20th Century Dreams Book

Max Vail (born Maxim Valesky) was at every 20th-century premiere and gala, the shadowy man photographed just behind each of its great celebrities, "a human Geiger counter, minutely responsive to stardom in all its gradations." Luckily for us, Vail kept his journals, month by month, "a tool of memory, my own humble form of jackdawism", charting his erratic progress from St Petersburg to Vienna to Zurich to Paris to Venice and of course finally to New York. Even in his own writings, Vail remains a shadow to his adored A-list, living in "the reflection of their glamour", in his own terms a "facilitator" of a particular magic "beyond the reach of fashion or changing fortune." When Vail dies, Nik Cohn collects the journals, only to find much magic-markered out. But from what's left, there's still "a few anecdotes" ripe for Cohn's words and Guy Peellaert's vivid collage art, familiar from their Rock Dreams, but here casting their net much wider. And what anecdotes they are, these 20th-Century Dreams: Josephine Baker spending a night with Trotsky and being surprised that "He never once tried to get me into bed"; Noel Coward adrift with Tallulah Bankhead on New York's sleazy Bowery in search of fresh supplies of cocaine; Gandhi and Freud having "a shared dislike of English food and a weakness for English murders"; J. Edgar Hoover as a tap-dancing bimbo entertaining surly marines; Leonard Bernstein insisting to James Baldwin that James Dean is "the real thing, a boy who loves me for myself"; a frumpish, incognito Greta Garbo caught up in the mob frenzy for a pneumatic Jayne Mansfield; Cassius Clay introducing Jackie O to the fast life; Studio 54 a blur of sweating celebrity 70s' trash; the Reagans breaking the ice by talking shoes to Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa; Diana in Prince's boudoir ("always an impetuous girl" ) and--heartbreakingly--a Marilyn Monroe who lived to be "stooped and frail" in her condo, her body found surrounded by mementoes of "Jack".After the early continental years, it's America all the way, but that trajectory tells its own story. As the pictures come closer to our time there's more colour and more flesh, but the wit, the satire, the pathos and the sheer surreality of it all remains the same. There's more truth about our extraordinary century in Cohn and Peellaert's book than you'll find in any end-of-millennium review because they identify, exploit and adore its defining feature--celebrity. --Alan StewartRead More