All posts tagged: old hollywood book club

Audrey Hepburn’s Sons Recount Her Remarkably Resilient Life

Audrey Hepburn’s Sons Recount Her Remarkably Resilient Life

Published by Sam Flores

War Child “I knew the cold clutch of human terror all through my teens,” Hepburn once said. “I saw it, felt it, heard it—and it never goes away. You see, it wasn’t just a nightmare: I was there, and it all happened.” In 1939, the Baroness misguidedly evacuated her daughter from Kent, believing she would be safer in neutral Holland. But in May 1940, the Nazis invaded Holland, and five years of hell on earth began. Ferrer believes World War II was the profound experience that most shaped his mother’s life, and the horrors she witnessed make this thesis highly believable. Hepburn and her family survived firebombing, starvation, and daily terror. Her family’s money was confiscated; her favorite uncle, Otto, was murdered by the Nazis; shrapnel lodged in Hepburn’s neck, giving it its beguiling tilt. One day at a train station, Hepburn saw Jewish families being transported to the concentration camps, an image she could never forget. She aided the underground resistance, delivering messages and pamphlets to those in hiding. While delivering a message to …

Jane Fonda’s Dishy Memoir Proves She Walks the Walk

Jane Fonda’s Dishy Memoir Proves She Walks the Walk

Published by Sam Flores

The Lone Ranger Throughout her childhood, Jane Fonda had a mantra: “Make it better. I know I can make it better.” She was born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda—yes, her first name is literally Lady—on December 21, 1937, in New York City. An original nepo baby, she was the daughter of wealthy socialite Frances Ford Seymour and movie star Henry Fonda, whose progressive views and sensitive, everyman roles in films like The Grapes of Wrath made him an offscreen hero. Growing up in Los Angeles, tomboy Jane—tough, tireless, infinitely curious—would do anything to gain her father’s approval. “He was happy with me when I was little,” she writes, “and deep down I knew his was the winning team, the one I’d do anything to join.” But as she got older, her father’s cold, distant personality and his “Protestant rages” made him impossible to reach. Fonda mimicked him, becoming insular, self-sufficient and obsessed with perfection. Once the family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, when Fonda was ten, the tense family situation went from bad to worse. Her mother …

Robert Evans’s Legendary Memoir Captures an Epic Hollywood Rise and Fall

Robert Evans’s Legendary Memoir Captures an Epic Hollywood Rise and Fall

Published by Sam Flores

“When your back’s against the wall,” legendary Paramount studio head Robert Evans liked to say, “the impossible is possible.” In 1994, Evans published The Kid Stays in the Picture, one of the most entertaining Hollywood memoirs of all time. Writing like the gangsters and gamblers he admired (and resembled), the wily, passionate producer, studio head, and actor tells the story of a life more melodramatic and topsy-turvy than many of his famous films. And Evans was responsible for so many films: The Odd Couple, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, Chinatown, The Godfather, Harold and Maude, Paper Moon, The Conversation, Romeo and Juliet, and Marathon Man, just to name a few. Simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, Evans is great at convincing you he’s telling the truth—or at least, that his version of the truth is the most fun. His material is endless. This is a man who had seven wives, including Ali MacGraw, Phyllis George, and Catherine Oxenberg. His girlfriends include Beverly Johnson, Margaux Hemingway, Princess Soraya, and Liv Ullmann. And he holds grudges against everyone from Ryan …

Diane Keaton’s Memoirs Show She Had That Special Something

Diane Keaton’s Memoirs Show She Had That Special Something

Published by Sam Flores

“I’ve always had trouble putting words together,” Diane Keaton writes in her 2011 memoir, Then Again. “In a way, I became famous for being an inarticulate woman.” As always, Keaton drastically underestimates herself. The Oscar-winning legend starred in classics like Annie Hall, Sleeper, The Godfather, The First Wives Club, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, The Family Stone, and Something’s Got to Give before her death earlier this year at the age of 79. She was also a talented photographer, editor, documentarian, preservationist, director, singer and a famed Hollywood house flipper. And in her three memoirs—Then Again, 2014’s Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, and 2020’s Brother and Sister—she proves herself a delightfully insightful, loopy writer, whose love of collage is evident in her free-form exuberant style: a pastiche of letters, poems, conversations, and artwork, which she uses to tell the story of her life and loves. Unlike most Hollywood stars, Keaton’s books seek to get super deep: to explore, examine and uncover. They also have a surprising undercurrent of melancholy, with frequent meditations on …