- Ex Libris Aileen Mehle (a.k.a. Suzy)
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- Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, Signed to Suzy ("La Côte Basque, 1965")
Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, Signed to Suzy ("La Côte Basque, 1965")
[Signed Presentation by Joshua Logan to Aileen “Suzy” Mehle] Logan, Josh. Movie Stars, Real People, and Me. First Edition. 1978. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is warmly inscribed to Aileen Mehle (the gossip columnist “Suzy”), “3.31.78 N.Y.C. For RADIANT Gorgeous Aileen: You are the only item I miss during this newspaper strike. The front page with world news about the dollar & the movie magazine columns can stay blacked out but bring me back Aileen, love, love, Josh Logan.”
Aileen Mehle declared Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers contained “only a skein of truth." Presumably she would know. It was Mehle who first called Truman “the Tiny Terror,” a nickname that stuck. For Josh Logan, she was singing to the choir. As he writes in this dishy memoir, he tried in vain to play interference when Capote sought to interview the press-shy Marlon Brando, the star of a film (Sayonara) that Logan was then directing. Capote not only outmaneuvered Logan; he outsmarted Brando, convincing the gullible star to reveal embarrassing details by revealing incidents from his own life. When the article appeared, Brando realized he’d been had. Somehow, it was Truman who decided he was the injured party. He nursed a grudge for two decades before writing disparagingly about Josh and his wife Nedda in “La Côte Basque, 1965” (not even bothering to disguise their names). Tiny Terror indeed. Capote's Swans appear in other episodes in Logan’s memoir: Bill and Babe Paley attend a party the Logans host for Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones; and Slim Keith makes a cameo as the wife of Leland Hayward, a theatrical and cinematic collaborator of Logan’s.
“Truman’s Sayonara piece came out in The New Yorker soon after we had finished shooting. It was just as bitchy as I had feared: it made us all into idiots.”
--Joshua Logan