As a more in-control memoir, this could have been a rich gold mine about Hollywood legends and lore.
Inside the chaotic Hollywood of the 1950s.
Social iconoclast Sigal (Emeritus, Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Hemingway Lives! (Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today), 2013, etc.) mined his early years as a leftist in novels like Going Away (1961). Here, he returns to this rich autobiographical well with a gonzo memoir about his life in the ’50s as a talent agent (“flesh peddler, ten-percenter, shark”) at the prestigious Sam Jaffe Agency in Los Angeles. The book opens with a reckless, chaotic pace in rambling, scattered, and jumpy prose describing the 25-year-old Sigal losing his job as a movie gofer. The narrative eventually settles down, but the book’s episodic, digressive structure, punctuated with movie and actor references, makes it a messy read, a never-ending litany of having clients, losing clients, and getting them back. All in a day’s work. Keep those commissions coming in. The back story is the McCarthy Hearings and the Commission’s unrelenting pursuit of getting Hollywood folks to turn on each other: “Informers rule my Hollywood.” Even Sigal was being pursued by FBI agents to give names: “Every nerve end tells me to get out before I make a splendid mess of things.” The agency boasted a spectacular client list—e.g., Jack Palace, Richard Burton, Ginger Rogers, Peter Lorre—and Sigal’s job was to hobnob with them, talk shop, promise them a role they probably wouldn’t get. They did help a number of blacklisted actors and writers. Numerous profiles and anecdotes are scattered about, some insightful, some just icky. Out drinking one evening at the Beverly Wilshire hotel with Sam Jaffe, Humphrey Bogart, Sheree North (“our bid against Marilyn Monroe’s increasingly fragile stardom”), and Louella Parsons (“queen/matriarch of vipers”), Sigal recounts how Parsons started “pissing, hugely, drunkenly, in her pants.”
As a more in-control memoir, this could have been a rich gold mine about Hollywood legends and lore.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-657-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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