A Hollywood Original
George Hamilton has it all,wealth, fame, manners and a very good tan
Apr 23, 2007
GEORGE HAMILTON – A HOLLYWOOD ORIGINAL
My girlfriend Jacqui Cohen, CEO of the Army & Navy Department Store chain, tells me that George Hamilton, (whom she dated in the late seventies) was “the best date a woman could have.” I prodded for more. “When you are with George Hamilton, he makes you feel like you are the only woman in the world, like no one else exists but you.”
Gentlemen, take heed: There are rules to the game and anyone can master it. The trick is to go through life leaving adoring conquests in your wake. A successful man remains thought of as fondly as the initial impact felt by the women he has endeavoured to pursue.
George Hamilton is such a man. His life reads like a screenplay. He is a man who created himself with complete confidence. By the time he was a teenager; George could mix a mean martini as well as mix in any social circle. He started working at the age of eleven with his first job, as a model in New York and has worked ever since. Once George decided upon becoming an actor, it was as simple as that. Hamilton has said, “I’ve always been aware of one important fact. You don’t get anything unless you ask for it. I have lived high because I have known that eventually I would be able to pay for everything.”
His father’s advice to him as a child was, “put a high price on yourself because people will take you at your own evaluation. You are the only one who knows what you are worth. Never sell yourself short.”
George’s father was the second of his mother’s four husbands. He was a society bandleader and developer of the popular “White Shoulders” perfume. His much-married mother, Ann Stevens Potter Hamilton Hunt Spalding, had Southern bloodlines that clearly enabled her to land on her feet when the going got tough. In a 1966 McCall’s story, a twenty-seven-year-old George, told Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham that back east in the lean years between marriages, his mother Ann “kept the family going with the doggy bags that she brought home from New York’s fashionable El Morocco.” Hamilton told another story of his mother’s tenacity to Fox News’, Roger Friedman."When I was 12, my mother took my two brothers and me and put us in a car and went driving across the country looking for old boyfriends whom she could marry. We were living on Sutton Place and had run out of money. So she was hoping to hook one." Roger Friedman had met up with Hamilton thirty-five years after the McCall’s story in New York, where Hamilton had just completed filming his role in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending and, at 61, was a new father to a fifteen-month old son. He was currently engaged in producing a feature film based on a story about his childhood (Michelle Pfeiffer as George Hamilton’s Mom? Fox 411 May 9, 2001.)
George Hamilton has created a line of cigars and cigar clubs, developed tanning products and opened tanning salons complemented by his status as the world’s most recognized suntan, in addition to a film and television career that has spanned five decades. 2005 saw Hamilton win raves and a new audience of fans by appearing on the second season of the hit US reality show Dancing With The Stars. Light on his feet as well as the effects of aging, Hamilton has what they call legs.
Back in 1966, George told Sheila Graham, “I have never confused breeding with money. My mother and I and my two brothers have had hard times – never exactly poor, but never rich. But we have always had good taste and good manners. It’s not what you do, but how you do it.”
By all accounts, George Hamilton has done it well.
