In 1966, writer Doon Arbus got an assignment from the New York Herald Tribune to profile James Brown on the occasion of the singer’s first-ever show at Madison Square Garden. Long before most of white America had heard of the “Godfather of Soul,” Arbus, daughter of famed photographer Diane Arbus, spent hours with Brown at his house in Queens, N.Y., then traveled with him to a show in Virginia Beach. Arbus even convinced Brown to let her, a 20-year-old white woman, stay in the hotel with him and his all-Black entourage — no inconsequential act in the 1960s South.
“James has armed me with one of his suitcases and a pad and pencil, insisting that I carry the pad and pencil all the time, to prove that I’m a traveling reporter, and to guard against the assumptions of suspicious Southern minds,” Arbus wrote. She recounted Brown warning her, “You remember what they did to President Kennedy.”
The resulting story, “James Brown Is Out of Sight,” is one of 18 long-form profiles featured in a new anthology, What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? Classic Celebrity Journalism, Volume 1, 1960s and 1970s, available in print on May 20. Edited by Bristol journalist Alex Belth, the collection is noteworthy less for the fame of its writers or their subjects than for the timeless quality of its journalism. Many of these pieces spent decades buried in libraries and archival stacks until Belth got permission to republish them. All of them stand the test of time, offering insights into the nature of fame and journalists’ sometimes conflicted relationship with it.
What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? also highlights the remarkable access journalists of that era enjoyed. In the modern age, celebrities can scrupulously manage and curate their public personas, requiring reporters to surrender their cellphones and sign nondisclosure agreements before ever setting foot inside their homes. When a megastar such as Taylor Swift can speak directly to 100 million of her fans via social media, she’s far less concerned with what a print publication with 100,000 subscribers might say about her — assuming she grants it access at all.
“The happy result for us readers is a trove of lively, interesting reportage that is both entertaining and historically intriguing.” Alex Belth
In contrast, these profiles from the 1960s and ’70s offer a fascinating view of celebrities when they still relied on print media to get themselves and their work noticed. It was also an era when magazines started giving writers more space and stylistic freedom to write long, candid, nuanced pieces, from which emerged the literary movement known as New Journalism.
“The happy result for us readers is a trove of lively, interesting reportage that is both entertaining and historically intriguing,” Belth writes in the introduction. “The writers in this anthology, in a range of styles, all put us right there in the room with the entertainers and artists who are grappling, in some way or another, with their fame. What it means to have it, sustain it, and lose it.”
Bearing a title that refers to its first profile, of entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., the book was a labor of love for Belth. The 53-year-old Manhattan native, a self-described “culture nerd” with no formal training in journalism or archiving, now works as editor of Esquire Classic, the magazine’s online archive. In an interview, he described unearthing these “gems,” many of which were never digitally archived, as “like truffle hunting.”
Given the space limitations and abundance of stories to choose from, Belth eschewed the more famous and easily accessible profiles of that era, such as Gay Talese’s April 1966 Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and Tom Wolfe’s June 1970 New York magazine piece “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” While this collection features a few writers whose names are still familiar today, including Nora Ephron and Rex Reed, it also includes compelling work by ones Belth calls “short-timers” in the profession. Among them: John Eskow, who wrote “Oedipus Rocks,” a 1978 profile of Hank Williams Jr. for New Times; and Anne Taylor Fleming, who wrote the 1978 profile “The Private World of Truman Capote” for the New York Times Magazine.
Also striking, Belth said, is the unadorned yet sophisticated prose of the youngest writers in this collection, Arbus and O’Connell Driscoll. The latter was a 21-year-old senior at the University of Southern California in 1974 when he penned the fascinating fly-on-the-wall profile “Jerry Lewis, Birthday Boy” for Playboy.
“The sense of restraint and poise they showed as young writers really blew me away,” Belth said. “These writers didn’t necessarily feel awed by being around celebrities. They may have been very impressed with their talents. But they felt as if they were on the same terra firma.”
What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? also features work by veteran journalists such as Helen Lawrenson, who was in her seventies when she wrote “Warren Beatty Has Been Wronged!” for Cosmopolitan in 1970. In the 1930s, Lawrenson spent six months in Havana, Cuba, after which she penned an explosive piece for Esquire titled “Latins Are Lousy Lovers.”
Though Lawrenson’s takedown of Latin machismo isn’t in this collection, What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? begins with a publisher’s note addressing the inclusion of words and sentiments about gender, race, ethnicity, body image and socioeconomic status that some may find offensive. While Belth didn’t include any profiles that a modern reader would find blatantly racist, sexist or otherwise cringeworthy, none was edited for space or content.
Nearly all the profiles do include detailed physical descriptions of their subjects, a practice that’s largely fallen out of favor in 21st-century journalism. As Belth explained, writers in the 1960s and ’70s used such descriptions not to ridicule or comment on celebrities but to paint a portrait for their readers in a far less visual age. While some of the subjects weren’t pleased with the final products, Belth included none that he considered mean-spirited.
The editor came to this project no stranger to the world of celebrities. A native of Manhattan’s Upper West Side whose father worked in television production, Belth got a job right out of college as a messenger for filmmaker Ken Burns on the 1994 docuseries “Baseball.” From there, he worked on Woody Allen’s 1996 musical Everyone Says I Love You. Later, Joel and Ethan Coen hired him as an assistant film editor on the 1998 cult classic The Big Lebowski.
By his thirties, however, Belth was ready to move on from the film industry.
“It took me a while to realize I could do something different,” he said, “without feeling like a failure.”
In 2002, while working a temp job in the finance department of media giant Time, Belth started a sports blog about the New York Yankees called Bronx Banter, written from a fan’s point of view. His research led him to bygone features in Sports Illustrated, which he republished on his blog with the writers’ permission.
Though Belth’s interest in sports blogging eventually waned, it sparked a new one in writing and archiving. In 2013, Deadspin, a sports blog then owned by Gawker, invited him to create a sports journalism reprint site. That led to his creation of a similar site devoted to show biz and entertainment for the Daily Beast, which in 2016 landed Belth his current gig at Esquire Classic. Belth has since created the Stacks Reader, his own free online archive of classic journalism about the arts, which he describes as “a museum for stories.”
Like the Stacks Reader, What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? didn’t emerge from nostalgia for some bygone golden age, Belth said, but from a desire to preserve stories that were written when journalism was more ephemeral. As its title suggests, this book is the first of three planned volumes, with Volume 2 covering stories from the 1980s and ’90s and Volume 3, the first two decades of the 21st century.
“Without being corny about it … I get to host somebody’s really great stuff,” he said. “To me, there’s no higher honor.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Among the Stars | A Bristol journalist compiled an anthology of classic celebrity profiles from the 1960s and ’70s”
This article appears in May 15-21, 2024.
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