Works by
Gavin Lambert
(Writer)

The Slide Area (1959)
The land along Pacific Palisades is apt to slip away without warning, hence the road-side signs -- SLIDE AREA.  Narrated by a script-writer, Lambert's widely-acclaimed 1959 classic of lonely souls marooned on a glittering wasteland is a perceptive and sensitive study of human emotion.

Inside Daisy Clover (1963)
A precocious teenager chronicles her own rise from trailer-camp squalor to singing stardom by way of a supermarket talent contest.  In her journals, Daisy Clover tells the story of how she is discovered by a Hollywood producer at 14 and proceeds through large doses of work, sex, and Benzedrine to a 24-hour marriage, a nervous breakdown, retirement, and finally obscurity in New York.  A has-been before her late teens, she makes a vaudeville comeback in Atlantic City at the age of 24.  A very campy, very funny look at the frenzy of late 50s Hollywood.  The film version is frequently on cable very late at night.
  Movie:  VHS

Norman's Letter: Postscript by Lady D (1966)
A novel

The Goodbye People (1971)
Long before the term Generation X was coined, Gavin Lambert captured the seedy landscape of Los Angeles in absolute moral and physical decay.  The Goodbye People is a danse macabre, with a group of ill-sorted people who are 'always changing their addresses and phone numbers as well as their lives'.  In an atmosphere of self-indulgence, blight, and emptiness, they revolve around one another their dreams and nightmares to create a complex pattern of despair.  The beautiful people who populate Lambert's novel are both the very rich and the very poor; what intrinsically links them is an all-pervading sense of aimlessness.

On Cukor (1972, revised 2000 ) by Gavin Lambert, edited by Robert Trachtenberg
   Movie (2000) VHS

Running Time (1982)
From child starlet to screen goddess, this is the story of the meteoric rise of Baby Jewel.  Propelled through the star system by her glamorous, calculating mother, Baby's life unrolls in spools of celluloid.  In a novel more sensational and more searingly honest than any movie history would dare to be, Gavin Lambert penetrates the cut-throat, heart-break world of Hollywood.

Nazimova (1997)
"Actress Alla Nazimova rode unto Broadway from the East, bearing lightning bolts. It was 1905, and her experience in the legendary Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislavsky made her a goddess in the eyes of the first generation of fully professional American actors. Lambert's remarkable feat of theatrical history recaptures the puissant mystique of Nazimova (true believers knew her only by that name, and rolled it off their tongues like an incantation). She introduced many of the primary Ibsen and Chekhov roles to America, introducing in the process a new standard of realistic performance that swept away the wildly melodramatic style of the late 19th century. Nazimova's choice of roles and standards of performance have become so encoded in the DNA of new actresses that they all strive to be Nazimova--whether they even know what a Nazimova was. Thanks to Lambert, they can again. The book includes some of Nazimova's poetry." -- Amazon.com

Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000)

Hollywood Life (2004)
Imagine yourself cruising over to Zsa Zsa's to borrow a cup of gems or dropping by Steve McQueen's for a dip in the pool--or maybe you fancy a sauna with Charlton Heston? In 1969, Life photographer Eliot Elisofon gained an insider's access to the dream homes and private lives of Hollywood's most intriguing legends, from Mary Pickford to Natalie Wood, George Cukor to Tony Curtis. Some of his photographs were published in 1969 in his book Hollywood Style--they have since become the ultimate map of stars' homes, one that takes an intimate tour through private Hollywood in its glory days. As Hollywood Life reveals, the styles of a stars' homes are as diverse as the personalities who dwell in them. Whether Mediterranean, Tudor, or designed by such uber-chic Hollywood decorators as Billy Haines and Tony Duquette, together these houses create the hodgepodge that is Hollywood style.

The Ivan Moffat File (2004)
Fascinating portrait of Hollywood screenwriter Ivan Moffat, whose lonely, aristocratic childhood led to a precociously fashionable and sensual life in London’s High Bohemia in the late 1930s, service in director George Stevens’s World War II film documentary unit, and membership in Hollywood’s dazzling postwar expatriate community.