Simon Louvish Books In Order

The Days of Miracles and Wonders

This series is designed to bring to North American readers the once unheard voices of writers who have achieved wide acclaim at home, but are not recognized beyond the borders of their native lands. With special emphasis on women writers, Interlink’s Emerging Voices series publishes the best of the world’s contemporary literature in translation or original English.

The Silencer

Joe Dekel is sent to cover an Israeli Palestinian peace conference in New York, he is waylaid by an earnest young American Jew who informs him he is Dekel’s ‘silencer’, representing a right wing blacklister to keep pro Palestinian literature from being published in the USA.

The Resurrections

In the tradition of Fatherland and The Man in the High Castle, Simon Louvish presents a vision of an alternative 20th century one in which Hitler and Trotsky lived well into the late 1960s. Louvish’s politically charged thriller forces readers to reexamine recent history and ponder what might have been.

It’s a Gift

frontis., 25 b&w photos, illus. Harold Bissonette owns a small-town grocery store in New Jersey, running the daily gauntlet of his nagging wife, demanding daughter, loud-mouthed son, prudish townspeople, blind or just plain ornery customers, and of course, Baby LeRoy. But when his rich uncle Bean dies, Harold can at last realize his dream of owning an orange grove in California. From this unpromising material the genius of W. C. Fields fashioned one of the most sheerly funny comedies Hollywood ever produced. In it, the Fields persona was honed to perfection: the misanthropic curmudgeon, nursing his small triumphs over the women and small children who beset him, managing, however improbably, to transorm disaster into success. Simon Louvish has performed a splendid work of excavation in tracing back the origins in Fields’ stage work of the wonderful set pieces from which the film is constructed. But in dissecting the origins and techniques of the routines, Louvish does not murder the comedy, for his descriptions of Fields at work recreate the joy of watching the most anarchic and original comic Hollywood ever discovered.

The Man On the Flying Trapeze

The first biography in decades and the only accurate one of the comic genius behind Larson E. Whipsnade, Egbert Sous, Eustace McGargle, and other immortal examples of the American male at bay. Everyone seems to know the story of W. C. Fields, the curmudgeon of classic film comedy his Dickensian childhood in Philadelphia, the numerous bank accounts opened around the world under outlandish names, and so on. All entertaining and all completely untrue. Simon Louvish’s meticulously researched and wonderfully entertaining biography is the first one to disentangle the facts from the pack of lies and myths mischievously nurtured by Fields himself. Louvish lovingly traces the origin of Fields’s comedy in his self authored vaudeville sketches and follows his progress from the stage where he was renowned as the world greatest juggler to silent screen to the talkies including such howlingly funny films as The Bank Dick, My Little Chickadee, and You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. He highlights his tragic struggles against studio heads, censorship, alcoholism, and illness in the course of which he created some of the greatest gems of film humor. Man on the Flying Trapeze is the story of an artist whose finest creation was himself a fully achieved, imaginary person who finally subsumed his creator, to the immense benefit of us all.

Monkey Business

Monkey Business is the first comprehensive biography of all five Marx brothers Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo. It features the first authentic account of their origins, their comedy roots, and their twenty four years on stage prior to their first movie, The Cocoanuts, in 1929. Monkey Business brings to life the vanished world of America’s variety circuits, leading to the Marx Brothers’ Broadway success and their alliance with New York’s theatrical lions, George S. Kaufman and the Algonquin Round Table. Louvish showcases well minted Marxian dialogue, and much madness and mayhem in this tale of the Brothers’ Hollywood battles, their films, their loves and marriages, and the story of the forgotten brother Gummo, who never appeared on screen. Salvador Dali’s ‘missing’ script for Harpo, the true identity of the long suffering Margaret Dumont, and the politics of ‘Marxism la Groucho’ all contribute to this definitive biography of these beloved brothers.

Stan and Ollie : The Roots of Comedy

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have remained, from 1927 to the present day, the screen’s most famous and popular comedy double act, celebrated by legions of fans. But despite many books about their films and individual lives, there has never been a fully researched, definitive narrative biography of the duo, from birth to death. Louvish traces the early lives of Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy and the surrounding minstrel and variety theatre, which influenced all of their later work. Louvish examines the rarely seen solo films of both our heroes, prior to their serendipitous pairing in 1927, in the long lost short ‘Duck Soup.’ The inspired casting teamed them until their last days. Both often married, they found balancing their personal and professional lives a nearly impossible feat. Between 1927 and 1938, they were able to successfully bridge the gap between silent and sound films, which tripped up most of their prominent colleagues. Their Hal Roach and MGM films were brilliant, but their move in 1941, to Twentieth Century Fox proved disastrous, with the nine films made there ranking as some of the most embarrassing moments of cinematic history. In spite of this, Laurel and Hardy survived as exemplars of lasting genius, and their influence is seen to this day. The clowns were elusive behind their masks, but now Simon Louvish can finally reveal their full and complex humanity, and their passionate devotion to their art. In Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy, Louvish has seamlessly woven tireless and thorough research into an authoritative biography of these two important and influential Hollywood pioneers.

Keystone

From the author of Stan and Ollie a funny, fresh, and compelling look at Hollywood’s Original King of Comedy. From his early aspirations to sing opera, to his time under the tutelage of D. W. Griffith, to the fortune and notoriety that his uncanny eye for talent deservedly brought him, Mack Sennett stood behind his belief in individuality and originality. Now, more than eighty years after Sennett rose to heights that epitomized the American dream, the acclaimed biographer of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and W. C. Fields offers a compelling account of comedy’s transformation at the hands of a true master. Regarded as the father of American slapstick, Sennett iron worker, boilermaker, actor, director, producer, writer, and creator of the infamous Keystone Kops held audiences in thrall to a world where chaos was order and banana peels, car crashes, and leaps from tall buildings were a matter of course. As the cameras rolled and vaudeville gags morphed into celluloid wonders, the rising stars of Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, and Gloria Swanson were born. Behind it all was the ‘King of Comedy,’ governing from his office bathtub. In this irresistible journey into early Hollywood at its peak, Simon Louvish crafts a fascinating portrait of the enigmatic entrepreneur. Through film scripts, telegrams, even liquor bills, Sennett’s world is skillfully re created, offering a rare and humorous glance into the infancy and innocence of moving pictures.

Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin

Sex goddess, Hollywood star, transgressive playwright, author, blues singer, and vaudeville brat Mae West remains the twentieth century’s greatest comedienne. She made an everlasting mark in trailblazing Broadway plays such as Sex and The Constant Sinner and in films such as She Done Him Wrong, Klondike Annie, and I m No Angel.
Simon Louvish, biographer of W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Keystone s Mack Sennett, brings Mae to vibrant life in this unparalleled new biography. He charts her amazing seven decades in show business, from early years in teenage summer stock to her last reincarnation as 1960s gay icon and grande dame of Hollywood survivors.
Mae West: It Ain t No Sin is the first biography to make use of Mae s recently uncovered personal papers, offering an unprecedented view into the endless creative drive and daring wit of this legendary star.

Coffee With Groucho

With a foreword by the actor, director, and playwright described as the greatest living exponent of Groucho Marx’s material by The New York Times, and text by the author of Monkey Business, a biography of the Marx Brothers, this bio brings the wisecracking, cigar chomping, eyebrow raising comedian to life on the page. Groucho discusses such issues as the film Duck Soup, the rules of comedy, the directors he worked with, and his talented brothers Harpo and Chico You know, of course, those two aren t really acting when they play those scenes. They re just being themselves. .

Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art

Cecil B. DeMille is Hollywood’s most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose biblical sagas, such as Samson and Delilah and his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, with its cast of tens of thousands before computer graphics made the modern epic mundane. Many judged DeMille a dinosaur both for his movies and his ultraconservative politics. But in his vision of the Bible as an American frontier narrative he recast this old trend in American culture as a cinematic precursor of the neoconservatism of our own times.

The paradox of DeMille goes deeper, as despite his fame, most of his seventy ?lms, of which ?fty were silent pictures, remain unknown even to avid ?lm fans, though his ?rst 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and his 1927 tale of Jesus Christ, King of Kings, linger in the imagination. A founder pioneer of Hollywood as an industry, DeMille was an unsung auteur, a master of increasingly bizarre narratives, with tales of adultery and divorce, hedonism and sin, in an age in which modernity, the consumer society, and the pursuit of money made America a battle?eld of clashing values and temptations.

Simon Louvish tells the tale of Cecil B. DeMille through his work: a major reexamination of Hollywood s most monumental founder. Savant or sinner, artist or hack, defender of freedom or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism, DeMille is a pervasive puzzle a mirror of the larger puzzle and contradictions of America itself.

Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey

An Everyman who expressed the defiant spirit of freedom, Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood’s richest man. He was a figure of multiple paradoxes, and many studies have sought to unveil ‘the man behind the mask’. But Simon Louvish’s new book following on from his five major biographies of comedy’s classic stars, from W.C. Fields to Laurel & Hardy and Mae West looks afresh at the ‘mask behind the man’. Louvish charts the tale of the Tramp himself through his films from the early Mack Sennett shorts through the major features ‘The Gold Rush’, ‘City Lights’, ‘Modern Times’, ‘The Great Dictator’ et al. He weighs the relationship between the Tramp, his creator, and his world wide fans, and in doing so retrieves Chaplin as the iconic London street kid who carried the ‘surreal’ antics of early British Music Hall triumphantly onto the Hollywood screen. Louvish also looks anew at Chaplin’s and the Tramp’s social and political ideas the challenge to fascism, defiance of the McCarthyite witch hunts, eventual ‘exile’, and last mature disguises as the serial killer ‘Monsieur Verdoux’ and the dying English clown Calvero in ‘Limelight’. This book is an epic journey, summing up the roots of Comedy and its appeal to audiences everywhere, who revelled in the clown’s raw energy, his ceaseless struggle against adversity, and his capacity to represent our own fears, foibles, dreams, inner demons and hopes.