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
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
“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
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. Several years Read More
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
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
Wednesday, July 15
Every week, a hidden camera in a second-floor window on a beautiful-people street in SoHo tapes women walking by for a cable-access show called Knit Bootie . It’s compelling television. Somebody splices together the most attractive specimens, creating narrative from nothing. It’s the purest form of TV; the creator simply brings Read More
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
