EXCERPT FROM STAR MOTHERS

On actor George Hamilton’s mother, Anne, from Star Mothers: The Moms Behind the Celebrities (Simon & Schuster, 1988).

Anne, who is nicknamed Teeny, lives in extreme but tasteful splendor in George’s Manhattan apartment. She emerges from her boudoir dressed for dinner, a thirties-glamour study in midnight blue and inky black, from her long, sleek hair and the skull cap it is tucked under, to her chic, knee-revealing suit, sheer stockings, and perilous, high-heeled court shoes. Perilous, given that outside her centrally heated domain, Manhattan is doing its annual impersonation of Antarctica and 99.9 percent of its inhabitants have taken refuge inside boots, furs, and the kind of coats that look like walking sleeping bags. The task at hand is to reach the hotel restaurant which lies just catty-corner across snowy Park Avenue. No matter, a limousine awaits and the trip is chauffeur-driven.

Anne Hamilton’s daunting elegance (haughty haute) is ameliorated entirely by her frisky personality and impish humor. It is hard to be intimidated by a woman who says she knew George was special the moment he was born because he promptly “pee-peed in the doctor’s eye.” Or a woman who is bemused but completely unperturbed when quizzed about George’s wedding to Alana Stewart (which she did not attend), at which a dog reportedly gave the bride away: “I never heard that one, but it suits me fine." Or a woman who looks positively gleeful upon spotting the National Enquirer outside her apartment and is so plainly enjoying the burst of tabloid coverage (much of it fictional) about her son’s relationship with Elizabeth Taylor.

George’s idea of style was ordering 365 roses from the White House florist, one to be laid daily upon the pillow of his then-girlfriend, Lynda Bird Johnson. His old-world, chivalrous charm is legendary, as is his wardrobe, which at one time included 350 made-to-measure suits and 500 shirts. What does his proud mother think when she hears it said that he is also too handsome, too rich, too much of a womanizer, and too self-involved? “That he’s a horse’s ass, in other words?” It is hard to fault her grasp of a situation, so one listens when she also says, “George has a tremendous sense of humor. He is so bright, I cannot tell you. He is the next thing to a genius, he really is. I cannot believe how many things he can absorb. I want to slap him in the face.” Everyone assumes he is a stuffed shirt because of the way he dresses and his gentlemanly behavior, but he is far from it.

Fortified by a martini, after dinner she is intent upon traversing the Park Avenue intersection minus the burly chauffeur and limousine. Rather, she insists upon negotiating kamikaze-style what once was snow but now is glass, teetering upon her spindly heels and clutching the arm of her not very surefooted companion. Her bravado is infectious.

Upon closer inspection, her exquisitely furnished dining room’s curious décor comes into focus as a rendition of Napoleon’s tent—Anne’s late and dearly beloved first-born son, Bill, an interior decorator, felt a strong affinity for Napoleon. Should there be such a thing as past lives, Napoleon’s world, she suspects, was Bill’s world. She has been told she was once a rich and powerful woman in Germany. “I’m glad I was rich somewhere.”

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