AND INTRODUCING DEXTER GAINES: A Novel of Old Hollywood, lovely way to spend an afternoon

AND INTRODUCING DEXTER GAINES: A Novel of Old Hollywood
MARK B. PERRY
Amble Press(non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook edition, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Emmy, Golden Globe, and GLAAD Award-winning writer Mark B. Perry deftly weaves fictional characters with well-known personalities of Hollywood’s golden age into this powerful and sparkling novel about the wages of flesh and sin.

HOLLYWOOD, 1952

Blessed with the smoldering good looks that destine him for the silver screen, the unfortunately named Dan Root arrives on the scene as a naïve but ambitious 21-year-old. Mentored and exploited by a powerful and dashing Svengali-like producer and his beguiling wife (a movie star whose career is on the tragic cusp between fame and fade out), Dan is transformed into the promising young actor, Dexter Gaines.

Soon their three lives become dangerously entangled by sexual awakening and unrequited love, but when their passion and deceit lead to a crushing discovery and attempted murder, Dexter is forced to choose between stardom and survival. Four decades later, a heartbreaking event compels Dan to return to the city of lost dreams and confront his past. It is only then he begins to unravel the twists and turns of a long-ago emotional mystery, to make peace with his past and his foiled chance at stardom.

Mark B. Perry's alternating timelines explore the corrosive confluence of fame, fortune, sexuality, and ill-fated romance in this captivating Capote-esque novel.

And Introducing Dexter Gaines: A Novel of Old Hollywood is a revised and retitled version of City of Whores from Amble Press, an imprint of Bywater Books.

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My Review: A book from ten years ago that I *vaguely* remember reading gets a glow-up. That's no doubt a good thing. I am far more sharply aware of this version of the story, and I'm very glad to say it deserved my sharpened attention.

I don't remember the cameos of real Hollywood stars anything like as clearly as they come across here, so I have to think those characterizations got a serious amount of attention...or my strokes ate more of my recall than I'm pretending to myself they did...either way, glamourous walk-ons like Tallulah Bankhead are such a joy to read.

The plot is a classic, an evergreen, and for a reason. It really happens. Read YOUNG MAN FROM THE PROVINCES: A Gay Life Before Stonewall if you want factual confirmation. There are so many memoirs from people whose beauty seduced powerful people into doing for them what they could not do for themselves, not always to their lasting benefit.

I don't think it will help you decide what to do about reading the story for me to run through the details. What I most want you to know is that, like all the best pulpy plots, this one hauled me along on each of its turns, implausible though I felt they were at times. I'm pretty sure I could find someone out there to whom even the most implausible things had honestly, in actual fact, occurred. Reality has that all over fiction: It isn't required to make sense.

There's intrigue, there's beautiful cinematically described settings and scenery...there to be chewed...there's exciting skulduggery in pursuit of...well, who really cares as long they're chewing the scenery with enough verve. I like a sudsy romantic read, and when it's also delivering commentary on period-appropriate homophobia and suchlike buffoonery, it's an extra win for this storytelling formula.

The missing star was lost in the time vortex between the 1950s and the 1990s. I really hate saying it out loud, but the 1990s were thirty years ago. *wince* A book about gay Hollywood set in two historical times that were both virulently homophobic felt...off, unbalanced, not to put too fine a point on it ill-judged.

Fun was had, though, and that ain't worth nothin' in today's horror movie of a world.

THE REAL JAMES BOND: A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue, and Ian Fleming, not quite what you're expecting

THE REAL JAMES BOND: A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue, and Ian Fleming
JIM WRIGHT
Schiffer Books
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Whatever happened to him actually outshines anything I’ve had my James Bond do. —Ian Fleming

James Bond: author, ornithologist, marksman, and . . . identity-theft victim?

When James Bond published his landmark book, Birds of the West Indies, he had no idea it would set in motion events that would link him to the most iconic spy in the Western world and turn his life upside down. Born into a wealthy family but cut off in his early twenties, James Bond took off to the West Indies in search of adventure.

Armed with arsenic and a shotgun, he took months-long excursions to the Caribbean to collect material for his iconic book, Birds of the West Indies, navigating snake-infested swamps, sleeping in hammocks, and island-hopping on tramp steamers and primitive boats. Packed with archival photos, many never before published, and interviews with Bond's colleagues, here is the real story of the pipe-smoking, ruthless ornithologist who introduced the world to the exotic birds of the West Indies.

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My Review: Gotcha!

You thought, like I did, that this was about someone glamourous and important to the intelligence agencies rife in the world, didn't you? After all, James Bond....

Turns out that the REAL James Bond, the one whose book inspired the stuck-for-a-name birder Ian Fleming to call 007 by his name, was a bad-ass adventurer and ornithologist whose privileged background and education prepared him for a leisurely life of loafing and then poof! got pulled out from under him by his dear old Dad. (007 has some daddy issues, you'll recall.)

The ancestral pile, now part of a university campus near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Being disinherited in favor of second wife of father, Bond went out to get his daily bread the best he could. It was some adventuring best! His ornithological methods weren't to modern tastes:

...but that's how it was done in those days.

The important part is that Bond and Ian Fleming shared a taste for adventure, an interest in birds, and resdency in the West Indies:

The only known photo of the Real James Bond with Ian Fleming, at Fleming's Jamaica home
...or we'd never have had the iconic 007 that we do now.

The book is quite a treat on the eyes with its over-a hundred photos, most in color, and its clear, easy-to-read text. The story of a man making another man's name and nature famous would play out very differently today. In this case the way it unfolded was amicable. The author got famous, but died young; the subject lived on, an ornithologist with the definitive textbook to his name; the character is immortal. The story's so astounding that your film-buff giftee might not believe it at first. If you know a Bond guy, he'll have heard the story in its outlines as part of the lore. The reality of James Bond, though, is less well-known and very much worth learning about. A birder friend? Get 'em in the tent by saying, perfectly truthfully, that James Bond was a bird-watcher.

The world the Real James Bond spent his life exploring and explaining to the world
Tomorrow I'm posting #Booksgiving ideas about Nature, so this seemed like a fun way to make the transition. Enjoy the read; I sure did.

THE WARNER BROTHERS, the Jewish immigrants who created modern Hollywood

THE WARNER BROTHERS
CHRIS YOGERST
The University Press of Kentucky (Screen Classics series)
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars.

These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it.

In The Warner Brothers, Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family's humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat—and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat.

Paying close attention to the brothers' identities as cultural and economic outsiders, Yogerst chronicles how the Warners built a global filmmaking powerhouse. Equal parts family history and cinematic journey, The Warner Brothers is an empowering story of the American dream and the legacy four brothers left behind for generations of filmmakers and film lovers to come.

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My Review: Four driven Jewish immigrants left Poland poor nobodies and became the architects of an entire multi-billion dollar empire...and multi-trillion dollar industry.

They didn't play nice all the time. They didn't hesitate to call out hypocrisy while practicing it. But they, for better or worse, made the modern celebrity/entertainment culture we all live in from their savviest business instincts and their unrelenting drive to be Safe in their new homeland. They were charitable with their money and made a big difference in many lives, for the better.

Their studio acquiesced to the Production Code, as they had to in order to stay in business, but produced subversively messaged anti-Nazi and anti-Klan movies. They innovated technologically (The Jazz Singer's sound was an invention of Sam Warner, who died before its premiere...one of the brothers' many personal tragedies). They created and massaged and changed advertising paradigms, distribution methods, audience metrics...and how to make a mess of your life. Jack Warner, a horrible man, comes out of this biographical book looking like Iago's mentor. He was awful to actresses, he was awful to his brothers, he was horrible to his son. No one that terrible should've made the amazing films he made.

Loads of black and white images make this a handy reference for studio publicity photo lovers, and enrich the general reader's experience of the story. It is told as a story, albeit not in the most exciting narrative voice. The author definitely wants you to know that he's done the research, thought through the implications of the Warner Brothers's effect on film as an art and an industry. He's not ignoring the personal details of their Shakespearan family saga. He just doesn't give it to you in punchy, quip-laden sentences.

Author Yogerst is telling us the story of an Institution, The Warner Brothers, a family of immigrant Jews in an anti-semitic world, who created the institution Warner Bros., whose thousands of films we've all watched our entire lives...pure Hollywood, that story. That will appeal to your film-buff giftee as well as your Jewish studies maven. The Warner Brothers are well-served by The Warner Brothers.

A FRONT ROW SEAT, as close as we can get to the Golden Age of Hollywood in real life

A FRONT ROW SEAT
NANCY OLSON LIVINGSTON
University Press of Kentucky (Screen Classics series)
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From her idyllic childhood in the American Midwest to her Oscar–nominated performance in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the social circles of New York and Los Angeles, actress Nancy Olson Livingston has lived abundantly. In her memoir, A Front Row Seat, Livingston treats readers to an intimate, charming chronicle of her life as an actress, wife, and mother, and her memories of many of the most notable figures and moments of her time.

Livingston shares reminiscences of her marriages to lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner, creator of award-winning musicals Paint Your Wagon, Gigi, and My Fair Lady (which was dedicated to her), and to Alan Wendell Livingston, former president of Capitol Records, who created Bozo the Clown and worked with legendary musical artists, including Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Band, and Don McLean. One of the last living actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Livingston shares memorable encounters with countless celebrities—William Holden, Billy Wilder, Bing Crosby, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne, to name a few—and less pleasant experiences with Howard Hughes and John F. Kennedy that act as reminders of women's long struggle for equality.

Entertaining and engrossing, A Front Row Seat deftly interweaves Livingston's life with her observations of the artists, celebrities, and luminaries with whom she came in contact—a paean to the twentieth century and a treasure for readers enamored with a bygone era.

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My Review: Oscar nominee for her second role, in Sunset Boulevard, Olson was a woman with a future in acting on stage and screen. Instead, she hitched her star to two powerful men and became a wife and mother. As they were powerful, she was never far away from the glamour of the industry she'd left behind.

She never stopped working, she never made it as big as she would have had she stuck it out, but this lady had herself one amazing ride through the greatest years of the industry she walked away from serving.

Imagine her two daughters born in the early 1950s as Mom and Stepdad bring 'em to meet the Beatles.

What this book does is give you exactly what the title says it will: A front row seat, next to a bona fide insider, at all the major theatrical, musical, and entertainment world events of the Jet Set/Rat Pack era.

The personal life the lady led was honestly one of pretty typical stuff for a woman in that time...a lot of hard work supporting the career of her husband, a lot of swatting away the eight hands most men seemed to grow when her lovely blonde-capped profile hove into view, raising three children in an ever-scarier world. She stints with none of it.

Come for the glamour, the nostalgia of this bygone cultural moment; stay to get acquainted with someone you can easily imagine becoming your friend. A book of delights and pleasures that raids a scrapbook of stunning depth and fun! There are so many more images than I could show to you, but I chose some to demonstrate the feel of them all.

Your women-in-film reader, your glamour-chaser giftee, and your own good self could really sink into this charming hostess's beautifully curated cocktail party. Great for #Booksgiving.

MEAN...MOODY...MAGNIFICENT!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend, more than one way to make it in the world

MEAN...MOODY...MAGNIFICENT!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend
CHRISTINA RICE
University Press of Kentucky
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921–2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched in what is arguably the most notorious advertising campaign in cinema history, which invited filmgoers to see Howard Hughes's The Outlaw (1943) and to "tussle with Russell." Throughout the 1940s, she was nicknamed the "motionless picture actress" and had only three films in theaters. With such an inauspicious, slow start, most aspiring actresses would have given up or faded away. Instead, Russell carved out a place for herself in Hollywood and became a memorable and enduring star.

In Mean... Moody... Magnificent!, Christina Rice offers the first biography of the actress and activist perhaps best known for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Despite the fact that her movie career was stalled for nearly a decade, Russell's filmography is respectable. She worked with some of Hollywood's most talented directors—including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg—and held her own alongside costars such as Marilyn Monroe, Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Bob Hope. She also learned how to fight back against Howard Hughes, her boss for over thirty-five years, and his marketing campaigns that exploited her physical appearance.

Beyond the screen, Rice reveals Russell as a complex and confident woman. She explores the star's years as a spokeswoman for Playtex as well as her deep faith and secondary vocation as a Christian vocalist. Rice also discusses Russell's work in creating and leading the WAIF foundation, which helped unite tens of thousands of orphaned children with adoptive parents. This stunning first biography offers a fresh perspective on a star whose legacy endures not simply because she forged a notable film career, but because she effectively used her celebrity to benefit others.

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My Review: Old Hollywood was an unfriendly place for women in general, buxom beauties in particular. Jane Russell was a very early example of what happens when a very targeted publicity campaign succeeds at one aim and damn near torpedoes a career in the process.

The very young girl Miss Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell
What makes a star? It's a question that most people really don't think much about. In today's world, it's less mysterious than it ever has been. The earlier one goes, the more the alchemy was being codified and made into chemistry...and Jane Russell was a kind of case in point of that moment of change.

Two examples of the advertising stills responsible for the actress being dismissed for a decade as a figure with a face, not a talent
Getting the world to pay attention to a newcomer in any industry is a giant challenge in every era. What Howard Hughes got into his head was to show Russell in the way he, and most men, saw her and women in general...sex objects. He gave her an entirely unfounded image as a sex kitten. It was something the religious, conservative Russell was unhappy to have lumbered on her. That is, until she leaned into it later in life, with her hugely successful Playtex 18-Hour Cross-Your-Heart bra campaigns that funded her old age! Making lemonade from bitter early-life lemons indeed.

In her entire film career, she made fewer than two dozen films, and was famous for only one: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in which she was decidedly less emphasized than Marilyn Monroe.

It was never her film, no matter what; the roles she played were pretty blah, if I'm at all honest; no one would remember her if not for her role in The Paleface starring Bob Hope:

...which she said saved her career, and which led to a lifelong friendship with the powerful and string-pulling Hope.

Honestly, the reason I cared to read the book, and recommend it to y'all, is simple: Russell the woman was more interesting than Russell the actress. After an abortion, illegal in those days so always unsafe to have, left her unable to bear children, she settled down with one wonderful husband, a football player then famous, and adopted three children. Her struggles to complete international adoptions led her to found Waif, a non-profit that helped people get international adoptions recognized in the US. She was actually pro-life, though unfortunately to me also anti-abortion; she focused her sincere christian belief into making it possible for people to bring otherwise parentless children into their homes to make families. That's walking the pro-life talk.

She married for the last of three times (one divorce, one death) to a real-estate developer whose projects she influenced, while re-starting a glamorous career in nightclubs:

And the image lived into the 2000s!

Her undistinguished Hollywood career, followed by her success as a nightclub entertainer for decades, her tenacity and uncompromising refusal to either quit or be dismissed by the many men who belittled, tried to control, and even ruin her is inspiring.

Film fans, students of fame and its many costs, glamourhounds...plus the feminists who need to see how someone not possessed of a liberal viewpoint could still make a powerful career...are among your giftees this #Booksgiving? Here's a book for them. Maybe you, too, don't front! You'll glom a few pages before wrapping.

MARILYN MONROE: A Photographic Life, a tabloid star's life and legacy...in beautiful photos

MARILYN MONROE: A Photographic Life
JENNA GLATZER
Chartwell Books
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The camera loved Marilyn, and she loved it right back. In this luxurious volume, get to know the enigmatic star through iconic and rare photos, intimate stories, and removable memorabilia.

Everyone knows the classic photographs of Marilyn Monroe: in the dress she wore to John F. Kennedy’s birthday, or leaning out of a balcony over the streets of New York City, or famously standing over the subway grates while shooting The Seven Year Itch. Behind the glamour, we’ve also heard the sad stories: her mother’s institutionalization, her three failed marriages, her own struggles with mental health, her surprising death that still leaves us with questions.

Marilyn Monroe: A Photographic Life delves into the life of the star—before, during, and after she became a “Blonde Bombshell.” Born Norma Jeane Mortenson (the Baker came later), she had a troubled childhood that culminated in her self-described “inferiority complex.” But all the while, she dreamed of something more.

Read the stories behind her first marriage (and why she kept it secret when she started modeling), her early roles with the studios (and the one exec who thought she didn’t have “it”), and her life as a budding actress that include humble anecdotes (at one point, she was so poor that she and a roommate shared one pair of high heels—and whoever had a date that night got to wear them).

Along with the stories are fabulous rare photographs and reproductions of frameable memorabilia, such as:

Birth and marriage certificates

Handwritten letters

Certificate of conversion to Judaism before her marriage to Arthur Miller

Screen Actors Guild membership card

Picture of Marilyn sketched by Jane Russell

Watercolor Marilyn painted for JFK

Childhood photos

Shots and ads from her earliest modeling days

Wedding photos

Images of those who knew her, including Groucho Marx, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and so many more Marilyn’s favorite image of herself, taken in 1956

Further chapters cover Marilyn’s marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, her time in England and New York, and her rise as one of Hollywood’s most sought after starlets. Through it all—the self doubts, the illnesses, the isolation—we see Marilyn triumph with the help of friends and confidantes and her own tenacious will of knowing what she wanted.

We see time and again the depths of Marilyn’s heart and her capacity to care for others. “I want to love and be loved more than anything else in the world,” she once said, and with Marilyn Monroe: A Photographic Life, you can’t help but oblige.

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My Review: I suppose the day will come that Marilyn Monroe is forgotten.

Standards of beauty have changed several times since these were taken, printed, and lusted over by young hormone factories of all genders. The zaftig lady here was out of step with 1980s and 1990s heroin chic, the bleached blonde bouffant out of step with the 1960s Cher-hair...string-straight, natural color...and the kittenish coy look makes modern feminists furious.

Yet we ALL know who this is.

Not so this kid:

...more so this young woman, but not with great confidence:

...which all goes to show you that the thing we see in photos of "Movie Star Marilyn Monroe" is a curated, designed image to project a fantasy of a person that did not...could not...exist outside a studio camera.

It took a lot of effort, and a lot of energy, to maintain this avatar in place of a real person with real needs. The book is careful and respectful of the star's actual personhood and doesn't ignore her enormous price paid in service of the stardom that ate her from the inside.

Whatever standard of beauty one uses, the person Marilyn Monroe was commands the respect of us all for her diligence and her great stregth in building and maintaining a career out of an unpromising start in life. Tragic endings have a way of burnishing a halo on someone. I think this photo essay both shines that halo up a bit for the twenty-first century, and shows the costs of celebrity sought as a career to new audiences.

Plus it's a great way to have a nostalgia-fest! Right, fellow Boomers?

TAB HUNTER CONFIDENTIAL, the late hunky heart-throb's own words telling his own story

TAB HUNTER CONFIDENTIAL: The Making of a Movie Star
TAB HUNTER with Eddie Muller
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome to Hollywood, circa 1950, the end of the Golden Age. A remarkably handsome young boy, still a teenager, gets "discovered" by a big-time movie agent. Because when he takes his shirt off young hearts beat faster, because he is the picture of innocence and trust and need, he will become a star. It seems almost preordained. The open smile says, "You will love me," and soon the whole world does.

The young boy's name was Tab Hunter—a made-up name, of course, a Hollywood name—and it was his time. Stardom didn't come overnight, although it seemed that way. In fact, the fame came first, when his face adorned hundreds of magazine covers; the movies, the studio contract, the name in lights—all that came later. For Tab Hunter was a true product of Hollywood, a movie star created from a stable boy, a shy kid made even more so by the way his schoolmates—both girls and boys—reacted to his beauty, by a mother who provided for him in every way except emotionally, and by a secret that both tormented him and propelled him forward.

In Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, Hunter speaks out for the first time about what it was like to be a movie star at the end of the big studio era, to be treated like a commodity, to be told what to do, how to behave, whom to be seen with, what to wear. He speaks also about what it was like to be gay, at first confused by his own fears and misgivings, then as an actor trapped by an image of boy-next-door innocence. And when he dared to be difficult, to complain to the studio about the string of mostly mediocre movies that were assigned to him, he learned that just like any manufactured product, he was disposable—disposable and replaceable.

Hunter's career as a bona fide movie star lasted a decade. But he persevered as an actor, working continuously at a profession he had come to love, seeking—and earning—the respect of his peers, and of the Hollywood community.

And so, Tab Hunter Confidential is at heart a story of survival—of the giddy highs of stardom, and the soul-destroying lows when phone calls begin to go unreturned; of the need to be loved, and the fear of being consumed; of the hope of an innocent boy, and the rueful summation of a man who did it all, and who lived to tell it all.

***R.I.P. TAB HUNTER*** He died 8 July 2018 at 86. He was married to Allan Glaser for 35 years.

My Review: Memoir of 1950s movie heartthrob Tab Hunter, his Southern California sun-kissed boyhood, his coming of gay age, and the effects of being part of the star-maker machinery of Hollywood as it existed at that time on a modestly talented, very very pretty boy. It's obvious that Mr. Hunter paid attention to the business of Hollywood...he gives a real and thorough account of the whys and wherefores of the last gasp of the studio era's decisions.

Not as salacious as some, and a whole lot sweeter than most. Mr. Hunter says very few unpleasant things about others in his memoir, and is in fact so generous to his exes that I wonder how large a role the Algonquin legal department played in the setting of the tone. Either that or this is one of the NICEST old stars ever born. The photos are all nicely chosen to illustrate Mr. Hunter's textual points. I liked this book, but I don't think anyone not interested in Hollywood, gay Hollywood, or the Fifties would do anything more than yawn through a Pearl-Rule 50pp. And, it is important to say, he is very much not telling a happy coming-out story. "Out" is not the goal of the book, so be aware of that fact and adjust your expectations or avoid the read.

If you ever had the pleasure of hearing his one-man show, you'll sniffle a little at some of his trademark nostrums:

You see, people hang labels, tags of false identification, on the people that disturb their own sense of reality too much, like the bells that used to be hung on the necks of lepers.
–and–
Sometimes when you’re confused, you push away the people you shouldn’t. You’re either afraid of being hurt or of hurting them.
–and–
I had become aware of the three stages of stardom. First is 'Get me Tab Hunter,' followed by, 'Get me a Tab Hunter type,' followed by, 'Who the hell is Tab Hunter?'