by Steven Rea
The gowns in the all-star 1962 comedy What a Way to Go! are by Edith Head, and maybe the legendary Hollywood designer conjured up shirley maclaine’s lacy two-piece swimsuit as well. In a role originally conceived for Marilyn Monroe, MacLaine is a distraught four-time widow with a $200-million-plus bank account and the belief that she’s cursed—that she’s somehow caused the deaths of her husbands, played, respectively, by Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and Gene Kelly. As for the copy of The Agony and the Ecstasy, 20th Century Fox wanted to plug its upcoming adaptation of Irving Stone’s Michelangelo novel. Product placement, poolside.
ann sheridan considers her source material on a break from shooting the World War II saga The Edge of Darkness, set in Nazi-occupied Norway. William Woods wrote the novel, published in 1942. The next year saw the film’s release. Sheridan shares top billing with Errol Flynn. He’s a fisherman-turned-underground-leader; she’s a doctor’s daughter who joins the fight alongside her leading man. Kirkus Reviews cited Woods’s book as having “the ring of truth. The movie has the ring of Hollywood, but its villagers-turned-guerrilla-fighters plot is nevertheless stirring stuff.” Sheridan, who can count Angels with Dirty Faces, Kings Row, and I Was a Male War Bride among her one-hundred-plus screen credits, was also the protagonist of a novel: In 1943 Whitman Publishing issued Ann Sheridan and the Sign of the Sphinx, in which the famous actress sleuths around, helping to hunt down a missing friend.
“I’m telling you, there’s a motorcycle chase in here somewhere,” steve mcqueen may have insisted to director john sturges as the actor and the filmmaker pore over The Great Escape, Paul Brickhill’s bestselling account of the British and American POW breakout from Nazi prison Stalag Luft III. McQueen stars as “The Cooler King,” a hotshot American pilot, in the 1963 blockbuster. Also on the desk in Sturges’s office: By Love Possessed, James Gould Cozzens’s book —another of the director’s screen adaptees.
Dressed as Roderick Usher, the singularly loony lone surviving male member of the Usher clan, vincent price settles back with a copy of The Portable Poe to bone up on his House of Usher role, and perhaps do some early research on the subsequent six Poe adaptations he would make with B-movie maestro Roger Corman. The trailer for the doom-y 1960 release hailed its star as “the screen’s foremost delineator of the Draculean,” and Price’s delivery of lines like “Did you know I could hear the scratching of her fingernails on the casket lid” (re: his sister, whom he has buried alive) bears the claim out. The line readings are, well, Priceless.
With a suitably weathered visage, veteran leading man spencer tracy takes a moment to study Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and to study the primitive wooden carving coincidentally laid out before him. Tracy was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in 1959 for his portrayal of the nameless old fisherman and his epic battle with a mighty marlin.
gregory peck’s 1960 J.P. Lippincott & Co. edition of Harper Lee’s classic may or may not be open to chapter 15, where the author describes the “graying black hair and square-cut features” of her hero, the small-town Southern lawyer and dad Atticus Finch. Peck, tall and wearing glasses just like Finch, fits the role to a T. In Decemberof 1962, when Robert Mulligan’s screen adaptation opened in theaters, a paperback movie tie-in hit bookstore shelves. Peck and child actress Mary Badham, who plays Atticus’s wide-eyed daughter Scout, adorn the cover. Peck went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor the following April.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s 1938 novel about a boy and his fawn in Florida scrub country was a huge seller, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a movie, too. jane wyman plays the lad’s hardscrabble mother, Ora, in the 1946 MGM adaptation. Here she is at the end of a day’s shoot doing her homework, checking out the N. C. Wyeth illustrations in the Charles Scribner and Sons original edition. Both Wyman and Gregory Peck, who stars as the boy’s father, were nominated for Oscars. Rawlings was edited at Scribner by Maxwell Perkins, whose stable of authors included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe.
Talk about large print editions! The cast of one of the most iconic movies of all time—1939’s The Wizard of Oz—perches atop a humongous copy of L. Frank Baum’s classic tale of a Kansas farm girl and her journey to a magical, mystical, flying-monkeys-plagued land. Probably not a coincidence that the cover art for the giant-sized volume features judy garland as Dorothy alongside costars Tin Man jack haley, Scarecrow ray bolger, Toto terry the terrier, Wizard frank morgan, and Cowardly Lion bert lahr.
The literary pedigree of 1944’s And Now Tomorrow is pretty impressive—susan hayward looks impressed, anyway. First, there’s Rachel Field’s novel, an enormous bestseller from the author of All This, and Heaven Too. Field won both a National Book Award and a Newbery (for her children’s book, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years). Then there’s the screenplay adaptation for the Alan Ladd/Loretta Young/Susan Hayward melodrama about a doctor’s efforts to cure deafness. And Now Tomorrow was scripted by Raymond Chandler—one of only four produced screenplays the creator of Philip Marlowe banged out while working for Paramount in the 1940s. Hayward, who died of a brain tumor at age fifty-seven, was the subject of a multitude of biographies: A Star, Is a Star, Is a Star! The Lives and Loves of Susan Hayward; Red: The Tempestuous Life of Susan Hayward; Susan Hayward: An Actress of Infinite Variety, the Divine Bitch; Susan Hayward: Her Films and Life, and Susan Hayward: Portrait of a Survivor. Phew!
Three Ziegfeld Follies Girls try a different way to absorb their literature—with a well-balanced selection of tomes from the MGM library. mary jane halsey, diana cook, and edna callahan all appeared in the 1930s’ song-and-dance spectaculars The Merry Widow, Gold Diggers of 1933, and The Great Ziegfeld. Halsey also had a turn in 1942’s Cat People, Val Lewton’s spooky noir.
FEATURED TITLES
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
An Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavsky
Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Travers
And Now Tomorrow by Rachel Field
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
Baby Animals by Garth Williams
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace
Cathedrals and Museums of France
The Champion of Far and Away by Ben Hecht
The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley
Doctors East Doctors West by Edward H. Hume
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
The Edge of Darkness by William Woods
Fair Play by Munro Leaf
Good Night, Sweet Prince: The Life and Times of John Barrymore by Gene Fowler
The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill
A History of Technology, Vol. III: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution
Kiki Is an Actress by Charlotte Steiner
The Odyssey of Homer
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine
The Portable Poe
Power of Will by Frank Channing Haddock
The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
Run of the Stars by Dora Aydelotte
Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong
Showdown by Errol Flynn
Sixteen Famous British Plays
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck
What Every Young Mother Should Know
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The World of Birds by James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the cofounder of the Connie and Steven Rea Book Club of Two, now in its fifth decade, a big, loving thank you. Thanks to Hillary Rea too, for her passion for books and film and for her remarkable storytelling talents.
Ace photographer Stuart Rome took time out from his own profoundly beautiful work
to ready the images in these pages, bringing the Hollywood stars and their respective reading matter to vivid black-and-white life.
Steve Mockus at Chronicle Books has been a sure, steady, enthusiastic guide. A huge thanks to him and the entire Chronicle team.
To friends, fellow readers, and movie buffs Dan DeLuca, David Hiltbrand, and Robert Kingsbury, have merci.
And a grateful nod to Nancy E. Wolff at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, ever ready with expert advice and counsel. To Michael Ochs, who paved the way. Thanks to Jonathan Hyams at Getty Images, Andy Howick at MPTV Images, Michael Shulman at Magnum Photos, and especially to Howard Mandelbaum at Photofest. Also: Juliet Cuming at the Mark Shaw Photographic Archive for the Audrey Hepburn help.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit: STUART ROME
In addition to The Hollywood Book Club, Steven Rea is the author of Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling with the Stars and Hollywood Cafe: Coffee with the Stars. He lives in Philadelphia, where he reads books, rides bikes, and drinks coffee. His archive of original Hollywood photographs numbers in the thousands. He posts photos from his collection of stars on bikes two or three times a week at ridesabike.com
