Sunday, February 19, 2012

Hollywood En Femme

Sascha Brastoff
Being a liberal, I read Salon every day.

Being a film fan, I read "My Tryst with Spencer Tracy" on Salon the other day.

The Spencer Tracy article was an excerpt "from Scotty Bowers' controversial new memoir, Full Service (written with the help of Lionel Friedberg), about working as a sexual fixer in Hollywood."

The article revealed that Tracy was bisexual and that his not-so-secret love affair with actress Katherine Hepburn was a publicity stunt to cover up Tracy's bisexuality and Hepburn's lesbianism.

After reading another excerpt on Amazon, I bought the Kindle version of the book and began reading it with the Mac Kindle reader application.

It is a page-turner and I have not been able to put the book down. If you are a film fan, especially films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, I think you will find the book very interesting. It is a no-holds-barred exposé of the sexual exploits of the Hollywood stars and celebrities of that era.

Naturally, I was curious if there were any trans stars mentioned in the book.

There was not one word about Jeff Chandler or Dan Dailey, but the book did mention that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover "got dressed up in drag" during a visit to Hollywood" and a "lot of fun was had by all…"

The book also mentions the crossdressing exploits of costume designer Sascha Brastoff. "When Sascha was in drag he looked, walked, talked, and behaved exactly like a woman. You simply could not tell that he was a man."

And so it goes.

2 comments:

  1. I find it hard to read such "memoirs". Are they true? Did those things happen? Is the author trying to sell books based on his enhanced exaggerations?
    deborah

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  2. Thank you for the kind words.

    I average 1 to 2 hours per day working on the blog.

    The blogger.com platform I use for my blog is easy to use. You don't need to know HTML to blog with blogger, although if you do know HTML, you can fine tune things on the blog --- not knowing HTML is not a deal breaker. Blogger and third party websites provide lots of free templates that you can use for the design if you blog. There are even blogs that offer Blogger tips and advice. So give it a go and good luck.

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