Gerold Frank [3 best-sellers: "I'll Cry Tomorrow" - "Too Much Too Soon" - "Beloved Infidel"] Life magazine June 1959 ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ

 

Gerold Frank

 “I’ll Cry Tomorrow”

“Too Much, Too Soon”

“Beloved Infidel”

3 best-sellers

Life magazine June 1959

ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ

 

 

 

 

Lillian Roth and Gerold Frank

 

 

 

 

 

Diana Barrymore and Gerold Frank

 

 

 

 

Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gerold Frank

   Gerold Frank is now 52, looks somewhat like a benign Erich von Stroheim, and knows Paris, Washington, New York, Cairo, Hollywood, Rome and Tel Aviv as well as he ever knew Cleveland. As a newspaperman, foreign correspondent, lecturer and magazine writer he has lived through a good many of the dramatic moments of our times. He has been totally unable to shake off his childhood conviction that “reality is what happens to somebody else,” and he is still the victim of a lifelong compulsion to discover and rediscover something he thinks his own nerve ends do not tell him: “what it is like to be alive.” Result: success.

   Frank, a frustrated poet and novelist, has substituted trips into the minds of mixed-up females for his old trips to the library and has become the world’s most eminent – and unusual – ghost writer.

   In the last four years he has produced three consecutive best-sellers:

“I’ll Cry Tomorrow”, the story of ex-Ziegfeld singer Lillian Roth’s descent into the abyss of drunkenness;

“Too Much, Too Soon”, Actress Diana Barrymore’s record of her travels to the “depths of degradation”;

and the current “Beloved Infidel”, in which British Hollywood Columnist Sheilah Graham describes her 1930s love affair with Novelist F. Scott Fiztgelard. She also confesses something even her children did not know: that for all her carefully mastered upper-class speech she was born Lily Sheil (“a name which horrifies me”) in the London slums.

   In hard-cover and paperback editions, the three books have sold six million copies and have earned, with motion picture sales and royalties from foreign language editions, a total of  $750,000.  

Susan Hayward

 

 

 

Dorothy Malone

 

 

 

   Frank is now engaged on the first person story of Zsa Zsa Gabor ("I want to find out what lies behind that beautiful face"), and this time inhabitants of the publishing world tend to discuss the project as though Miss Gabor, rather than Frank, were the collaborator.

 

Zsa Zsa Gabor and Gerold Frank

 

 

 

 

Gerold Frank and Zsa Zsa Gabor

 

 

 

The would-be collaborators

 

    Frank’s impressive batting average prompts all sorts of people to telephone him or to write letters offering their life stories in return for riches, fame or the revival of ancient glory.

   Pola Negri, Rudy Vallee, Constance Bennett, Dick Haymes and Rita Hayworth have all pressed him in vain to do “their book”.

   Widows of forgotten corporation executives, soldiers and politicians importune him to re-create their husbands in print. Dope addicts, drunks and maniacs of every kind plead for the chance to tell him their peculiar tales.

   These disturbed souls are often drawn to Frank because he seems to provide his subjects not only with money and publicity but with a cure for what ails them. All his “girls” have conquered the problems the books discussed and have inspired sympathy and even admiration in the process of telling all. Diana Barrymore, who is now a hard-working road company actress, cries, “I have been reborn, I give myself some of the credit. I’m tough. And all the money helped. But I don’t think I’d ever have done it without Gerold. Telling him about myself must have been something like going through analysis. I told him things I wouldn’t have told a priest. He was always there – like a sponge. I lied to him and I am a brilliant liar. But he’d know. Or he find out. He never raised his voice. He never seemed angry… I had to tell him the truth. I had to tell myself the truth too.”

   Like psychiatric patients, Frank’s subjects develop a curious and apparently lasting attachment to him.

   Baffled members of his own sex are continually asking Frank how he manages to extract women’s innermost secrets from them. "They wouldn't be talking to me in the first place,” he says, “if they hadn't made up their minds to do a book about themselves. But for the first two or three months they con me. They describe a person they would prefer to be. … It takes time to arrive at a working basis and I arrive at it only when the woman decides to trust me. I felt sure these women could be presented sympathetically only if the reader knew all about them, if the reader could see them whole. I think they all came to accept my view, my professional opinion.

  

 

  

 (αποσπάσματα από το εκτενές άρθρο του Paul O’Neil “Great Tell-It-All Ghost” για τον βιογράφο Gerold Frank και τις πρωταγωνίστριες των τριων βιογραφικού τύπου μπεστ-σέλλερς του. To δεύτερο και μεγαλύτερο μέρος του άρθρου αναφερόταν  στο βιβλίο που ετοίμαζε ο Gerold Frank με τις εξομολογήσεις της Zsa Zsa Gabor.)

 

  

 

Life magazine, June 29, 1959, pp. 128-139.

 

 

 

 

Zsa Zsa Gabor

Cover Photo

Life Magazine, June 29, 1959.

Background photo: Gerold Frank

 

 

 

 

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Gerold Frank

“I’ll Cry Tomorrow”

“Too Much, Too Soon”

“Beloved Infidel”

3 best-sellers

Life magazine June 1959

ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ ]