A regular outside Peggy Porschen’s Parlour in Ebury Street, Belgravia, SW1 ‘Mr Black Lives Matter’ attempts to entertain those queuing for somewhat overpriced cakes. Though little is known about this dreadlocked man and despite the fact he is not popular with the staff of this bizarre “boutique bakery,” one titled local comments: “His music is jolly and he adds a bit of joy to an area now increasingly devoid of character.” Others, however, remark: “Where does the money he raise actually go?” and add: “I sense a bit of a scam.”
Category: WILDCARDS
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Evelyn McHale (1923 – 1947)
Little is known about what drove Evelyn McHale to jump from the Empire State Building and be captured in the “most beautiful suicide [photograph] ever” on 1st May 1947.
Berkeley, California born bookkeeper McHale was one of nine children of a divorced bank examiner. The 23-year-old worked at the Kitab Engraving Company in Pearl Street, Manhattan and was engaged to a college student discharged from the United States Army Air Force named Barry Rhodes. She seemed to have had it all, but chose to end her life from atop one of the most famous buildings in the world.
“Elegantly attired and wearing a silk scarf, white gloves and a pearl necklace… [she is said to have] carefully removed her coat and neatly folded it, next she placed her black pocketbook on top of her coat [along with her makeup compact filled with family pictures and a handbag]. At 10:40am: Patrolman John Morrisey of Traffic C, directing traffic at 34th and 35th Avenue, reported seeing a white scarf floating lazily down from the heavens. Moments later this peaceful, dreamy scene was brutally interrupted by a heart rendering boom” as McHale had jumped 1,050-feet to her death and a crowd had converged.
Photography student Robert Wiles is said to have run over and captured a “poignant and surreal photo.” It was the only image of his ever published and Life Magazine captioned it: “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes in grotesque bier, her falling body punched into the top of a [United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine].” The driver was “in a nearby drug store, thereby escaping death or serious injury” other reports added.
A note found in her pocketbook announced: “I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me.” She had crossed out the following: “My fiancé asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me” and then ended: “Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”
Of the image, one commentator later remarked: “Evelyn’s gloved hand appears to be serenely touching her pearl necklace, and her legs crossed as if taking a nap,” whilst another added: “Evelyn McHale will go down in history as something akin to a fallen angel, as poignant and iconic as Marilyn Monroe.”
She was cremated with no service, grave or memorial and her fiancé reportedly said of her: “When I kissed her goodbye, she was happy and as normal as any girl about to be married.” He remained single for the rest of his life and died in Melbourne, Florida in 2007.
Many ‘sightings’ of Evelyn McHale wearing bright red lipstick and “looking distressed” on the 86th floor observation deck have been reported and in the years since her death, she has been recalled in the works of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Pearl Jam and Taylor Swift amongst others.
![Evelyn McHale (1923 – 1947) – Little is known about what drove Evelyn McHale to jump from the Empire State Building and be captured in the “most beautiful suicide [photograph] ever” on 1st May 1947.](https://www.thesteepletimes.com//wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Evelyn-McHale-2.png)
The United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine that the body of Evelyn McHale landed upon after falling 86 floors from the observatory deck of the Empire State Building in New York City and the original image (unedited) taken by Robert Wiles. It has been has been compared to the photograph by Malcolm Wilde Browne of the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức who burned himself alive at a busy Saigon road intersection on 11th June 1963. ![Evelyn McHale (1923 – 1947) – Little is known about what drove Evelyn McHale to jump from the Empire State Building and be captured in the “most beautiful suicide [photograph] ever” on 1st May 1947.](https://www.thesteepletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Evelyn-McHale-1.jpg)
An image clearly showing the damage to the car from above. ![Evelyn McHale (1923 – 1947) – Little is known about what drove Evelyn McHale to jump from the Empire State Building and be captured in the “most beautiful suicide [photograph] ever” on 1st May 1947.](https://www.thesteepletimes.com//wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Evelyn-McHale-3.png)
Joséphine Wister Faure created a ‘mixed media sculpture’ of the car that the body of Evelyn McHale hit on 1st May 1947. Her sculpture is described as: “An interpretation of the photo, revisiting the impact of the image and the trace this woman left, both literally and physically. Also being true to her last wishes in which she specifically asked not to be seen. Inside the car the radio is playing 1947 NYC broadcast.” It was exhibited at the Boite Noire Gallery in the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles in 2015. -
Gabriel and Sarah A. Chrisman
Port Townsend, Washington State residents Gabriel and Sarah A. Chrisman live as if they are Victorians. A bike shop employee and a writer respectively, the couple have never owned mobile phones and live in a house built in 1888 with a “period appropriate icebox” instead of a fridge and oil lamps instead of modern light bulbs. Of their existence, Sarah Chrisman comments: “The process didn’t happen all at once. It’s not as though someone suddenly dropped us into a ready-furnished Victorian existence one day – that sort of thing only happens in fairy tales and Hollywood. We had to work hard for our dreams. The life we now enjoy came bit by bit, through gifts we gave each other. The greatest gift we give each other is mutual support in moving forward with our dreams.” Sadly for them, they also get a lot of abuse.
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Eileen Gray (1878 – 1976, née Eileen Smith)
A pioneer of both the Art Deco style and the functionalist Modernist movement, bisexual Irish aristocrat Eileen Gray was best known for designing the Bibendum chair and the E.1027 table. This great tastemaker lived primarily in South Kensington, Paris and the South of France and another of her creations, once owned by Yves Saint Laurent, the ‘Fauteuil aux Dragons’ armchair, sold for £19 million at auction in 2009.
Extremely private, Gray once remarked: “The art of the engineer is not enough… A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. Not only its visual harmony but its organisation as a whole, the whole work combined together, make it human in the most profound sense.”
A stunning example of Eileen Gray’s work, an S-bend chair, is on display in Room 135, The Dr. Susan Weber Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Eileen Gray also designed the ‘E.1027’ house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, overlooking the Bay of Monaco in Franc as a gift for her lover, Jean Badovici, the editor of ‘L’Architecture Vivante’. ‘E’ is for Eileen, ‘10’ for the tenth letter of the alphabet, ‘J’ for Jean, ‘2’ for ‘B’ for Badovici and ‘7’ for ‘G’ for Gray. The building was completed in 1929.
The E-1027 table was designed for the eponymous house in 1927. -
Robert Adam
With such a name, this suave gent just had to design landmarks. University of Westminster educated and Hampshire based Robert Adam (born 1948) followed his more famous namesake (1728 – 1792) and became a designer of “progressive neo-classical style buildings” in 1975. He won “the richest prize in architecture” in January 2017 and counts the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford, a “miniature Baroque mansion” at Eastwood Farm – complete with a lion on the roof – in Herstmonceux, East Sussex and the “KGB proof” Ingliston House on the Wentworth Estate in Surrey amongst his notable works.
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Bob Marshall-Andrews QC
A “libertarian-left” Labour MP between 1997 and 2010, distinguished barrister and novelist Bob Marshall-Andrews defected to the Liberal Democrats in 2017. Described as “an irritant” to his former party whilst they were in government, multi-millionaire Marshall-Andrews built and owns “one of the most innovative houses of the 20th century – the famed ‘Teletubby House’ in Druidston, Pembrokeshire – and is chairman of the George Adamson Wildlife Trust. In 2013, of him, Chambers Legal Directory remarked: “Juries love him… I’ve never seen a jury eat out of anyone’s hand as much” whilst he amusingly references himself as “the complete antidote to political humbug”. Of Labour, this “intellectually brilliant” individual added: “They’re a basket case…They effectively abdicated all responsibility [on Brexit]”.
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Lady Ridsdale DBE (1921 – 2009, née Victoire Bennett)
Dame Paddy Ridsdale, as she generally known, was an intelligence operative, secretary to Ian Fleming during WW2 and the inspiration for the Bond character Miss Moneypenny.
A Conservative Party stalwart and married to Member of Parliament for Harwich from 1954 to 1992 Sir Julian Ridsdale CBE (1915 – 2004), Dame Paddy – or Vicky, as she was known to some – is best known for her role in ‘Operation Mincemeat’, a “famous caper” concerning a “man who never was” in 1943.
In the war, Dame Paddy wrote love letters and telegrams that were planted on the body of ‘Major William Martin’, an invented, drowned naval officer, that was floated in the ocean off Spain. The body carried fictitious plans of a purported Allied invasion of Sardinia and Greece and formed part of a plot designed to deflect attention from the Allied landings in Sicily. Of it, she later remarked: “I was sent to buy clothes in all the best men’s shops and had to pose as his girlfriend. I had to go to post offices and rather loudly send this telegram to ‘my boyfriend’, hoping of course that somebody would overhear me”. In due course, the body was indeed found, the Axis powers completely taken in and “Mincemeat swallowed whole, hook, line, and sinker”. A BAFTA winning film directed by Ronald Neame, The Man Who Never Was, made about the deceptive scheme in 1956.
Dame Paddy was known as a “political hostess in the style of a bygone era”, lived in a mansion “sandwiched between a sheikh and a Saudi prince” in The Boltons for the majority of her adult life and is buried in the grounds of the church there. She had one daughter, became Lady Ridsdale when her husband was knighted in 1981 and was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in her own right, for political services, in 1991.
Of her relationship with her one-time employer Fleming, she concluded: “Ian had so many girlfriends that I was not tempted to become one of them”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xemGlAV6TAw
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Charlot Malin (1969 – 2017)
Oslo born, San Francisco based interior designer and philanthropist Charlot D. Malin had a day named in her honour by The City and County of San Francisco in November 2016. A mother of twins and the co-founder of Troon Pacific Inc. with her husband Gregory, “forward-thinking” Malin worked on properties for George Lucas and Robert Redford and supported everything from the San Francisco Opera Guild to the Voss Foundation. She considered “health the ultimate luxury” and loathed microwave ovens.
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Baba Vanga (баба Ванга, AKA ‘Nostradamus from the Balkans’, 1911 – 1996)
This blind, illiterate, psychic Macedonian villager predicted everything from 9/11 – in suggesting that “the American brethren would be attacked by two steel birds” in 2001 many years earlier in 1989 – to an African-American being the 44th US President. Baba Vanga got it right on the “great Muslim war” that started with the Arab Spring in 2010 and claimed it would “come to a conclusion in 2043 with the establishment of a caliphate with Rome at its centre”. She supposedly found her power after “losing her eyesight during a storm when she was picked up in a fierce gust of wind and dumped back down on the ground” and looking further into the future, the clairvoyant claimed that everything on earth will die by 3797 and aliens will help civilisations live underwater by 2130. Tellingly, she also predicted: “An economic crisis will prevent the 45th President from taking office”. Anyone care to break this news to ‘The Donald’?