Well-observed reflections for true fans of the silver screen.
Background becomes foreground in this take on actors with memorable faces and forgotten names.
As a young man in the 1970s gazing up at the silver screens of the Thalia, the Art, and the Bleeker Street—Manhattan’s film classic revival cinemas—Lazar learned about the importance of supporting actors—e.g., Edward Everett Horton and Ruth Donnelly in the comedy Holiday, who upstaged the film’s stars, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. In personal, insightful essays, the author defines the brilliance of second-billed players such as Horton and Donnelly as well as many others (Eric Blore, Jessie Royce Landis, Franklin Pangborn) in Hollywood films from the 1930s through the 1960s. Lazar divides his subjects into two categories: actors whose quirks, mannerisms, and attitudes remained constant in all of their films and actors who created a gallery of completely different characters. Among the former group, the titular Holm, along with Eleanor Parker, Nina Foch, and Eve Arden, played chic, mature, canny women whom male leads ultimately threw over for bland, unthreatening leading ladies. At the time, Hollywood’s version of patriarchy ruled. Throughout, Lazar limns his subjects with wit. Holm’s voice in All About Eve, he writes, was “tonic to [Bette] Davis’s gin.” But his essays transcend reminiscence. A look at the difficult Oscar Levant reflects on the broader nature of character itself, and, inevitably, the observations on the performers reflect on the author. A perceptive chapter on actors notable for playing mothers leads to Lazar’s sensitive memories of his own mother. Most entertaining, though, is the penultimate chapter, about Martin Balsam. The actor was a close friend of Lazar’s father, a successful travel agent who himself knew a bit about acting: He impersonated VIPs on the phone to get “unavailable” rooms and plane reservations, and he once foiled a robbery by feigning a faint.
Well-observed reflections for true fans of the silver screen.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0045-7
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.
The Oscar-winning actor and producer opens up about filmmaking, sex, drugs, and escaping his father’s shadow.
Despite its casual, just-shooting-the-breeze title, Douglas’ memoir is detailed and precision-engineered to entertain; as a filmmaker who won his first Oscar as a producer (for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), he knows a successful story needs clarity and conflict to work. The son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, he was well-acquainted with celebrity at an early age; witnessing his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his youth acting out. (He paid for college by selling weed by the suitcase-load.) After years of stalls and failures, he broke through on TV with the ’70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco. But small-screen work (along with his nepo-baby status) made breaking into big-screen roles harder until 1984’s Romancing the Stone made him a star and 1987’s Wall Street earned him a second Oscar. Douglas is candid about his industry struggles—like endless budget fights and betraying his father, who was promised the lead in Cuckoo’s Nest—and his reputation as a lothario. (Though married, he had an on-set affair with Kathleen Turner during Stone.) He’s also open about his alcohol and cocaine abuse, leading to a rehab stint, echoed in his son Cameron’s own struggles with addiction and recovery. He’s comfortable discussing controversies—the LGBTQ+ community’s protests of 1992’s Basic Instinct, his proto-MAGA character in 1993’s Falling Down—and plainly keeps an enemies list. But this story arc leaves him triumphant, with a loving wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his family, his health (after a cancer scare), and a late-career Emmy for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013).
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781538782224
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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