Praise for bio

   

“Once an impresario who orchestrated an unceasing string of show business successes, once an inescapable object of half a century of ballyhoo, Billy Rose has long needed to be rescued from the obscurity into which his singular career has sunk. 

 Mark Cohen has now performed that salvage operation, with a mixture of judicious sympathy and critical detachment. Cohen’s research has been prodigious, and the result is a biography packed with psychological nuance and more than a few surprises.”

Stephen Whitfield, author, In Search of American Jewish Culture

"A meticulously researched study of the impresario/philanthropist Billy Rose, a figure rich in contradictions: on the one hand, an anonymous altruist (working to rescue Jews from Nazism), on the other, a hard-nosed self-publicist, possessor of what Saul Bellow called 'a buglike tropism for celebrity.' 

Fascinating."

Zachary Leader, author, The Life of Saul Bellow

Who remembers Broadway Billy: shorthand wizard, impresario, songwriter, columnist, promoter? Mark Cohen’s Billy proves more audacious, kinkier, more full of mystery than your grandfather’s Billy or the Billy you read about in novels.

 

There are endless surprises here from the number of beautiful lyrics we owe the man to unforgettable accounts of his intersection with major historical figures. To amass millions seems the least of his many triumphs— perhaps most astonishing the creation of a full American life in which he openly embraces his identity as a Jew. 

In the pages of this meticulously researched, probing and affectionate biography, Cohen grants Billy Rose the revival he deserves.

Janis Freedman Bellow, Tufts University