It ‘aint necessarily so.

On April 29^th 2008 I wrote the following in my post ‘Progress Report’:-

It was a comfort to read in The DT’s Review that when , after writing two successful books about the death of her husband and then her daughter’s serious illness, Joan Didion on being asked to write a play said, ‘I did not want to write a play. I had never wanted to write a play. I did not know how to write play.’

On meeting David Hare, who was to direct it she asked him how ‘long’ a play should be. ‘He did a word count on his own Via Dolorosa: 15,000 give or take.’

The point being that even someone as gifted as she is, feels uncertain when tackling something new. (The play, by the way, was ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’)

Thus I was surprised to read - over a year later – in an obituary of Ruth Ford actress , model and renowned American hostess :-

‘During the 1960s she returned to Hollywood appearing in films including ‘Act One’ (1964) with George Hamilton and Joan Didion’s ‘Play it as it Lays’ (1972) with Anthony Perkins.’

Both pieces were by the Daily Telegraph. Odd!

Ruth Ford sounded quite a gal. She died recently aged 98 and modelled for Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Pierre Balmain. She abandoned modelling for the stage and Orson Welles hired her for his Mercury Theatre in New York. Later she went to Hollywood and was signed by Warner Brothers. Tennessee Williams described her as “the Bernhardt of B movies’. She married the actor Peter van Eyck in 1940 but the marriage didn’t last long and she married her second husband Zachary Scott and they were together until he died. She appeared on the London stage in William Faulkner’s ‘Requiem for a Nun’ which was praised by the distinguished critic Harold Hobson but the enfant terrible Ken Tynan said:

‘What a personality that girl needs.’

What she is most remembered for is the salon she created in her apartment in the Dakota building in New York where she entertained. Capote, Warhol, Beaton, Albee et al. Stephen Sondheim said meeting Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein at one of her parties resulted in ‘West Side Story’

Her social life in her later years was reduced to telephone calls from her bedroom which seems to happen to many, very old ladies.

‘It’s easier this way,’ she said, ‘I don’t bother to dress.’