all the leaves are brown/and the sky is grey....

December 23, 2007

all the leaves are brown/and the sky is grey....

I bought two issues of Vanity Fair the other day - the December one with that great cover of Julia Roberts and the new January one with Katherine Heigl. I don't usually buy Vanity Fair unless the fates conspire to pull together an issue where every article - from politics to Dominick Dunne's column to the cover girl - actually consists of something I'm vaguely intrigued to read.

ANYWAY, the point of this post was to talk about the one feature I found particularly enjoyable - the interview with Michelle Phillips (that's her up there, age 63) of The Mamas and the Papas (you know, "California Dreamin'"). The woman is HOT. Like, I never get the fuss about half the women regularly evangelised as icons (Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren) but I definitely get the appeal of Ms Phillips - and so did Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty. She's got the heartbreaking all-American sweetheart face with none of the saccharine and there's something smoky and dark about her that makes her infinitely alluring. She doesn't look like your regular siren (Rita Hayworth, Greta Garbo etc), but she could drive you to obsession and lead you to your doom. Reading the article, I wondered why her freewheeling sex life doesn't annoy me the way the modern tabloiders' do. There's something very cheap about fame these days and it makes the whole Hollywood thing fairly unbearable sometimes, which is sad for a lover of film (and its associated glamour) like me. I wonder who in our times could intrigue me like Ms Phillips did. Read the whole story here and admire the charms of Ms Phillips in her youth below.