Carol Easton

Sam Goldwyn's career spanned almost the entire history of Hollywood. He made his first film, The Squaw Man, in 1913, and he died in 1974 at the age of ninety-one. In the many years between, he produced an enormous number of films--including such classics as Wuthering Heights, Street Scene, Arrowsmith, Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, and The Best Years of Our Lives--and worked with many luminaries--Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, Laurence Olivier, George Balanchine, Lillian Hellman, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Eddie Cantor, Busby Berkeley, Danny Kaye, Merle Oberon, and Bob Hope among them. When Samuel Goldfisch was born in the Warsaw ghetto, he was penniless; when Sam Goldwyn died in Los Angeles, he was worth an estimated $19 million. The Search for Sam Goldwyn locates the real Sam Goldwyn and shatters the ""hostile conspiracy of silence"" that protected his legend. In writing Goldwyn's story, Carol Easton has given us a fine examination of ""the civilization known as Hollywood"" and how Goldwyn himself shaped that culture.

Carol Easton, who knew Jacqueline du Pré well, draws on this friendship to create a moving and insightful portrait of a singularly complex person. Jacqueline du Pré (the subject of the recent film Hilary and Jackie ) was the music world's "golden girl," with what appeared to many to be a fairytale career and storybook marriage to Daniel Barenboim. But away from her cello, du Pré was achingly human. As a child, she was isolated by her phenomenal talent. As an adult, she was confined to the rarefied, insular concert world. And during the last fifteen years of her life, she lived in the inexorably shrinking world of the invalid, as multiple sclerosis took its toll. The Baltimore Sun said, Carol Easton tells this extraordinary story "with feeling befitting du Pré's own."

Pioneering a distinctly American style that combined modern dance and ballet with a traditional folk idiom, Agnes de Mille popularized what had been an elitist art and irrevocably changed the American musical theater. During a life that spanned most of the twentieth century, de Mille worked and played with a fabulous cast of characters, from her uncle (the legendary Cecil B. de Mille) to Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, Cole Porter, NoëCoward, Rebecca West, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Drawing on unpublished papers and extensive interviews with friends, colleagues, relatives, and de Mille herself, Carol Easton takes us behind the scenes of de Mille's extraordinary life: struggling to establish a reputation, surviving a series of disastrous love affairs, meeting the conflicting demands of ambition and motherhood, and dealing with a devastating illness. She unforgettably brings to life the combination of intelligence, artistry, and humor that was Agnes de Mille.