Hollywood Book Club Read online

  Text copyright © 2019 by Steven Rea.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Rea, Steven, author.

  Title: The Hollywood book club : reading with the stars / by Steven Rea.

  Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018053807 | ISBN 9781452176895 (hardcover : alk. paper); ISBN 9781452183732 (epub, mobi)

  Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture actors and actresses—Books and reading—California—Los Angeles. | Celebrities—Books and reading—California—Los Angeles. | Books and reading—California—Los Angeles.

  Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U65 R425 2019 | DDC 791.4302/8092279494—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053807

  AP Photo: 36; Getty Images/Archive Photos: front cover, 32; Getty Images/Bettmann: 30, 66, 68; Getty Images/Ed Clark/LIFE Picture Collection: 52; Getty Images/Hulton Archive: 18, 34; Getty Images/John Kobal Foundation: 25; Getty Images/Popperfoto: 40; Globe Photos/Frank Bez: 44; Magnum Photos/Dennis Stock: 10; MPTV Images: 16; MPTV Images/Bernie Abramson: 15; MPTV Images/Sid Avery: 102; MPTV Images/Gunther: 50; MPTV Images/Mark Shaw: 43; MPTV Images/Universal Pictures: back cover left, 109; MPTV Images/Warner Bros.: 60; Photofest/American International Pictures: 105; Photofest/Clarence S. Bull/MGM: 12; Photofest/Christie/Columbia Pictures: 64; Photofest/Columbia Pictures: 26, 94; Photofest/Cronenweth/Columbia Pictures: 20; Photofest/J. Arthur Rank Organization: 59; Photofest/Bert Longworth/Warner Bros.: back cover center, 56; Photofest/MGM: back cover right, 28, 49, 63, 81, 82, 90, 110, 113, 117; Photofest/Paramount Pictures: 9, 46, 82, 86, 92, 114; Photofest/RKO Radio Pictures: 78, 89; Photofest/Scotty Welbourne/Warner Bros.: 38; Photofest/Bert Six/Vitaphone/Warner Bros.: 100; Photofest/Twentieth Century Fox: 22, 55, 76, 97, 98; Photofest/United Artists: 74; Photofest/Warner Bros.: 70, 72, 107

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  “Read any good books lately?”

  —humphrey bogart, In a Lonely Place

  CONTENTS

  introduction

  James Dean

  Hedy Lamarr

  Sammy Davis Jr.

  Lauren Bacall

  Sean Connery

  Rita Hayworth

  Joanne Woodward

  Buster Keaton

  Rosalind Russell

  Leslie Caron

  Errol Flynn

  Marilyn Monroe

  Joan Crawford

  Orson Welles

  Edward G. Robinson

  Sophia Loren

  Audrey Hepburn

  Eva Marie Saint

  Jack Benny

  Robert Young

  John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands

  Marlon Brando

  Joan Collins

  Bette Davis

  Jean Simmons

  Dennis Hopper

  Grace Kelly

  Maylia

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Dorothy Dandridge

  Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart

  Burt Lancaster

  Ringo Starr and Wilfrid Brambell

  Harry Belafonte

  Ginger Rogers

  Lana Turner

  Gary Cooper

  Greer Garson and Rex Thompson

  Joan Fontaine

  John Wayne and Claudette Colbert

  Angie Dickinson

  Bob Hope

  Marsha Mason

  Jayne Mansfield and Joan Blondell

  Shirley MacLaine

  Ann Sheridan

  Steve McQueen and John Sturges

  Vincent Price

  Spencer Tracy

  Gregory Peck

  Jane Wyman

  Jack Haley, Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, Terry, Frank Morgan, and Bert Lahr

  Susan Hayward

  Mary Jane Halsey, Diana Cook, and Edna Callahan

  featured titles

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  INTRODUCTION

  pop quiz: What’s the name of the bookshop where Audrey Hepburn is employed in Funny Face?

  (a) Acme Book Shop

  (b) Argosy Book Store

  (c) Embryo Concepts

  (d) Flourish and Blotts

  (e) The Shop Around the Corner

  Cheers if you answered “c.” Hepburn’s empathicalism-spouting gamine is a clerk at this philosophy books emporium in ’50s boho Greenwich Village—her hushed, dusty, musty world rudely upended when Fred Astaire and a bossy team from a fashion mag charge in with cameras and model in tow. And extra points if you can match the other four fictional establishments with the films they’re in. (Answers below)

  Books and movies have been intersecting in significant ways since the silent era: actors on screen reading tomes that tell us something about the characters they’re playing; books as instructional guides, or plot devices, or humorous props; or as stealth objects slipped into bookcases, pages carved out, to hide a weapon or a wad of cash. (And what about the bookcases with secret hinges— entryways to hidden lairs?) From Voltaire and Emile Zola to Shakespeare and Kerouac to Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace, biopics of authors and poets have made for one of filmdom’s most reliable genres. The life stories of fictional scribes, too, have always been a big part of the big screen diet. Barton Fink, anyone?

  Novels and biographies, history and investigative series, memoirs and sci-fi—thousands upon thousands of published works have provided the foundation, the core, the starting-off-point-but-we’re-going-to-totally-change-the-ending-and-make-you-really-mad basis for motion picture adaptations.

  The Hollywood Book Club is a bibliophile-meets-cinephile celebration of the convergence points between these two very different media. Its 55 photographs capture some iconic stars with some pretty iconic (or ironic) books in their mitts. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Bette Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, they’re all here with literature (or not) in their hands—or on their laps, or in the general vicinity. Some of the titles are easily discernible in these images—the book jackets or spines held upright for the photographer’s lens, for our view. But some photos required further investigation. That gorgeous shot of a napping Leslie Caron seated with the book open to a page of print? By enlarging the image and isolating the book, phrases became readable: “the food which we produced . . . the softness of the bed . . . coffin walls . . . ” Enter them in an internet search engine and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! shows up like magic: Modern Library 1951 edition, p. 160. Ditto for the volume resting on Orson Welles’s chest: the just-moved-to-L.A. writer, director, actor, and soon-to-be-filmmaker was well into A History of Technology, Vol. III: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. A little light reading before bed.

  These candid pics, publicity shots, and production stills—many taken by the respective Hollywood studios’ mostly unsung and intrepid still photographers—are sequenced in six thematic categories: There’s a batch of “ex libris,” at-home images of the stars lounging in their personal libraries, or in a garden on a rustic twig settee (Edward G. Robinson). There’s a collection of stars reading kid-lit to their kids. There’s an often surprising, amusing, illuminating series taken on set (a bare-shouldered Joan Collins hefting Thomas Wolfe, or Dennis Hopper reading Stanislavsky). There are two in-a-bookstore or some-place-with-a-pile-of-books portraits. There is a batch of production stills—shots taken with the actors and actresses in character, in costume, in the movie. And, finally, a group of “source material” im
ages: Steve McQueen with The Great Escape, Gregory Peck with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Wyman with The Yearling. The stars of the film interpretations going back to the original works—and doing a little crossover promotion while they’re at it.

  The books in The Hollywood Book Club make for some eclectic reading: Irving Stone and Oscar Wilde, a sex manual and a Louis Armstrong memoir, Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway.

  Groucho Marx famously quipped that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have wanted to belong to the Hollywood Book Club (in fact, Marx was an avid admirer of the book in Joanne Woodward’s hands). The fast-talkin’, cigar-flickin’, mustachioed Marx Brother is also credited with another old saw, one that speaks to the immeasurable satisfaction of spending time with a bound volume of prose or poetry: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

  Enjoy!

  ANSWERS: (a) The Big Sleep, (b) Vertigo, (c) Funny Face, (d) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, (e) You’ve Got Mail

  The Hollywood icon of East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, seated at his aunt and uncle’s breakfast table in Fairmount, Indiana, with a cigarette and The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley. The Indiana poet was known for his humor, folksy vernacular, and children’s verse. james dean, a fellow Hoosier, lived on his relatives’ farm from the age of nine on. This Dennis Stock photograph was taken in February 1955. Dean died, in a car crash, at the end of September that same year. He could be reading Riley’s “The Days Gone By.”

  hedy lamarr, the subject of three biographies, a documentary, and a graphic novel about her patented invention of the frequency-hopping spread spectrum, was one of the biggest screen stars of the 1940s and early ’50s. The Austrian-born beauty was signed to MGM, and there’s a pair of the studio’s scripts on the bottom shelf of her nightstand.

  For his reading pleasure, sammy davis jr. lounges with a paperback edition of Lloyd C. Douglas’s mega-selling biblical epic The Robe, originally published in 1942. The film version, starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, was released in 1953 in CinemaScope—the first film to be issued in the widescreen format. Davis starred in Anna Lucasta in 1958, Porgy and Bess in 1959, and then joined Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and his Rat Pack pals in Ocean’s 11 in 1960.

  At the home she shares with Humphrey Bogart, the To Have and Have Not and Big Sleep siren lauren bacall rifles through a pictorial history of twentieth century conflict, open to “The March of Aggression” chapter. Robert Capa’s iconic “The Falling Soldier” is among the spread of combat images visible. The other book next to Bacall in this 1946 photo? William Chaffers’s essential Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain.

  In early 1962 it was announced that Ian Fleming’s espionage best seller Dr. No was about to be filmed—with a Scotsman, sean connery, as the British spy James Bond. A London photographer was quickly dispatched to the actor’s Hampstead flat in London to capture the soon-to-be licensed-to-kill secret agent. Here Connery lounges on his sofa immersed in a book—maybe one of Fleming’s? On the window sill, Mr. 007’s other titles include: Lilith by George MacDonald, Marianne by Frederic Mullally (also known as Danse Macabre), and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  Still sporting the platinum hairdo Orson Welles insisted she have for 1947’s The Lady from Shanghai, rita hayworth scans her library for a good read, pulling a title adjacent to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Also visible in Hayworth’s collection: Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham, and Progress and Poverty by Henry George.

  Curled up with a good book and a good Oscar—the one she won in 1958 for Best Actress in The Three Faces of Eve—joanne woodward is well into The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy’s debut novel, published that same year, about a young American on the loose in Paris. The book was an instant bestseller, oft-reissued in the decades since, and counts Groucho Marx and, more recently, Greta Gerwig among its fans.

  buster keaton, the silent screen funnyman-turned-talkies-star-turned-sad-eyed character actor, spent $300,000 in 1926 ($4.3 million today) to build his Italian villa–inspired home in Beverly Hills. It was a place to sit by the fire with a compelling read, and to shoot his first talkie there, too: 1931’s Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. Cary Grant and James Mason would each later own and occupy Keaton’s manse—not certain if it came with Keaton’s library collection.

  “Book-filled shelves, bleached mahogany walls and a generous fireplace lend charm and warmth to the den of rosalind russell’s home in Beverly Hills,” reads the typed snipe on the back of this 1947 photo. In the four-time-Oscar-nominated actress’s hands: Good Night, Sweet Prince: The Life and Times of John Barrymore, author Gene Fowler’s affectionate bio of another celebrated thespian.

  In 1955, French export leslie caron made two films for MGM: The Glass Slipper, a retelling of the Cinderella tale, and Gaby, a loose adaptation of Waterloo Bridge. This gorgeous photo of Caron with a Modern Library edition of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! on her lap was taken in Caron’s Laurel Canyon home to promote one of those films. Caron’s Hollywood career was launched in 1951 when she starred—and danced—opposite Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. Two years later she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for the title role in Lili. In 1958 another Best Actress nomination, and a Golden Globe, for Gigi. In 2010, Caron published a memoir, Thank Heaven.

  errol flynn stops his library globe from spinning on “the barbarous South Sea islands” where his 1946 adventure yarn, Showdown, takes place. The swashbuckling star wrote three books wrote three books over his career: Beam Ends (1936), the account of Flynn and three sailing buddies navigating the tricky Tasman Sea, Showdown, a ripping high-seas yarn, and My Wicked, Wicked Ways (with ghost writer Earl Conrad), a memoir published posthumously in 1959. In between he made a few pictures you may have heard of: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, The Dawn Patrol, The Sea Hawk, and They Died with Their Boots On among them.

  In her journey from 20th Century Fox contract player to 20th century pop culture icon, marilyn monroe made a habit of having photographers capture her with a book in hand. Be it James Joyce’s Ulysses, or What You Can Do for Angina Pectoris and Coronary Occlusion (truly—that’s what’s she’s “reading” in a 1948 bathing suit shot!), the tomes helped counter the notion that she was just another vacuous La La Land blonde. And clearly she wasn’t: In 1999, Christie’s auctioned over 400 books from Monroe’s personal library—novels, classics, artist monographs, history, biography, you name it. And the late star’s journal entries, letters, poems, and notes reveal a deeply curious soul. In this 1951 photo, Monroe is curled up on her sofa bed with a copy of The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, an 874-page collection of the German-Jewish lyric poet’s writings in translation. And on the shelves and end tables: a Charlie Chaplin bio, Dürer and Michelangelo coffee table books, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flats, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Alan Barth’s The Loyalty of Free Men, and Stanislavski’s Building a Character (work-related). Also on a shelf: a small framed photograph of Arthur Miller, with whom she had recently commenced an affair. In 1956, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and The Seven Year Itch sex symbol would marry.

  Noël Coward’s Cavalcade? J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner? Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest? joan crawford cozies up with Clicquot, her poodle, to sample some tasty morsels from the Modern Library Giant edition of Sixteen Famous British Plays: Complete and Unabridged. Crawford’s film career spanned six decades, from the silent era to the noisy 1970 sci-fi horror spectacle Trog. She authored two autobiographies: A Portrait of Joan (1962) and My Way of Life (1971).

  It’s 1939, and orson welles, having already conquered stage (Broadway’s Caesar) and radio (the alien invasion broadcast The War of the Worlds), has headed west to work on his first film. At his Brentwood home with a pipe and a copy of A History
of Technology, Vol. III: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, Welles was plotting to bring Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the big screen. But RKO balked at the price of the ambitious project, and so Welles instead made his directing-writing-producing-and-starring-in debut with a little something he called Citizen Kane. Welles’s Heart of Darkness screenplay has only ever been performed once—as a stage reading, in 2012.

  Captured in his Beverly Hills garden enjoying a satisfying pipe and volume (with a couple of backup titles stacked on that rustic twig bench), edward g. robinson had recently finished the 1936 Warner’s crime drama Bullets or Ballots with Humphrey Bogart. (Classic Robinson line from the gangster pic: “I just want to thank you for the kick in the teeth.”) Known for his collection of French Impressionist art, Robinson was also an avid reader, with a library full of first editions. His autobiography, All My Yesterdays, was published in 1973.

  In stripy pajamas, sophia loren takes to her bed—her bedtime reading, that is. The Italian actress was in London in 1956 for the production of the World War II drama The Key, in which she portrays a Swiss expat called upon by a succession of Royal Navy tug captains. Loren is reading The Champion from Far Away, a collection of short stories by Ben Hecht—the prolific scribe who just happened to have scripted Legend of the Lost, the lusty Sahara adventure yarn she would star in with John Wayne the following year.

  In 1953, while shooting Sabrina at Paramount Studios, audrey hepburn rented an apartment in Beverly Hills—an apartment with shag carpeting, a flamingo bedspread, and a tray for her breakfast. Barefoot and be-striped, the leading lady, with the title role as a chauffeur’s daughter caught between Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, posed for an at-home and on-the-job series that photographer Mark Shaw took for Life magazine. A caption for the piece notes, “While eating, she often reads classical drama, with heavy helpings of Shaw and Shakespeare.” A few years down the line, Hepburn would play a New York bookshop clerk who falls into an affair—and into some great dance numbers—with Fred Astaire, in Funny Face.