MGM with lots of pulp. (Eight pages of photos)
Slipshod biographies of the men who roared at MGM.
Given that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was one of the most successful and influential film studios during Hollywood’s golden age, a take on its leading male stars is entirely in order. As actors, just how great were Tracy and Gable? What sort of masculinity emanated from two of the studio’s biggest stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly? Look for little insight here into those or other related topics. Wayne (The Golden Girls of MGM, 2003, etc.), who has penned nine other Hollywood bios, reveals her slant early on. Interviewing the famous, she writes in her preface, is “a waste of time.” The “unknown starlets” bent on revenge are much more reliable, while prostitutes who serviced the stars are even better sources, especially on their clients’ penis sizes. Thus, Wayne reveals that some stars (Frank Sinatra, for example) were bigger than others (Gable, alas). Overall, it seems, Wayne spends perhaps more time in her subjects’ bedrooms than she does on the sets of their pictures. She reports, for instance, that Spencer Tracy sometimes suffered impotence, Robert Taylor was rumored to be bisexual, and Van Johnson was presumed by some actors to be gay. As for the films these MGM Boys (as they were called) starred in, the author seldom has more than a word or a phrase for them: Sea of Grass, she writes, was “a miserable picture,” and so on. Tossing off more clichés than there are in a shelf of romance novels, and leaning heavily on previously published accounts, Wayne goes on to rehash the tired details of the men’s lives. Peter Lawford ran interference when John F. Kennedy had sex with Marilyn Monroe. Frank Sinatra was hopelessly besotted by Ava Gardner. Clark Gable broke into pictures by having sex with openly gay actor William Haines. Frankly, though, few will give a damn.
MGM with lots of pulp. (Eight pages of photos)Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1475-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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