Author Archive | Lawrence Grobel

Though the poems in this book are about very public, very private people, they are, for me, very personal.  After spending time interviewing a particular subject for a book or magazine article, I often found myself thinking about a specific detail that seemed to define that person for me. Occasionally I’d jot down a few […]

  When writing about celebrities, I’m often confronted with how to approach them. What’s the “angle”?  Editors often want a particular slant. When Tiger Woods was chased by his wife with a golf club, stories about Tiger changed from his incredible prowess on the golf course to his remarkable infidelities off it.  When Kim Basinger […]

         Let’s not do this slow, no, let’s get the words out fast, yes, steam through the history, gas, pass, Commando Ex got class, crass? Here comes, hold it now, the rise and droppings, the stiffenings and squirtings, the balls-and-jacks beginnings of a never-ending life-suspending continent-hopping mind-expanding experience-stretching story: the life and times, the […]

At the port in Mombasa Anika asked a guard where they might find the Black Eyes of Akbah. The man said if they just walked along the docks they would surely find it if it was there. Eric suppressed his laugh. Africans were so wonderfully simple. They went into a bar, ordered a beer and […]

One definition of an Icon is somebody widely and uncritically admired, but that would eliminate the most hallowed in the pantheon, like Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Pablo Picasso, Cervantes, Dante, Dickens, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Michael Jordan, John the Baptist, Abraham Lincoln….the list can go on and on, […]

“After Mickey and I separated, I got a call from a friend saying there was a man who wanted to meet me, and his name was Howard Hughes. I thought she said Howard Hawks, the director, who wanted to see me for a film.  Kay came by with Johnny Meyers, who worked for Hughes as […]