Ellen Stock Stern

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Sister Sets: Sisters Whose Togetherness Sets Them Apart

Ellen Stock Stern; Emily Gwathmey; Ellen Stern

Synopsis:
Here are such devoted and undevoted sisters as Jackie and Lee Bouvier, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Cinderella and her wicked stepsisters, the literary Bronte sisters, the Toni twins and the Doublemint twins, and vaudeville's Cherry Sisters, the worst sister act in the history of show business. Emily Gwathmey and Ellen Stern offer a lively look at sisters in the spotlight. Meet Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, identical twins with parallel careers and a zigzag relationship; Sadie and Bessie Delany, lovingly together for almost a century; Lillian and Dorothy Gish, who co-starred in each other's lives as well as in the birth of Hollywood; the all-American Andrews Sisters, peppy and patriotic songbirds; the Dionne Quintuplets, whose adorable lookalike exploits mesmerized the world while traumatizing them; Siamese-twin actresses Violet and Daisy Hilton, literally joined at the hip; Margaret and Kate Fox, whose seances raised spirits in the 1850s; and the Hill sisters, who wrote "Happy Birthday", the most popular American song ever. Weaving a stunning tapestry of photographs, paintings, movie stills, song sheets, posters, ads, and other ephemera, Sister Sets swings from the boardwalk to Broadway, Mount Olympus to the English moors, Madison Avenue to Hollywood, the Bible to the burlesque house.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1995, 1977