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Steven Gaines | |
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Born | 1946 |
Occupation | Author, journalist, radio show host |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Years active | 1970s–present |
Notable works | Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan |
Website | |
stevengaines |
Steven Gaines (born 1946) is an American author, journalist, and radio show host. His 13 books include Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons; The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan; The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of The Beatles ; Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys ; Marjoe, the biography of evangelist Marjoe Gortner; Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs and the Culture of Excess in South Beach ; and the memoirs, One of These Things First and "The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls." His 1991 biography of the fashion designer Halston (Simply Halston) was the basis for Ryan Murphy's 2021 Netflix series Halston , for which Ewan McGregor won an Emmy Award for Best Actor at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards. [1] [2] [3]
Gaines was a contributing editor at New York magazine and his journalism has appeared in Vanity Fair , The New York Observer , The New York Times , Los Angeles, Worth , and Connoisseur.
From 2003 to 2010 Gaines hosted a weekly, live roundtable radio interview show from the Hamptons called Sunday Brunch Live from the American Hotel in Sag Harbor that aired from Memorial Weekend to Labor Day on a local National Public Radio affiliate.
Gaines was born and brought up in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York and attended Erasmus Hall High School and New York University, where he studied with film director Martin Scorsese. His father was a school teacher and child guidance counselor, and his mother a bookkeeper. When he was 15 years old, after a suicide attempt because he was gay, he was voluntarily hospitalized at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan, which is the subject of his memoir, One of These Things First. [4] [5]
He graduated near the bottom of his class at Erasmus Hall, and flunked out of Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia that he met children's TV star Gene London who encouraged him to write.
Gaines was working in a small auction gallery in 1971 when he met former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner at Max's Kansas City, a New York restaurant and club. Although Gaines had never published anything before he convinced Gortner to allow him to write his biography, which was published by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) in 1973. The film of Marjoe won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and although the film was not based on Gaines' biography, the attention brought by the Academy Award helped promote the book Marjoe into a religion bestseller and establish Gaines' career as a writer.
The same year Marjoe was published, Gaines became editor of Circus , a national teeny-bopper rock and roll magazine, and he also began a six-year run as the "Top of the Pop" columnist for the New York Sunday News, on alternate Sundays, dual positions that gave him a catbird seat in the fast lane of the rock and roll business during the golden era of the seventies.
Gaines spent a year on the road living with Alice Cooper, and in 1976 he published Me, Alice, by Alice Cooper with Steven Gaines, the first autobiography of a rock star. Published only in hardcover, the book has since become a collectors' item and sells for up to $2500 a copy.
In 1978 Gaines met Robert Jon Cohen, a 21-year-old Studio 54 bartender, with whom he collaborated on a book called The Club, a thinly-veiled roman a clef about Studio 54. The book raised the ire of nightclub owner Steve Rubell, designer Halston, and singer Liza Minnelli, among others. Fodder for the gossip columns, the book caused a sensation and got advances in the six-figures, but won Gaines ignominy. Soon after the publication of The Club, Gaines moved to Laguna Beach, California, then to London, and finally to East Hampton, New York, where he wrote the international best-seller The Love You Make: An Insiders Story of the Beatles, with Beatle insider Peter Brown. Published in 1983, The Love You Make was on the New York Times Hardcover bestseller list for 16 weeks. [6] [7]
Gaines began his journalism career as the "Top of the Pop" columnist for the New York Daily News. In the early part of his career he wrote several books about the music business, including Alice Cooper's autobiography, Me, Alice; The Love You Make, a biography of The Beatles; and Heroes and Villains, a biography of The Beach Boys, before briefly switching his focus to fashion designers with biographies on Halston and Calvin Klein. [8]
In 1978 he wrote the lyrics for two major disco hits, "New York at Night" and "Like An Eagle," composed by Village People creator Jacques Morali.
In 1980 he published a controversial "roman a clef" called The Club about the nightclub Studio 54 that he co-wrote with a 21-year-old Studio 54 bartender, Robert Jon Cohen. As Robert Granit, he published Another Runner in the Night in 1981, a novel about a homosexual film producer married to the daughter of a studio boss. He coined the phrase "velvet mafia" in his "New York Sunday News" column in reference to the Robert Stigwood Organization, a British record company and management group, but the term soon began to be used to describe the influential gay crowd who ran Hollywood and the fashion industry. [7]
Gaines is best known for his 1998 social and cultural history of the East End of Long Island called Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons. [9]
In 1993, he co-founded the Hamptons International Film Festival.
In 1999, he created one of the first online magazines, iHamptons.com.
In 2021 his book, Simply Halston, was made into a Netflix television series starring Ewan McGregor, who won the Emmy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the fashion designer. The Netflix series was also nominated for a Writers Guild Award for best screenplay adapted from a book. [10] [11] [12]
The Hamptons, part of the East End of Long Island, consist of the towns of Southampton and East Hampton, which together compose the South Fork of Long Island, in Suffolk County, New York. The Hamptons are a popular seaside resort and one of the historical summer colonies of the northeastern United States.
The Village of East Hampton is a village in Suffolk County, New York. It is located in the town of East Hampton on the South Fork of eastern Long Island. The population was 1,083 at the time of the 2010 census, 251 less than in the year 2000. It is a center of the summer resort and upscale locality at the East End of Long Island known as The Hamptons and is generally considered one of the area's two most prestigious communities. The Mayor of East Hampton Village is Jerry Larsen, elected on September 15, 2020.
Geoffrey Giuliano is an American author, radio personality, and film actor, best known for his biographies of rock musicians.
Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner is a former evangelist preacher and actor. He first gained public attention during the late 1940s when his parents arranged for him to be ordained as a preacher at age four due to his extraordinary speaking ability, making him the youngest known in that position to this day. As a young man, he preached on the revival circuit and brought celebrity to the revival movement.
Pray for the Wildcats is a 1974 American made-for-television thriller film about a psychopathic business executive chasing his workers on dirtbikes through the desert after he killed a young man. The film was directed by Robert Michael Lewis and starred William Shatner and Andy Griffith, Robert Reed, Marjoe Gortner, Angie Dickinson, and Lorraine Gary. It originally aired as an ABC Movie of the Week on January 23, 1974.
Candace June Clark is an American actress and model. She is best known for her role as Debbie Dunham in the 1973 film American Graffiti, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and her role as Mary Lou in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Nicholas Schaffner was an American non-fiction author, journalist, and singer-songwriter.
Howard Smith was an American Oscar-winning film director, producer, journalist, screenwriter, actor and radio broadcaster.
Marjoe is a 1972 American documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan about the life of Pentecostal preacher Marjoe Gortner. It won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Roy Halston Frowick, known mononymously as Halston, was an American fashion designer, who rose to international fame in the 1970s.
Georgica Pond is a 290-acre (1.2 km2) coastal lagoon on the west border of East Hampton Village and Wainscott, New York, and was the site of a Summer White House of Bill Clinton in 1998 and 1999.
Peter Brown is an American-based English businessman. After Brian Epstein recruited Brown to run the Epstein's music store in Liverpool, he became part of the Beatles' management team. He remained Epstein's and the Beatles' personal assistant until the band's dissolution. He helped found and served as a board member of Apple Corps and assumed Epstein's duties after the manager's death. He went on to establish several companies and resides in New York City.
The Maidstone Club is a private country club on the Atlantic Ocean in the village of East Hampton, New York. Maidstone has both an 18-hole and nine-hole private golf course.
H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods, also billed as just The Food of the Gods, is a 1976 science fiction thriller film released by American International Pictures and was written, produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon.
No. 5, 1948 is a 1948 painting by Jackson Pollock, an American painter known for his contributions to the abstract expressionist movement. It was sold on 22 May 2006 for $140 million, a new mark for highest ever price for a painting, not surpassed until April 2011.
The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles is a 1983 book by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. Brown was personal assistant to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, a senior executive at Apple Corps, as well as best man to John Lennon at the latter's wedding to Yoko Ono in March 1969.
Victor Hugo, born Victor Rojas, (1948–1994) was a Venezuelan-born American artist, window dresser, and partner of the designer Halston.
Van Campen Heilner (1899-1970) was an American sportsman, and author of works on hunting and fishing. Heilner was born wealthy, his family's wealth, from coal mining, financed his hunting and fishing expeditions around the world.
Halston is an American biographical drama television miniseries based on the life of designer Halston, starring Ewan McGregor. Adapted from the 1991 book Simply Halston by Steven Gaines, the series was ordered by Netflix in September 2019 and premiered on May 14, 2021.
Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys is a 1986 book by American journalist Steven Gaines that covers the history of the Beach Boys. The contents are focused on the band members' private lives and personal struggles, with little commentary reserved for the music itself. Coverage spans the group's early years to Dennis Wilson's death in 1983. It was the third major biography written about the band, following David Leaf's The Beach Boys and the California Myth (1978) and Byron Preiss' The Beach Boys (1979).