The Kennedys in Hollywood - Hardcover

Quirk, Lawrence J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0878339345 ISBN 13: 9780878339341

Publisher: Taylor Trade Pub, 1996

Synopsis

Looks at the Kennedy family's Hollywood ties, especially focusing on Joseph Kennedy's liasons with Hollywood stars and JFK's relationships with Marilyn Monroe and others

About this title

About the Author:

Lawrence J. Quirk is the author of more than twenty-five books, including the bestseller Fasten Your Seatbelts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis, The Films of Gloria Swanson, and Robert Francis Kennedy. His family-noted in Massachusetts's politics for most of the century-has know the Kennedys since before the turn of the century. Quirk lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

The enduring soap-operatic status of the Kennedy family fuels yet another volume of Tinselown tidbits. Boasting social ties to the Kennedys via his grandfather and various uncles, veteran Hollywood observer Quirk (Fasten Your Seatbelts, etc.) cuts and pastes material he's collected during decades of entertainment world interviews. His best passages appear early on, when he chronicles patriarch Joseph Kennedy's legendary penchant for silent film stars (like Gloria Swanson), shady business dealings and political ambitions. Quirk seems genuinely intrigued by this material. But as the narrative progresses, he loses his focus and his prose gets sloppier ("Lee [Remick] liked to spread herself around"). JFK is a shadowy figure here, but Peter Lawford, with his boozy, bisexual life, makes for a far more vivid, if supporting, character. Quirk takes time out to offer iconoclastic, withering opinions on Marilyn Monroe ("...not a very nice person... monstrously self-pitying and self-dramatizing") and wraps up with a look at the younger Kennedy generation, including John Kennedy Jr., whom he claims has real acting talent. Quirk's main point, in fact, besides recycling gossip, seems to be a lament that the Kennedy men have never been movie stars. "Certainly the Kennedys, in the way they raised their sons, were guilty not only of creativity thwarting?forcing talented actors to become lawyers, for instance?but of inculcating ridiculously lopsided sexual and romantic values." Photos, not seen by PW. 80,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Taylor Trade Pub
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0878339345
• ISBN 13: 9780878339341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 382