Crowned Heads

In Thomas Tryon's 1976 Hollywood gothic, four fictionalized portraits of golden-age stars examine the price of fame, the strange metabolism of celebrity, and what happens when the spotlight moves on. Fedora is the most beautiful and mysterious star who ever graced the screen, her face impossibly young after decades. Lorna is the girl who became a sex symbol and now hides at a Mexican resort, trying to find herself. Bobbitt is the child star that time forgot. Willie is the aging wit surrounded by the ashes of a glamorous life. Together, their stories compose an elegy for an era and an industry that consumed its luminaries.

Rosemary Benson narrates with a tone suited to the material's blend of nostalgia and dread, giving the interconnected stories an atmospheric continuity. Tryon was a Hollywood insider who understood the machinery behind the mythology, and his prose carries an insider's disenchantment that Benson renders without condescension. At nearly twenty hours, Crowned Heads is a substantial audio commitment that rewards listeners drawn to literary Hollywood fiction.