Sometimes it seems we only learn of remarkable women when their obituaries appear, even in the case of movie stars. Lives are always so much more complex than the snippets.
I’d never heard of Ruth Adler Schnee who died recently in Colorado Springs at the age of 99 and yet her store in downtown Detroit was in its way a revolution, introducing midwesterners to her bold designs and brilliant colors—one fabric was called “Slits and Slats and Pits and Pods.”
It was hard going at first: a glass Bauhaus teapot took fifteen years to sell. And Schnee and her husband and business partner didn’t just want to sell new designs, they wanted to teach people how to live with them— holding workshops to teach bemused customers how to cook on the weird-looking Japanese grills. Trained at nearby Cranbrook, the birthplace of mid-century modernism, Ms. Adler Schnee introduced the idea of the house as a work of avant-garde art.
As for Ms. Lollobrigida, we may think we know all about her, having perhaps seen her, tightly girdled into an hourglass shape under her bathing suit, beside Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in the 1956 film, Trapeze, or more likely, Falcon Crest, or her last feature film XXL. But every detail of her life and career, at least in the U.S., was obscured by our fascinated focus on her body, which made it difficult for her to be viewed through any other lens. But how many know she wrote, filmed and produced her documentary, Rittrato di Fidel, based on her long interview with the Cuban revolutionary leader? Of that she was a sculptor, with a large collection of her pieces shown in galleries and museums in Europe? With women, it often seems we can’t escape one box or another—but these two women did. Talent and determination: one is of little use without the other.
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