Tiffany & Co. Celebrates Liz Goldwyn’s Sporting Guide

Francesca Amfitheatrof, Design Director, Tiffany & Co. celebrated best-selling author, filmmaker, artist and good friend Liz Goldwyn, best-selling author, filmmaker, fashion editor and artist, and the release of her historical fiction novel, Sporting Guide, which was published by Regan Arts on October 6. The book is beautifully crafted to resemble an actual Sporting Guide of the late 1800’s, which were leather bound pocket guides to all of the brothels in each respective city.

Guests at the fete, which was held at the newly renovated Los Angeles Athletic Club, included Camilla Belle (Diablo), Selma Blair (American Crime Story), filmmaker Gia Coppola, costume designer Jacqui Getty, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, musician Kim Gordon, Gillian Jacobs (Community), Mía Maestro (The Strain), philanthropist Linda Ramone, Lucy Punch (Into the Woods), celebrity stylist Estee Stanley, Sam Taylor-Johnson (director, Fifty Shades of Gray), Marisa Tomei (Empire), burlesque queen/lingerie designer Dita Von Teese and more…

In Sporting Guide, a series of haunting, interlinked stories set in the period, author and filmmaker Goldwyn re-creates a “sporting guide”—a secret diary and guidebook of the best brothels and prostitutes in the city. In this world a hushed conversation inside a velvet-lined boudoir could destroy a man, and the rustle of bushes might reveal a sordid assignation. Based on original research in the libraries and archives of Los Angeles, these fictional stories are often inspired by real historical characters—like the laudanum-addicted Cora Phillips, whose tombstone Goldwyn rediscovered, or Bartolo Ballerino, Italian immigrant slumlord of the forgotten red-light district, or thirteen-year-old Frances dreaming of life beyond the Children’s Orphan Asylum. Interspersed in these stories—and featuring over a hundred historical photos and illustrations—Goldwyn reveals the history of the period, from the rage for corsets to crushed pearl powder cosmetics and the awful cures for syphilis. Sporting Guide evokes a lost world of those on the margins of Los Angeles, of the hustlers who made it into one of the great cities of the world, and Goldwyn gives a poignant voice to the people and stories forgotten by time.