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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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