Starting with William Mann's How To Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood. In his book, Mann looks at the image of love: Elizabeth Taylor. No other person has personified love and sex as much as Taylor. Mann charts how one woman has come to symbolize so much and you start to wonder if this is how Aphrodite and Cleopatra's fame was first charted? Paparazzi gets its toe hold with the rise of Elizabeth and that's for obvious reasons.
It's a lively read with Mann landing on key moments in Taylor's life to document what makes a legend. Darwin Porter's also concerned with a legend, Steve McQueen.
Steve McQueen: King Of Cool Tales Of A Lurid Life is Porter's book and it's a page turner as well -- one interested in offering something other than the traditional stories about the late actor Steve McQueen. So you'll find out about how Elizabeth Taylor blew him off -- one of the few who ever did. And you find out about his sexual entanglements with Joan Crawford, Paul Newman, Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando and many, many more.
His difficult life is charted with his mother repeatedly dropping him off with relatives and repeatedly bringing him to live with her and her abusive boyfriends, his gang filled youth, his working in bordellos in Latin America, and somehow, it all adds up to the knowledge he'll need to make it in Hollywood.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"