, at least not on Stella’s part. She is a true, blue American. Petite, fiercely loyal to friends and family, with savvy know-how, she runs a successful company making bespoke furniture. Beautiful things of exquisite quality, and precision. Secretly, I have great ambitions for our own flat one day, featuring her furniture- her chaise lounge in my bedroom, the small desk of European walnut in my study, and so on- in the meantime, like so many of our friends, we remain school-fee poor, and Ikea bound. Sigh.

On Monday night, I found myself on her purple, mohair sofa with several people I’d met at previous Stella/Ambrose dinners and parties- Dills, a charming art historian, and Max, and old friend of Ambrose’s from school. I mentioned my Bellini obsession, my search for a delicious and not outrageously priced drink in the Big Smoke, and they talked among themselves about a few places I might try, places I haven’t heard of, some of which they admittedly added, didn’t even exist any more. And then a woman who’d been sitting there quietly all along, piped up that she had a good Bellini story.

Her father, who had been a hip surgeon, was once called to New York, to treat the great silent screen actress, Lillian Gish. Apparently, Ms. Gish suffered from terrible arthritis of the hip, which they think was initially caused from sitting on an ice flow for days at a time, many years earlier while shooting a film.

The hip surgeon was rather nervous about treating the famous, but now elderly film star, and arrived at her hotel on time for her 11a.m. appointment. The room must have been elegant, I imagine, in the Roosevelt perhaps, at Madison and 45^th? A maid must have answered the door to the room, and Gish, was probably wearing some sort of Dior dressing gown. The doctor, his daughter explained to us, assumed he’d be offered a cup of coffee upon his arrival. But what did Gish offer him at 11a.m., on a Tuesday morning? A Bellini! The girl had taste.

Gish certainly would have felt very much at home at Stella and Ambrose’s party, lying across the grand piano, re-enacting her ice flow scene for us all…. a Bellini in hand.

Lillian Gish on an ice flow, during the filming of "Way Down East," directed by D.W. Griffith. 

I feel like I ought to honor Ms. Gish and her marvelous, mid-morning Bellini habit, and so am including here the link to an excerpt from her biography, regarding the ice flow scene. Please read and be impressed.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/gish.htm