Somebody's Darling

By Larry McMurtry

Book Overview

Pulitzer Prize-winning Larry McMurtry writes like no one else about the American frontier. In Somebody's Darling, the frontier lies farther west, in Hollywood, where his subject is the strange world of the movies -- those who make them and those who play in them. Somebody's Darling is the story of the fortunes of Jill Peel. Jill is brilliant, talented, and disciplined, and one of the best female directors in Tinseltown, or anywhere else. She's got it all together, except where the men in her life are concerned: Joe Percy and Owen Oarson. Joe is a womanizing, aging screenwriter, cheerfully cynical about life, love, and art and the pursuit of all three. But he'd rather be left alone with the young, oversexed wives of studio moguls. Owen is an ex-Texas football player and tractor salesman turned studio climber and sexual athlete. He'll climb from bed to bed in pursuit of his starry goal: to be a movie producer. Between the two of them and a cast of Hollywood's most unforgettable eccentrics, Jill Peel tries to create some movie magic. Full of all the grit and warmth of his best work, Somebody's Darling is Larry McMurtry's deft and raunchy romp behind the scenes of America's own unique Babel: Hollywood.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671633198
• ISBN13: 9780671633196
• Release Date: April 1987
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 347 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A great example of McMurtry's diversity

In a novel about one of Larry McMurtry's most lovable female characters, McMurtry shows the literary diversity that has caused some critics to claim that he has the best male insight into the female world of any modern American novelist. The novel develops the stories of memorable but minor characters from All My Friends and Moving On into an insightful look at late 1970s Hollywood, and McMurtry's creative literary strategy shows that he is a master of characterization.