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 Welcome to our New Year of Hollywood’s “les girls” that you should know.  Who are they?  Amy Adams stars with Matthew Goode in the romantic comedy Leap Year.   Anna Kendrick assists George Clooney in his employee-firing squad in Up in the Air.   Rachel McAdams appears as the adventuress Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.    Also welcoming 2010 are starlets  Lily Collins, Selena Gomez, Demi Novato, Vanessa Hudgens. 

Nominated for the Golden Globe and the Oscars, Amy Lou Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy, the town famed for architect Andrea Palladio’s palatial Italian Renaissance villas.  She was the fourth of seven children for Kathryn and Richard Adams.   An army brat, Amy and the family traveled wherever her serviceman dad was assigned.  He, too, had been bitten by the showbusiness bug, and moonlighted singing professionally in restaurants, while mom was a body builder.

Amy’s breakthrough role came in Junebug.  No less an esteemed critic as Roger Ebert carried the torch for her talent, with Amy receiving her first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.   More than 300 actresses competed to play Giselle in Disney’s big-budget musical, Enchanted.  Amy won what became a star-making vehicle, with the film grossing more than $360 million.  Not long afterward, she won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Doubt, co-starring with heavyweights Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.   At her Leap Year premiere in New York, infanticipating Amy claimed her new role will be that of mom, taking care of her first born, the father being her fiance of eight years, actor/artist Darren Le Gallo.

Up in the Air’s Anna Kendrick’s acting bug bit when she was ten years old, with her parents driving from their home in Portland, Maine for Anna to attend auditions on Broadway.  At 12, she landed her first role in the musical High Society, earning Drama Desk and Tony nominations, and in Hollywood she appeared in Rocket Science, auditioned and won the role of Jessica Stanley in the blockbuster Twilight, following that with the blockbuster New Moon.  Next is The Marc Pease Experience with Jason Schwartzman and Ben Stiller – Anna plays a high school senior in musical shows.

Rachel McAdams politely bowed out of appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley when she discovered that they would all be nude, and admitting she’s disturbed with our culture’s obsession with nudity. 

Canadian-born Rachel’s been working in films for ten years, from Mean Girls to The Notebook, where she was romanced off-screen by the movie’s Ryan Gosling, and hung out lately with Josh Lucas. This year, she was chosen Female Star of the Year by ShoWest, and won MTV’s Best Kiss award with Ryan Gosling in The Notebook.   She takes public transportation, lives with her brother in a Toronto Victorian, which she says “is falling apart, like most houses.”  Her Time Traveler’s Wife co-star Eric Bana tells Vogue magazine that “Rachel’s someone who would survive outside of the film business.   She just blends in with the traffic on the street … someone from the real world and not at all affected by any egomania in the industry.”

Our Chicago friends, Ruth and Dan Edelman own the Daniel J. Edelman Agency, the largest privately held public relations empire in the world.  Thanks to our friendship with Ruth and Dan, we met Eunice and John Johnson and daughter Linda, who’ve created a megamillion dollar powerful  publishing empire with Ebony and Jet magazines, a book division, Fashion Fair cosmetics and the Ebony Fashion Fair, the world’s largest traveling fashion show.

We lost Eunice this past week, having lost John four years ago.  “She became a trailblazer in fashion, philanthropy and the arts,” says the company’s corporate communications director Wendy Parks, adding that it was Eunice who paved the way for supermodels Tyra Banks, Naomi Campbell, Iman, Beverly Johnson and Pat Cleveland.

“What started as a favor to a friend, the production of a fashion show to raise money for a New Orleans hospital in 1958, evolved into a grand traveling tour that brought designers like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta and Valentino to runways in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean … one of the tour’s aims was to bring attention to aspiring black designers,” writes Dennis Hevesi in the New York Times.   “Over the years, the fair has raised more than $55 million for civil rights groups, hospitals, community centers and scholarships.  It was not always easy.  In the early years, when the chartered bus bearing the dozen or so models and the fashions selected by Mrs. Johnson stopped at gas stations in the segregated South, signs said, ‘No Blacks in the Ladies Room.’”  Eunice’s  annual Ebony Fashion Fair tour covered 180 cities.  She directed and produced through last year.

It was Eunice who encouraged Valentino to use black models during his shows in the ’60s.   And by creating Fashion Fair cosmetics in 1973, Eunice “filled the void for models who struggled to find cosmetics in shades that matched their diverse skin tones,” adds Wendy Parks.   Revlon, Avon and Max Factor followed.  “Today it remains the world beauty brand leader for women of color.”  Devotees include Diahann Carroll, Leontyne Price, and Aretha Franklin.

When he was six years old, Arkansas-born John Johnson lost his dad in a sawmill accident and was raised by his mother, a levee cook, and his grandmother.  During the Depression in the ’30s, the family relocated to Chicago, anticipating it was more likely they would find work in the North, which still wasn’t easy, considering the hard times confronting the country.   At school, John, whose classmates were Nat King Cole and Redd Foxx, distinguished himself with strong leadership abilities and won a scholarship.  With a $500 loan as collateral on his mother’s furniture, entrepreneur John launched his publishing career with the Negro Digest (not unlike the Reader’s Digest), Jet, and then Ebony, which Eunice named and was similar in size to Life magazine.  He became one of the 400 richest Americans, honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, acknowledged as Publisher of the Year, and received honorary doctorates from USC, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and other temples of higher learning.

In years past, we’ve enjoyed the great pleasure of sharing the Johnsons’ Thanksgiving table at their elegant villa in Palm Springs where we met their daughter Linda,, now chairman and CEO, who oversees the empire with its more than 2,500 employees.  We learned over the holiday turkey that Eunice’s father, Dr. Nathaniel Walker, practiced medicine for more than 50 years, while her mother, Ethel McAlpine Walker, was the principal of Selma High School, taught education and art at Selma University, founded by Eunice’s grandfather, Dr. William McAlpine.  

Over the traditional pumpkin pie, John revealed that he’d been concerned about his excellent executives being lured by rival firms.  “I wanted them to know how important they were to our business, and decided I should treat them and their families by underwriting education for their sons and daughters, gifting their families with trips to Europe, loans on their houses, whatever they were in need of.”  

Which reminded us of Wolfgang Puck’s long-ago comment one evening at Spago.   We complimented Wolfgang on the dining room’s indefatigable general manager Tracey Spillane and assistant general manager Laurent Steanou, managers David Wilson, Horst Ringler, floor manager and maitresse d’hotel Ellen Farentino, hostesses Lisa Marie McGillvery, Jill Deutsch, Jenni Bonaccoursi, Maria Delavega and Gracie Zane.  We added that the delightful Laurent “Energizer Bunny” Steanou is a mind reader, invariably suggesting an ideal entrée, and what a charmer he’d be in a movie.    “We’re lucky,” Wolfgang commented. “We like seeing that they’re happy, and most importantly we want to keep them.”