Sam Kashner

Nancy Schoenberger

From veteran entertainment reporter Sam Kashner and biographer Nancy Schoenberger comes the definitive account of the greatest Hollywood love story ever told—the romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Kashner has interviewed Elizabeth Taylor numerous times and is the only journalist given access to her extensive collection of personal letters and journals, and he and Schoenberger have also interviewed the Burton family at length, including Burton’s actress daughter Kate. This is truly an authorized and singularly informed biography of these two larger-than-life stars, and of their glamorous, volatile, and audacious relationship.

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century

Furious Love

"The definitive, larger-than-life account of the greatest Hollywood love story ever -- the romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton"--

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the marriage of the century

Furious love

A poignant, evocative, and wonderfully gossipy account of the two sisters who represented style and class above all else—Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill—from the authors of Furious Love. When sixty-four-year-old Jackie Kennedy Onassis died in her Fifth Avenue apartment, her younger sister Lee wept inconsolably. Then Jackie’s thirty-eight-page will was read. Lee discovered that substantial cash bequests were left to family members, friends, and employees—but nothing to her. "I have made no provision in this my Will for my sister, Lee B. Radziwill, for whom I have great affection, because I have already done so during my lifetime," read Jackie’s final testament. Drawing on the authors’ candid interviews with Lee Radziwill, The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters explores their complicated relationship, placing them at the center of twentieth-century fashion, design, and style. In life, Jackie and Lee were alike in so many ways. Both women had a keen eye for beauty—in fashion, design, painting, music, dance, sculpture, poetry—and both were talented artists. Both loved pre-revolutionary Russian culture, and the blinding sunlight, calm seas, and ancient olive groves of Greece. Both loved the siren call of the Atlantic, sharing sweet, early memories of swimming with the rakish father they adored, Jack Vernou Bouvier, at his East Hampton retreat. But Jackie was her father’s favorite, and Lee, her mother’s. One would grow to become the most iconic woman of her time, while the other lived in her shadow. As they grew up, the two sisters developed an extremely close relationship threaded with rivalry, jealousy, and competition. Yet it was probably the most important relationship of their lives. For the first time, Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Kashner and acclaimed biographer Nancy Schoenberger tell the complete story of these larger-than-life sisters. Drawing on new information and extensive interviews with Lee, now eighty-four, this dual biography sheds light on the public and private lives of two extraordinary women who lived through immense tragedy in enormous glamour.

The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee

The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

First student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Sam Kashner tells with humor and grace his life with the Beats. But the best story is Kashner himself -- the coming-of-age of a young man in the chaotic world of the very idols he hoped to emulate. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

My Life at the Jack Kerouac School

When I Was Cool

A brilliant, funny and touching memoir of a coming of age in the drug-obsessed, free-love and rock-n-roll world of 1970s America. When Sam Kashner leaves his nice, safe parents and his nice, safe neighbourhood in Long Island to pursue his love of literature, where else would this innocent, geeky 17 year old kid go but the Jack Kerouc School of Disembodied Poets? Because it is there that he hopes to meet his heroes who made up the Beat Generation of the 1950s, those, that is, that are still living. Because this is no longer the 1950s and his beat heroes - and now supposed tutors - are no longer the daring, youthful, beautiful beatniks that Sam had dreamed of becoming part of, but rather an irascible, drug-ravaged and slightly rheumatic bunch of ageing hippies. Kashner describes the embarrassing, frightening, exciting moments that fill he two-year long education - and odyssey. From his first homework assignment - to finish Ginsberg's poetry collection while fending off his amorous advances, to being enlisted by the terrifying William Burroughs to babysit his genius drug-addict son, to falling in love with various mysterious-looking, poetry-reciting, bangle-wearing women to whom he cannot speak for shyness, to getting drunk for the first time. From Buddhism and Bob Dylan to marijuana and hot tubs, Sam discovers an entirely new and absurd world littered with fantastic, dazzling, sometimes horrible personalities; romantic rebels, poets, musicians and shoplifters. A tale of following a dream and surviving its flaws.

My Life at the Jack Kerouac School ; a Memoir

When I was Cool

Sometime in the early hours of June 16, 1959, George Reeves, the actor known to millions of kids as Superman, died of a gunshot to the head. The man of steel was now cold as ice. The L.A. police labeled the death a suicide. Some friends called it murder, and the disturbing evidence left behind a tantalizing mystery.
Here, for the first time, is the truth about the dangerous double life and tragic death of Reeves: the real events of that Los Angeles night set amid the glamor, allure, and sinister core of Tinseltown in the 1950s. "Hollywood Kryptonite" is a riveting tale of jealousy, passion, and tragedy in the day swhen the Hollywood studio held absolute power.

Hollywood Kryptonite

Oscar Levant was one of the wildly self-destructive personalities ever to become a household name. This biography looks at his life, from his work as concert pianist and the premier interpreter of Gershwin's concert works, to his presence as an insulting wit, raconteur and best-selling author.

The Life and Times of Oscar Levant

A Talent for Genius

Furious love. Liz Taylor, Richard Burton: la storia d'amore del secolo

Ash Carter

An up close and personal portrait of a legendary filmmaker, theater director, and comedian, drawing on candid conversations with his closest friends in show business and the arts—from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep to Natalie Portman and Lorne Michaels. The work of Mike Nichols pervades American cultural consciousness—from The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Angels in America, The Birdcage, Working Girl, and Primary Colors, not to mention his string of hit plays, including Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. If that weren’t enough, he was also one half of the timelessly funny duo Nichols & May, as well as a founding member of the original improv troupe. Over a career that spanned half a century, Mike Nichols changed Hollywood, Broadway, and comedy forever. Most fans, however, know very little of the person behind it all. Since he never wrote his memoirs, and seldom appeared on television, they have very little sense of his searching intellect or his devastating wit. They don't know that Nichols, the great American director, was born Mikail Igor Peschkowsky, in Berlin, and came to this country, speaking no English, to escape the Nazis. They don't know that Nichols was at one time a solitary psychology student, or that a childhood illness caused permanent, life-altering side effects. They don't know that he withdrew into a debilitating depression before he "finally got it right," in his words, by marrying Diane Sawyer. Here, for the first time, Ash Carter and Sam Kashner offer an intimate look behind the scenes of Nichols' life, as told by the stars, moguls, playwrights, producers, comics and crewmembers who stayed loyal to Nichols for years. Life Isn't Everything is a mosaic portrait of a brilliant and original director known for his uncommon charm, wit, vitality, and genius for friendship, this volume is also a snapshot of what it meant to be living, loving, and making art in the 20th century.

Mike Nichols, as remembered by 150 of his closest friends.

Life isn't everything

Jennifer MacNair

A revealing look inside Hollywood's most scandalous decade and colorful illuminates the secret lives of Lana Turner, Rock Hudson, Kim Novak, Walter Winchell, and many others while describing such key events as the decline of the studio system, the rise of television, the emergence of tabloid culture, and blacklisting. Reprint.

Hollywood in the Fifties

The Bad & the Beautiful

Relates the story of a businessman from New Jersey named Finkie Finkelstein, a lovingly obsessed fan of Frank Sinatra, as his life unfolds in a series of unanswered letters sent to his idol.

A Novel

Sinatraland

Los detalles inéditos de una historia de amor que revolucionó el mundo del cine y de las revistas del corazón a mediados del siglo pasado. Un recorrido exhaustivo por la vida de los dos actores más conocidos de Hollywood en el siglo XX, y una nueva exploración de su historia de amor que a menudo cabalgó entre la pasión y la violencia. Elizabeth Taylor y Richard Burton se conocieron a principios de los años cincuenta, pero fue durante la polémica filmación de la película Cleopatra, cuando su idilio fue la comidilla de todo el mundo del cine. Los biógrafos han tenido acceso a documentos inéditos que permiten profundizar en esta historia. A la hora de trabajar, los autores han tenido también el apoyo de Elizabeth Taylor, un hecho que da credibilidad a su trabajo sin restarle honestidad.

Sam Kashner

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