Doris Kearns Goodwin's classic life of Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and other defining moments the tumultuous 1960s, is a monument in political biography.

From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, first encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 1967, she became fascinated by the man—his character, his enormous energy and drive, and his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power.

As a member of his White House staff, she soon became his personal confidante, and in the years before his death he revealed himself to her as he did to no other.

Widely praised and enormously popular, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream is a work of biography like few others. With uncanny insight and a richly engrossing style, the author renders LBJ in all his vibrant, conflicted humanity.


ISBN-13 : 9780312060275
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Publication date : 6/28/1991
Author : Doris Kearns Goodwin

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"The most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read . . . No other President has had a biographer who had such access to his private thoughts."—The New York Times

"Magnificent, brilliant, illuminating . . . A profound analysis of both the private and the public man."—Miami Herald

"Kearns has made Lyndon Johnson so whole, so understandable that the impact of the book is difficult to describe. It might have been called 'The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson,' for he comes to seem nothing so much as a figure out of Greek tragedy."—Houston Chronicle

"Johnson's every word and deed is measured in an attempt to understand one of the most powerful yet tragic of American Presidents."—Chicago Tribune

"A fine and shrewd book . . . Extraordinary . . . Poignant . . . The best [biography of LBJ] we have to date."—Boston Globe

"An extraordinary portrait of a generous, devious, complex, and profoundly manipulative man . . . [Kearns Goodwin] became the custodian not only of LBJ's political lore but of his memories, hopes, and nightmares . . . We have it all laid out for us in this wrenchingly intimate analysis of a man who virtues, like his faults, were on a giant scale."—Cosmopolitan

"Absorbing and sympathetic, warts and all."—The Washington Post

"A grand and fascinating portrait of a most complicated, haunted, and here appealing man."—The Village Voice

"Vivid . . . No other book is likely to offer a sharper, more intimate portrait of Lyndon Johnson in his full psychic undress."—Newsweek

"Powerful, first-rate, gratifying . . . [The author] has proven herself worthy of Lyndon Johnson's trust; for by sharing his fears and dreams with us, she has helped us to understand no just one man, but an era, and ultimately ourselves."—Newsday

Meet the Author

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the celebrated historian who is also the author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and other bestsellers, has written a new foreword for this edition of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband and their three sons.

published 07/10/2010 at 17:31 PM

Notes, poèmes, correspondances... voici un recueil de textes inédits de l'actrice Marilyn Monroe, publié par les éditions du Seuil, qui vont ravir votre curiosité. Poupoupidou !

Véritable évènement dans l'édition, le recueil de textes inédits de l'actrice Marilyn Monroe sera publié le 7 octobre prochain par les éditions du Seuil. La société s'est rendue détentrice des droits mondiaux et publiera l'ouvrage dans plusieurs pays, dont les Etats-Unis.

Des textes inédits de la star hollywoodienne, tous originaux, rassemblants des fac-similés de notes, poèmes ainsi que ses correspondances manuscrites avec le directeur de l'Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg, ou avec sa psychanalyste, seront rassemblés dans un ouvrage de plus de 250 pages.

Des photos de l'actrice illustreront ces pages et un texte explicatif permettra de resituer les lettres dans leur contexte historique. Le premier document date de fin 1943 et le dernier de 1962, l'année de sa mort.

Une telle entreprise a été possible grâce à Anna Strasberg, veuve de Lee Strasberg, lui-même héritier par testament de la succession de Marilyn Monroe. Anna Strasberg a confié la publication de ces textes au producteur Stanley Buchthal et à Bernard Comment, éditeur au Seuil.

Selon les éditeurs, Monroe évoque dans cet ouvrage les hommes de sa vie, notamment Arthur Miller. Elle livre aussi un regard critique sur son statut de pin-up hollywoodienne.

La maison d'édition française distribuera ce livre dans plusieurs pays via des maisons d'édition nationales, sélectionnées selon le prestige de leur catalogue. En Allemagne par exemple, S. Fischer Verlag se chargera d'éditer le livre, en Espagne ce sera Seix Barral, Feltrinelli pour l'Italie et aux Etats-Unis chez Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Marilyn Monroe, Fragments, poèmes, écrits intimes et lettres - Sortie : 7 octobre 2010 - Seuil, 256 pages - 29,80 euros

published 02/08/2011 at 01:54 PM EDT

The FBI director kept famous files on everything from Martin Luther King’s sex life to never-before-reported secret meetings between RFK and Marilyn Monroe, as a new book reveals. An exclusive excerpt from Ronald Kessler’s 'The Secrets of the FBI.'

Complex man that he was, J. Edgar Hoover left nothing to chance. The director shrewdly recognized that building what became known as the world’s greatest law enforcement agency would not necessarily keep him in office. So after Hoover became director, he began to maintain a special Official and Confidential file in his office. The “secret files,” as they became widely known, would guarantee that Hoover would remain director as long as he wished.

Defenders of Hoover— a dwindling number of older former agents who still refer to him as “Mr. Hoover”—have claimed his Official and Confidential files were not used to blackmail members of Congress or presidents. They say Hoover kept the files with sensitive information about political leaders in his suite so that young file clerks would not peruse them and spread gossip. The files were no more secret than any other bureau files, Hoover supporters say.

While the files may well have been kept in Hoover’s office to protect them from curious clerks, it was also true that far more sensitive files containing top-secret information on pending espionage cases were kept in the central files. If Hoover truly was concerned about information getting out, he should have been more worried about the highly classified information in those files.

The Secrets of the FBI By Ronald Kessler, 304 pages. Crown. $26.

Moreover, the Official and Confidential files were secret in the sense that Hoover never referred to them publicly, as he did the rest of the bureau’s files. He distinguished them from other bureau files by calling them “confidential,” denoting secrecy.  But whether they were secret or not and where they were kept was irrelevant. What was important was how Hoover used the information from those files and from other bureau files.

“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” said William Sullivan, who became the number three official in the bureau under Hoover, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this. We realize you’d want to know it.’ Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”

Lawrence J. Heim, who was in the Crime Records Division, confirmed to me that the bureau sent agents to tell members of Congress that Hoover had picked up derogatory information on them.

“He [Hoover] would send someone over on a very confidential basis,” Heim said. As an example, if the Metropolitan Police in Washington had picked up evidence of homosexuality, “he [Hoover] would have him say, ‘This activity is known by the Metropolitan Police Department and some of our informants, and it is in your best interests to know this.’ But nobody has ever claimed to have been blackmailed. You can deduce what you want from that.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is seen in his Washington office, date unknown

Of course, the reason no one publicly claimed to have been blackmailed is that blackmail, by definition, entails collecting embarrassing information that people do not want public. But not everyone was intimidated.

Roy L. Elson, the administrative assistant to Senator Carl T. Hayden, will never forget an encounter he had with Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison with Congress. For twenty years, Hayden headed the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and later the Senate Appropriations Committee, which had jurisdiction over the FBI’s budget. He was one of the most powerful members of Congress. As Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, suffered hearing loss and some dementia in his later years, Elson became known as the “101st senator” because he made many of the senator’s decisions for him.

In the early 1960s, DeLoach wanted an additional appropriation for the new FBI headquarters building, which Congress approved in April 1962.

“The senator supported the building,” Elson said. “He always gave the bureau more money than they needed. This was a request for an additional appropriation. I had reservations about it. DeLoach was persistent.”

DeLoach “hinted” that he had “information that was unflattering and detrimental to my marital situation and that the senator might be disturbed,” said Elson, who was then married to his second wife. “I was certainly vulnerable that way,” Elson said. “There was more than one girl [he was seeing]. . . . The implication was there was information about my sex life. There was no doubt in my mind what he was talking about.”

published 13/01/2011 at 05:41 PM EST


The Daily Beast obtained an exclusive, early copy of the script of the botched History Channel miniseries The Kennedys. Jace Lacob picks eight salacious bits from the first episode.

Katie Holmes and Greg Kinnear star in The Kennedys

Ask just about anyone in Hollywood what they had thought of The Kennedys, the History Channel miniseries about the Kennedy clan, and they’ll tell you it was so far off their radars that they didn’t give it a thought. That changed last week when the History Channel, a division of A&E Television Networks, announced that it had opted to shelve the project—from 24 co-creator Joel Surnow, director Jon Cassar, and writer Steve Kronish—stating that the “ dramatic interpretation [was] not a fit for the History brand.”

The news was particularly shocking as The Kennedys features actors Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes as John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy Sr. (A Canadian broadcast of the eight-part miniseries is still set for this spring, while the project is expected to air internationally.) The show’s creators immediately began to shop the project to other cable networks, receiving passes from FX, Starz, and, most recently, Showtime.

The Daily Beast has obtained an undated draft of the first episode of writer Kronish’s script for The Kennedys, potentially the same draft the late former Kennedy adviser Theodore C. Sorensen and documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald, founder of website StopKennedySmears.com, told The New York Times last winter was “political character assassination.”

The episode largely revolves around the Svengali-like grip that Joe Kennedy (Wilkinson) held over his sons, Joe Jr. (slain during WWII), war hero Jack, and lawyer Bobby (Barry Pepper), telling his story in non-linear fashion. The action flashes between his undergraduate days at Harvard—where he was denied admission the exclusive Porcellian Club (itself recently featured in The Social Network)—and two political campaigns being waged by John Kennedy (Kinnear), one for Congress and one the fateful presidential campaign that made him the 35th president of the United States.

But while the scene is set for JFK’s victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, Kronish seems to relish in painting the Kennedys as a group of rowdy schoolboys, equally hungry for power and sex, particularly in the case of Wilkinson’s Joe Sr., whose quest for vengeance provides the throughline for the first episode.

What follows are eight of the most shocking moments in the script for The Kennedys’ first installment. (Kennedy obsessives, is there any truth to these dramatized events?)

One

Pages 16-17: Wilkinson’s Joe Sr. fondles his secretary in his office at the ambassador’s residence in London in 1938. As he dictates a note to the president, Joe “fondles her breasts” and “nuzzles her neck.” When sons Joe Jr. and Jack enter his office, Joe Sr. continues his fondling as his sons look on, “amused.” The note he’s dictating? It suggests that in order to keep the peace in Europe, certain concessions be made to Hitler. (It’s a viewpoint later parroted by son Joe Jr. even after the annexation of Czechoslovakia.) A comment made about Jack’s shabby clothes results in him telling his father, “Girls figure I need help dressing. Once I get ‘em in the closet…”

Two

Years later, Joe Sr. and his secretary Janet pass by his wife Rose in the hallway of their Hyannisport home on Election Night 1960. After chatting with Rose, he and his secretary Janet enter his bedroom as Rose locks her own bedroom door. [Page 57]

Three

Pages 21-23: Joe Sr. learns that Jack is romantically involved with married Danish national Inga Arvard (whom Jack refers to as “Inga Binga”), a woman that J. Edgar Hoover reports has “been linked to counterintelligence activities in Washington on behalf of the German government.” When Jack refuses to break off relations with Arvard, Joe Sr. has Jack shipped overseas after placing a call to the secretary of the Navy.

Four

Page 24: When beloved eldest son Joe Jr. dies during the war, Joe Sr. receives the tragic news by retreating to his bedroom alone, leaving his deeply religious wife Rose holding her rosary by herself. Upon entering the bedroom, he spies a two-foot wooden crucifix on the wall and breaks it across his knee.

Five

Page 41: Brothers Jack and Bobby engage in banter about horniness after their father has begun to apply pressure on Jack to marry in 1951. “What do you do when you’re horny?” asks Jack. “I mean, how can you stand the boredom?” When Bobby replies that he loves Ethel (who has just jumped into the pool during a party in McLean, at which she released live frogs), Jack says, “I love lobster, but not every night. If I don’t have some strange ass every couple of days, I get migraines.”

Six

On Election Day 1960, Jack implies to his brother Bobby that he had sex with a redheaded aide in his campaign offices. “She volunteered to work overtime last night,” says Jack. “We discussed the ins and outs of politics.” [Page 8]

Seven

Pages 44-46: In September 1953, while at Hyannisport, Joe Sr. tells Jackie he knows her grandfather was a Jew, changing his name from Levy to Lee so that he “could get a job on Wall Street.” In the same conversation, Jackie tells Joe Sr. she wants a divorce from Jack. In order to keep the two together, Joe Sr. offers Jackie a $1 million trust, with the promise that if Jack doesn’t win presidency, she can leave him and keep the money.

Eight

Page 55: Joe Sr. buys off Chicago Italian mobster Sam Giancana in an effort to help win Jack’s presidential election, telling Giancana to “get names off of tombstones for all I give a damn.” In exchange, Joe Sr. promises Giancana protection from the Justice Department and the IRS once Jack is elected. “If you get on board—my hand to God—all you boys’ll see the best times you’ve had since Prohibition,” he says. Giancana, of course, was said to be involved with a CIA operation in which he and other mobsters were recruited to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro; Giancana was also reputed to have shared two mistresses—Judith Exner and Phyllis McGuire—with JFK.

Editor’s Note: An early version of this story stated that Sam Giancana and John F. Kennedy were reputed to have shared one mistress, Phyllis McGuire. The text was later updated to add Judith Exner’s name.

Plus: Check out more of the latest entertainment, fashion, and culture coverage on Sexy Beast—photos, videos, features, and Tweets.

Jace Lacob is The Daily Beast's TV Columnist. As a freelance writer, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, TV Week, and others. Jace is the founder of television criticism and analysis website Televisionary and can be found on Twitter. He is a member of the Television Critics Association.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Jace Lacob is the deputy West Coast bureau chief and television critic for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He has written about television and culture at large, including food and cocktails, books, film, and even the real-life sport of Quidditch. Prior to joining The Daily Beast in 2009, his work appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TV Week, AOLtv, and Film.com. He also founded Televisionary, an award-winning television-criticism website, in 2006. He is a member of the Television Critics Association and lives in Los Angeles.

published 26/04/2010 at 06:36 PM EDT by Daniel Okrent

In an exclusive excerpt from Last Call, his history of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent writes that long-held beliefs about Joe Kennedy’s bootlegging business are bunk.

On September 26, 1933, the same day that Colorado became the 24th state to ratify the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition, the 45-year-old Joseph P. Kennedy was aboard the S.S. Europa, bound east with a younger friend and their wives. Their primary destination was England, where the seeds of Prohibition’s most enduring legend were about to be planted.

The younger man was an insurance agent named James Roosevelt. As he was also the eldest son of the new president, he was, said the Saturday Evening Post, “something like an American Prince of Wales.” Kennedy’s fondness for his 25-year-old shipboard companion was such that he sometimes referred to himself as Roosevelt’s “foster father.” During their stay in London, one or the other of them met with Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and two of his eventual successors, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Together they had lunch with the managing director of the Distillers Company conglomerate. If Joe Kennedy wanted to open political doors or commercial ones, he could have done worse than travel with the son of a president.

One writer, citing an interview with Al Capone’s 93-year-old piano tuner, actually has Kennedy coming to Capone’s house for spaghetti dinner to discuss trading a shipment of his Irish whiskey.

By the time he returned from the U.K.—his wife had continued on to Cannes, and then to Rome with the Roosevelts for an audience with the pope—Kennedy had concluded all-but-final agreements with Distillers to become the sole American importer of three of its most valuable brands, Dewar’s, Haig & Haig, and Gordon’s Gin. These contracts were the crucial third leg of an enterprise that was also balanced on medicinal liquor permits—legal throughout Prohibition —that Kennedy had obtained in Washington, and the bonded warehouse space he had lined up. Shipments began arriving in November. On December 5, Utah’s legislature became the 36th to ratify the Repeal amendment, rendering Prohibition officially dead. The next morning, before the national hangover from the previous night’s revels had entirely subsided, Somerset Importers was in business, founded on an investment of $118,000. Kennedy’s firm took its name from the Boston men’s club that barred its doors to Irish Catholics, and it owed its creation to Kennedy’s friendship with Franklin Roosevelt’s son. Somerset emitted the pungent air that hovered around most marriages of politics and commerce, but it was in every respect perfectly legal.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. By Daniel Okrent. 480 pages. Scribner. $30

That last part—“perfectly legal”—was something that Walter Trohan, the longtime Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, failed to include in an article published some 20 years later, when Kennedy’s son John was serving his first term as U.S. senator from Massachusetts. In that 1954 article on James Roosevelt’s impending divorce, Trohan also related the story of Joseph Kennedy’s Roosevelt-assisted entry into the liquor business. After a brief description of Kennedy’s deal with the British, Trohan added, “At the time, Prohibition had not been repealed.” This was true, as far as it went—but it did not acknowledge that the pre-Repeal liquor Kennedy imported in November 1933 entered the country under legal medicinal permits, and was at first stored in legally bonded warehouse space. From such acorns, nourished by a lifetime’s accumulation of rumors, enemies, and vast sums of money, arose the widely accepted story of Joseph P. Kennedy, bootlegger.

Except there’s really no reason to believe he was one. The most familiar legacy of Prohibition might be its own mythology, a body of lore and gossip and Hollywood-induced imagery that comes close enough to the truth to be believable, but not close enough to be… well, to be true. The Kennedy myth is an outstanding example. The facts of Kennedy’s life (that he was rich; that he was in the liquor business; that he was deeply unpopular and widely distrusted) were rich loam for a rumor that did not begin to blossom until nearly 30 years after Repeal. Three times during the 1930s, Kennedy was appointed to federal positions requiring Senate confirmation (chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, Ambassador to Great Britain). At a time when the memory of Prohibition was vivid and the passions it inflamed still smoldered, no one seemed to think Joe Kennedy had been a bootlegger—not the Republicans, not the anti-Roosevelt Democrats, not remnant Klansmen or anti-Irish Boston Brahmins or cynical newsmen or resentful Dry leaders still seething from the humiliation of Repeal. There’s nothing in the Senate record that suggests anyone brought up the bootlegging charge; there’s nothing about it in the press coverage that appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or The Boston Globe. There was nothing asserting, suggesting, or hinting at bootlegging in the Roosevelt-hating Chicago Tribune, or in the long-dry Los Angeles Times. Around the time of his three Senate confirmations, the last of them concluding barely four years after Repeal, there was some murmuring about Kennedy’s involvement in possible stock-manipulation schemes, and a possible conflict of interest. But about involvement in the illegal liquor trade, there was nothing at all. With Prohibition fresh in the national mind, when a hint of illegal behavior would have been dearly prized by the president’s enemies or Kennedy’s own, there wasn’t even a whisper.

In the 1950s, another presidential appointment provoked another investigation of Kennedy’s past. This time, Dwight Eisenhower intended to name him to the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, an advisory group meant to provide oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency. The office of Sherman Adams, the White House chief of staff, asked the FBI to comb through Kennedy’s past associations and activities. The fat file that resulted touched on nearly every aspect of his life, including his business relations with James Roosevelt. But nowhere in the file is there any indication of bootlegging in the Kennedy past, or even a suggestion of it from Kennedy’s detractors.

And so the record remained, apparently, until his son’s presidential campaign. That’s when the word “bootlegger” first attached itself to Kennedy’s name in prominent places—for instance, in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article dated October 15, 1960, where Edward R. Woods wrote, “In certain ultra-dry sections of the country, Joe Kennedy is now referred to as ‘a rich bootlegger’ by his candidate-son’s detractors.” A quiet period followed, and then the suggestion started showing up again after the 1964 publication of the Warren Commission Report. Supporters of the theory that John F. Kennedy was murdered by the Mafia suggested the assassination had something to do with the aged resentments of mobster Sam Giancana, who was, as one writer later claimed without evidence, “a former partner in Joe's bootlegging business.”

Meyer Lansky, who’d had plenty of chances to talk about it before, suddenly claimed a pre-Repeal Kennedy connection.

Then the mob stories burst into bloom. Meyer Lansky, who’d had plenty of chances to talk about it before, suddenly claimed a pre-Repeal Kennedy connection. In 1973, Frank Costello told a journalist (with whom he was collaborating on a book) that he had done business with Kennedy during Prohibition; the inconsiderate Costello proceeded to die a week and a half later. Another mobster, Joe Bonanno, repeated Costello’s assertion on 60 Minutes 10 years after that—while promoting a book of his own. By 1991, a drama critic for The New York Times could refer to Kennedy as a bootlegger, without any elaboration, in a theater review. The same year, a potential juror in the rape trial of one of Kennedy’s grandsons could assert without challenge, during voir dire, that the family fortune had been founded on bootlegging. By then it had become nearly impossible to ask a reasonably informed individual to name a bootlegger without getting “Joe Kennedy” as a reply.

Some of the less reputable Joe-as-Bootlegger assertions are based on “evidence” as flimsy as one man’s recollection that he’d seen Kennedy on the docks near Gloucester, gazing out to sea, waiting for his next shipment to come in. Never mind that during the 1920s, when he was an extremely successful stock market trader and the hands-on owner of a major motion picture studio, Kennedy might have had more productive ways to pass his time. One writer, citing an interview with Al Capone’s 93-year-old piano tuner, actually has Kennedy coming to Capone’s house for spaghetti dinner to discuss trading a shipment of his Irish whiskey for a load of Capone’s Canadian. Looking backward, many find convincing evidence in the booze Kennedy provided for his Harvard 10th Reunion—something any 33-year-old sport could have done in 1922, especially one whose father had been a legitimate tavern owner before Prohibition and retained the right to own his remaining stock.

Others have chosen to leave shards of evidence insufficiently examined—for instance, the biographer who found a 1938 letter from Kennedy to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in which the new ambassador mentions his 20 years of doing business with Great Britain. The investment industry and the movie industry could have provided Kennedy with plenty of opportunity for trans-Atlantic commerce in those years. Additionally, had the biographer realized that Hull was a life-long and active Dry, he might have been less eager to conclude that Kennedy could have been referring to absolutely nothing else but the bootlegging business. Others have uncovered the name of a Joseph Kennedy in the transcripts of hearings conducted by the Canadian Royal Commission on Customs in 1927, but do not mention that the “Joseph Kennedy Export House” was based in Vancouver; that its eponym was identified at the time as fictitious; and that the operation in fact belonged to Henry Reifel, a notorious British Columbia distiller who, according one prominent Canadian journalist, had simply appropriated the name of a waiter in a Vancouver bar.

Even the most reputable investigators have been unconvincing. Trying to nail down Kennedy’s putative bootlegging career, one of the finest reporters of the last 40 years tried and tried to overcome what he called “the remarkable lack of documentation in government files.” Having failed, he chose to retail a batch of second- and thirdhand stories from people who had been suspiciously silent for generations. A noted scholar of the Scotch Whisky industry based his case for Kennedy’s illegal activity on the memory of a Scotsman he interviewed more than three decades after Repeal—a man who not only might have been remembering the liquor-importing Joe Kennedy of 1934, but who also, as it happened, asked his interviewer not to reveal his name, not even after his death.

One can exonerate the old Scot of malicious intent. The Kennedy family’s rise to prominence, compounded by the increasing appearance of stray rumors in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, surely made dimly recalled encounters from the distant past suddenly seem more meaningful (or, as the aspiring litterateurs Costello and Bonanno may have hoped, more profitable as well). But it’s harder to forgive writers who stretch logic and research standards as if they were Silly Putty —for instance, the author of a Kennedy family biography who, unable to find substantive evidence of bootlegging, reaches a particularly dubious conclusion: “The sheer magnitude of the recollections,” he writes, “is more important than the veracity of the individual stories.”

One cannot prove a negative. Perhaps there’s a document somewhere, or even a credible memory, that establishes a connection between Joseph P. Kennedy and the illegal liquor trade. But all we know for certain is that Joe Kennedy brought liquor into the country legally before the end of Prohibition, and sold a great deal of it after. Along the way, the “legally” somehow fell off the page, as it had in Walter Trohan’s 1954 article. Given nearly eight decades of journalism, history, and biography, and three trips through the Senate confirmation process, and the ongoing efforts of legions of Kennedy haters and Kennedy doubters (and even Kennedy lovers who venerated the sons but despised the father), one would think that some scrap or sliver of evidence that he was indeed a bootlegger would have turned up by now.

But Joe Kennedy didn’t have to be a bootlegger. After all, nearly everyone else was.

Copyright © 2101 by Last Laugh, Inc. From the forthcoming book LAST CALL by Daniel Okrent to be published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

Daniel Okrent is the author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. He was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He was also a featured commentator on Ken Burns' PBS series, Baseball , and is author of four books, one of which, Great Fortune, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times and editor-at-large at Time Inc., is the author of the just-published Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

Natalie Wood was always a star; her mother made sure this was true. A superstitious Russian immigrant who claimed to be royalty, Maria had been told by a gypsy, long before little Natasha Zakharenko's birth, that her second child would be famous throughout the world. When the beautiful child with the hypnotic eyes was first placed in Maria's arms, she knew the prophecy would become true and proceeded to do everything in her power — everything — to make sure of it.

Natasha is the haunting story of a vulnerable and talented actress whom many of us felt we knew. We watched her mature on the movie screen before our eyes — in Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, Splendor in the Grass, and on and on. She has been hailed — along with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor — as one of the top three female movie stars in the history of film, making her a legend in her own lifetime and beyond. But the story of what Natalie endured, of what her life was like when the doors of the soundstages closed, has long been obscured.

Natasha is based on years of exhaustive research into Natalie's turbulent life and mysterious drowning in the dark water that was her greatest fear. Author Suzanne Finstad, a former lawyer, conducted nearly four hundred interviews with Natalie's family, close friends, legendary costars, lovers, film crews, and virtually everyone connected with the investigation of her strange death. Through these firsthand accounts from many who have never spoken publicly before, Finstad has reconstructed a life of emotional abuse and exploitation, of almost unprecedented fame, great loneliness, poignancy, and loss. She sheds an unwavering light on Natalie's complex relationships with James Dean, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Raymond Burr, Warren Beatty, and Robert Wagner and reveals the two lost loves of Natalie's life, whom her controlling mother prevented her from marrying. Finstad tells this beauty's heartbreaking story with sensitivity and grace, revealing a complex and conflicting mix of fragility and strength in a woman who was swept along by forces few could have resisted. Natasha is impossible to put down — it is the definitive biography of Natalie Wood that we've long been waiting for.

ISBN-13 : 9780609809570
Publisher : Crown Publishing Group
Publication date : 04/09/2002
Author : Suzanne Finstad


Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

The fruit of nearly 400 interviews, this authoritative biography offers perhaps our first comprehensive view of a woman and movie actress whose life, until now, had remained as much a mystery as her unexplained 1981 drowning. Finstad's zestful research illuminates every phase of Wood's abbreviated life, from her sudden fame as a nine-year-old child star to her last night aboard The Splendour. Apparently, Ms. Wood took her role as sex symbol seriously: The former Natasha Nikolaevna Zacharenko conducted offscreen romances with Elvis Presley, James Dean, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Robert Wagner.

Jonathan Yardley

[Finstad] helps us reach what certainly seems to be a clearer understanding of a woman who, it turns out, was even more interesting, appealing and vulnerable in private than on the screen. A resident of Los Angeles whose previous books include a biography of Priscilla Presley, Finstad also has a keen sense of how that city's dream factory simultaneously turns women into stars and leaves them bereft. — Washington Post Book World

Library Journal

Fans of celebrity biographies will be interested in the life story of Wood, who was born in San Francisco in 1938 to Russian immigrants, the second of three daughters. Her name was Natasha Zakharenko, later Gurdin. Positive that her dark-eyed daughter was destined for fame, Maria Gurdin got Natasha her first screen role at age six, controlling her life and career and providing dire warnings about men and other perils. She did not dispel Natalie's terrible fear of "dark water," which Finstad repeats many times throughout the tale, leading up to the actress's tragic drowning in 1981 at age 43. Wood's screen successes include Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, and The Searchers. She had male companions Raymond Burr, Dennis Hopper, and Frank Sinatra but the great love of her life was actor Robert Wagner, whom she married, divorced, and remarried. The mysterious circumstances of her death are reviewed in detail; Finstad conducted hundreds of interviews with friends, attorneys, the coroner, and other officials. Wood's younger sister Lana's careful reading keeps the story from sounding sensational.

Meet the Author

Suzanne Finstad, a former lawyer, is the award-winning author of five previous literary works, including the bestseller Sleeping with the Devil. She lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

"Natalie Wood" never really existed. The actress with that name was a fictional creation of her mother, a disturbed genius known by various first names, usually Maria. How Natalie was discovered, why she went into show business as a child, her background, were all part of a tapestry of lies woven by Maria that began before Natalie was even born. "God created her, but I invented her," her mother said once, after Natalie's body was discovered floating in the dark waters off Catalina Island the Sunday after Thanksgiving of 1981, when she was just forty-three. Natalie Wood, the celebrity, was an entwined alter ego of mother and daughter so powerfully macabre her drowning had been predicted by a gypsy, years before, to happen to Maria, not Natalie. The person inside the illusion of "Natalie Wood" was lost for years, even to herself.

Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, the real name of the actress known as Natalie Wood, was a child of Russia, once removed. Exactly where in Russia we may never know, for her mother, the source of the family history, was an unreliable witness, a feverishly imaginative woman who lived in a world of her own invention, only occasionally punctuated by the truth. Maria's friends characterized this as colorful; others considered her devious; her youngest child eventually concluded she was a pathological liar. There was intrigue to Maria no biographer could fully unravel. She would have three daughters -- Olga, Natalia, and Svetlana -- three sisters, as in the Chekhov play. For Maria, there was only and ever Natalia. Her consuming obsession with Natasha, Natalia's pet name, was the one thing no one questioned about Maria.

The rest of her life was a masquerade, with Maria assuming different disguises.

Natalie Wood's mother came into the world somewhere in Siberia. It was most likely the town of Barnaul, as her oldest child, Olga, believed and ship's records document, though she told a different daughter and a biographer that she was born in Tomsk. They are both close to Russia's border with Mongolia, near the Altai Mountains. Maria's early years were spent in this nethermost, Russian-Asian region of the more than four and a half million square miles known as Siberia, famous for its bitterly cold winters, romanticized for its forests primeval, and considered the ends of the earth.

Maria claimed, throughout her life, to have grown up in fantastical luxury on a palatial Siberian estate with a Chinese cook, three governesses, and a "nyanka" (nanny) per child. But her most cherished belief, or delusion, was that she was related, through her mother, to the Romanovs, Russia's royal family. Her stories -- whether true or not, and most who heard them questioned their veracity -- "kept you spellbound," according to a young actor who befriended Maria in the 1980s, after Natalie drowned. "She herself was quite the actress. She spoke in a very dramatic whisper, so you had to lean in, and pay close attention. She used her hands as she would describe in great detail her genealogy from Russia. She would whisper, 'We were descended from royalty . . .' and you would just hang on every word."

What is known of Maria's family is that her father, Stepan Zudilov, was married twice. He had four children -- two boys, Mikhael and Semen, and two girls, Apollinaria (called Lilia) and Kallisfenia (or Kalia) -- by his first wife, Anna. Anna died in childbirth with Kalia in 1905 in Barnaul, where the Zudilovs resided. Stepan took a second bride, who would likewise bear him two sons and two daughters in reverse order: a girl, Zoia, born in 1907, followed by Maria, then Boris and Gleb. Stepan Zudilov's youngest daughter, Maria Stepanovna Zudilova, would become the mother of Natalie Wood.

According to Maria, her mother (also named Maria) was "close relations" to the Romanov family. It is believed her maiden name was Kulev. Whether she was an aristocrat is unknown. Kalia, Stepan's younger daughter by his first wife and the only Zudilov child other than Maria to immigrate to the United States, would later tell her children, "Somebody in the line was a countess." But as a Russian historian notes sardonically, "Everyone from Russia wants to be related to the Romanovs."

If Natalie Wood's grandmother had royal blood, her mother undermined her own credibility by the thousand-and-one variations on her lineage she offered, Scheherazade-style. "One story was that her parents took her to China when she was a little girl and she became a Chinese princess through some mysterious circumstances that were never explained," recalls a Hollywood friend. Another version that surfaced in studio biographies after Natalie became a child actress identified Maria as "being of French extraction." According to her eldest daughter, Olga, this was a prank on Maria's part. "When they would ask her if she's French, she'd say, 'Oh, yes . . .' She knew how to speak French, because she probably had French nannies." Even this was based solely on Maria's word, for Olga never heard her mother actually speak a word of French (nor did Maria's half-sister Kalia speak it). Maria's white lie sustained itself all the way to a 1983 television tribute to Natalie Wood, during which Orson Welles, her first costar, refers to Natalie being "not just of Russian but also of French descent." Maria, in the opinion of her daughter Lana (Americanized from Svetlana), was "frightening" in her ability to bend reality and convince others it was true, "because she did believe everything that came out of her mouth."

Maria told Lana that she was born to gypsy parents who left her on a hillside, where the Zudilovs found her and raised her as their own. "I heard that story my entire life." Maria would laugh about it with friends after Natalie became famous, muttering, in her heavy Slavic whisper, "They used to call me 'The Gypsy!' " She could easily create that impression as an adult, with her raven hair, magical tales and musical accent. "I could almost see her," remarked a Hollywood writer who spent hours with Maria, "waylaying me on a street with a bunch of heather, saying, 'Buy this or you'll be cursed for life.' "

The idea that Maria was the displaced child of gypsies is "hogwash" in the pronouncement of her closest traceable living relation -- Kalia's son Constantine. No one in the family, including Lana, took this tale seriously. It originated, Maria's daughter Olga believes, as gossip among the family servants, for Maria was born, she told Olga, at the Zudilovs' "dacha," a country cottage, in the mountains. "And when my grandmother came back she had my mother, so the servants used to tell her, 'You were born by gypsies,' because she wasn't born right there where they could see her."

One clue exists to help decipher Maria's past. It is a photograph of the Zudilov family, retained separately by both Maria and Kalia, taken somewhere in Russia circa March 1919, according to the handwritten description. Maria's family, judged by their portrait, appears to be of means. They are dressed á la mode, the girls in shirtwaists and sailor dresses, posed regally, projecting a patrician mien. Stepan Zudilov, Natalie Wood's maternal grandfather, sits on a chair to the far left of the photograph, a stout but stately figure with a sweeping moustache, in a well-tailored three-piece woolen suit. At the center of the portrait, also seated, is his second wife, Maria, the putative Romanov. Maria evokes a gentle womanliness. She is possessed of a round face with soft features, girlishly pretty; her dark hair, contrasted by fair skin, is styled in marcelled waves. What distinguishes her as the grandmother of Natalie Wood are her liquid brown eyes: they hold the camera with their tender, slightly sad gaze.

Stepan and Maria occupy the front row with their four children -- Natalie's mother, Maria, staring brazenly into the camera's eye; thirteen-year-old Zoia; and the two boys, Boris and Gleb, six and four, seated side-by-side in identical Lord Fauntleroy suits. (Maria would later bizarrely refer to them as "twins.") Standing behind Stepan's second family are his four grown children by his first wife, Anna; including Kalia, the corroborating witness to the family history. Anna's offspring are swarthier, with sharper features than Stepan's children by Natalie's grandmother. Everyone has captivating eyes.

The picture helps to solve the riddle of Maria's true age, which would become the subject of whispered speculation once she came to Hollywood. From the time she was twenty or so, she gave her date of birth as February 8, 1912. On the back of the 1919 family photo, she is identified as "11 years, 1 month," which would mean she was born in 1908 -- the same year recorded in the ship's log when she immigrated to America. Both Maria and Kalia, Kalia's son cheerfully admits, "lied about their age."

The photograph of Maria's family, ironically, bears a resemblance to the romantic images of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, in formal portraits with their children, taken in the last days of the Romanov monarchy. Maria kept this family photo beside a framed portrait of the Romanovs in similar pose, to the day she died, prizing them as jewels. Aside from Natalie, her link to Russian aristocracy is what defined Maria to herself, true or false, for as one companion remarked, "She believed every word of it. That's the mark of a good actress."

Musia or Marusia, as young Maria was affectionately called, was pampered from the time she was born because of her diminutive size. One of her stories was that she weighed only two pounds at birth, nearly dying. In the family portrait, she is nestled into her mother, cradling her to her breast as Marusia peers out with the smug self-possession of the favored child. She has an elfin quality, her dark hair pixie-short, with penetrating, bird-like eyes she compared to her father's as green, her daughter Olga describes as a changeable gray-blue, and those who considered her malevolent called "black and beady." Her expression, even at eleven, suggests cunning. She was a mischievous girl. Her German nanny was fired for making Musia kneel; she learned to swear in Chinese from the cook. When she did so in front of her father, it was the cook -- not Musia -- who "got a talking." The young Marusia adored jewelry (a bold bracelet leaps out from her tiny wrist in the family photo). She collected pictures and books depicting the royal family "because I worship them," she would say later, "almost like a god."

Kalia, Marusia's older half-sister, supported her grandiose accounts of governesses and fur coats and seamstresses for their dolls, though Kalia identified the origin of the family's wealth as a factory that produced vodka and textiles, while Maria said their father manufactured candles, ink and candy. Kalia was not heard to repeat Maria's boast that the town where they kept their dacha was named after Natalie's grandfather. ("Because he was such a generous man. If a peasant is nice and he likes him, he'll give him house, he gives him horse, he gives him land.") According to Maria, her parents' marriage was arranged to merge Stepan Zudilov's fortune with Maria Zuleva's name. Neither Kalia nor Maria, once in America, had photos of the family's estate, or their dacha, to authenticate living such rarefied childhoods, though according to Kalia's son, they behaved like it. "Didn't cook, didn't clean, had other people do that."

This idyll, if it existed, came to a tragic end around 1919. A civil war erupted in Petrograd two years before, forcing Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. Bolshevik workers seized the Winter Palace by October, naming Communist Vladimir Lenin as their leader. The summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their five young children, Grand Duke Alexei and the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and presumably Anastasia.

Natalie's grandparents kept an uneasy vigil at their home in Barnaul as the Bolshevik Revolution made its way toward Siberia. Sometime after March of 1919, the date they sat for their portrait, they were warned the Bolsheviks were coming. "They told us, 'Run!' " said Maria, "because of Mother, the whole family would have been killed. They were killing aristocrats." They left so quickly, she recalled, there was no time to find her favorite brother, Semen.

The Zudilovs, dressed as peasants, crossed the border into Manchuria, where they stayed a few days per Maria, a year by Kalia's version. "Then the Czechs came and chased the Communists away," Maria recounted, "so we came back."

Marusia and her family returned to Barnaul to find Semen hanging from the archway of their front door, a rope around his neck. Ten-year-old Marusia went into violent convulsions. "I was so little and I loved him so much -- he was such a nice half-brother. When I saw him hanging there, with the tongue and everything, I start to have convulsions, starting with the neck, then with leg and hands, and then I just drop." The episode, a family legend, permanently affected Natalie's mother's nerves, leaving her subject to "the fits," she called it, damaging her psyche in ways unknowable.

Marusia and her family remained in Siberia until the Bolshevik Revolution reached their door, when they fled for China, "because the Reds were killing everybody." She and Kalia would provide essentially the same drama of the family's escape: how they packed what jewels and belongings they could onto a train their father bought from the Chinese. According to Maria, Natalie's grandfather buried "jewels and money and gold" worth "millions" in a waterproof box with a map of its location provided to everyone in the family "except me. I was young, they didn't give me the plan." A similar story surfaced from Kalia, though never, notably, the "plan." Whether the tale of their escape and the buried family treasure is true remains cryptic. "The problem with stories from Russians," one historian of the era observes, "is that they're all probable."

According to Natalie's mother, her parents changed everyone's names because they were afraid Communists would find them, exacting a promise from each child never to reveal the family's true identity -- a reaction a Russian émigré friend considered extreme to the point of "demented." "Stepan Zudilov" is identified as Kalia's father on her 1905 birth certificate, before the alleged name change, and "Maria Kuleva" is the name documented as Marusia's mother on family possessions prior to the Revolution. These are also the names Natalie's mother would use to identify her parents on legal records once in the U.S., leaving little room for doubt that Natalie's grandparents were born Stepan Zudilov and Maria Kuleva; though Olga, Natalie's older sister, still expresses uncertainty those are their true names, "or if they changed them when they ran." Olga and Natalie's mother remained haunted all her life by the fear that Communists would come after her and "kill me like killed my brother."

Once in Manchuria, little Marusia and her family stayed at a hotel in Qiqihar, where Natalie's mother had the first of several alleged mystical experiences. As Maria later told the story, she "recognized" a house near their hotel as one she had lived in, remembering an outdoor playhouse and the ceiling of her bedroom, with "angels" on it. Her parents took her to the house, afraid she would have another seizure if they refused. Upstairs was a room with cherubim painted on the ceiling; in the backyard, concealed by spiders' webs, Marusia found a decaying playhouse. Natalie's mother believed in reincarnation ever after, despite the opposite position of the Russian Orthodox religion in which she was baptized, and to which she and her parents adhered. ("How can you explain that?" she would ask. "There was my angels!")

Natalie's grandparents settled in nearby Harbin, China, where so many Russians had fled, neighborhoods appeared to have been lifted out of Siberia. The family lived in such an enclave, in a "good" part of town. Stepan, Natalie's grandfather, is presumed to have managed a soap factory. Natalie's mother, Marusia, attended an all-Russian girls' school, though Marusia's eye was on "pretty young boys." She went to church so she could "look at the boys, and look at what the girls are wearing -- is my dress better than theirs?" Marusia had thick, naturally curly, crow-black hair and was preternaturally tiny -- just five feet -- "But she carried herself as if she were seven foot tall," an acquaintance from Maria's senior years. "She liked to talk about how she had been a great dancer, and how she had been a great beauty." Natalie's studio press releases would later describe her mother as a "professional ballerina" in China. "That was made up," admits daughter Olga. Teenage Marusia took one ballet class in Harbin. "For grace," she put it later, claiming her parents withdrew her, believing dancers and performers fell into a category with "prostitutes."

Marusia and her sisters placed absolute faith in Russian superstitions and "did gypsy stuff" using Romany magic, such as "looking in the mirror on a certain night between two candles and you can see the person you're supposed to marry." One day, the sisters had their fortunes read by a Harbin gypsy. The fortuneteller warned Marusia to "beware of dark water," for she was going to drown. The gypsy also predicted her second child "would be a great beauty, known throughout the world." Natalie Wood's life, and death, would be dictated by the gypsy's twin prophecies.

The fortuneteller's predictions held an immediate power over Natalie's mother. She refused to go near water, "especially if it's dark waters."

published 05/01/2009 at 08:06 AM EST

A new book on the JFK assassination adds credence to the theory that the mafia was at the center of the president's murder.

The question won’t go away: Was President John F. Kennedy killed by a lone, crazed gunman serendipitously acting out his bizarre fantasy? Or were more sinister forces at work, manipulating or taking advantage of Oswald’s act of regicide? Why hasn’t the United States government opened all the records that illuminate this historic question?

A new book by the long-time assassination researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann adds some new information to the legitimate accumulating literature. Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination delves into the murder of JFK in over 800 pages of intricately documented data. It expands on their earlier Ultimate Sacrifice, which analyzed thousands of pages of released classified documents. Their findings add pieces to one of our most perplexing puzzles, and suggest where the key missing pieces may be found.

In their new book, Waldron and Hartmann report that our government had a secret plan for a high Cuban insider to kill Fidel Castro on December 1, 1963—just days after JFK was assassinated.

The Warren Commission Report assured the world that a lone and aberrant gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot the president from a hidden perch in a now infamous book depository building in Dallas. With the stunning slaying of Oswald soon thereafter while in custody by a pseudo-patriotic, second rate Dallas hoodlum, Jack Ruby, it seemed the horrifying tragedy was ended.

But in 1966, Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth seriously challenged the single bullet thesis of the Warren Commission, leading to the conclusion that Oswald was not acting alone. Inquest did not resolve who acted with him, though speculations—then and now—abound about contemporaneous gunshots from a nearby grassy knoll.

The famous Zapruder film of the shooting (I’ve seen the full original because my former law partner was the family’s representative handling its licensing) provides graphic and commanding corroboration of Epstein’s conclusion.

In 1974, a U. S. Senate Select Committee (the Church Committee) disclosed shocking misconduct by the CIA and the U.S. government’s aborted plans to use mafia figures (Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, both later killed by the mob) to kill Fidel Castro. In 1979, the U. S. House of Representatives Assassinations Committee unearthed troubling new wiretap evidence, concluding that 1) Oswald did not act alone; and 2) that Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafficante, Jr. had the motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute the assassination of JFK, setting up Oswald as a patsy.

Case Closed (1993) by Gerald Posner, analyzed the accumulating evidence critical of the Warren Commission report and concluded, as the general American public seemed to hope, that Oswald acted alone and that the Warren Commission’s fundamental conclusion was correct. Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,600-page Reclaiming History (2007) supported Posner’s conclusion.

My book, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroe: Robert F. Kennedy’s War Against Organized Crime, attempted to demonstrate that the case should not be closed and that the House Assassinations Committee had it right, though certain critical documentation of its position was unavailable. Drawing on incriminating tapped phone conversations, new literature and investigations, and Trafficante’s lawyer’s 1994 memoir (Frank Ragano’s Mob Lawyer), I concluded that the assassination was generated by Jimmy Hoffa. Oswald was, as he claimed, a patsy. It was a mob touch to use someone to carry out their deadly assignments, and then to kill that person to avoid detection.

As the century ended, a congressionally mandated Assassination Records Review Commission opened some classified records, but many critical records, in the United States and in Cuba, remain secret to this day.

In their new book, Waldron and Hartmann report that our government had a secret plan for a high Cuban insider (named in their new book) to kill Fidel Castro on December 1, 1963—just days after JFK was assassinated. It would be followed by an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles aided by the U. S. military. It was managed off the books by Robert Kennedy and a select group of government officials and the military. The mafia learned of it, and after its furtive, aborted plans to kill Kennedy weeks earlier in Chicago and Tampa failed, they arranged for him to be killed in Texas, knowing that our government could not disclose these facts without admitting its own provocative plans and endangering worldwide retaliation. It was, assassination expert Jefferson Morley quipped in The Washington Post, “a deus ex mafia”.

Waldron’s and Hartmann’s new revelations in Legacy of Secrecy add newly released government recordings of Carlos Marcello in prison, claiming to have arranged the assassination. Trafficante’s and Rosselli’s attorneys both have reported that their clients claimed responsibility for the assassination. Along with Marcello’s confession, and credible information that has eked out from mentioned sources, the evidence points to a conspiracy case that could go to a jury—were the parties alive.

Interviews with Kennedy aide Dave Powers, who rode close behind the president in the fatal motorcade, disclosed that he saw and heard evidence of shots from the grassy knoll, and that he was subject to “intense pressure to get him to change his testimony ‘for the good of the country’.” Presidential assistant Kenneth O’Donnell agreed. Later sound, visual, and medical studies—persuasive but controverted—confirm their and other on-the-scene observers’ opinions, and the Edward Epstein thesis.

The Waldron-Hartmann books suggest why the grieving Attorney General and the powerful government authorities at the time failed to aggressively pursue all leads based on the government’s prior dealing with the mob. Robert Kennedy could not pursue them because his own misconduct would have come to light, and knowledge of it would have had serious foreign policy implications. Those few investigative officials who knew of the critical facts had every reason to hide them.

The Warren Commission relied in its investigation on the obvious investigating authorities at the time, the FBI and CIA. Both agencies, especially the CIA, had intramural interests for dissembling and hiding the true facts. Lyndon Johnson later questioned that conclusion, his aides reported. RFK told aides he would pursue the true facts when he became president.

A German documentary film, Rendezvous With Death, included an interview with a former Cuban secret service agent who said the Cuban Secret Service was responsible for the JFK assassination, using Oswald as its hired gun. After Fidel Castro is out of power, Cuban records—if they exist—could corroborate that story. Castro told an AP reporter days before the Kennedy assassination that he knew plans were afoot to assassinate him and that if the US pursued those plans—plans we know did exist, and which Waldron-Hartmann books document—our president’s life would be in danger. Days later that scenario played out. An American agent met a Cuban Castro assassin in Paris, and our president was shot.

The Waldron-Hartmann books do not resolve the case. Many more government records remain to be released. It is now nearly a half century later, and there is no good reason not to release the voluminous secret records which may clarify the important, continuing mystery behind this epic American tragedy. Hopefully, the new Obama administration will open all these records as part of its proclaimed policy of openness and transparency. Hiding information always raises suspicions. Open information policies are more likely to lead to truthful conclusions. It is time the world knew every bit of available information about the assassination of JFK.

Ronald Goldfarb is a veteran Washington, D.C., attorney, author and literary agent who worked in the Department of Justice as a special assistant to Robert F. Kennedy in the organized crime and racketeering section, and as a speechwriter for Kennedy’s Senate campaign in New York. He has written 11 books and 300 articles in addition to numerous op-eds and reviews (see www.RonaldGoldfarb.com).

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Albert T. Patrick immediately after his release in 1913

Albert T. Patrick was a lawyer who was convicted and sentenced to death at Sing Sing for the murder of his client William Marsh Rice. Patrick was born in Texas during the 19th century. He was charged with conspiring to murder Rice on 24 September 1900, convicted on 26 March 1902 and sentenced to be electrocuted. His appeals of the conviction delayed the execution of the sentence. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor of New York Frank W. Higgins in 1906. Doubts about the evidence caused the Governor John Alden Dix to pardon him in 1912. In 1930 he was disbarred and the disbarment was upheld by the New York State Supreme Court. It was said that the conduct of the case during the 12 years between being charged and being pardoned cost Patrick and his friends $162,000.

James H. "Jack" Pollack (21 October 1899 – 14 March 1977) was an American Democrat politician known for criminal pursuits and interference in court system. Pollack was born in Baltimore, Maryland and lived in a home near the intersection of Wilson and Exeter Streets during his childhood. However, the death of his mother at age 13 and the death of his father at age 15 forced him to quit school and live on the streets. Pollack found his place in the streets of Baltimore through competitive boxing. Pollack travelled the country competing for $1,500 dollar purses in lightweight title fights. At 175 pounds Pollack was a stout fighter who won acclaim for fighting men as much as 40 pounds heavier.

Pollack also made a name for himself during prohibition as a whiskey-runner. From a residence on West Fayette Street, Pollack organized whiskey smuggling under the claimed profession of "chauffeur". From 1921 to 1926, Pollack was arrested 13 times on charges that ranged from assault to murder. Pollack was charged with the murder of Hugo Caplan in 1921 during the hijacking of a contraband whiskey truck. Two years later, Pollack was acquitted of the charges and the files disappeared from the State's Attorney's office in 1948. Pollack gained some local fame within from his prohibition activities.

Pollack gained notoriety and political success during the 1930s with the creation of the Trenton Democratic Club. He used his ties with Baltimore politician William Curran to form a political base amongst area Democrats. Pollack saw major involvement in the Baltimore court system as a tool for political success. His relationships with jurists made him well known for payoffs, bribery, and corruption. In 1954, he beat a charge on obstruction of justice in which he pressured defendants in a series of corruption trials. Pollack was well respected despite some blatant criminal activity while in politics. He was appointed to the Maryland State Athletic Commission in 1933 by Governor Albert Ritchie. Pollack remained active in politics until his death from cancer on 14 March 1977 at University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

In the darkest days of World War II, an American Mafioso is the Allies’ only hope to tip the scales of victory. The classic Jack Higgins thriller :  As the Allies struggle to gain a foothold in Italy in 1943, American gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano is pulled from his prison cell in New York by the U.S. military and handed a top-secret mission. Lucky must go to Sicily to persuade a distrustful Mafia to revolt against the island’s fascist occupiers.

If successful, Lucky’s mission will pave the way for a full-scale invasion of Italy and aid the advancing Allied forces in breaking Hitler’s grip on the nation once and for all. But if he fails, the toll in human blood will be higher than anyone can imagine.







ISBN-13 : 9781453200599
Publisher : Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Publication date : 06/28/2010
Author : Jack Higgins

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Dove Audio goes to the head of the pack with this exciting, unabridged rendition of Higgins's (Sheba, Audio Reviews, LJ 2/15/95) story of an Allied plan to release Lucky Luciano from prison. Luciano is slated to join a team that includes the granddaughter of Luciano's Mafia counterpart in Sicily and a crack Special Services operative. Their objective: to persuade the Don to rally the people of Sicily to aid the Allies in their effort to run the Axis forces off the island, paving the way for the Allied invasion of Italy. The action builds to a riveting climax and concomitant bloody conclusion. British actor and former Avenger Patrick Macnee is required to juggle Sicilian, German, American, and Ukrainian accents and does so superbly. Best of all, this unabridged recording is reasonably priced. Recommended for most public libraries.Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, N.C.

Meet the Author

Since The Eagle Has Landed—one of the biggest-selling thrillers of all time—every novel Jack Higgins has written has become an international bestseller. He has had simultaneous number-one bestsellers in hardcover and paperback, and many of his books have been made into successful movies, including The Eagle Has Landed, To Catch a King, On Dangerous Ground, Eye of the Storm, and Thunder Point. He has degrees in sociology, social psychology, and economics from the University of London, and a doctorate in media from Leeds Metropolitan University. A fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an expert scuba diver and marksman, Higgins lives in Jersey on the Channel Islands.

The public called him Scarface; the FBI called him Public Enemy Number One; his associates called him Snorky. But Capone is the name most remember. And John Kobler’s Capone is the definitive biography of this most brutal and flamboyant of the underground kings—an intimate and dramatic book that presents a complete view of Al Capone and his gaudy era.

Here is Capone’s story: his violent childhood in Brooklyn, his lieutenancy to Johnny Torrio, his rise in the ranks of the underworld, the notorious St. Valentine Massacre, his eventual control of the entire city of Chicago, and his decline during his imprisonment in Alcatraz. Capone was the ultimate gangster, and Capone is the ultimate in gangster biographies—a classic in the literature of crime.








ISBN-13 : 9780306812859
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Publication date : 10/7/2003
Author : John Kobler

All I ever did was to sell beer and whiskey to our best people. All I ever did was to supply a demand that was pretty popular. Why, the very guys that make my trade good are the ones that yell the loudest about me. Some of the leading judges use the stuff.

When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality. — Al Capone

In 1930 Al Capone was the most famous American alive. Now, the bestselling author of Geneen, the acclaimed biography of ITT founder Harold Geneen, reveals the real Capone and how he ran his operation. Schoenberg's scrupulous research shows that Capone was a man as calculating and brutal as his legend. Photos.





ISBN-13 : 9780688128388
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date : 09/28/1993
Author : Robert J. Schoenberg

Meet the Author

Robert J. Shoenberg, a former advertising executive, is the author or two other books, including Geneen, a much-praised biography of ITT founder Harold Green.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone. The machine-gun murders of seven men on the morning of February 14, 1929, by killers dressed as cops became the gangland crime of the century." Or so the story went.

Since then it has been featured in countless histories, biographies, movies, and television specials. 'The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, ' however, is the first book-length treatment of the subject, and it challenges the commonly held assumption that Al Capone ordered the slayings to gain supremacy in the Chicago underworld."








ISBN-13 : 9781581825497
Publisher : Turner Publishing Company
Publication date : 08/28/2006
Author : William J. Helmer, Arthur J. Bilek

Comments

The Saint Valentine's Day massacre is the first time the shooting of seven members of the north side gang was but into a full biography. The book was based on a careful review of reliable evidence, a critical reading of reading of news accounts by the authors William J. Helmer and Arthur J. Bilek, and a widow of one of the gunmen, and a lookout¿s long detailed confession. Throughout the story the authors are able to set up an image of 1920's Chicago, during the time of prohibition, and illegal bootlegging of alcohol. Through this method of imagery, the authors are also able to use the background of Chicago¿s beer wars, the victims, and the gunmen, to allow the reader to feel as if the crimes are currently occurring. On the morning of February 14, 1929 in the SMC Cartage Company A four-man team led by Fred Burke would then enter the building, two disguised as police officers, Capone¿s men disguised as cops lined the mechanic and six members of the north side gang against the wall and repeatedly shot them with Thompson machine guns killing all seven.

The hit was a setup for Bugs Moran, but Moran never showed up. To show by-standers that everything was under control, the pair in street clothes came out with their hands up, led by the two uniformed cops. Alphonse Gabriel Capone was cheifly behind the murders of the seven men. Capone was an American gangster who led a crime syndicate dedicated to the smuggling and bootlegging of liquor and other illegal activities during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s and 1930s. And by wiping out head members of the north side gang Capone would be able to climb on top of the industry with no competitors. The time frame was the roaring twenties in Chicago during the Prohibition in the United Through the use of detailed imagery Helmer and Bilek are able to set up a written visual of the scenarios around the crime. The era of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the years 1920 to 1933, during which alcohol sale, manufacture and transportation were constitutionally banned throughout the United States. Prohibition can also encompass the antecedent religious and political temperance movements calling for sumptuary laws to end or encumber alcohol use.

Prior to the St. Valentines Dat massacre there were brutal gang wars between Capone¿s gang and Moran¿s gang. The crime itself was provoked by Moran and previous attempts on Capone¿s life. By thoroughly discussing the Chicago beer wars and events stirring up the bad blood between these two gangs the authors are able to allow the reader to understand the timing and significance of the St. Valentines day massacre. Overall the St. Valentines day Massacre is a very interesting book to read, and gives the reader a better knowledge of the crime. Through the authors factual writing the biography of the crime serves as a far more informative account of the crime and the 1920's Chicago gangs, then any other previous collections of these events. Allowing the reader to become aware of the beginning and end of the Chicago beer wars, and Capone¿s empire.

Jan "Face" Krogh Jensen (August 23, 1958 – June 16, 1996) was a Danish mobster and member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. He emigrated to Helsingborg, Sweden and co-founded White Trash MC, Sweden's first "outlaw" motorcycle club, with Michael Ljunggren in the mid-1980s. He later became a member of the Bandidos in the early 1990s.

On June 16, 1996, he was travelling to the Bandidos chapter in Drammen, Norway with Michael Lerche Olsen, the President of the Bandidos' Swedish chapters, and a number of Norwegian members when he was murdered.

He stopped at a rest point in Mjøndalen, Lower Eiker and was shot several times with a 7.65 semi-automatic pistol and taken to the Ullevål University Hospital in Oslo where he was pronounced dead. It is thought that Lerche Olsen was the intended target. A member of the Hells Angels was prosecuted for the murder but later acquitted in court.

The first biography of Capone to focus on his youth in Brooklyn and the events that shaped him into one of history’s most notorious criminals. Many people are familiar with the story of Al Capone, the “untouchable” Chicago gangster best known for orchestrating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. But few are aware that Capone’s remarkable story began in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn, New York. Tutored by the likes of infamous mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale, young Capone’s disquieting demeanor, combined with the “technical advice” he learned from these insidious pedagogues, contributed to the molding of a brutal criminal whose pseudonym, “Scarface,” evoked fascination throughout the world.

Despite the best efforts of previous biographers lacking true insider’s access, details about Capone’s early years have, until now, mostly been shrouded in mystery. With access gained through invaluable familial connections, the authors were able to open the previously sealed mouths of Capone’s known living associates. Collecting information through these interviews and never-before-published documents, the life of young Al Capone at last comes into focus.

Among the many revelations in Young Al Capone are new details about the brutal Halloween Night murder of rival gangster “Wild Bill” Lovett, grisly details on how Capone and his Black Hand crew cleverly planned the shootout and barbaric hatchet slaying of White Hand boss, Richard “Peg Leg” Lonergan, insight into the dramatic incident that forced Capone to leave New York, and much more.

ISBN-13 : 9781616080853
Publisher : Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date : 03/01/2011
Author : William Balsamo, John Balsamo

Meet the Author

Bill Balsamo, considered by many to be one of the premier Capone historians, has invested more than twenty-five years in researching and writing this unique book. He is the author of Crime, Inc., now in its fifth printing, and served as a consultant to both Brian DePalma’s blockbuster 1987 film, The Untouchables, and the companion book for the 1994 Fox TV special, Loyalty and Betrayal: The Story of the American Mob, produced by Nicholas Pillegi (Wiseguy, Casino). Mr. Balsamo’s many television appearances include The Sally Jesse Raphael Show, The Joe Franklin Show, The Geraldo Rivera Show, and various documentary features on the History Channel, A&E, the Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, and, most recently, the Bio Channel.

John Balsamo is the chief executive of SUPERDON INC., a company that markets board games. Previous to that, John worked on the Brooklyn waterfront for more than thirty years while compiling extensive material regarding the life of young Capone.

Colleen Moore est une actrice américaine né le 19 août 1900 et décédée le 25 janvier 1988. Elle apparaît dans Intolérance en 1916 mais ne devient une vedette que dans les années vingt. Elle impose la coupe garçonne, symbole de la flapper chantée par Francis Scott Fitzgerald, avant Louise Brooks (Christian Viviani dans Dictionnaire du cinéma américain, Références Larousse, 1988).











Filmographie

• 1916 : The Prince of Graustark : Maid
• 1917 : The Bad Boy : Ruth
• 1917 : An Old Fashioned Young Man : Margaret
• 1917 : Hands Up! : Marjorie Houston
• 1917 : La Petite Américaine (The Little American)
• 1917 : The Savage : Lizette
• 1918 : Little Orphant Annie : Annie
• 1918 : A Hoosier Romance : Patience Thompson
• 1919 : The Busher : Mazie Palmer
• 1919 : The Wilderness Trail : Jeanne Fitzpatrick
• 1919 : The Man in the Moonlight : Rosine Delorme
• 1919 : The Egg Crate Wallop : Kitty Haskell
• 1919 : Common Property : Tatyoe ["Tatyana"]
• 1919 : A Roman Scandal : Mary
• 1920 : The Cyclone : Sylvia Sturgis
• 1920 : Her Bridal Night-Mare : Mary
• 1920 : When Dawn Came : Mary Harrison
• 1920 : The Devil's Claim : Indora
• 1920 : So Long Letty : Grace Miller
• 1920 : Dinty
• 1921 : The Sky Pilot : Gwen
• 1921 : His Nibs : The Girl
• 1921 : The Lotus Eater : Mavis
• 1922 : Come on Over : Moyna Killiea
• 1922 : The Wall Flower : Idalene Nobbin
• 1922 : Affinities : Fanny Illington
• 1922 : Forsaking All Others : Penelope Mason
• 1922 : Broken Chains : Mercy Boone
• 1922 : The Ninety and Nine : Ruth Blake
• 1923 : Look Your Best : Perla Quaranta
• 1923 : The Nth Commandment : Sarah Juke
• 1923 : Slippy McGee : Mary Virginia
• 1923 : Broken Hearts of Broadway : Mary Ellis
• 1923 : The Huntress : Bela
• 1923 : April Showers : Maggie Muldoon
• 1923 : Flaming Youth : Patricia Fentriss
• 1924 : Through the Dark : Mary McGinn
• 1924 : Painted People : Ellie Byrne
• 1924 : The Perfect Flapper : Tommie Lou Pember
• 1924 : Flirting with Love : Gilda Lamont
• 1924 : Mon grand : Selina Peake
• 1925 : Sally : Sally
• 1925 : The Desert Flower : Maggie Fortune
• 1925 : We Moderns : Mary Sundale
• 1925 : Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ : Crowd extra in chariot race
• 1926 : Irene : Irene O'Dare
• 1926 : Ella Cinders : Ella Cinders
• 1926 : It Must Be Love : Fernie Schmidt
• 1926 : Twinkletoes : Twinkletoes
• 1927 : Orchids and Ermine : 'Pink' Watson
• 1927 : Naughty But Nice : Bernice Sumners
• 1927 : Her Wild Oat : Mary Brown
• 1928 : Happiness Ahead : Mary Randall
• 1928 : Lilac Time : Jeannine Berthelot
• 1928 : Oh Kay! : Lady Kay Rutfield
• 1929 : Synthetic Sin : Betty
• 1929 : Why Be Good? : Pert
• 1929 : Smiling Irish Eyes : Kathleen O'Connor
• 1929 : Footlights and Fools : Betty Murphy / Fifi D'Auray
• 1933 : The Power and the Glory : Sally Garner
• 1934 : The Social Register : Patsy Shaw
• 1934 : Success at Any Price : Sarah Griswold
• 1934 : The Scarlet Letter : Hester Prynne

Colleen Moore (1899-1988) was one of the most popular and beloved stars of the American silent screen. Remembered primarily as a comedienne in such films as Ella Cinders (1926) and Orchids and Ermine (1927), Moore's career was also filled with dramatic roles that often reflected societal trends. A trailblazing performer, her legacy was somewhat overshadowed by the female stars that followed her, notably Louise Brooks and Clara Bow.

An in-depth examination of Moore's early life and film career, the book reveals the ways in which her family and the times in which she lived influenced the roles she chose. Included are forewords written by film historian Joseph Yranski, a friend of the actress, and by Moore's stepdaughter, Judith Hargrave Coleman.






ISBN-13 : 9780786449699
Publisher : McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date : 04/30/2012
Author : Jeff Codori

Meet the Author

Jeff Codori is the creator of the Colleen Moore Project, a website devoted to strengthening the actress's place in cinematic history, and to finding new sources of information about her.

In Marlene, the legendary Hollywood icon is vividly brought to life, based on a series of conversations with the star herself and with others who knew her well. In the mid-1970s Charlotte Chandler spoke with Marlene Dietrich in Dietrich’s Paris apartment. The star’s career was all but over, but she agreed to meet because Chandler hadn’t known Dietrich earlier, “when I was young and very beautiful.” Dietrich may have been retired, but her appearance and her celebrity—her famous mystique—were as important to her as ever.

Marlene Dietrich’s life is one of the most fabulous in Hollywood history. She began her career in her native Berlin as a model, then a stage and screen actress during the silent era, becoming a star with the international success The Blue Angel. Then, under the watchful eye of the director of that film, her mentor Josef von Sternberg, she came to America and became one of the brightest stars in Hollywood. She made a series of acclaimed pictures—Morocco, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, Destry Rides Again, among many others—that propelled her to international stardom. With the outbreak of World War II, the fiercely anti-Nazi Dietrich became an American citizen and entertained Allied troops on the front lines. After the war she embarked on a new career as a stage performer, and with her young music director, the gifted Burt Bacharach—whom Chandler interviewed for the book—Dietrich had an outstanding second career.

Dietrich spoke candidly with Chandler about her unconventional private life: although she never divorced her husband, Rudi Sieber, she had numerous well-publicized affairs with his knowledge (and he had a longtime mistress with her approval). By the late 1970s, plagued by accidents, Dietrich had become a virtual recluse in her Paris apartment, communicating with the outside world almost entirely by telephone Marlene Dietrich lived an extraordinary life, and Marlene relies extensively on the star’s own words to reveal how intriguing and fascinating that life really was.

ISBN-13 : 9781439188354
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Publication date : 03/29/2011
Author : Charlotte Chandler

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

A few cynics might think that Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) outlived her beauty, but no sane person could contend that she outlived her mystique. Author Charlotte Chandler (Not The Girl Next Door; Ingrid) can claim a status that few biographers of silver screen icons can claim: She actually knew many of her legendary subjects. Her personal biography of the German-American movie star is informed by Chandler's conversations with her, which enables her to transcend the generic rehashs of publicist copy and tabloid concoctions. Dietrich was fiercely private during her film career, but spoke candidly to Chandler about her unconventional (and notably active) romantic life. A fascinating bio of a star who outshone Oscar.

Publishers Weekly

To most, Marlene Dietrich is an enigma, a divine creation of the silver screen. Chandler's newest biography wonderfully brings to life the person behind the facade of lights and cameras, using interviews, interspersed with synopses of her films, to tell Dietrich's story. Chandler's gift is her ear for anecdote. Contributing oral passages are Leni Riefenstahl, Edward Kennedy ("she preferred my brother Jack"), and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who provides a fascinating account of Dietrich's intent to dissuade Edward VIII from abdicating and her plot to kill Hitler ("if necessary, I would go in and visit him naked"). Born Marie Magdalene, she would eventually change her name to Marlene Dietrich and capture Hollywood as a love goddess on and off the screen. Dietrich made her own contribution to history: she abandoned her German citizenship to become a U.S. citizen as an anti-Nazi gesture. She dazzled U.S. troops as a front line patriot singing "Lili Marlene" at the liberation of Paris. As the supreme chanteuse, she toured Las Vegas, Nev.; Germany; and Israel where she boldly sang in German to a Tel Aviv audience. A complex woman, Dietrich struggled with her fame, and in the end it came to hold her hostage, and her principles of candor and liberty were lost to ego and vanity.

From the Publisher

"It hardly seems possible that there could be room for yet another important biography on so iconic a star as Marlene Dietrich. . . . Yet Charlotte Chandler's Marlene: Marlene Dietrich, A Personal Biography proves invaluable. . . . Chandler has again demonstrated her unparalleled ability to get major figures of Hollywood's golden age to talk about their lives with unprecedented openness." —Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Library Journal

Drawing on original interviews she conducted with Marlene Dietrich and others, Chandler (author of many "personal biographies," on, e.g., Mae West, Ingrid Bergman, and Alfred Hitchcock) mixes the screen icon's personal reminiscences with impressions from those who knew her, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Chandler follows Dietrich's career trajectory chronologically, with a basic synopsis of and reflections on each of Dietrich's films. Although Dietrich remains one of the great faces of Hollywood, her life and career as relayed here are not riveting. She is presented as an enigma, which is how she seems to have wanted it. VERDICT The information Chandler provides on Dietrich's career before her breakout role in The Blue Angel is of interest, but little else sets this book apart from other Dietrich biographies, e.g., Donald Spoto's Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich and her daughter Maria Riva's Marlene Dietrich. Any of these three would suffice.—Barb Kundanis, Longmont P.L., CO

Kirkus Reviews

Prolific biographer Chandler (I Know Where I'm Going: Katharine Hepburn, a Personal Biography, 2010, etc.) delivers an evocative portrait of film icon Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992), perhaps cinema's ultimate manifestation of the mysterious, dangerous, unknowable woman.

The author covers the actress' career but foregoesin-depth analysis of the star's films and technique, focusing instead on Dietrich's enduring persona. Chandler is greatly aided in this by the inclusion of copious reminiscences by Dietrich herself, who recounts the triumphs and tragedies of her life in her inimitable grand manner, full of rueful irony and Olympian hauteur. Dietrich is candid about her various affairs, which included the likes of James Stewart, Yul Brynner and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whose own recollections reveal a supremely witty and urbane man clearly still in erotic thrall to the legend years after the conclusion of their physical relationship. Among the narrative's most delightful surprises are Dietrich's wartime plan to seduce and murder Adolph Hitler—she would consistently denounce the Nazis and maintain a troubled relationship with her homeland throughout her life—and her many-years-removed trysts with Joseph and Jack Kennedy, the latter dismissed with a withering report of his abbreviated performance. One time accompanist Burt Bacharach waxes appreciatively about Dietrich's courage and tenacity, and various family members weigh in on the star's conflicted filial relationships, but the heart of the book remains Dietrich's account of herself as simultaneously an earthy, maternal woman, who was happiest cooking and cleaning for friends and loved ones, and an impossibly glamorous camera subject who retired into near total seclusion when her looks began to fade. At the end of her life, Dietrich, holed up in her Parisian apartment, eccentrically answered the phone in the guise of her own nonexistent maid in a gambit to preserve her dignity and ward off unwanted visitors.

A poetic and indelible portrait of the great star.

Meet the Author

Charlotte Chandler is the author of several biographies of actors and directors, including Groucho Marx, Federico Fellini, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, and Mae West, all of whom she interviewed extensively. She is a member of the board of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

Marlene Dietrich was on her farewell tour and she was going to be at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles for two weeks, in 1968,” publicist Dale Olson told me. “I received a call from the Ahmanson, and they were worried. They had heard that she would be a terror, that she would be unreasonably demanding, and they wouldn’t be able to work with her. They said they wanted to hire me for the two weeks because they knew I had a good relationship with her, and they wanted me to look after her. I think what they really meant was they wanted me to look after them.

“I said yes.

“When she arrived, I told her what they had said, that they were afraid of her.

“She laughed. ‘They are right,’ she said. ‘They are right to be afraid of me.’ She was laughing as she spoke.

“She said there was one thing she wanted. She had to have an extremely large refrigerator for her dressing room. I said they had one which was large enough for champagne bottles, smoked salmon, and caviar, which doesn’t take up much room, the usual for the dressing room of a star.

“She said, ‘No. That isn’t what I want. I want the largest refrigerator.’

“So I went back with her request. They didn’t understand and weren’t pleased. They wanted to know why she wanted such a large refrigerator. I certainly didn’t know. I wondered if she was going to cook her famous goulash for everyone. She loved to cook for people, and her goulash was delicious, but I didn’t think that was likely. Anyway, she got her huge refrigerator.

“On opening night, I was in the dressing room. When she went out, I couldn’t resist. I was curious about what she had in the refrigerator. I opened the door and looked in.

“She had removed the shelves. It was completely empty.

“She was wonderfully received. After her opening night performance, there was tremendous applause, a standing ovation, and people in the aisles with bouquets of flowers, and single flowers, rushing up to throw their flowers on the stage.

“After absolutely everyone had left the theater, she went out on the stage, all by herself. She had changed from stiletto-heeled shoes to perfectly flat ballerina-type slippers. She began picking up the bouquets. She brought them back to her dressing room. She didn’t stop until she had picked up the last single rose and carried it back to her dressing room. Then, she began carefully arranging them in the refrigerator.

“We hadn’t seen the last of those flowers. The next night, the ushers had them ready for the end of her performance. The flowers were all thrown on the stage. The next night the same. And so on.

“At the end of the two weeks, on the night of the last performance, there they were. The flowers were performing for the last time. They were pretty wilted, but the audience didn’t know. From where they were sitting, the flowers looked fine.

“She was quite a showman.”

Bogart is not just a movie star biography. Perhaps no other book has ever provided a more graphic rendering of what life was like for a contract player when the big studios ruled Hollywood or has so dramatically captured what happened in the late 1940's as some of the biggest names in the industry pitted themselves against the excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early days of the Cold War.

Based on more than two hundred interviews with everyone from such famous co-workers as Katharine Hepburn and John Huston to behind-the-scenes publicists and makeup artists (even a bellman who served Bogart on one memorable night at the Beverly Hills Hotel), on a year and a half spent in the Warner Brothers archives at the University of Southern California poring over memos, letters, script reports, and contracts, and on Bogart's two-inch-thick FBI folder obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Bogart finally tells the full story of a Hollywood legend while re-creating the history of both a Hollywood and a political era.



ISBN-13 : 9780062107367
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date : 11/29/2011
Author : Ann Sperber

Meet the Author

The late A. M. Sperber was born in Vienna, graduated from Barnard College, and was a Fulbright Scholar. She authored the critically acclaimed bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Murrow: His Life and Times. Bogart is the culmination of the years of research she performed before her death in 1994.

Eric Lax’s books include Faith, Interrupted: A Spiritual Journey; The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat; and the international bestseller Woody Allen. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Esquire.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One - The House at Seneca Point

His earliest memories were of the estate where his family summered, and of a sailboat tied to the dock at the end of a stretch of manicured lawn. The elegant two-story Victorian house dominated a curve of land on the shoreline of Canandaigua Lake in western New York State. The spire on the tower room jutted above the treetops on the fifty-five acres of farmland, pasture, and woods, and large high windows stared out over the water. Broad awning-shaded steps led to the lawn that ended at a shale beach, where the long dock sliced into the lake. His father's champion-class yacht was moored there, and he would be a sailor all his life.

A carriage road swept over a little stone bridge to the back entrance of the house, but, like the other homes nearby, Willow Brook was best reached by water. Visitors arrived at a leafy landing on the long, narrow Finger Lake--deep blue in morning, turquoise in the afternoon--gouged out of the hills aeons before by an advancing glacier. The boathouse flanked one side of the four-hundred-foot beachfront. On the other, sheltered by tall stands of ash, oak, and poplar, were the clear-running brook and weeping willows that gave the property its name. It was a showplace, built in 1871 by the owners of the local brewery as testimony to their wealth.

In the last summer of the nineteenth century, Dr. Belmont DeForest Bogart bought the estate for his wife, Maud, then five months pregnant with their first child, a son. Two daughters would soon follow his birth. For the three offspring, Willow Brook was the summer home of their childhood, a place that would figure in both Humphrey Bogart's fondest recollections and his most nightmarish ones.

The Bogarts seemed the model of the solid, successful Victorian family--upper-middle-class New York City people whose comings and goings in the village of Canandaigua were regularly recorded in the local paper: Dr. and Mrs. Belmont D. Bogart had arrived with their little son and were waiting to occupy their summer "cottage"; Dr. B. D. Bogart and children had moved in for the summer and would shortly be joined by Mrs. Bogart; Mrs. B. DeForest Bogart had improvised a studio from an old cabin on the property and was giving much time to her art.

Like the other summer people, they had little to do with the daily life of the town. But as owners of property and householders of substance, they fit easily into Seneca Point, the exclusive lakeside enclave south of Canandaigua for leading locals and for professional families escaping the heat of Boston and New York--a mix of bankers and businessmen, old settlers, clergy, journalists, and academics. Show people were almost unheard of. The only Warner Brothers here were the local steamboat builders.

The colony, usually referred to as the Point, was a little more than halfway down the sixteen-mile-long lake--a secluded Arcadia surrounded on three sides by the grapevine-covered hills that caused the region to be compared with northern Italy. The 142-foot-long sidewheeled steamer Onnalinda ferried people from place to place, stopping at any of the sixty-six landings around the lake whenever a white flag was raised, its two decks redolent with the aroma of fresh grapes, peaches, and other fruit headed for the rail spur at the Canandaigua pier, then on to markets in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

The Point was self-contained, protected both by the cliffs and by the owners' corporation, which determined who could move in, and life there was paced to the easy elegance that prevailed for the privileged in those years before World War I. The residents visited, boated, and played tennis; in the evening they played bridge and attended uplifting lectures. On Sundays there were baseball games on the golf course--but only after church. For that, the families would travel by canoe or rowboat to the next point south, where the retired rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Canandaigua had his cottage. Many of the children would congregate on the stairs, beneath the walls lined with rattlesnake skins. The old priest would recite the service faster than anyone but his wife, who beat everyone through the Apostles' Creed. He was in a hurry to go fishing, and she was in a hurry to fix his lunch so he could. On all days, children went easily between the houses, whose doors were always unlocked. It was a secure, prosperous, homogeneous world, staunchly Republican, though once visited by young Franklin Roosevelt, who developed a cramp while swimming and was pulled ashore by a resident. In later years when New Deal rulings offended local sensibilities, FDR's Good Samaritan was often heard to declare, "I should have let the son of a bitch drown!"

Even in that well-off community, the Bogarts were accorded a certain deference. Dr. Bogart ran a flourishing downstate practice and was known to have inherited wealth. His wife was the renowned illustrator and children's artist Maud Humphrey. It was said in hushed tones that they were DeForests--socially well connected and linked in some indefinable way with one of the oldest and most distinguished names in New York State.

And they looked it. For years afterward people would remember the family, up from Grand Central Station on the overnight Pullman, getting off the train at Canandaigua and boarding the Onnalinda, headed for their landing: the doctor, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, immaculate in his heavy suit, boiled shirt, and stiff collar; his handsome wife, nearly as tall, thin, fashionable in starched cottons or flowing silks of gray or mauve, with lavender-ribboned high-heeled high-button shoes that accentuated the tininess of her size-2 1/2 feet, of which she was so proud; the small, dark-eyed boy and his two little sisters Frances and Catherine, all three under the close watch of a nurse in a starched uniform. They swept aboard the steamer, a splendid caravan, the rear brought up by a sourfaced servant couple straining under the weight of abundant trunks and packages.

But there was an underside to the domestic portrait that was generally hidden, though not obscured from those who knew them well. Decades later, Humphrey Bogart would describe for his fans a meticulously proper view of his early life: a weak-willed but charming father; an undemonstrative yet wholly admirable mother; a home life lacking in affection but with plenty of character. "We were a career family," he told interviewers, "too busy to be intimate." Hardly the most comforting of descriptions, but perhaps the best available considering the recollections of his childhood friends. Theirs depict a far harsher reality.

"Dr. Bogart had a violent temper," said Grace Lansing, later Mrs. Gerard Lambert of Palm Beach and Princeton, and a cousin of Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state. She lived nearby with her mother and the shadow of an absentee father, Harry Lansing, the alcoholic scion of a New York railroad dynasty who had long since disappeared into the wilds of the Adirondacks. Harry Lansing and Belmont Bogart had been hunting friends, and the doctor was attracted to the plump and pretty Mrs. Lansing.

Grace Lambert pitied "those poor children. Humphrey was a month younger than I, very handsome. They were always sent up to the cottage for the summer, with the most awful servants. Common people, with loud voices, ignorant. Oh, they were tough! They used to beat them and shout at them, they were horrible. And the mother and father didn't seem to notice."

Perhaps because the doctor and his wife were part of the problem. They fought continuously, loudly, and publicly. Both were heavy drinkers, with Belmont, as were many physicians of his time, quietly acknowledged to be addicted to morphine. Maud, for her part, seemed constantly preoccupied with her deadlines, always under pressure and loudly impatient with the needs of her children and household. "She had a short temper," Grace Lambert said. "And she'd flare up--against her children, against anybody. She was always painting, under a set time, so anything that came across this deadline was upsetting to her." When the work was finally done, Dr. and Mrs. Bogart would gather up Mrs. Lansing, and the three would go off by motorboat for dinner in Canandaigua. Next morning, Grace would hear from her mother of how poor, dear Mrs. Bogart had had too much to drink and taken to her bed; but it was all right, Dr. Bogart had given her some pills.

Maud was a hostage to bad headaches, though no one really knew whether they or the drinking came first in a life replete with tension and anxiety. Her son, in his idealized recollections, would describe her as a near teetotaler, hardly venturing beyond a lady-like glass of champagne, a recollection considerably at odds with those of many others, including Grace Lambert: "She drank quite a lot."

Maud also fought a painful skin condition known as erysipelas, a streptococcal inflammation named for the hot, red skin that results. "When the pain began," her son once said, "it lashed her so terribly that her left eye closed and the side of her face flamed.... Then my father shot a quarter of a grain of morphine into her to keep her from going insane."

Eventually, erysipelas would be controllable by penicillin; at the time, however, the only relief was through narcotics, carrying with it the dangers of addiction. Belmont Bogart had been snared by drugs in the course of needed medication for a painful leg injury shortly before his marriage, and evidence suggests that Maud was caught as well.

Frank Hamlin, a grandson of the town banker and later chairman of the board of the Canandaigua National Bank, was at the time the smallest of the local boys. He would never forget one day when, in his words, bare-legged and runny-nosed, he stopped off to see his friend Hump Bogart.

Nobody ever bothered to knock on the open doors at the Point, least of all an eight-year-old in a hurry. What Hamlin saw in the hallway, however, made him stop and gape, his greeting locked in his throat.

Dr. and Mrs. Bogart stood on the front stairs, dressed for dinner, oblivious to the boy or to anything besides themselves. The doctor had a syringe in one hand, Mrs. Bogart's extended arm in the other, the summer sleeve pushed back. With the expertise of his profession, he inserted the needle into his wife's forearm, after which she took the syringe and injected him. There was nothing furtive about it, the whole procedure completed with the practiced nonchalance of sophisticates enjoying a pre-supper aperitif.

The scene confused and disturbed the boy. Dr. Bogart was a doctor, after all, and doctors used needles. But it also brought to mind bits and pieces of grownups' talk overheard before bedtime. As he stood there trying to make sense of what he'd seen, the couple swept out, unaware or perhaps simply not caring that they had an audience.

Addiction among medical practitioners was to some extent accepted at the time; if doctors liked a taste of their own medicine, it was entirely their business. And early-twentieth-century attitudes to drugs aside, the Bogarts' wealth seemed always to give them a cushioned remove from contemporary mores; they lived by their own rules as surely as Maud Humphrey wore white boots in the rain when custom dictated that one wear only black, a color she deemed "plebeian." Not so easily overlooked, however, was the treatment of the three children behind the lace curtains and the massive front door of Willow Brook.

To adults, Belmont Bogart, whom most everyone called Bogie, seemed a charming, civilized man with an easygoing nature, an outdoorsman who loved hunting and camping and always had time to talk with truck drivers and farmers. His son's contemporaries often saw someone else--a gruff, overbearing grownup who awed them with his physical presence and was quick to resort to corporal punishment for the least infraction. Mrs. Bogart was little better. Faced with a husband increasingly less inclined to work, which made her own deadlines more important, she released her short temper in shouts at her children when they annoyed her or got in her way. She was now in her forties and clinging to the remnants of her youthful good looks. One attempted augmentation, a newly introduced permanent wave, left her hair discolored, unruly, and the subject of unflattering conversation among the other ladies. To Humphrey's friends, she was an imperious, erratic presence, known as "Queen Maud" or "Lady Maud." Mercurial in mood, she was at times a pleasant grande dame paying youngsters the lavish rate of one dollar an hour to pose for her drawings, but at others a shrill, intimidating shrew whose scolding voice carried halfway across the lake.

She was the determining factor in her son's early life.

Maud Humphrey painted angelic children nestling up to Madonnalike mothers in a series of successful books that began in the 1890s with The Bride's Book. Her own children, however, seemed little more than biological evidence that she had done her duty as a wife. They knew their place; it was with the servants, to whom they were shunted off in the routine manner of the day, always secondary to her art. In a way, the closest she came to her children was when she had them sit for her. Humphrey was his mother's favorite model, although he was not the original Maud Humphrey baby, as so often later claimed. Her drawings depicted idealized children. And when her own child posed for her, he was removed from the realm of real person with real needs. It was as if in painting a picture of a perfect child, she made her own child, who was the subject, perfect, and therefore perfectly mothered.

"She was essentially a woman who loved work, loved her work, to the exclusion of everything else," Bogart would recall. "I don't think she honestly cared about anything but her work and her family. Yet she was totally incapable of showing affection to us."

To her children, she was always "Maud," never "Mother." It was easier, her son rationalized; it was unsentimental, as direct, business-like, and impersonal as Maud was. It also meant a childhood without a kiss or a hug. When she did show her approbation, it was conveyed in a masculine way; long after he was an adult, Bogart still did not know whether her manner was caused by shyness or a fear of seeming weak. "Her caress was a kind of blow," he said. "She clapped you on the shoulder, almost the way a man does."

Humphrey Bogart would eventually come to terms with the mother of his childhood, would even admire her. After all, she was a woman who was famous in her own right, an acknowledged talent in a man's world, and a high-income earner in an age that consigned women to the kitchen. But admiration was as far as he could go: "I can't say truthfully that I loved her." The relationship engendered a streak of distrust that bedeviled his later intimacies with women. Once he was established as a tough guy in films, he gave interviews with super-macho titles such as "I Hate Dames," confessions with more of a basis in reality than the studio flacks who placed them realized.

The classification of dysfunctional families was decades away, but the concept was no stranger to the Bogarts' neighbors on the Point, who were concerned for the welfare of the children. Humphrey's sisters, Frances and Catherine Elizabeth, known as Pat and Catty, were two and three years younger, respectively. (Frances was at first called "Fat" by Humphrey because she was, though she soon grew tall and slender and became Pat thereafter. As an adult, Catherine was called Kay.) Their gentle older brother with his sad dark eyes was protective of them but ill-equipped to cope with the rages of the servant couple who themselves were mistreated by Belmont and Maud, and who vented their resentment on their employers' helpless offspring.

"They were abused," said Grace Lambert. "Everyone worried so about them, but they couldn't do much about it. Those servants were awful."

The worst times were the extended periods, lasting anywhere from two weeks to a month, when the parents would return to the city, leaving the servants in total control. Even though sounds traveled on the Point, allowing others to hear the shouts and cries, Humphrey and his sisters never complained openly. "Wouldn't dare," Lambert said. "They were afraid."

But Grace wasn't. If he wasn't going to talk about it, she told Humphrey one day, she would. Anyway, she added, the grownups already were. He grew anxious, his eyes troubled beneath the fringe of dark hair: "Don't--don't say that. Don't."

She went ahead anyway--"And it got back to Mrs. Bogart that I was saying things about her servants."

A walkway ran along the lakeshore, a favorite promenade for local families on summer evenings, when neighbor called on neighbor. Grace and her mother were out walking one night when a tall, imperious figure bore down on them out of the gloaming, shouting at the top of her voice. Maud Humphrey Bogart, made even more towering by her high-heeled shoes with the little purple bows, railed at the embarrassed little girl: Oh, she knew what Grace was up to, spreading stories about her servants being cruel. Well, she didn't believe it--not a word of it! The eleven-year-old winced, shaken at the dressing-down in front of the grownups. But to Grace's surprise, she saw them turn instead on Maud and berate her. While this comforted Grace, she also knew what would happen to Humphrey.

On another summer's afternoon she had entered the cool, dark hallway of the Bogart house. She often came to pose for Maud, but that day she was just looking for her friend as she made her way up the stairway. The walls of the stairwell and landing were covered with murals, in which Mrs. Bogart, with a sardonic eye, had depicted the comings and goings of the colony.

The house was quiet, except for an odd sound she couldn't quite place: a dull snap at regular intervals that echoed in the stillness. A door on the landing was ajar. Drawn by curiosity, she moved quietly until she saw, outlined against the light from the windows, Humphrey, hunched over, and his father, who held the boy's neck with one arm while the razor strop in the hand of the other came down repeatedly on his back. There was no shouting, no sign of anger, no murmur or struggle from Humphrey, who slightly flinched as the blows landed, his face expressionless. Only the recurring snap as the leather found its target.

Grace quickly fled the house. As she hurried to the carriage road, she passed the little studio where Maud, a cool detached figure in mauve, sat painting one of her famous tableaux of angelic children.

Humphrey Bogart would make his career in film, a medium based on illusion. He was perfectly trained for it, for a good deal about the Bogarts was illusion: the solid Victorian facade that masked alcoholism and drug and child abuse; the distinguished doctor with needle tracks under his boiled shirt; the revered children's artist with no understanding of her own son and daughters. Just as illusory were the Bogarts' pretensions of being Old New York society. The fact was, Dr. Bogart's father had begun as a Canandaigua innkeeper.

Adam Watkins Bogart had always wanted more. With a single exception, his people had been farmers for generations, ever since Gisbert in den Bogart, "Gisbert in the Orchard," had arrived from Holland in the 1600s. They had lived first in Brooklyn--up to modern times there would be a Bogart Avenue there--then migrated in stages to the newly opened farmlands around the Finger Lakes in the lovely, hilly region of western New York known as the Southern Tier.

Adam was ambitious and he was tough, and one way to be freed from slavery to the soil was to run a tavern, a two-fisted job in an area only a generation or two removed from frontier days. By the 1850s, he had saved enough for a lease on the Franklin House, Canandaigua's one hotel, which doubled as the county seat. The town jail was in the basement, a tap room out front was the social hub. Here were farmers gathered on their infrequent visits to town, travelers passing through, politicians arguing and dealing amid clouds of cigar smoke. Adam was in his element as proprietor and host; the appropriate occupation and place for the grandfather of Casablanca's Rick Blaine.

He married a woman of property, like himself no longer young, and like himself eager for betterment. Julia Bogart had the money for the lease on the elegant three-story Jefferson House, the social center of what was then the village of Watkins on nearby Lake Seneca. The brick and stone hotel had been built by a distant cousin of Adam's, who had given his name to the town. Jefferson House had fourteen rooms, each with a fireplace, a two-story balustraded tower, and a spacious lobby with a floor of gleaming black and white Italian tile.

Julia held the lease, and the money, too. Adam minded the business. The younger of their two children, both boys, was given the grandiose name of Belmont DeForest, joining the names of two leading New York high-society families of no relation to each other or the Bogarts, but a clear statement of the parents' aspirations. Only naming the child Vanderbilt Rockefeller would have been more pretentious.

The older boy's name would be obliterated over the years, though not the story of his fate. He was six years old, sliding down the sleek, polished banister of the massive stairs that ascended two floors on one side of the high-ceilinged lobby. Perhaps the father had promised to keep an eye on him. Lost in the pleasure of descent, the boy failed to check his speed. Seconds later, he sailed off the railing and smashed against the bright, hard tiles, dying on impact.

Julia never forgave her husband, although whether because marital rights were not to be denied or, more likely, because she simply wanted another child, Belmont was born a year later. He was two when his mother died in November 1868, after five months on a sickbed, treated by a doctor who had come by every day with useless medications. Her body was interred at Glenwood Cemetery, but not her fury. In the will she wrote just two months before, Julia A. Bogart left her worldly goods to her only child, with specific instructions that the boy's upbringing and financial affairs be in the care of a legally appointed guardian. Adam was left with nothing, not even his son.

He contested the will, charging that his wife was not in her right mind. Local sympathies were with him, but hearings and conflicting family claims dragged on for two years, depleting the estate and embittering Adam. In March 1871, Adam traveled to Newark, New Jersey, to appeal directly to Julia's sisters. Whatever opposition they may formerly have had, they now petitioned the court on his behalf. Wrote one: "He has always thought I was opposed to his having his rights. Now I will say this to you in confidence--Brother Bogart has always been an honorable man with his family. I now think it the best way to let him have his own way and there is not a doubt [that he should be] with his own child." Another stated, "I know his whole mind is on the future welfare of the son" and asked that the money be released "in Brother Bogart's hands so he can go in business and make a living for self and boy.... I know [Adam] to be an affectionate father, ever watchful over the interest of the motherless son." Soon after, the court declared all accounts settled, leaving father and son free to go. Adam paid his debts and took his boy to New York City. He did not return to Watkins until he was shipped back in a casket twenty-one years later, to be buried near the wife who hated him.

He had never remarried. Belmont DeForest Bogart grew up alone, a confused, disoriented child who was the object of a custody battle in which one of the litigants was his dead mother.

Not that the boy lacked for material comforts. In the boomtown of 1870s New York, Adam Bogart invested Julia's remaining money well. He made a fortune as a pioneer manufacturer of lithographed tin advertising signs and was determined that Belmont would have not only the name of a rich man's son, but all the advantages as well. He would not have to endure the taproom of the Franklin House, the farmers with their muddy boots smelling of cow dung, and the country politicians with their tobacco plugs and cheap cigars; neither would he have to cater to the patrons of the Jefferson. Instead, he would go to Andover, like the sons of the landed gentry of Canandaigua and Rochester, and then to Yale. He would know the right people. He would be a gentleman.

Belmont learned this lesson all too well. Tall and good-looking, with a thatch of thick, dark hair, he was popular with women and the sons of the best families, an avid huntsman and skilled sailor at the fashionable summer resorts. In a social world attuned to the "Gentleman's C," he made his way easily through Andover and Yale, then the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City; later he was on the staffs of Bellevue, St. Luke's, and Sloan hospitals. Following his graduation from Columbia in 1896 and eased by the right entrees, he launched a prosperous practice that never intruded on the pleasures of a gentleman. He had, on the surface anyway, an ideal life. And perhaps if it hadn't been for the ambulance accident, his son's life would have been very different.

According to newspaper accounts, Dr. Bogart, just months out of medical school, was waiting alongside a city street when a horse-drawn ambulance, top-heavy and balanced precariously on large, spindly wheels, came by. Possibly the horse turned skittish, but without warning the ambulance tipped over and fell on the young doctor, leaving him with massive cuts and bruises, and a fractured leg. The bone, badly set, refused to heal and had to be rebroken and reset. Eventually he learned to walk again, but from then on his health would always be unstable. The use of drugs, prescribed at the outset to alleviate the excruciating pain, became a daily ritual; he would be addicted for the rest of his life.

The accident had a secondary, equally fateful outcome. Two years earlier at an art studio party, Belmont Bogart had met the beautiful, spirited Maud Humphrey, two years younger than he and already famous. Their instantaneous attraction that led to a quick near-engagement was reinforced by the proper social attributes--he had money and position, she was tall and slender with fine features and an independent air that excited him, though not so bohemian as to preclude a good income. But she was also an outspoken conservative as well as a suffragist--her son would call her a laboring Tory--who worked hard for her earnings and for women's rights. Their differences soon led to a break in the relationship.

Now, two years later, she walked into the hospital room and back into Belmont's life. Their reconciliation was as instantaneous as their initial attraction. From that point on, Maud took over. In view of "the impending sufferings" of her fiance, she told a reporter from upstate, she had decided that she would rather nurse her husband through his trial than visit a fiance with the chaperons required for a single lady. They were married within a week, a few Humphrey cousins on hand to stand for the bride. "The honeymoon," reported the Ontario County Times of Canandaigua, "will be spent in a hospital." They married in June 1898, the bridegroom thirty-two, old for those times, the bride thirty, an age considered well into spinsterhood.

But labels seldom concerned Maud. In her case, moreover, the usual social pressures to marry had been inoperative. Her parents were dead, as were Belmont's; financially, she was independent. Even so, the doctor was a catch; he was rich, he was good-looking, and marriage was still the ultimate success, especially for a woman of thirty.

She was the daughter of a comfortable middle-class family from Rochester's Third Ward, known locally as the Ruffled Shirt District. The Humphreys were proud of their English roots and their lateral connections to the Churchills, connections that make Maud and her children distant relations of Winston Churchill and of Princess Diana. One of Maud's uncles was a prominent lawyer, another the owner of Humphrey's Bookstore, for years a city landmark. Her father John had been a prosperous Rochester merchant.

Maud's determination had sustained her through a bout of near blindness that inexplicably began when she was fourteen and just as inexplicably reversed itself two years later. Her parents died not long after, and she left Rochester at eighteen, going first to New York City to enroll at the Art Students League, and then to Paris, where one of her teachers was James McNeill Whistler. She returned a skilled painter, only to find that men of large affairs, who controlled the fat commissions, weren't about to have their portraits painted by a woman. Children, however, were another matter; the nursery was after all a woman's place. Her best work in any case was in watercolors and in the strong, sure charcoal drawings that would include some of the most insightful likenesses of her son. "The Maud Humphrey baby," he later said, was painted in "water color worked so dry the painting seemed to have been etched."

Maud mined her niche. Her paintings appeared on the covers of such magazines as the Delineator and Buttrick's as well as in ads and sewing patterns. Soon her work caught the attention of such color printers as Louis Prang of Boston and Frederick A. Stokes of Rochester, who quickly bought exclusive rights to all her color work and kept her under contract until 1900, illustrating popular books of the publisher's invention. It was a lucrative arrangement for them both. Her artworks were printed on finer paper than the text, and were signed and copyrighted so that they could be resold as prints or reproduced as calendars and postcards by other publishers who had made agreements with Stokes. She also illustrated calendars for upstate New York newspapers, generally given to subscribers by their paper boys. A particularly beautiful one, done for the Buffalo Evening News, could be cut to form a jigsaw puzzle.

The Marlene Dietrich Handbook - Everything You Need To Know About Marlene Dietrich. Marlene Dietrich (27 December 1901 - 6 May 1992) was a German actress and singer. Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself. In 1920s Berlin, she acted on the stage and in silent films.

Her performance as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest paid actresses of the era.

Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939; during World War II, she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer. In 1999 the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth greatest female star of all time. This book is your ultimate resource for Marlene Dietrich. Here you will find the most up-to-date information, photos, and much more.

In easy to read chapters, with extensive references and links to get you to know all there is to know about her Early life, Career and Personal life right away: Marlene Dietrich filmography, Manon Lescaut (1926 film), I Kiss Your Hand, Madame, The Blue Angel, Morocco (1930 film), Dishonored, Shanghai Express (film), Blonde Venus, The Song of Songs (1933 film), The Scarlet Empress, The Devil Is a Woman (1935 film), I Loved a Soldier, Desire (1936 film), The Garden of Allah (1936 film), Knight Without Armour, Angel (1937 film), Destry Rides Again, Seven Sinners (1940 film), The Flame of New Orleans, Manpower (1941 film), The Lady is Willing, The Spoilers (1942 film), Pittsburgh (1942 film), Kismet (1944 film), Follow the Boys, Martin Roumagnac, Golden Earrings, A Foreign Affair, Jigsaw (film), Stage Fright (film), No Highway in the Sky, Rancho Notorious, Around the World in 80 Days (1956 film), The Monte Carlo Story, Witness for the Prosecution (1957 film), Touch of Evil, Judgment at Nuremberg, Paris When It Sizzles, Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo, Marlene (1984 film).

Contains selected content from the highest rated entries, typeset, printed and shipped, combining the advantages of up-to-date and in-depth knowledge with the convenience of printed books. A portion of the proceeds of each book will be donated to the Wikimedia Foundation to support their mission.

ISBN-13 : 9781743040461
Publisher : Emereo Pty Ltd
Publication date : 04/01/2011
Author : Emily Smith