Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
They led lives of bed-hopping and partying. They had affairs and courted scandal even as they swanned down the red carpet at Oscar ceremonies.
At the same time the American public lapped up every detail of their lives and worshipped them through the tabloid Press.
That’s not a modern description of Paris Hilton and her C-list celebrity friends. It is the picture that emerges from a number of new books on some of the greatest names of Hollywood’s golden age.
From Katharine Hepburn to Jimmy Stewart, the new books reveal lives that chime more than just a little with the fame-hungry starlets of today.
Except, unlike Hilton, these stars were also producing some of the greatest movies to grace the silver screen.
The literary world is now swamped with new books on Hollywood’s past greats. A biography of Katharine Hepburn, claiming that she and her lover Spencer Tracy were both bisexual, has already created headlines. A life of Audrey Hepburn is also in the shops and depicts the star of Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s as sleeping with several co-stars, including Albert Finney, while she was married.
It also delves into her life in Europe under Nazi occupation and portrays an often lonely figure who allowed herself a piece of chocolate and a scotch each day.
This week a book on Jimmy Stewart will be published that closely examines the star’s private life.
Ellen Burstyn, 74, who won a best actress Oscar for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, is bringing out her tell-all autobiography and in November a book on the life of sex symbol Mae West is published, which is whispered to contain more salacious material than all the rest of the books put together.
The publications pull few punches in unveiling the details of their subjects’ private lives.
Amid all the salacious details the new books offer a chronicle of top-class movie-making that carved out high art.
— The Observer
