By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair April 1987 Among the keepers of the collective memory of Hollywood, the story goes that some kind of curse has haunted the lives of the people who appeared in Rebel Without a Cause. There was James Dean, of course, dead in a car crash...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair November 1988 She can’t stop talking about that gun. The anti-aircraft gun, the one in Hanoi, the one she posed with in 1972, the one she seemed to flirt with in a ten-second stretch of silent newsreel that has become her most famous...
By Robert Friedman Inside Sports June, 1980 I. 80 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF BOB ARUM From his fourteenth-floor, comer suite on Park Avenue and 57th Street, Bob Arum, the man many consider the most powerful boxing promoter in the world today, has a commanding view of...
By Jennifer Allen New York Magazine January 24, 1983 Arthur Miller is slouched in the drafty rehearsal hall on the top door of the New Amsterdam Theatre, on 42nd Street. Miller is tired to his bones. He lifts his round, black-framed glasses and rubs his eyes with his...
By John Eskow Playboy August, 1980 Looking ill at ease in their tuxedos, The Doobie Brothers strode onstage at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony to receive a thunderous ovation and four of the little golden gramophones that signify overwhelming success in the record...
By Jennifer Allen New York Magazine April 9, 1984 It is three days before the Broadway opening of David Mamet’s new play, Glengarry Glen Ross, one day before the critics—“crickets,” he calls them—start to come, and there is nothing for the playwright to do but wait...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair October 1989 “I think maybe I’ve leaned too much on the clandestine thing,” Al Pacino concedes, a bit ruefully. “It was a phase I was going through.” It’s a phase he’s not entirely out of yet, at least stylistically. Tonight, for instance,...
By Jon Bradshaw Vanity Fair March, 1985 When Libby Holman arrived in Manhattan in 1924, it was a bold and brassy town, devoted to the pleasure of pleasing itself. Prohibition—“the Great Foolishness,” as the gossip columnist Lucius Beebe called it—was in effect, but it...
By Teresa Carpenter The Village Voice November 5, 1980 It is shortly past four in the afternoon and Hugh Hefner glides wordlessly into the library of his Playboy Mansion West. He is wearing pajamas and looking somber in green silk. The incongruous spectacle of a...
By Stephen Fried Philadelphia Magazine June, 1983 The Sound: A tight, simple rhythm, pulsing, throbbing. A smooth, cool guitar lightly plays a handful of notes, but just the right notes. The feel is subtle, complex; a combination of what is right about jazz, what is...
By Willie Morris Inside Sports May, 1980 I finally came home. It was not too late. I always had home in my blood—Mississippi—but with this final homecoming the love I had for home stunned me. Much of it has to do with the land, its sensual textures—one’s memory...
By Fred Schruers Rolling Stone February 5, 1981 Bruce Springsteen, in the abstract, is just the kind of guy my little New Jersey hometown schooled me to despise. Born seventy-seven days apart, raised maybe fifty miles apart, this beatified greaser and I grew up...
