Belletti, alas, was a prosaic stylist, but her ingenuous point of view lends her stories charm.
Snapshots from Hollywood’s early days.
The film business may have boomed in the 1920s, but Samuel Goldwyn’s secretary Valeria Belletti still had enough down time to get off long letters to lifelong friend Irma Prima back in New York City. Belletti’s correspondence survives, presented here with film scholar and author Beauchamp filling in background notes on some of the films and filmmakers Belletti mentioned to her friend. Belletti wrote to Irma that she approached Goldwyn with trepidation since he had a reputation for being a terror. Mrs. Goldwyn soon told Valeria the mogul liked her—after all, hadn’t he entrusted her to order bootleg booze for one of his parties? Belletti also got to know the stars on the Goldwyn lot—Ronald Coleman, Rudolph Valentino and an awkward, shy young actor she insisted Goldwyn hire, Gary Cooper. (Her potential courtship with Cooper faded as he headed to stardom.) Belletti also told her friend what was happening on and off the set. Especially poignant is an anecdote about Belle Bennett, who arrived to play the eagerly sought title role in Stella Dallas on the same day her teenaged son died of a sports injury. A single mother, Bennett had told people the boy was her brother. Writing about her personal life, Belletti often falls into a dullish “I’m fine/how are you” tone. However Bohemian her friends may have been, their behavior never rivaled that of their often scandalous Hollywood neighbors. “We sat in front of a big fireplace,” Belletti writes of an afternoon tea, “and had an enjoyable afternoon.”
Belletti, alas, was a prosaic stylist, but her ingenuous point of view lends her stories charm.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-520-24551-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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