That is a fantastically funny review.Fletch F. Fletch wrote:Also, the New York Observer trashed the Audrey Hepburn bio by Donald Spoto, Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.
Salacious Biographies
- Polybius
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- Polybius
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- Polybius
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I raise a glass to you, sir.davidhare wrote:I loathe her performance in the Hours, but then the whole movie reeks of sanctified artistic purity - only Julieanne's all too brief performance has any cogency.
I actually laughed out loud when Ed Harris' character jumps out the window. (He beat me to it.)
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This might have been excerpted or paraphrased from Frascella and Weisel's Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, which is a great read with some deliciously salacious sections about the soap opera that was the set.Polybius wrote:Not to sound like I'm selling subscriptions, but...there was a long article about Nicholas Ray in Vanity Fair about a year ago (I've mentioned it somewhere around here) and the depiction there was that during the filming of Rebel, Natalie was carrying on simultaneous affairs w/ Ray and Hopper, while Ray was fitting in Mineo and (to a lesser extent) Dean, as well.
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- Michael
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From William Mann, author of the new Kate bio:
"I've been gratified by the reviews Kate has gotten so far. Thomas Mallon, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, writes a very smart essay about the book and about what I was trying to do. But in other coverage, the sensationalism continues, and it's disappointing.
This "billboarding" of the book's contentsâ€â€sensationalizing the stories I tell about Hepburn's (and Spencer Tracy's) sexualityâ€â€is an indication that much of the media simply does not know how to talk about sexuality. People magazine, in its positive review of the book, made it seem that Kate's 600-plus pages are all about sex. The Hartford Courant summed up the book with a staggeringly reductive tagline: Hepburn had "a pattern of caring for secretly gay men with drinking problems.â€
"I've been gratified by the reviews Kate has gotten so far. Thomas Mallon, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, writes a very smart essay about the book and about what I was trying to do. But in other coverage, the sensationalism continues, and it's disappointing.
This "billboarding" of the book's contentsâ€â€sensationalizing the stories I tell about Hepburn's (and Spencer Tracy's) sexualityâ€â€is an indication that much of the media simply does not know how to talk about sexuality. People magazine, in its positive review of the book, made it seem that Kate's 600-plus pages are all about sex. The Hartford Courant summed up the book with a staggeringly reductive tagline: Hepburn had "a pattern of caring for secretly gay men with drinking problems.â€
- Matt
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I understand where he's coming from, but it's laughably unrealistic (not to mention disingenuous) to expect People Magazine or the Hartford Courant to offer a nuanced review of a work that does, to be frank, drop quite the bombshell. You can, at best, hope for such from The New York Times (which he got), but even that's a crap shoot.
- dadaistnun
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- Matt
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The recent Charlotte Chandler book, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone has some very candid revelations from Miss Davis, but I didn't think much of it as "biography." The Barbara Leaming book Bette Davis: A Biography is more exhaustive, but it's still "meh"--not very engaging despite its subject. Unfortunately, those are your only options for books still in print. If you have to pick between the two, get the Chandler. It's available in hardcover and will make for a better gift.dadaistnun wrote:Can anyone recommend a good Bette Davis biography? Looking for one for a Christmas present.
For sheer entertainment value, I'd recommend picking up one of Davis' "memoirs" such as This 'n' That or The Lonely Life, but both are long out of print. Also recommended but out of print is Charles Higham's Bette: A Biography of Bette Davis.
You will most definitely want to avoid daughter B.D. Hyman's My Mother's Keeper. It makes Mommie Dearest look like a paragon of literary restraint.
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That little piece of information can also be found in Anger's Hollywood Babylon.David Ehrenstein wrote:And in my interview with Gore Vidal in the current Written By he reveals that Clark Gable got Cukor fired from GWTW because he was a hustler in his youth and Cukor was one of his customers. The source? Mr. Cukor himself.
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Gore is a far more trustyworthy source than Mr. Angerim.That little piece of information can also be found in Anger's Hollywood Babylon
Actually the story was that Andy Lawler said Gable was "One of Bill's old tricks," meaning Haines. But it was George.I recall Anger quoted Cukor as saying William Haines gave Gable a blowjob when he started at MGM.
SING OUT LOUISE!True - they never had sex, and Howard loved NYC while Gore hated it. But I can assure you from my own life a LTCompanion/not-husband (24 years for us) has been the most important thing in my life
George and Howard met at the Everard Baths and discovered immediately they aren't each other's type (both being Tops.) But they got on in absolutely every other way and so decided to live together. I met Howard a couple of times. He was a delightful, bubbly man.
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I guess that explains why Lombard thought Gable was such a lousy lover- he just wasn't interested.David Ehrenstein wrote:And in my interview with Gore Vidal in the current Written By he reveals that Clark Gable got Cukor fired from GWTW because he was a hustler in his youth and Cukor was one of his customers. The source? Mr. Cukor himself.
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- Polybius
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