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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
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
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