Compared with 1988's The Peter Lawford Story, a shimmering tower of sleaze by Patricia Seaton Lawford and Ted Schwarz, Spada's Lawford bio is serious and respectful. Spada (Grace, 1987, etc.) shoots for the big time at 512 pages, does heavy research and strong fact-packaging. The outstanding section of the book, the middle hundred pages, covers the ties between Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe and manages to assemble that now-familiar story with verve and freshness. The subplot throughout these pages is Kennedy- supporter Frank Sinatra's tie with top Mafia boss Sam Giancana, with Sinatra, JFK, and Giancana all sleeping with Judith Campbell, and JFK enlisting Giancana to blow away Fidel Castro, and then RFK as attorney general attacking organized crime, with Giancana asking buddy Sinatra to smooth it with RFK by having RFK's brother-in-law and Sinatra Rat Pack member Lawford speak to RFK or JFK. When Lawford fails and Sinatra's power wavers in Giancana's eyes, and then JFK reneges at staying at Sinatra's massively rebuilt Palm Springs house, Sinatra exiles Lawford from the Rat Pack—forever. All this is lively and gripping and shows fresh spadework, but no new dirt. Lawford, a child actor from Britain, struck it big at 20 with an MGM contract, had his greatest hit singing and dancing in the ever-enjoyable Good News. A fantastic ladies' man, he married into the Kennedy family via Pat Kennedy, became JFK's Hollywood go- between with Monroe. He never sobered up and even had coke delivered to him by helicopter at the Betty Ford Clinic. His lack of self-confidence was apparently a gift from his mother, who told him he wasn't good enough or strong enough to survive without her. Sympathy for a poor devil, once the gayest of blades.
Pub Date: June 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-553-07185-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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