Chinois chic
Society doyenne Beverley Jackson and friends celebrate Chinese New Year in bed.
Photography by Luca TrovatoIt’s only fitting that the hottest Chinese New Year party in town would unfold at Beverley Jackson’s exquisite Montecito home. Here, decor means a museum’s worth of Chinese art and antiques, fortune cookies may arrive with cocktails to start the celebration, and guests cozy up for an intimately lavish six-course feast in none other than Jackson’s red lacquer Chinese wedding bed. Indulgence, Jackson points out with a hint of glee, is all part of the holiday.
China’s lunar New Year revelry originated centuries ago as a crop celebration to herald spring and bring good luck. In China today, it kicks off two solid weeks of mass gourmandizing punctuated by firecrackers and parades—this year, to usher in the official Year of the Pig. Indeed, according to Chinese tradition, by holiday’s end, both host and guests should be “NEAR TO BURSTING,” Jackson writes me in an e-mail a week or so before her do, the screamer all caps promising a sybaritically captivating evening….
Like rising star China on the world stage, the ever-glamorous Jackson—author, lecturer, collector, historian, raconteur, a former society columnist for more than two decades—is a paradox as full of surprises. This is a senior citizen strawberry blonde with violet eye shadow and a penchant for the outré who readily includes among her claims to fame both having served on the boards of more than 30 local charitable and civic organizations and being the first Santa Barbaran in the ’70s to wear hot pants.
As party host, Jackson’s jocose ease belies a meticulous planner. She works a menu right down to the brand of lychee nuts. She special-orders the fortune cookies from Mee Mee Bakery, her (until now) secret source in San Francisco. She even rearranges her already dazzling home, bringing out a Chinese wedding headdress of vibrant turquoise kingfisher feathers to display on a 17th-century Peranakan (early Indonesian Chinese) table.
In the last decade, Jackson has written five books about Chinese costume and antiquities, a passion that began in her youth as a love of textiles and has since given rise to her prescient collections of luminous kesi silk badges (ranking civil servants of the emperor), embroidered robes, minute silk shoes for women with bound feet (a Chinese aesthetic—some say “fetish”—in vogue from medieval times to the early 20th century), and priceless kingfisher feather headdresses, chandeliers and jewelry. The collections became the subjects of her first four books. Her latest, A Grand Tour of Asia (Ten Speed Press) came out last fall. Coauthored with Hania Tallmadge (niece of Lotusland diva Ganna Walska), it re-creates the photo journal of four Americans’ 1910 trip to the Far East.
Jackson’s first foray to China dates back to her hot pants days, when she joined an American contingent posing as carpet mavens to gain entrance to the Communist-ruled country (then virtually closed to Westerners). “I just wanted to walk on the Great Wall,” she says. “It was almost easier to consider walking on the moon at the time.
“The Cultural Revolution is raging—it’s 1974. My phone rings one day and it’s [actress] Jayne Meadows. And she’s found out the Chinese are going to hold the first Tientsin carpet fair. All the Iron Curtain will be there—and they want ten Americans!” Jackson, Meadows, and Meadows’s husband, comedian Steve Allen, teamed up with seven other intrepid souls to make the 19-day junket in February 1975.
“That’s how we got in—lying like crazy!”
The experience made an impression to last a lifetime. Nearly two dozen trips later, Jackson is off to China again in the spring to host a singular tour of Shanghai for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. “It’s going to be like flying to New York City for a change of scene—for parties, museums, theater, and concerts…. This isn’t a rush-from-temple-to-temple tour,” says Jackson. “We’re not doing any tourist spots except the China Sex Museum—I know the director from working with him on a Chinese foot-binding exhibit at the Museum of Sex in New York.”
She readily includes among her claims to fame both having served on the boards of 30 charitable organizations and being among the first in town to wear hot pants.
So why the abiding interest in literally all things Chinese? “If there is another life, I think I was Chinese in it,” she says. “My daughter thinks I was the Empress Dowager—at her cruelest! People say horrible things about her, but I’ve done tremendous research on her and have great admiration for her. She was the only commoner ever to serve on the throne. So she was the only one in touch with the common people. She understood them.”
Ironically, Jackson has kept her Chinese New Year observances to once in Hong Kong and the rest stateside over the years—with good reason: Today China’s biggest seasonal event brings gridlock, with some 800 million people traveling for the holiday. “Almost every Chinese,” Jackson says, “no matter how poor or how far he has to travel—standing on trains for days, going by donkey, walking, whatever—goes home to his family.” Happily for her guest merrymakers, they all live in town, at least part of the time.
Her gathering includes Patricia and Guy de Gramont (she’s a photographer’s rep, he owns and operates Santa Barbara Flight Academy, and Chinese Vogue in Beijing employs their eldest daughter), sometime entertainment executives Kelly and Ted Simmons (Tiananmen Square tops their must-see-in-China wish list for its historical significance), and artist-photographer Gerald Incandela, who shares the sign of the dragon with Jackson according to Chinese astrology. Guy is a pig. Patty is a horse. Kelly is a tiger and Ted, a snake. Impromptu cocktail fun with fortune cookies (“You are always welcome at any party—in bed!” “Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure—in bed!”) segues handily into dinner— in Jackson’s bed, of course, a serendipitous find at Gentlemen Antiquarians in Summerland. It was her novel idea to convert it to a dining table.
“It’s a Chinese wedding bed. I think it ended up in a whorehouse at one point—who else could afford it second hand? A man would not buy a secondhand bed for his daughter and a poor person couldn’t afford it.”
Experts have deemed it a mid-19th-century piece from the seaport of Ningbo, with the endearingly gaudy paintings on the interior panels added later. “No matter who I have over, it’s always the same,” she adds. “I have people here from the Louvre and they love the collections, but the bed is what they all ask about. It fascinates them.”
Jackson loves to entertain as much as she loves to cook, a talent fostered throughout the years via lessons-turned-friendships with celebrity chefs such as the late, great Kenneth Lo in London and Jereme Leung, superstar of the Whampoa Club in Shanghai. Her specialty, the succulent shrimp-filled dim sum that arrive in bamboo steamers precedes a delicate chicken and water chestnut soup. The follow-up, an auspicious roasted salmon in a light crust of sesame seeds (Jackson says any self-respecting Chinese New Year meal should be at least five or six courses and, for luck, absolutely must include a fish dish), barely leaves room for Leung’s heavenly recipe of cilantro-and-chili infused, melt-in-your-mouth braised lamb on clouds of white rice; Jackson’s signature wok-cooked crab and asparagus seasoned with fresh garlic and ginger; and a sweet and saucy lychee sorbet for dessert (fortune cookie encore optional).
And the evening’s official Year of the Pig dinner toast? “To being in bed with the right people!” Only at Beverley’s. •
Santa Barbara Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
