Audiobooks by William J. Mann

Hollywood, The True Story: Bogie and Bacall

William J. Mann is the author of ten books, including his most recent, Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime for Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, and the Lambda Literary Award for Biography for Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines. He is also the author of The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando and Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. He’s written for Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and many other publications. He’s appeared on CNN, Turner Movie Classics, the BBC, and various documentary series and films, including Scotty: The Secret History of Hollywood. His New York Times bestsellers include his books on Hepburn and Brando; How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood; Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand; and Tinseltown. For many years, Mann was an Assistant Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University. He lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

William J. Mann (Author), William J. Mann (Narrator)

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Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair

From the noted Hollywood biographer and author of The Contender comes this celebration of the great American love story—the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before. In Bogie & Bacall, William Mann offers a deep and comprehensive look at Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and the unlikely love they shared. Mann details their early years—Bogart’s effete upbringing in New York City; Bacall’s rise as a model and actress. He paints a vivid portrait of their courtship and twelve-year marriage: the fights, the reconciliations, the children, the affairs, Bogie’s illness and Bacall’s steadfastness until his death. He offers a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrait of Bacall’s life after Bogie, exploring her relationships with Frank Sinatra and Jason Robards, who would become her second husband, and the identity crisis she faced. Surpassing previous biographies, Mann digs deep into the celebrities’ personal lives and considers their relationship from surprising angles. Bacall was just nineteen when she started dating the thrice-married forty-five-year-old Bogart. How might that age gap have influenced their relationship? In addition to what she gained, what might Bacall have lost by marrying a Hollywood superstar more than twice her age? How did Bogart, a man of average looks, become one of the greatest movie stars of all time? Throughout, Mann explains the unparalleled successes of their individual careers as well as the extraordinary love between them and the legend that has endured. Filled with entertaining details and thoughtful insights based on newly available records and correspondence, Bogie & Bacall offers a fresh look at this famous couple, their remarkable relationship, and their legacy.

William J. Mann (Author), Todd Mclaren (Narrator)

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The Contender

Based on new and revelatory material from Brando's own private archives, an award-winning film biographer presents a deeply-textured, ambitious, and definitive portrait of the greatest movie actor of the twentieth century, the elusive Marlon Brando, bringing his extraordinarily complex life into view as never before. The most influential movie actor of his era, Marlon Brando changed the way other actors perceived their craft. His approach was natural, honest, and deeply personal, resulting in performances-most notably in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront-that are without parallel. Brando was heralded as the American Hamlet-the Yank who surpassed British stage royalty Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson as the standard of greatness in the mid-twentieth century. Brando's impact on American culture matches his professional significance; he both challenged and codified our ideas of masculinity and sexuality. Brando was also one of the first stars to use his fame as a platform to address social, political, and moral issues, courageously calling out America's deeply rooted racism. William Mann's brilliant biography of the Hollywood legend illuminates this culture icon for a new age. Mann astutely argues that Brando was not only a great actor but also a cultural soothsayer, a Cassandra warning us about the challenges to come. Brando's admonitions against the monetization of nearly every aspect of the culture were prescient. His public protests against racial segregation and discrimination at the height of the Civil Rights movement-getting himself arrested at least once-were criticized as being needlessly provocative. Yet those actions of fifty years ago have become a model many actors follow today. Psychologically astute and masterfully researched, based on new and revelatory material, The Contender explores the star and the man in full, including the childhood traumas that reverberated through his professional and personal life. It is a dazzling biography of our nation's greatest actor that is sure to become an instant classic. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

William J. Mann (Author), Will Damron (Narrator)

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The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America's Greatest Political Family

The award-winning author presents a provocative, thoroughly modern revisionist biographical history of one of America's greatest and most influential families-the Roosevelts-exposing heretofore unknown family secrets and detailing complex family rivalries with his signature cinematic flair. Drawing on previously hidden historical documents and interviews with the long-silent "illegitimate" branch of the family, William J. Mann paints an elegant, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking group portrait of this legendary family. Mann argues that the Roosevelts' rise to power and prestige was actually driven by a series of intense personal contest that at times devolved into blood sport. His compelling and eye-opening masterwork is the story of a family at war with itself, of social Darwinism at its most ruthless-in which the strong devoured the weak and repudiated the inconvenient. Mann focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt, who, he argues, experienced this brutality firsthand, witnessing her Uncle Theodore cruelly destroy her father, Elliott-his brother and bitter rival-for political expediency. Mann presents a fascinating alternate picture of Eleanor, contending that this "worshipful niece" in fact bore a grudge against TR for the rest of her life, and dares to tell the truth about her intimate relationships without obfuscations, explanations, or labels. Mann also brings into focus Eleanor's cousins, TR's children, whose stories propelled the family rivalry but have never before been fully chronicled, as well as her illegitimate half-brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann, who inherited his family's ambition and skill without their name and privilege. Growing up in poverty just miles from his wealthy relatives, Elliott Mann embodied the American Dream, rising to middle-class prosperity and enjoying one of the very few happy, long-term marriages in the Roosevelt saga. For the first time, The Wars of the Roosevelts also includes the stories of Elliott's daughter and grandchildren. Deeply psychological and finely rendered, The Wars of the Roosevelts illuminates not only the enviable strengths but also the profound shame of this remarkable and influential family.

William J. Mann (Author), Christopher Grove (Narrator)

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Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true account of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America’s new favorite pastime and one of the nation’s largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence; yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now. In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to uncover the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse group of people who surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount Pictures, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly minted legends, and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate. A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century. “Many readers will come away from this stellar and gripping true-crime narrative utterly convinced by Mann’s solution to the unsolved 1922 gunshot murder of William Desmond Taylor, president of the Motion Pictures Directors Association…With a gift for evocative phrasing (one figure is described as having a face like a ‘living mug shot’), Mann has crafted what is likely to be a true-crime classic.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

William J. Mann (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

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