Not much new in this rehearsal of one of celebrity’s saddest stories.
A thoroughly researched but ill-balanced retelling of the brief love affair, marriage, creative collaboration, estrangement and divorce of Hollywood’s sexiest star and Broadway’s leading playwright.
Prolific biographer Meyers (Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, 2008, etc.) is particularly well equipped for the task of gleaning something new from this heavily harvested field. However, like many others who have drifted into the gravitational pull of planet Monroe, he can barely force his eyes away from her long enough to give Miller’s story more than a perfunctory summary and analysis. Describing her nude calendar from 1950, for example, he pants about Monroe’s “perfect body,” calling her “a modern Venus” in a torrid paragraph smoking with erotic detail (“Her alluring breasts promise pneumatic bliss, and her pink nipples merge with the red velvet”). Meyers begins his chronicle in 1951 with the initial meeting of his two principals, then retreats into alternating biographies, devoting nearly 80 pages to Monroe’s well-known depressing childhood and youth. Miller’s 36 pre-Monroe years merit only ten pages. The author revisits all of the central Marilyn moments: multiple foster homes, abuse, character flaws (habitual tardiness, deep insecurity), substance issues (alcohol, drugs), serial sexual escapades, notable marriages (to Joe DiMaggio and Miller) and most controversial affairs (JFK, RFK). Meyers dismisses as “wildly implausible” the conspiracy theories about her death and repeatedly assails both her acting coach Paula Strasberg and her final psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who was “more disturbed and dangerous than the patient.” Meyers recognizes that Miller truly loved Monroe but finally ended the marriage when he realized she was destroying him. He’d spent three years working on a film for her (The Misfits), earning only her scorn, and her needs were too complex and her problems too intractable. In the final chapter, Meyers thoughtfully mines Miller’s last plays for nuggets about Monroe.
Not much new in this rehearsal of one of celebrity’s saddest stories.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-252-03544-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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