A familiar but fun Hollywood tale.
The history of Hollywood plays out in the corridors and bedrooms of an iconic hotel.
In his latest, biographer Levy (Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome, 2016, etc.) turns to an inanimate subject as colorful and outrageous as some of the living subjects he’s covered—e.g., Paul Newman, Porfirio Rubirosa, and the Rat Pack. The author chronicles the history of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, suggesting that its story “parallels the story of Hollywood so thoroughly as to be inseparable from it.” Levy’s history is both staid and juicy. A lesser-known aspect of the history begins in 1926 when Fred Horowitz, a prominent attorney, envisioned an apartment building modeled on a French castle in the Loire Valley. Horowitz built an earthquake-proof structure of “pale stone, slate-gray gables, balconies, Gothic archways, and turrets.” The denizens of Hollywood adored the place, making it, to this day, their own. Levy diligently details the effect on the hotel over the years of its different owners. Some nurtured the property while others saw it as part of a business deal. The place changed from an apartment to a hotel; it thrived, it turned seedy, and then, in the new millennium, morphed into a luxury hotel. What kept celebrities checking in was a staff that looked the other way. Leaning on previously published accounts, the author tells what went on at the discreet hideaway. Tony Perkins and Tab Hunter began a clandestine liaison at the hotel. Working on Rebel Without a Cause (one of many films developed on the premises), director Nicholas Ray had an affair with 16-year-old Natalie Wood. The most infamous event at the hotel occurred in 1982, when John Belushi died of a drug overdose in a hotel bungalow. The Marmont survived the scandal, and, in 2018, the tiniest room went for a price of $500 per night.
A familiar but fun Hollywood tale.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54316-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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