The author of Five for Hollywood (1991) comes up with a galloping, hard-breathing bio of Beatty that recycles the gossip about his love life against the plots of his films. Parker here offers a wavering image that may well resemble Warren Beatty. Unlike close buddy Jack Nicholson (also the subject of a Parker bio), Beatty never sits for Rolling Stone profiles—and it wouldn't matter if he did, since all his interviews are masterpieces of smokespeak in which he absorbs questions like a black hole, taking in matter but giving off no light. His first major Hollywood romance, Joan Collins, however, has much to say, though largely through Parker's rehashes of her autobiography, Past Imperfect. A seeming interview with early Beatty lover Leslie Caron also sounds suspiciously literary: ``[Method acting] happened as with the Impressionists who all have a common denominator in their painting...This school of acting was first created by Stanislavski, director of the Moscow Arts Theatre''—and so on. Parker takes us through all the headline affairs: with Natalie Wood (separated from husband Robert Wagner), Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Michelle Phillips, Madonna, and Annette Bening, his wife and mother of his only child. Though Beatty's performances were always interesting and based in a discriminating choice of roles, he had to overcome a longstanding pretty-boy image to win critical favor by starring in and directing and/or producing Bonnie and Clyde (which rose above a bad press to become a smash hit), Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds—for which he won a directing Oscar—Dick Tracy, and Bugsy, among others. No sensational revelations here: just the glitz behind the tinsel.
Pub Date: April 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0072-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
Brimming with open introspection, engaging anecdotes, and gorgeous photographs, Field’s moving account sheds light on how...
A beloved actor attempts to assemble her fragmented past.
In her debut memoir, Field (b. 1946) takes to the page to explore her early life and storied acting career; she also pens an extended love letter to her mother, who died in 2011, on the author’s 65th birthday. Described by the author as “drop-your-jaw beautiful,” Margaret Morlan was discovered by a Paramount talent scout while sitting in a Pasadena Playhouse audience and instantly got a career at age 23. Affectionately called “Baa” by Field, Morlan never achieved anywhere near her eldest daughter’s screen credits, but she played a central role throughout Field’s life as both a peerless champion of and “backup generator” to her daughter’s burgeoning talents. Baa was also a complicated source of great psychological trauma, as she failed to protect her daughter from the sexual advances of her stepfather, stuntman Jock Mahoney. While the memoir details the rapid progression of Field’s childhood interest in acting to on-screen success in TV (from Gidget and The Flying Nun to winning the Emmy for Sybil in 1977) and film (for Norma Rae, she won “every award for best actress that existed in the United States”), Field’s narrative of her professional and personal achievements may be best viewed through the lens of her fraught relationship with Baa. “My cherished mother had known…something,” she writes. “What exactly that was, I didn’t want to hear, because even at that time, when I was middle-aged, I couldn’t bear the idea that she hadn’t run to my side….I had accepted the idea that I was broken in an effort to keep my mother whole.” Through acting, Field found a way to constitute herself: “By standing in Norma’s shoes, I felt my own feet. If I could play her, I could be me.”
Brimming with open introspection, engaging anecdotes, and gorgeous photographs, Field’s moving account sheds light on how playing larger-than-life figures has enabled her to keep her feet on the ground.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6302-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2018
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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