{"id":85674,"date":"2023-12-07T21:49:05","date_gmt":"2023-12-07T21:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topmovieandtv.com\/?p=85674"},"modified":"2023-12-07T21:49:05","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T21:49:05","slug":"why-liz-taylor-needed-21-suites-in-a-paris-hotel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topmovieandtv.com\/books\/why-liz-taylor-needed-21-suites-in-a-paris-hotel\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Liz Taylor needed 21 suites in a Paris hotel"},"content":{"rendered":"
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE YEAR<\/span><\/p>\n Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor<\/span><\/p>\n by Roger Lewis\u00a0(Riverrun \u00a330, 656pp)<\/p>\n Can there be anything new to say about the king and queen of excess? The answer is a stonking yes, as Lewis brings his distinctive perception and wit to bear on the spell-binding, super-charged Hollywood couple who lived life as a spectacle and whose bed-hopping earned Vatican condemnation as \u2018erotic vagrancy\u2019.<\/p>\n Voluptuous Liz and brooding Burton were diamond-decked, mink-lined icons of indulgence for whom illusion and reality merged.<\/p>\n Their extravagance was eye-watering. When Taylor flew to Leningrad, she took 2,800lbs of excess luggage \u2014 that\u2019s nearly a ton and a half of clothes!\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n King and queen of excess: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the Oscars in 1970<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Taylor and Burton played opposite each other in the 1963 film of Cleopatra directed by\u00a0Joseph L. Mankiewicz<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis (Riverrun \u00a330, 656pp)\u00a0<\/p>\n To film in Paris, she needed 21 suites at a hotel on the Champs-Elysee. To go for lunch in Nice one day, they simply bought their own jet.<\/p>\n They scintillated on screen together in films such as Cleopatra and Who\u2019s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, exuding \u2018intensity and force, excitement and eroticism\u2019. But behind Liz\u2019s eyes, Lewis catches \u2018a sadness that was often her best quality, the sorrow that underlies joy\u2019.<\/p>\n Much the same went for the melancholic Burton, a disappointed romantic who Taylor herself said suffered moods \u2018like a whirlpool of black molasses, carrying him down, down, down\u2019. Yet she never minded his agony. It added to the ecstasy. And there was always that voice \u2014\u2018like seawater washing over a scallop shell\u2019. You couldn\u2019t converse with Burton, a contemporary said, you could only listen.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle<\/span><\/p>\n by Philip Norman\u00a0(Simon & Schuster \u00a325, 560pp)<\/p>\n He was the romantic soul who composed the haunting Something (in the way she moves), acknowledged by no less an authority than Frank Sinatra as the greatest love song of the 20th century.\u00a0And yet George Harrison could be dismissive to the point of brutality when it came to women.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman (Simon & Schuster \u00a325, 560pp)\u00a0<\/p>\n He serially cheated on gorgeous Patti Boyd, the wife for whom he created that song of loyalty and devotion, before passing her on to his mate Eric Clapton, and he incestuously bedded the wife of his Beatle \u2018brother\u2019 Ringo. As Patti put it, he could be \u2018very minxy\u2019.<\/p>\n He had a chip on his shoulder from being the outsider in the Liverpool group, dismissed as \u2018the bloody kid\u2019 by ring-leaders Lennon and McCartney, and shoved aside when it came to song-writing and arrangement. On records, Paul would replace him on lead guitar when he felt like it. On the ground-breaking Sgt Pepper album he hardly got a look-in.<\/p>\n But that suited him, because he hated the fame. \u2018No more private person can ever have trodden a stage more mercilessly public,\u2019 writes Norman, Beatle-ographer supreme. But he pioneered many features that distinguished The Beatles, like their trademark mop haircut and cutaway-collar jacket. And when they split up, he was the first to move on.<\/p>\n Winkle: The Extraordinary life of Britain\u2019s Greatest Pilot<\/span><\/p>\n by Paul Beaver\u00a0(Michael Joseph \u00a325, 544pp)<\/p>\n On a newly captured German airfield in early 1945, fearless British naval aviator Eric Brown strapped himself into the Komet, an experimental Nazi rocket plane, and fired up the engine.<\/p>\n He could have died in an instant. Instead, three explosive minutes later, he was levelling out at 32,000ft, a plume of smoke trailing behind him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Winkle: The Extraordinary life of Britain\u2019s Greatest Pilot by Paul Beaver (Michael Joseph \u00a325, 544pp)\u00a0<\/p>\n A new era in flight had begun, and Britain was in the forefront \u2014 thanks to the tiny Top Gun his mates nicknamed \u2018Winkle\u2019 because he was just 5ft 7in tall. A pioneer who put his life on the line every time he took off, he had progressed from prop-engine planes to be the first to land a jet fighter on an aircraft carrier at sea.<\/p>\n He then established himself as Britain\u2019s greatest test pilot, flying close to 750 different kinds of aircraft, more than any other aviator in history, and surviving 23 major aircraft accidents.<\/p>\n Here was a British Chuck Yeager no less, yet his amazing life and times have largely gone unrecognised \u2014 perhaps because his brittle, sometimes arrogant personality made him more feared than loved by those who flew with him. But in this official biography by aviation historian Paul Beaver, based on Brown\u2019s personal archive, his death-defying courage gets the treatment and the honour it merits.<\/p>\n Elon Musk<\/span><\/p>\n by Walter Isaacson\u00a0(Simon & Schuster \u00a328, 688pp)<\/p>\n \u2018One day when I was young,\u2019 recalls Silicon Valley super-mogul and billionaire Elon Musk, \u2018my parents warned me against playing with fire. So I took a box of matches behind a tree and started lighting them.\u2019<\/p>\n This is the mindset that drives the world\u2019s richest man, with his Tesla electric cars, space exploration and, most recently, the Twitter social media platform, bought by him for an outrageous $44 billion and weirdly rebranded with his favourite appellation, a simple X (also the name he\u2019s given one of his 11 children).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster \u00a328, 688pp)\u00a0<\/p>\n A visionary but ruthless businessman, he can\u2019t help pushing himself \u2014 and anyone in his orbit \u2014 to the limit and beyond, emailing staff that \u2018a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle\u2019.<\/p>\n To some this makes him a pillock; to others he is a genius. But love him or loathe him, you cannot ignore him. He\u2019s the crazy, out-of-control 21st century personified and astonishingly influential.<\/p>\n Isaacson, a highly respected biographer, does an excellent job in tying him down. Musk cooperated in its writing, but it\u2019s no hagiography, delving into dark family secrets, exposing Musk\u2019s anti-social nature, his addiction to drama and risk, his tendency to, in the words of his ex-wife, go \u2018king-crazy\u2019.<\/p>\n Musk excuses himself thus: \u2018I reinvented electric cars, and I\u2019m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?\u2019<\/p>\n Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood\u2019s Greatest Love Affair<\/span><\/p>\n by William J. Mann\u00a0(Harper \u00a335, 656pp)<\/p>\n Grizzled and gruff, he\u2019d established himself as one of America\u2019s great movie actors with that iconic line from Casablanca, \u2018Here\u2019s looking at you, kid\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n A few years later, 45-year-old Humphrey Bogart ran into a real kid on the set of To Have And Have Not, the precocious Lauren Bacall, a 19-year-old minx with a history of batting her eyelids at men, particularly older ones who could further her career.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood\u2019s Greatest Love Affair by William J. Mann (Harper \u00a335, 656pp)\u00a0<\/p>\n Though he was three-times married and there was a 25-year age gap, the mutual attraction was unstoppable. \u2018I\u2019m insane about him\u2019, Bacall told her mother \u2014 and so began what would be lauded as Hollywood\u2019s greatest love affair. \u2018No one has written a romance better than we lived it\u2019 was how she described it.<\/p>\n For 12 rip-roaring years, they were key figures in a glitzy, fast-living, hard-drinking Beverly Hills set. They made films together \u2014 she was happy to learn acting skills from him and he was happy to teach her.<\/p>\n She was a foil to his excessive boozing, giving him hell when he behaved badly. But then his lifetime of over-indulgence caught up with him and he was dead from throat cancer at the age of 55, leaving his 30-year-old widow to rebuild her life as best she could.<\/p>\n Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops and Feuds of Hollywood\u2019s Kings of Carnage<\/span><\/p>\n by Nick de Semlyen\u00a0(Picador \u00a314.99, 352pp)<\/p>\n THIS book kicks off with a quotation from Napoleon: \u2018If you wage war, do it energetically and with severity\u2019.<\/p>\n And this is precisely what its central characters do as the stars of a very distinctive genre of fantasy films that came out of Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s \u2014 the ultra-macho, all-action heroes: the Terminators, Rockies, Rambos, Conans and Diehards.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops and Feuds of Hollywood\u2019s Kings of Carnage by Nick de Semlyen (Picador \u00a314.99, 352pp)\u00a0<\/p>\n Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Norris, Willis, Van Damme \u2014 you couldn\u2019t move for sculpted musclemen and street brawlers taking on the world, against insane odds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some films were great, others lamentable, but they filled a longing in an America reeling from defeat in Vietnam to kick back and reassert itself. The message was: never give up.<\/p>\n There was as much fighting off-screen as there was on it. Here is the juicy inside track on the rivalries \u2014 particularly vicious between Sly and Arnie \u2014 de Semlyen analyses one killing machine after another and the ultimate battle for box-office superiority.<\/p>\n As a genre, he justifies them at one level as \u2018the spiritual successors to the Greek myths, tales of derring-do to stir the spirit and excite the soul\u2019. And on another as just great entertainment, two hours of escapism in an increasingly regimented world.<\/p>\n MUSIC\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980<\/span><\/p>\n by Jerome Soligny\u00a0(Monoray \u00a330, 704pp)<\/p>\n Soligny\u2019s epic tribute to David Bowie is an oral history built up from dozens of interviews with famous names \u2014 Robert Fripp, Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello. But some of the most insightful comments come from backing musicians, producers and recording engineers. All these disparate (and sometimes competing) voices come together in this fascinating celebration of Bowie\u2019s boundless creativity.<\/p>\n L-R:\u00a0David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980 by Jerome Soligny (Monoray \u00a330, 704pp);\u00a0Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes (Viking \u00a325, 560pp)<\/p>\n Lou Reed: The King of New York<\/span><\/p>\n by Will Hermes\u00a0(Viking \u00a325, 560pp)<\/p>\n It was once said of a Velvet Underground album that it may have sold only 30,000 copies, but \u2018everyone who bought one . . . started a band\u2019. Lou Reed was at the heart of New York\u2019s artistic avant-garde. Although Hermes\u2019s prose can be overwrought, his book provides a vivid portrait not only of Reed but also the New York cultural maelstrom in which he flourished.<\/p>\n Madonna: A Rebel Life<\/span><\/p>\n by Mary Gabriel\u00a0(Coronet \u00a335, 880pp)<\/p>\n \u2018I wanted to do everything everybody told me I couldn\u2019t do,\u2019 Madonna once said. As this exhaustive, occasionally exhausting, biography demonstrates. She has become the queen of reinvention, rendering herself relevant to new generations of fans.<\/p>\n Gabriel charts her extraordinary life, right through to pop icon. She deserves a biographer as meticulous, intelligent and insightful as Gabriel.<\/p>\n L-R:\u00a0Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel (Coronet \u00a335, 880pp);\u00a0The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021 by Clinton Heylin (Bodley Head \u00a335, 848pp)<\/p>\n The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021<\/span><\/p>\n by Clinton Heylin\u00a0(Bodley Head \u00a335, 848pp)<\/p>\n Heylin has written more than a dozen books on Bob Dylan, so he is an obvious candidate to be the biographer of the legendary singer, songwriter and Nobel Prize winner. This second volume takes up the story in the aftermath of the mysterious motorbike accident that allegedly changed his life.<\/p>\n The accumulation of detail can be relentless. But no true Dylan fan will want to miss what is as close to a definitive biography as we\u2019re likely to get of an artist who has eluded easy definition.<\/p>\n
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