Jann Wenner is (Gulp!) 40

By E. Graydon Carter GQ November 1985 A mile or so from the spot where Jackson Pollock came to a messy end on a lonely stretch of Long Island black-top, Jann Wenner is sliding his silver Dino 308 GT4 Ferrari through a long, graceful turn. Route 114, between Sag Harbor...

Salute to One of the Greats

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader March 30, 2023 Bill Zehme, who chronicled the lives of show business personalities in the ’80s and ’90s, died last weekend after a ten-year battle with cancer. He was 64 and one of the most personable and likable people you’d ever want...

The Man Who Wrote the “Citizen Kane” of Celebrity Profiles

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 13, 2020 O’Connell Driscoll is a great name for a writer, the kind of byline that sticks. Trouble is bylines are easily forgotten and the history of magazine writing is littered with terrific writers who are neglected and Driscoll...

The Making of An American Swami

By Sara Davidson My Generation September 2001 It’s eight a.m. on New Year’s morning and I’m sitting in the darkened hall of the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center in Los Angeles, staring at the cluster of swamis in red sitting cross-legged on the floor. There’s a slender...

This Gun for Hire

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader July 2, 2019 Julian Allen is one of our favorite magazine illustrators. He made a splash in England in the late ’60s and then arrived in New York during the Watergate era. For the next twenty plus years his work was a fixture in the...

The Ice Cream Man with the Clean White Suit

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Tom Wolfe died a couple of days ago and if you have never read his entertaining and much-celebrated non-fiction, well, now is as good a time as any to dig in. Start with the relatively straight-forward “The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius...

Splendor in the Short Grass

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 Flying west, through Texas, you leave Dallas-Fort Worth behind and look out suddenly onto a rolling, bare-boned, November country that stretches away to the horizon on every side—a vast, landlocked Sargasso Sea of mesquite-dotted...

Sam Peckinpah in Mexico: Overlearning with El Jefe

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone October 12, 1972 Limping delicately as if his boots are a couple of sizes too tight, so rockinghorse loaded on Juarez tequila he’d flunk a knee-walking test, Roy Jenson, one of the neo-Wild Bunch of characters and character actors that...

Up in Fat City: On The Set With Keach And Huston

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 Stockton, Calif.—The Memorial Civic Auditorium, located not far from the central ganglia of this crumby hick town, is old, cavernous, sweltering hot, and overripe with the stink of vintage sweat and piss. The litter-strewn floors are...

Drinks with Liberty Vance: Lee Marvin Shoots from the Hip

By Robert Ward Rolling Stone September 3, 1981 Ransom Stoddard, attorney at law, is doing his best to cover up, but the hell-forged maniac above him just keeps grunting and drooling and lashing him with a bullwhip. Stoddard is backed up as far as he can get against a...

Bow Down

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader I’ve never read Conversations with Wilder, the hell is wrong with me? Man, I need to correct that. I’m  grateful that I tuned in to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing interview with Cameron Crowe, who put the book together, and has some...

Mr. Bad Taste and Trouble Himself

By Robert Ward Rolling Stone March 3, 1983 “He drank too much and smoked too much. He granted too many interviews full of cynical observations about himself and his business. He made too many bad movies and hardly any of the kind that stir critics to rapture or that,...