Joel Lobenthal

Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse is a revelatory, irresistible treat for dance aficionados and fashionistas alike. Couturiers such as Balmain, Balenciaga, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Charles James, Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent designed ballet-inspired dresses and gowns, many featuring the boned bodices and voluminous tulle skirts of classical tutus. American ready-to-wear designers such as Claire McCardell found inspiration in ballet leotards and other practice clothing, creating knitted separates, bathing suits, and wrap dresses. Written by fashion and ballet experts, the book is illustrated with archival photography by such masters as Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Man Ray, and Cecil Beaton, along with newly commissioned photography of contemporary ballerinas wearing ballet-influenced couture.

Red Star, White Nights: The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev is a biography of one of history's greatest dancers, who ended his own life in a snow-bound Russian dacha in 1977 at the age of thirty-six. The book is also a personal memoir by Lisa Whitaker, who befriended Soloviev when he toured Australia in 1969. And it is autobiography, too, describing Whitaker's travels to Russia after Perestroika to find his family and uncover the mystery of his fate.Soloviev was a government-decorated icon in the USSR, and an international star as well. On tour with the Kirov, he was idolized by audiences and critics. In words and more than one hundred photos, many never before published, his phenomenal talent lives again.The book is the culmination of decades of research, during which the authors interviewed Soloviev's family, friends, and colleagues to peel back layers of accrued myth and reduction. Soloviev's suicide was his response to both personal and institutional repression, a bombshell hurled at Soviet officialdom. Soloviev's psychology reflected the stringency of the Soviet system and the individual vagaries of a turbulent family.Red Star, White Nights is informed by Whitaker's experience in Russian research and Lobenthal's many accounts of Russian culture and ballet. The book weaves together Soloviev's story with multiple epochs of Soviet history: the 1917 revolution, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, the "thaw" of the 1950s and '60s, the stagnation of the '70s.Preserved on video, Soloviev's talent continues to astound, while his life and death continue to haunt. Red Star, White Nights illuminates the many facets of this most enigmatic of ballet stars.

At eighty-seven, Patricia Wilde remains a grande dame of the ballet world. As a young star she toured America in the company of the Ballet Russe. In her heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, she was a first-generation member and principal dancer of New York City Ballet during the uniquely dramatic Balanchine era—the golden age of the company and its hugely gifted, influential, exploitative, and dictatorial director. In Wilde Times, Joel Lobenthal brings the world of Wilde and Balanchine, of Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams, Suzanne Farrell, Maria Tallchief, and many others thrillingly to life. With unfettered access to Wilde and her family, friends, and colleagues, Lobenthal takes the reader backstage to some of the greatest ballet triumphs of the modern era—and some of the greatest tragedies. Through it all Patricia Wilde emerges as a figure of towering strength, grace, and grit. Wilde Times is the first biography of this seminal figure in American dance, written with the cooperation of the star, but wide-ranging in its use of sources to tell the full and intertwining stories of the development of Wilde, of Balanchine, and of American national ballet at its peak in the twentieth century.

In the golden age of American theater, no celestial body shone more dazzlingly than Tallulah Bankhead. Outrageous, outspoken, and totally uninhibited, she was an actress known as much for her offstage vices as for her onstage roles--the cocaine and alcohol, the blistering tirades, and her scandalous affairs with both men and women.In Tallulah , author Joel Lobenthal has captured the private essence of this most public of Broadway stars, the irrepressible diva who enjoyed intimate relationships with the top entertainment luminaries of her day, from Tennessee Williams and No l Coward to Marlene Dietrich and Billie Holiday. Here also are the close and personal details of her family life and doomed romances, drawn from scores of exclusive interviews, and previously untapped information from Scotland Yard and the FBI. This is the definitive biography of Tallulah Bankhead, a woman even more complex, more nuanced, and more shocking than her notorious mythology suggests.