Customer Reviews

Hollywood Beauty: Linda Darnell and the American Dream

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
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Ronald L.Davis' study of the beautiful 'Fox Girl', Linda Darnell is one written with great kindness and respect to this most wonderful lady. This book does not delve into the trash and gossip that often is cruelly and unnecessarily found in film star biographies. Davis looks at Linda with a caring pen and writes about her fairly. Although he writes about her personal troubles he does so gently with heart and understanding. He spent many hours interviewing her daughter Charlotte, her sisters Undeen and Monte, her brother Cal and numerous friends. This helps to give the book a personal feel that is not found in those written from archives and second hand news. I adored Linda before reading this book and when I finished he cemented my adoration of the Lady forever.

I always liked Linda Darnell. My mother had told me about her when I was in my early teens, saw some of her films, and was quite taken by her. She wasn't a great actress, but she certainly wasn't a bad one, either. But when you look like that, who cares? Linda, born Monetta Eloyse Darnell in Texas, was blessed, or cursed, with a strikingly beautiful face. Pushed by her volatile, ambitious mother, Linda was signed to a contract at 20th Century Fox at the age of 15. Touted as Fox's "Glory Girl", she was featured in several films as a decorative brunette. With her lovely "Latin" looks (her grandfather actually was part Cherokee) and voluptuous figure, she adorned the screen in films such as "The Mask of Zorro" and "Blood and Sand", playing "good girls". When her box-office appeal started to wane, she was still barely over 20 years old. Her personal problems began to mount, dealing with her overbearing mother, a mounting drinking problem that began when she was married to her first husband, (who was some twenty-odd years older), and the fact that she could not bear children. Ms. Darnell's career picked up, however, when she started playing gorgeous "bad girls" in films such as "Fallen Angel", "Hangover Square", and the overblown costume epic "Forever Amber", in which she played an upwardly mobile woman of ill repute. Her best role, as the golddigger with a tender heart in Joseph Mankiewicz's "A Letter to Three Wives", came in 1949, but from then on it was pretty much downhill. Ms. Darnell's personal life became a series of unhappy marriages, exploitative relationships, a spotty career, alcoholism, and ultimately ended in a spectacularly awful way: she was horribly burned in a house fire in 1965, with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 90% of her body,lingered for about 33 hours, and died, aged 41.
The book is a quick, albeit depressing read. Ronald Davis, also a native Texan, writes with compassion for his subject. Several interviews with her siblings, friends, and adopted daughter give a sympathetic portrayal of the "Fallen Angel". To put it in a nutshell, Ms. Darnell wasn't tough enough to handle the ups and downs of show business. Her tale isn't the first nor the last about the cruel world of showbiz, but it just seems even more depressing, when one thinks of the beauty with the face of a Madonna, going downhill at such a young age, and dying so horribly. I may add that there are eerie foreshadowings of her demise in three of her best known films. In "Hangover Square", she is strangled by Laird Cregar, who places her body on a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Day; in "Anna and the King of Siam", Linda, playing the runaway concubine Tuptim, is burned at the stake; and in "Forever Amber", she bears witness to the Great Fire of London. Creepy, isn't it?
Just a word of warning: Don't read this book if you're depressed!

One of those books you don't want to put down- sensitively written the author follows Darnell's career and personal life-highlighting how much the beauriful Darnell was liked by her contemporaries in the movie world. A must to add to any library.

This was the only bio I could find on Linda Darnell and I must say, it was worth the money. The author's honest depiction and narrative of this actress is wonderfully written. I highly recommend this insightful biography!

Very well, written, but the author couldn't decide the year of Linda's birth. On the copyright page, one year of birth was given, then in the book, another year. It made me question the other facts. Aside from that, the book was very interesting-- the strange homelife, the thyroid problem, the marriages, the films, the decline of her acting career and the section on her burning and death are just gripping. I recommend this one.

"Hollywood Beauty" is a thoroughly well researched bio of the late actress, Linda Darnell. It definitely portrays a tough, life in the Tinseltown whirlwind. HB also offers a solid overview of life in the old studio system that wedded performers to one autocratic employer. We read how actors were assigned to a picture, then suddenly pulled or shuffled off to another job with no thought given to personal feelings or effects on careers. Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck and director Joseph l. Mankiewicz are portrayed as hedonistic cads. This reviewer is too young to remember but that system broke up in the early 1950s. TV was the culprit. Fewer Americans were going out to movies so fewer films were made. Linda was cut by Fox but such stars as Clark Gable, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, and Jeanne Crain also received pink slips. This reviewer encountered one minor disappointment with HB: He would like to have learned more about the making of that classic, brooding western, "My Darling Clementine". How did LD like react to working with director John Ford? (Do we remember that scene where she tries to cheat Henry Fonda at cards?). That minor complaint aside, HB is highly recommended to movie fans of any age. One may be too young to remember LD but that is what VHS and DVDs are for! Some may believe that HB is a sad story but this reviewer disagrees. For all her troubles, LD never gave up. She hung in there through it all and was gainfully working as a stage actress right up to her untimely death in that fire. Readers should enjoy HB more if they approach with an optimistic mindset and a desire to learn of the old Hollywood studio system that is gone forever, for better or worse. Most likely the latter.

Just a great book for those of us who want to know more about this late beautiful Hollywood star.
It touches on events and relationships that turned this most beautiful, gifted and talented Lady from such a sweet, considerate young girl (who looks so happy in photos caressing her pet rabbit [not in this book], and who actually brought an unusual family pet [gotta read the book] with her to Hollywood)...to a sweet, considerate and giving, but alcoholic, course and used up, yet still highly professional Hollywood Star.
An "if only" story that can tear your heart out. It did and does mine. (To have posted this review yesterday...oh,[you gotta read the book])

Linda Darnell has been a long favorite of mine, so to read "Hollywood Beauty: Linda Darnell and the American Dream," was a real treat. Well written, with a good insight to this lady as both an actress and woman.

Madam Shopper
http://www.marchars.com

I have not read the book however I gave it 5 stars for the purpose of being gracious to the author. My comment is about the death of Linda Darnell. Oh course I do not know if this it true for I have no way to find out, that is, that I am willing to give the time and effort to... Back in the early 90's at the Georgian, a Retirement home in Evanston, IL., now torn down & being rebuilt; the property is owned by the Mather which is across the street..., I met a very old woman whom I visited each week for 7 years while my aunt lived at the Georgian just down the hall from this old woman. This old gal was well educated and well traveled. She told me Linda Darnell died in a fire in her own family's home, and that is the same fire where she got the burns which left her with plenty of scars. This woman was from OLD money and plenty of it, she had never married. She worked for her whole career as a reference librarian for Northwestern University. Her understanding was that Linda had been smoking in bed. She also stated servants had tried to rescue her but they could not get up the stairs due to smoke. Her name was Helen Perkins. Maybe someone could find out if she told me the truth. Helen died at the Wagner, the nursing home building owned by the Georgian I believe in late 1995 or early 1996. Helen had a younger sister who had children and one of these sons would visit Helen at the Georgian.