Jewel Kay compares her own recollections with entries in her deceased mother's diary to get the real story of how Elva, in 1918, made her daughter Jewel into one of the first child stars in Hollywood

Running Time

Literature & Fiction

LAMBERT, Gavin

United States

Macmillan Pub. Co.

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Fine cloth copy in a near fine, slightly sun-toned & price-clipped dw, now mylar-sleeved. Spine somewhat faded. Remains particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and sharp-cornered. ; 271 pages; Description: xv, 271, [1] p. ; 23 cm. Subjects: Detective and mystery stories --History and criticism. Notes: Bibliography: p. 271-[272].

The dangerous edge

Barrie Jenkins

A behind-the-scenes glimpse at the casting and production of Selznick's classic supplemented by movie stills and photographs of the stars

GWTW: The Making of Gone with the Wind

Humor & Entertainment

Little,Brown & Co

The Slide Area

Star Books

She spent her life in the movies. Her childhood is still there to see in Miracle on 34th Street. Her adolescence in Rebel Without a Cause. Her coming of age? Still playing in Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story and countless other hit movies. From the moment Natalie Wood made her debut in 1946, playing Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles’s ward in Tomorrow Is Forever at the age of seven, to her shocking, untimely death in 1981, the decades of her life are marked by movies that–for their moments–summed up America’s dreams. Now the acclaimed novelist, biographer, critic and screenwriter Gavin Lambert, whose twenty-year friendship with Natalie Wood began when she wanted to star in the movie adaptation of his novel Inside Daisy Clover, tells her extraordinary story. He writes about her parents, uncovering secrets that Natalie either didn’t know or kept hidden from those closest to her. Here is the young Natalie, from her years as a child actress at the mercy of a driven, controlling stage mother (“Make Mr. Pichel love you,” she whispered to the five-year-old Natalie before depositing her unexpectedly on the director’s lap), to her awkward adolescence when, suddenly too old for kiddie roles, she was shunted aside, just another freshman at Van Nuys High. Lambert shows us the glamorous movie star in her twenties—All the Fine Young Cannibals, Gypsy and Love with the Proper Stranger. He writes about her marriages, her divorces, her love affairs, her suicide attempt at twenty-six, the birth of her children, her friendships, her struggles as an actress and her tragic death by drowning (she was always terrified of water) at forty-three. For the first time, everyone who knew Natalie Wood speaks freely–including her husbands Robert Wagner and Richard Gregson, famously private people like Warren Beatty, intimate friends such as playwright Mart Crowley, directors Robert Mulligan and Paul Mazursky, and Leslie Caron, each of whom told the author stories about this remarkable woman who was both life-loving and filled with despair. What we couldn’t know–have never been told before–Lambert perceptively uncovers. His book provides the richest portrait we have had of Natalie Wood.

Natalie Wood: A Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

KNOPF

Here is a fascinating portrait of Hollywood screenwriter Ivan Moffat, whose lonely, aristocratic childhood led to a precociously fashionable and sensual life in London’s High Bohemia in the late 1930s, service in director George Stevens’s World War II film documentary unit, and membership in Hollywood’s dazzling postwar expatriate community. Moffat’s grandfather, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was one of the most celebrated actors of his day, producing and starring in everything from Richard II to Pygmalion on the London stage and founding the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His mother, Iris Tree, was a well-known poet-actress-adventuress whose circle included British bluebloods Nancy Cunard and Diana Cooper, and Bloomsburyites Carrington, Lytton Strachey, and Augustus John. Ivan’s photographer father, Curtis Moffat, came from a well-connected New York family, studied with Man Ray, and had an audacious showroom that focused on Moderne furniture and lighting, some of which he designed himself. But Ivan Moffat’s extraordinary pedigree was only the foundation upon which he built his own equally extraordinary and surprisingly active personal life, populated by the leading artists and personalities of his day—from Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas to Preston Sturges, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, and David Selznick. In 1943 Moffat enlisted in the army and was assigned to Stevens’s unit, started by Eisenhower, which covered the last stage of World War II, from D-day to the fall of Berlin and the liberation of the concentration camps. After the war, Stevens invited Moffat to become an associate producer for his new Hollywood company. Moffat’s unofficial credits on the screenplays for A Place in the Sun and Shane and his co-writing credit on Giant led to a successful screenwriting career, and at the same time he became a leading social figure in Hollywood. Moffat had affairs with many women—from a waitress to a duchess, from a stripper to a movie star. The most serious affair of his life was probably with the novelist Caroline Blackwood. At the center of The Ivan Moffat File is the elegantly written autobiography that Moffat was working on at the time of his death in 2002, to which Gavin Lambert adds never-before-seen letters, interviews, and screenplays, as well as many anecdotes and his own memories of Moffat. The result is a re-creation of the life of this unique figure, flamboyant and mysterious.

The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York,and Hollywood

Pantheon

A compelling new portrait of Natalie Wood draws on the author's own twenty-year friendship with the acclaimed actress, as well as interviews with family and intimates, private letters, and personal photographs, to chronicle her life, from child actress at the mercy of a controlling stage mother to her tragic drowning death at the age of forty-three. (Biography)

Natalie Wood: A Life (Random House Large Print)

Random House, Large Print

Drawing on the reminiscences of friends and colleagues, as well as on private archives, this evocative portrait of the great Hollywood star captures the triumphant film career and tragic private life of Norma Shearer

Norma Shearer: A Biography

Dust jacket design by Ben Feder. Lambert interviews Cukor.

On Cukor

Movies

G.P.Putnam's Sons

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LAMBERT, Gavin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by LAMBERT, Gavin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LAMBERT, Gavin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Running Time

Running Time

The dangerous edge

GWTW: The Making of Gone with the Wind

The Slide Area

Natalie Wood: A Life

The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York,and Hollywood

Natalie Wood: A Life (Random House Large Print)

Norma Shearer: A Biography

On Cukor