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Lucy biographer Charles Higham dies at 81


Brock

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From the NY Times:

 

By MARGALIT FOX

 

Charles Higham, a prolific celebrity biographer whose books drew vast attention for their memorably vast claims (Errol Flynn was a Nazi spy, Howard Hughes played a central role in Watergate), died on April 21 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.

 

His death, apparently of a heart attack, was announced on Wednesday by his friend Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic of The Hollywood Reporter.

 

Mr. Higham (pronounced HYE-um), who began his career as a poet, wrote some two dozen biographies, whose subjects included Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Cary Grant and Orson Welles.

 

...

 

But while they were taking Mr. Higham to task for sins from pedestrian prose to a heavy reliance on anonymous sources, reviewers sometimes admitted that the undiluted juiciness of his narratives made them hard to put down.

 

“A cloying vulgarity and coarseness suffuse this book,” Carolyn See wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 1986, reviewing his “Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball.” “But the author is either so cunning — or so closely allied in emotional terms with the subject of this biography — that the reader can’t tell if the vulgarity comes from Charles Higham or from Lucille Ball herself.”

 

MORE AT THE SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/books/charles-higham-celebrity-biographer-dies-at-81.html?_r=1

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I loved the work off of this book,but only flipped through the pages.

I kept i for the pictures only when I checked it out at the library.

I'll try and read it again...maybe..sorry to hear of the passing though

0312500041_large.jpg

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I loved the work off of this book,but only flipped through the pages.

I kept i for the pictures only when I checked it out at the library.

I'll try and read it again...maybe..sorry to hear of the passing though

0312500041_large.jpg

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