Names drop like snowflakes, glistening in the sunny terrain of this exuberant memoir.
A frothy collection of stories and gossip from the comedic actress.
Reynolds (Unsinkable, 2013, etc.), aided by co-author Hannaway, former late-night programming director for CBS, looks back happily at her 65-year career on stage, screen, and TV. Calling herself “a vaudevillian, a baggy-pants comedian,” she confesses she’ll “do anything to get a laugh”: pretending to ravish TV host Jack Paar under his desk (“Debbie Goes Wild!” exclaimed the next day’s headlines); tackling Regis Philbin (“a cute young thing…small and wiry and fit”); dancing so energetically with Johnny Carson that he ended up sweating and winded. Although she regrets not having had “more sex” and confesses to a “lack of passion” that “probably cost me dearly in my marriages,” Reynolds delights in revealing some of her aristocratic admirers. Newly divorced from Eddie Fisher, she caught the eye of 28-year-old King Baudouin of Belgium, whom she spirited away to a day at the beach; in London for a celebration of Bob Hope’s 82nd birthday, Prince Philip progressed from holding her hand to caressing her backside; and the shah of Iran, whose wife invited her to perform at their palace, was so enchanted that he wouldn’t let her stop singing. At a post-performance dinner, “I kept looking around, hoping for some rich, single prince to take an interest in me,” Reynolds writes. Instead, she received a gift from the shah of a handmade Persian rug. The bubbly Reynolds has a kind word for almost everyone: Howard Hughes, “the most polite, southern Texas kind of gentleman”; Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Reynolds had “a very unusual friendship”; her personal assistant, who had been one of her most ardent fans; and her many hairdressers. Only the “obnoxious” Milton Berle and the “pain in the ass” Shelley Winters merit her scorn. The rest is pure frosting.
Names drop like snowflakes, glistening in the sunny terrain of this exuberant memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-241663-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
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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