James Robert Parish, the author of more than one hundred books about show business and Hollywood celebrities, took a coincidental and circuitous route to a prolific writing life that has included groundbreaking film reference works, revealing biographies of actors and actresses, and lively pop culture compendiums. Few writers have shown such industrious devotion to their subject matter and even fewer are still going strong after more than thirty years.

Parish got his start as a pop culture chronicler almost by accident. In the 1960s, the future author was visiting Los Angeles on a semester break from college in Philadelphia. While shopping at a Hollywood bookstore, he filled out a photo purchase request form with the names of his movie star favorites, mentioning his partiality for 1930s celebrity, Kay Francis. A few weeks later, he returned East and to his summer position as prop master at the Cape Playhouse, the famous star-package theater located in Dennis, Massachusetts. One day that July he received a note from Gene Ringgold, an employee at the Hollywood Boulevard shop, telling Parish that not only did the store now have Kay Francis photos available for sale, but also asking whether he knew that Ms. Francis was vacationing at a resort only fifteen miles from the Cape Playhouse.