The incredible life and times of Hollywood's most iconoclastic
producer, the miracle worker who went from penniless refugee to
show biz legend, and made possible "The African Queen, On the
Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia,
" not to speak of many more, including movies as distinct as
"Suddenly, Last Summer; Nicholas and Alexandra; The Last Tycoon;"
and "Betrayal;" all of them sharing the unique vision that earned
Spiegel twenty-five Oscars: star-filled, bigger-than-life,
conceived on a vast scale, intensely dramatic, and overwhelmingly
ambitious.
In this rich and brilliant biography, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni,
who had the advantage of knowing and working for Spiegel, brings
into sharp focus a Hollywood legend who was at once crafty,
unscrupulous, mendacious, and equally capable of great charm and
petty meanness, who was sentimental and ruthless, a shrewd judge of
talent, a gambler on a colossal scale, a man of almost unique
artistic vision and courage who was, in the final analysis, that
most elusive and rare of movie producers, a genius.
The story of a how a Jewish refugee without a penny to his name
managed to produce several of the greatest films of all time is
alone worth telling, but Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni has done more;
she has drawn the definitive portrait of the man himself -- the
elusive, witty, cynical adventurer who, like so many refugees, was
able to live, succeed, and raise money everywhere, but who was at
home nowhere. Spiegel surrounded himself with luxury and beautiful
women but remained a loner despite his countless friends.
Spiegel was mysterious about his origins, prompting Arthur
Miller to refer to him as "The Great Gatsby." In reality, he was
born of middle-class Jewish parents in the last years of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised in Jaroslav, in western Galicia,
Spiegel left home in his late teens and quickly became a hero of
the Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement.
Step by step, with immense research and a vast number of
interviews, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni recreates the world of Sam
Spiegel's childhood and youth, separating often self-serving
fiction from fact. She follows Spiegel's dramatic flight from the
Nazis in Berlin, a prison sentence in London, problems with the
police in Paris and Mexico City, and finally his arrival in Los
Angeles. In America his career languished for a time, though he
acquired a reputation for being a supreme "fixer," a brilliant
luftmensh on the fringes of Hollywood power, the ultimate
party-giver who knew everybody's secrets and was always quick to
charm women and take advantage of men. Billy Wilder called him "a
modern day Robin Hood, who steals from the rich and steals from the
poor."
With a brilliant sense of time and place and a deep
understanding of Spiegel's complex personality, Fraser-Cavassoni
traces his disasters, successes, romances, friendships, and tangled
finances in a narrative that is rich with colorful Spiegel stories,
scandals, and bon mots.
The cast of characters in Spiegel's life includes Lauren Bacall,
Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro,
Barry Diller, David Geffen, Katharine Hepburn, John Huston, Elia
Kazan, David Lean, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Mike Nichols, Harold
Pinter, Otto Preminger, Elizabeth Taylor, Gore Vidal, Orson Welles,
Billy Wilder, Darryl F. Zanuck, bevies of beautiful women, three
wives, countless members of high society, and, most important, Sam
Spiegel himself -- the last of the great independent film producers
who, in the swashbuckling tradition of David O. Selznick and Sam
Goldwyn, operated alone, aimed high, and believed, above all, in
their own star.
More than a major book about the movie business, "Sam Spiegel"
is an intricate and engrossing biography, comparable in its
richness, depth, and attention to detail to A. Scott Berg's
acclaimed biography of Samuel Goldwyn. It is a marvelous,
once-in-a-lifetime reading experience and an astonishing debut for
Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni.
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