100 Books Like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

An excellent nonfiction account of an actual Hollywood killing, this is a well-written and researched investigation of the (as yet) unsolved 1922 shooting of director William Desmond Taylor. The murder was committed right when scandals, including Fatty Arbuckle’s, besieged an ascendant Hollywood.

Also of interest: A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman, which recaps the killing of Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, supposedly by her teenage daughter, Cheryl. This crime inspired entertainment from Harold Robbin’s potboiler, Where Love Has Gone, to Woody Allen’s self-serious movie, September.

Hardboiled specialist Horace McCoy made his mark as an unsparing chronicler of Depression-era despair with his 1935 masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. His 1938 novel isn't nearly as good, but it feels so lived-in and sordid that it tells major truths about the dreamers, users, and big talents who populated '30s Hollywood. In it, Ralph and Mona, two modestly talented beautiful losers, hit Tinseltown hungering for stardom. But Ralph, 18 years before the doomed screenwriter hero of Sunset Boulevard, winds up providing stud service to a wealthy older woman and Mona finds her own private hell. The novel is a bleak meditation on exploitation, failure, and corruption in a town where, as one character observes, “Morality never crosses the city limits.”

This roman à clef about billionaire Howard Hughes has everything you covet in a great beach read: money, power, sex, betrayal.

The rugged tycoon Jonas Cord and the screen siren Rita Marlowe tussle, tangle, couple, uncouple, and everything in between over decades and continents, and Robbins’s talent for saucy dialogue and spicier plotlines furiously bubbles to the surface in perhaps the last great book he wrote before his own life—as dramatic as anything he penned—and his work both began to crumble.

It’s hardly short (the original hardback clocks in at a hefty 650-plus pages), but I could not get enough of its blazing, take-no-prisoners leads as they barreled through the worlds of show business, aviation, and business to conquer the world.   

Novelist-screenwriter-director Richard Sale’s scabrous, compulsively readable 1963 novel is packed with malicious characters scrambling up Hollywood’s “glass mountain of success” only to tumble into what Jacqueline Susann would call four years later would call “the Valley of the Dolls.” Pretty much set in Movieland’s seven circles of hell, the novel charts the rise and fall of an ex-gigolo who becomes a major movie star leading man. Grabbing a "Best Actor" Oscar nomination, he becomes hellbent on knee-capping -- or flat-out destroying -- his competitors. An acid-laced smorgasbord of its era, it teems with transactional sex, unapologetic misogyny, homophobia, and groovy Swinging Sixties dialogue – all of it as despicably and wondrously monstrous as its 1966 movie version (scripted by Harlan Ellison!) is unintentionally side-splitting.

Newbie novelist Jacqueline Susann created an iconic all-time bestseller with her tale of three young glamazons who vault to the show business heights, only to tumble into a pit of addictions, poor choices in men, and delightfully overripe dialogue. Susann made her sweeping, sexy soap opera shenanigans even more irresistible by patterning her characters on such 20th-century headline-makers as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, Ethel Merman, and the Kennedys. Said publicity-savvy Susann, “They can keep calling it that ‘roman à clef'. It’ll only make my books sell.” They did. It did. Although the sanitized and critically bashed 1967 movie version toned down the à clef elements, it became a box-office smash that has gone on to become enshrined as a kitsch classic.

Gavin Lambert adapted the works of D. H. Lawrence and Tennessee Williams for the films Sons and Lovers and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He directed one interesting, low-budget, Paul Bowles-like movie, Another Sky. His prose work is insightful about the behind-the-scenes world of the movies.

The linked stories in this book memorably spotlight hangers-on and working-class people on the edges of entertainment. Also of interest is Inside Daisy Clover, his novel about a teen tomboy star which became an affected, bombastic, entertaining Natalie Wood movie.

A leading man in the fifties and early sixties (I Married a Monster from Outer Space is a good, suburbs-set science fiction movie), Tom Tryon became an acclaimed horror writer with his novel The Other.

His collection of stories and novellas about Hollywood is gamy, gruesome, and sometimes ugly (his story, Willie, based on the brutal murder of silent film star Ramon Navarro, borders on torture porn) but also feels authoritative and true. Fedora, his sub-Sunset Boulevard story about a faded movie star, came full circle and was one of Billy Wilder’s last and least successful films.

With strange echoes of today’s New York City, Irwin Shaw’s 1962 novel starts with a once-famous actor being punched in the face for no reason after arriving in Rome to do a looping job. While the overwritten story goes downhill from there, it takes a riveting look at Italy’s La Dolce Vita atmosphere, with characters reportedly based on Tyrone Power and Darryl Zanuck.

It’s about babka! What’s not to like?

I love the clever wordplay in this story. The sisters’ names are Esther and Hester, and their pets are Lester and Chester. Both sisters claim they bake the best babka, and they ask their new neighbor, Sylvester (whose name also rhymes), to judge their friendly competition. Will he choose Esther’s cinnamon-filled babka or Hester’s chocolate-filled one?

I enjoy the sprinkling of Yiddish words (there’s a glossary in the back), the lively illustrations, and Sylvester’s witty resolution. There’s even a recipe for this traditional Jewish bread. A yummy book for Shabbat or any other day!

This is a lovely book about two celestial sisters, one is the sun and the other the moon. As siblings do, they argue about who is more important. They decide to swap roles and the sun begins to shine day and night so nobody can sleep and the earth and growing things suffer. Then the moon takes over and at first everybody is relieved. But gradually the lack of warmth and light makes the world an unhappy place. The sisters realize the importance of harmony in the world and in their relationship. The pictures softly reflect the hues of sun and moon. This would make a lovely bedtime story and the end picture shows the girls' love for each other.