Word: schulberg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...changed both of us, but he made Mike from scratch." In Brooklyn, Tyson had drawn the absent father and saintly mother, the standard neighborhood issue. "You fought to keep what you took," he says, "not what you bought." His literary pedigree is by Charles Dickens out of Budd Schulberg. When Tyson wasn't mugging and robbing, he actually raised pigeons, like Terry Malloy. A tough amateur boxer named Bobby Stewart discovered Tyson in the "bad cottage" of a mountain reformatory and steered him to D'Amato's informal halfway house at Catskill...
Three star-quality performances help. In Natica Jackson, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a pampered screen beauty who falls for a married man. John O'Hara's tale has a bitter twist, and Pfeiffer adds her own tasty mix of sweetness and vinegar. A Table at Ciro's, from a Budd Schulberg story, resorts to broader caricature, as some familiar Hollywood types (washed-up director, naive ingenue, swaggering Latin lover) gather at a dinner hosted by a powerful studio mogul. But Darren McGavin plays the bigwig with such bemused dignity that the character seems brand...
Anyone who reads has toured parts of this fun house before. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West spurned it in novels. Elderly actresses and directors have told gaudy lies to their tape recorders. What Author Otto Friedrich contributes in City of Nets (Harper & Row; 512 pages; $25) is a lucid, darkly funny recounting that threads the loopy stories and the titanic egos into a coherent narrative. Friedrich, a TIME senior writer, clearly cherishes the surreal nuttiness of Hollywood's great days...
...pays tribute to a neglected master like Joyce Gary, of whose The Horse's Mouth he writes: "Depicting low life, it blazes with an image of the highest life of all-that of the creative imagination." At other times he elevates a merely unfashionable craftsman like Budd Schulberg, for whose The Disenchanted he makes the dubious claim: "No fiction has ever done better at presenting the inner torments of a writer in decline...
...change his habits. Despite his proclaimed affection for Hellman, he continued to patronize ladies of the evening and once asked her to join in a threesome (she declined). Hammett admired Marxism more than the U.S. Communist Party but joined a celebrity cell where he indulged in what Budd Schulberg called "dialectical materialism by the pool." In 1951, long after most film radicals had fled the cause, he spent six months in prison for refusing to divulge names in a Communist-hunting case...