Though I am not a huge fan of 60s starlet Stefanie Powers, I was looking forward to her autobiography hoping it would be a look into her acting career.  For a short period of time she was a promising movie actress (Experiment in Terror, Palm Springs Weekend, New Interns, Die! Die ! My Darling, Stagecoach) up there with brunettes Pamela Tiffin, Diane Baker, Anjanette Comer but she instead followed Barbara Eden, Julie Newmar, Tina Louise into television with The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. When that was canceled, she worked non-stop on TV (trapped perhaps? though she did a feature movie here and there) making guest appearances and in TV-movies before landing the lead in the series Feather and Father Gang and then Hart to Hart.

Alas per two friends who have perused her book, she gives her acting career short shrift and instead it is another philosophical look at life ala Goldie Hawn, Richard Chamberlain and Raquel Welch.  One friend says Powers even takes a back seat to her long-time boyfriend William Holden in her own memoir!  When it comes to celebrity bios I want to know what went on behind-the-scenes of their TV shows and movies not their opinions about the human spirit. Geez, Goldie all I wanted to read was what was it like to work with Judy Carne instead of the New Agey claptrap you gave us. Hence, her book wound up in the garbage heap half read.  I won’t make the same mistake with Powers’ book.

For a great read, Faye Dunaway’s autobiography comes highly recommended.  She gives us readers the back story on all her movies and the actors she worked with that you expect from a celebrity bio.  This is the one I will be buying.

A lot of people probably do not know that before Julie Newmar donned her catsuit to play the villainous Catwoman on TV’s Batman to purrrrfection, she won a Tony Award for her performance as a sexy Swedish exchange college student who decides her married professor will sire her child in the hit sex comedy The Marriage-Go-Round in 1959. (She reprised her role for the movie version in 1960 and received a Golden Globe nomination.)

Life magazine did a photo shoot on the stage set and just recently some never-before-seen photos have surfaced. Click here to read more and see below for a video tribute.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCiesUK9_Io

Actor James MacArthur passed away recently. He is most famous for his 11 year run as Det. Danno Williams on the hit CBS detective series Hawaii 5-O from 1968-1979. “Book him Danno” became a hugely popular catchphrase used even to this day and in the new reboot of the series with James Caan’s son Scott as Danno.  Due to his TV show MacArthur got to work with pracitically every 60s starlet in town including Nancy Kwan, Anne Helm, Nancy Kovack, Jean Hale, BarBara Luna, Sabrina Scharf, Melody Patterson (who became Mrs. James MacArthur for a short time), Carol Lynley, etc.

On the big screen, MacArthur was an affable leading man going from playing a juvenile delinquent in his debut movie The Young Stranger (1957) to signing with Walt Disney who turned him into a clean-cut teen idol in such films as The Light in the Forest (with Carol Lynley), Third Man on the Mountain and Swiss Family Robertson (both with Janet Munro). After leaving Disney in 1960, he played the leading man for awhile in The Interns (with Suzy Parker), Cry of  Battle (with Rita Moreno), and Spencer’s Mountain (with Mimsy Farmer) before working mostly in ensemble films such as The Bedford Incident and Battle of the Bulge.

Fans of cult movies remember him most as a college radical gone straight in The Love-Ins (with Susan Oliver who has the requisite LSD freak out scene) and cast against type as a motorcycle gang leader in The Angry Breed (with Melody Patterson and Suzie Kaye). Right after he landed Hawaii 5-0.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIlxcrA_MWg

Have decided to self-publish my next book Dueling Harlows: Race to the Silver Screen through Amazon’s Create Space publishing arm.Coming in early Spring 2011.

In 1965, in a rare occurrence before or since, two motion pictures titled Harlow opened within weeks of each other. Carroll Baker was Jean Harlow in Paramount’s big budget color production from Joseph E. Levine. Carol Lynley was Jean Harlow in Electronovision’s quickie b&w production from Bill Sargent. Both endeavored to tell the story of legendary thirties blonde bombshell Jean Harlow’s passionate love life and her meteoric rise from bit player to super star before her death at the young age of twenty-six.

Dueling Harlows: Race to the Silver Screen recounts the back story of the struggle it took to get these competing movie biographies into theaters considering the fighting between the movies’ two larger-than-life showman producers, the casting problems each faced, the poor screenplays, the hurried pace to complete filming, and the law suits that followed in the aftermath. Both were failures at the time but have cult and camp appeal today. The illustrated book includes interviews from actors and crew including Carol Lynley, Michael Dante, Aron Kincaid, casting director Marvin Paige, and producer David Permut a protégé of Bill Sargent.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opa-KrMv_z8