vip in the city

The Rise of Dorothy Hale

”The Rise of Dorothy Hale” began previews at St. Luke’s Theatre on September 19, and we were there for the first weekend of performances. The play by Myra Bairstow explores the suspicious circumstances surrounding the alleged 1938 suicide of socialite Dorothy Hale, widow of noted American muralist Gardner Hale. Ms. Hale died in New York City after plunging sixteen stories from the window of her Hampshire House apartment at 150 Central Park South. At the time, her death was ruled a suicide – Hale’s New York Times obituary declared “Painter’s Widow Said to Have Been Dissatisfied With Her Progress on the Stage Fell or Jumped” — but history has a means of revising of itself… sometimes under the influence of wealthy and powerful people. The story of Hale’s death at age 33 involves the likes of her friend Clare Booth Luce (author of “The Women” and wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce), onetime companion Harry L. Hopkins (WPA Administrator and one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest advisers), and Frida Kahlo, who painted the work that inspired the play.

The playwright first became transfixed with her subject after seeing Kahlo’s mysterious oil painting in a museum. The work had been commissioned by Mrs. Luce, who had intentions of presenting it to her deceased friend’s mother, but Luce was so horrified with the finished product that she stored it away for decades until donating it anonymously to the Phoenix Art Museum. It was not until the 1970’s that the story behind “El Suicido de Dorothy Hale” came to light. Painted like a multiple exposure photograph, the image is of an eerily calm woman descending from an open window through a swirl of clouds, before finding her final bloody rest on the New York City sidewalk below.

Kahlo’s inscription (translated into English) reads: “In New York City on the 21st of October 1938, at 6:00 in the morning, Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself from a very high window in the Hampshire House. In her memory …[words erased]…, this retablo was executed by Frida Kahlo.” Over the course of a decade researching the painting’s backstory, Bairstow encountered many historical inaccuracies and contradictions surrounding Hale’s death, intriguing and disturbing details which ultimately became the basis of her play.

“The Rise of Dorothy Hale” intersperses scenes from Hale’s life in the months leading up to her death, with Kahlo’s creative process and her psychic connection with the deceased.

Was that the actual painting mounted on an easel inside the theater lobby, surrounded by framed news clippings and personal correspondence between the playwright and Hale’s niece Penny Weeks? Or a clever replica? The latter seems more likely, but I couldn’t say for sure.

Director Pamela Hall led the production, which starred a few faces familiar from film and television, including Emmy winner Michael Badalucco (Jimmy Berluti from The Practice) as a suspicious Hampshire House doorman, and Sarah Wynter (Kate Warner from Season 2 of 24) as an imperious Clare Booth Luce. Sarita Choudhury (Denzel Washington’s lover in Mississippi Masala and the cuckolded queen Tara in Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love) played the Mexican Kahlo, in yet another nationality-defying turn for the half-Indian, half-English actress.

Garden in Transit

I’ve been spotting these flower-decaled cabs all around town this month – part of temporary, mobile public art project “Garden in Transit,” which celebrates the 100th anniversary of New York’s first motorized taxicab. 23,000 children and adults, drawn mostly from the city’s public schools, hospitals and youth programs, participated in the Portraits of Hope creative therapy program. The massive project of painting the flowers on adhesive weatherproof panels to be applied to the hoods, roofs and trunks of an estimated 13,000 of the city’s yellow cabs began last September; negotiations with city officials for the deployment began six years earlier. Owners volunteer their cabs for the project; individuals can sponsor cabs for $500 apiece, which includes a signed certificate with the cab’s medallion number.

I always enjoy public art in unexpected places: whales in Cape Cod, cows in Boston, apples in New York City. These colorful blooms will remain on the streets through December 2007, long after their real life counterparts brown and wither away for the season.