Them Ornery Mitchum Boys

One of the movies' greatest actors and most colorful characters, a real-life tough guy with the prison record to prove it, Robert Mitchum was a movie icon for an almost unprecedented half-century, the cool, sleepy-eyed star of such classics as The Night of the Hunter; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool. Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

"The most complete and engrossing biography yet of this exotic Southern girl...Excellent."—Liz Smith She was the sex symbol who dazzled all the other sex symbols. She was the temptress who drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide and haunted him to the end of his life. Ernest Hemingway saved one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento, and Howard Hughes begged her to marry him—but she knocked out his front teeth instead. She was one of the great icons in Hollywood history—star of The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa, and The Night of the Iguana—and one of the few whose actual life was grander and more colorful than any movie. Her jaw-dropping beauty, charismatic presence, and fabulous, scandalous adventures fueled the legend of Ava Gardner—Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star. In this acclaimed first full biography of Gardner, Lee Server recreates—with great style and vivid detail—the actress's life, from her beginnings as a barefoot North Carolina farm girl to her heady days as a Hollywood goddess. He paints the full spectacle of her tumultuous private life—including her string of failed marriages to Mickey Rooney, Sinatra and Artie Shaw—and Gardner's lifelong search for adventure and love. Ava Gardner: "Love is Nothing" is both an exceptional work of biography and a richly entertaining read.

Robert Mitchum was--and still is--one of Hollywood's defining stars of Western film. For more than 30 years, the actor played the weary and cynical cowboy, and his rough-and-tough presence on-screen was no different than his one off-screen. With a personality fit for western-noir, Robert Mitchum dominated the genre during the mid-20th century, and returned as the anti-hero again during the 1990s before his death. This book lays down the life of Mitchum and the films that established him as one of Hollywood's strongest and smartest horsemen. Going through early classics like Pursued (1947) and Blood on the Moon (1948) to more recent cult favorites like Tombstone (1993) and Dead Man (1995), Freese shows how Mitchum's nuanced portrayals of the iconic anti-hero of the West earned him his spot in the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

"Mitchum's tales include beatings, hanging producers by their shoelaces, killings in Mexican bars and slapping Teutonic helmer Otto Preminger. And there are classic observations, such as his quip to Variety that 'the best producer is an absent one.' Mitchum editor Jerry Roberts...conducted one of the interviews, and has done a terrific job piecing together vintage conversations with David Frost, Dick Lochte, Richard Schickel and Charles Champlin, as well as collecting a wonderful array of prize quotes by and about Mitchum." -Steven Gaydos, Variety

John Stanley, thirty-three-year veteran entertainment writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, stalks the environs of Hollywood and San Francisco to profile male and female stars of yesteryear who blasted their way through movies and TV series with high-powered handguns, curvaceous, slinky bodies, and other weapons of excessive destruction, all for decent box office. Savor four classic Clint Eastwood encounters: Two "Dirty Harry" moments with actor Clint and two Iwo Jima moments with director Clint. Can hard-hitting martial arts star Chuck Norris survive three showdowns with Stanley? James Stewart survived two Stanley encounters: one about his hard-boiled Westerns, the other about his Hitchcock classics. Meet Robert and John Mitchum, ornery fighting brothers whom Stanley knew intimately, and learn the full truth behind Robert's 1948 arrest for marijuana use, never before revealed. Karl Malden faces Stanley in five showdowns on the streets of San Francisco. The book also includes text and imagery material that will shake up any motion picture lover.

John Stanley, who hosted Creature Features in the San Francisco-Bay Area for six years (1979-84) introduced old horror and science fiction movies on late-night programming. This title provides 559 photos, Stanley's exclusive interview material to describe such leading players as Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner and Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek.