Kirkus Reviews QR Code
GEORGE RAFT by Lewis Yablonsky

GEORGE RAFT

By

Pub Date: June 19th, 1974
ISBN: 0595010032
Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Yablonsky's no stylist but Raft has all the style needed to make this the most roguishly appealing movie bio since Errol Flynn's My Wicked Wicked Ways. And the sexiest. At his peak, Raft used up two and three starlets and chorines a day as bedmates, morn and night, year after year. But this herculean activity is not the story's mainstay. What captures us is the Raft tone, the shoes and hair like patent leather (he used a full jar of vaseline daily on his hair), the dark Latin gigolo smoothie whose sensuous tango matched Elvis the Pelvis for driving 'em wild, though his lips never moved when he delivered his lines. Among his conquests: Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer. One night he bangs seven in a row, "". . . it was like a cascade of different bodies, shapes, and colors of dresses, chemises, panties, and perfume scents."" Perhaps the highlight is the day Carole Lombard strips to the buff in her dressing room and starts dabbing her ""honeypot"" with peroxide. ""She glanced up, saw my amazed look, and smiled. 'Relax, Georgie. I'm just making the collar and cuffs match.'