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It may come after six months or six years, but there’s a moment in every job when you realize you’ve reached your limit. Read on for nine signs you’ve been in your job for too long.
13 of History’s Greatest Husbands
Despite living in eras in which men called all the shots, these 13 husbands bucked societal norms by either helping drive their wives’ careers to success or just doing their part to allow them personal control over their pursuits.
While there are a number of memorable fictional movie hotels (the Grand Budapest Hotel, the Bates Motel, and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are a few that come to mind) there are many more that are real, working businesses that offer guests a chance to experience some of their favorite movie locations, while also offering a great night’s sleep. Here are 15 movie hotels you can book in real life.
Located in the heart of the city, the Park Hyatt Tokyo is the five-star hotel at the center of Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Lost In Translation. Along with its spectacular views of the neon lights of downtown Tokyo and Mount Fuji in the distance, you can also order a glass of Suntory Whisky at the New York Bar in the 52-story skyscraper where Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) first met and began their wild adventure through Japan.
Although it takes place at the fictional Kellerman’s Resort in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Dirty Dancing (1987) was actually filmed at two locations: Lake Lure in North Carolina and the Mountain Lake Hotel in Pembroke, Virginia, which is still a popular vacation spot. The hotel hosts Dirty Dancing weekends with group dance lessons, a tour of the filming locations, and a watermelon toss. The resort even features the Virginia Cottage (or “Baby’s Cabin”), where the Houseman Family stayed in the film. It’s also where “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner!“
New York City’s Plaza Hotel is a famed shooting location for many Hollywood movies, including Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) stayed at the luxury hotel when he was separated from the rest of his family (again) in this 1992 sequel. The legendary hotel also served as the new home for Mick Dundee (Paul Hogan) when he came to New York from Australia in Crocodile Dundee (1986), as well as the location where William Miller (Patrick Fugit) finds Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), who almost overdosed at the end of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000).
Other movies that were filmed at The Plaza include North by Northwest (1959), Arthur (1981), American Hustle (2013), and The Great Gatsby (2013).
The primary filming location for Pretty Woman (1990) was the historic Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. The luxury hotel even offers guests a glamorous “Pretty Woman For The Day” package, which starts at $15,000 and features a stay in the “Pretty Woman Suite” (the hotel’s Presidential Suite), a personal shopper on Rodeo Drive, a couple’s massage, a “shoeless” picnic with cuisine inspired by the movie, and a night at the Los Angeles Opera. The Beverly Wilshire Hotel also made appearances in Clueless (1995), Sex and the City: The Movie (2008), and Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971).
If you’d like to stay in the beautiful and romantic room from James Ivory’s A Room with a View (1985), ask for Room 414 on the fourth floor in the Hotel Degli Orafi in Florence, Italy. It’s true, the room has an amazing view of the Arno river and the Ponte Vecchio.
Sofia Coppola shot her fourth film, 2010’s Somewhere, almost entirely on location at Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont, a luxury hotel known for its celebrity guests and residents. In fact, the film’s star, Stephen Dorff, stayed at the hotel during production to get into the mindset of his character and to easily get to set every day.
“I was living in Paris, and I was homesick,” Coppola explained to LA Weekly of why she shot the film at the hotel. “In France, it’s so different, and I was thinking about L.A., how it seems like our whole pop culture is so interested in celebrity, and now people all know about the Chateau Marmont. There have been iconic L.A. movies that I always loved, and I thought, ‘We haven’t had one showing today, this era of L.A.’ ”
Many L.A.-based artists and writers such as Billy Wilder, Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Tim Burton have all stayed and worked within the Chateau Marmont at one time during their careers, while The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison took up a brief residence at the hotel. Unfortunately, John Belushi also died of a drug overdose in one of its rooms in 1982. At the end of La La Land, Oscar winner Emma Stone’s Mia Dolan finds herself at the legendary hotel.
The Hangover (2009) was shot almost entirely on location at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas (and no, Caesar didn’t really live there). Aside from the Wolfpack’s villa—which was a sound stage in Hollywood—a majority of the hotel and casino were used for filming, including the front desk, lobby, entrance driveway, pools, corridors, elevators, and the infamous rooftop, where Doug (Justin Bartha) was found at the end of the comedy. Other movies that were filmed at Caesars Palace include Rain Man (1988), Iron Man (2008), Dreamgirls (2006), and The Big Short (2015).
The Fontainebleau Miami Beach is featured at the beginning of Goldfinger (1965) and is where James Bond (Sean Connery) first met the villainous Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe). It was also the location of the iconic scene where Bond discovers the dead body of the character Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) after the lethal henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) suffocated her by painting her in gold.
In addition, the luxury hotel was also the setting for Jerry Lewis’s The Bellboy (1960) and Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach (1988).
Founded in 1882, the Plaza Hotel is an historical landmark in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The Coen brothers renamed the hotel The Eagle Pass Hotel in No Country For Old Men (2007). The hotel is where the heart-stopping shootout between Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) took place.
Just outside of Portland, Oregon and near the peak of Mount Hood rests the Timberline Lodge, which was featured in The Shining (1980). While its interiors were filmed at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England, director Stanley Kubrick used the Timberline Lodge for the exteriors of The Overlook Hotel. Although the hotel doesn’t have a Room 237, the hotel’s most requested room is number 217—the mysterious and haunted room from Stephen King’s best-selling novel, on which the film is based. King also used the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado as inspiration for the book.
Today, the Timberline Lodge is a popular vacation spot for its amazing ski slopes and snowboarding. There’s also an annual Overlook Film Festival, which showcases the strangest and brightest films in horror.
Located in the side of a mountain in northern Norway, the modernist Juvet Landscape Hotel was the filming location for tech billionaire Nathan Bateman’s (Oscar Isaac) isolated home in 2015’s Ex Machina. While Norwegian architects Jensen & Skodvin designed the hotel with the idea of simplistic modern design in a tranquil setting, producers chose the scenic location to emphasize the character’s power and good taste.
“We wanted it to be among nature, we wanted it to be stunning, and we wanted it to be exclusive,” Ex Machina’s production designer, Mark Digby, told Vanity Fair. “We felt someone as powerful, as rich as this, and as intellectually competent as him, would have a good sense of design.”
One of the greatest comedies in American cinema history, a number of scenes from Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1958)—which follows two musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) who flee town after witnessing a mob hit and later disguise themselves as women to join an all-female band—was filmed at the Hotel del Coronado in Coronado, California. The historic hotel, which appeared as the Seminole Ritz Hotel in Miami, was selected because it fit the film’s 1920s era setting with its Victorian architecture.
Fun Fact: Author L. Frank Baum wrote three books in the Wonderful Wizard of Oz series at the Hotel del Coronado during the early 20th century. He designed elements of the Emerald City based on the hotel.
In In Bruges (2008), Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are sent to Belgium and hole up at the Relais Bourgondisch Cruyce, which is located at the intersection of two canals in Brugge, until the two hit men get further instructions from their crime boss (Ralph Fiennes). The boutique hotel is considered one of the most romantic hotels in Europe, while Lonely Planet even called the bed-and-breakfast, “The very epitome of a Bruges experience.”
First opening its doors in 1923, Hollywood has long had a fascination with Los Angeles’s Millennium Biltmore Hotel. The historic hotel has appeared in a number of big movie productions, from The Sting (1973) and Chinatown (1974), which filmed in its Gold Room and Limousine/VIP Ramp, respectively, to Ghostbusters (1984) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984), which used its Music Room and Rendezvous Court, respectively, as filming locations. The hotel has also appeared in many other movies, including Bachelor Party (1984), Splash (1984), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), and Cruel Intentions (1999).
As legend has it, the Millennium Biltmore Hotel was also the last place Elizabeth Short (a.k.a. the Black Dahlia) was seen before her dead body was discovered bisected in a vacant lot in 1947.
The whirlwind romance between Augustus (Ansel Elgort) and Hazel (Shailene Woodley) in The Fault in Our Stars (2014) took place at the Hotel de Filosoof in Amsterdam, where author John Green wrote the novel on which the film is based. Although the couple stayed at the hotel, its interiors were actually filmed at the American Hotel across town.
April 18, 2017 – 10:00am
Sixteenth century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo followed in the footsteps of his father, Biagio, training in stained glass and fresco painting. But it was this imaginative Italian’s curious take on portraits—composite heads composed of flowers, fruits, and other inanimate objects—that have defined his legacy.
Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I first claimed the artist and his talents for Vienna in 1562, where Arcimboldo served as court painter for his son and successor Maximilian II. He continued with the Habsburgs under Maximilian II, and when Rudolf II moved the court from Vienna to Prague, Arcimboldo made the move as well. In honor of Maximilian II, Arcimboldo began experimenting, creating The Four Seasons, a series of portraits in profile that constructed faces out of blooming blossoms, swollen gourds, withered roots, and ripe grain. He also dabbled in interior design and costume creations.
Arcimboldo didn’t just personify the seasons with produce. His most famous piece is a portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who was so fond of having his likeness captured that he contracted several acclaimed artists to do so. Germany’s Hans von Aachen presented the emperor with a frilly collar and a generous chin. Dutch sculptor Adrian de Vries made a regal bust of the monarch. Arcimboldo reimagined him as Vertumnus, the Roman God of plant life, building his cheeks with peaches, his neck with chives, and his hair with grapes and grain.
The Librarian built a scholar out of books. The Waiter constructed a server out of barrels and bottles. The Jurist utilized books, a chicken carcass, and a bit of fish.
These words translate loosely to whimsical and games. The artist’s mosaic masterpieces were intended to be playful, entertaining, and humorous, sometimes at others’ expense.
Art historians suspect The Jurist is a depiction of Maximilian’s duplicitous vice-chancellor, Ulrich Zasius. Rather than a face radiant with natural beauty and color, the two-faced Zasius is constructed out of mud-colored plucked poultry and fecund fish, clearly illustrating Arcimboldo’s disdain.
Arcimboldo’s works may be playful, but he and his contemporaries were fascinated by the beauty and grotesqueness that could be found in the natural world. His dedicated depiction of flora and fauna down to the finest details [PDF] is a major part of why the composite heads are still marveled over centuries later.
Four Elements offered surreal portraits made up of elegant animals and man made luxury. Air soars with a flock of birds, including an owl, a rooster, a parrot, and a peacock. Water contains a string of pearls and a coral crown laced around a swimming collection of fish, sharks, squids, sea turtles, and crustaceans. Earth is made of mammals, like elephants, deer, predatory cats, a wild boar, rabbit, and lamb. Lastly, Fire shimmers with sparks, flames, candles, lamps, and glistening gold and guns.
Though royal portraits of the time were intended to idealize their subjects, the Habsburgs adored Arcimboldo’s inventive renderings. Their court was known for welcoming intellectuals and encouraging avant-garde art. Arcimboldo happily worked for the family for more than 25 years and would continue to accept commissions even after moving back to his homeland in Milan.
Summer has an ear of corn for an ear. Winter includes a cloak with a monogrammed M, referring to Emperor Maximilian, who owned a similar garment. Similarly, Fire includes fire strikers, a symbol of the Habsburg family, and Earth‘s lion skin cloak harkens to Hercules, whom the royal clan liked to claim as an ancestor.
In 1571, Maximilian requested Arcimboldo arrange a festival in which the royals and their fancy friends might masquerade as the elements and the seasons. It’s likely the painter’s costuming ambitions were given a fantastic outlet at the festivities, where life reflected art (which reflected life): Maximilian attended as Arcimboldo’s Winter.
These paintings took playfulness to a new level by flipping them literally on their heads. At first glance, these pieces look like a still life, a bowl of vegetables for instance. But linger on their legumes and you’ll see a face, upside down, with a bowl as a hat.
Art historians believed that Arcimboldo painted these pieces as still life, right side up. Then he would turn them to see their faces and adjust accordingly. X-rays of the canvases reveal that this required some shifting of positions and repainting of fruit to get everything just right.
For decades, Arcimboldo was well known and admired among the elite. Yet following his death in 1593, these incredible paintings were largely forgotten for centuries.
Artists like Salvador Dali have cited the groundbreaking painter’s composite heads as a major source of inspiration. But it was Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr’s inclusion of his works in the 1930s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism that re-introduced the world to Arcimboldo’s originality and influence [PDF]. Retroactively, art historians dubbed the Renaissance Mannerist the grandfather of Surrealism.
Arcimboldo’s works once again enjoy widespread acclaim. Vertumnus is on display in Sweden’s Skokloster Castle along with The Librarian (although testing in 2011 [PDF] revealed that The Librarian might be a later copy). Spring belongs to Madrid’s Museo de la Real Academia de San Fernando, while the Louvre in Paris displays Autumn and Winter. Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna boasts Summer, Fire and Water. Italy’s Museo Civico holds The Vegetable Bowl (also known as The Gardener), and Four Seasons in One Head calls the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. home.
April 18, 2017 – 2:00am
Maleficent’s castle. Image credit: Disney via Disney Wikia
Disney World is known as “The Happiest Place on Earth” for a reason. The characters, scenery, and rides exude the squeaky-clean cheeriness the brand is famous for, but something much darker was once planned for the Orlando, Florida destination. According to Movie Pilot, a land celebrating the villains of Disney never made it past the proposal stage.
The area, dubbed “The Dark Kingdom,” would have looked like a very different version of the Disney World that fans are familiar with. Filling the role of Cinderella’s castle would have been Maleficent’s castle from the 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty, which was set to loom over the skyline as the park’s primary landmark. The concept was also floated as an addition to an existing land rather than a standalone park. In the smaller proposed version, a sea witch ride inspired by The Little Mermaid (1989) would have channeled the famous Dumbo attraction. “Villain Mountain,” either a log flume or roller coaster, would have been the section’s main thrill ride.
The Dark Kingdom, or “Shadowlands” as it was also known, joins a long list of Disney park projects that failed to launch. A tiny Gulliver’s Travelers land, a Mel Brooks-inspired Tower of Terror, and a Soviet Union pavilion at Epcot were all scrapped for one reason or another.
[h/t Movie Pilot]
April 18, 2017 – 9:00am
Sweeping, mopping, vacuuming—for the most part, cleaning is pretty intuitive. But what about those hard-to-reach places you forget about all year? Save time (and money) with these modern-day hacks that speed up spring cleaning, thanks to household items you already own.
If you can’t toss a lampshade in the washer and a duster doesn’t do the trick, how are you supposed to deal with it? Don’t give in and buy a new shade—just use a lint roller. Unlike dusting with a cloth or duster, a lint roller will quickly pick up dirt and grime and can more easily roll along unusually shaped lampshades for a speedy cleaning job.
The tops of kitchen cabinets attract dust and cooking grease, making for a sticky (and disgusting) seasonal clean-up. To help keep them out of sight and out of mind, line cabinet tops with sheets of wax paper that will collect the dust for you. Cleanup becomes as simple as tossing the used wax paper in the trash and cutting new sheets every few months. This trick can also be used on bookcases and other tall furniture that’s difficult to dust.
Keyboards are one of the most germ-ridden items in your home or office, and they’re also a pain to clean. If you’re daring enough—and still use an older USB keyboard—swap the tedious scrubbing with cotton swabs for a light dishwasher cycle, avoiding the heat-dry setting and opting to air drying instead. But before you pop your keyboard in the top rack, check your manufacturer specs—some keyboards can handle water submersion, while others should just be dusted or wiped with a damp cloth (or, you can spring for a Silly Putty-like goo that grabs all the grime between the keys).
Blinds can be a spring cleaner’s worst enemy. They collect dust and flop around, making them difficult to wipe down. Instead of buying a commercial blind cleaning tool, round up old socks and slip them on like gloves to easily clean between the blinds. This hack gives you two cleaning wins: fresh blinds and a purpose for those unmatched socks.
Microwave and stove vents accumulate grime but are difficult to clean because of their tiny size. Instead of ignoring them, dislodge gunk along ridges and vents with a nail brush. Or for a deeper scrub in areas you can reach with your fingertips, use exfoliating gloves as scrubbers.
If there one place that crumbs collect in, it’s the abyss known as the bottom of your toaster. Clean out this tiny crumb chasm by using a pastry brush to loosen and wipe away bread debris stuck within the slots. Then pop open the bottom of the toaster to brush everything away.
Fan blades accumulate heavy dust that isn’t easy to wipe away while on a ladder or step stool. Make the job easier by repurposing a pillowcase as a catch-all duster. Simply slide the pillowcase over the fan blade and pull down any dust that’s collected inside the bag for a sneeze-free cleaning.
Oven racks withstand splatters, boil overs, and broiling abuse all throughout casserole season. Give your oven racks a facelift by soaking them overnight in a bathtub with dish soap and dryer sheets. Baked-on gunk will wipe away easily, leaving like-new racks. Just remember to thoroughly scrub the bathtub afterward to prevent staining.
If your dishes have been through several wash cycles but still aren’t getting clean, consider giving the dishwasher sprayer arm some attention. Over time, sprayer arms can fill with hard water deposits (not to mention gross food particles), making them less efficient. Use picture hanging wire or a wire hanger to dislodge grime particles from sprayer arm holes. Then, give your entire dishwasher a deep clean with vinegar. After all, keeping this machine going may be your best bet for time-saving cleaning year-round.
Cleaning registers and vents along floors, baseboards, and ceilings is often a job for vacuums. But for a deeper clean, head to your flatware drawer for a butter knife. Quickly clean registers by wrapping a butter knife in a thin towel, then inserting along the grooves to snag embedded debris. There’s no need for a specialty tool and this hack will keep you from having to remove the register altogether.
The inside grooves of window frames and sliding doors are notorious for attracting dirt, bugs, and cobwebs. But the tiny, rubber ridges can be difficult to brush or rinse out. For a cleaner view, attach toilet paper tubes to your vacuum’s hose, then fold or bend as necessary for a custom, disposable track cleaner.
All images via iStock.
April 10, 2017 – 1:20pm
Throughout much of history—and certainly to this day, in many parts of the world—women have been largely controlled by men. Governed by either their fathers or their husbands and held down by societal norms, women were often forced into roles as wives, mothers, and runners of households when they might have preferred to, say, get an education or hold down a job. However, not every marriage throughout history was this way. Despite social pressure, there have been men along the way who bucked societal norms and either helped drive their wives’ careers to success or just did their part to allow them personal control over their pursuits, in eras where the husband traditionally ruled the roost and called all the shots. The men on this list were happy to be outshone by their gifted spouses, so hey, let’s hear it for the boys—or at least a few of them, anyway.
In 1894, as she was studying for her second science degree at the University of Paris, Maria Skłodowska was introduced to Pierre Curie by a mutual friend who thought Pierre, a physics and chemistry instructor, might have some extra lab space for Maria to use. Immediately recognizing her talent as a researcher, Pierre took her into his own lab as a student, and they worked harmoniously together, although Maria initially rejected Pierre’s quick marriage proposal. By the following year, she had gone back to her native Poland after finishing her degree, Pierre had convinced her to return to Paris to work on her Ph.D. (which was practically unheard of for a woman at the time), and the two were married.
Pierre was thrilled by his bride’s brilliance; as he wrote to her, “It would be a beautiful thing, a thing I dare not hope, if we could spend our life near each other hypnotized by our dreams: your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream and our scientific dream.” Pierre’s dream came true, as the Curies worked side by side as peers and pioneers in the field of physics, particularly magnetism and radioactivity, until his death in 1906. With physicist Henri Becquerel, they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, and Maria—known in France as Marie Curie—went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on her own in 1911.
Paul and Julia met when they were both stationed in Ceylon during WWII, as members of the Office of Strategic Services. (The OSS was Julia’s second choice—she’d only joined because at 6 feet 2 inches, she was too tall to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps.) After the couple returned to the U.S. and married in 1946, Paul learned that his new wife didn’t really know how to cook, as she’d been raised in a household with a chef. After getting married, Julia began cooking and found out she “enjoyed it immensely.” Her foodie husband took her to France and introduced her to French cuisine, and she took the reins from there.
Paul and Julia worked in tandem in the beginning of her career as a chef, as he took the photographs that were converted to sketches for her early cookbooks (he was credited in The French Chef Cookbook as “Paul Child, the man who is always there: porter, dishwasher, official photographer, mushroom dicer and onion chopper, editor, fish illustrator, manager, taster, idea man, resident poet, and husband.”). And Paul’s great admiration and support for her skills is well documented, as surviving letters to his twin brother, Charles, attest. The Childs were an inseparable, rock-solid team: When they hosted dinner parties, they’d plan the menu together; and while Julia cooked, Paul would chop veggies, set the table, pour wine, and serve the plates. Then they’d both clean the house together after the show was over. A voracious reader, he also proofread and edited her books, and he dabbled in poetry on the side. His most frequent subject? Julia.
When newspaper publisher Putnam married pioneer pilot Earhart in 1931, after his sixth proposal, his new wife insisted on keeping her own name—which was very unusual for married women at the time—and Putnam was thereafter derisively called “Mr. Earhart.” (He reportedly bore it well.) Earhart also made it clear that she intended an equal partnership in every way, and in a letter that was delivered to him the day of the wedding, she wrote, “I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil [sic] code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.” Putnam was down with it, though, and he also cosigned her request that “you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.” Although some of today’s feminists find their agreement to be startlingly progressive for the early 1930s, Putnam himself seemed unfazed: “Thousands of wives and husbands are operating on exactly the same basis, successfully and happily,” he wrote at the time. “It’s not even ‘modern’ anymore.”
A style icon in his own right, Carl had no problem with the spotlight being fixed on his ever-fabulous wife, Iris. For 42 years, the pair co-ran Old World Weavers, a textile business they founded in the 1950s, and they traveled the globe together, procuring statement pieces to wear at upscale parties around NYC. Carl was known to wear the sharp threads as expertly as Iris ever did. In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute ran an exhibit dedicated to her art and style. The event launched her from being a celebrated, but ultimately fashion-world-only collaborator, to a nationally recognized figure—and Carl was incredibly proud and supportive of Iris’s newfound fame. “As friends have pointed out, some husbands would have been jealous, or envious, or annoyed,” Iris said, “but he just loved it, he wallowed in it.” Upon Carl’s death in 2015, at the age of 100, friend and fellow designer Duro Olowu told The New York Times that “…his dedication to Iris is an example to us all of true and unconditional love and mutual respect.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay was flourishing in New York City as a successful poet and playwright when she met the Dutch businessman, poet, and feminist Eugen Boissevain in 1923. He was the widower of political icon Inez Milholland, whom Millay had met and admired during her time at Vassar College, and although Millay had rejected many proposals of marriage, she accepted Boissevain’s after knowing him only a few weeks. Boissevain worked in importing, mostly coffee and sugar, and in addition to his work, he took on all the household duties in order to allow his wife to write as much as possible. He traveled the world with Millay, catered to her whims, and condoned her relationship with her lover, George Dillon, in 1928. (Millay signed off on Boissevain’s lovers as well.) Later, in the mid-’40s, Boissevain devotedly attended to Millay for two years as she suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to write. The pair never allowed any of the drama to split them up; after 26 years, it was only death that parted them, with Boissevain passing away in 1949 and Millay following just over a year later.
It was Grace Lee who pursued her husband, Jimmy Boggs, which was uncommon for a woman to do in the 1950s, to say the least. The two were working as political activists in Detroit in 1953 when Grace took a shine to Jimmy, who was a man of few words. “I kept chasing him,” she said. “He kept avoiding me. And he finally came to dinner one night and asked me to marry him, and I said yes.” Over the course of their 40-year marriage, the Boggses would establish Boggses would establish or assist Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Gardening Angels, the Detroit civic organization Save Our Sons And Daughters (SOSAD), and Detroit Summer, a “multi-racial, inter-generational collective” to develop youth leadership in Detroit. After Jimmy’s death in 1993, associate professor at the University of Michigan Stephen Ward said that they had “built a durable partnership that was at once marital, intellectual, and political. It was a genuine partnership of equals, remarkable not only for its unique pairing or for its longevity, but also for its capacity to continually generate theoretical reflection and modes of activist engagement.”
Though Carl Dean isn’t a historic figure in that he is very much alive, his wife, Dolly Parton, is a living legend, and he’s been by her side since 1964. Dolly and Carl met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat on the very day she moved to Nashville from rural Appalachia, when she was 18 and he was 21. “I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Dolly recalled of their first encounter. They married two years later. The quiet type, Carl famously shuns the limelight, but he’s never been resentful of Dolly’s megastardom and “has always been supportive,” choosing to express his feelings for her through poetry. Until he recently retired, Dean ran an asphalt-laying company and carefully stayed out of Parton’s many business ventures—although he’s known to occasionally visit the Dollywood theme park, undercover, just to check on things. He also sees her movies the old-fashioned way—by buying a ticket and going to the cineplex. In 2016, the pair renewed their vows after 50 years of marriage.
You might say that Albert was born to play second fiddle. From the start, it was his older brother who was slated to take over for their father in ruling the duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha—and even when the two teenaged princes traveled to Windsor in 1836 to see their young cousin, Victoria of Kent, who was looking for a husband, everyone expected her to choose lively, sociable Ernest and not the reserved Albert. But after Victoria was crowned queen of the United Kingdom, the two visited her again, and she proposed to the younger prince. But with marrying the queen, Albert was given a completely unheard of title: that of a prince consort (although the title wouldn’t be officially granted until 1857). Specifically, he was not to be king.
Albert was fine with the inherent lack of power though and excelled at the tasks ahead of him. Taking his unorthodox role in stride, he became Victoria’s trusted adviser and essentially her secretary, supporting his queen throughout disputes with Prussia and the United States, as well as taking on much of her day-to-day workload whenever her frequent pregnancies interfered. The marriage was also a love match—unlike his philandering brother and father, it’s said Albert never so much as looked at another woman. His letters to his wife consistently reflect this, e.g.: “Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illumine my life … In body and soul ever your slave, your loyal Albert.”
Although Lewes and his partner of over 20 years, Mary Anne Evans, were never legally married (as he was technically married to someone else), but they lived together from 1854 until his death in 1878—and started referring to one another as husband and wife right off the bat. (The two even took a honeymoon to Germany soon after moving in together, and Evans began calling herself Mary Anne Lewes thereafter.) A philosopher and critic, G. H. Lewes encouraged her to begin a career as a novelist in 1857, when she was writing pieces for magazines—unattributed ones, per Victorian convention, because she was a woman—and she took on the masculine byname George Eliot for her first book, 1859’s Adam Bede. As it and her subsequent books became instant successes, Lewes’ own works were not garnering the attention he’d hoped for; his wife’s most productive and lucrative years were his least. But Eliot was careful to point out in letters to her friends that Lewes was not jealous of her success in the slightest, and people who knew them corroborated this idea: It’s known that Lewes managed her social and literary relationships for her and “devoted the last decade of his life almost entirely to fostering [Eliot’s] genius.”
Frank Butler might be one of the more unfairly maligned historical figures out there, in large part thanks to the 1940s musical Annie Get Your Gun, which paints him as kind of a jealous jerk. In 1875, Butler was traveling through Ohio as a performing marksman with his show, Baughman & Butler, when he foolishly bet Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost 100 bucks that he could best any local sharpshooter. Turns out, Frost knew just the gal for the job. After 15-year-old Annie Oakley beat him by just one shot, Butler was intrigued rather than embarrassed, and the pair began dating.
“Little Sure Shot” married the Irishman about a year later, by which time Butler had figured out that his wife was not only a better shot than he was, but she had more star power too. He stepped aside and made her the lead in their road show before they both joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—as Butler put it, she “outclassed” him. Butler seems to have been an easygoing fella, brushing off the myriad proposals of marriage to his wife from her fans, and not getting too ruffled when he was mistaken for her butler as she was being feted by the British aristocracy. They had been married for 50 years when Oakley died of anemia in 1926, and it’s said that Butler was so grief-stricken that he stopped eating. He died 18 days after his wife.
Denver teenager Ruth Handler took a vacation to Hollywood around 1936, and then informed her sweetheart back home, Elliot, that she would be staying permanently. So, he moved there as well. They soon married, and after a brief stint running a successful giftware business, they joined Harold “Matt” Matson, in a new venture which they named Mattel (a name derived from “Matt” and the first two letters of “Elliot”). They began with picture frames, but they soon expanded into dollhouse furniture, and when Matson left the company and Ruth took over his job, as an equal partner, she became interested in manufacturing dolls as well. After watching their daughter, Barbara, play with dolls, Ruth invented the Barbie Teen-Age Fashion Model doll.
Although Elliot was unsure about the idea, he put faith in his wife and green-lighted the Barbie doll, marketing it as the alternative to baby dolls and aiming to empower girls to engage in speculative play rather than just mommy practice. It became one of Mattel’s best-performing products, of course, and the rest is history. Responding to negative reactions from feminists, Barbie expanded her career path under the Handlers’ joint direction, becoming not just a model but a fashion designer in 1960, a nurse in 1961, and an executive—just like Ruth—in 1963. Elliot developed other products with the company too, including Mattel Modern Furniture, a series of wooden dollhouse pieces with a midcentury Scandinavian aesthetic, It was a failure, though, and Elliot later said that one of his mistakes was that he wasn’t able to recruit his “brilliant” wife to develop a marketing campaign for the line.
The namesake of the band Sonic Youth, Fred “Sonic” Smith was the guitarist for the far-left political rock band MC5, a.k.a. The Motor City Five. In 1976 poet/musician Patti Smith (no relation) was attending a party a record label was hosting when the two were introduced. By ’78, Fred and Patti were an item, and he encouraged her songwriting from Day 1 and taught her to play the guitar. They married in 1980 and collaborated on musical projects such as 1988’s Dream of Life until his death in 1994. “Fred crafted that whole album,” Patti said. “He wrote all the music. A lot of the concept of the songs were his.” She claims she tried to put both of their names on the album, but Fred refused, insisting on giving his wife all the credit. “I look at Dream of Life as [Fred’s] gift to me.”
When they married in 1954, Marty and Ruth Ginsburg decided that whatever they were going to pursue, they would do it together, with absolute mutual respect and support. That pursuit turned out to be law. But when Ruth made Law Review at Harvard and Marty didn’t, at a time when men were expected to be the breadwinners and top achievers in their households, Marty’s reaction was only to frequently boast to others about how he was proud he was of her. (Marty ended up doing quite well for himself in the field, becoming a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and an internationally renowned expert on taxation law.) He also happily cared for the children and handled other domestic tasks—again, in the fabulously sexist 1950s—so that Ruth could focus on her career. After she was sworn into the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993, he developed a reputation around the Supreme Court for presenting each of his wife’s clerks with homemade cakes for their birthdays.
Before Marty died of cancer in 2010 (just after the couple’s 56th anniversary), he reportedly told a friend, “I think the most important thing I have done is enable Ruth to do what she has done.”
April 17, 2017 – 2:00pm
One of the last homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is in need of new owners, according to Apartment Therapy. The American architect got to work on the house in 1958, a year before his death. Construction was completed without him in 1960 and now the house is on the market for the first time in its history.
The structure has belonged Paul and Helen Olfelt since the couple hired Wright to build it nearly 60 years ago. Located seven miles from downtown Minneapolis, it contains three bedrooms, two baths, and fixtures and furnishings designed by Wright himself. The property is one of about 60 Usonian-style homes designed by the architect between the mid-1930s and late ’50s. Like others in the group, the Minnesota building is a ranch house with an open floor plan and strong lines throughout. It also features a finished basement—a rarity for a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed property.
In the past few years alone, Wright houses have been listed at prices ranging from $445,000 to $3.6 million. The Minnesota listing lands somewhere in the middle at $1.395 million. You can find a more detailed description of the home at Coldwell Banker.
[h/t Apartment Therapy]
All images courtesy of Coldwell Banker
April 17, 2017 – 1:30pm
Thomas via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 2.0
Spring has arrived in Southern California, and dedicated selfie-snappers have taken note. For the past month, the typically barren deserts of the region have been animated with flowers and tourists traveling to see them. The vibrant flora makes for an epic Instagram backdrop, but California park rangers are begging guests to stick to the trails and resist trampling flowers for the sake of a photo op, Mashable reports.
California’s current super bloom follows a winter of drought-ending rainfall. Thousands have visited places like Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Walker Canyon, and the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve to see the rare display, but for some people appreciating the flowers from afar isn’t enough. Tourists hoping to snap the perfect photo are stepping, sitting, and laying down in the fields. In some cases, they’re doing damage that lasts for years.
Park officials have made it clear that the fragile flowers should be left alone. A post on the California Poppy Reserve’s Facebook page reads:
“If you walk off-trail because ‘everybody else is doing it,’ or because someone else already stepped on those plants, you’re still part of the problem. Wild lands everywhere are experiencing unprecedented damage this year because tens of thousands of individuals want that one picture in the flowers.”
In response to the destruction, one section of the park’s wildflower trail has been closed for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, there are other places in the reserve to see the super bloom during the last few weeks of the season. And selfies are still permitted, given they’re snapped from a reasonable distance.
[h/t Mashable]
April 17, 2017 – 1:00pm
Craig Burrows
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