Rea - The Hollywood book club: reading with the stars

Text copyright 2019 by Steven Rea.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Rea, Steven, author.
Title: The Hollywood book club : reading with the stars / by Steven Rea.
Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053807 | ISBN 9781452176895 (hardcover : alk. paper); ISBN 9781452183732 (epub, mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture actors and actressesBooks and readingCaliforniaLos Angeles. | CelebritiesBooks and readingCaliforniaLos Angeles. | Books and readingCaliforniaLos Angeles.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U65 R425 2019 | DDC 791.4302/8092279494dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053807

AP Photo:

Design by Michael Morris.

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Read any good books lately?
humphrey bogart, In a Lonely Place

pop quiz: Whats the name of the bookshop where Audrey Hepburn is employed in Funny Face?

(a) Acme Book Shop

(b) Argosy Book Store

(c) Embryo Concepts

(d) Flourish and Blotts

(e) The Shop Around the Corner

Cheers if you answered c. Hepburns empathicalism-spouting gamine is a clerk at this philosophy books emporium in 50s boho Greenwich Villageher hushed, dusty, musty world rudely upended when Fred Astaire and a bossy team from a fashion mag charge in with cameras and model in tow. And extra points if you can match the other four fictional establishments with the films theyre in. (Answers below)

Books and movies have been intersecting in significant ways since the silent era: actors on screen reading tomes that tell us something about the characters theyre playing; books as instructional guides, or plot devices, or humorous props; or as stealth objects slipped into bookcases, pages carved out, to hide a weapon or a wad of cash. (And what about the bookcases with secret hinges entryways to hidden lairs?) From Voltaire and Emile Zola to Shakespeare and Kerouac to Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace, biopics of authors and poets have made for one of filmdoms most reliable genres. The life stories of fictional scribes, too, have always been a big part of the big screen diet. Barton Fink, anyone?

Novels and biographies, history and investigative series, memoirs and sci-fithousands upon thousands of published works have provided the foundation, the core, the starting-off-point-but-were-going-to-totally-change-the-ending-and-make-you-really-mad basis for motion picture adaptations.

The Hollywood Book Club is a bibliophile-meets-cinephile celebration of the convergence points between these two very different media. Its 55 photographs capture some iconic stars with some pretty iconic (or ironic) books in their mitts. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Bette Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, theyre all here with literature (or not) in their handsor on their laps, or in the general vicinity. Some of the titles are easily discernible in these imagesthe book jackets or spines held upright for the photographers lens, for our view. But some photos required further investigation. That gorgeous shot of a napping chest: the just-moved-to-L.A. writer, director, actor, and soon-to-be-filmmaker was well into A History of Technology, Vol. III: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. A little light reading before bed.

These candid pics, publicity shots, and production stillsmany taken by the respective Hollywood studios mostly unsung and intrepid still photographersare sequenced in six thematic categories: Theres a batch of ex libris, at-home images of the stars lounging in their personal libraries, or in a garden on a rustic twig settee with The Yearling. The stars of the film interpretations going back to the original worksand doing a little crossover promotion while theyre at it.

The books in The Hollywood Book Club make for some eclectic reading: Irving Stone and Oscar Wilde, a sex manual and a Louis Armstrong memoir, Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway.

Groucho Marx famously quipped that he didnt want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But its hard to imagine that he wouldnt have wanted to belong to the Hollywood Book Club . The fast-talkin, cigar-flickin, mustachioed Marx Brother is also credited with another old saw, one that speaks to the immeasurable satisfaction of spending time with a bound volume of prose or poetry: Outside of a dog, a book is mans best friend. Inside of a dog, its too dark to read.

Enjoy!

ANSWERS: (a) The Big Sleep, (b) Vertigo, (c) Funny Face, (d) Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, (e) Youve Got Mail

The Hollywood icon of East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, seated at his aunt and uncles breakfast table in Fairmount, Indiana, with a cigarette and The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley. The Indiana poet was known for his humor, folksy vernacular, and childrens verse. james dean , a fellow Hoosier, lived on his relatives farm from the age of nine on. This Dennis Stock photograph was taken in February 1955. Dean died, in a car crash, at the end of September that same year. He could be reading Rileys The Days Gone By.

hedy lamarr , the subject of three biographies, a documentary, and a graphic novel about her patented invention of the frequency-hopping spread spectrum, was one of the biggest screen stars of the 1940s and early 50s. The Austrian-born beauty was signed to MGM, and theres a pair of the studios scripts on the bottom shelf of her nightstand.

For his reading pleasure, sammy davis jr. lounges with a paperback edition of Lloyd C. Douglass mega-selling biblical epic The Robe, originally published in 1942. The film version, starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, was released in 1953 in CinemaScopethe first film to be issued in the widescreen format. Davis starred in Anna Lucasta in 1958, Porgy and Bess in 1959, and then joined Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and his Rat Pack pals in Oceans 11 in 1960.

At the home she shares with Humphrey Bogart, the To Have and Have Not and Big Sleep siren lauren bacall rifles through a pictorial history of twentieth century conflict, open to The March of Aggression chapter. Robert Capas iconic The Falling Soldier is among the spread of combat images visible. The other book next to Bacall in this 1946 photo? William Chafferss essential