Product Description

An old man died. The name on his passport is Max Vail. Born in humble circumstances in St Petersburg at the turn of the century, he moved relentlessly up the ladders of power to Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London. During the thirties he made America his permanent centre operations, though he continued to spend much time in Europe. He has left a journal. More than a personal testament, it is a secret history of the century's buried liaisons and fatal indiscretions, plots, deceptions, fateful meetings and stolen romances. We see Jackie Kennedy with Muhammad Ali, Hitler and the Windsors, Lord Lucan and Martin Bormann, Princess Di and Prince, Elvis and Bill Clinton, Idi Amin and Queen Elizabeth II. And Max Vail himself, the eternal loner who is their missing link. With 84 colour images and captivating narrative, this work is a tour of the century's psyche.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #438926 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 211 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 Stewart

Customer Reviews

Hope it is of Rock Dreams quality.
I am taking the chance of giving it five stars without having seen it. All based on the brilliance of Rock Dreams. Below is a review I have posted on Rock Dreams. A reader from England

Best ever commentary on this dubious artform. This is wonderful. The illustrations and the captions complement each other so well. I loved the depiction of Dylan. Best of all is the description of the brilliant Del Shannon: 'Del Shannon may have looked and sounded like a lumberjack but he cracked like a sodajerk. He was incessantly on the run, broke and alone and his trueloves all betrayed him. In the naked city there was an eternal thunderstorm and his teardrops mingled with the rain.' Wonderful!

Curtis Vander