Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ANITA Loos was a Hollywood oddity, a silent movie screenwriter who was almost as famous as the actors for whom she wrote. She went on to become a prolific playwright and novelist whose sharp, witty work sustained a career that spanned seven decades. Her friends included Aldous Huxley and Cecil Beaton and she numbered William Faulkner, Winston Churchill and James Joyce among her admirers. In Gary Carey's biography, however, what emerges is a portrait of struggle and frustration...
Carey attempts to prove that though Loos associated with the excesses and inanities of Hollywood life, she clung to a reserved, almost conventional outlook. Carey's book is thorough, almost painstakingly so. He does not fall into the trap of treating his subject with simpering adoration, a common pitfall of Hollywood biographies. But Carey's impassive storytelling is dry, relying too often on Loos' detailed diary to the exclusion of analysis. Do we really need to know that, "That afternoon, while Gladys was still in Teaneck, she prepared a lunch of toast and Lipton's chicken noodle soup and started...
...even more individualized approach to food can be found in Sylvia Thompson's Feasts and Friends (North Point Press; $21.95), a beautifully evocative memoir recounting the author's dining adventures in California and Europe. The daughter of actress Gloria Stuart, Thompson learned good cooking at home in Hollywood, where dinner guests included Groucho Marx and Robert Benchley. Traveling around Europe, cooking while in and out of love, she developed an eclectic repertoire: from Russian fish soup to French vegetable soup with white wine, from Southern "transparent pie" -- made with quince jelly -- to an opaque Dutch apple pudding. The icing...
Trapped inside this billionaire publishing baron are a multitude of people: a peasant haggler, stage director, domineering patriarch, sophisticated currency trader, military commander, politician, Hollywood mogul and unabashed publicity man. Following his train of thought is like listening to ten tape recorders, constantly switching on and off, constantly interrupting one another...
Sometimes, it seems, the biggest news on TV is a movie that hasn' t opened yet. That' s because Hollywood' s master publicists get free air time on every talk show that traffics in star quality...