LESLIE MCRAY ON AGING OUT OF INTERNATIONAL MODELING

Excerpt:  Page 71 (This is the lowest point Leslie experienced as a mistress...)

"I was forty in a world where players in their twenties were overage. I had come to recognize that I was addicted to a highly destructive life-style. Increasingly I had been involved with men who were violent toward me, yet with whom I continued to associate. I retained photographs of myself from when I was a top international model. I framed a letter from the office of a major presidential adviser. I talked of what was happening in Monte Carlo, Cannes, Rome, London, Paris, and other sections of the world, but I was speaking of past trips, past associations. The telephone no longer rang with offers for the modeling jobs I once dominated. The men who contacted me were fewer in number, less sophisticated that in the past, no longer, the world's elite. My time was past and I knew it."

Excerpt: Page 73

"Then there was another man because there had always been another man. "Use my house, consider my staff your staff, drive my car." It was a familiar litany I heard and I fantasized that all was well again. I was still in the game, still competing with the twenty year olds ...still a prize to be won by men who competed for the attention my presence on their arm would bring... But the man who loaned me his house could not keep me there, did not want me there. He had his own life, his own kept woman. I was no longer his but merely a friend, or perhaps a faded memory for whom he retained enough love or enough guilt to provide what was a little more than a few day's vacation... I was on the streets, living from my car, desperately calling men I knew, yet trying to disguise the panic in my voice...

C 2010 - 2024 Mistress Manifesto Blogspot

AUDREY MUNSON : EXPLOITED SHATTERED BROKEN : A COME BACK AFTER YEARS OF REJECTION AND POVERTY BUT FIRST THE PERFECT MAN

I discovered a link to some news articles and "The Queen of the Artists Studios" is a series of articles from 1921 written by Audrey Munson (perhaps with a ghost writer)  At the time Hollywood was making a film about her life called "The Audrey Munston Story" which became titled "The Soul Within."

ANDREA GEYER ; Link to Images re Audrey Munson News Articles

She ended up more that disappointed and fighting for money owed her.

Page 249:  "The "Perfect Model" now sought "The Perfect Man." Audrey had been badly battered by the double blow of Oelriches's rejection and the Wilkins murder-suicide.  Her movie career was over and she had been reduced to selling kitchen utensils door-to-door with Kittie.  Her manager had robbed her and she was still living with her mother at the age of thirty.  It was time to find a husband."

***

The press loved the story and soon enough it became a national obsession to find this woman a husband.  Some reported that she was looking for a man who resembled a Greek or Roman statue. It was a time in which Eugenics, the study of how to cause humans to reproduce in order to increase what were considered perfect characteristics of health and beauty, was popular.  Since she embodied the perfect woman, she needed a perfect man. Letters from all over became to arrive, men proposing themselves to her. Now the often rejected Audrey was like a kid in a candy store, finding reasons to reject potential suitors.

She wrote that the Gypsy Queen had told her she would reject six and marry the seventh.  Actually she rejected the seventh - if we think of all these potential suitors as one effort and with the suggestion that she was rejected by the perfect man. 

In April of 1922, she declared that a man named Joseph H. Stevenson was the one she wanted. It did not work out, though there is a mystery to this. Stevenson may have gotten engaged or married to someone else. His name is common enough to not assume.  Audrey, overwrought by yet another tragedy, attempted to poison herself - suicide.

C 2024  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights 

FOUNTAIN BY THE VATICAN BASILICA

LA FEST DELGI INNSMORATI - THE FEAST OF LOVERS : VALENTINES IN ITALY

 LA FESTA DEGLI INNAMORATI - THE FEAST OF LOVERS

This may surprise you, but Italian Valentine's Day is only for couples - sweethearts, lovers, partners. So if you have an Italian who you thought you were friends with, but now you're getting a card or flowers, maybe he's thinking of you a different way.

Other than that, it's much like in the United States, a day for gifting your partner with romantic cards, poetry, flowers, chocolates - especially chocolate covered cherries, going out to dinner.  And to imbibe in wine with dinner. It's a popular date for marriage proposals. 

The Italians take credit for establishing the holiday to start. February 14th, however, turns out to be a celebration of the ancient, pagan Romans. The Queen of the Roman pantheon of Gods and Goddesses was Juno and she was celebrated as a patroness of women and of marriage.

About 800 years before the best candidate for Saint Valentine was born, this spring festival was also about fertility. February 15th was the feast of Lupercalia in Rome. The idea was not just to bring fertility to humans but also to crops and animals.

What did the pagan Romans do for their festivities? One story is that young men and women would draw names from an urn and whomever they picked by this method became their special friend for a year, a year in which they might decide to marry. Or perhaps that's a bit censored: Maybe they actually enjoyed each other for a year and before the year was up they had to marry.

SMITHSONIAN : 10 Customs of Valentine's Day

ANCIENT ROMAN WOMEN INCLUDE MISTRESSES

BBC UK HISTORY ANCIENT ROMANS WOMEN by Suzanne Dixon, who has held lecturing positions at both the Australian National University and the University of Queensland.  Since women in ancient Rome overall had lesser status, there is less evidence about the roles they assumed in life.  Learn a little more with this BBC site essay!

AT THE FUNERAL WIFE AND MISTRESS WERE THERE

Excerpts and Notes from Patricia Gucci's memoir "In The Name of Gucci."

When Aldo, his first wife Olwen Price, a woman of English heritage, and their three sons, Giorgio, Paolo, and Roberto were at the funeral, as were Patricia and her mother.  Patricia was now 26 years old and pregnant with her second child.

"Eager to pay tribute to my mother, he'd penned his own obituary to be issued upon his death.  Aldo Gucci, he wrote, left behind his wife, Bruna Palombo, and his companion, Olwen Price." (4)

According to Patricia the reversal of the truth was intentional but the New York Times caught the error and printed, "Mr. Gucci is survived by his wife, the former Olwen Price, and three sons," not mentioning Patricia and Bruna at all. (4)

In 2009 when Patricia visited her mother in Rome, where Bruna was living out her life, Bruna gave her a gift of all the love letters Aldo had written to her and telegrams he had sent to her in the early passion of their romance circa 1958-1961, when Patricia had been conceived. (8)

NOTE June 2022

I'm not infallible but I do try to read any books or other materials I reference cover to cover, take notes, and choose excerpts and detail my reportage correctly.  I'm aware that on some of my select subjects there are other books or other media that might say something different.  So, if there is anyone out there who thinks something I've posted is incorrect, please send a link to your reference so I can read it too and evaluate it.

Please read my comments policy.  I do not ever publish on the world wide web anyone's e-mail address or personal contact information.

Thanks!

Missy

FOUNTAIN OF THE SWANS WITH SLEEPING NYMPH

THE FOURTY EIGHT HOURS WITH ALDO "COMPRESSED VISITS"

Missy's Notes and Quotes from "In the Name of Gucci," a memoir by Patricia Gucci.

Many children find themselves outside of marriage and awaiting visits from a parent. Patricia Gucci was one of those children, because her mother Bruna Palombo was a Mistress, set up first to live in England.  Aldo Gucci, a long married man who Kept Bruna visited them about once a month for a weekend.  Patricia calls these visits "compressed."

Patricia says no sooner he came through the door, her mother would start complaining about her and she would be banished to her bedroom. (133)  She realized in adulthood that her mother was in seclusion for weeks and had a lot to talk to him about.  "She rants, vents, they have a fight and reconcile all in forty-eight hours."  This was their pattern, but finally he would relax and Bruna would spoil him.  She "nurtured him and gave him safe harbor."

"He'd leave and the days were dark. Without his affection, my mother withered like an unattended plant." (136)

Eventually so that Bruna could travel with Aldo, Patricia was put into a boarding school where she found herself with "lots of kindred spirits." She loved it. (137)  When the family moved back to Rome in 1973, Patricia was heartbroken. (149)

 
When Patricia was ten years old, Bruna finally told her, "Your father has a wife in Italy and three sons," and admitted she wasn't married to him. (151)


*** Are you the child of a Mistress? We'd like to hear your story.

RUINS OF ROME