Hollywood Requiem - Hardcover

Freeborn, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671727494 ISBN 13: 9780671727499

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1991

Synopsis

Commissioned to pen the autobiography of one of Hollywood's most glamorous and reclusive actresses, Dan Springer falls into the web of a stellar seductress who uses love as a lethal weapon

About this title

From Library Journal:

When best-selling ghost writer Dan Springer is offered the chance to "do" the memoirs of actress Nina Hardy, a fabled, reclusive 53-year-old Hollywood legend, he jumps at it (and the $1 million advance), little figuring to fall in love and lose his wife, New England home, career, and maybe his life. The characters are lively if cliched, and the bicoastal cultural, business, physical, and (im)moral ambiences are well caught in the twin worlds (equally sleazy) of big-time moviemaking and publishing. Author Freeborn, however, fails to make Nina enough of a mysterious, sexy object of Dan's so complete downfall. Also the often dense and repetitive wordiness is just that, not the noir ish psychological web promised on the dust jacket. (Nor is its reference to Fatal Attraction at all true-- Sunset Boulevard , yes.) The book catches fire (along with Dan's refurbished writing barn) near the end, but it's a bit too little too late.
- David Bartholomew, NYPL
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

The pseudonymous Freeborn's ( The Stark Truth ) second novel teeters despite his endearingly chatty, amusing style. Ghostwriter Daniel Springer lives in Manhattan with his on-again-off-again wife, who is known as the Fawn. Penning the "autobiography" of Nina Hardy, a beautiful, reclusive actress who had been his adolescent idol, Springer jets between New York and Los Angeles for interviews, meetings and negotiations. In the process, he loses his wife to his publisher's brother, falls in love (again) with Hardy, and must come to terms with the fact that his paramour is not at all the woman he thought her to be. The last few chapters, surprising, suspenseful, often humorous and almost always touching, only partially redeem the previously tepid narrative.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0671727494
• ISBN 13: 9780671727499
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 281