The entertainer
Subtitle: movies, magic, and my father's twentieth century
By: Margaret Talbot
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 418
ISBN-13: 9781594487064
Subjects: Travel; Actors; Biography
Description: Using the life and career of her father, writer Margaret Talbot tells the story of the rise of popular culture through a personal lens. The arc of Lyle Talbot's career is in fact the story of American entertainment. Born in 1902, Lyle left small-town Nebraska in 1918 to join a traveling carnival. From there he became a magician's assistant, an actor in a traveling theater troupe, a romantic lead in early talkies, then an actor in major Warner Bros. pictures, then an actor in cult B movies, and finally a part of the advent of television, with regular roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. In her impeccably researched narrative--a combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir--Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of '10s and '20s small-town America, '30s and '40s Hollywood.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Learning to cry; title: The hypnotist's boy; title: Footlights on the prairie; title: Hooray for Hollywood; title: Gangsters, grifters, and gold diggers; title: Man about town; title: Empty bottles; title: Unionizing actors, uniting fans; title: Broadway and B movies; title: From Ed Wood to Ozzie and Harriet.