Not Bad for Delancey Street
The Rise of Billy Rose
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
He was amazing. “A little man with a Napoleonic penchant for the colossal and magnificent, Billy Rose is the country’s No. 1 purveyor of mass entertainment,” Life magazine announced in 1936. The Times reported that with 1,400 people on his payroll, Rose ran a larger organization than any other producer in America. “He’s clever, clever, clever,” said Rose’s first wife, the legendary Fanny Brice. “He’s a smart little goose.” Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose is the first biography in fifty years of the producer, World’s Fair impresario, songwriter, nightclub and theater owner, syndicated columnist, art collector, tough guy, and philanthropist, and the first to tell the whole story of Rose’s life. He combined a love for his thrilling and lucrative American moment with sometimes grandiose plans to aid his fellow Jews. He was an exaggerated exemplar of the American Jewish experience that predominated after World War II: secular, intermarried, bent on financial success, in love with Israel, and wedded to America. The life of Billy Rose was set against the great events of the twentieth century, including the Depression, when Rose became rich entertaining millions; the Nazi war on the Jews, which Rose combated through theatrical pageants that urged the American government to act; the postwar American boom, which Rose harnessed to attain extraordinary wealth; and the birth of Israel, where Rose staked his claim to immortality. Mark Cohen tells the unlikely but true story, based on exhaustive research, of Rose’s single-handed rescue in 1939 of an Austrian Jewish refugee stranded in Fascist Italy, an event about which Rose never spoke but which surfaced fifty years later as the nucleus of Saul Bellow’s short novel The Bellarosa Connection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cohen author of Overweight Sensation, a biography of 1960s comedian Allan Sherman moves from the fringes of the entertainment world to the center of the action with a biography of show business legend Billy Rose, a songwriter, impresario, nightclub owner, art collector, and producer who for good measure was also a central figure in the American Jewish community of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. Cohen ably describes Rose's mind-bending shows and productions, like a 1935 production entitled Jumbo that included horses, monkeys, and an elephant and was performed in New York City's Hippodrome, and a production for the Fort Worth Centennial featuring an outdoor-theater restaurant constructed on an artificial lagoon that boasted the world's largest revolving stage. Cohen also chronicles Rose's efforts to aid European Jews caught up in the vortex of WWII and to support the newly created Israeli government by, among other things, helping engineer a cloak-and-dagger arrangement to secure military arms. Although Cohen doesn't ignore Rose's penchant for tough dealing, or his celebrity divorces (one from the original Funny Girl, Fanny Brice), he focuses on Rose's successes and affectionately captures Rose's outsize personality. Readers will find Rose entertaining company.