Description

The Hollywood Fix

Paperback – December 2, 2025
By Richard Kirshenbaum

A glittering, razor-edged novel of old Hollywood—where stars are manufactured, scandals are managed, and nothing shines unless someone is paid to polish it.

Set during the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age, The Hollywood Fix follows Bartie Maddox, a penniless young man who arrives in Los Angeles with little more than ambition and charm. Through sheer grit (and a knack for knowing what people want before they say it), Bartie becomes the indispensable PR fixer for a major studio and its formidable chief, Solomon Myers.

From there, Bartie’s fingerprints are everywhere: crafting Duke Drake’s heroic public persona, concealing the cracks in Carroll Madison’s glamorous façade, shaping Mirielle Montaigne’s rise to international superstardom, and managing the high-society mystique of Grace Greystone, the enigmatic La Marquise de Faucigny. Behind every dazzling premiere, every gossip-column triumph, and every wartime morale-boosting appearance, Bartie is the invisible architect—making sure the myths hold steady and the public never sees the rot beneath the gold.

Inspired by real scandals and the hidden machinery of the studio-system era, Kirshenbaum delivers a sweeping tale of money, sex, image-crafting, and the morally murky art of reputation management. Affairs are buried, careers are salvaged, deaths are disguised, and legends are manufactured.

But Bartie’s greatest challenge comes when the fixer himself needs fixing—and the cost of keeping Hollywood’s secrets threatens to finally demand its price.

A decadent, addictive dive into the beautiful lies that built an industry and the man who kept them from falling apart.