Trust in the art, not in the artist: movie star edition.
The link's going to go down at 1000 GMT tomorrow -- that's a bit less than 24 hours from now, if I've figured it right -- but I thought I'd recommend it just the same: last week BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week featured "adapted for radio" excerpts from the fourth volume of Clive James' autobiography (the books in toto are apparently referred to by the first volume's title: Unreliable Memoirs [1980]), North Face of Soho (2006), which apparently deals with his vida loca in the 1960s and 1970s. If you go here and click on the link for Thursday before 1000 GMT (or before 5:00 a.m. EST) on Thursday, 16 November, you'll hear fifteen minutes of James relating his stint as a celebrity-interviewing journalist and his amazing and amusing accounts of two of his more memorable subjects, Burt Lancaster and Peter Sellers. HINT: neither gent comes off particularly well.
I'd read before that Lancaster was a major twat (particularly in Sam Kashner's article about the making of Sweet Smell of Success, "A Cookie Full of Arsenic," originally published in Vanity Fair and collected in The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties by Kashner and Jennifer MacNair), but I'd never heard of him being as effin' ridiculous as James describes him during the making of Scorpio (1973).
It's part of Peter Sellers' "legend" that the only role which he couldn't get a handle on was himself; but, again, as James portrays him, apparently the only thing that kept Sellers from the looney-bin was his celebrity (and his money, of course): if he was just Bob the Bank Teller or Sam the Sewer Worker he'd have been locked up straight away. In fact, James' account of his interview with Sellers -- on the heels of the latter's success in the second Inspector Clouseau movie (but not the second Pink Panther movie), A Shot in the Dark (1964) -- is so damning, one has to question just how much "creative input" Sellers really had in the making of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (also 1964): he all but barked at the moon when James met him.
If you're at all interested in these two actors in particular or in "entertainment journalism" in general, do give a listen to this link before it's taken down (replaced by tomorrow's segment of this week's "Book of the Week," Margaret MacMillan's Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao [2006]); or try to score a copy of North Face of Soho: hopefully there's interesting bits in there that Auntie Beeb didn't find suitable for her listeners.
I'd read before that Lancaster was a major twat (particularly in Sam Kashner's article about the making of Sweet Smell of Success, "A Cookie Full of Arsenic," originally published in Vanity Fair and collected in The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties by Kashner and Jennifer MacNair), but I'd never heard of him being as effin' ridiculous as James describes him during the making of Scorpio (1973).
It's part of Peter Sellers' "legend" that the only role which he couldn't get a handle on was himself; but, again, as James portrays him, apparently the only thing that kept Sellers from the looney-bin was his celebrity (and his money, of course): if he was just Bob the Bank Teller or Sam the Sewer Worker he'd have been locked up straight away. In fact, James' account of his interview with Sellers -- on the heels of the latter's success in the second Inspector Clouseau movie (but not the second Pink Panther movie), A Shot in the Dark (1964) -- is so damning, one has to question just how much "creative input" Sellers really had in the making of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (also 1964): he all but barked at the moon when James met him.
If you're at all interested in these two actors in particular or in "entertainment journalism" in general, do give a listen to this link before it's taken down (replaced by tomorrow's segment of this week's "Book of the Week," Margaret MacMillan's Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao [2006]); or try to score a copy of North Face of Soho: hopefully there's interesting bits in there that Auntie Beeb didn't find suitable for her listeners.