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.

(Jason Seiler)

Demonstrating a generous spirit, he had posted news of the party to Facebook and Guest of a Guest, luring in hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends, the more the merrier, and plying them with premium booze.

The apartment had all the trappings a wayfaring bachelor requires: the cello, a relic from Mr. Brady’s days playing at the Kennedy Center and Avery Fisher Hall; the African ceremonial masks, collected on his jaunts to the subcontinent; the large antique globe; the red-felt billiards table; the framed photos of Mr. Brady from his journeys.

It was, in the estimation of one female guest, “shit-tastic.”

“He’s, like, famous dude,” said Dmitry Astafev, a Russian entrepreneur who learned about the party through his girlfriend, who had been forwarded a Facebook invite and actually didn’t know Mr. Brady, either.

No matter. Sooner or later, it is safe to say, we will all know Mr. Brady.

“My boyfriend met him in the Hamptons,” said a blond-haired woman in her early 20s.

“I met him at Cyril’s,” claimed another woman.

The place was packed with bros in suit-coats and more babes in slinkier-than-thou dresses, in the appraisal of Justin Ross Lee, than one could shake a stick at.

“Unfortunately for these ladies, I’ve already shaken my stick at most of them,” he added with a wink.

Mr. Lee is an entrepreneur and shameless self-promoter, whose reputation, like Mr. Brady’s, preceded him.The day before, he had been the subject of of a comical New York Times Styles Section profile that depicted him, among other things, tussling with a doorman at The Dream Downtown and bragging about his first-class travels to the Middle East and Europe (“Jew Jetting,” as he proudly refers to it on his Facebook page). Mr. Lee hadn’t made Mr. Brady’s acquaintance either—not yet—though their meeting seemed preordained.

“Unlike me, Edward seems to be very well-liked and a lot less controversial, which means he sleeps better at night than I do,” Mr. Lee quipped.

Then Mr. Lee went over to greet Tabber Benedict, a slick-haired attorney whose khaki suit and classic looks gave him the appearance of an attendee at a convention of Patrick Bateman impersonators. If you squinted, he even resembled a clean shaven Clark Gable, or a more avuncular upgrade of reality TV-rake Scott Disick.

Edward Scott Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

As the two stopped to pose for a Guest of a Guest photographer, people in the crowd discussed the size of Mr. Brady’s loft. “This loft is, like, biggest loft in New York City,” said the impressionable Mr. Astafev.

Still, was one loft—whatever its size—big enough for all three men, for their grandiose personalities? The presence of the trio, all in one place, seemed to signal a small if meaningful shift in the city’s cultural history: After a long, dire post-Lehman cold snap, during which ostentatious displays of wealth, social bravado and dandyish fashion gambits were put into deep hibernation, something was stirring. Wall Street was no longer occupied. The impassioned battle cries of the stringy-haired sleeping-bag brigade, fulminating about the ample chasm separating the 99 and 1 percents, had faded. A socially ambitious lad no longer had to hide his Cartier cufflinks or Stubbs & Wootton slippers under a bushel. Suddenly it was okay again to venture into the limelight, okay to aspire to notoriety and social prominence.

Not everyone was ready to put it all out there, of course, but this was the vanguard. Call them the Gatsbabies: three dandyish gentlemen—but straight, mind you, very, very straight—who seemed to come out of nowhere. In this, they were not unlike the former James Gatz himself, on whom they unconsciously styled themselves, the emperor of West Egg, the subject of a million high school book reports and any minute now, a glistening slice of Oscar bait starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Baz Luhrmann.

“They’re products of the zeitgeist right now, and that zeitgeist is one of social media and ability to be your own kind of publicist,” said Rachelle Hruska, the founder of Guest of a Guest, which has helped cultivate the personas of both Mr. Lee and Mr. Brady.

“I think never before have people been able to kind of be their own publicist,” she added. “You can just get a Facebook page and just put basically anything you want on it about yourself all day long, and I think that’s what these three people excel at, is using social media to pump up their brand.”
Photographer Patrick McMullan agreed. “They want to be known, they want to be out there, they want to use their profiles to get more work and more girls,” he said, “and more fun.”
Mr. Brady stood amid the throng, holding a magnum of Cristal in each hand, his long hair slicked-back and his dark tailored suit hugging his athletic form. He greeted his female guests with a kiss on the cheek, often pausing to give a Guest of a Guest photographer a cocksure smirk as the ladies struck poses with him.

Like Gatsby, he seemed a little too good to be true. The open bar and free canapes for his hundreds of guests? The National Geographic-quality photographs? The crowd of beautiful and seemingly available women? Surely there was more to this guy than met the eye—or less. We turned to Mr. Benedict and asked if the scene was real or illusion.

“Being in the industry that you’re in, you of all people should understand,” he said. “Perception becomes reality.”

Tabber Benedict (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

A few days after the party, The Observer received a terse text from Mr. Brady asking us to call him. We had been reaching out to those who RSVP’d for his party, asking how they knew him, and word had come back to him that we were snooping around. In a faltering, nervous tone, he said he was caught off guard by it.

We explained to him that this was just simple reporting. We were doing our due diligence.

“I guess I have to get comfortable with what this media thing is,” he said with a sigh.

We found his response curious, given his highly visible activities. We had seen snaps of him surrounded by a gang of Indian women in their native country, shooting the breeze with the Hmong on the China-Vietnam border, posing casually with a cheetah somewhere in the African Sahara. Downtown Magazine dubbed him “The Most Interesting Man in The World.” His life was like a Tina-era issue of Vanity Fair. Why so shy all of the sudden?

The son of Edward Alden Brady, a former ship captain and Chevron salesman, he was raised in the Larchmont section of Westchester. They shared a name—Mr. Brady goes by “Scott” to help differentiate himself—and a talent for the cello. They also shared a wanderlust: the elder Mr. Brady traveled extensively for work (“He’s been around the world on a boat four times,” the son recalled).

Mr. Brady’s talent for the cello landed him at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, where he studied under Norman Fischer, a noted classical music teacher. The brawny Mr. Brady said he also played on the hockey team, eventually bowing out to protect his hands from potential injury.
When Mr. Fischer left Oberlin for a new position at Rice University in Texas, Mr. Brady followed him there and received the Fondren scholarship, earning his degree in in 1995.

At 25, he was awarded the 1998 Panasonic National Young Performers prize. At 27, he became one of the first Americans ever invited to a residency with a Russian orchestra at the Moscow Symphony. There, Mr. Brady endured 15-hour bus rides, eight-hour practices and a measly diet of canned food and scraps while somehow maintaining his sturdy physique (his fellow students, according to a 2000 Times article, nicknamed him Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The next year he returned to New York and started Musika, a private-music tutoring service that targeted wealthy areas in Westchester County and New Jersey. Musika grew from 15 teachers to 800 nationwide, becoming profitable enough for Mr. Brady to retire at the age of 33. He would not comment on Musika’s annual profits. “I can do pretty much whatever I want at this point,” he said. “I can travel, I’m able to lead the life I want to have.”

On Musika’s website, his biography elaborates on his “World Most Interesting Man” pedigree, noting that he is a member of Mensa, “an organization of people with high-level IQs.” (A spokeswoman for Mensa confirmed that an Edward Brady from New York was a member in 2003–2004, but said that his membership had since lapsed).

After his retirement, Mr. Brady set out to travel the world. His travel itinerary reads like a list of locations for a Bond film: playing polo in Abu Dhabi, surfing in Bocas del Toro, Panama; traveling across Madagascar in an ox-led transport.

The photos of his travels are sweeping and sensational in composition and tone, which has led some to believe that he hired a photographer to document his adventures.

“Everyone’s so curious about who’s taking the photographs,” he told us with a laugh. “I have a tripod, I have a Canon 5d Mark II, and there is a device called the Giga T Pro.” The device, he explained, acts as a remote release that can be activated from a quarter of a mile away. He uses it to capture himself in tender, social moments, like speaking with the female members of the Maasai tribe, which he then posts to his Facebook page.

“That’s why I identify with Scott,” said Mr. Lee, while seated in his Murray Heights office. “There’s no accidental postings. He’s methodical and I’m methodical.”

Perhaps, although that’s not the first term one might apply to Mr. Lee, who likes to say there are three things he never pays for: “parking, publicity and pussy.” His borscht-belt schtick and enormous bravado has brought him infamy (if Page Six still counts), sponsorships, and more publicity for Pretentious Pocket, his line of pocket squares, than might seem reasonable.
The day after his Times profile went online, he claimed he did three months worth of business in one day.

Justin Ross Lee (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

“I mean, I had them working through the Sabbath,” Mr. Lee said, nodding toward a quiet and severe-looking intern who was typing on a MacBook air. “I said, ‘No shul without drool.’”
He admitted that he played up his feud with the doorman at The Dream Downtown to provide some material for Bob Morris, the Times reporter who was following him around for the evening.
“I never would have gone to The Dream Downtown,” he said. “I was going there because I had a New York Times reporter behind me. I set him up and he’s stupid enough to walk right into the lion’s den.” [UPDATE: After this story was published, Mr. Lee wrote to say that he "misspoke and was referring to the stupid doorman," not to Mr. Morris. "Bob is a brilliant writer and journalist whom I respect."]

Such behavior is all part of the schtick. So is the peacockish attire—stylish and garish, in equal measure—guaranteed to draw glances. The Gatsbabies are not particularly concerned with how others see them, as long as they’re being seen.

“People look at me and they’re like, ‘That spoiled prick,’” said Mr. Benedict, a 35-year-old attorney who recently launched his own practice, Benedict Advisors LLC. He didn’t seem too concerned about that. Although there is one oft-made comparison he can’t abide.

“Don’t tell him he looks like Scott Disick. He hates that,” said one female friend. We brought up his resemblance to Clark Gable, and the woman paused. “I don’t know what Clark Gable looks like,” she said flatly.

Mr. Benedict says he has earned his pinstripe C. Oliver Custom Suits. At Mr. Brady’s party, he recalled a hardscrabble childhood in upstate New York, working lousy jobs at grocery stores and McDonald’s throughout high school while being raised by a single mom.

“I literally was using foodstamps,” he said. “Justin never did that. He wore nice Brooks Brothers clothes that his parents bought him, you know what I mean?”

He won a scholarship to Colgate while working in the school library, then went to Columbia Law School and put in time at White & Case and The ACE Group before eventually launching his own firm.

Mr. Benedict was at one time engaged to a woman he met through taxi driving matchmaker Ahmed Ibrahim (their pairing was featured in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article). He said he adopted the name “Thomas Pink,” a pseudonym he uses primarily on Facebook, in the interest of personal safety—to protect him from his now ex-fiancée.

“Girls would post on my [Facebook] wall funny things, and she would take it the wrong way,” he recalled.

There was also the enterprising stalker who broke into his Upper East Side apartment as he was attending a charity event. “She called and said, ‘I’m inside your apartment, Tabber. It’s really nice! My friend Tyrone is here, who has brought me some party favors,’” he said.

Nonetheless, he noted that getting his face out there as much as possible—attending the Seeds of Africa charity event, co-hosting the First Annual Post-Walk Celebration to Benefit Breast Cancer Victims—helps to shore up business.

“You don’t meet people in your bathroom, or like on your sofa, watching Game of Thrones,” he said. “I meet people out, and that’s how I meet my clients.”

Mr. Benedict and Mr. Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

We were at 286 Spring Street for the launch party of TheCityStreet.com, an “exclusive” global directory of bankers founded by former investment banker Vana Koutsomitis. Mr. Benedict did not know Ms. Koutsomitis, but as the party lagged, he pulled her aside and offered to call a photographer from Patrick McMullan’s agency. Within 30 minutes, the photographer arrived, Ms. Koutsomitis happily posed with friends and colleagues, and the vibe picked up considerably.

“He sort of looks like Scott Disick,” Ms. Koutsomitis whispered to us.

The night was a success for Mr. Benedict. He had walked in virtually a stranger, and had left with a few business cards of prospective clients. However, as he has learned, the more public the face, the less understanding the girlfriend.

“The last time I checked, I want my lawyer to be as discreet and dorky and smart as possible, not some philandering playboy,” said Elizabeth Stockton Howard, his blue-blooded, Princeton-educated paramour.

When asked what it’s like dating an internet personality, she replied, “It’s awful! I think about breaking up with him everyday because of that!”

Edward Scott Brady does not have a girlfriend to take issue with his activities. But he blanches at the idea that he is aggressively self-promotional.

“I never think I am actively necessarily promoting myself,” he said, sipping from a beer at the rooftop bar at the James Hotel. “I am just doing what I want to do, and traveling, and that is what I am becoming, and what people see me as. Why am I am traveling around the world? Because I want to do it. I’m not thinking about packaging.”

“Edward Scott doesn’t have the same media focus that Justin does, obviously,” said Mr. Benedict. “That’s Justin’s life. I would of course argue that I have a different focus than Justin, too. My focus is on more of the high-end charity events, because that’s what I care about. Justin does a lot more club parties.”

Differences aside, all three of them owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Fitzgerald’s indelible playboy.
“That was one of my nicknames,” Mr. Brady admitted. “‘Gatsby, what are you doing tonight?’ Especially in the Hamptons.”

“We tickle people’s curiosity,” Mr. Lee said. He’s found that, as it was for Gatsby, a certain air of mystery can be useful. “The first question I get is ‘What do you really do?’” he said. “And that’s how I know I’ve garnished their attention, and that’s how I know it’s a three-pointer.”
drosen@observer.com

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 (in the case of the latter), there was an Anna Sten; for every Clark Gable, there was a James Craig or a John Carroll; for every Myrna Loy, there was a Marsha Hunt.

But let’s face it, one Tyrone Power pays for a lot of failed male ingénues.

The studios’ basic modus operandi was to try to clone success, replicating those personalities and physical types that had already tickled the fans’ fancy. Robert Montgomery led to Franchot Tone; Tyrone Power led to Jeffrey Hunter, and so forth. That the imitation seldom brought an equivalent lightning down from the skies was irrelevant; the object was to feed a public need, as well as to let the talent feel some hot breath on the back of their neck. Nobody was irreplaceable.

The star system existed only because the movies used to be a volume business. If a studio is making 10 or 12 movies a year, you can just go buy people, which is what happens today. But if you’re making 40 or 50 a year, as was the norm in the 1920’s, 30’s and often in the 40’s, it’s much more economical to develop talent in-house.

There’s no real equivalent for this system in the movies today. But there is in TV—another volume business, where the star trajectory tends to go downward, from pay cable, or network, to lower-rung USA, then to Lifetime and, just before death, Sci-Fi. Every once in a while, miraculously, a George Clooney will claw his way up to movie stardom, but most of the time, stars, like water, have a way of finding their own level, which is why David Caruso has become the most outrageously Shatneresque of television hams.

That some of the types Jeanine Basinger writes about in her long, luxurious, often delicious book no longer exist—the classy WASP gentleman, for instance, exemplified on the high end by the miraculous, saucy William Powell, and on the low end by the frigid Robert Montgomery, or by distaff equivalents such as Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert—doesn’t negate what they meant to previous generations, and what they can still mean to us.

(One of the advantages of the long view is that it discourages smugness. For every old-time star who provokes a response of “What were they thinking?”, it’s always wise to imagine what succeeding generations will make of our bewildering nonentities—Meg Ryan and Matthew McConaughey, among many others.)

A lot of The Star Machine is about stars frozen in amber, locked in their time—Deanna Durbin, for instance. Ms. Basinger seems to think that some star types are dead and gone, conveniently staked through the heart, even though it seems to me that they’re still out there stalking innocent blood. Wallace Beery, for instance, is a genuine horror of loutish sentimentality, but the lovable-slob type persisted through Walter Matthau, John Belushi and Chris Farley—and have you looked at any of Billy Bob Thornton’s recent movies?

MS. BASINGER TELLS her story with her customary verve and sass—she’s the Rosalind Russell of film historians, though she might prefer to be compared to Glenda Farrell. She tosses off at least one line I wish I’d written: “[Mickey] Rooney had talent to burn, and he burned it.”

For much of The Star Machine, Ms. Basinger gives every indication of having a great time, mostly because she’s clearly scratching personal itches. Her piece about Tyrone Power, who deserves to get into actor’s heaven just for Nightmare Alley, is the best thing ever written about that sad, undervalued actor, who had everything going for him except timing. (He had the looks for his time, but he would have been better served by being an actor in our time.)

On the other hand, Ms. Basinger’s piece on Betty Grable feels longer than some of Grable’s movies, which is saying something. Sometimes, stars can be explained away with one simple sentence: “There was a war on.”

I do think that a book this intrinsically discursive shouldn’t be so long. For starters, I could easily have done without the last 30 pages, wherein Ms. Basinger attempts to bring things up to date by discussing people like Tom Cruise, Brendan Fraser and—the horror!—McConaughey.

But there is no star system anymore, and there hasn’t been since the studios dumped the contract system in the 50’s. A genuine star today is far more important than any studio, or any studio head, and that’s 180 degrees from the situation 60 years ago.

That low rumble you hear is Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner whirling in their tombs like lathes.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

With time, it’s become obvious that Hepburn possessed a sensuality all her own. Despite her ethereal appeal, she was strongly sexed: She had extramarital affairs with William Holden, Robert Anderson and Ben Gazzara. She was also a conflicted, somewhat morose personality, not far removed from Marilyn’s own fault lines.

Hepburn came out of war-torn Belgium with an abiding sense of the crevasse beneath the high wire, and a very odd bloodline: Her mother was a baroness, her father an emotionally remote fascist. (Both parents raised money for Oswald Mosley.) She came to acting through dance and was a star in both theater (Gigi, in 1951) and movies (Roman Holiday, in 1953) before she was 24.

As is often the case, her professional success was unmatched by personal satisfaction. Her first husband was the sepulchral, charmless Mel Ferrer, who tried to leverage their marriage into a directorial career; his successor was Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychiatrist with zipper problems. It was only near the end of her life, with her work for UNICEF and a relationship with the actor Robert Wolders, that she seems to have found some contentment.

There have been four or five books about Hepburn, the most emotionally intimate being a memoir by her son Sean. Donald Spoto thus comes to the party a bit late, shortly after issuing volumes on subjects as diverse as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Francis of Assisi and the efficacy of prayer. (Once as ubiquitous as the giddy, reliably goofy Charles Higham, Mr. Spoto’s output of gossipy but adoring biographies has slowed since he reconnected with his religious roots.)

Do we need yet another harvesting of this over-ploughed field? Probably not—especially not one with a weakness for buzz-kill transitions, like the subtitles in a Griffith Biograph that tell us what we’re about to see: “A terrifying accident interrupted filming on January 28.”

As he does in most of his books, Mr. Spoto brings to Enchantment a moist sensibility, presenting his subject as a near-divinity. Writing about Hepburn’s frequent pairings with much older male stars such as Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire, he writes, “The situation was very much like the tradition of medieval and Renaissance religious art, in which the youthful Virgin Mary is represented alongside her husband, Joseph—represented as a venerable old man, bearded and avuncular. The relationship, therefore, seemed chaste, free of the taint of carnal progress.”

This is ridiculous. Aging male stars of that generation often hitched their weathered glory to a younger star with more commercial or sensual heat: Witness Cary Grant and Sophia Loren in Houseboat; Clark Gable and Doris Day in Teacher’s Pet; Gable and Monroe in The Misfits; or, to take an example closer to the present day, Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in Six Days Seven Nights. (Decline and fall, neatly illustrated.)

It’s hard to give much credence to the judgments of an author who prefers the badly embalmed My Fair Lady (1964) to Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957)—and then compounds the error by calling the musical “in every visual detail … one of the great artistic achievements in popular entertainment.” What on earth is Mr. Spoto burbling about? The flowers in the foreground as Jeremy Brett lip-syncs “On the Street Where You Live”?

Having outraged common sense, Mr. Spoto foolishly forges on. Although Hepburn (along with Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins) is among the least convincing Cockneys in movie history, Mr. Spoto believes that her breathy little whisper of a singing voice should have been used instead of Marni Nixon’s. But My Fair Lady is carefully constructed for a Henry Higgins who can’t sing and an Eliza Doolittle who can. The film’s creative problems were planted when Jack Warner blundered and hired Audrey Hepburn instead of Julie Andrews, or anyone else who could sing—hence the need for Ms. Nixon’s soprano.

Mr. Spoto doesn’t write comprehensive biographies; rather, he targets his research so he can drop some fresh raisins into the porridge. In this case, there are the details of the financial hiding that Hepburn took at the beginning of her career—she was paid only about $12,000 for starring in Sabrina (1954), while William Holden got $80,000 and Bogart got $200,000.

Also interesting is the revelation that Kathryn Hulme, the author of The Nun’s Story, which Fred Zinnemann converted into one of his—and Hepburn’s—best movies, was in fact the lover of Marie Louise Habets, the book’s subject. Mr. Spoto opts for a prissier phrase—“soul mates”—but there’s no doubt what he’s talking about, which gives Sister Luke’s renunciation a meaning that would have seriously compromised the lofty idealism of Zinnemann’s film.

It’s become increasingly obvious that any great star makes mid-level biographies redundant. The truth of their being is in every close-up, and that truth is wrapped in a mystery mere words can’t dispel. Certainly, Audrey Hepburn’s performances in Funny Face (1957), The Nun’s Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Two for the Road (1967), Robin and Marian (1976) and, yes, Love in the Afternoon have a luminosity that’s nowhere to be found in this book.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Ms. Smith, now 82, originally of Fort Worth, Tex., has lived in New York City since 1949, but she still retains a thick, honeyed twang. She has written her column since 1976; it runs in the New York Post. Frank Sinatra once famously called her “a dumpy, fat, ugly broad.”

And this September, on the retirement of Variety’s Army Archerd after 52 years, instead of hiring some young punk, the Hollywood industry rag began a new institution: a weekly “In New York” column by Ms. Smith.

So what’s she up to? “I write all the time,” Ms. Smith said. “I think that people who have their health, who like to work, still get up every single morning just like everyone else. They’re still ambitious; they live in a state of attention, like everyone else, that the world is coming to an end and ‘Am I going to be fired?’ and ‘Will I cut the mustard today?’

“Peggy Lee said, ‘Success is loving your work,’ and I believe that’s true. If you love your work, you want to go on working. Retirement is just anathema as an idea to me. My whole identification with my own ego, my personal life and whatever my place is in New York City’s recent history is tied up in my work. I can’t imagine not getting up every morning and reading all the papers and magazines and trying to catch up on what’s going on,” she said.

Her columns seem, from the outside, a daunting feat. “It’s sort of like riding a tiger,” Ms. Smith said. “You can’t dismount. I think the routine of deadlines is very healthy for intrinsically lazy people like me.

“Also,” she added, “I’m very much aware that my energy is just a gift that I didn’t deserve. You know, anybody can get sick or have a heart attack or a stroke—even young people.

“And I think older people are all younger now than they used to be: 60 is like 40 now—though I won’t say 80 is like 60.” Ms. Smith laughed. “They do the same things that young people do—they just don’t stay out all night dancing in Tribeca. I don’t do that anymore.” Instead, she confines her nightly activities to the only slightly earlier-ending charity circuit.

In the decades that Ms. Smith has been writing, both the presentation and the manufacture of gossip have evolved.

“The celebrity craze has engendered a lot of interest in gossip, but I don’t think gossip ever changes that much—it’s just very hard for the standard print media to beat the bloggers,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t read the blogs, because I’m afraid I’ll believe them.”

Ms. Smith rarely plays the nasty heavy in her column, though she confesses to having thrown her weight around now and then. “I don’t need to do what everyone else is doing,” she said. “I’m not talented at doing that anyway. Besides, in my paper alone there are other places you can read that. And in the Daily News, and the 5,000 weekly magazines that have inflicted themselves on us every Monday, with all the same story. And they all look so much alike! You can’t tell People from Us Weekly or Fame Weekly or whatever the names are.

“I try to keep up,” she said, “but I confess I can’t. Half the time, I don’t know who people are talking about. I read Page Six, but I would say I don’t know 40 percent of the people they’re writing about.”

It’s true that, for anyone with a sense of history, today’s gossip landscape makes very little sense. “The studios used to manufacture someone like Clark Gable or Joan Crawford, and you didn’t know much about them, and what you did know probably wasn’t even true,” she said. “They had mystique. There are so many venues now for writing—and that’s why they all get written about, and you get so sick of them. The public has developed a very short attention span for real news. Four days later, they’re ready to junk it and move on to the latest tragedy, tsunami, accusation or whatever.

“Technology is driving us all over the edge—I can’t imagine what’s going to happen,” Ms. Smith said. “The only reason I’d like to just keep living on and on, if I had my health, would be just to see what’s going to happen. I’m enormously curious—which I suppose is why retirement wouldn’t suit me. I’d just become an insatiable news junkie, and I’d die somewhere hunched over the keyboard. So I would much rather be working and going out and dressing up.”

Speaking of which: “Honey, can I go? I just put on some lipstick and everything,” Ms. Smith said. “If you need something, I’ll be writing at home over the weekend about Truman Capote for Harper’s Bazaar.”

Despite being 3,000 miles from our usual turf, we couldn't resist offering a peek at Morrissey's lavish limestone bath. Several years ago, he decided that sunny California was a worthy substitute to gloomy Manchester.

But Morrissey isn't the only celebrity owner of this Hollywood Hills mansion. In fact, the Mediterranean-style house was built by Clark Gable for Carole Lombard, and later owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Note to obsessive fans: he's already moved out. And if Smiths lyrics offer any indication of his future plans, he "would rather not go back to the old house."

- Michael Calderone

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 meat and marrow had been sucked from the bones.

Mr. Wallach's gusto could have led to his being lumped in with Anthony Quinn as a rather overly vital ham with a gift for playing peasants. But, as with Quinn, a long look at the career in question shows that the gentleman has chops.

The Good, the Bad and Me is a genial autobiography, fairly typical of a book undertaken by an author of great age-Mr. Wallach is 90 this year-in that the early years are the most vividly remembered.

Which brings me to a rhetorical question: What is it about Brooklyn, anyway? Florence during the Renaissance would be hard-pressed to compete with the literary raptures inspired by Park Slope during the Depression. Mr. Wallach begins his book with a paragraph that Hemingway might admire for its concision and specific visual impact: "Union Street was a wide main artery running from Prospect Park past Park Slope down to the docks of the East River. Number 166 housed Bertha's, a small toy, candy, and stationary store named for my mother. A long glass counter ran the length of the store. There was an icebox for soda pop and a pay telephone. On the back wall of the store were shelves, which held toys, big jars of Indian nuts, and cigarettes."

The Good, the Bad, and Me doesn't sustain this level of spare magic, and soon we segue into the land of "And then I played …. " As the subtitle indicates, Mr. Wallach's book is primarily an anthology of anecdotes about actors and acting. His innate enthusiasm rather attractively translates into an appreciation for his fellow craftsmen.

Initially intimidated by working with Clark Gable on The Misfits (1961), Mr. Wallach soon realized that Gable "was an inordinately shy man who enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow actors. He was a true professional, always on time and line perfect …. He never talked about movies; he talked about growing up in Ohio, doing summer stock, acting Shakespeare …. He had a great laugh and enjoyed teasing me when I'd prepare for a scene using exercises I'd learned at the Actors Studio. 'Oh, you're at it again,' he would say with a laugh. 'Maybe I'll try those exercises in our next scene.'"

The legendarily difficult production ground everybody down. At a birthday party, Marilyn Monroe, who had been having a heated discussion with Arthur Miller, stood up and began yelling: "You don't understand women …. I am a film actress and I know what I'm doing. Stop interfering. Why don't you let John [Huston] direct?" Later that night, Mr. Wallach ran into Monroe in a hotel corridor. "Oh, you Jewish men," she snapped, before slamming the door to her room. It was the last thing she said to him.

As with any good autobiography, the author tells stories on himself. Buoyed by a great laugh he got on stage in Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, Mr. Wallach bragged about his comic expertise to the old pro Ernest Truex. The next night, the line died. Truex came knocking at his door. "Wallach," he said, "you're not the only one onstage when you get your laugh …. Your laugh came about because there are other actors skillfully setting up the situation for you."

And, obviously, not setting up the situation if they didn't feel like it.

Mr. Wallach reveals that John Sturges' uncredited assistant director on The Magnificent Seven (1960) was Emilio Fernández, El Indio himself, once upon a time the director of such films as Maria Candelaria and The Pearl-perhaps the most rapturously photographed series of movies since Josef von Sternberg stumbled on an entertainingly insolent young woman named Dietrich. But Fernández had been temporarily blackballed from directing after shooting a critic in the balls-perhaps the ultimate example of man biting dog.

As you wend your way through the book, a theme gradually becomes apparent: What Mr. Wallach admires is professionalism combined with technique combined with … something else, something that can't be completely explained, let alone analyzed-for lack of a better term, star quality. Henry Fonda tearing up every night at the same moment in the Broadway version of Mister Roberts might be ascribed to impeccable technique, but what about Fonda's apparently effortless projection of integrity?

Mr. Wallach is blind in one eye, hobbled by hip replacements, but he goes on, and he respects others who do the same, as with his old co-star Clint Eastwood, who brought him back for one scene in Mystic River (2003). After saying hello, Mr. Eastwood's next sentence was: "Any time you're ready, Eli." "Not one word of direction was given," writes Mr. Wallach.

And always, there's the animal vitality familiar from his acting. Mr. Wallach compares acting in the theater to sex: "curtain up, foreplay, excitement, then finally an orgasmic release, curtain down. In film, there's action, foreplay, excitement, and just before you reach the glorious moment of release, the director yells 'Cut! Let's do this scene again.'"

As you might have guessed, there's a lot in The Good, the Bad, and Me about working with Sergio Leone in the concluding film of the Man With No Name trilogy. The fact that a Brooklyn Jew became famous for playing Mexican bandits-in The Magnificent Seven, How the West Was Won (1962) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)-certainly speaks to the democratic Mixmaster nature of the movies.

I would've liked more about working with the underrated Richard Brooks on Lord Jim (1965), and perhaps a more searching appraisal of Elia Kazan, surely the movie and theatrical talent most in need of a great biography. But any book that takes in Huston, Leone, Mr. Eastwood, Monroe, Gable, Charles Laughton and Tennessee Williams, not to mention humanizing the legendarily explosive Henry Hathaway, has more than enough pillars to support a very pleasant edifice indeed.

Scott Eyman is the author of the newly published Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer (Simon and Schuster). He reviews books regularly for The Observer.

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 is no small

attraction.) Back then, studio moguls and directors were not averse to a

glimpse of female flesh on the screen.

But even the most lecherous of the old-timers would be

struck dumb by the exposed flesh of today, a landscape that fills the screen

like an IMAX travelogue of the female anatomy. Am I alone in finding something

embarrassingly retrograde in the spectacle of actresses having to compete with

their own body parts? Legs that are longer than ski slopes, skirts shorter than

a New York spring, bottoms as compact as a Palm Pilot. When skin looms larger

than face or personality, it's hard to take a character seriously. The leg

display on Ally McBeal annoyed women

and undermined any legal-eagle authority the character might have, even within

the show's comic framework. I notice the microskirts are gone this year.

But it's breasts, great mammary mountains and silicon

valleys, that now dominate the cinematic vista: veritable Himalayas heaving and

strutting, rising and falling and threatening to overflow their

suspension-bridge bras and support structures, designed less as containers than

launching pads for a game of hide-and-seek with the nipples. Everywhere you

look are breasts that sit up and bark for your attention, knockers that knock

on your door and demand to be admitted, mammary glands that have a dramatic

life of their own-and for all I know, their own agent. (Possibly their own

lawyer, if implants are involved.)

Fifteen of the reported 20 pounds that Renée Zellweger

gained to play the neurotic Bridget Jones seem to have landed in the upper-body

region, creating a milky white shelf that exists in a titillatingly wayward

relationship-now under restraint, now propelled forward-with her undergarment.

The actress has enough real-girl charm to override the aggressive frontage, but

it's hard not to feel pangs of embarrassment.

Ditto Julia Roberts' in-your-face cleavage in Erin Brockovich , a bit of

special-effects virtuosity that certainly should have won a technical award.

O.K., so the real Erin Brockovich is a good ol' girl jangling her sex like a

royal jewel. What's tacky-cute in real life becomes-in the broad (both senses

of the word) aesthetic of contemporary cinema-a magnification of Brobdingnagian

proportions. Ms. Roberts, like Ms. Zellweger, has such down-to-earth appeal

that her frontal swagger can be made to blend, if incompletely, into the whole,

so that we only occasionally wish she had toned it down.

Heartbreakers is

the latest entry in the breast-o-rama sweepstakes. In this mother-daughter

grifter comedy, Sigourney Weaver's and Jennifer Love Hewitt's highly visible

breasts (the only physical gene shared by this Mutt-and-Jeff couple) threaten

to topple not only their possessors, but the deftly constructed farcical dance

in which they star. Whose idea is the frontal focus, and whom precisely is it

meant to attract?

Let's say these actresses, being no longer indentured

servants, bear some share of the credit or blame. Sigourney Weaver was no doubt

eager to shed her Ripley action gear and show how fabulous a 51-year-old woman

can look (very!), while Jennifer Love Hewitt wanted to escape the straitjacket

of the reputation she earned as America's television sweetheart on Party of Five . But there's something to

be said for a straitjacket, especially in its more modified form: a girdle that

conceals rather than reveals; the slinky gowns and satin lingerie of the

aforementioned pre-Code actresses, which turn the whole body into undulating

visual music without overwhelming the face.

You might argue that these movies are just expressing a

different taste in female beauty. But whose taste? Not adult men: I checked out

some online reviews of Heartbreakers ,

and male critics who, like me, were favorably disposed to the film nevertheless

objected to the mammary excess. If all this flesh is a bid to grab that

all-important male audience-teenagers who are more comfortable with a Hee Haw view of sex-then, like so many

of today's market-driven movies, it fails. It loses the sophisticates without

having enough vulgarity for the kiddy crowd.

Not since the postwar obsession with pin-up girls has there

been so much footage of frontage in the movies. (Remember Howard Hughes' ad for

The Outlaw , featuring double-barreled

Jane Russell and the tag line "Two good reasons why every red-blooded American

male should see this movie"?) In the 50's, among my gang of teenage friends-who

based our body ideal on Audrey Hepburn-big "boobs" were considered déclassé, an

unseemly invitation to lewd attention that would classify us as the wrong kind

of girl. But now the popularity of augmentation, the off-the-chart sales of

push-up bras, says women are into buxom as much as men. It's seen as one of the

weapons in the escalating battle of the sexes, nuclear firepower as opposed to

earlier, more primitive weaponry. The flagrantly busty gold-diggers played by

Marilyn Monroe and Russell in Howard Hawks' Gentlemen

Prefer Blondes were like female gunslingers, their knockers the equivalent

of the Western hero's six-shooters.

But what kind of woman wants the kind of man who would drool

over cleavage? Hawks suggested the answer in the peculiar group of swains

gathered round Russell and Monroe: little boys wanting to rest their heads on

mamma's breasts; geezers seeking trophy gals. However demure those two "little

girls from Little Rock" might look by today's standards, and even with the

media canonization of Monroe, there was something grotesque about the way she

advertised her anatomical assets. When breasts are your bid for fame and

fortune in the mating game, the part that stands for the whole, what does that

say about the whole?

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 outside inside, hangs a frame on it and turns one story into two: You watch to look at the people, even though you can get the same experience looking out your window. But you also watch so you can scratch your head and think, Who's making this? Why am I watching this? Where's that chick's going? I wonder if she has a boyfriend? [Manhattan Neighborhood Network, 16, midnight.]

Thursday, July 16

There's a rumor that Brian Unger, a correspondent at The Daily Show , will replace pretty-boy Craig Kilborn as host when he leaves for his own show. Which would be good. Before joining Comedy Central two years ago, Mr. Unger was a producer at Eye to Eye With Connie Chung at CBS, a job where, he said, there was "not a lot of opportunity to go all the way to the edge." How does he get to the edge at The Daily Show ? By "rebelling against hero culture" and "focusing on ordinary people who live mundane lives and do insignificant things because they deserve their 15 minutes, too." Like the guy in Florida who wants to be Tom Arnold's body double ….

But he's got two strikes against him so far: He is tall and dark instead of frat-boy blond, and he is a buddy and sitcom-writing partner of Kilborn-nemesis Lizz Winstead. "I watch Rivera Live a lot," said Mr. Unger. "I just dig the whole show, it's like a circus. Unedited chaos. I watch Magic Johnson religiously. He is the grin that stole late-night. Rarely have you seen a train wreck within a train wreck. I also like the local news. I love WCBS's virtual set, I feel like I'm watching a video game. I like Chuck and Sue for their rapport, I like Chopper Seven 'cause … they're always telling us that every bridge in Manhattan is backed up." …

So would you take the job? "I would. We are bumping up against the wall a little bit with the way the show is structured now … but I think that, on a personal note, it's like having a crush on a girl who's not going to go with you to the dance." [Comedy Central, 45, 11 P.M.]

Friday, July 17

Thirty-year-old chef Bobby Flay (Mesa Grill, Bolo) was getting lonely doing one-man food shows, so he found himself a sidekick (comedienne Jacqui Malouf) and created a show called Hot Off the Grill With Bobby Flay . "You have to find yourself on camera," said the native New Yorker. (Turns out Emeril Lagasse's loudmouth TV persona is fake! "He's actually really sweet and soft-spoken," said Mr. Flay.) "In The Main Ingredient , I was really hyper, but now what you see is really Bobby Flay," said the redhead from the Mesa Grill kitchen…

The show is the first cooking show to depart from the no-frills kitchen setting. Name-brand guests sip expensive drinks in an al fresco kitchen and carry on playful conversations with Bobby (Bo) and Jacqui (who's hoping the show turns into "the Conan of food"). They cook. May sound contrived, like aerobics shows at the beach, but watching Bobby Flay cook is fun–rapid-fire, graceful, with the economy of movement of a good cabdriver, or the cart guy who gets your coffee in three swift moves…

In general, Bobby Flay attributes his success to this fact: He knows "how to feed New Yorkers." "When you walk into our restaurants, we want your blood pressure to go up a little," he said. "People want to be excited, they want big-flavored food, it's got to be an event." His dream guest, James Carville, has already been on. "I think he kicks ass. He's a total foodie; I was nervous before he came on. We dig each other. We made soft-shell crab sandwiches."…

If you had a week to eat in Manhattan where would you go? "I think the best food is in New York: Daniel; Jean Georges; J.G. Melon for a cheeseburger without a doubt; Felidia, the greatest Italian food in New York; Il Buco; Peter Luger; and Nobu. I think the greatest meal in New York is at Nobu. I just think it's so good. Drink that cold, frozen sake and let them cook." Bobby, what's with all the food shows? "Food has become important in this country in the last 10 years. In the 80's it was like everyone was doing all these drugs, and now we're spending our money drinking martinis and eating good food." Today: Korean-style marinated skirt steak for Bobby's guest, drummer Max Weinberg. [Food Network, 50, 1 A.M.]

Saturday, July 18

When Gabé Doppelt, VH1's creative director for fashion, called up Unzipped director Douglas Keeve and asked him to direct a movie about Naomi Campbell, he was a little skeptical. "I never worked for television so I imagined the worst," said the 40-year-old former fashion editor. "I imagined something plodding and not terribly intelligent."…

But guess what? He was able to "make a film about someone who turned out to be mesmerizing," said Mr. Keeve. "She's pretty captivating. It's incredibly fast-paced. My style is fly-by, especially with documentary, and I get bored very quickly." The film revolves around Naomi's trip to South Africa, where she produced and hosted a fashion show to benefit Nelson Mandela's children's charity….

"When you combine the incredible world that she lives in and the incredible things, both disastrous and fabulous, that happen to her, I have to say I think, for television, it's as good as it gets," said Mr. Keeve. How good? "Well, the amazing thing is that in most people's lives, something incredible happens like once a year and with Naomi … one day it's a fistfight on the airplane, the next a millionaire kid is buying her jewelry, the next she's supposed to be in a fashion show but has diarrhea and can't get off the toilet. You can do a documentary in five days that for most people would take a year." [VH1, 19, 10 P.M.]

Sunday, July 19

Madeline marathon. Three hours of the animated version of Ludwig Bemelmans' schoolgirl. If they'd only do a cartoon that took place in the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle: "Once there was a little weenie/ Who could drink a very big martini/ He was your basic novelist manqué/ Who liked to get stinko in his 'banquet'…" [Disney Channel, 33, 10 A.M.]

Another E! True Hollywood Story to make you question how you spend your time. Everything you probably didn't need to know about One Day at a Time star Mackenzie Phillips, the less-cute sister who was eventually fired for a drug and alcohol addiction that lasted 20 years. "We had the run of the rock-and-roll world," said Ms. Phillips of her 70's life. "You know, we went everywhere in helicopters and limousines and some Lear jets." Things are different now: "I would like to have a nice, quiet life. I don't want to go to parties and meet stars. I just want to work in my chosen profession, stay sober and be somebody's mom. Simple." [E!, 24, 8 P.M.]

Monday, July 20

After The Cosby Show ended in 1992, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played Theodore Huxtable, moved out to Los Angeles, starred in a short-lived sitcom called Here and Now , started directing for television (mostly for Nickelodeon) and got another sitcom, Malcolm & Eddie , one of the few asked back for next year. In his spare time, the 27-year-old has a spoken-word band and a jazz funk band and writes poetry. He read this one, "She Excites Me":

Am I too old,

To sometimes simply lose control?

Cause I just want to drop to my knees and

plead with her to abuse my soul

She makes me want to cry just to see if the

tears come cause I envision her

tongue tasting each drop one by one …

NYTV asked Mr. Warner the following: Do you think The Magic Hour is trying to appeal to too broad an audience? …

"That in itself is a difficult call," he said. "Arsenio did not initially go for an urban audience, there just wasn't anything else exciting in late-night television. But then the audience broadened, and now you have rappers and urban artists who are finally getting late-night airplay that weren't getting airplay on Letterman or Carson . Arsenio expanded that audience … To say we're going to have a black late-night talk show, I think, just from a business perspective, isn't smart. If you look at the numbers and numbers of late-night talk shows, period, it would be pretty difficult to sustain a late-night talk show only geared to one audience. But even if Arsenio came back today, he wouldn't have the same numbers as he had before." …

How long are they going to give it?…

"I think Fox has a lot of hopes for the show, and, quite honestly, what else is there? So they're going to give it some time to let it find its way … Part of the problem with African-American sitcoms is they have such a limited vision on how we can be funny. Almost every African-American sitcom, with the exception of Cosby and Family Matters , tends to perpetuate the same stereotypes. There were only two in the history of TV where you had characters who were clearly black but did not have to act black. It didn't have to be "Yo, yo, yo" or "Your momma" or shucking and jiving…

"There are not a lot of people of color in strong executive positions in television. For anyone who has a goal of expanding that vision, there is a lot of muck to have to get through. Sometimes you have to re-educate a network, a studio, or even fellow actors, because we've only seen being funny in certain situations." Tonight: The guys' feud threatens to end their friendship. [WWOR, 9, 8:30 P.M.]

Tuesday, July 21

You know you're in the middle of summer when the networks air Christmas-themed repeats to practically taunt you for watching TV. On a repeat Soul Man , a suicidal elf tries to jump from a church steeple, and on Spin City , the gang tries to restore a little boy's belief in Santa. [WABC, 7, 8:30 and 9 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

John Ford always used to say that he tried to alternate his pictures by doing "one for them" and then "one for myself," meaning he would accept an assignment to satisfy the studios and the box office, and this would often enable him to get the backing for his more risky, personal projects. Ironically, sometimes the ones "for them" have endured as well, if not better, than the others because of that intriguingly complicated tension between material and a director's way of handling it, an aspect of film which was among the most basic tenets of the French politique des auteurs , and is also one of the most difficult things to see in, and to convey about, a movie. A good example from Ford's work is his evocative, though largely forgotten, 1953 African love story starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly as the extremely potent sides of a triangle in Mogambo [Sunday, July 19, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 6 P.M.; also on videocassette] .

It was, in fact, a remake: Gable himself had played the same role opposite Jean Harlow (doing Gardner's part) two decades earlier in one of his first big successes (also still a pretty fair picture), Red Dust (1932), directed by Victor Fleming. But Fleming was a competent though impersonal director, very dependent for quality on his script and cast, while Ford is among the precious few U.S. directors who could be called a poet. Orson Welles called him "a poet and comedian," and both qualities are apparent in the gloriously color-photographed Mogambo –an uninspired title with no known meaning: Legend has it the producer made up the name as a variant on his favorite nightclub, the Mocambo.

Gable plays an aging big-game hunter who basically makes his living by taking tourists on safaris. Kelly is the repressed, frustrated, spoiled and slightly hysterical wife of a pleasant young British anthropologist who hires Gable's services while Kelly yearns for his services elsewhere. Gardner is a worldly-wise showgirl who happens to get stranded at Gable's place and, after an antagonistic beginning, allows herself an affair with him, only to become humiliated when he takes up with Kelly. Ford's unusual treatment of all this is what gives the picture its distinction–that, combined with the three actors' excellent performances and their individual star personas. Gable lets himself be more unbuttoned than usual, more reckless, a consummate cocksman, often a heel. Kelly, in her last non-starring picture and her best work for anyone other than the three Hitchcocks that followed, was nominated by the Academy for best supporting actress. Rumor has it that she and Gable had an affair during the shooting, and their love scenes certainly don't disprove it. Gardner, whom then-husband Frank Sinatra was visiting through some of the filming, was nominated as best actress for unquestionably her finest job in any movie; she's just brilliant in it.

Of course, Ford slants the film totally in Gardner's favor, making her not only the most sympathetic character but, in one sequence after another, things are subtly shown from her perspective, and she receives the most loving close-ups. Ford clearly adored her. In Gardner's first scene, the meeting between her and Gable, notice how Ford shoots her in the closer angle so that we are unconsciously seeing Gable from her point of view, and therefore identifying more with her than with him. This is typical of Ford's empathy with the underdog: Remember his treatment of Claire Trevor's "fallen woman" in Stagecoach (1939) or even Linda Darnell's misguided spitfire as she died in My Darling Clementine (1946).

It was Ford's idea not to use a score for Mogambo , the only music being African tribal rhythms he recorded on location. His way of playing certain scenes without a cut or not going to a reaction shot when you most expect it, his expressive choice of where to put the camera and therefore the emphasis–all these give the work a personal intensity, a dynamic quite apart from the script or the actors, which used to be what direction was all about. Speaking of influences in the movies, Howard Hawks once admitted to me that, "It's hard to make a picture without thinking of Jack Ford." Just watching Ford do his thing on Mogambo becomes a valuable lesson in the reasons why Hawks said that.