By Nat Hentoff From Jazz Is 1976 Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing,...
By Steve Oney The Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine September 16, 1979 It was getting into the heart of the Vermont summer, and the air was still and heavy. Resting in a wicker chair on his front porch, Robert Penn Warren, sweat dripping from his sharp, freckled...
By Brad Darrach Playboy February 1975 “The rich,” according to a Spanish proverb, “laugh carefully.” They have a lot to lose. The poor, on the other hand, need to laugh in order to forget how little they have to laugh about—which may be why the Depression was the last...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader May 22, 2016 Rich Cohen writes books that are hard to put down. From Tough Jews and The Record Men to his hilarious memoir, Sweet and Low: A Family Story, to the hearty—and heartfelt—appreciation of the 1985 Chicago Bears, Cohen is...
By Seymour Krim Nugget June 1963 We come, with mixed feelings, to the Case of Lenny Bruce. You probably have an opinion—who doesn’t?—but sit still long enough to hear ours. First, so that no matter how finky you finally think our stand is, let it be triple-clear that...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter June 15, 2011 My father was an incorrigible name dropper. He called famous actors and directors by their first names, suggesting an intimacy that didn’t always exist. He had met a lot of celebrities when he worked as a unit production...
By Mark Kram Esquire November 1989 How civilized the fame game was then, a timid, furtive glimpse for the observer, the observed cordoned off by a dreamlike distance of respect. Worship knew its place; so did greatness. It was caught sharply once by a young American...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice September 4, 1990 By the banks of the Truckee River, under a nearly full moon, a tall, vaguely Hispanic-looking man with beautiful shoulder-length black hair, a foot-long beard, and a plump, perfectly relaxed body comes over to...
By Peter Richmond GQ July 1992 The lights are rheostated low inside a customized bus parked on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan at nine o’clock on a winter dark evening. Two candle flames dance on a table. Eddie Murphy stares at them, without speaking. Hammer just dropped...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader The origins of “The Gookie,” from one of the great showbiz memoirs, Harpo Speaks! The man who first inspired me to become an actor was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theatre. He rolled cigars in the window of a...
By David Hirshey Rolling Stone April 1981 Out of the blue, in the middle of the action, an extremely clever comic actor began counting, very slowly, and with great concentration: one, two, three, four … enunciating each of the numbers with the utmost...
By Stanley Booth Playboy April 1970 “By now there must be in the world a million guitar virtuosos; but there are very few real blues players. The reason for this is that the blues—not the form but the blues—demands such dedication. This dedication lies beyond...
