I know my father served from almost the start of World War II until 1946 when it was all over. He was nineteen and studying pre-med when he enlisted. He told me that the carnage he witnessed during the war caused him to study something else, entirely, when he came…
BEGUILING HOLLYWOOD Posts
Oasis: The bookshop on Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York which stays open till midnight. Dietrich: In the German language: the name for a key that opens all locks. Not a magic key. A very real object, necessitating great skill in the making. The actress Marlene Dietrich spent…
I have a thing about how Los Angeles is portrayed on film and in books. An author who makes me laugh, perhaps because of his dour satiric streak, is Evelyn Waugh. He visited Hollywood in 1947 to discuss a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, loathed the place, and ended up…
I do. There’s a question of degree, certainly, and while the term Dragon Lady implies an implacable force, the bitch epithet contains a big splash of disrespect and venom. One term was used by Olivia de Havilland in real life, the other came from the pen of a screenwriter. There’s…
INTERVIEWER There’s a passage in one of your books in which you and Auden are on a train, and you’re savagely attacking religion, and he says: “Be careful, my dear, if you carry on like that, one day you’ll have such a conversion.” Do you think of it in those…