Pop culture can be immediately disposable. It's a point Rob Ebner's HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITIES: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? unintentionally and repeatedly makes.
The book was published in 2013 and is available on KINDLE UNLIMITED. The point? To update you on where your favorites of the past are now.
Ebner applies the term "favorites" fr too liberally. Most of these people aren't just forgotten, they were never really what you would consider "known."
FRIENDS is not covered in the book which largely focuses on pop culture from the 50s and early 60s. But let me use it as an example. To say that any of the core six stars were celebrities is no stretch of the truth. You can even include Maggie Wheeler who played Janis across 19 episodes of the series. But when you start including minor characters that honestly weren't played by celebrities . . .
The no-names are generally no-names because they are never wars. And Ebner lacks the talent and skill to make the case that they made any contribution at all.
Ebner is a very bad writer who writes a brief bio like this: "Candy Leigh starred in BLONDES AND GIGGLES with Marilyn Monroe" and a paragraph later writes, "Candy Leigh's films include the biblical epic REHOBOAM SON OF SOLOMON and BLONDES AND GIGGLES." Now if Candy Leigh had something interesting she did onscreen, some riveting moment? It's never noted. In some cases, even listing the real life marriages is beyond Ebner's grasp.
So we're left with dull character sketches on people we never knew and have no reason at all to want to know.
Patty Duke. Let me do a brief sketch that could go in a book like this:
A child actress who would eventually be diagnosed bi-polar late in her life, Patty Duke came to fame on Broadway as Helen Keller in THE MIRACLE WORKER starring Anne Bancroft. When the play was turned into a film, Duke and Bancroft would recreate their roles with both winning Academy Awards for their portrayals (Duke winning for Best Supporting Actress). Following this film, Patty would enter the American collective conscious starring in THE PATTY DUKE SHOW where she played identical cousins Patty and Cathy. The show's theme song became as memorable as the show itself and Patty used the fame to start a brief recording career which led to two top forty hits. She then transitioned into adult roles starring with Barbara Perkins and Sharon Tate in the blockbuster VALLEY OF THE DOLLS -- the seventh biggest box office film of 1967. Patty's career had brights spots in the sixties that largely ended in 1971 when, in an acceptance speech at the Emmys, she came off drunk or drugged on national television. This sloppy appearance (which Duke decades later blamed on being bi-polar and not on her frequent drug use) took place at the same time Patty had turned her private life into a spectacle claiming that she was pregnant with Desi Arnaz Jr.'s son. While his father Desi Arnaz publicly welcomed the idea and embraced the child when the boy was born, Lucille Ball felt that Patty was lying and saw her as drug using trash who started an affair with Lucy's underage son Desi Jr. Baby, baby, who's the daddy was a big scandal in real time. John Astin (Gomez on THE ADAMS FAMILY) was also a potential father per Patty. She married William Tell to give her son Sean a father. She would insist in her 'true' autobiography CALL ME ANNA that either Astin or Arnaz was Sean's father and she never slept with William Tell before marrying him but that, like so many of Patty Duke's claims, turned out to be another lie. 23 years after he was born, Sean took a test (1994) which determined that William Tell was his father.
So that gives you a lively sketch.
In the book, we instead get no mention of Patty's Emmy meltdown (again, this derailed her career -- she'd followed the film VALLEY OF THE DOLLS with the hit ME, NATALIE (she won a Golden Globe for the film) and then did the TV movie MY SWEET CHARLIE (1970) to further cement her adult stature. But all the applause stopped when she came off high or intoxicated during her rambling speech. There is no mention of Patty's lies passing Desi Jr. off as the father or the very public comments from Desi's parents (again, his father told the press how happy he was while his mother made clear that Patty Duke was trash and she didn't believe her). Despite the many lies in CALL ME ANNA, Ebner mentions the book and treats it as gospel.
Seriously, how much of an exposed liar can you be? She wrote in that eighties book that the father of her son Sean was either Desi or John and she knew this, she wrote, because she never slept with William Tell until she married him and she married him only after she was pregnant to give her son a father. That's what she wrote. But the 90s blood test determined that Tell was Sean's father.
She's an exposed liar -- and that's not the only lie she put into that 'autobiography.'
But he ignores that.
Worst of all, he's writing about an Academy Award winning actress and he never mentions in his mini-bio that Patty won an Oscar. That's the sort of detail you lead with.
Like Patty, Ebner's a liar.
Take his Robert Blake bio. Blake was a child star who tried to transition to an adult actor and did so with a number of film roles in the 60s -- most famously with 1967's IN COLD BLOOD. The film was based on the true-crime book of the same name by Truman Capote in which Blake starred as one of the two killers.
Problem?
Ebner thinks Robert co-starred with James Woods in that film. In fact, he's so confident that he repeats that claim twice in the brief character sketch. Robert played one of the two killers, the other was played by Scott Wilson -- not James Woods. James made his Broadway debut in 1969 and his film debut in 1972's THE VISITORS. He did not co-star in the 1967 film IN COLD BLOOD.
Things like this pop up over and over throughout the book.
Along with the errors and the omissions, there's the reality that the brief bios aren't interesting. A bad book on every level.
