Synopsis
“You want to see me driving up and down the Sunset Strip in my car picking up girls, right? Well, you don’t think I’d be stupid enough to let you see that side of me, do you?”—actor Warren Beatty, Esquire 1967
For more than a hundred years, we’ve made celebrity worship a national pastime. Celebrities charm us with their beauty, ability, and fame; we want to know everything about them. Today, for the most part, celebrities control their own media. They communicate directly with the world on X and Instagram. They produce documentaries or docuseries or write their own books.
But during the 1960s and 1970s, things were different. The press controlled the publicity. Writers employed by magazines had the freedom to publish nuanced, intimate, and occasionally revealing stories. What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? is a textbook/anthology of 19 literary, lively, and deeply reported stories that are both entertaining and historically intriguing, sourced from many of the great magazines and newspapers of the era — including Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, LIFE, The Washington Post, New York, Sport, and Cosmopolitan. Each story includes a biography or interview with the author and a postscript that adds context.
Read Doon Arbus on soul pioneer James Brown, Sara Davidson on pulp goddess Jacqueline Suzanne, Robert Ward on baseball superstar Reggie Jackson, Nora Ephron on feminist Helen Gurley Brown, Anne Taylor Fleming on the benighted and controversial writer Truman Capote, Sally Quinn on ballet’s Rudolf Nureyev, Jacqueline Trescott on disco’s Donna Summer, Helen Dudar on cinema beauty Lauren Bacall, Rex Reed on Ava Gardner, and more.
As it turned out, some of the writers in this anthology became celebrities in their own right—though admired by a smaller and more particular following. Employing a range of styles and reporting techniques, all put us in the room with entertainers and artists who are grappling, in some way or another, with fame — what it means to have it, sustain it, and lose it.
What some of today's great journalists say about What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? :
“This is the greatest, fastest, wildest, most timeless collection of celebrity journalism ever!” —E. Jean Carroll, author and columnist.
“Alex Belth, with his keen, keen eye, has brought a 20th century art form—the celebrity profile—into the 21st century. This is a brilliant collection. And it proves that the 1960s and 1970s were, without a doubt, the apogee of American journalism.”
—Lili Anolik, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, author of the forthcoming Didion and Babitz
“Longform lovers: Time-travel back to the glorious days of unfettered access and infinite word counts with this engrossing collection of classic profiles. What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?—with invaluable intros and postscripts—is the pleasure-read we need now.” —Lucy Kaylin, Editorial Director, Hearst Magazines
“The smartest pieces you will ever read about the most captivating celebrities and cultural rascals in our collective memory. The New Journalism at its most most.” —Terry McDonell, former editor of Esquire, author of The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers
“The celebrity profile, when taken seriously by a non-fiction master like the ones included in this book, is a uniquely American art form that opens windows into the national mood, identity, dreams and insecurities. These stories are as essential to understanding America as Route 66, Norman Rockwell and cable TV.” —Wright Thompson, author of The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business
À propos de l'auteur
Alex Belth is the editor of Esquire Classic, the magazine's digital archive, as well as the imprint editor of The Stacks Reader, a website and book series dedicated to preserving great journalism from the Golden Age of magazines. He's been a contributor to Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Deadspin, and The Daily Beast, and created BronxBanter, one of the original New York Yankees blogs, which the Village Voice called a "New York City treasure." In a previous life, he worked in film post-production for the likes of Ken Burns, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers.
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