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Hollywood didn’t kill Dorothy Parker, but booze probably did. In fact, if Hollywood hadn’t paid her so well to spend so much time at home, she couldn’t have afforded the booze – as well as maintain a lifelong ability to insult almost everyone she loved while still earning their (sometimes reluctant) affection. It’s hard to believe that Parker didn’t take her film work seriously, since she kept producing such good work Gail Crowther’s latest book (she has written entertainingly on other notably cocktail-absorbed writers such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) is a focused, fun and almost recreationally enjoyable brief biography not of a writer but of a well-framed aspect

‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’ She had a point. Even those of us who believe the movies weren’t really the movies until they had snappy dialogue (and no dialogue ever snapped the way Wilder’s did) have to concede that Swanson had a face that could stop a train. Still, she was an also-ran compared with Greta Garbo, who had a face that could start a religion. As her first champion, the Swedish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, once said that Garbo’s mush would ‘make the gods happy’. Her embonpoint was rather less empyreal. John Gilbert, her most