Only the Best – A Celebration of Gift Giving in America

Only the Best – A Celebration of Gift Giving in America

Only the Best

A Celebration of Gift Giving in America

By Stuart E. Jacobson
The wonder is that gift giving has never before had a book of its own—so basic is the giving impulse to the human spirit, so ancient its lineage and so all-pervasive its tradition. Only the Best, taking America as its particular province, is a deserved and delectable tribute to the art of elegant and imaginative gift giving. Exquisitely illustrated with scores of large color  photographs, this unique book carries the reader into the lives of some of the best-known and most influential Americans. Amazing, endearing, and amusing in turn are the intimate glimpses these pages afford into personal relations as expressed in gestures of generosity.
Gift giving in America is a tradition and a talent. We give gifts the way we go to the office, routinely and continually—if not always as conventionally. Reflecting our tendency to flamboyance and our inclination for the sentimental, gift giving in America has reached from the gilded edges of the marketplace to the innermost corners of the heart.
Grandma Moses and Lillian Gish - star of 1952 television drama
Grandma Moses and Lillian Gish – star of 1952 television drama based on My Life History – Moses autobiography

Grandma Moses to Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish: “Grandma Moses gave me this painting a little after I did the film ‘Grandma Moses’. She came to my home for dinner with her daughter. Her daughter was an old woman, but Grandma wasn’t. She didn’t know how to say no, and she didn’t know about the market value of her paintings. Nancy Hamilton, writer and producer of such musical reviews as ‘One for the Money and Two for the Show’, wanted to buy one, but it was too expensive, and Grandma said, ‘We could cut it in two and sell her half.’ “I remember asking her, ‘Grandma, you have lived so much longer than I, are there things you know that you could tell me that would help me with my life?’ And she thought for a long time and said, ‘You know, if I have a problem, I do the very best I can; and then I say, Ishkabibble, which in real language means It’s in God’s hands.’ It was so beautiful for her to tell me that. Grandma to me represented what America was all about.”
Only the best : a celebration of gift giving in America - Lillian Gish and a gift painting from Grandma Moses
Only the best : a celebration of gift giving in America – Lillian Gish and a gift painting from Grandma Moses

Back to Lillian Gish Home page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

D.W. Griffith – An American Life (By Richard Schickel – 1984)

Image
D.W. Griffith – An American Life (By Richard Schickel – 1984) D.W. Griffith – An American Life By Richard Schickel – 1984 Griffith! Before him, the movies were a nickelodeon novelty, after him, they were an international art form and a powerful, glamorous American industry He was the first to codify the rules and techniques of screen storytelling, the first to establish the conventions by which the unique capacities of the movies for both sweeping spectacle and profound intimacy could be employed in long, complex narratives, the first to assert the director’s claim to primary authorship of a film Above all, it was Griffith who imagined the future of his medium, and with his driving energy, his taste for the grandiose and his flair for publicity, propelled that medium toward that future—only to be crushed by the very forces he had unleashed. D.w. Griffith (1875-1948) Painting; D.w. Griffith (1875-1948) Art Print for sale His story is, in huge measure, the story of how the
Read more

Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair 1983

Image
Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair 1983 Vanity Fair – October 1983 Lillian Gish Jeanne Moreau This is a summit meeting: a queen paying homage to an empress. Of course, Lillian Gish, far right, is no truer a blueblood than any other homespun midwesterner. But wherever she goes now, she is treated like a monarch, acknowledging standing ovations in allAmerican palaces like Radio City Music Hall. Her admirers aren’t really applauding her 101 films (she has just completed the 102nd, about a sweet old lady and her sweet old dog). They may never have seen her slim but supernally intense performances in the D. W. Griffith masterpieces or in the Victor Sjostrom classics she made in the late ’20s at MGM. Lillian-Gish-Jeanne-Moreau 60s But they sense in her the grace, the purity, the wealth of symbolism that royalty sustains. Gish’s companion here, Jeanne Moreau, radiates a similar authority; what Gish was to the cinema of the ’20s, Moreau was to the cinema of the ’60s. “The
Read more