Bad for the Business

A trio of showbiz books walks on the mean side.

by A.D. Amorosi

The further Hollywood flies into corporate conglomeration, the more it reminisces about the old days -- how it came from great literature and Broadway shows, how surprisingly sweet the studio system was, what a damn shame it was about Judy (you know, the pills and all).

There are new volumes, some more gossipy than others, about the smarts and heart of show biz. In Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, Gerald Nachman turns Borscht Belt boys Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and George Carlin into scholars. In Carl Reiner's My Anecdotal Life, show biz is aw-shucks with yuks, sandwiches and awards. The Sam Spiegel portrayed by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is a maverick producer with great appetites. Even the story of infamous Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture, is little more than a hokey tale of a guy who, darn it, dug women, drugs and the sass of filmmaking.

These books have one thing in mind: to lift the show above the biz, to maintain the myth.

But Hollywood did become salacious, smarmy and pushy, beyond the usual scandal of sex, ego and money. That's the job of another crop of new books: to portray, without sentiment, the pure business of being a star and to reveal how it all turned sour.

To valet-turned-writer George Jacobs, his boss and the subject of Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra (HarperCollins) was the ultimate all-around showbiz figure whose eccentricities, obsessions and belief systems became his downfall. By holding not-so-dearly to the entertainer's machismo and ethnic stereotyping, Jacobs (with co-author Bill Stadiem) paints the first portrait of Sinatra not enveloped by his sartorial ring-a-ding charms. Rather, Jacobs, who worked as Sinatra's aide-de-camp during the height of his second coming, portrays a man clinging to the cliffs of success by his own nastiness, sexual conquests, Mafia favors and jealous rages. Jacobs balances brisk, quick wit with bitchy, gossipy asides (lots of dirt about sex and the mob, coke parties with JFK, lesbian action between Garbo and Dietrich, Sammy Davis' anti-black racism), making Mr. S a rapid, racy read that will have you squirming about the low lives of the Rat Pack and how they set the stage for the ugly behavior of Tinseltown's current crop.

Author Jonathan Van Meter maintains that ring-a-ding zing for The Last Good Time: Skinny D'Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City (Crown). At first, he portrays the razzle dazzle of a starstruck seashore resort clearly amazed by the gambling and glitz bestowed upon them by grade-school dropout turned flamboyant entrepreneur Paul D'Amato and corruptible politicians like Nucky Johnson. Van Meter's years at Esquire must have helped here, because he makes a colorfully macho show of Dean and Jerry and mobster Sam Giancana, as well as the profitable clubland, with its babes, bucks and whispers during the rolls of the dice. That's the whiskey-soaked part of The Last Good Time. For every drunken giggle in Van Meter's layered book, there's the comedown. Take Nick Pileggi's central character in Casino, sports handicapper Frank Rosenthal, a man Van Meter's anti-hero resembles. As with Rosenthal's reign during Vegas' last great stand of the '70s and '80s, there's the tearing down of a proud but schmaltzy community in the face of money. Like Casino, The Last Good Time focuses on that one guy with a fleeting interest in show biz (except when it came to self-glorification) and a numb outlook that often made art into schmaltz. With Van Meter at the helm, the greed and emptiness of ignorance has rarely seemed so delicious.

Except where Lew Wasserman and Connie Bruck are concerned.

Bruck, author of the sly Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner, has taken her dry writing to When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence (Random House). She brings to the fore a man whose very business was cold, simple acquisition. Wasserman, the MCA president and first-ever agent to be referred to as a "shark" -- he bought out Universal Pictures -- was the first and best of show biz's cold execs, exploiting MCA's links to the Chicago unions, organized crime and the uppermost echelons of government. (Not to mention the conflict of interest that was MCA talent agencies and its copywriters becoming the biggest film, television and recording plant, theater owner, etc.) As the man who created the men-in-black concept of "the agency" -- a warring structure that would give way to the likes of Mike Ovitz and his Creative Artists Agency's hardballing -- Wasserman was hardly the chummy sort or the smartly sarcastic "cookie full of arsenic" a noir classic like Sweet Smell of Success might have called his ilk. He made and broke careers without knowing or caring about their artistic, communal or even entertainment value. And Bruck never lets Wasserman melt. Unlike Hollywood essayist Peter Bart, who mixes business with the pleasures of the form, Bruck focuses on Wasserman's bullying of corporate tactics, his connections to mob lawyer Sidney Korshak and his willingness to unthinkingly turn art into kitsch. Bruck makes Hollywood into a giant of world commerce by portraying Wasserman's long history of blindness to anything but the art of the deal.

To quote again from Sweet Smell of Success: "I love this dirty town."

Jonathan Van Meter will read from The Last Good Time: Skinny D’Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City, Wed., July 9, 7 p.m., free, Barnes & Noble, 1805 Walnut St., 215-665-0716.

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