The Golden Girls of MGM
By Jane Ellen Wayne
Carroll & Graf, $26
This one volume reveals more than most people care to know about the legendary figures of Hollywood’s Golden Age. From the ridiculously trivial (Jeanette McDonald’s complaint about Clark Gable’s garlic breath on the set of San Francisco) to the sensationally criminal (Gable’s drunken hit-and-run homicide for which an MGM employee took the rap), every fact, rumor, and bit of malicious gossip is here, and all are recounted in the same breathlessly urgent voice. That urgency is on autopilot, though — this is Wayne’s ninth book, and includes rehashed abbreviations from such earlier efforts as Ava’s Men and The Life and Loves of Grace Kelly. Still, trash has its appeal, and the Hollywood studio system of the ’30s through the ’50s is indeed a gold mine of gossip. The sixteen screen goddesses profiled here were all under contract to MGM, the studio known for its combination of extravagant spectacle and “family values” — and which went to great lengths to maintain the appearance of virtuous glamour among its female stars. Actresses who dared marry without studio head Louis B. Mayer’s permission faced suspension without pay; abortions were commonplace. Kid stars such as Judy Garland were fed Dexedrine to keep them working long hours, then put to bed with sleeping pills in the studio’s own hospital. Many newcomers were renamed when the studio “bought” them; in the case of the already glamorously named Ava Gardner, MGM created a fictitious “real” name — Lucy Ann Johnson — just to be able to say the studio had created her. Most of these “revelations” concern the stars’ sex lives, but lists of affairs and marriages are reeled off with no particular attention to the lovers’ motives or the affairs’ contexts. It’s entertaining for a while, but long before the end you might start thinking that, frankly, you don’t give a damn. — Gina Covina
The Crimson Petal and the White
By Michel Faber
Harcourt, $26
Review a thousand-page novel in a couple hundred words? Who’s kidding whom? This one starts out a little scratchy, following a capricious narrator through the filth of mid-19th-century London’s poorest streets — an arch conceit that backfires the first time he or she won’t let you follow the most interesting characters. Thankfully Faber lets it go. The novel develops slowly, as do its characters: A prostitute named Sugar is famous for being able to satisfy any man, in spite of her physical imperfections (dry skin and small breasts, described ad nauseam by the author — we got it the first time, really). But she’s just being practical. Bitter about her early introduction to the profession, but trained by her heartless mother to hide the bitterness, Sugar finds an outlet in the writing of a novel in which a prostitute brutally murders a succession of men. Sugar is smart and ambitious, but she is hampered by Victorian England’s utter subjugation of women and the poor. Faber revels, a bit too much, in describing the visual and aromatic qualities of filth and discomfort involving various bodily fluids (some of which are exclusive to women, so it’s impressive that a male author gets it right — when he does). Naturally there’s graphic sex, but don’t expect anything erotic. In a culture in which a rich girl can enter marriage without ever having learned about menstruation, sex, and childbirth — and in a world where nothing is given and women are nothing — loneliness is inevitable. This would be an unrecommendably bleak tale if not for Sugar’s determination to gain some dignity. It doesn’t bode well that the planned film version already has a possible star, Kirsten Dunst, but as yet neither writer nor director. What a shame it would be if this visceral tale ended up with a standard Hollywood treatment. — Melanie Curry
The Reel Civil War
By Bruce Chadwick
Vintage, $15
This could have been a great pamphlet. With a solid thesis on how silent films helped foster enduring and fallacious myths about the Civil War, it would make for provocative reading on a city bus or in a medical waiting room. Film historian Chadwick explains that because this war took such an enormous toll on American lives and goodwill, the desire for reconciliation trumped any imperative for an honest reckoning. Thus through pulp novels, theater, and early cinema, Civil War mythology was born. Among the fallacies Chadwick highlights are the South as besieged victim of Yankee aggression; the war as an inexplicable tragedy with no winners or losers; and the romanticized Southern plantation as home to benign patriarch aristocrats, virtuous belles, and loyal slaves. (As the recent Trent Lott scandal reveals, the Civil War can still find its way to the forefront of American politics.) Unfortunately, Chadwick chooses to expound upon these myths by revealing how they were manifested in what feels like all eight hundred of the silent Civil War shorts produced during the first two decades of the 20th century. While the book includes longer explorations of seminal Civil War films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, its redundancy and clunky exposition make for a tiresome read. Unless you’re a film scholar, or spend your weekends chomping period salt pork with a phalanx of reenactors, chances are slim that you’ve actually seen any of these silents or that you ever will. In addition, Chadwick seems forever dismayed that filmmakers could possibly prioritize dramatic expedience above historical accuracy. While his arguments about African Americans paying the greatest price for Civil War mythology is dead on, it’s not quite enough to make this book compelling. — John Dicker
Gods and Generals
By Jeff Shaara
Ballantine, $14.95
If you missed this novel when it first came out in 1996, the forthcoming film version has yielded another edition of the book and a second opportunity. Shaara accomplishes something miraculous by writing a worthy and thoroughly engrossing prelude to his father Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 novel The Killer Angels. That book was hailed as unique, a history of Gettysburg that explored the major players’ souls and psychologies as much as it did their travails in the field. Now the son is able to take a broader view, as he is not restricted to the events of one battle. This novel begins in the fall of 1858, as Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee takes leave from a frustrating military career to serve as executor of his father-in-law’s confusing and contradictory estate. A year later, because he is close by, he is sent by Washington to quell the “riot” at Harpers Ferry. Lee’s good sense in dealing with John Brown and his hostages does not go unnoticed, and Lee finds himself faced with the excruciating choice of being promoted to major general and leading the Union Army against his own homeland or resigning from the career that has defined his life. This is only the first of many ironies that confront Lee and other famous figures on both sides of the conflict. Shaara’s great skill is in weaving a story so involving that even though we know Lee goes on to become one of the great strategists of all time, we feel his loss intensely as he dons civilian clothes and heads home to Virginia. If you haven’t had the good luck to read The Killer Angels, read Gods and Generals first, then dive into the elder Shaara’s masterpiece. Both books illustrate why the Civil War still casts such a long shadow. — Linnea Due
Why We Make Movies
By George Alexander
Harlem Moon/Doubleday, $15.95
Calling the scene “unnecessary,” director Spike Lee asserts in this book that he now regrets the incendiary rape of protagonist Nola Darling in his 1986 feature-film debut, She’s Gotta Have It. For the real deal on what stokes and stresses black filmmakers, readers will be hard-pressed to find a better book than this engaging collection of thirty interviews. A former banker who jump-cut to film journalism, Alexander also converses with such figures as Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Gordon Parks (Shaft), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), Warrington Hudlin (House Party), and Haile Gerima (Sankofa). Reflective of the candor that infuses the collection, Gerima charges that with Do the Right Thing (in which blacks demand props in an Italian-owned pizza parlor), Spike Lee put forth a film marred by a “white supremacist” sensibility. “What we see daily is … black people dying for being normal — going to work they are intercepted, going to a party, a black kid may never come back — so why would I concoct an abnormal device [like black characters demanding that photos be on the wall] to set a story in motion. … That’s the problem I have with a lot of black films.” Following her triumph with Sugar Cane Alley (1983), Martinique-born Euzhan Palcy got the unprecedented nod to direct Marlon Brando in the anti-apartheid film A Dry White Season (1989). She reveals that the legendary actor went psycho after she cut an unflattering scene that exposed his protruding belly: Palcy thought she’d been doing him a favor, yet “I will make sure you never work in Hollywood again,” he reputedly railed. Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle) notes that he was inspired to direct after a failed audition for the character Harpo in The Color Purple (1985). Why We Make Movies is resplendent with such gems. — Evelyn C. White
Morvern Callar
By Alan Warner
Anchor, $12.95
Stuck in a dead-end supermarket job in a small Scottish port town, Morvern Callar awakens on the morning before Christmas to find her boyfriend dead by his own hand on the kitchen floor. That’s on page one, yet it’s far from the most morbid image in a novel that’s by turns gripping and exasperating in its fractured first-person narrative and unself-conscious amorality. The first third of the book catalogs its heroine’s cheerless meandering between meaningless sex romps, rave clubs, the violently hip alternative rock blasting in her Walkman (a posthumous Christmas present from her ex, no less), and a foster family who gave her little grounding for giving and receiving affection. All the while her boyfriend’s death remains unreported, his body rotting in the attic of the flat, Morvern seeming emotionally numb at the core, her prose heavily peppered with Scottish slang that some American readers will find impenetrable. Morvern’s not a sympathetic character, as you can gather. Even less so after she chops the carcass into small bits for burial so that it won’t be discovered. (Her cold character, as well as the boyfriend’s dismemberment, is softened considerably in the new movie based on the book.) But before her bottled-up despair becomes tedious, unexpected plot twists make her tale far more interesting, and at times riveting. Feasting on a couple of surprise bequests from her departed boyfriend, our heroine is soon living the high life in Spain and London, running through her funds with as little care and conscience as she seems to bestow upon her friends, lovers, and family at home. Yet the book’s power to shock, if intermittent, lies not so much in the distastefulness of Morvern’s most gruesome acts, but rather in her own absence of hope, ethics, or vision of a way out. — Richie Unterberger
Scavenger Hunt
By Robert Ferrigno
Pantheon, 24.95
While attending a Hollywood party, Slap magazine star reporter Jimmy Gage takes part in a scavenger hunt during which the tabloid writer and his goofy teammates set out to find an Oscar statue. But they promptly find themselves involved in murder and mayhem involving a Tarantino-like director who is down on his luck, just out of prison for the murder of a teenage girl. The director is trying to sell his latest screenplay, titled The Fall Guy, supposedly the story of the frame-up that put him behind bars. This latest novel from the author of The Horse Latitudes is a comic, don’t-take-me-too-seriously noir thriller. Ferrigno hits all the right notes when describing LA, balancing the expected clichés — “It was hot and dry and overcast, the twelfth straight day of a thermal inversion” — with some new Southern California material: “One of those fancy AM/FM radios was on the top shelf, tuned to a New Age music station, which was a waste of technology if you ask him.” The plot is a real work of art, an unpredictable roller-coaster ride that finds its second wind in the weirdest spots. There’s just enough gritty violence, including a great fight scene, to qualify this as noir. Its supporting cast is, while not quite believable, one of the book’s major strengths. The ditzy Monelli twins and tough cop Helen Katz are truly funny. Too oddball to be compared with the works of Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald — which is, in some ways, a relief — Ferrigno’s tales of LA scandal and mayhem are unique. — Owen Hill
