By Stephen Fried The Washington Post Magazine May 10, 1992 It began, like too many change-of-life stories do, with an uncompleted novel. This novel was about King Saul, and, lo, it was bad. In fact, it was very bad. “It was abominable,” recalls its author, “an...
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 Fred Schruers Premiere May 1993 “I have to straighten out my karma,” says Sharon Stone. “I’ve become a sex symbol, which is an absurd thing for me. Particularly since I symbolize a kind of sex I don’t believe in.” That swirling girl-on-top, biting, moaning,...
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...
By Ron Rosenbaum Manhattan Inc. September, 1985 Who is that tall, spectral figure haunting the gloomy halls of the state capitol building today? Who is that silver-haired, patrician wraith with the lines of a shattered past engraved on his face? Could it be—yes—it’s...
By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire August 1982 The way Wayne Newton explained it to me, it all started with a post-midnight punch-out in a private suite at the Frontier hotel. Wayne is knocking them dead in the Frontier’s showroom when these two wise guys swagger onto the...
By Brad Darrach People September 3, 1979 A sunburst blonde lolls on lavender satin sheets. Her mouth is large, scarlet, half-open. Her blank blue eyes smolder like sapphires in candlelight. “My beauty,” she murmurs breathily as her sensuous snout writhes with allure,...
By John Eskow Rolling Stone August 23, 1979 There is a deceptive air of chaos at the Mork & Mindy rehearsal. Robin Williams grabs his crotch and stomps around the room, mocking himself in a street-kid growl: “I gotcha shazbot, right here, buddy. Yeah, here’s...
By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc April 1984 Picture this: your dinner guest is Thomas Pynchon, the writer much of scholarly America considers our best living novelist. He is also a tantalizingly shadowy figure; a generation of fervent readers has fantasized meeting him,...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair November 1991 The night before I left for South Texas to join Willie Nelson as he went back on the road again to sing for the I.R.S., I had dinner with a woman from L.A. who’d known him. She told me a fascinating story about Willie Nelson,...
By Brad Darrach People July 24, 1989 An old man died in his sleep one day last week, and it was as if a continent had sunk into the sea. A wave of feeling rose and moved outward, and when it was gone the world seemed different and smaller than it had been before....
By Alex Belth SI.com September 23, 2015 Yogi. It’s hard not to smile when you hear his name. You might think of his goofy mug, with the crooked smile that looked as if it had been ripped from the funny pages. Then there’s the oddly-shaped wrestler’s body—squat torso,...
