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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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