"Why doesn’t everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?" asked Jimmy Durante.

Good question. I’m mindful of it.

***

Our great wOw pal, Helen Mirren, has been in Russia to check out her ancestors. This quintessentially "English" dame was actually born Ilynea Mironov and her forebears lived on an estate at Kuryanovo near Smolensk.

Helen says it was an incredible experience to go back; she wanted to because she had made a film titled "The Last Station," which is about the final year in the life of the famed writer Leo Tolstoy.

I, Liz, have always privately cherished the story of how Tolstoy died, having run away from his estate and his wife, Sofya, because (it was said) Sofya had denied him sex. (They had been married for 48 years and had 13 children.)

Tolstoy died in the little railroad station at Astapovo, feeling aggrieved at Sofya and ignoring the fact that he had become a national treasure with hundreds of newspaper reporters trying to find him and discover his condition. I don’t know how the movie handles these facts.

***

Christopher Plummer plays Tolstoy in this movie version, which is based on Jay Parini’s novel and has a screenplay by Michael Hoffman. The film was completed last year after being made in Germany. Coloradans loved it at the Telluride Film Festival.

Helen’s family lost their estate when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. She waited quite a long time to play a Russian, which she is, because although the adaptations of Parini’s novel existed, Anthony Quinn as Tolstoy fell by the wayside and then Anthony Hopkins waited to inherit it. Both Meryl Streep and Glenn Close had been talked of for the role of Sofya.

Well, nobody will quarrel that it finally went to the real Russian – Dame Helen Mirren.

***

Want to talk about a Christmas gift practically nobody I know would quarrel with? Why not make the holidays easy on yourself and wrap up the fresh new book, The World in Vogue: People, Parties, Places. It just fell like a dazzling bonbon in my lap. And it is totally spellbinding, all from the Vogue archives, put together from the world’s greatest photographers by the editors Alexandra Kotur and Hamish Bowles.


Image: Amazon

This massive, thrilling coffee-table work was made possible by Condé Nast with an assist from Calvin Klein. It has an almost-nude Gisele Bundchen on the cover with a handsome Tom Brady and the venerable party photographer Bill Cunningham moving away from them at a Met Costume Gala.

Every page, including the text, is a thrill, with stars we all know and love and hate and despise and adore from the Duchess of Windsor to Audrey Hepburn to Babe Paley to Marlene Dietrich – oh, for heaven’s sake. Just wait and name them! And there are men, men, men from JFK to Baryshnikov, but Vogue’s favorite, Oscar de la Renta, sets a record – appearing at least five times. (It’s OK with me, Oscar is also one of my favorites!)

This is the book to give everyone who loves celebrity, stars, glamour, fashion, fabulous houses and yachts and cars and all the yesterdays that made them up. It costs $75.