This page, from left: Isabel Lucas graces the cover of Claiborne Swanson Frank’s Young Hollywood (Assouline), available at assouline.com; the actress Lorenza Izzo, who gets into her character by imagining how she would walk, brush her teeth, or make her bed. “I wonder,” Izzo says, “‘Does she have well-manicured toes? What kind of television shows would she watch?’” Opposite page: Leven Rambin never felt like she belonged in her home state of Texas. “I found release from this anxiety through acting in plays at school,” she says. “I was determined to become an actress, to affect people’s lives.”
and again. There’s a quality in each of them that speaks to sophistication and experience, but also to curiosity and possibility, as Kors puts it. “That’s what Claiborne has harnessed in this book. She’s brilliant at showing heightened reality.” For Swanson Frank, her role as photographer is to document American culture through large bodies of portrait work. And Hollywood, which has been a driving force in defining American culture for generations, presented itself as a natural subject and progression from her first book, especially since she and her husband moved to Los Angeles from New York two years ago. Upon arrival, she says, she felt that there was a unique opportunity to tell a fresh story in her new home town. And the story that emerges is one of “ambitious and passionate” women, as Kors describes them. “They’re not afraid to show the world who they are or who they want to be.” Neither, thankfully, is their photographer. u 136 QUEST