The fabulous d’Issac-Spango Family, (most of them anyway; Steve was on tour with his breakout garage band from Los Banos CA, ‘Green Pants’, the twins were in the Maldives sandbagging the bars in the port and passing out condoms. Fredo was inexplicably delayed on the tarmac in Riyad, but sent a congratulatory iCast from the cockpit of his Marlo-Stukka V7, and Ghislene, well, no one quite knew where Ghislene was.
That’s Smokey with his Bear Hat on the left of course, and then the Daddy Spango with his dear momma on his arm, yes, the one and only Dame Lily Vandegam Spango. Next is Maria d’Issac-Spango, the Mde Daddy Spango, she’s holding Georgette’s hand and finally there’s the marvelously multi-talented Giles, still in costume from a first act rehearsal of his featured performance as The Acrobat Watteau in the Family’s world renowned sold out show, ‘The Spectacle in Your Mind’.
They were gathered for Dame Lily’s 113th birthday party on Friday, the 13th of May, held at the Old Vandegam Farm in West Linn, now the country residence of Dame Lily’s cousins, the Manning-Belmonts.
Here they are without their hats. Lucien Oscar Thomas ‘High Tip Tommy’ Spango! He looks great doesn’t he? The Daddy Spango. His extraordinary interpretation of King Pontiac in Ricasoli’s great opera ‘”Dona Gianadonna” restablished the legendary actor-entertainer’s reputation as One-of-The-All-Time-Greats last season, and his Live Television series, “Zoot Suit Survivor, Zoot Suit Alors!”, iCast from Paris every Sunday night is a critical and popular hit world wide.
If Georgette looks a little peaked in the family shots by the way, it’s the result of the several Cosmopolitans she drank at breakfast with Anthony Eisly and Aikia Kha, Georgette’s musical partners. The three of them make up The Aikia Kha Trio, the extraordinary group noted for the resurgence of experimental the’ dansant. Maria, still somewhat disconcerted by her daughters’ artistic collaboration with Ms Kha, and not forgetting their recent encounter at the ensembles’ recording session with Ray Tipton Slim, the famous Memphis blues man the day before, put Georgette tout-suite on plane headed south. Georgette was enrolled in one of those 28 day Billie Holiday retreats as soon as the cake was cut, and, not known to Maria, joined Mr. Eisly at the desert de-tox center in Twenty Nine Palms. (More on all that will have to be saved for another report!)
But what can one say that hasn’t been said about the fabulous Lillian Jeanette Moss Spango Pleasance Folioni Vandegam?
It seems she’s been part of our lives forever. Child star, (“Little Eva’s Last Christmas”, 1917; “I See the Plague Ending”, 1919; the hilariously unforgettable “Open the Blinds: It’s Venice, Sister!”, 1979); animal tamer and professional jockey, (she rode Thruster in the Derby twice, in drag, and won both times), she is a comedienne, tragedienne, a dancer, a singer: she is an actress supreme, an Icon of The Arts. She is also an Olympic Gold Medalist, (Rekyavik, 1925, singles water ballet), a repeated Lottery Winner, (Minnesota, 1967, 72 million, New Jersey 1982, 15 million) and the grand dame mother of the late cinema legend Elena Spango, and of course, the beloved momma of Lucien, the Daddy Spango.
Never a… conventionally great beauty, Lily Spango, (born Lillian Jeanette Moss in 1892 to a machine shop assistant turned carnival barker and his Nez-Perce’ wife in Kalispell, Montana), is known and universally admired for the attractions of her inimitable and contagiously sparkling personality.
She received her title from King George V in 1930.
She was married five times, to four men: the first and fifth to the true love of her life, Sir John Lucien Knemble Spango of The Great White Way and The London Stage. Her second marriage, one of convenience to Lord Pleasance, 10th Earl of Shouting was short, (six blank months on the Riviera she called them; the months subsequently became the background of J. Samuel Dierky’s best selling romance novels), and were not quite as romantically fulfilling as she’d hoped after the disconsolation of her failed first marriage to, and divorce from, the philandering Sir John. However the marriage proved enormously fulfilling financially. Lord Pleasance died with a certain dignity but no real discretion, in the arms of an apprentice sel-de-mer grinder from Montpellier, but he left several hundred million, and the inheritance dispute with the Pleasance family was tidily settled in Lily’s favor. Her third marriage to Italian communist filmmaker Reza Ragusa Folioni was noted for public turmoil as well as the great films she made with him: (“Stiletto”, 1947, The Moon in Milano, 1950”, and “The Butter, The Padre and Me”, 1954).
But it was the love for John Spango of Broadway and the London stage that she held most dearly, they never forgot each other through the decades and remarried late in Sir John’s life. They spent three glorious weeks of resurrected bliss sailing the Greek Isles on the yacht Dame Lily inherited from Lord Pleasance, but alas Sir John himself fell over board near San Torini one moon lit night recounting in a game of charades the tragic story of Natalie Wood off Catalina, suffered an embolism and died in the water.
Companionship, friends in common, and a shared love of classic Japanese ikebana floral arranging brought Andy Vandegam III and Dame Lily together. They enjoyed many years breeding exotic orchids and thorobreds at the Old Vandegam Farm in West Linn until Andy’s death at the age of 101.
Since then Dame Lily has happily returned to the appreciative eye of the public with cameo appearances in d’Issac-Spango productions, receiving special accolades for her famous equestrienne and elephantine acrobatics.
Dame Lilly maintains a floor-through in Sutton Place, and the Spango pied-a-terre on the Ile-St-Louis. She sold the villa at Cap d’Ail on the death of Sir John saying the place was just too damned windy.
She dotes on her son and grandchildren.
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