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Wheeler-dealer: The Rip-roaring Adventures of My Uncle Gordon, a Quadriplegic in Hollywood
Wheelerdealer The Riproaring Adventures of My Uncle Gordon a Quadriplegic in Hollywood Author:Chip Jacobs It's not unusual for a guy from L.A. to dream about becoming a big Hollywood honcho with employees who jump when you bark, a blond trophy wife, a driver, a showplace house, and TV deals all over town. Now, what if you achieve all that -- plus a globetrotting, risk-taking lifestyle ? after you were a penniless quadriplegic not expected to see 30.... more » That was Gordon Zahler. With chutzpah and cunning, he lifted himself and his mother off welfare in the early-1950s by selling canned music to anyone willing to buy it. What began with Ed Wood Jr?s infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space and a Doris Day/MGM romantic comedy ended 20 years later with Gordon deep in network television, foreign films and dreams of super-wealth. In Wheeler-Dealer, Zahler?s nephew, Chip Jacobs, puts his career on hold as a zealous investigative reporter to chronicle the uncle he once despised. When Gordon broke his neck in a horrifying school-gym accident in October 1941, it hit like a bomb. The accident rendered the 14-year-old daredevil permanently paralyzed, obliterated his parent?s marriage, and reduced his family to a life on handouts. Nobody expected the boy would make it out of intensive care, let alone head one of Hollywood?s busiest independent post-production studios. Played out against the backdrop of Ed Wood Jr.'s B-movie showbiz and later 1960s network TV, Wheeler-Dealer introduces readers to a barrelful of action-loving personalities, from Western stars to the creator of Gentle Ben, who orbit the little mogul in a wheelchair. Part biography, part memoir, Jacobs unearths family secrets he battled his own mother to disclose: double murders concealed for 50 years, fortunes won and lost, and the betrayal of Gordon's mother (the author?s grandmother), discarded when her immobile son wooed a bride. By the end, Jacobs comes to understand the collateral costs of disability, while recognizing the triumph of Gordon's self-absorbed, but ultimately dazzling, appetite for life. It's a story too improbable to fabricate.« less