Hyams, Joe.

Joe Hyams (1923-2008) was a newspaperman, writer, and columnist. He wrote numerous books on Hollywood personalities and other subjects.

Joseph Hyams (1923-2008) was a newspaper columnist and writer in California.

Newspaperman, writer, and Hollywood columnist Joseph Hyams was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 6, 1923. At the age of six, he was encouraged by his aunt to develop his writing talent. In those early years, also, Joe was an admirer of Orson Welles whom he imitated to improve his pronunciation. He attended simultaneously both Boston and Harvard universities and was enrolled briefly at the University of Kentucky.

He joined the Army during World War II and was assigned to a labor battalion in the South Pacific, but en route to his destination in New Guinea, he was fortunately reassigned to the Army News Bureau, and hence, as he later reminisced, "My fate was sealed." His first assignment was to cover a USO show where he met Bob Hope, Chill Wills, and Robert Taylor. Following his stint in the Army, Hyams was a reporter with the New York Herald Tribune. Beginning in 1951--and for the next twenty-two years--he was assigned to cover Hollywood as a feature columnist, and became familiar with such Hollywood luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and other stars.

Hyams was married to Elke Sommer for seventeen years, during which he devoted his time to sixteen books, among them Bogie: A Biography of Humphrey Bogart (1966), My Life With Cleopatra (1968), and Bogart and Bacall (1975). Hyams moved from Los Angeles to Penrose, Colorado in 2005. He passed away in Denver on November 8, 2008.