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From: Stephen Lauf
To: design-l@lists.psu.edu
Subject: almost El Mirasol, generous Eva, and it's only a movie
Date: 2004.05.17 12:26
In 1935, while in India on her honeymoon with James Cromwell, Doris Duke commissioned a bedroom and bathroom suite based on designs seen at the Taj Mahal and other examples of Mughal architecture. She intended to install her marble suite in El Mirasol, the mansion owned by the Stotesbury family in Palm Beach, Florida.
-- www.shangrilahawaii.org/page.asp?pageId=228
These massive lions were a gift from Eva Stotesbury, Miss Duke's mother-in-law. In 1935, Doris Duke married James Cromwell and they immediately embarked on an around-the-world honeymoon. They explored the Middle East, India, China and traveled throughout Southeast Asia -- and these travels had an enormous impact on Doris Duke's taste and collections.
-- www.christies.com
As the traditional obnoxious brat, a little boy, Mickey Bennett, played Ray Dooley's part in the picnic sequence of the film, It's the Old Army Game (1926). It was shot on the front lawn of the most lavish estate in Palm Beach, El Mirasol, the winter home of a J. P. Morgan partner, Edward Stotesbury. Not only was it the most improbable spot for a [W.C.] Fields picnic, but what the production unit did to the lawn was frightful. During the five days of shooting the litter converted it to a garbage dump; and when the trucks and forty pairs of feet finished their work it looked like the abandoned site of an old soldiers' reunion. But Mr. and Mrs. Stotesbury were thrilled. 'Everybody,' said Mrs. Stotesbury, 'everybody in Palm Beach is driving by to see what is going on here!' I was not in the sequence so she invited me to tea inside the villa. After I autographed a photograph for her young granddaughter whose name was also Louise Brooks, Mr. Stotesbury, a teetery but spry little man of seventy-seven, dressed in the costume of an 18th-century dandy, took me up to his library where he entertained me with a short concert on the drums.
-- www.psykickgirl.com/lulu/wcfields.html
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