In case you missed it, our Web site now has 10 exclusive videos from behind the scenes at Bruce Weber's New Orleans photo shoot. Model Karen Elson, who stars in the portfolio, can be seen doing a little dance with her new pal, transwoman and former mill worker Princess LaRouge. We were most impressed with Karen's ability to dance gracefully in those Miu Miu heels.

P.S. For those obsessing over Karen's wardrobe, her whole outfit is Lanvin and her jangly necklace is by Fenton. Princess LaRouge is dressed in Alexander McQueen.

Thursday in Los Angeles was a miserable day for a pool party—overcast and chilly—but the poolside patio at Robert Evans's legendary Beverly Hills estate, Woodland, was packed nonetheless. Evans, the producer behind Chinatown, Marathon Man and The Two Jakes, has now produced a signature line of eyeglasses for Oliver Peoples, and the outdoor lunch gave the company a chance to trumpet its relationship with Hollywood's most famous four-eyes.

The crowd included many types who would never otherwise be invited to Woodland: reporters, for instance, and guys like the one who wore lime-green pants and a yellow rain hat. There were also a few friends of Evans on hand, such as director Brett Ratner, who used to live in Evans's guesthouse.

Ratner bragged that he's making a biopic about Helmut Newton—the late photographer was perhaps Evans's closest friend—if, that is, he can secure the rights from Newton's indomitable widow, June. "I'm wresting with June," said Ratner, adding that he also wants to do a sequel to the documentary Helmut by June, which aired on HBO last year.

Then Ratner was peeled away by Lady Victoria White, who cut a rather chic figure as Evans's seventh wife, and the two joined a knot of conversation around Evans's longtime English butler, Alan Selka.

"Bob," as most people called him, was nowhere to be seen.

Turns out he was in his bedroom, the inner sanctum from which he often conducts business, and select guests were escorted in, either singly or in small groups, for a private audience. Behind a set of heavy wooden doors, Evans was perched on his velvet-upholstered bed like a pasha upon a pillow. He wore one pair of Oliver Peoples glasses and held a second in his left hand; occasionally he switched for effect.

"When I was growing up, glasses were medicinal," he said. "Now they're cosmetical."

Evans seemed to enjoy his visitors, especially the female ones, and he was attentive to them. His talk was very subtly funny, and he turned several phrases to particular effect, as if dialing down his humor to the lowest pitch at which it could still be perceived.

"Everyone should wear glasses," he said. "You'll see people you've never seen before."

Soon, a group of young men came in for their chance to kiss the ring, and they fell agog before a huge black-and-white Helmut Newton photograph on the wall. It showed two nude women sprawled under a sycamore tree at Woodland, not a stone's throw from where they stood that moment.

Evans noticed their gaze.

"They're not here," he said to the lads.

Or was the old rake speaking to himself, remembering happy days long gone?

Ah, Bob! Sic transit gloria mundi.

On a recent weekend in Philly, I attended a preview of "The Art of Lee Miller," a major retrospective of the photographer's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which originally showed at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. I was also lucky enough to catch a talk given by her only son, Antony Penrose. Despite the 350-plus crowd in the museum auditorium, it felt like a rather intimate affair.  The quick-witted Penrose, 60, shared a handful of his own family photos in his accompanying slideshow and traced his mother's life from her years as a fashion model in New York to her apprenticeship in Paris with Man Ray to her later stint as a photojournalist covering WWII. "I found soon after I was born," he remarked at one point, "that I had been featured in Vogue's December 1947 issue, and the marvelous thing was that, when the magazine was closed, I was able to bury my face in the ample chest of Diamond Lil." (Her photo was opposite his baby picture.)

All of this and more is well-represented in the exhibit itself, which encompasses images from the horrific to the elegant. It's startling to see Miller's harrowing photographs of Buchenwald and then see Miller herself, beautifully modeling a Patou hat. Indeed, it's the many faces of the artist herself, that make her—and this exhibit—so fascinating.  "I remembered her at worst as a useless drunk," Penrose said, "and at best as a beautiful enigma who bore no resemblance to the woman I know and hated so much." (Throughout, he didn't hold back in describing his turbulent relationship with his mother. "She knew how to use words to devastating effect," he said.)

At the end, in response to an audience query, Penrose mentioned that a Lee Miller biopic might be in the works. "We have interest from—I can't say the guy's name—but he's an A-list director," he said. "Things are getting cranked up." And the actress he would most like to portray his mother? "Cate Blanchett," he answered, without skipping a beat.

Self Portrait in Headband, New York, 1932 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. All rights reserved.

Once dubbed "box office poison," Katharine Hepburn proved her critics dead wrong, ultimately charming audiences—then and now—with her feisty, film characters as well as her no-nonsense style and her famous New England lilt. This month, the Smithsonian celebrates all things Hepburn with an exhibit at its National Portrait Gallery—with everything from images and clips to her record-setting four Oscar statuettes. "Kate: A Centennial" will be on view through June 1, 2008.

Katharine Hepburn By Edward Jean Steichen, Gelatin silver print, 1933
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © 1982 Joanna T. Steichen

One might call it the perfect antidote to plunging temperatures and abbreviated sunlight: this week Abrams releases Poolside with Slim Aarons ($75.00), a frothy compendium of photographs depicting the by-the-seashore (or infinity pool) life of the leisure class through the sixties, seventies, and eighties. There's Esther Williams, out of her boned-corset suit and sporting lemon-yellow capris, nibbling a canapé at the Lighthouse Club in the Bahamas; flip a few pages further and you'll find the Austrian swim-capped masses bobbling in a heated pool in Bad Gastein. A favorite of those blonde-tressed society icons, C.Z. Guest and Lilly Pulitzer, Aarons, a Life photographer whose previous books include the equally glittery Once Upon a Time and A Place in the Sun, manages to pull off the impossible: even the oiled, lobster-red couples giggling at a swim-up bar in Acapulco look glamorous.