Broadway Babylon [Hardcover]

Boze Hadleigh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 2007

The first book of theater celebrity gossip, can you believe it? Here's the book that airs Broadway's dirty laundry! Inspired by the classic Hollywood Babylon (in print for more than forty years, more than 100,000 copies sold), Broadway Babylon presents a hyper-entertaining look at the Great White Way's biggest scandals, best-kept secrets, and most over-the-top feuds. Author Boze Hadleigh, the preeminent disher of celebrity dish, serves up 400 pages of tasty, never-before-told stories about such show-biz icons as Ethel Merman, Tennessee Williams, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, and many, many others. Get it while it's hot!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Boze Hadleigh is a very successful author of celebrity gossip books, including Celebrity Feuds, Hollywood Gays, Bette Davis Speaks, Celebrity Lies, and Sing Out—Gays and Lesbians in the Music Industry. He has appeared on Entertainment Tonight, Larry King Live, Showbiz Today, and E! True Hollywood Stories. He lives in Beverly Hills, California, where else?

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Back Stage Books (June 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823088308
• ISBN-13: 978-0823088300
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,076,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Boze Hadleigh, author of Celebrity Feuds! and Hollywood and Whine, has written more than 15 books. He holds a master's degree in journalism, speaks five languages, and has been a winner on Jeopardy! Boze also writes extensively for magazines, and his work has appeared in more than 100 publications including TV Guide, Playboy, and Us. The author splits his time, when not traveling the world, between Beverly Hills and Sydney, Australia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars OK Lightweight Reading, July 1, 2007

By 

Erik NYC - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Broadway Babylon (Hardcover)

Mildly enjoyable rehash of Broadway gossip. Hadleigh's over-reliance on pages (and pages) of standalone quotes on various topics (thesping, the problem with musicals, etc.) becomes monotonous after awhile.

And one of those quotes is jarringly wrong---on page 288, Hadleigh includes a comment from Madeline Kahn on Nathan Lane's success in "The Producers"---"The Producers" opened in 2001 and Kahn died in 1999. Oops.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is not HOLLYWOOD BABYLON for Broadway fans, September 16, 2007

By 

John McWhorter (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Broadway Babylon (Hardcover)

This is a weird little scrapbook promoted as a book.

Hadleigh has two goals.

One is to make sure we know that a great many people working on or around Broadway are gay. Even when he is addressing topics unrelated to sexuality, he must get in that such-and-such was -- Wow! -- gay. But how many people who would buy this book have missed that there is a certain nexus between the gay world and the theatre world?

The other goal is to just dish, and that could make for a fun book. But what Hadleigh wants to dish about often makes him seem like someone who stepped out of a time machine from 1986.

This is a book most excited about the likes of Carol Channing, how bad CATS was, Michael Bennett, and AIDS. Except for the coverage of RENT, this book reads as if it was written two decades ago-plus by a show music fan of a certain age. Mary Martin? Harold Lang? THE BOYS IN THE BAND?

I suppose there is value in getting the nuggets Hadleigh has mined from dishy conversations in piano bars and after cabaret shows down in print, and I am sincere in that.

But readers going from the title will be disappointed. This book is largely a meandering anthropological survey of the Broadway scene from about 1948 to 1988. Special attention is paid to who was gay and which among them died of AIDS. Special attention is paid to performers and shows most of interest to people who were attending to the aforesaid scene during those years, and thus chapters on the controversy over Jonathan Pryce in MISS SAIGON, whether or not Ethel Merman was nice, and magnificently "floppish" shows (a cultish in-joke cherished largely by fans the age of Ken "Not Since Carrie" Mandelbaum).

One chapter follows another for no apparent reason; it's like a transcript of a conversation you could have with an august old gent at Don't Tell Momma's.

If you wouldn't mind having that conversation, pick this one up. Otherwise, be under no impression that this is, in the true sense, a book.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Incoherent Mess, July 16, 2007

By 

V. Addams - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Broadway Babylon (Hardcover)

Disappointing isn't even the word. This is one of the most amateur excuses for a coherent book I've ever seen. Entire chapters are merely pulled quotes from various theatre-folk past and present on random subjects without any apparent point or organization. This isn't writing, it's editing by a publicist. What chapters are supposedly authored by this Boze Hadleigh are written without color or insight and explained as if to a Broadway novice, when--who are we kidding?--the only audience for this kind of thing is the Broadway afficianado. In appropriating the title "Broadway Babylon" Hadleigh doubtless wanted to invoke Kenneth Anger's legendary unmasking of Hollywood's seamier underside. Those expecting similar tales but of the Great White Way, will be doubly disappointed when they take stock of this cheap collection of card catalogue anecdotes and out of context quotations.