The inspiration for Holly Golightly.
Offsite Link| by Anonymous | reply 11 | November 12, 2020 5:30 AM |
Marguerite Littman, a honey-voiced Louisianian and literary muse who taught Hollywood to speak Southern, but who left her most enduring legacy as an early force in the fight against AIDS, died on Oct. 16 at her home in London. She was 90.
Peter Eyre, a longtime friend, confirmed the death. He said she had been ill for some time.
By all accounts hypnotically charming, Ms. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles at midcentury, counted among her closest friends the writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, as well as Gore Vidal, David Hockney and, famously, Truman Capote, who is said to have distilled that charm into his most famous character, Holly Golightly of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
“She was a rarefied creature — generous, restless,” the Irish novelist and memoirist Edna O’Brien wrote in an email, adding, “She was like a character in fiction.”
An oft-told story about Ms. Littman goes like this: Mr. Capote and Ms. Littman were sitting at the pool at Cipriani’s in Venice in the late 1970s when Ms. Littman pointed out an extremely thin woman. “That is anorexia nervosa,” she declared. And Mr. Capote replied, “Oh Marguerite, you know everybody.”
| by Anonymous | reply 1 | November 11, 2020 7:05 PM |
“She wove legends while you were with her,” said Ben Brantley, the former chief theater critic for The New York Times and a longtime friend. “I remember someone saying you can’t take her seriously, but there was such seriousness in her frivolity. It was an existential choice.
“If you were sick, she was there,” Mr. Brantley continued. “She didn’t push darkness into a corner. She once said relationships should be ‘as light as a butterfly, a pale, pale shade of beige.’ Life was somber enough.”
In 1986, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Ms. Littman, who was then living in London, wrote to 100 friends asking them each to contribute 100 pounds as a founding member of what would become the AIDS Charitable Trust, a powerhouse of fund-raising in Britain for more than a decade. Those famous friends all kicked in, and continued to do so.
One bonanza was the sale of the book “Hockney’s Alphabet,” a collaboration between Mr. Hockney and the poet Stephen Spender, who edited it, containing letters drawn by the artist and essays by authors like Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. (Mr. Vidal, writing about the letter E, began his essay with typical acidity, “I never liked the look of E. …”)
And just before her death in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, long a supporter of AIDS organizations, donated her wardrobe for sale at an auction to benefit the trust and other charities. It raised more than $3 million.
| by Anonymous | reply 2 | November 11, 2020 7:05 PM |
“She rang me in the morning,” Ms. Littman told Cathy Horyn of The New York Times in 1999, when she was honored for her AIDS philanthropy by the Harvard AIDS Institute alongside the boldfaced names Judith Peabody and Deeda Blair. “She said: ‘I have a wonderful idea. I’m going to give you all of my dresses.’ I didn’t know quite what that meant. I thought, Oh, God, do I dress that badly?”
In 1999, Ms. Littman stepped back from the trust, and it was rolled into the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
“Marguerite was a true vanguard in the war on H.I.V./AIDS,” Mr. John and David Furnish, the organization’s chairman, wrote in an email. “In the ’80s, people dying of AIDS were treated like lepers — shunned from society because of fear, ignorance and bigotry. With her customary wit and indefatigable life force, Marguerite steamrollered in where others feared to tread and raised millions.”
| by Anonymous | reply 3 | November 11, 2020 7:06 PM |
[quote] “That is anorexia nervosa,” she declared. And Mr. Capote replied, “Oh Marguerite, you know everybody.”
This made me laugh.
| by Anonymous | reply 4 | November 11, 2020 7:06 PM |
Thank you OP. This is the first I'm hearing of her, and I thought i knew everybody!
Also thoughtful of you to post the entire obit. Cheers.
| by Anonymous | reply 6 | November 11, 2020 7:33 PM |
Thank you for your kindness R6. Cheers to you, too.
| by Anonymous | reply 7 | November 11, 2020 7:42 PM |
Interesting - just from one sentence in the description, she knew a lot of prominent gays.
| by Anonymous | reply 8 | November 11, 2020 11:41 PM |
Sounds like it was her older playwright brother who most likely introduced her around the gay literary circle and she became the queens' delight.
Wonder what he thought of all that.
Offsite Link| by Anonymous | reply 9 | November 11, 2020 11:45 PM |
Did any of you eldergays ever meet her?
| by Anonymous | reply 10 | November 12, 2020 5:09 AM |
Yes R10. She and I discussed Balzac while Truman tongued my ball sac.
| by Anonymous | reply 11 | November 12, 2020 5:30 AM |
