The photography exhibit "Who Shot Rock and Roll" features a "who's who" of rock photographers including James Marshall, Lynn Goldsmith, Annie Liebowitz, Henry Diltz and Gloria Stavers. Gloria was not only a pop culture tastemaker, trailblazing magazine editor and writer, she also took some of rock's most iconic photos of Jim Morrison, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and many others. Here is her photo of a relatively unknown David Bowie, featured in the exhibit and the book (Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955-Present) which it celebrates.
"Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955-Present" by Gail Buckland
Fans, friends and family of Davy Jones have contributed their favorite veggie recipes in the new cookbook "Written In Our Hearts." I'm excited that three recipes that I contributed in memory of Gloria's friendship with Davy (Morning "Gloria" Muffins, Fave Rave "16" Bean Soup, and "Glorious" Mushroom Bourguignon) are among the many delicious options. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Davy Jones Equine Memorial Fund. You can purchase it on amazon or here.
Jacques Chambrun was a New York-based literary agent in the nineteen-forties and fifties with a penchant for pinstripe suits and stealing his clients’ money. One of his clients was Mavis Gallant. The diary entries excerpted in this week’s issue of the magazine show Gallant starving and desperate in Spain, selling her clock for breakfast. Her agent hadn’t mentioned that two of her stories—“The Picnic” and “One Morning in June”—would be appearing in The New Yorker.
Gallant wasn’t his only victim. Chambrun embezzled thirty thousand dollars from W. Somerset Maugham by secretly negotiating the world rights to his books. When Ben Hecht ghost-wrote Marilyn Monroe’s memoir, Chambrun sold a scandalous passage to a London tabloid for a thousand pounds with neither Monroe nor Hecht’s permission; Monroe was so unnerved by the article that she rescinded her support for the book and Hecht had to return his five-thousand-dollar advance to Doubleday. (“My Story” was eventually published, twenty years later, but Hecht was not credited until the book’s third printing.)
Chambrun quietly arranged for the books of Grace Metalious (author of “Peyton Place”) to be published in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy and used the money from these deals to cover his debts to Jack Schaefer, another client. Chambrun had used the money from Schaefer’s foreign rights to pay back Maugham, and so on and so on, in a kind of literary pyramid scheme. Chambrun was transparent about his methods, at least to those who inquired. If authors threatened legal action, as many reportedly did, Chambrun offered a stump speech: “If you put me in jail, I can’t earn any money, and I can’t pay you back. If you don’t sue me, I’ll pay you back.” The pitch worked. All of his authors abandoned him, but not as quickly as one might imagine. Money trumped revenge, and some writers, like Hecht, were still grateful to Chambrun for their careers.
According to the New York Public Library’s records, Chambrun’s client list included many established authors, like Zora Neale Hurston, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells, with relatively deep coffers to skim from. But Chambrun stole just as readily from his younger clients, like Gallant. He sold manuscripts and stories behinds his clients’ back and produced contracts allotting him a twenty to thirty per cent commission. (Agents typically take fifteen per cent.) “This man knew I had not two cents to put together,” Gallant said of Chambrun in an interview earlier this year with Radio-Canada. She left Chambrun after her editor at The New Yorker urged her to do so. “I woke up,” Gallant said.
Chambrun was grandiose and very French—a combination that made writers feel like a big deal long before they got to be one. Grace Metalious was seduced by his name alone. “I just picked your name cold out of a book,” she wrote in her first letter of inquiry, according to “Inside Peyton Place,” a biography of Metalious by Emily Toth. Chambrun wore a boutonniere, travelled in a chauffeured car, and maintained an office at 745 Fifth Avenue—across the street from the Plaza Hotel. He could be elegant or oily, depending on whom you asked. Knox Burger, an editor and agent, once described Chambrun as a “feral character” and said he would be perfect “if you were casting an unctuous Levantine villain in a 1950 film noir.” He dyed his hair a deep black and threw Hugh Hefner-style parties in his basement pool. Chambrun claimed relation to the French counts de Chambrun, but rumor had it he was raised in the Bronx. (There’s a record of a Jacques Chambrun born in New York in 1906, but no one is certain that this was even his real name.)
In 1956, when he had no clients left, Chambrun started 16, a celebrity magazine for teen-age girls with cover stories like “Barbara Hearn: Elvis’ Girl Friend Tells Why She Makes Up as She Does.” He and a partner wrote most of the magazine’s stories under the pseudonym Georgia Winters. In 1958, Chambrun yielded control of the magazine to Gloria Stavers and slipped away. He died in 1976, according to Toth. Gallant heard that he was killed in a car crash, along with his two dogs. Gallant’s checks were recovered, but all the possessions she sold to survive those dry months in Spain—her grandmother’s ring, her typewriter—were not. “I never forgave him for that,” she said.
To honor Ray Manzarek after his passing on May 20, The Warner Music Group placed a full page ad in Billboard Magazine. The entire page is too large for me to scan, but it is this photo with REMEMBERING RAY above it and RAY MANZAREK 1939 - 2013 below it. It is gratifying that Gloria is credited for her great photo of Ray (I have enlarged the photo credit to make it readable.) This photo is also being used on a t-shirt as a fundraiser for Stand Up 2 Cancer on thedoors.com website. It is also the raymanzarek.com homepage photo, and was The Doors Facebook cover photo.
Gloria was an early champion of Cliff Richard's, but despite her enthusiasm Cliff never became a top 16 Magazine fave, nor did he achieve the same massive success here as he did in England. Cliff did, however, have eight Top 40 U.S. singles, including "Devil Woman" and "We Don't Talk Anymore."
Sir Cliff Richard is the third biggest-selling singles artist of all time in the U.K., and shares the record with Elvis Presley as the only acts to hit the U.K. singles chart in every one of its first six (1950s-2000s) decades.
On this day in 1967, The Doors and Tim Buckley performed in the gymnasium of The State University of New York at Stony Brook. The audience of 3,000 people (800 over the venue's stated capacity) included Gloria Stavers, who shot these photos of Jim Morrison.
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dion DiMucci rarely speaks publicly about his close relationship with Gloria Stavers. The young Bronx hitmaker and the 16 Magazine editor 13 years his senior were romantically involved at a pivotal time in Dion's life. In a 1996 interview conducted by Danny Fields for the book "Who's Your Fave Rave?," Dion discussed the impact Gloria had on his personal life and career. I would love to talk to Dion about Gloria some day, but until then, here's an excerpt of that interview, used with the author's permission.
"I loved Gloria, she was wild. I was from the Bronx, and she was a whole different breed of woman. I got a kick out of the way she was so different. I was 19 and she was 32, and we both discovered Lenny Bruce together. She was interviewing me for the magazine, and she told me that I couldn't tell people I was taking drugs, or about any serious problems I had. She told me to smile, put down the cigarette, and don't threaten anyone. She knew the minds of teenagers so well. I recorded 'Wish Upon a Star' after a conversation with her.
"Did I become her lover to get into 16? Definitely not, not at all. That's not my thing. I was naive, and I thought I was really special. I was kind of defiant and arrogant, and it was a time, the early days of rock and roll, of rebellion and revolution, breaking the showbiz traditions. And the magazine was kind of in that showbiz tradition, yet the stars were a lot of the new rebels. I couldn't control what was written in the magazine, so the rebellious side was only hinted at, and Gloria and I understood that's the way it had to be.
"But she was so different from anyone I'd ever known, as if she were from another planet. I kind of, maybe, approached her, and she responded, and we had an affair for almost three years. I used to pour my heart out to that woman. She would come to Baltimore, Philly, Boston, where I was playing, and we would sit in my hotel room and I would just brainstorm, run things by her, visions and dreams, to get her reaction, to learn from her. At that time, all I knew was my neighborhood in the Bronx, nothing too much beyond that. It baffled me. At 19, I had a lot more questions than answers, and it was those kinds of things I could talk to her about. Knowing her was part of my inner life, my real life, and the stuff in the magazine was cool, it made you feel good seeing your face on the cover or having a story written about you, but that was an ego thing, different from my real life.
"I wrote a song about Gloria, called 'The Road I'm On.' Some of my real thoughts are on that. I thought she was one of the most terrific people I've ever known, a really important part of my younger years."
Who's Your Fave Rave? by Randi Reisfeld & Danny Fields (1997) Boulevard Books
Who was cooler than Joe Namath in 1970? After making good on his guarantee of a New York Jets victory over the NFL's heavily-favored Baltimore Colts, he was not only the toast of the town in Manhattan, but football's first media superstar. Full length fur coat worn on the sidelines? Check. Unruly mop of hair and long sideburns? Check. Gorgeous woman on each arm? Check. Commercials? Movies? TV shows? Check. Check. Check.
Like Gloria, Joe lived on the Upper East Side, where he also owned a bar called "Bachelors III." Unfortunately for Namath, his entrepreneurial spirit was not condoned when it came to watering holes, and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle forced him to sell his interest in the New York club.
Here Joe gets "creamed" by a pre-Charlie's Angels Farrah Fawcett in an early 70's classic Super Bowl commercial for Noxema.
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