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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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