William Stadiem

"In October 1958, Pan American World Airways began making regularly scheduled flights between New York and Paris, courtesy of its newly minted wonder jet, the Boeing 707. Almost overnight, the moneyed celebrities of the era made Europe their playground. At the same time, the dream of international travel came true for thousands of ordinary Americans who longed to emulate the "jet set" lifestyle. Bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributor William...

"From Top Gun to Howard the Duck, Hollywood was never more excessive than it was in the 1980s. In the Moneywood era, the purse strings were not controlled by adults, but by pop culture cowboys who couldn't balance their own checkbooks but could fast talk the talent, snowball the Japanese, and explain their way out of Dodge when the grosses came in. Their know-nothing raging narcissistic personalities make Sam Goldwyn look professorial and some of...

The illegitimate daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond breaks her lifelong silence. Her father, the longtime senator from South Carolina, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation; he mounted a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 -- in the name of saving the South from "mongrelization." Her mother was Carrie Butler, a black teenager who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation. The memoir...

"Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, by former valet-aide George Jacobs with an oh-so-able assist by William Stadiem, has at least five quotable and shocking remarks about the famous on every page. The fifteen years Jacobs toiled for Frank produces a classic of its genre -- a gold-star gossip-lover's dream.... "The rest is showbiz history as it was, and only Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart, and Betty Bacall are spared. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland,...