The Nine Lives of Michael Todd

SHOW BIZ’ “LAST TYCOON”

At eighteen he was president of a $2-million-a-year construction company. At twenty he couldn’t afford a house of his own.

When he was thirty-seven he had four plays running simultaneously, netting him $20,000 a week. The following year he went into bankruptcy for over a million dollars.

At forty-nine he married Hollywood’s reigning beauty, Elizabeth Taylor, and had the greatest hit in motion-picture history—Around the World in Eighty Days, the first motion picture likely to gross $100 million.

Brash, flamboyant, half genius, half conman, he rose from the slums to giddy heights in the roller-coaster worlds of Broadway and Hollywood. Then, as in a script he might have written himself, he met death in a tragic plane crash—along with his biographer, the man who wrote this book.