By Daniel Edward Rosen 6/27/12 8:00am

An Unbroken Series of Successful Gestures

(Jason Seiler)

Meet The Gatsbabies! Preening Prepsters Lure Ladies, Lucre and Limelight in Merry Manhattan

The girls, so many girls, dressed in pastel-colored wraps that bared shoulders and the swells of their cleavage, clacked their Louboutin heels up a SoHo staircase one muggy May evening.

At the landing, visibly breathless and sweaty, their eyes lit up. They had entered the penthouse loft of Edward Scott Brady, the boyishly handsome world traveler, former classical cello virtuoso and “retired entrepreneur,” who was throwing a “Welcome Back Bash” to honor his return from his seventh trip around the globe. Read More

By Scott Eyman 11/27/07 4:59pm

How Studio Stars Got Their Twinkle

THE STAR MACHINE
By Jeanine Basinger
Alfred A. Knopf, 586 pages, $35

For all of posterity’s gaping wonder, Hollywood’s star system was a legendarily inexact science. For every Garbo or Dietrich successfully snatched from obscurity by someone with a discerning eye for languid pain (in the case of the former) or sexual insolence Read More

By Scott Eyman 10/02/06 12:00am

Not So Saintly After All: A Sad Star, Strongly Sexed

Audrey Hepburn moved through her movies like a mournful swan, unsure of her own beauty. For years she was the anti-Marilyn, the pensive garden princess preferred by people who pined for the gentility and grace that had supposedly been driven out of Hollywood’s Edenic garden by Monroe and the overtly sexual stars that followed in Read More

By Sara Vilkomerson 12/19/05 12:00am

Liz Smith

“Well, I know y’all are probably on a deadline,” said newspaperwoman Liz Smith on the phone. She was, as she nearly always is, about to rush out the door of her office.

Ms. Smith, now 82, originally of Fort Worth, Tex., has lived in New York City since 1949, but she still retains a Read More

By Staff 8/15/05 2:01pm

This Charming House

The Real Estate had no intention of reporting during last night’s Morrissey party at Sway, but happened to learn that the brooding singer’s Los Angeles home is now on the market.

Despite being 3,000 miles from our usual turf, we couldn’t resist offering a peek at Morrissey’s lavish limestone bath. Read More

By Scott Eyman 5/23/05 12:00am

Generous, Vital, Enthusiastic, Wallach Lives to Tell the Tale

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach. Harcourt, 320 pages, $25.

It never mattered whether the part was big or small, whether the movie was wonderful or execrable, Eli Wallach always approached acting like Albert Finney approached eating in Tom Jones: The job wasn’t finished until the last bit of Read More

By Molly Haskell 4/30/01 12:00am

Our Best Feature Forward?

A scene everyone

remembers from pre-Code Hollywood is Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932), bathing in a barrel like Venus on the half-shell,

her platinum hair and translucent skin posing an almost irresistible invitation

to the rubber-plantation overseer played by Clark Gable. (And, speaking of

Gable, an eyeful of his upper body-hairless and unbuffed-was and Read More

By Peter Bogdanovich 11/17/97 12:00am

Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week

In the 50′s and 60′s, my European parents would sometimes talk about the powerful antifascist theme-especially timely and valuable in 1941-expressed in Frank Capra’s film of that year, Meet John Doe They used to, at the same time, lament the loss of the kind of America that produced such a picture. Barbara Stanwyck gives one Read More