The inside story of Hollywood- money and corruption, drink and drugs, fame and terrible secrets
Jean Stein's father, Jules, founded MCA and she grew up in the golden years of Hollywood. At Jean's coming-out party, Judy Garland sang 'Over the Rainbow'; later she had an affair with William Faulkner, became an editor at The Paris Review, and was Elia Kazan's assistant on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Immersed in the demi-monde of New York, she was close to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and to Warhol's muse - Edie Sedgewick - about whom Lou Reed wrote 'Femme Fatale' and Jean Stein wrote Edie (1982). That book became an international best-seller, of which Norman Mailer wrote- 'This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.'
One of the best books ever written about the movies.
*Daily Telegraph, Book of the Year #1*
Selective and sly, personal and political – and by far one of the
best books ever written about Hollywood… The stories are vivid and
the voices as clear as if the speakers were still alive… Like
reading a secret diary and looking at a geologist’s diagram at the
same time: with each intimate revelation, the precise
stratification of the world’s most glamorous and closed society
becomes clear.
*Daily Telegraph*
The best book ever done on the terrifying social dysfunction of the
beautiful people… [Stein] is clear-eyed and knows where the bodies
are buried… Though all “true”, this book reads like a dream… A
spellbinding record of that ancien régime.
*New Statesman*
The dark side of Tinseltown – the fame, the fortunes, the secrets –
told by those in the know… Stein edits together the dizzying array
of interviews she has collected, weaving them into a subtly
revealing oral history that illuminates Hollywood life from the
1920s to the 1990s.
*Sunday Times*
A gripping story of money, power and fame… Highly entertaining
stuff packed with memorable anecdotes.
*Tatler*
A saga, like Steinbeck’s version of Genesis, about family squabbles
and sins passed down, along with money, from one generation to the
next.
*Observer*
Absorbing oral history of Hollywood… A tantilisingly intimate
portrait of a handful of families whose very different experiences
together sum up Tinseltown to a T.
*Daily Mail*
Stein’s style is addictive: briskly intercut (rarely does one voice
claim a full page), unafraid that gossipy asides will lessen its
gravity. And like Chandler, like James Ellroy, like Kenneth Anger’s
Hollywood Babylon and Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, West of
Eden sees something primally rotten in the bedrock of the city.
*Financial Times*
This is the book Hollywood has been waiting for… Gripping and
stealthily emotive… An astonishing collection of voices… Read this
and you'll never turn onto Doheny Drive in the sunshine again
without thinking about this gilded, glittering city’s identity as a
fascinating and troubled invention of the 20th century.
*GQ*
Jean Stein’s book deploys a wonderful grace in uncovering a
monstrous reality – it tells brilliant stories, sometimes very
personal ones, and lets their accretion work its own magic… A wild
compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of
childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the
moral consequences of being looked after by powerful monsters with
sick egos.
*London Review of Books*
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