Latest news with #biography
Mail & Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Come now, spill the beans on Sol
Sol: My Friend and Adversary, Sol Kerzner by Peter Venison (J DoubleD Publicity, 2025) Sometimes it's better to take no action than to take the wrong action. Peter Venison should have rather used his retirement to improve his golf handicap or something. At the beginning of this biography, he confirms that the only reason he put pen to paper was that he had been searching for a Sol Kerzner biography at an Exclusive Books store and hadn't found any. Being the man of action that he portrays himself to be, Venison took on the task of waxing lyrical about one of South Africa's greatest sons. Sol Kerzner! The Sol Kerzner! Remember him? If you're a 1980s baby like me and whenever you asked your parents for soccer boots and they said, 'I just paid for your school fees, I don't have money for soccer boots … I can't buy everything, I am not Sol Kerzner!' Yes, that guy. Venison thought we needed to immortalise him with a half-cooked book that features half the writer's family emigrations and important promotions. It was a gonzo journalism-inspired idea. Put the writer at the centre of the story, push the subject to the edges and Hunter S Thompson has competition. The book is not entirely crap. It's just that if I had 20 years of working with a man whose name is synonymous with success, I'd like to think I would produce a book far more detailed than what a long-form magazine would have done. For example, Venison says he worked at the Lost Palace construction site circa 1975. Yet he has limited details of what transpired during construction, bar the fact that it was built at record speed. Yeah, am sure it was. We could have pulled a newspaper clipping to confirm that. But I am being unfair. Venison did tell a story no writer has managed to publish. The previous one who tried to was stopped by the courts after Kerzner got an interdict, literally the night before publication. There are exciting parts to the book, Kerzner's adult-rated rants to his staff being my favourite. He was not your typical Jewish boy. He swore. A lot. He drank like a fish and loved his ladies (according to the book he was married three times, but others say four times). But Sol was also super smart and had made accounting partner at a firm in Johannesburg by 29. His story is one of perseverance and determination to be rich. Seemingly nothing else. Sol was driven by the wish to live a good life. He hailed from Troyeville via Durban. Like any township boy narrative, he just wanted to make it so he can ball out. He wasn't trying to be a professor of anything. He wanted to get cash so he could pay for the private jet and the big houses. He was unmistakable to today's tenderpreuner. It wasn't that deep for him. It was all about the Benjys. The true difference, we're told, was that he wasn't willing to take shortcuts to get to his ultimate dream, that of being rich. He built his empire one hotel — sometimes two — at a time. He bent rules and influenced (and bribed a few apartheid government officials) to get his land approvals. He wasn't exactly a corporate governance advocate. In fact I think he was just following the corrupt ways of the Calvinist apartheid state. He was no angel and he didn't pretend that he was one. Anyway, for Venison to now write a book that gives us newspaper highlights such as the Matanzima bribery incident, without letting us into the inner conversations of that time, is weird. It's like, what was the use of Matanzima being second-in-command at Sun International if he isn't going to spill the beans? Sol is long gone … we can't arrest him now. Tell us the full thing, maan! Anyway, I enjoyed reading about a prominent South African business person who started a company that has gone to be internationally renowned and employed a shitlot of our people. God knows we need to get our people employed. Sun International is one of those local companies that punches above their weight, in the same vein as Shoprite, Bidvest, Sibanye-Stillwater, Sasol, Nandos, Aspen… Companies that are South African by birth but now live across the world. I would encourage anyone who likes the art of building an empire to read this one. For history aficionados, I would suggest you wait for the real biography. I am sure it's still coming.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rock's Legends Were Messy. You'd Never Know That From Today's Movies.
Like any qualified rock 'n' roll dork, I began consuming the lore around the music early. I was a tenderhearted tween Beatlemaniac when I picked up Albert Goldman's 1988 biography, 'The Lives of John Lennon,' still a landmark of salaciousness. There followed, in some rough order, 'The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,' by Stanley Booth; 'Hellfire,' Nick Tosches' incendiary character study of Jerry Lee Lewis; and 'Hammer of the Gods,' Stephen Davis's blow-by-blow exegesis of Led Zeppelin. I am strait-laced by disposition, so I was rendered slack jawed by the toxic excesses of rock stardom described in these books, or at least the parts I could grasp well enough to conjure a mental picture. Some things — things you should never Google about Led Zeppelin and mud sharks — remain blissfully outside my ken. I'm strait-laced but not a prude. Over time, I came to understand that sex and drugs and sharks are among the ancillary consequences of taking the world's most gifted, vain and emotionally marginal people, placing them in stressful situations and giving them bottomless expense accounts. Nature simply takes its course. People used to seem endlessly entertained by hearing appalling stories about the results. The feral behavior of even middling musicians was the draw for VH1 programs like 'Behind the Music,' which was light on music but quite detailed about behinds, or '100 Most Shocking Music Moments.' (No. 97 featured Chuck Negron, of Three Dog Night, explaining how a certain part of his body 'exploded' following an exceedingly ambitious surfeit of human contact.) I will admit that I, too, came to relish these tales. I like Mötley Crüe just fine, but I loved Neil Strauss's medium-ironic group history, 'The Dirt,' from 2001 — again, light on music and heavy on dirt, including things you should never Google about Mötley Crüe and burritos. Music documentaries and biopics now feel like a larger part of the entertainment ecosystem than ever, but they've traveled a long distance from that tabloid bonanza. Today's rock historians echo groundbreaking filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, treating rock 'n' roll as serious intellectual business. Early this year, 'A Complete Unknown,' James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, did respectably at the box office, bringing figures like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into a modern frame. Soon after, in Bernard MacMahon's documentary 'Becoming Led Zeppelin,' you could watch that band coalesce, transforming from an also-ran version of the Yardbirds into a juggernaut whose unique combination of brute force and strange, feminine vulnerability has rendered them an insoluble legend. Yet in both, something seems to be missing. If you, like me, have mentally cataloged the countless forms of bad behavior that marked the Dylan and Zeppelin years these films cover, you find yourself practically jonesing for a scene of rampant chemical intake or at least a television being hurled through a hotel window. Aside from Robert Plant's glancing mention of the ambient feeling of drugs and girls arriving on the scene as Zeppelin's fame grew, a blissful innocent could watch MacMahon's film and believe the individuals on the screen endured the Caligula-like high-water mark of their fame with the quiet dignity of devoted family men. These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own. It's not that I want to see the nasty stuff for fun; a lot of it is depressing, idiotic, cruel or seriously criminal. The question is what is actually true and how much we care about it. There was a time when we were prepared to hear all sorts of shocking tales, but today's filmmakers seem to be moving expediently in the opposite direction — toward cleaned-up, on-message image-making, the sorts of revised mythologies fans are eager to engage. Consider, for instance, the Disney+ documentary 'The Beach Boys.' The band started off writing songs about surfing and cars, to match contemporary trends, and were photographed in matching striped shirts that, in some crucial way, they were never allowed to take off; they would become emblems of a carefree baby-boomer adolescence, the innocent 'before' in the before-and-after picture of the 1960s. But perhaps more than any other band of the era — an enormously high bar — the Beach Boys' story only got stranger, with problems ranging from the typical (drugs, alcohol, fights, lawsuits) to the infamous (Brian Wilson's yearslong breakdown) to the bizarre (Dennis Wilson's brief acquaintance with Charles Manson, whose song 'Cease to Exist' the band recorded a version of). In 1983, the secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned the group from performing a Fourth of July concert on the Washington Mall, on the basis of their degeneracy. Very little of this is covered in the documentary. By its very nature, it needs to see the Beach Boys the way their fellow Californian Ronald Reagan must have when he moved to restore their annual Washington gig — as a sunny redoubt of wholesome Americana, a totem of nostalgia too sturdy for those details to topple. One simple explanation for today's hagiographies is that everyone involved is eager to cement a musical legacy, not sort through unflattering gossip. The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin are in their 70s and 80s now, fathers and grandfathers; they have, in various ways, assumed an austere dignity. As for filmmakers, looking at some of the band's past behavior through today's eyes must be just as unappetizing. Their films would be expected to devote half their run time to weighty moral investigations; almost inevitably, the music would be subsumed by the outrage. But there is also, increasingly, the question of brand value, the preservation of intellectual property for maximum future profit. 'A Complete Unknown,' for instance, skirts the speedy, druggy side of Dylan's early work; it even massages the particulars of Dylan's personal life such that within the film's love triangle, there is no mention at all of his pregnant soon-to-be-wife, Sara Lownds. My 79-year-old mother, who has excellent taste, loved the film and walked out eager to engage with Dylan's music, despite being more of a show-tunes lady. She might not have been so smitten with a less tidy version of his life. It's not just the artist's reputation that is at stake. In 2020, Dylan sold his catalog of more than 600 songs to Universal Music Group for a reported $300 million. Many other big-ticket acts have cashed in their catalogs in recent years, including Bruce Springsteen (sold to Sony for an estimated $550 million) and Queen (also to Sony, for what is said to be more than $1 billion). These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own; why tarnish their value with off-brand looks at their creators? There's a quote often attributed to the Illinois senator Everett Dirksen: 'A billion here, and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.' Profit motive, fan service, squeamishness — all are present. On the other hand, I recently worked on a liner-notes project for a beloved band that was notorious for its excesses, to the point where the musicians' sheer will to debasement will always feature in the first two paragraphs of their Wikipedia overview. The more time I spent with their story, though, the less I found their self-destructiveness as interesting as their constructiveness — the factors that made four reprobates hold things together long enough to make a handful of generationally defining albums. Once you've heard about enough toxic behavior, a certain tedium sets in. The familiar pileups of sex and drugs and narcissism start to feel less like a thrill ride and more like a dull narrative cul-de-sac. People don't remember the saxophonist Dexter Gordon for his heroin addiction; they remember him for 'I Can't Get Started.' For even the most debauched of our great musicians, time is on their side. Elizabeth Nelson has written for The New Yorker, The Ringer, Pitchfork and others and is a singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, a band based in Washington. She last wrote for the magazine about Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump. Source photographs for illustration above: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures; Michael; Larry Hulst/Michael.
Fox News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Clint Eastwood's complicated love life, 'addictive' affairs exposed in new biography
NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Clint Eastwood is a man of many layers. In a new biography written by filmmaker Shawn Levy, "Clint: The Man and The Movies," the legendary actor's life behind the camera is examined through past quotes from Eastwood and various peers who shed insight into his extensive romantic past and "addictive" affairs he had while married to his first wife, Maggie Johnson, and other partners. "His affairs, he later admitted to Richard Schickel, 'just became … I don't know … addictive … like you have to have another cigarette,'" Levy wrote in the book, quoting Eastwood. CLINT EASTWOOD REFLECTS ON DECADES IN HOLLYWOOD AND HIS DRIVE TO KEEP WORKING AS HE TURNS 95 Eastwood married Johnson in 1953. Throughout their 21-year marriage, Eastwood had many affairs with various women and fathered multiple children. "There were many other women, some from the ranks of classmates, some encountered at the nightspots and jazz clubs that he frequented, some from among his neighbors at the apartment complex in Studio City, near Universal, to which he and Maggie had moved when he first went under contract to the studio," Levy wrote in the book. "The atmosphere of that small apartment building — which, naturally, was centered around a swimming pool — not only encouraged sexual adventures but facilitated them; several of Clint's friends from Oakland, Seattle, and Fort Ord moved into the place or similar places nearby, meaning that there were always apartments readily available for a quick tryst — and buddies willing to help him cover his tracks." According to Levy, Eastwood was always upfront about his behavior and allegedly had an "understanding" with Johnson. "It wasn't entirely evident, though, that he needed such help. As a friend put it, 'Clint goes where he wants, does what he wants — goes to dinner with a girl if he wants. Maggie doesn't say a thing. Clint is the undisputed boss.' He referred to himself half-jokingly as a 'married bachelor,' but there were significant hints that his wife knew the score and was okay with it," Levy wrote. CLINT EASTWOOD 'S DAUGHTER SAYS 'VERY STRICT' DAD HAD THIS PIECE OF ADVICE GROWING UP "'Maggie and I have an understanding,' he was quoted as saying. 'I'm independent, a vagabond, and she accepts me as I am and doesn't strangle me with female possessiveness.' Speaking more broadly, he declared, 'Maggie doesn't chain me. The worst thing is owning people. I don't want to be owned by anybody — maybe shared, but not lock, stock, and barrel. "Love is respecting privacy, accepting faults. But I don't believe it's a one-way street. The sophisticated woman accepts that chances are a guy's not being 100 percent faithful. If she talks about it, it only makes it worse.'" Eastwood allegedly said of his relationship with Johnson, "There's no ownership in this marriage. My soul is my own. Maggie knows this. Possession is the worst thing. I'm hard to live with. … I'm moody, and lots of the time I'd rather be alone. … It took Maggie a while, but she learned." Though Johnson was aware of the trysts, Levy wrote, it's unclear if she knew just how extensive the affairs were. LIKE WHAT YOU'RE READING? CLICK HERE FOR MORE ENTERTAINMENT NEWS "Their private life was another matter, as Maggie admitted some years later when she told an interviewer, 'We're not advocates of the total togetherness theory.' It's not clear that she was aware of just how many liberties Clint took, or, for that matter, whether she availed herself of any. "But they stayed together through these lean years, despite living near enough to her family for her to make other choices, so she either didn't know or didn't care about his sexual entanglements — or she believed that they were his business and nobody else's, not even hers," Levy wrote. "It seemed to some who knew the couple that she thrived. 'She's got more steel than a hardware store,' a friend noted. 'Clint talks to her about everything.' And Clint himself admitted, 'She is the very best friend I have. She loved me when no one else did.'" A representative for Eastwood did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. The couple, who had two children together during their marriage, got divorced in 1984. Eastwood and stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis welcomed a daughter, Kimber Lynn, in 1964, while he was still married to Johnson. Eastwood married Dina Ruiz in 1996, and the couple divorced in 2014. He also had long-term relationships with actresses Sondra Locke and Frances Fisher. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT NEWSLETTER The award-winning actor and director is a father of eight: Laurie Murray, Kimber Eastwood, Kyle Eastwood, Alison Eastwood , Scott Eastwood, Kathryn Eastwood, Francesca Eastwood and Morgan Eastwood. In July 2023, Eastwood announced his girlfriend of ten years, Christina Sandera, had died. "Christina was a lovely, caring woman, and I will miss her very much," he said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter at the time. A few days later, his daughter Morgan shared a photo with the couple, noting the "devastating" loss. "A devastating loss for our whole family," Morgan wrote of Sandera, who died at the age of 61 July 18. "Thank you Christina for being a good partner to my Dad. You will be missed." Sandera's cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia, the Monterey, California, County Department of Health said in a death certificate obtained by Fox News Digital. Two years after his loss, he said he had no plans to slow down professionally. In a recent interview with the Austrian newspaper Kurier, the director, who turned 95 in May, revealed he is in pre-production on a new movie, dispelling rumors that 2024's "Juror #2" would be his final film. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP "There's no reason why a man can't get better with age," he explained. "And I have much more experience today. Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I'm not one of them."
Fox News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Gwyneth Paltrow thought Brad Pitt wasn't 'sophisticated enough' for her Hollywood tastes: book
Gwyneth Paltrow believed she was "smarter, better educated, more sophisticated" than Brad Pitt, according to a new biography. In an excerpt of "Gwyneth: The Biography," which was obtained by People, author Amy Odell detailed the early stages of the former couple's relationship and wrote about Paltrow's alleged concerns about Pitt. The pair met in 1993 during an audition for "Legends of the Fall." Paltrow didn't land the role, but later Pitt suggested her for the role opposite of him in the movie "Se7en." At the time, Paltrow was also offered a role in "Feeling Minnesota," which starred Keanu Reeves. "She consulted with a friend, who said, 'Well, who do you want to date, Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves?' Gwyneth chose 'Se7en' and Pitt, and Cameron Diaz took the 'Feeling Minnesota' part," Odell wrote. Paltrow and Pitt dated for two years before they got engaged in 1996. "Her dad [Bruce Paltrow] loved Brad. Her friends loved Brad. They thought he was the nicest guy," Odell wrote. According to the author, Paltrow had doubts about her relationship with Pitt early on. "Gwyneth expressed doubts to a crew member [while making the 1996 film 'Emma'] that Pitt was right for her, and admitted she had a crush on Hugh Grant," Odell wrote. She continued, "He was brought up very religious, in Missouri. It's just a very different world from hers, growing up in Manhattan, going to Spence, I think she thought he wasn't sophisticated enough for her. She thought she was smarter, better educated, more sophisticated." The book also references an interview Paltrow previously gave on her relationship with Pitt. "Brad and I have very different upbringings. So when we go to restaurants and order caviar, I have to say to Brad 'This is beluga and this is osetra,'" Paltrow said, per People. Pitt and Paltrow eventually called it quits in 1997. Representatives for Pitt and Paltrow did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Clint Eastwood, 95, had 'long periods of being unfaithful' and saw marriage as 'confinement', tell-all claims
Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood reportedly wasn't a strong believer in monogamy, with a new biography claiming he viewed marriage as 'a form of confinement.' The revelation comes from author Shawn Levy, who explores the actor-director's life in his new book, Clint: The Man and The Movies. Drawing on interviews, reflections, and decades of public and private insight, the biography dives deep into Eastwood's storied film career, romantic entanglements, and complex personal life. Since his rise to stardom in the early 1960s, Eastwood's love life has drawn headlines—starting with a first marriage marred by infidelity, followed by on-set affairs, a high-profile romance with a woman 33 years younger, and reportedly fathering eight children. According to the book, Eastwood's friends were 'aware that he considered marriage to be a form of confinement, and he gave himself free rein when it came to other women.' Representatives for Eastwood have been contacted for comment. Levy himself weighed in on the star's outlook in a recent interview with Fox, noting, 'There's a part of him that respects the institution of marriage. But his personal liberty, I think, eventually has equal weight, if not more weight for him. 'He always tried to treat his partners with respect, but he also always followed his passions and instincts.' 'I think, in retrospect, it's an appetite,' Levy continued. 'It's something that he found pleasure in, something he could do. 'He did it before he was famous. He did it after he became famous. 'There were periods, long periods, of his life, when he was faithful to a partner. And there were periods when he was in between partners or when he was unfaithful to his principal partner.' Levy concluded, 'He was not faithful in the traditional sense. He found monogamy to be confining, just the way he found being a studio contract actor confining.' Even Clint seemed to acknowledge his wandering ways. In a 1963 Photoplay interview, he reflected on his first marriage to Maggie Johnson, 'One thing Mag had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn't, we wouldn't be married.' The couple separated in 1978 and finalized their divorce in 1984, ending a marriage that began in 1954. Years later, he opened up further to his authorized biographer Richard Schickel in the 1997 book Clint Eastwood: A Biography. He confessed that his affairs 'just became… I don't know… addictive… like you have to have another cigarette.' That 'addictive' pull led to a tangled love life that started long before he became a household name. He met Maggie on a blind date in 1953, shortly after being discharged from the military. The pair married just six months later and remained together for more than two decades, even as Eastwood's rising stardom brought a series of affairs. While still dating Johnson, he fathered a daughter, Laurie, with another woman — a fact he allegedly didn't know at the time. During his marriage, Eastwood began a 14-year affair with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis, with whom he had another daughter, Kimber, in 1964. He later embarked on a highly publicized 13-year relationship with actress Sondra Locke, his co-star in The Outlaw Josey Wales. That affair was mired in controversy, ending in a bitter lawsuit after Locke accused him of emotional abuse and professional sabotage. She also claimed he pressured her into multiple abortions during their time together. In the midst of that relationship, Eastwood quietly fathered two more children — Scott and Kathryn — with flight attendant Jacelyn Reeves. By the early '90s, he was romantically involved with actress Frances Fisher, with whom he had a daughter, Francesca. That relationship ended after Eastwood was photographed kissing TV reporter Dina Ruiz, whom he would go on to marry in 1996. With Ruiz, Eastwood welcomed his youngest daughter, Morgan, and for years it appeared he had settled down. But their marriage unraveled in the 2010s, with Ruiz citing emotional distance and the revelation of Eastwood's new relationship — with her friend's ex-wife, Erica Tomlinson-Fisher. Eastwood and Ruiz officially divorced in 2014. Shortly afterward, Eastwood met restaurant hostess Christina Sandera at his Carmel hotel, the Mission Ranch. Despite a 33-year age gap, their relationship lasted a decade and marked one of his longest and most stable romances. Tragically, Sandera passed away in July 2024 at the age of 61. In total, Eastwood is believed to have fathered at least eight children with six different women, though he has never publicly confirmed the full count.
