All the Stars Came Out That Night

Walter Winchell posthumously narrates rookie King's sparkling Depression-era baseball epic. It's the early 1930s, and blundering bad boys James Atwood and John Henry Seadlund, the latter "flush with $25,000 from his first kidnapping," meet and join forces, forging east in search of more easy money. They fall into all-star scrapes pretty quick—hitchhiking with Clarence Darrow, kidnapping Dizzy Dean and crashing a party at Henry Ford's. (Later, a pie fight at Carole Lombard's Hollywood-theme party attended by the likes of Clark Gable and Errol Flynn almost steals the show, with all of the high drama hungrily observed by gossip hounds Louella Parsons and Winchell himself.) Then with "every portable light in New England" illuminating Fenway Park, a Ford-bankrolled, forbidden all-star baseball game forms, setting Dizzy Dean's all-white team with "too green" minor-league rookie Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig and Shoeless Joe Jackson against the best of Satchel Paige's Negro League: Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and speedy base-stealer Cool Papa Bell. Eventually, Atwood and Seadlund's antics become a mere subplot to the game's nail-biting final innings. King's set pieces capture the era and his droll cast of characters, fictional and historical, provide the entertainment of a World Series skybox seat. (Oct.)