Bill Millers Riviera

Where did Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joan Crawford and hundreds of other A-listers along with mobsters like Meyer Lansky eat, drink and dance? It wasn't in Hollywood or at the Copacabana but at Bill Miller's Riviera in Fort Lee. The Riviera's breathtaking views of New York, its stunning showgirls and its gambling hall drew the famous and infamous to its tables. After it was originally run as a speakeasy by Ben Marden during the 1920s, Bill Miller, a Russian Jewish immigrant, attracted the most sought-after performers and turned it into one of the most popular nightclubs during the 1940s and 1950s. Relive Bill Miller's Riviera and experience the excitement of his lucky patrons.

Chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud once explained: “The future of cooking is about how we can rewrite the history of it—it’s important to keep the memory and be entertained by it and inspired by it.” What A Swell Party It Was! entertains and inspires with a delicious slice of nearly forgotten culinary history—an era that followed the Great Depression and prohibition’s repeal, where America boomed and the nightclub scene flourished. Opening this book is like swinging open the doors to another time and place, when big city life was a unique mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality. It spotlights twenty-five legendary clubs that thrived in the 1930s and ’40s, just as Jazz exploded into mainstream popularity and alcohol was no longer illegal to serve. Through these pages and recipes, enter past the proverbial velvet rope into establishments forever-immortalized, such as Chez Paree in Chicago, Café Trocadero in Hollywood, The Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, The Blue Room in New Orleans, and New York City’s Cotton Club. In addition to including entrée, appetizer, dessert, and cocktail recipes from their original menus, each featured venue will be introduced with vivid anecdotes and history, narrated in a breezy style and illustrated with reproductions of vintage menu covers, beverage napkins, matchbooks, postcards, and rare photos. An unabashedly joyful journey and a deeply authentic perspective on American culture in a rich, tumultuous age, What a Swell Party It Was! promises a cookbook/cocktail guide with a tip of the hat to history, crammed with details that bring life again to a fascinating American era.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • With a new afterword by the author in honor of Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday This is the book that Frank Sinatra tried—but failed—to keep from publication, and it’s easy to understand why. This unauthorized biography goes behind the iconic myth of Sinatra to expose the well-hidden side of one of the most celebrated—and elusive—public figures of our time. Celebrated journalist Kitty Kelley spent three years researching government documents (Mafia-related material, wiretaps, and secret testimony) and interviewing more than 800 people in Sinatra’s life (family, colleagues, law-enforcement officers, friends). The result is a stunning, often shocking exposé of a man as tortured as he was talented, as driven to self-destruction as he was to success. Featuring a new afterword by the author, this fully documented, highly detailed biography—filled with revealing anecdotes—is the penetrating story of the explosively controversial and undeniably multitalented legend who ruled the entertainment industry for fifty years and continues to fascinate to this day. Praise for His Way “The most eye-opening celebrity biography of our time.”—The New York Times “A compelling page-turner . . . Kitty Kelley’s book has made all future Sinatra biographies virtually redundant.”—Los Angeles Herald Examiner

The untold story of Sammy Davis, Jr.: This incisive biography and sweeping cultural history conjures "the many worlds [Davis, Jr.] traversed, and shows how the issue of race, in his own mind and in the minds of his fans and detractors, shaped his career and life" (The New York Times). For decades one of America’s most recognizable stars, the real Sammy Davis, Jr. has long remained hidden behind the persona the performer so vigorously generated—and so fiercely protected. Here Wil Haygood brings Davis’s life into full relief against the backdrop of an America in the throes of racial change. He made his living entertaining white people but was often denied service in the very venues he played, and in his broad and varied friendships—not to mention his romances—Davis crossed racial lines in ways few others had. In Black and White vividly draws on painstaking research and more than two hundred and fifty interviews to trace Davis, Jr.’s journey from the vaudeville stage to Broadway, Hollywood, and, of course, Las Vegas. It is an important record of a vanished America—and of one of its greatest entertainers.

Based on unprecedented research and interviews, this authoritative biography of Colonel Tom Parker (1909-1997) includes new revelations and insights into rock music's most renowned and notorious manager.

How the famous and not-so-famous like-minded citizens all gave their time, expertise, and money to build a park legacy of incomparable benefit The Palisades park and historic site system in New York and New Jersey is a significant anchor-point for the spread of national and state parks across the nation. The challenge to protect these treasures began with a brutal blast of dynamite in the late nineteenth century and continues to this day. Palisades: The People’s Park presents the story of getting from zero protected acres to the rich tapestry that is today’s Palisades park system, located in the nation’s most densely populated metropolitan region. This is an account of huge determination, moments of crisis, caustic resistance to the very idea of conservation, glorious philanthropy, a steep learning curve, and responsibilities for guardianship passed with care from one generation to the next. Despite the involvement of men of great wealth and fame from its earliest beginnings, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission faced an early and ongoing struggle to arrange financial support from both the New York and New Jersey state governments for a park that would cross state lines. The conflicts between developers and conservationists, industrialists and wilderness enthusiasts, with their opposing views regarding the uses of natural resources required the commissioners of the PIPC to become skilled negotiators, assiduous fundraisers, and savvy participants in the political process. The efforts to create Palisades Interstate Park was prodigious, requiring more than 1,000 real estate transactions to establish Sterling Forest, to save Storm King Mountain, to preserve Lake Minnewaska, to protect Stony Point Battlefield and Washington’s headquarters, to open Bear Mountain and Harriman state parks, and to add the other sixteen parks to the Palisades Interstate Park System. Beginning with the efforts of Elizabeth Vermilye of the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs, who enlisted President Theodore Roosevelt’s support to stop the blasting and quarrying of Palisades rock, author Robert Binnewies traces the story of the famous, including J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, and the Harrimans, as well as the not-so-famous men and women whose donations of time and money led to the preservation of New York and New Jersey’s most scenic and historic lands. The park experiment, begun in 1900, still stands as a dynamic model among the nation’s major environmental achievements.

In 1950 Las Vegas saw a million tourists. In 1960 it attracted ten million. The city entered the fifties as a regional destination where prosperous postwar Americans could enjoy vices largely forbidden elsewhere, and it emerged in the sixties as a national hotspot, the glitzy resort city that lights up the American West today. Becoming America’s Playground chronicles the vice and the toil that gave Las Vegas its worldwide reputation in those transformative years. Las Vegas’s rise was no happy accident. After World War II, vacationing Americans traveled the country in record numbers, making tourism a top industry in such states as California and Florida. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce saw its chance and developed a plan to capitalize on the town’s burgeoning reputation for leisure. Las Vegas pinned its hopes for the future on Americans’ need for escape. Transforming a vice city financed largely by the mob into a family vacation spot was not easy. Hotel and casino publicists closely monitored media representations of the city and took every opportunity to stage images of good, clean fun for the public—posing even the atomic bomb tests conducted just miles away as an attraction. The racism and sexism common in the rest of the nation in the era prevailed in Las Vegas too. The wild success of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack performances at the Sands Hotel in 1960 demonstrated the city’s slow progress toward equality. Women couldn’t work as dealers in Las Vegas until the 1970s, yet they found more opportunities for well-paying jobs there than many American women could find elsewhere. Gragg shows how a place like the Las Vegas Strip—with its glitz and vast wealth and its wildly public consumption of vice—rose to prominence in the 1950s, a decade of Cold War anxiety and civil rights conflict. Becoming America’s Playground brings this pivotal decade in Las Vegas into sharp focus for the first time.

Well before the curtains drew on the first annual Grammy Awards ceremony, before the Nevada deserts were lit up by the casinos of Las Vegas, Pierre Cossette was just another Canadian kid, running around the rural town of Valleyfield, Quebec. Circumstances would bring the Cossette family to Pasadena, California; from there, a brazen determination and entrepreneurial savvy would hoist Pierre to the top of the world of glitz and glamour. Along the road, the entertainment industry in the United States would be forever changed by the kid from Valleyfield. In Another Day in Showbiz, Pierre Cossette tells his unique story for the first time -- from his days as a rookie MCA agent in Vegas, pedling the likes of Ann-Margret and Sammy Davis Jr. to wary casino bosses, to his current capers alongside Donald Trump and Celine Dion's extended family. Triumphs and trip-ups, Broadway hits and broadcasting battles, all recounted in a tale that is both the intimate story of one man's life and an unabashed account of the world's most watched industry. Few in Valleyfield, Quebec would have guessed that one of their own would go on to talk Ronald Reagan into doing a show at the Last Frontier Casino, or introduce the concept of the "lounge act" to Las Vegas. Few in the music business would have guessed it possible to start a major record label from scratch, or to televise the Grammy Awards to more than 100 million viewers. Yet Pierre Cossette has accomplished all this -- and plenty more. In Another Day in Showbiz, he tells us how. Book jacket.