What do you think?
Rate this book
Sam Spiegel: The Incredible Life and Times of Hollywood's Most Iconoclastic Producer, the Miracle Worker Who Went from Penniless Refugee to Showbiz ... on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia
The incredible life and times of Hollywood's most iconoclastic producer, the miracle worker who went from penniless refugee to show biz legend, and made possible The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, not to speak of many more, including movies as distinct as Suddenly, Last Summer; Nicholas and Alexandra; The Last Tycoon; and Betrayal; all of them sharing the unique vision that earned Spiegel twenty-five star-filled, bigger-than-life, conceived on a vast scale, intensely dramatic, and overwhelmingly ambitious.
In this rich and brilliant biography, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, who had the advantage of knowing and working for Spiegel, brings into sharp focus a Hollywood legend who was at once crafty, unscrupulous, mendacious, and equally capable of great charm and petty meanness, who was sentimental and ruthless, a shrewd judge of talent, a gambler on a colossal scale, a man of almost unique artistic vision and courage who was, in the final analysis, that most elusive and rare of movie producers, a genius.
The story of a how a Jewish refugee without a penny to his name managed to produce several of the greatest films of all time is alone worth telling, but Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni has done more; she has drawn the definitive portrait of the man himself -- the elusive, witty, cynical adventurer who, like so many refugees, was able to live, succeed, and raise money everywhere, but who was at home nowhere. Spiegel surrounded himself with luxury and beautiful women but remained a loner despite his countless friends.
Spiegel was mysterious about his origins, prompting Arthur Miller to refer to him as "The Great Gatsby." In reality, he was born of middle-class Jewish parents in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised in Jaroslav, in western Galicia, Spiegel left home in his late teens and quickly became a hero of the Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement.
Step by step, with immense research and a vast number of interviews, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni recreates the world of Sam Spiegel's childhood and youth, separating often self-serving fiction from fact. She follows Spiegel's dramatic flight from the Nazis in Berlin, a prison sentence in London, problems with the police in Paris and Mexico City, and finally his arrival in Los Angeles. In America his career languished for a time, though he acquired a reputation for being a supreme "fixer," a brilliant luftmensh on the fringes of Hollywood power, the ultimate party-giver who knew everybody's secrets and was always quick to charm women and take advantage of men. Billy Wilder called him "a modern day Robin Hood, who steals from the rich and steals from the poor."
With a brilliant sense of time and place and a deep understanding of Spiegel's complex personality, Fraser-Cavassoni traces his disasters, successes, romances, friendships, and tangled finances in a narrative that is rich with colorful Spiegel stories, scandals, and bon mots.
The cast of characters in Spiegel's life includes Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Katharine Hepburn, John Huston, Elia Kazan, David Lean, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Mike Nichols, Harold Pinter, Otto Preminger, Elizabeth Taylor, Gore Vidal, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Darryl F. Zanuck, bevies of beautiful women, three wives, countless members of high society, and, most important, Sam Spiegel himself -- the last of the great independent film producers who, in the swashbuckling tradition of David O. Selznick and Sam Goldwyn, operated alone, aimed high, and believed, above all, in their own star.
pard
More than a major book about the movie business, Sam Spiegel is an intricate and engrossing biography, comparable in its richness, depth, and attention to detail to A. Scott Berg's acclaimed biography of Samuel Goldwyn. It is a marvelous, once-in-a-lifetime reading experience and an astonishing debut for Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni.
In this rich and brilliant biography, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, who had the advantage of knowing and working for Spiegel, brings into sharp focus a Hollywood legend who was at once crafty, unscrupulous, mendacious, and equally capable of great charm and petty meanness, who was sentimental and ruthless, a shrewd judge of talent, a gambler on a colossal scale, a man of almost unique artistic vision and courage who was, in the final analysis, that most elusive and rare of movie producers, a genius.
The story of a how a Jewish refugee without a penny to his name managed to produce several of the greatest films of all time is alone worth telling, but Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni has done more; she has drawn the definitive portrait of the man himself -- the elusive, witty, cynical adventurer who, like so many refugees, was able to live, succeed, and raise money everywhere, but who was at home nowhere. Spiegel surrounded himself with luxury and beautiful women but remained a loner despite his countless friends.
Spiegel was mysterious about his origins, prompting Arthur Miller to refer to him as "The Great Gatsby." In reality, he was born of middle-class Jewish parents in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised in Jaroslav, in western Galicia, Spiegel left home in his late teens and quickly became a hero of the Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement.
Step by step, with immense research and a vast number of interviews, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni recreates the world of Sam Spiegel's childhood and youth, separating often self-serving fiction from fact. She follows Spiegel's dramatic flight from the Nazis in Berlin, a prison sentence in London, problems with the police in Paris and Mexico City, and finally his arrival in Los Angeles. In America his career languished for a time, though he acquired a reputation for being a supreme "fixer," a brilliant luftmensh on the fringes of Hollywood power, the ultimate party-giver who knew everybody's secrets and was always quick to charm women and take advantage of men. Billy Wilder called him "a modern day Robin Hood, who steals from the rich and steals from the poor."
With a brilliant sense of time and place and a deep understanding of Spiegel's complex personality, Fraser-Cavassoni traces his disasters, successes, romances, friendships, and tangled finances in a narrative that is rich with colorful Spiegel stories, scandals, and bon mots.
The cast of characters in Spiegel's life includes Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Katharine Hepburn, John Huston, Elia Kazan, David Lean, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Mike Nichols, Harold Pinter, Otto Preminger, Elizabeth Taylor, Gore Vidal, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Darryl F. Zanuck, bevies of beautiful women, three wives, countless members of high society, and, most important, Sam Spiegel himself -- the last of the great independent film producers who, in the swashbuckling tradition of David O. Selznick and Sam Goldwyn, operated alone, aimed high, and believed, above all, in their own star.
pard
More than a major book about the movie business, Sam Spiegel is an intricate and engrossing biography, comparable in its richness, depth, and attention to detail to A. Scott Berg's acclaimed biography of Samuel Goldwyn. It is a marvelous, once-in-a-lifetime reading experience and an astonishing debut for Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni.
- GenresBiographyNonfictionFilm
504 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
1 person is currently reading
38 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 18, 2014
Sam Spiegel, producer of On The Waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai, was a Hollywood legend and a monster of a man, capable of feigning heart attacks to get his way, lying, cheating and running from the law. This is a fine biography, particularly strong in unravelling the tissue of myths he promulgated about his own European Jewish origins. Fraser-Cavassoni is even-handed, neither shirking nor sensationalising his predilections for adultery, prostitutes and young girls. What shines through though is a wistful longing for the golden age of cinema, when making a movie was more about creative energy than commercial projections. And spectacle took more than CGI. As Spiegel says when looking for locations to film Lawrence of Arabia: "Dunes, Baby. I want dunes."
June 11, 2022
It seems author Cavassoni is so smitten with her grotesque yet successful subject, she often assumes the producer's identity throughout the book, cheerfully dismissing or laughing away at his many atrocities. She describes Spiegel as "completely above all feelings that he was not superior to everyone else". And thus follows as much promiscuity, gluttony, robbery, cowardice and ripping off blacklisted, soon-to-be-suicide victim writers while simultaneously supporting the Red Scare. At one point Spiegel even bemoans how narrowly he avoided "becoming a bar of soap" at the hands of the Nazis. He does this almost as many times as he fakes heart attacks.
Honor the man all you want for his illustrious credits, but it's uncomfortable admiring a man who would "slit your throat and convince you it was necessary". Meanwhile, the chapters devoted to Spiegel's womanizing are so prominently featured (and redundant), Cavassoni obviously sides with the man and celebrates his appetites--no matter how foul. Furthermore, more than one Hollywood figure admires Spiegel's "guts" and "raw animal courage"--be it John Huston, Elia Kazan, or David Geffen--yet this image is endlessly contradicted by the man's behavior. He hides from everybody--especially creditors--runs out on paying actors, writers, directors, not to mention restaurant and hotel bills. He constantly interferes with productions without offering constructive advice, causes dissension and disruption at every turn, not to mention treats all technicians and crew members like garbage. At one point he subtracts budget from a movie production in a jungle to have steaks flown from NYC to his posh London hotel because he can't "eat English food".
Cavassoni shows little regard or sympathy for Spiegel's "steady women companions" except in one weird section where one Spiegel wife drives drunk and sends a 9-year-old kid head-first into the pavement, killing him. In the next paragraph, a companion states, "It was the saddest thing. Lyne was the loneliest lady and couldn't drive because she had that accident". That accident. Say what? While Spiegel steals payment from his film crews but Xmas gifts his pretty secretaries expensive perfumes, his warring with the creatives knows no end. Even after cleaning up at an Oscars ceremony, Spiegel steals the other victorious department heads' statues, then holds them hostage! More author applause follows.
Luckily, the second half of the book focuses on the films themselves, especially Spiegel's relationships with Kazan and David Lean. A sordid story pops up now and again, like wife-surrogate-companion Betty Spiegel speculating about catching genital herpes from Spiegel, joking that "Spiegel 'invited' everybody to his bed. He didn't mind the rejection at all. No meant nothing to him" Ah, the good old days of Hollywood. If all of this doesn't alienate the reader, a yacht party of super-rich Eurotrash on Spiegel's craft in the Mediterranean hears the news of the 1969 Manson murders. According to Cavassoni, "there was such a relief that it wasn't our children, that the world was still intact, that everybody giggled." Spiegel holding a dinner in honor of Herbert von Karajan, a member of the Nazi party, merits hardly a comment, either.
Overall, about half the book presents actual movie information, but the man's actual brilliance as a producer is reported in a muddled, disruptive and downright transparent fashion. More than anything, it feels the best movies of his career got made by themselves. Or by the tormented writers and directors and technicians he seldom respected.
Honor the man all you want for his illustrious credits, but it's uncomfortable admiring a man who would "slit your throat and convince you it was necessary". Meanwhile, the chapters devoted to Spiegel's womanizing are so prominently featured (and redundant), Cavassoni obviously sides with the man and celebrates his appetites--no matter how foul. Furthermore, more than one Hollywood figure admires Spiegel's "guts" and "raw animal courage"--be it John Huston, Elia Kazan, or David Geffen--yet this image is endlessly contradicted by the man's behavior. He hides from everybody--especially creditors--runs out on paying actors, writers, directors, not to mention restaurant and hotel bills. He constantly interferes with productions without offering constructive advice, causes dissension and disruption at every turn, not to mention treats all technicians and crew members like garbage. At one point he subtracts budget from a movie production in a jungle to have steaks flown from NYC to his posh London hotel because he can't "eat English food".
Cavassoni shows little regard or sympathy for Spiegel's "steady women companions" except in one weird section where one Spiegel wife drives drunk and sends a 9-year-old kid head-first into the pavement, killing him. In the next paragraph, a companion states, "It was the saddest thing. Lyne was the loneliest lady and couldn't drive because she had that accident". That accident. Say what? While Spiegel steals payment from his film crews but Xmas gifts his pretty secretaries expensive perfumes, his warring with the creatives knows no end. Even after cleaning up at an Oscars ceremony, Spiegel steals the other victorious department heads' statues, then holds them hostage! More author applause follows.
Luckily, the second half of the book focuses on the films themselves, especially Spiegel's relationships with Kazan and David Lean. A sordid story pops up now and again, like wife-surrogate-companion Betty Spiegel speculating about catching genital herpes from Spiegel, joking that "Spiegel 'invited' everybody to his bed. He didn't mind the rejection at all. No meant nothing to him" Ah, the good old days of Hollywood. If all of this doesn't alienate the reader, a yacht party of super-rich Eurotrash on Spiegel's craft in the Mediterranean hears the news of the 1969 Manson murders. According to Cavassoni, "there was such a relief that it wasn't our children, that the world was still intact, that everybody giggled." Spiegel holding a dinner in honor of Herbert von Karajan, a member of the Nazi party, merits hardly a comment, either.
Overall, about half the book presents actual movie information, but the man's actual brilliance as a producer is reported in a muddled, disruptive and downright transparent fashion. More than anything, it feels the best movies of his career got made by themselves. Or by the tormented writers and directors and technicians he seldom respected.
April 21, 2024
Sam Spiegel might be "legendary" but that isn't necessarily a good thing. It's difficult to separate the disgusting Hollywood producer from the writing style of this book, which seemed unusually gentle in exposing the man's many flaws. Then in the final author's note we discover why--the writer had been friends with Spiegel and after his death was given access to all sorts of private papers, so the whole thing is biased.
That doesn't mean she leaves out a lot of the infamously horrible things Spiegel is known for. It just means that there's not the edge to it that there should be in showing what a terrible man this was. As a movie producer Spiegel financially cheats and lies to almost everyone he works with and marries, is thrown in jail, runs from the U.S. government, has no problem spending money on yachts and wild parties while telling his employees they can't be paid, and sleeps around on his wives with young models.
Instead, she points her fangs at a few others, even in the final author's note saying great director David "Lean told many, many lies" about Spiegel. Huh? Isn't this book about one of the biggest show business liars of all time? She also makes the absurd claim that Spiegel's son's delinquent behavior "had not influenced his father's will" keeping the boy from inheriting millions. How could she possible have known what went on in Sam Spiegel's head when writing a will? She couldn't.
This is the kind of laborious book that you have to skip through in order to get past the dull spots. Then when you hit something interesting, like Spiegel's lecherous ways with barely legal-aged women, you'll wonder why the writer didn't include more details of the moviemaker's bad sides. It isn't until the end that you figure out that the point of the book is really to make Spiegel's legend positive and please his estate.
In truth he was a precursor to terrible Harvey Weinstein. Here's hoping this writer doesn't take up Weinstein's cause as well, summarizing that creep's life the way she ends Spiegel's book by claiming "it's inconceivable to love a producer" but many in Hollywood supposedly loved Sam Spiegel. No woman should stand up for disgusting criminal movie producers that have this kind of evidence against them.
That doesn't mean she leaves out a lot of the infamously horrible things Spiegel is known for. It just means that there's not the edge to it that there should be in showing what a terrible man this was. As a movie producer Spiegel financially cheats and lies to almost everyone he works with and marries, is thrown in jail, runs from the U.S. government, has no problem spending money on yachts and wild parties while telling his employees they can't be paid, and sleeps around on his wives with young models.
Instead, she points her fangs at a few others, even in the final author's note saying great director David "Lean told many, many lies" about Spiegel. Huh? Isn't this book about one of the biggest show business liars of all time? She also makes the absurd claim that Spiegel's son's delinquent behavior "had not influenced his father's will" keeping the boy from inheriting millions. How could she possible have known what went on in Sam Spiegel's head when writing a will? She couldn't.
This is the kind of laborious book that you have to skip through in order to get past the dull spots. Then when you hit something interesting, like Spiegel's lecherous ways with barely legal-aged women, you'll wonder why the writer didn't include more details of the moviemaker's bad sides. It isn't until the end that you figure out that the point of the book is really to make Spiegel's legend positive and please his estate.
In truth he was a precursor to terrible Harvey Weinstein. Here's hoping this writer doesn't take up Weinstein's cause as well, summarizing that creep's life the way she ends Spiegel's book by claiming "it's inconceivable to love a producer" but many in Hollywood supposedly loved Sam Spiegel. No woman should stand up for disgusting criminal movie producers that have this kind of evidence against them.
March 15, 2022
A very interesting read if you are interested in the film industry. A bit horrifying now to read how misogynistic the industry was back during Sam Spiegel's the time. I suppose my take away was that this guy was a shyster at best and a crook at worst. But somehow he was involved in some of the all time best movies ever made. Guess that means there is hope for the rest of us.
June 29, 2022
Sam Spiegel main slayer
September 14, 2015
Sam Spiegel, AKA S. P. Eagle, was one of the all-time great independent Hollywood producers (On the Waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia, etc) and also, famously, one of the biggest con men who ever worked in the film biz. Unfortunately, this book sheds very little light onto his career or personality and mainly comprises a string of endless anecdotes of his misdeeds and sayings ('Dunes. Baby, I want Dunes!' being his famous advice to stiff-upper-lipped David Lean on the set of Lawrence). If you want to read a good book on being a producer then Scott Berg's Goldwyn is a fa r better read and full of actual insights rather than just gossip.
March 2, 2016
Brings out the legendary producer out in all his vibrant colours (including quite a bit of the less than salutary aspects not to mention the chicanery), and as such gives an unforgettable view of the Hollywood system and the making of some classics as well of those who acted in them...
March 11, 2012
Fascinating about the Hollywood legend.
November 2, 2012
What I learned from the last three years and this book:
You either have to inherit or be remarkably unscrupulous to
make your way.
You either have to inherit or be remarkably unscrupulous to
make your way.
November 8, 2024
The author arranged the storyline of man's life (Sam Spiegel) with delicacy and nourishingly astounding.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews