In Praise of the Profile, Before the Age of Public Relations

The one thing these three books have in common is that they were written before the celebrity-industrial complex was fully formed, when a journalist could still push past an artist’s P.R. phalanx and come back with a story that possessed real feeling and offbeat detail.

Rex Reed’s “People are Crazy Here” (1974) is the sequel to “Do You Sleep in the Nude,” the book of profiles that put Mr. Reed on the map. Both volumes are easy to mock for their glibness, but both are candy-colored treats. The long profile of an aging Tennessee Williams in “People are Crazy Here” is worth the price of admission alone. “Baby, I’ve been sick,” Williams drawls in the profile’s first sentence, about which Mr. Reed observes: “If a swamp alligator could talk, he would sound like Tennessee Williams.” Stick around for the profiles of Jack Nicholson and Grace Slick. At Ms. Slick’s place, the interview is interrupted by a shaggy David Crosby bounding down the stairs. “David’s been sleeping in my bed the past week,” Ms. Slick shrugs, “and the place is a mess.”

Kenneth Tynan’s “The Sound of Two Hands Clapping” (1975) is an assortment of the kind of critical profiles that no one really writes anymore. My god, these pieces are resonant. Tynan’s epic profile of Roman Polanski has long been a particular favorite. Early on, Tynan quotes an observer who calls Polanski “the original five-foot Pole you wouldn’t touch anyone with.” That line sets the profile’s tone. Tynan is a deep admirer (and keen assessor) of Polanski’s ouevre; he’s also a goggle-eyed observer of the director’s way of being on the planet. We witness Mr. Polanski doing a bit of impromptu kung fu. We hear him comparing the posteriors of Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda. (He likes Ms. Fonda’s; he’s also proud of his own.) He climbs into a Rolls-Royce with smoked glass windows and begins flipping though a private Rolodex of women before asking aloud, “Who shall I gratify tonight”

Michael Lydon’s “Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Pantheon” (1971) is a lost classic, a rolling series of profiles that crank down the windows in your mind. Mr. Lydon delivers acoustic-seeming pieces on everyone from Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead to B.B. King during his last days on the chitlin’ circuit. The piece de resistance is a long profile, written for Ramparts, of the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour in the months leading up to Altamont. This piece is like an alternative version of Cameron Crowe’s film “Almost Famous.” It commences with the author hitchhiking to join the tour, then dropping into the Stones’s world for months as the cities rush past: Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Detroit, Dallas, New York. Keith Richards functions as what Mr. Lydon calls “the group’s eminence bizarre.” The author compares the scene onboard the Stones’s airplane to a cocaine-fueled political campaign. At one point, he takes a weeping runaway girl, lost aftr a concert with nowhere to go, out for something to eat and he helps get her a bit of money. Best of all, Mr. Lydon is a fan. During a show in Alabama, he spies a fellow rock writer in the crowd and he declares: “Stanley Booth (a remarkable lunatic from Memphis) and I share a look of bewildered joy, know we are both insane Rolling Stones fans, and then whoop with the jolts of pleasure they give us.”

Dwight Garner is a book critic for The Times.