Book Review: John O'Hara's Hollywood, short stories by John O'Hara (2007)

Cover of John O'Hara's Hollywood, 2007.

John O'Hara at work, circa 1960. He's looking you over to figure out which brand of shirt you're wearing and what that says about you.

John O’Hara was one of the most successful American authors of his generation. O’Hara rose to fame during the 1930’s through his short stories in The New Yorker, and from his first two novels, Appointment in Samarra, and BUtterfield 8. O’Hara spent varying amounts of time in Hollywood from 1934 to 1955 as a screenwriter, and his time in California informed the short stories in the 2007 collection John O’Hara’s Hollywood. The book collects all of O’Hara’s 22 stories about Hollywood and the movies. It’s an excellent collection for fans of O’Hara’s writing, but it’s not without its faults. 

Most of O’Hara’s early short stories from the 1930’s and 1940’s were very short, with many being under 1,000 words. O’Hara was a master at creating a mood in just a few words in these super short stories. O’Hara’s stories don’t really have endings that resolve the story; they just suddenly come to a halt. In this way, they capture the rhythm of real life. 

Personally, I found the early short stories in John O’Hara’s Hollywood to be the most interesting. I thought that some of his later stories from the 1960’s were just too long and lacked narrative drive. The longest stories in the book are “Yucca Knolls,” “James Francis and the Star,” and “Natica Jackson,” and those are the three stories I found most disposable. They range from 50-80 pages in length, and they’re overly reliant on dialogue. Not much happens in them, and it seems that the only reason they are so long is just because they could be. O’Hara also seems stuck in the past in these stories, as they re-hash the 1920’s and 1930’s, the decades which he was most comfortable writing about. 

The last piece in the book is one of the most fascinating; it’s a non-fiction piece titled “Hello Hollywood Goodbye,” that O’Hara wrote in 1968 for the magazine Holiday. Unfortunately, the introduction doesn’t mention it at all, so we don’t get much context for this piece. From what I know about O’Hara’s writings, it was fairly unusual for him to write an autobiographical non-fiction essay. 

John O’Hara’s Hollywood was edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the leading scholar of John O’Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bruccoli’s introduction is excellent, but someone in the proof reading department was asleep at the wheel, as the introduction states that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote What Makes Sammy Run? and The Disenchanted, while Budd Schulberg wrote The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, when it’s actually the other way around. 

I noticed some interesting things as I read John O’Hara’s Hollywood, and one of them is that O’Hara really had a thing for fake movie titles with the word “strange” in them. In “The Magical Numbers” the fake biopic of President John Tyler is called Strange President. (p.22) Strange Courage is the movie the actor in “Adventure on the Set” has just finished. (p.27) Strange Virgin is the name of the movie that Kenyon Littlejohn is making a test for in “Drawing Room B,” (p.49), and it’s also the name of the movie, adapted from a novel, being made in “The Industry and the Professor.” (p.62) I wondered if all these fake movies with “strange” in the title was supposed to be an in-joke for movie fans. Were there a lot of movies with “strange” in the title being made in the 1930’s and 1940’s? 

O’Hara might be making some in-jokes as he re-uses some character names in different stories. “The Answer Depends” name checks Sidney Gainsborough, who appears in the first story in the book, “Mr. Sidney Gainsborough: Quality Pictures.” The fictional actress Doris Arlington is mentioned in “The Answer Depends,” “Yucca Knolls,” and “James Francis and the Star.” 

John O’Hara was a very interesting writer. He was clearly gifted with superb and sensitive abilities to capture the way people talked, thought, and felt, but yet in his personal life he had a knack for pissing off nearly everyone he met. Of course, he’s not the only great writer who also had a difficult personality. O’Hara had a keen sense of class and status in America, and he had a large inferiority complex about having never attended college. Ernest Hemingway supposedly once made the joke that he was collecting funds to send O’Hara to Yale. The sad part is, O’Hara might have taken Hemingway up on his offer. Obsessed with Yale life, O’Hara badgered the university to give him an honorary degree. Yale declined, because O’Hara was graceless enough to ask for the degree. O’Hara also made no secret of his desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of course, he never got it. 

O’Hara finally quit drinking in the mid 1950’s, and he became a much more prolific author, publishing 10 novels and 7 short story collections between 1955 and his death in 1970. He became a famous and wealthy author, and he gloried in the social signifiers that his status afforded him, as he drove a Rolls-Royce and an MG convertible with his monogram on the door.

O’Hara still holds the record for the most short stories published in The New Yorker, with an incredible 247! Along with those two other Johns, Cheever and Updike, O’Hara became synonymous with The New Yorker and the sophisticated short stories found between its covers. 

At his best, John O’Hara was a superb chronicler of American life and culture, and John O’Hara’s Hollywood presents some of his best work.

Book Review: Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth, by Lana Turner (1982)

Book cover of Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth, by Lana Turner, 1982.

The beautiful and glamorous Lana Turner at the peak of her beauty.

Another glamorous still of the lovely Lana.

Lana making her dramatic entrance in The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946. It's no wonder that John Garfield was willing to kill for her. 

Lana Turner was one of the biggest movie stars in the 1940’s and 1950’s and also one of the most beautiful and glamorous. Turner was well known for her stunning beauty, and also for her dramatic personal life. She was married 8 times to 7 different men. None of her marriages lasted longer than 5 years. Turner chronicled her extraordinary life in her 1982 autobiography Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth. The book actually started as a biography of Turner by movie critic Hollis Alpert, but once he interviewed her for the book, it slowly turned into her autobiography, which explains why Alpert’s name is listed as one of the copyright holders.

Lana the book is an interesting look at the woman behind the image. However, the book is not without its faults. The ending of the book is oddly rushed, as the last 11 years that the book covers, from 1971-1982, take up only the last 15 pages. Granted, those are not the most fascinating years of Lana Turner’s life and career, but it felt like she suddenly ran out of time and rushed the ending. And suddenly, in the last four pages of the book, Turner has a religious awakening. This seemingly life-changing moment is catalogued without much detail. 

The real focus of Lana is on her husbands, and not her movies. Unfortunately for fans of old Hollywood, there’s not much behind the scenes information on any of Turner’s movies. We learn that Clark Gable, her most frequent co-star, was nice to her, but she only saw him socially once. There’s a lot that Turner doesn’t tell us, which holds back Lana from being a classic Hollywood autobiography. Who were Turner’s good girl friends who she socialized with? What leading men did she like playing opposite? We never find out because Turner simply doesn’t tell us. It’s too bad there isn’t more focus on her acting and her movies, because Lana Turner had true acting talent, and she was much more than just a pretty face. 

Turner had an unfortunate penchant for marrying men who were bad for her, and the catalogue of failed marriages eventually becomes numbing. It also begs the question, why did she marry so many men who were not suited for her? Turner attempts to answer the question, but doesn’t come up with a very satisfactory answer. Turner wrote:

“With the exception of dear Fred May, who is still my good friend, all my husbands have taken, and I was always giving. Why? Well, I was always a giver, even as a little girl. If I had candy and you had none, I’d give you half of mine….But that’s an easy answer, one I’ve used all my life. Now I see that somewhere there was a pattern, something in me that made me choose takers, over and over again. Surely I should have learned that, when respect goes out the door, love flies out the window. So why did I lose respect again and again? I honestly don’t know. Once would have been enough for some people.” (Lana, p.249) 

My own guess is that Turner must have had low self-confidence when it came to her relationships with men. Turner once said, “My plan was to have one husband and seven children but it turned out the other way.” She got off to a bad start at age 19 by eloping with big band-leader Artie Shaw to Las Vegas on their very first date! Shaw proved to be selfish and mean, and the marriage soon collapsed. Husband number 2 was Steve Crane, who eventually became a successful restaurant owner. Turner and Crane married twice because when they first got married Crane wasn’t divorced from his first wife. Oops! Crane fathered Turner’s only child, her daughter Cheryl Crane. Steve Crane inspired perhaps my favorite line in the book. While Turner was pregnant, he bought a tiny lion cub as a pet. Why, I don’t know. Turner writes, “With a baby coming, having a lion around the house seemed too risky to me.” (Lana, p.73) Good call Lana! 

In between husbands 2 and 3 Turner had a passionate affair with matinee idol Tyrone Power, who Turner describes as her true love. But Power was in the process of getting divorced from his first wife, and when she got pregnant with his child they weren’t able to marry. Turner writes about wanting to go away and have the baby in secret and then claim she adopted it. But she dismisses it as a foolish idea, even though it’s exactly what Loretta Young did when she got pregnant with Clark Gable’s baby. Young’s career survived unblemished. Power left for a press junket in Europe, leaving the ball in Turner’s court about whether to keep the child or not, saying it wasn’t his decision to make. Power contacted Turner via shortwave radio during his trip and she told him “I found the house today,” which was their secret code that meant she decided to have an abortion. When Power returned to the United States, he had fallen in love with actress Linda Christian, who would become his second wife. 

Husband number 3 was millionaire Bob Topping, who had a drinking problem and spent too much money. When Topping proposed to her, Turner told him “You know I don’t love you.” (Lana, p.109) Which is a good sign that you shouldn’t marry someone. But she eventually said yes. Turner makes it sound as though she wanted someone who would take care of her monetary needs, but did she really want to quit making movies and become a lady of leisure? She never answers definitively. Depressed and despondent over the failure of her marriage to Topping, Turner attempted suicide in late 1951, taking an overdose of sleeping pills and slashing her wrist. Her manager Ben Cole saved her by breaking down her bathroom door. The incident was covered up, and the official story was that Turner had slipped in the bathroom and broken the glass of her shower door, thus injuring her wrist. Husband number 4 was actor Lex Barker, most famous for playing Tarzan. According to Turner’s daughter Cheryl Crane, Barker sexually abused Crane, and once she told her mother about the abuse, she promptly left Barker. Turner doesn’t mention this in her autobiography.

In between husbands 4 and 5 was the most notorious relationship of Turner’s life, her year-long affair with minor mobster Johnny Stompanato, a former bodyguard for gangster Mickey Cohen. He introduced himself to her as “John Steele,” and had no inkling of his ties to gangsters until much later in their relationship. Stompanato was relentless in his pursuit of Turner, obsessively sending her flowers and trying to get her to go out on a date with him. Turner had a queasy feeling from the beginning about him, but unfortunately she finally went out with him. He quickly proved to be abusive and controlling. Once Turner learned of his connections to the underworld, she feared the bad publicity that would result if it became known that she was dating him. Ironically, Turner’s nightmares of bad publicity would come true, but not in any way she could have imagined. Turner wanted to end her relationship with Stompanato, but she proved unable to get rid of him. In the midst of this crisis, Turner was nominated for Best Actress for her role in Peyton Place. After the Oscar ceremony on March 26, 1958, when Turner came home to Stompanato that night, he went into a violent rage and brutally beat her, slapping her and punching her repeatedly. Turner wrote, “There were welts all over my face and neck, and the beginnings of what would be terrible bruises.” (Lana, p.194) Just a week later, on April 4^th, Turner and Stompanato had another loud argument and he was threatening her again. Turner’s daughter Cheryl was listening to their argument, and entered the room. Holding a kitchen knife, she stabbed Stompanato in the stomach, killing him. The incident was a huge Hollywood scandal, and Turner saw her private life splashed all over the front pages. Cheryl’s stabbing of Stompanato was ruled a justifiable homicide, and she was spared having to go to jail. Luckily for Turner, the scandal didn’t ruin her movie career, as Peyton Place’s box office totals were probably helped by all of the press coverage.

Husband number 5 was Fred May, who sounds like he was a really nice guy. He’s the only one of Turner’s ex-husbands that she remained close friends with, and Turner admits in the book that maybe she shouldn’t have divorced him. Husband number 6 was Robert Eaton, who misused lot of Turner’s money and threw extravagant parties when she was out of the country. Her final husband was nightclub hypnotist Ronald Pellar, also known as Ronald Dante. He allegedly stole a lot of money and jewelry from Turner. Turner declared herself finished with men at that point and never married again. I guess she knew that once she had basically married Gob Bluth, Will Arnett’s character from “Arrested Development,” she probably shouldn’t get married again. 

To her credit, Lana Turner was a survivor. She made it through 7 failed marriages, 2 abortions, 3 stillbirths, and she still kept going. That takes guts, and you have to respect someone who has been through all that.

Movie Review: The Last Tycoon, starring Robert De Niro, directed by Elia Kazan, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1976)

Some of the cast of The Last Tycoon. From left to right: Tony Curtis, Leslie Curtis (Tony's real-life wife playing his movie wife), Ray Milland, Robert De Niro, Jeanne Moreau, Robert Mitchum, and Theresa Russell.

Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson size each other up in The Last Tycoon, 1976. This is before they play ping pong.

Robert De Niro, generating zero chemistry with co-star Ingrid Boulting in The Last Tycoon, 1976.

Director Elia Kazan’s last movie was his 1976 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, starring Robert De Niro, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. The movie is proof that all the talent in the world can still produce a bad movie.

There are so many things wrong with The Last Tycoon that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps making a movie of an unfinished novel was not a good idea. I haven’t read Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, also known as The Love of the Last Tycoon, so I don’t know how faithful the movie is to his writing, but it sure feels like it was based on an unfinished novel. The Last Tycoon is set in Hollywood in the late 1930’s, and the titular character is Monroe Stahr, who is the head of a film studio. (Stahr was loosely based on real-life movie mogul Irving Thalberg.) The film follows him as he works on movies and seeks out a beautiful young woman who reminds him of his dead movie star wife. 

Unfortunately, Robert De Niro is miscast as Stahr. Monroe Stahr is a boring character, and it’s a disservice to cast one of the silver screen’s most exciting performers in that role. Stahr was too much of a blank slate for me to ever feel invested in his emotions. There’s no dramatic tension to the movie, and whatever lingering tension there was comes to a screeching halt during the way too long love scenes between De Niro and Ingrid Boulting, as the girl who reminds Stahr of his dead wife. The scenes between Boulting and De Niro are just not that interesting, and they don’t have any chemistry together. Theresa Russell plays the other main female character, and while Boulting and Russell are both very beautiful to look at, they are not very good actresses. On a positive note, I did love Stahr's beautiful red Packard convertible.

Kazan seemed determined to include every famous person he could find in the cast, which makes watching The Last Tycoon slightly more interesting. The supporting cast includes Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, Jeanne Moreau, Donald Pleasence, John Carradine, Jeff Corey, Anjelica Huston, Peter Strauss, and, oh yeah, Jack Nicholson. Yes, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro made a movie together in 1976. Unfortunately, it was this turkey.

I couldn’t figure out the tone that The Last Tycoon was going for. There are times when it seems to want to be a comedy. On their first date, Stahr takes Boulting’s character to see a trained seal at a restaurant. Am I supposed to laugh at De Niro’s interactions with the seal and his trainer? Is the scene where a movie editor dies during a screening supposed to be humorously ironic? I have no idea. I blame Harold Pinter for this. 

Another weird moment is when we see the movie-within-a-movie that Tony Curtis and Jeanne Moreau have been working on. It’s very obviously a pastiche of Casablanca, as Curtis plays the piano and bids Moreau adieu. She even sings part of the song he’s playing. It’s almost high camp, but not quite. I really think it’s supposed to be serious. Also, Casablanca wasn’t released until 1942, which is several years after the time period of The Last Tycoon. Curtis also has a scene where he confides to Stahr that he can’t get it up anymore, but he knows that Stahr will have a solution for his problem. I don’t remember what the hell Stahr tells him, but it works for Curtis. Of the random celebrity cameos, Robert Mitchum gets the most to do as another powerful producer at the studio. It is fun to watch Mitchum and De Niro together, as they both played the same role in the two different versions of Cape Fear. Hell, it’s always fun to watch Robert Mitchum. Ray Milland doesn’t have much to do other than hang out with Robert Mitchum and look like a more bald version of Jimmy Stewart. Dana Andrews has a couple of scenes as a beleaguered director whom Stahr releases from a movie. Despite his real-life battle with alcoholism, which he overcame in the late 1960’s, Andrews looks super handsome and not much different from his heyday as a leading man in the 1940’s. 

So, what about Jack Nicholson? Does he swoop in to save the movie from terminal boredom? Does he demand to order toast from the studio commissary? Isn’t it super exciting that The Last Tycoon pairs up two of the greatest actors of the 1970’s? Well, even the scenes between De Niro and Nicholson are dull. Their characters are adversaries, as Nicholson plays a Communist who wants to unionize the screenwriters at De Niro’s studio. Both Nicholson and De Niro seem to be operating at half-speed during their first scene together. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is super boring. And I don’t know if Nicholson is trying to do an accent or what-his character is from Tennessee-but he doesn’t have his usual Jack Nicholson vocal cadences. It’s terribly frustrating to watch two exciting, dynamic actors play boring people. In their other two scenes together De Niro totally overacts Stahr’s drunkenness, as he challenges Nicholson’s character to a game of ping pong. Yep, De Niro and Nicholson face off in a movie over a fucking game of ping pong. Opportunity wasted!

The last scene of The Last Tycoon, where De Niro/Stahr breaks the fourth wall and looks directly at the camera as he tells a story about watching a girl burn a pair of gloves-a story we’ve already heard once before in the movie-is a real “what the fuck?” moment. 

The Last Tycoon was an unfortunate waste of talent, and a sad ending to the great directing career of Elia Kazan.

Movie Review: Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952)

Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas in "The Bad and the Beautiful," 1952. Understatement of the day: wow, she was beautiful.

Barry Sullivan, Lana Turner, and Dick Powell in "The Bad and the Beautiful," 1952.

“The Bad and the Beautiful,” directed by Vincente Minnelli, is a look at a callous movie producer who makes great films but destroys the lives of those around him. Kirk Douglas is perfectly cast as the producer, and garnered his second Best Actor Oscar nomination for the movie. As Douglas himself once said, “I’ve made a career out of playing sons-of-bitches.” And Jonathan Shields, the character Douglas plays, is certainly a son of a bitch.

“The Bad and the Beautiful” is told largely in flashback form, as director Fred Amiel, (Barry Sullivan) leading actress Georgia Lorrison, (Lana Turner) and author James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) meet in producer Harry Pebbel’s office. (Pebbel is played by Walter Pidgeon.) Pebbel tells them that Shields, who is living in France and hasn’t made a movie in years, wants them to work with him one more time on a new project. As they all wait for the trans-Atlantic phone call to be connected, they each tell their memories of Shields, and how he screwed them over. However, Pebbel is quick to point out when each of them have finished their stories that Shields’s bad behavior actually helped them to become the successes they are. 

The acting in “The Bad and the Beautiful” is superb, with strong performances from all of the leads. Kirk Douglas had the perfect blend of seductive charm and arrogance to pull off the role of Jonathan Shields. Lana Turner was excellent, and her scenes with Douglas crackle with dynamic energy. Turner, always known more for her gorgeous looks than her acting talent, shows that she was much more than just a pretty face. Turner also looks beautiful throughout the film, making the title quite apt. Barry Sullivan gives a nice performance as Shields’s early friend who is soon left by the wayside. Walter Pidgeon does a good job as Pebbel, who gives the slick-talking young Shields his first real job in the movies, and Pidgeon projects his usual air of calm authority. Dick Powell is also excellent as Bartlow, the cynical and jaded author. Powell had a very interesting movie career. He began as a musical star in light comedies during the 1930’s, starring in movies like “42^nd Street,” (1933) and “On the Avenue” (1937). When it seemed as though his days as a romantic leading man were numbered, he tried to broaden his image. While he lost out on the lead in “Double Indemnity,” (1944) he landed the role of private detective Philip Marlowe in “Murder, My Sweet,” also known as “Farewell, My Lovely” (1944). That role led to many more dramatic roles, as Powell made the successful transition to dramatic actor. Powell starred in many TV shows during the 1950’s, and also directed five films during the mid-1950’s. (One of those was the ill-fated “The Conqueror” starring John Wayne as Genghis Kahn.) Powell’s second wife was the actress Joan Blondell, and his third wife was June Allyson. Powell died of cancer in 1963, at the age of 58. Gloria Grahame took home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Rosemary, even though she’s only onscreen for 9 minutes. But it’s an excellent performance, no matter the length. Grahame’s stormy personal life would soon overshadow her fine acting ability, though. Grahame was married four times. Her second marriage was to the director Nicholas Ray, who had one son, Anthony, from a previous marriage. Ray and Grahame also had one son together before divorcing in 1952. In 1960, Grahame married her former stepson, Nicholas Ray’s son Anthony. Grahame then had two sons with Anthony Ray. Weird.

“The Bad and the Beautiful” set a record for most Oscar wins for a film that was not nominated for either Best Picture or Best Director, winning 5 of the 6 Oscars it was nominated for. Douglas was the only one to come home empty-handed, losing out to Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” It’s surprising that Minnelli wasn’t nominated for his excellent directing. Fresh off his success with 1951’s “An American in Paris,” Minnelli created vivid compositions with rich black and white photography. It’s odd to see a Minnelli film in black and white, since he’s so known for his rich color palettes. Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas must have enjoyed working together, as they would later team up for two more movies, 1956’s “Lust For Life,” which starred Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh, in one of his best performances, and 1962’s “Two Weeks in Another Town.” There’s a good amount of humor in “The Bad and the Beautiful,” which makes it a delight to see, even today. There’s a parody of a fussy English director, which is a jab at Alfred Hitchcock, amid other Hollywood in-jokes. 

There are no tales of outrageous behavior from the set, as producer John Houseman wrote in his autobiography, Unfinished Business, “I have never produced a film on which there were fewer problems.” (P.319) Kirk Douglas, in his 1988 autobiography The Ragman’s Son, spends just a page on the movie, writing, “When they announced that Lana Turner was the ‘beautiful,’ the paper were filled with ‘When these two get together…’ I was ready for it. But she was going with Fernando Lamas, who was terribly jealous. He was always around. Nothing happened. I liked Lana, and I thought she did one of her best pieces of acting in that picture.” (P.171) Given Douglas’s reputation as a ladies’ man, I think Fernando Lamas was very smart to not let Lana spend any time off-set with Kirk. 

If you’re a fan of movies about Old Hollywood, or any of the leading actors, you’ll definitely enjoy “The Bad and the Beautiful.”