A FULL LIFE

by Helen Gahagan Douglas ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1982

A full life indeed: these posthumous memoirs take Helen Gahagan from a privileged Park Slope (Brooklyn) childhood to overnight stardom on Broadway to an unprecedented switch-over career as an international soprano. . . to politics with a vengeance. And, if the book's second half is often slow and unexciting--Mrs. Douglas is rigorous in setting down her record, her views on each issue--it's nonetheless a rich, personable account peopled by the great and the infamous. ""'Forget about acting,' Father ordered. 'Think!'"" Such was the reaction when proper, beautiful Helen Gahagan was lured from college to Broadway. But Helen independently stood her ground, became an ingenue-star (sharing legendary John Drew's last performance), and met Melvyn Douglas in a Belasco play: ""I watched him go and thought, that's the handsomest back I've ever seen""--and ""his simple 'I'm a Jew' dissolved me."" By the 1930s, however, Helen had found far greater pleasure in singing than acting; so, aside from the film She (""It's a mystery to me that anyone would consider it a classic""), she concentrated on opera--though refusing to sing in Hitler's Europe. And, then, in California with Melvyn, performing became less and less important--as Helen worked first for migrant-worker aid, then for the WPA, then as Democratic committeewoman (with a special program for raising women's political consciousness). She pressured FDR about New Deal cutbacks (""You and Eleanor, you must stop ganging up on me""), was urged by the Roosevelts to run for Congress: in the House she battled for cancer-research (unsuccessfully), loathed the ""pernicious lobbying,"" won passage of an A-bomb control bill, stood up to racists (with an assist from young LBJ), hired a black secretary, helped write the Marshall Plan, pleaded with Henry Wallace not to run in '48, attacked the HUAC, lunched with an anti-Semitic Dean Acheson re Israel. But when she ran for Senator in '50, Richard Nixon's famed smear campaign did her in (""Perhaps I shouldn't have been so above-it-all, sticking to my record all the time""), though ""Korea was the critical element"" in her loss. (The worst moment: ""when children picked up rocks and threw them. . . at me."") Afterwards: work with SANE, a 1960 split from LBJ (on arms-race policy), Latin American fact-gathering, a long fight with cancer, and tender old age with the late Melvyn (who contributes a paragraph here and there). Stolid, fact-filled reading, perhaps, but a great life vigorously recalled.

Pub Date: June 18, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982

Categories: NONFICTION