Let Me Entertain You

Book excerpt: Seldom has the world seen a man with the grace, style, and intellect of David Brown. Known in his lifetime as a journalist (The Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, and Collier's), a publisher (Cosmpolitan), an Academy Award winning film producer (Jaws, The Sting, The Verdict, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy), a Broadway producer (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Sweet Smell of Success, A Few Good Men), an author, a one-time astrologer, and husband to long-time Cosmopolitan head Helen Gurley Brown. Throughout his remarkable life he was a friend, acquaintance, and confidant of the world's most powerful, most famous, and most notorious. With his remarkably perfect memory, this raconteur extraordinaire shares in intimate detail his personal encounters and experiences with a cavalcade of world famous personalities - from Mafia chieftains to world leaders, the reclusive Howard Hughes, the super-rich J. Paul Getty, William Randolph Hearst, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy, Irving Berlin, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Darryl Zanuck, David, O. Selznick, John O'Hara, Carl Sandburg, Nikita Khrushchev, Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Salvador Dali, Irving Lazar, John Belushi, and scores of others.