“She found Rafael Alterio and I was very amazed by his drawings. “My publisher Martine Assouline is used to visual books,” Beigbeder says. Manhattan’s Babe is Assouline’s first illustrated novel. You couldn’t eat hot dogs in the streets of Paris. I remember very well our visit to the World Trade Center because I filmed it with a Super 8 camera … I also remember the good hot dogs in the streets. Suddenly I was inside the TV programs we watched on French television. “My father is half American, so he took my brother and I to visit our American cousins in New York when I was 12,” he recalls. Though the 51-year-old was born and raised in Neuilly-sur-Seine just outside of Paris, he has long had a relationship with Manhattan. He then won the Prix Interallié in 2003 for the 9/11-set Windows on the World and the Prix Renaudot in 2009 for his book Un roman français, and also established his own literary prize, the Prix de Flore. The more I was digging, the more nuggets I was finding.”īeigbeder, who is the executive editor of Lui, published his first novel, La table ronde, when he was still in his 20s. Chaplin wrote about her in his memoir… Suddenly I found a gold mine. Orson Welles talked about her in a famous TV interview. She was best friends with Truman Capote and he talks about Oona and Salinger in Answered Prayers. “He wrote many letters to Oona-I found them. Usually it says: ‘Jerry fell in love with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter in 1941, then Jerry went to the army and Oona married Chaplin in 1942.’ But if you start studying you find a lot more information,” he continues. “In all of Salinger’s biographies, his love story with young Oona O’Neill takes one paragraph maximum.
“Once you start a story, you feel that everything around you is related,” Beigbeder explains. The details, however-the conversations, the emotions-come from Beigbeder’s imagination. Oona and Salinger did indeed have a brief romance, and many real-life characters appear throughout their narrative, including as Truman Capote and Gloria Vanderbilt. In the book’s introduction, Beigbeder deems it a work of “faction,” a word he borrows from Diana Vreeland. Salinger and Oona O’Neill, the future wife of Charlie Chaplin and the daughter of the famed playwright Eugene O’Neill. Set in New York during the 1940s, Manhattan’s Babe recounts the love story between J.D. On Fifth Avenue, the Tiffany’s store is right next to Trump Tower, but I know where I prefer to have breakfast.” “I hope this book is a sad, romantic tribute to the America I love. “I want to break readers’ hearts,” says French writer Frédéric Beigbeder of his novel Manhattan’s Babe, which was recently translated into English and released as an illustrated hardback by Assouline. RETOUCHING: KASIA KRET/ STUDIO INVISIBLE.
FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, JANUARY 2017.
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