Volume 20, Number 4 · March 22, 1973
Hollywood: Having Fun
By Joan Didion
Memo from David O. Selznick
selected and edited by Rudy Behlmer
Viking, 518 pp., $15.00
Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment
by Stanley Kauffmann
Harper & Row, 296 pp., $2.95 (paper)
To the extent that The Last Tycoon is 'about' Hollywood it is about not Monroe Stahr but Cecelia Brady, as anyone who understands the equation of pictures even dimly or in flashes would apprehend immediately: the Monroe Stahrs come and go, but the Cecelia Bradys are the second generation, the survivors, the inheritors of a community as intricate, rigid, and deceptive in its mores as any devised on this continent. At midwinter in the survivors' big houses off Benedict Canyon the fireplaces blaze all day with scrub oak and eucalyptus, the French windows are opened wide to the subtropical sun, the rooms filled with white phalaenopsis and cymbidium orchids and needlepoint rugs and the requisite scent of Rigaud candles. Dinner guests pick with vermeil forks at broiled fish and limestone lettuce vinaigrette, decline dessert, adjourn to the screening room, and settle down to The Heartbreak Kid with a little seltzer in a Baccarat glass.
Review, 4313 words
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