No fool for Hollywood, Variety reporter Hofler gets off a lot of good lines as he tells this familiar tale of Hollywood gays...
Bedroom journalism about a Hollywood talent agent who—surprise!—shaped actors’ careers in return for sex.
Truck driver Roy Fitzgerald had bad teeth and used bad grammar. But the tall hunk also had a great face and great pecs. Agent Henry Willson played a hunch that someone with Fitzgerald’s all-American image would excite audiences who, after World War II, liked their men heroic and brawny. Willson had the actor’s teeth fixed and gave him an iconic name, Rock Hudson. A block of oak as an actor, Hudson nevertheless became a top box-office star, cueing Willson to turn Arthur Gelien into Tab Hunter, Robert Moseley into Guy Madison, Francis Durgin into Rory Calhoun, etc., etc. Besides paying Willson ten percent of their earnings, the actors were expected to sleep with Willson, who was gay and a troll in the looks department. Most actors, including some who were straight, gave in. The success of his clients kept actors showing up at Willson’s office or by his pool, reportedly the scene of orgies. More than a lecher, Willson could be generous with his boys (he supported Hudson during the actor’s first year in Hollywood) and gave them canny career advice. The agent could also be treacherous. When Confidential magazine threatened to expose Hudson as gay, Willson bartered the rag’s silence about Hudson for tales about Calhoun’s prison record and Hunter’s arrest at a gay party (see Tab Hunter Confidential, p. 776). To butch up Hudson’s image, Willson arranged a marriage between his secretary and the future star of Pillow Talk. And to keep blackmailers off Hudson’s trail, Willson let loose the hounds—off-duty cops and mafia men.
No fool for Hollywood, Variety reporter Hofler gets off a lot of good lines as he tells this familiar tale of Hollywood gays in the ’50s.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1607-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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