Bio of the Stars

Tracy and Hepburn was written by their friend Garson Kanin, a writer, actor, and director. He captures how great they were together, how they inspired each other.

Notes on Cowardly Lion is a biography of Bert Lahr by his son John Lahr. Not a tell-all like Christina Crawford's book, but he does not pull any punches about his distant and brooding (how like a comedian) but loving father.

Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams' biography of Bogart Bogie is worth reading, since Hyams knew Bogie and Bacall personally.

Robert Lewis Taylor's bio W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes is a old-timey bio: lots of funny stories, no dirt or scandal or judgments, alcoholism of subject handled as the ordeal that it was for Fields. But worth reading for the funny stories, anyway.

Probably the best bio of a star I've ever read is Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift: A Biography. She writes very objectively. Clift's relationship with his mother was...well, really something. Her biography of Marlon Brando is very good too, though very short.

Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art by Simon Louvish is well worth reading. A review is here.

Mailer's biography of Marilyn Monroe is worth a look to get the take of a great writer on a great celebrity. A review is here.

Fave Dickens Characters

Pickwick Papers: Classic are Mr. Jingle's description of the cricket match in the Indies and Lawyer Buzfuz's parody of legalese.

Oliver Twist: Mr. Bumble makes Oliver's life miserable but it is hard not to see him as a comic figure.

Nicholas Nickleby. Comic too is the old lech Mr. Mantalini for harassing Kate Nickleby in the sweat shop. He would've been scared if Kate suddenly went insane and took his advances seriously.

I know now Steerforth is a cad, but when I read David Copperfield at 12 or 13, I thought he was cool. Obviously I didn't quite get how he ruined Lil Em'ly. The rotter!

Xmas Carol: I dunno, there's a certain gusto in Scrooge's mean opinions that makes us laugh. That's why people like impersonating him. Bah, humbug. I always threaten My Dear One that one year for Christmas I'm gonna set up the ultimate decoration, a little crutch and a stool. She slugs me.

Great Expectations: Magwitch because of his rough exterior and noble interior. Any hard-pressed husband who gets slugged for making sincere suggestions about Xmas decorations will root for Joe Gargery.

A Tale of Two Cities: The Seamstress whose hand was held by Syd at the end. Get misty every time I think of her.

Cloak & Dagger #1

I read this for the 2016 Cloak and Dagger Mystery Reading Challenge

Gas City – Loren D. Estleman

This crime novel opens with the funeral of the wife of a corrupt police chief. His corruption has played a role in enabling a Rust Belt city of three-quarters of a million, allowing it to get all the vice it wants in the bad neighborhood but enjoy safe streets where nice people live. Other enablers of dope, illegal gambling and prostitution include organized crime figures and their minions and politicians and their hangers-on. In this hard-boiled novel, it’s hard to tell difference between hustlers with guns and hustlers with fountain pens.

But the death of the chief’s wife has consequences. First, it puts the chief though a crisis of conscience. A good Irish Catholic, suicide is out of the question. So he decides to get unbought and clean up city’s rackets, thus inviting getting knocked off by an enraged Mob. Second, the anti-vice campaign motivates a drunken PI to clean up his act by doing his job better and quitting smoking and drinking. His GF, a prostitute, considers leaving The Life. Third, with so much virtue going around, a serial killer starts to get sloppy with clues, as if he were feeling that the only way he was going to stop killing was if he got caught.

This is a crime novel, not a mystery. The main focus is not on catching the serial killer, but on the changes the various characters are going though. Incidents lead to a climax that ties everything up in a nice bow. Estleman’s goal for this novel, I think, was to examine the effects of crime and its attendant corruption on politics in a small city. He never forgets the human element, though, in creating plausible characters and motivations.

Adventure Books

John Buchan (1875 - 1940) is most famous for The 39 Steps, which is one of the Richard Hannay quartet. Of the other three, Mr. Standfast is just okay, while The 3 Hostages is a skip. The remaining one is Greenmantle, which I read for the third time or so a couple years ago.

Also in the Haggard tradition is Lionel Davidson (born 1922). The Rose of Tibet is okay, but The Night of Wencelas is a rocker and so is The Menorah Men.

M.R. James

M.R. James (1862 - 1936) was a medieval scholar at Cambridge. He wrote many ghost stories that were to be read on Christmas Eve, a fine Victorian tradition. His stories often take place in the country, in old houses, ancient churches, or dusty libraries. The heroes are usually quiet professor-types, rational and utterly unable to take in the supernatural happenings. The stories are never gory but slowly build a menace that is really unsettling, especially in contrast to the quiet country setting and harmless scholarly activity. The vocabulary is somewhat challenging, a plus for word fans.

Ruth Rendall

Start with the Inspector Wexford novels. I think From Doon with Death is the first one. It was published in the early 1960s so if you want cell phones, data bases, and the latest forensic techniques, you will be disappointed. Reg Wexford is one of my favorite series detectives. He's got common sense and is never cynical or callous. His sidekick Burden, however, is the one that does the most changing from novel to novel. The books she publishes under the Barbara Vine pen-name are more gothic with lots of psychological torment and edgy thrills. There's next to no violence in her stories but they are very scary.

The first five Wexford ones are: From Doon with Death (1964), Wolf to the Slaugher (1967), A New Lease of Death (1969), The Best Man to Die (1969), and A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970).

Show and Tell

Show and Tell – John Lahr

This is a compilation of profiles that first appeared in the New Yorker in the 1990s. If nothing else, these pieces remind us that being creative doesn’t immunize an artist or a performer from being a creep. Or, even if creative genius could affect such inoculation, being rich and famous will often as not transform a fairly normal nice guy into an overbearing creep. The pieces that especially remind us that the behavior of an artist had better be discounted when assessing his art feature Frank Sinatra, Eddie Izzard, and David Mamet.

All the articles provide fascinating object lessons as how, with the assistance of talent, daring, determination, and luck, unhappy childhoods – and the resulting rage - drove the subject to the performing arts. Performing by acting or telling jokes or directing plays and movies helped artists to overcome fear and sadness by creating a reality around them the way they wanted it (to paraphrase Ingmar Bergman). Examples here include anxiety-ridden personalities Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, actor Liev Schreiber and the force of nature Roseanne. I was out of the country for most of her celebrity (1988-97) so the article that paints her as ferocious and frightening and driven filled in many gaps for me.

The article on Bob Hope was especially interesting. Talk about the right set of skills at the right time when the country wanted a safe joke-making device, the apparatus has to be Bob Hope. On Hope’s appetite for adulation, Lahr opines “At ninety-five, Hope is nearly as old as the century, and he personifies its brash deliriums. His obsession with output, aggrandizement, and fame belongs to the modern era, particularly in this country.”

Lahr the journalist also finds the provocative quotation. Related to the self-centered remoteness often seen in comedians, Hope’s ex-son in law says, “You never get into the inner space. Too threatening. Too vulnerable. I don’t think anybody has ever gotten there. It’s undiscovered. … And once you get there, there may be nothing there. We’ll never know.”

I don’t know much Irving Berlin and so found the articles on his tireless career informative. I know nothing about the theater so I did not get much out of the pieces about Arthur Miller, Wallace Shawn, and Neil Labute. What I took away from these three articles was that it seems a miracle in that anything in drama ends up good given the fact that so many things can go wrong and not work.

The collection ends with pieces about the writer’s parents, Bert and Mildred Lahr. His father’s most famous part was the Cowardly Lion in the The Wizard of Oz. Lahr’s excellent biography of his father Notes on a Cowardly Lion also paints his father as craving intimacy but physically and emotionally absent.

So, it is 2016 and only a couple of subjects are still around. Still, I think for people who need quick studies of towering figures of their time  - e.g. Miller, Bergman, Nichols – this book is worth reading. Also for middle-aged people the attraction is good old nostalgia and that wistful feeling, ‘they don’t make ‘em like than anymore.’