Neal Gabler

Walter Winchell escaped New York-immigrant poverty via the vaudeville stage, his massive insecurity and ambition driving him on. But it was as a young newspaperman that he found his real calling. In 1925, at a time when most newspaper editors were reluctant to publish even the notice of an impending birth for fear of crossing the boundaries of good taste, Winchell brought unabashed and undisguised gossip into the public press. He understood the bitter subtext of gossip: how invading the lives of the famous and revealing their secrets empowered both purveyor and audience. His columns revealed who was cavorting with gangsters or chorus girls, who was engaging in financial shenanigans, whose husband was compromisingly sighted with whose wife. By legitimizing gossip he forever shattered the taboo against what could be said about celebrities in the media. In his own words: "Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else's ass." Adding: "But you can't kick Winchell's.". Because Winchell was present at the creation of celebrity as we now know it, because he reached the top and tumbled precipitously, an examination of his life illustrates how fame is achieved, how it is lost, what one gains from it, what it exacts - and why America is obsessed with it. "Historians," said a speaker at his funeral, "will be unable to explain the twentieth century without understanding Winchell." His life and his films are richly recaptured - and understood - in Neal Gabler's brilliant biography.

Neal Gabler examines Streisand's life and career through the prism of otherness-- a Jew in a gentile world, a self-proclaimed homely girl in a world of glamour, a kooky girl in a world of convention --and shows how central it was to Streisand's triumph as one of the voices of her age.

Neal Gabler shows us today's astonishing conversion of life itself into Entertainment - Life the Movie. Revealing what now unites phenomena as diverse as modern art, President Clinton versus Kenneth Starr, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Unabomber murders, and Elizabeth Taylor's marriages, Gabler demonstrates how our hunger for entertainment and the massive exploitation of that hunger have combined to make everything from religion to politics to painting to the news into branches of show business; how Life the Movie has generated and popularized its own stars - the rich and famous; and how all of us are not only an audience for the life spectacular, but also performance artists acting out our own dramas within it. Gabler traces the phenomenal rise of Entertainment as it challenges high culture. He also shows how entertainment, most notably with the arrival of the movies, comes to dominate the national consciousness by introducing a new way of seeing, until it seems that every endeavor and idea must become part of the grand, ever-growing, ongoing Big Show or risk invisibility.