“Where did you find her, Miss Crawford?” the interviewer asks of Carol, the terrified six-year-old placed on Joan’s lap as a prop—sort of like the crumpled flowers. One feels for the bewildered child, whom Joan now asphyxiates in the fetid brew of her alcohol- perfume- and cigarette-drenched plane ride. “Oh, I just always pick up children,” the star replies without a hint of irony, clearly unaware that George Cukor is not, in fact, the man behind the camera and that it is no longer 1940.
The shop was located at 63 Thompson Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood where Elisa had operated a different vintage boutique called Chelsea Girl for twenty years. In 2012 she expanded that shop and moved around the corner. This allowed me to take the Laurel Canyon concept and move it from my mental queue to prime real estate directly across from the Thompson Hotel. In a fever of enthusiasm, I set about transforming a hundred-year-old storefront in what was once a part of New York’s Little Italy into a California Craftsman fantasy on Lookout Mountain Road circa 1972.
