ORIGINAL STORY BY

A veteran of stage and screen tells all in this sometimes enjoyable but often exasperating autobiography.

A distinguished director, playwright, and screenwriter, Laurents's many credits include stage productions such as Gypsy, West Side Story, and La Cage Aux Folles, and the movie Rope. He has worked with most of the leading talents of Broadway and Hollywood, including Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim, to name a few. When he takes us backstage to witness the dramas that attend the production of some show or other, Laurents spins entertaining yarns and can be scathingly funny and clever (“It was a good story with only three characters. One and a half of them, alas, were lesbians, which sent the Catholic Church foaming at the font.”). Of his Hollywood experience, Laurents writes, “Life in the movies was based on the life of the people who made movies who based their lives on the life they saw in the movies.” From his collaborators, unfortunately, Laurents has suffered a great many injustices, and he spills much ink settling scores with them, whether the perpetrators are alive or (mostly) dead. Potshots at celebrities are always enjoyable and mostly well-deserved, but Laurents doesn't know when to stop. Salvo follows salvo until we wish we could shove a saucer of milk his way and tell him to stop. Laurents also writes extensively on being gay, Jewish, left-wing, and atheistic in the show business community of postwar New York and Hollywood. He was hardly the odd man out in either town and, by the year 2000, this territory is well-trod turf indeed. By relentlessly trashing colleagues, outing the usual suspects, and venting spleen at those who informed to the House Un-American Activities Committee half a century ago, Laurents (despite occasional lapses into charm and wit) quickly becomes

a wearisome old bore.