"You want to see me driving up and down the Sunset Strip in my car picking up girls, right? Well, you don't think I'd be stupid enough to let you see that side of me, do you?"-actor Warren Beatty, Esquire 1967
For more than a hundred years, we've made celebrity worship a national pastime. Celebrities charm us with their beauty, ability, and fame; we want to know everything about them. Today, for the most part, celebrities control their own media. They communicate directly with the world on X and Instagram. They produce documentaries or docuseries or write their own books.
But during the 1960s and 1970s, things were different. The press controlled the publicity. Writers employed by magazines had the freedom to publish nuanced, intimate, and occasionally revealing stories.What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? is a textbook/anthology of 19 literary, lively, and deeply reported stories that are both entertaining and historically intriguing, sourced from many of the great magazines and newspapers of the era - including Esquire, Harper's, Playboy, LIFE, The Washington Post, New York, Sport, and Cosmopolitan. Each story includes a biography or interview with the author and a postscript that adds context.
Read Doon Arbus on soul pioneer James Brown, Sara Davidson on pulp goddess Jacqueline Suzanne, Robert Ward on baseball superstar Reggie Jackson, Nora Ephron on feminist Helen Gurley Brown, Anne Taylor Fleming on the benighted and controversial writer Truman Capote, Sally Quinn on ballet's Rudolf Nureyev, Jacqueline Trescott on disco's Donna Summer, Helen Dudar on cinema beauty Lauren Bacall, Rex Reed on Ava Gardner, and more.
As it turned out, some of the writers in this anthology became celebrities in their own right-though admired by a smaller and more particular following. Employing a range of styles and reporting techniques, all put us in the room with entertainers and artists who are grappling, in some way or another, with fame - what it means to have it, sustain it, and lose it.