Roy Hoopes (1922–2009)

The silver screen lit up with “Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Dark Victory,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” and “Wuthering Heights” in Hollywood’s Golden Year of 1939. The rest of the world was much darker: Adolph Hitler invaded Poland, extinguishing lights around the world.

Two years later, Hollywood went to war.

This is the story of the stars who served. It is the story those who raised money selling bonds. It is show more the story of those who put themselves in danger entertaining the troops on the front lines.

Reading like a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s A-list of the 1930s and the 1940s, these are the wartime stories of the men and women who went to war on and off the screen.

Although the book has a tendency to lean toward gossipy-ness, it spins out its stories as a tribute to the contributions of the men and women who stepped up to do what they could in wartime. It’s interesting reading, especially for aficionados of Hollywood’s Golden Age and/or the history of the Second World War.

The book is replete with photographs and includes an extensive bibliography and source list.

Highly recommended. show less

Ralph Ingersoll, b. 1900. My notes say this biog is "amazingly readable" even though Hoopes's writing is "pedestrian."

1924. "We were drunk almost every night and each one of us drinks for a different reason." Ingersoll's life in the 1920's was "one long pursuit of a hangover." A Yale graduate, he was an early writer for The New Yorker, writing and editing "Talk of the Town."

At one point, Ingersoll and Lillian Hellman were an item--really? Yes.

Ingersoll worked on several magazines throughout show more his career; he was "primarily responsible" for bring Life mag into existence. He also worked on Time mag. It's hard to imagine in 2010, but the older staffers at Time in the 1930s tended to be conservative.

Ingersoll wrote a bitchy novel, *The Great Ones.* Oh, was he an angry man. Claire Booth Luce's biographer calls the novel a "thinly disguised and embittered caricature" of Claire, Harry Luce, and Time magazine. If you know anything about the period, this thing certainly isn't much "disguised."

A plus: the biography contains an index and sources. show less