Sermak writes of Davis’ tutelage, “she was training me for a world that was fading from view.” The author ably documents...
A chronicle of the last years of a cinema legend as told by her personal assistant.
Would anyone familiar with Bette Davis’ reputation as headstrong and independent be surprised to learn that she yanked out the bushes of a Long Island beachfront property she rented for a weekend because she didn’t like the way they looked? Sermak, co-executor of Davis’ estate, was a 22-year-old Southern California native in 1979 when she jettisoned a plan to pursue a career in clinical psychology and took a job as the 71-year-old actress's personal assistant. This book covers the years in which Sermak was Davis’ live-in assistant, accompanying her to film sets, cooking her meals, and staying by Davis’ side during and after the star’s 1983 mastectomy and stroke. (The author movingly renders these scenes.) Davis was as much a mentor to Sermak as an employer. She told her to change the spelling of her first name because “one of the big battles in life is to stand out from the crowd,” gave her lessons on posture, and even hired a butler to teach her the protocol for a formal dinner. One might have expected this book to be a hagiography, but, refreshingly, the author shows not only Davis’ kindness, but also her cruelty, as when she rudely declined a dinner invitation from Sermak’s mother. The author gets bogged down in extraneous detail, with rambling accounts of conversations and long descriptions of the meals she and Davis enjoyed. However, the book is a poignant portrait of an aging screen icon reduced to taking her medicine with swigs of Ensure Plus and struggling to live her life with the grandeur to which she had become accustomed.
Sermak writes of Davis’ tutelage, “she was training me for a world that was fading from view.” The author ably documents Davis’ growing realization that, long before her death in 1989, her time was already passing.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-50784-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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